 eviction rate, and has itself been displaced by a dot-com. Landlords of rent-controlled properties are jumping on late rent payments. “Nuisance” evictions, for supposed bad conduct, are up. Citywide, Section 8 public housing certificates are expiring for lack of landlords willing to accept subsidized tenants. In mid-June last summer, 5,700 people applied for a chance at fifty-four new units of public housing.
Under Highways 80, 101, and 280, “property sweeps” have turned camping from a difficult but possible way of life for homeless San Franciscans into a risky last resort. A “property sweep” happens when city or highway maintenance crews, acting on police orders, remove the entire contents of a campsite. The crews are supposed to save any items of value for later collection by the owners. In practice the crusher trucks often eat sleeping bags and raingear, medicine and eyeglasses.
Sweeps are especially common in India Basin, under and around Highway 280. (This is the scenic Jag-laden route to San Jose.) The Residential Builders Association pushed through permits to build lofts all over India Basin, which has long been a live-and-let-live warehouse district full of rusty truck parts and wild fennel. The inhabitants still include bikers, hippies, artists, mechanics, and metal recyclers, many of them proudly self-sufficient “vehicular residents.” Now that the district has to be made safe for yuppification, the law in its majestic equality is sweeping campers out of the freeway’s wide rain shadow, and sending city tow crews to take cars, trucks and campers from people who use them as their homes.
Of course a lot of the money is in solutions to problems that had to be invented first. Like one company’s work on Internet surfing machines for exercise treadmills.
Joel had another interview at a dot-com startup near a brewery, in one of San Francisco’s fashionably post-industrial bonanza districts. Internet finance solutions this time around. The programmers there kept boasting about their “informal atmosphere” and the beer keg in the kitchen. One claimed the keg had helped his headache problem. The gradually apparent catch being the godawful working hours.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling suggested ten years ago that corporate yuppies have given up middle-class professionals’ traditional prerogative of doing useful, interesting work and are therefore more susceptible to the “addictive” attractions of wealth. A stock market derivatives programmer, for example, doesn’t enjoy the satisfactions of, say, a professor or civil engineer. If you spend your days setting up the Wall Street equivalent of trifecta bets, you’ll want to be well paid for it because money is your only reward.
Addictive is definitely the word, and—during the high tide of tech mania—the addiction had a twist: Dot-coms seemed to have improved on Eighties corporate culture by rewarding long hours with controlled injections of novelty and excitement as well as money—an appropriately Huxleyan approach for a place called SoMa.
To start with, there was the continual gambler’s excitement of watching stock options shimmy on the Nasdaq. Then there were the silly perks. The popcorn machine, the keg in the kitchen, weekly soccer, the Informal Atmosphere. When Joel started one programming job, the owner took him out for Thai food and the new Star Trek flick. Another startup reportedly made itself an indoor beach with real sand. All of which was supposed to keep our video-gaming generation persuaded that even at work, Computers are Fun. If your leisure activities actually were your work, then why did you need free time?
The flip side of Work as Fun is Fun as Work: the creation of dot-com products by putting dams, flow meters, and advertising rates on things people do for free in their spare time. It turns out that if you do something on the Net for its own sake, some third party will find a way to sell your enthusiasm.
My own virtual home is a Usenet discussion group where advertisements are either ignored or barbecued. So it was a shock to find that we served as unpaid “content providers” for Deja.com, RemarQ.com, and other ad-laden commercial sites that peddle Usenet posts to browsers and browsers’ eyeballs to advertisers.
Worse, when the free services couldn’t make a buck after all, they stranded Usenet contributors by cutting back. RemarQ dropped free browsing and posting. Google.com recently took over Deja’s discussion archive, making it available again. That’s good, but nothing says Google won’t yank it off the Net when they discover they can’t profit from it.
They did find a labor freelancer after all. Eventually a nice Labor History links page appeared, courtesy of “a mild-mannered librarian in a quaint metropolitan library.” After accepting or canceling five profile-tracking “cookies,” you could read about the Everett Massacre and the Pullman Strike alongside advertisements for Headline News, Shopping.About, and something called i-drive.com. It was an attractive site. Probably a labor of love. The guy’s a hobbyist to himself, but he’s a temp to About.com.
Investing for Tomorrow’s Retirement … Today!
How nice. For us, that is. I hear they’ve ended free pharmacy service at General Hospital. Thanks to which a neighbor living on disability benefits has gone for months at a time without his seizure medication.
On those conditions, in these times, do we want to belong?
Now some of us are watching cheerfully as the whole dot-com hallucination and its tin-eared libertarianism begin to fall apart. Maybe we can rebuild us a democracy out of what’s left. Already there are signs this city is tired of being a boomtown. This winter we elected a pro-tenant majority to the Board of Supervisors, which promptly slapped a moratorium on loft development.
Still, Joel and I have talked about moving. Maybe the rest of America is no better than San Francisco, but at least in my New England hometown the policemen don’t swagger on Harleys, and wealth isn’t so openly defended against poverty.
I keep thinking about a nameless quiet rainy place with no millionaires, plentiful roofs, and modest policemen. We could do with a change of scene.
Input: 2008 Summer Olympics torch relay

 India: Due to concerns about pro-Tibet protests, the relay through New Delhi on April 17 was cut to just 2.3 km (less than 1.5 miles), which was shared amongst 70 runners. It concluded at the India Gate. The event was peaceful due to the public not being allowed at the relay. A total of five intended torchbearers -Kiran Bedi, Soha Ali Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Bhaichung Bhutia and Sunil Gavaskar- withdrew from the event, citing "personal reasons", or, in Bhutia's case, explicitly wishing to "stand by the people of Tibet and their struggle" and protest against the PRC "crackdown" in Tibet. Indian national football captain, Baichung Bhutia refused to take part in the Indian leg of the torch relay, citing concerns over Tibet. Bhutia, who is Sikkimese, is the first athlete to refuse to run with the torch. Indian film star Aamir Khan states on his personal blog that the "Olympic Games do not belong to China" and confirms taking part in the torch relay "with a prayer in his heart for the people of Tibet, and... for all people across the world who are victims of human rights violations". Rahul Gandhi, son of the Congress President Sonia Gandhi and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, also refused to carry the torch.

How many bearers of the torch were used in India?
Output: 70

Input: Antenna (radio)
The ordinary half-wave dipole is probably the most widely used antenna design. This consists of two 1⁄4-wavelength elements arranged end-to-end, and lying along essentially the same axis (or collinear), each feeding one side of a two-conductor transmission wire. The physical arrangement of the two elements places them 180 degrees out of phase, which means that at any given instant one of the elements is driving current into the transmission line while the other is pulling it out. The monopole antenna is essentially one half of the half-wave dipole, a single 1⁄4-wavelength element with the other side connected to ground or an equivalent ground plane (or counterpoise). Monopoles, which are one-half the size of a dipole, are common for long-wavelength radio signals where a dipole would be impractically large. Another common design is the folded dipole, which is essentially two dipoles placed side-by-side and connected at their ends to make a single one-wavelength antenna.

Elements in a half wave dipole and on an identical axis are said to be what?
Output: collinear

Input: PlayStation 3
Critical and commercial reception to PS3 improved over time, after a series of price revisions, Blu-ray's victory over HD DVD, and the release of several well received titles. Ars Technica's original launch review gave PS3 only a 6/10, but second review of the console in June 2008 rated it a 9/10. In September 2009, IGN named PlayStation 3 the 15th best