"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours."
Among some cultures, if you don't go to people's funerals, they will (1) come back to haunt you or (2) their aggrieved relatives will put a curse on you. Still true in some parts of the good old USA.
" I'm not having any funeral, so don't care a lot about what the embalmers want to do."
Dead people don't make funerals, living people do. Presence of a dead body is optional.
That actually happened to me. I am not an electrician, but I know something about household AC power. One morning some of the power in my house was out, some wasn't. I checked the feed lines going to the main dual breakers - only one line was "hot", the other was dead. I called my city-owned power company, and like the ignoramuses they were, they told me to call an electrician, on my $. I insisted they come out and check their own wiring up to the point where it became MY wiring, since there was very, very little on my end that could have caused such a problem. So they did. Sure enough, one of the 3 crimps connecting the city's wiring to my house had failed & opened one leg of my 220V feed. Their excuse was that the last time the house had its wiring worked on (decades before the problem developed) they had used temporary crimps which were supposed to have been replaced with permanent ones - but never were. so the city replaced all 3 crimps (a few decades late) and immediately restored my power - at no cost to me. Had I followed their suggestion, I would have wasted my money on an electrician, who would have wound up having the same discussion with the city that I did.
"send humanity down a the long dark path of extermination" We are doing this very well on our own initiative and need no help from other planets or dimensions, thenk yew veddy much.
'The result of the connection being disrupted can generate some amazing sparks' Maybe that's why the perps used rifles & shot out the wiring from a safe distance. D'oh!
"As it turns out, one guy in a pickup truck can cripple a city's ability to function. You don't think that any enemies could muster those kind of resources? Nobody is even trying."
You have no idea is anyone is really trying. None of us do. 30 guys with 30 pickup trucks, 30 hunting rifles shooting armor-piercing bullets (available almost anywhere in the USA), could easily take out transformers over a wide area, and cripple a region's ability to function.
drunk teenager is not the answer with the fewest assumptions if you take into account the facts.
"involved snipping AT&T fiber-optic lines to knock out phone and 911 service in the area and firing shots into a PG&E substation."
how do you get drunk teenager from that? from your years as a wild youth coordinating safe ingress and egress from locations allowing deliberate phone line sabotage and long range high powered rifle targeting intermediate power supply stations on a whim after too many beers?
the only razor applied here was the one to any hint of sanity.
Access to the fiber-optic lines that were damaged included lifting a 200 or 300 lb metal manhole cover. I doubt one person could have done this.
The speed of evolutionary processes depends on the length of the lifecycle of the organism. Any species bigger than viruses and bacteria will quite likely die off before they adapt to human technology.
This statement makes me wonder if the human species will die off before it adapts to its own technology. Alas, Babylon.
I've hit one deer at 70 mph & another ran into the side of my truck when I was going 40 mph. Since then, if I see deer ahead of me on the roadside, or if one crosses road ahead of me, I honk my horn. Most of the time, the deer I honk at show an obvious startle reaction and move away from my car. None has ever moved toward my car or into my path. If one deer crosses the road, there's a good chance others will follow, that's why I honk. I think it helps, don't think it hurts. Most animals act as if they dislike loud, sudden noises.
Will happen of its own accord once gasoline costs more than $10/gallon and each car owner is rationed to 10 gallons a month. That's not rocket science.
One will quickly notice a conspicuous absence of rights for corporations, even though at the time of the Constitution's writing incorporation was not a new concept.
Damn few other commenters have noticed this, here and especially elsewhere.
All you would get is a fresh slate of alpha sociopaths.
Go ahead and start a PAC. The alphas will control it before the ink is dry on your flyers because they are willing to do what it takes to get to power- things you are not willing to do.
No, I don't have a better answer. What do you do against people willing to do anything in their drive for power?
You have described a tendency common to all human societies. Believe it or not, some other societies have been able to deal with the tendency, with more success than the US is showing at present. E.g. some Greek city states practiced ostracism.
I wonder if a regular diesel engine
Most diesel-powered vehicles sold nowadays are boosted. I have a 1983 non-boosted Ford diesel pickup. It barely runs above 5000 feet elevation. Below that it runs well, gets 23 mpg even though it weighs 5000 lb.
Apparently I've taken a more radical approach than anyone else. I have stopped sitting upright at a desk to type on a computer. Nearly all of my time using my laptop is done in a fully-reclined chair. I am nearly supine as I type this. The built-in head & neck rest on the back of the chair fully supports my shoulders, neck & head. My upper arms, elbows & forearms arm supported by the backrest & padded arm rest. The laptop itself is supported by a cheap plastic laptray. The laptray has pockets on either side that serve as legs. The laptop is separated from my lap by an air space of about 2". The tray pockets hold pens, small pads, TV remotes, occasionally a can of Dew or a bottle of beer (if either tips, the liquid goes into the tray pocket & nowhere near the laptop.)
If I gaze straight ahead from this relaxed position, my line of sight is about 2" above the top of the screen. I wear bifocals. The screen is about 30" away from my eyes. I had my ophthalmologist adjust the prescription for my lower lenses to allow me to read materials from 30", not from 20" as is typically prescribed for reading glasses. The bifocals are the lined type, so the entire plane of the laptop's screen is viewed through the same lens prescription. I once tried using lineless bifocals & found with them I could only see a small fraction of the screen clearly. I had to continually move my head to focus clearly on the screen. The projected line between the upper & lower eyeglass lenses lines up very closely with the top of the laptop's screen. So I can see distant objects past the screen clearly without moving my head.
When I use a desktop scanner, I have to sit or stand bent over at the desk as most anyone would do. My land line phone is on the floor below the right arm rest.
I am retired, so I have to justify my arrangement to no boss who might perhaps believe I am too comfortable to be really working. If I stay up too late at my laptop, I tend to fall asleep in my computer position, it is that comfortable.
A couple of my hobbies are genealogy & local history. I travel around the US to do this & sometimes find I need to work my laptop for several hours at a time to catch up on email and type up my discoveries while they are still fresh in memory. I bought a folding recliner chair, similar to what is sold for use on patios, where a mesh fabric supports the body. I use a small pillow to provide more support for my head & neck, but otherwise it's very similar to my home recliner. This works almost as well as my home recliner.
I think the foundation of RSI for computer users is attempting to sit upright and pound on a keyboard, with minimal support for the arms & wrists. It's an unnatural and pain-provoking position, dictated by the all-too-human thinking of "We've always done it this way."
If the system is down, the patient records can't be pulled up and maybe somebody gets the wrong medicines and dies. All the more reason to have adequate on-site and off-site backup of some kind. You don't need multiple workstations for that.
Hard drives sometimes die or become corrupt and that recovery partition is useless at that point. Better to say they reliably die or become corrupt, and usually at a most inopportune moment. I've owned several dozen laptops & desktops over the last 25 years, and hard drive failure or corruption has been my most frequently occurring problem.
Good point about the increased reliability of a 'pressed' recovery disk vs. a home-burned one. I have never had a pressed disk go bad, but have had plenty of home-brewed ones do that, of all degrees of quality.
I have also tried to burn a recovery DVD immediately after starting a new laptop, had that operation fail, and then discovered I could not make a second attempt. I had to pay the manufacturer for their pressed recovery DVD in addition to the price of the new laptop.
The kids who were camping apologized at the end of their patch, saying the repeater was the only way they could contact Dad from where they were. That makes me thing the repeater was an open one. However, I didn't note any of the repeater's details.
"open autopatches" Last week I heard one being used on a 2M repeater near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in an area with no cell phone coverage. Some young people camping in the park were checking in with Dad at home. YMMV.
the optimal size for fine control and large movements I suspect whatever is optimal varies from user to user. My hands are way too large for netbook keyboards. I have used trackpoints and trackpads, some are better than others.
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"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours."
Among some cultures, if you don't go to people's funerals, they will (1) come back to haunt you or (2) their aggrieved relatives will put a curse on you. Still true in some parts of the good old USA.
" I'm not having any funeral, so don't care a lot about what the embalmers want to do." Dead people don't make funerals, living people do. Presence of a dead body is optional.
That actually happened to me. I am not an electrician, but I know something about household AC power. One morning some of the power in my house was out, some wasn't. I checked the feed lines going to the main dual breakers - only one line was "hot", the other was dead. I called my city-owned power company, and like the ignoramuses they were, they told me to call an electrician, on my $. I insisted they come out and check their own wiring up to the point where it became MY wiring, since there was very, very little on my end that could have caused such a problem. So they did. Sure enough, one of the 3 crimps connecting the city's wiring to my house had failed & opened one leg of my 220V feed. Their excuse was that the last time the house had its wiring worked on (decades before the problem developed) they had used temporary crimps which were supposed to have been replaced with permanent ones - but never were. so the city replaced all 3 crimps (a few decades late) and immediately restored my power - at no cost to me. Had I followed their suggestion, I would have wasted my money on an electrician, who would have wound up having the same discussion with the city that I did.
Everyone reading this is 100% likely to be dead in 140 years.
"send humanity down a the long dark path of extermination" We are doing this very well on our own initiative and need no help from other planets or dimensions, thenk yew veddy much.
'The result of the connection being disrupted can generate some amazing sparks' Maybe that's why the perps used rifles & shot out the wiring from a safe distance. D'oh!
"As it turns out, one guy in a pickup truck can cripple a city's ability to function. You don't think that any enemies could muster those kind of resources? Nobody is even trying." You have no idea is anyone is really trying. None of us do. 30 guys with 30 pickup trucks, 30 hunting rifles shooting armor-piercing bullets (available almost anywhere in the USA), could easily take out transformers over a wide area, and cripple a region's ability to function.
drunk teenager is not the answer with the fewest assumptions if you take into account the facts.
"involved snipping AT&T fiber-optic lines to knock out phone and 911 service in the area and firing shots into a PG&E substation."
how do you get drunk teenager from that? from your years as a wild youth coordinating safe ingress and egress from locations allowing deliberate phone line sabotage and long range high powered rifle targeting intermediate power supply stations on a whim after too many beers?
the only razor applied here was the one to any hint of sanity.
Access to the fiber-optic lines that were damaged included lifting a 200 or 300 lb metal manhole cover. I doubt one person could have done this.
The speed of evolutionary processes depends on the length of the lifecycle of the organism. Any species bigger than viruses and bacteria will quite likely die off before they adapt to human technology.
This statement makes me wonder if the human species will die off before it adapts to its own technology. Alas, Babylon.
I've hit one deer at 70 mph & another ran into the side of my truck when I was going 40 mph. Since then, if I see deer ahead of me on the roadside, or if one crosses road ahead of me, I honk my horn. Most of the time, the deer I honk at show an obvious startle reaction and move away from my car. None has ever moved toward my car or into my path. If one deer crosses the road, there's a good chance others will follow, that's why I honk. I think it helps, don't think it hurts. Most animals act as if they dislike loud, sudden noises.
Will happen of its own accord once gasoline costs more than $10/gallon and each car owner is rationed to 10 gallons a month. That's not rocket science.
One will quickly notice a conspicuous absence of rights for corporations, even though at the time of the Constitution's writing incorporation was not a new concept.
Damn few other commenters have noticed this, here and especially elsewhere.
All you would get is a fresh slate of alpha sociopaths.
Go ahead and start a PAC. The alphas will control it before the ink is dry on your flyers because they are willing to do what it takes to get to power- things you are not willing to do.
No, I don't have a better answer. What do you do against people willing to do anything in their drive for power?
You have described a tendency common to all human societies. Believe it or not, some other societies have been able to deal with the tendency, with more success than the US is showing at present. E.g. some Greek city states practiced ostracism.
in its unproven effectiveness. Plus it's a big red pill, red pills always work better than other colors.
I got the same email from US Bank at about the same time. Time to change my password with them.
I wonder if a regular diesel engine Most diesel-powered vehicles sold nowadays are boosted. I have a 1983 non-boosted Ford diesel pickup. It barely runs above 5000 feet elevation. Below that it runs well, gets 23 mpg even though it weighs 5000 lb.
Apparently I've taken a more radical approach than anyone else. I have stopped sitting upright at a desk to type on a computer. Nearly all of my time using my laptop is done in a fully-reclined chair. I am nearly supine as I type this. The built-in head & neck rest on the back of the chair fully supports my shoulders, neck & head. My upper arms, elbows & forearms arm supported by the backrest & padded arm rest. The laptop itself is supported by a cheap plastic laptray. The laptray has pockets on either side that serve as legs. The laptop is separated from my lap by an air space of about 2". The tray pockets hold pens, small pads, TV remotes, occasionally a can of Dew or a bottle of beer (if either tips, the liquid goes into the tray pocket & nowhere near the laptop.)
If I gaze straight ahead from this relaxed position, my line of sight is about 2" above the top of the screen. I wear bifocals. The screen is about 30" away from my eyes. I had my ophthalmologist adjust the prescription for my lower lenses to allow me to read materials from 30", not from 20" as is typically prescribed for reading glasses. The bifocals are the lined type, so the entire plane of the laptop's screen is viewed through the same lens prescription. I once tried using lineless bifocals & found with them I could only see a small fraction of the screen clearly. I had to continually move my head to focus clearly on the screen. The projected line between the upper & lower eyeglass lenses lines up very closely with the top of the laptop's screen. So I can see distant objects past the screen clearly without moving my head.
When I use a desktop scanner, I have to sit or stand bent over at the desk as most anyone would do. My land line phone is on the floor below the right arm rest.
I am retired, so I have to justify my arrangement to no boss who might perhaps believe I am too comfortable to be really working. If I stay up too late at my laptop, I tend to fall asleep in my computer position, it is that comfortable.
A couple of my hobbies are genealogy & local history. I travel around the US to do this & sometimes find I need to work my laptop for several hours at a time to catch up on email and type up my discoveries while they are still fresh in memory. I bought a folding recliner chair, similar to what is sold for use on patios, where a mesh fabric supports the body. I use a small pillow to provide more support for my head & neck, but otherwise it's very similar to my home recliner. This works almost as well as my home recliner.
I think the foundation of RSI for computer users is attempting to sit upright and pound on a keyboard, with minimal support for the arms & wrists. It's an unnatural and pain-provoking position, dictated by the all-too-human thinking of "We've always done it this way."
If the system is down, the patient records can't be pulled up and maybe somebody gets the wrong medicines and dies. All the more reason to have adequate on-site and off-site backup of some kind. You don't need multiple workstations for that.
Hard drives sometimes die or become corrupt and that recovery partition is useless at that point. Better to say they reliably die or become corrupt, and usually at a most inopportune moment. I've owned several dozen laptops & desktops over the last 25 years, and hard drive failure or corruption has been my most frequently occurring problem.
Good point about the increased reliability of a 'pressed' recovery disk vs. a home-burned one. I have never had a pressed disk go bad, but have had plenty of home-brewed ones do that, of all degrees of quality. I have also tried to burn a recovery DVD immediately after starting a new laptop, had that operation fail, and then discovered I could not make a second attempt. I had to pay the manufacturer for their pressed recovery DVD in addition to the price of the new laptop.
The kids who were camping apologized at the end of their patch, saying the repeater was the only way they could contact Dad from where they were. That makes me thing the repeater was an open one. However, I didn't note any of the repeater's details.
"open autopatches" Last week I heard one being used on a 2M repeater near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in an area with no cell phone coverage. Some young people camping in the park were checking in with Dad at home. YMMV.
Who was/were the victim(s) of this convicted murderer anyway? Buehler? Anyone? Not that they matter one bit.
I just did a quick and completely non-scientific study of asking several people about these, all of them hate them. Birds of feather...
the optimal size for fine control and large movements I suspect whatever is optimal varies from user to user. My hands are way too large for netbook keyboards. I have used trackpoints and trackpads, some are better than others.