Idunno about that "healthy young specimens" bit. That was true when I was young. But now most of the hog riders I see on the road are gray bearded balding overweight guys who would have trouble pulling their bike upright if it fell over.
I understand that they are also developing a graphene playing card / titanium clothespin module that can be attached to the front fork for that awesome 1950s Schwinn Beach Cruiser buzz.
I've never enjoyed trying to read by firelight when camping. Using lanterns is even worse; they attract the bugs. I won't read during the daylight hours; those are for hiking and photos and such.
Yeah. The official alternate pronunciation is "Oreegun".
I really cannot understand the confusion of Portland OR with Portland ME. One has Portlandia, the Wildwood, and the setting for the Grimm stories. The other has... uh, lobster.
For all in tents and porpoises, science is no better than any other religion.
I cannot speak for the dolphins, but yes, many if not all, of those who are living in tents seem to believe that science is but another religion.
For that matter, there are a lot of people living with advanced technologies that invoke "Science" as if it were a religious belief, when what they are really doing is citing some authority or other, rather than perfoming scientific experiments or scientific research. Science is not scholasticism, despite what you may have been taught in school.
Can you say "scholasticism"? . . . I thought you could.
The easiest way to move water from here to there is to put it in the atmosphere at a place where the prevailing winds will carry the rain clouds where we want them. And we know how to do that for California!
We'd have to work out the best depth to set off the nukes and the best megatonnage per blow, but those are trivial problems.
Hell, we have the delivery systems. We have the nuclear arsenal (and that's just an embarrassment any more). This is consistent with the Manifest Destiny that made the USA what it is today! Getting this done can be a rallying point for the Tea Partiers! After all, you cannot make tea without first boiling some water!!
That's a familiar story. I had a 5 digit UID until I lost access to the email account I had used to set it up. But also I was then posting under a nick I no longer have a need for: mysticgoat or mysticgoat1993 or something like that. Now I'm retired and no longer have to preserve a professional persona. So even if I had access to my old account, I would not use it, since slashdot in its wisdom does not allow the username on an account to be changed. I understand the reasoning behind that, and do not disagree with it. Sucks to have been Mystic Goat.
Now I have a 7 digit UID. For a while I was often mistaken as a youngster, but due to my inherently churlish nature, I'm quickly seen as the curmudgeon I have always been.
Unless you're pushing a lawnmower, get off my lawn.
Something so big that it is mostly overlooked is that the Earth has an exceptionally large Moon that created very high tides earlier, before it had spiralled out to its current distance. For that matter, today's tides are still pretty big. The Moon has kept stirring the primordial soup. Having that kind of a stirring rod is quite possibly a key to rapid evolution and eventually signs of civilization.
Is the technology we are using to search for exoplanets sufficiently advanced that we can identify any with satellites large enough to perturb the primary's orbit as much as the Moon perturbs the Earth's orbit? We should maybe be focusing on those, even if they are on the edges of the Goldilocks zone.
I've met people who have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence. Are you one of them? Is the author of the post that triggered this discussion one of them? What proof can you offer for your opinion on these questions?
This is a measure of Blender's success as FOSS. I hadn't expected this kind of reaction for a couple more years, but Blender has been developing a lot faster than I had thought it would.
The impact to USA society of the ability to make a gun in the privacy of your own home is piddly compared to the impact this technology will have in several other societies.
Here is a newly articulated rule that is proven by several thousand years of history:
The Luddites never win.
Gun control is a product of Luddite thinking. There are other ways of dealing with the crazies who go on rampages, and the criminals who use guns in their crimes. Work out how to handle those bad behaviors rather than wasting efforts trying to stop a technology. It is not the technology that kills. It is the abberant behavior of those who would abuse whatever technology comes easiest to their hand.
At this time, I think any attempt to bring Snowden to trial would ignite a firestorm in this country no matter what verdict was reached. I think that will be the situation for the rest of his life.
There can be no question that he violated USA laws.
But there can also be no question that his actions are bringing pressure to bear on USA agencies to force them to comply with the Constitution. Without those actions, the NSA would continue to run wild as a rogue agency.
I think the only sane way to resolve this mess is to let it alone until Obama's last day in office. Then give Snowden the same kind of Presidential pardon that President Ford gave to President Nixon: a pardon before trial, a pardon before even accusation or indictment. Let Snowden have his passport back, so he could live and move anywhere in the world with the same freedom that any other USA citizen enjoys. But make it clear that he is not welcome to return to the USA, since nothing good could come of that. I would even support paying him a modest annuity on condition that he never return to the USA, and never take any further legal or public action regarding his status. Let him live out his days as, in the view of some persons, a reprehensible outcast in exile. And in the view of other persons, as a patriotic hero whose sacrifices include ostracism from his native land. Let the historians of a hundred years from now be the ones to measure the value of his actions. There is no reason why that has to be done now and there are many reasons why it should not be attempted until all of us are dead.
Lol, you think I haven't used a mouse and a GUI? Or you think that Slackware doesn't support a mouse and a GUI?
Hmm. I assumed you were doing mostly CLI or you would not have made that claim in your sig. Unless you have been studying and using the CLI, your Slackware experience has given you no more knowledge of Unix than the Ubuntu experience. For that matter, anyone who wanted to get their feet wet in Unix could learn to use the Ubuntu CLI extensively, muck about in bash and seashells, and go nuts with vi or whatever the other one is (I forget-- it's a bad memory from decades ago, worse even than vi.)
So what is it about Slackware that makes you think it is somehow closer to venerable Unix than Ubuntu? The lack of extensive repositories? The need to spend hours chasing down dependencies and adjusting make criteria to compile something that has been compiled hundreds of times before?
BTW, you have lost all those extra points that were awarded earlier for consistency. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a lesser mind."
Your POV is noted. And you get a higher grade for consistency.
Perhaps, though, you should expand your horizons. You can continue to spend your limited brain power on memorizing all those nifty little CLI commands with all their single letter modifiers. I stepped away from all that years ago: give me a GUI with mouse navigation and context sensitive menus and I can get more done more quickly and with less study of crap that I will not need to use again for maybe a year or so.
Spreadsheets are definitely valuable in analysis and design phases. That can sometimes be very complex work, especially before all the constraints and contingencies of the project are identified. But as a general rule, even simple spreadsheets have no place in production work.
A spreadsheet is a great way to test the usefulness of different ways of handling complex data. They are also relatively easy to modify as a project's specifications evolve. Which they always do.
However an important part of implementing a project-- moving it from design into production-- is building software that is more robust than spreadsheets can be for use in the daily grind. That will sometimes be a database, but even a sequence of Perl or Python scripts is more robust over time than any spreadsheet. You have no control over the skills and knowledge of some temp whose been hired to fill in for that admin assistant who is in hospital for an appendectomy. That temp needs to be working in a highly constrained environment where he cannot do any unintentional damage, and no spreadsheet can supply that kind of environment.
The easiest way is to make a temporary copy of the spreadsheet and use the "copy downward" capabilities to fill the formula columns in the tempsheet. Then compare the results to the original.
"If you learn Ubuntu, you know Ubuntu; if you learn Slackware, you know Unix"
....Okay....
And how exactly is Unix relevant to a lifeform that is part of a Linux ecosystem? Unix has as much relevance to me today as the DOS I outgrew three decades ago. While I know that much of what I work with in Ubuntu and Linux in general is descended from Unix, I also know that much of the English I communicate with is descended from ancient Elizabethan dialects that only classical thespians use any more. And even they don't use the old words when ordering fries at the local MickeyDees when on break between rehearsals.
No, grasshopper, when bamboo fiber begins to fulfill all its potential uses, the amount of carbon sequestered away in all those automotive and construction pieces will be significant. Bamboo/epoxy can replace many of the uses of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and plastic. And do so with a smaller carbon footprint.
When a product made of bamboo fiber is worn out or otherwise removed from service, it does not need to go into a landfill. It can be chipped and the chips used as feedstock to produce fiberboard and other construction materials. The stuff is more easily repurposed than carbon fiber, fiberglass, and many plastics.
Would bamboo artifacts sequester away carbon for thousands of years? Probably not, probably only for hundreds of years, maybe only a few times as long as trees gone naturally to logs to rot on the forest floor sequester carbon. But the short term advantages are good, and the process not only removes CO2 from the ecosystem, it also reduces the amount of newly extracted fossilized carbon that is injected into the ecosystem.
Now it could be that hemp would be better at many uses than bamboo. Hemp would be a lot easier to process in many ways, and its longer fibers are probably more suitable to textiles and fabric applications than bamboo. But that discussion should be done in another thread (pun intended).
3. The claim that it would break down in landfills is bogus. Material decomposition in landfills is slow due to the anaerobic nature of landfills. Also, bamboo encased in epoxy isn't going to decompose like typical un-worked bamboo.
True, but this is actually a benefit of using bamboo. The carbon in a bamboo discard has been removed from atmospheric CO2 when it was growing and is now sequestered. That is a good thing. When it is encased in epoxy that will not release the CO2 for centuries, that is a far better thing than being sequestered for only dozen decades or so, as is the case for untreated bamboo. A landfill built of discarded epoxy encased bamboo fabrications would not be bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Idunno about that "healthy young specimens" bit. That was true when I was young. But now most of the hog riders I see on the road are gray bearded balding overweight guys who would have trouble pulling their bike upright if it fell over.
I understand that they are also developing a graphene playing card / titanium clothespin module that can be attached to the front fork for that awesome 1950s Schwinn Beach Cruiser buzz.
LGB-Transexual
Well, to each their own.
I've never enjoyed trying to read by firelight when camping. Using lanterns is even worse; they attract the bugs. I won't read during the daylight hours; those are for hiking and photos and such.
Yeah but they've got lobsters. That's got to count for something.
Yeah. The official alternate pronunciation is "Oreegun".
I really cannot understand the confusion of Portland OR with Portland ME. One has Portlandia, the Wildwood, and the setting for the Grimm stories. The other has... uh, lobster.
Maine has relevance?
I'm not sure Bert and Ernie would agree with that.
For all in tents and porpoises, science is no better than any other religion.
I cannot speak for the dolphins, but yes, many if not all, of those who are living in tents seem to believe that science is but another religion.
For that matter, there are a lot of people living with advanced technologies that invoke "Science" as if it were a religious belief, when what they are really doing is citing some authority or other, rather than perfoming scientific experiments or scientific research. Science is not scholasticism, despite what you may have been taught in school.
Can you say "scholasticism"? . . . I thought you could.
Right on!
The easiest way to move water from here to there is to put it in the atmosphere at a place where the prevailing winds will carry the rain clouds where we want them. And we know how to do that for California!
We'd have to work out the best depth to set off the nukes and the best megatonnage per blow, but those are trivial problems.
Hell, we have the delivery systems. We have the nuclear arsenal (and that's just an embarrassment any more). This is consistent with the Manifest Destiny that made the USA what it is today! Getting this done can be a rallying point for the Tea Partiers! After all, you cannot make tea without first boiling some water!!
Both are forms of dihydrogen monoxide. However each of these synonyms exist at a different level of obfuscation.
That's a familiar story. I had a 5 digit UID until I lost access to the email account I had used to set it up. But also I was then posting under a nick I no longer have a need for: mysticgoat or mysticgoat1993 or something like that. Now I'm retired and no longer have to preserve a professional persona. So even if I had access to my old account, I would not use it, since slashdot in its wisdom does not allow the username on an account to be changed. I understand the reasoning behind that, and do not disagree with it. Sucks to have been Mystic Goat.
Now I have a 7 digit UID. For a while I was often mistaken as a youngster, but due to my inherently churlish nature, I'm quickly seen as the curmudgeon I have always been.
Unless you're pushing a lawnmower, get off my lawn.
Something so big that it is mostly overlooked is that the Earth has an exceptionally large Moon that created very high tides earlier, before it had spiralled out to its current distance. For that matter, today's tides are still pretty big. The Moon has kept stirring the primordial soup. Having that kind of a stirring rod is quite possibly a key to rapid evolution and eventually signs of civilization.
Is the technology we are using to search for exoplanets sufficiently advanced that we can identify any with satellites large enough to perturb the primary's orbit as much as the Moon perturbs the Earth's orbit? We should maybe be focusing on those, even if they are on the edges of the Goldilocks zone.
I've met people who have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence. Are you one of them? Is the author of the post that triggered this discussion one of them? What proof can you offer for your opinion on these questions?
This is a measure of Blender's success as FOSS. I hadn't expected this kind of reaction for a couple more years, but Blender has been developing a lot faster than I had thought it would.
Mod parent post up.
The impact to USA society of the ability to make a gun in the privacy of your own home is piddly compared to the impact this technology will have in several other societies.
Here is a newly articulated rule that is proven by several thousand years of history:
The Luddites never win.
Gun control is a product of Luddite thinking. There are other ways of dealing with the crazies who go on rampages, and the criminals who use guns in their crimes. Work out how to handle those bad behaviors rather than wasting efforts trying to stop a technology. It is not the technology that kills. It is the abberant behavior of those who would abuse whatever technology comes easiest to their hand.
At this time, I think any attempt to bring Snowden to trial would ignite a firestorm in this country no matter what verdict was reached. I think that will be the situation for the rest of his life.
There can be no question that he violated USA laws.
But there can also be no question that his actions are bringing pressure to bear on USA agencies to force them to comply with the Constitution. Without those actions, the NSA would continue to run wild as a rogue agency.
I think the only sane way to resolve this mess is to let it alone until Obama's last day in office. Then give Snowden the same kind of Presidential pardon that President Ford gave to President Nixon: a pardon before trial, a pardon before even accusation or indictment. Let Snowden have his passport back, so he could live and move anywhere in the world with the same freedom that any other USA citizen enjoys. But make it clear that he is not welcome to return to the USA, since nothing good could come of that. I would even support paying him a modest annuity on condition that he never return to the USA, and never take any further legal or public action regarding his status. Let him live out his days as, in the view of some persons, a reprehensible outcast in exile. And in the view of other persons, as a patriotic hero whose sacrifices include ostracism from his native land. Let the historians of a hundred years from now be the ones to measure the value of his actions. There is no reason why that has to be done now and there are many reasons why it should not be attempted until all of us are dead.
Lol, you think I haven't used a mouse and a GUI? Or you think that Slackware doesn't support a mouse and a GUI?
Hmm. I assumed you were doing mostly CLI or you would not have made that claim in your sig. Unless you have been studying and using the CLI, your Slackware experience has given you no more knowledge of Unix than the Ubuntu experience. For that matter, anyone who wanted to get their feet wet in Unix could learn to use the Ubuntu CLI extensively, muck about in bash and seashells, and go nuts with vi or whatever the other one is (I forget-- it's a bad memory from decades ago, worse even than vi.)
So what is it about Slackware that makes you think it is somehow closer to venerable Unix than Ubuntu? The lack of extensive repositories? The need to spend hours chasing down dependencies and adjusting make criteria to compile something that has been compiled hundreds of times before?
BTW, you have lost all those extra points that were awarded earlier for consistency. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a lesser mind."
Your POV is noted. And you get a higher grade for consistency.
Perhaps, though, you should expand your horizons. You can continue to spend your limited brain power on memorizing all those nifty little CLI commands with all their single letter modifiers. I stepped away from all that years ago: give me a GUI with mouse navigation and context sensitive menus and I can get more done more quickly and with less study of crap that I will not need to use again for maybe a year or so.
Spreadsheets are definitely valuable in analysis and design phases. That can sometimes be very complex work, especially before all the constraints and contingencies of the project are identified. But as a general rule, even simple spreadsheets have no place in production work.
A spreadsheet is a great way to test the usefulness of different ways of handling complex data. They are also relatively easy to modify as a project's specifications evolve. Which they always do.
However an important part of implementing a project-- moving it from design into production-- is building software that is more robust than spreadsheets can be for use in the daily grind. That will sometimes be a database, but even a sequence of Perl or Python scripts is more robust over time than any spreadsheet. You have no control over the skills and knowledge of some temp whose been hired to fill in for that admin assistant who is in hospital for an appendectomy. That temp needs to be working in a highly constrained environment where he cannot do any unintentional damage, and no spreadsheet can supply that kind of environment.
The easiest way is to make a temporary copy of the spreadsheet and use the "copy downward" capabilities to fill the formula columns in the tempsheet. Then compare the results to the original.
--
"If you learn Ubuntu, you know Ubuntu; if you learn Slackware, you know Unix"
....Okay....
And how exactly is Unix relevant to a lifeform that is part of a Linux ecosystem? Unix has as much relevance to me today as the DOS I outgrew three decades ago. While I know that much of what I work with in Ubuntu and Linux in general is descended from Unix, I also know that much of the English I communicate with is descended from ancient Elizabethan dialects that only classical thespians use any more. And even they don't use the old words when ordering fries at the local MickeyDees when on break between rehearsals.
And I was sure they were talking about The Mathemagician's Rule of Three:
--The hunting of the snark, Lewis Carrol. Fit the First, second stanza.
No, grasshopper, when bamboo fiber begins to fulfill all its potential uses, the amount of carbon sequestered away in all those automotive and construction pieces will be significant. Bamboo/epoxy can replace many of the uses of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and plastic. And do so with a smaller carbon footprint.
When a product made of bamboo fiber is worn out or otherwise removed from service, it does not need to go into a landfill. It can be chipped and the chips used as feedstock to produce fiberboard and other construction materials. The stuff is more easily repurposed than carbon fiber, fiberglass, and many plastics.
Would bamboo artifacts sequester away carbon for thousands of years? Probably not, probably only for hundreds of years, maybe only a few times as long as trees gone naturally to logs to rot on the forest floor sequester carbon. But the short term advantages are good, and the process not only removes CO2 from the ecosystem, it also reduces the amount of newly extracted fossilized carbon that is injected into the ecosystem.
Now it could be that hemp would be better at many uses than bamboo. Hemp would be a lot easier to process in many ways, and its longer fibers are probably more suitable to textiles and fabric applications than bamboo. But that discussion should be done in another thread (pun intended).
When you mix bamboo fibers with epoxy, you sequester the carbon that the bamboo extracted from atmospheric CO2.
And that is a far better thing to do than allowing the stuff to decompose.
About your third point:
3. The claim that it would break down in landfills is bogus. Material decomposition in landfills is slow due to the anaerobic nature of landfills. Also, bamboo encased in epoxy isn't going to decompose like typical un-worked bamboo.
True, but this is actually a benefit of using bamboo. The carbon in a bamboo discard has been removed from atmospheric CO2 when it was growing and is now sequestered. That is a good thing. When it is encased in epoxy that will not release the CO2 for centuries, that is a far better thing than being sequestered for only dozen decades or so, as is the case for untreated bamboo. A landfill built of discarded epoxy encased bamboo fabrications would not be bad thing.