According to TFA, Boundless is drawing only from open source material. Which means they have access to just about everything written by the programmers, early adopters, and companies that have developed open source ecosystems like Android, Apache, Firefox, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, etc, since the custom is to put explicit GPL similar licenses on all this material.
Other companies like Elsevier - Focal Press have been making piles of money by doing the same thing, lightly paraphrasing to make an easier read of it, and publishing the result as yet another how to do it book, perhaps as yet another title in a Dummies or Idiots series. These companies did some original, creative work in structuring chapters, fitting examples lifted from one open source users' blog to technical documentation published in another open source blog, and so forth. The original and creative parts deserve copyright, and you can bet that anything published by Focal Press or Elsevier is copyrighted to more than the full extent of the law (as expressly stated in the license). Boundless is doing the same kind of aggregation.
It is difficult to understand how Boundless can be sued under copyright for what is so clearly their own creative and copyrightable work Yes, the stuff is probably very similar to something published by Focal Press, since both have taken from the same open sources. But the creative part of doing the aggregation-- that is different and both companies are equally protected under current copyright law.
Not only agree with the above, but also want to point out, again, that the aggregation is creative work that is under copyright (either expressed or implied). The company is being sued for copyright infringement of its own created, and copyrighted, material.
There is something seriously wrong here. The lawyers involved in making this suit-- well, it is clearly a case of not enough sand....
If I read TFA correctly, only open source materials are used, and they are being cited properly. There is some creative re-arrangement being done, and I would hope that the company that is doing so is copyrighting their art (similar to the copyright one can put on an anthology). The stuff should be going out under some equivalent of the GPL (which if you will recall is a use of copyright).
So what strikes me as odd is that the company is being sued for copyright infringement of what is, very clearly, their own creative work. This should not just get thrown out of court, but all the lawyers involved in filing this suit should be permanently disbarred for malpractice. Every lawyer allowed before the bar has a duty to the Court to uphold the law, which transcends any contractual or for-hire duties they may otherwise take on. We do not need, nor can we afford to have, lawyers who do not understand this basic ethic practicing in this country.
I have a definite allergic reaction to HFCS: wheezing, shortness of breath, the works. It made no sense, since HFCS should be no more of an allergen than sugar. Meaning, not at all.
But if there is enough residual pesticide in HFCS to cause bee colony collapse, then there is enough that it could affect my asthma. It is a matter of purity; evidently the makers of HFCS are allowing more contaminants to get through to the end product than is good for bees or people with allergies.
Since the stuff has no nutritional or health value, I would not be opposed to seeing it be banned. The economic impact would be minimal: every company from Nabisco to Gator Ade that uses the stuff could go back to sugar without any major hit to the bottom line.
An easier solution: use a KVM switch: one desktop that you can swap from a Windows box to a Linux box instantaneously, with the tap of a hot key (typically Fn-Break). I have been doing this for a couple of years, between my business computer (mostly spreadsheets and journaling) and my graphics computer (set up for fast rendering and not terribly stable, especially when I am exploring the very latest new shiny). While I am currently running versions of Ubuntu on both right now, I had no problem with Ubuntu on the graphics monster and WinXP on the meek business machine.
But I learned long ago not to get out the rototiller when granddaddy's old hoe would weed the row faster and easier. Dual booting has its place, but sometimes a KVM makes life easier.
Back in the day when I used to hunt, the 30-06 was my best choice as I was hunting blacktail deer (light animals in dense brush at short range using 125 - 135 grain bullets and fast burning powders), and elk (very heavy animals at various ranges, 200 grain bullets and slow powders), and I had hopes of getting some mule deer hunting in (long range with 150 - 170 grain bullets) but the logistics never worked out. Better deer guns like the.270 are limited in the cartridge loads and bullet weights while a 30-06 can manage the entire gamut from bear killers down to long distance varmint loads (110 grain with sabots, IIRC-- I never used them). Also, 30-06 brass is very massive compared to the charges that are used in hunting, so you can reload your fire-formed brass and get excellent patterns. I was consistently shooting tight, 4 inch patterns at 100 yards with carefully prepared reloads; could not get close to that with factory loads. And I was not a particularly good shot.
Anyone who worries about damaging too much meat from hunting with too much of a round should be worrying instead about taking wasteful shots instead of waiting for a clean shot at vital areas and passing up those opportunities that would waste meat and cause a slow, painful death rather than a humane quick kill. Whether the animal is wasted depends on what is in the hunter's mind, not what he has chambered in his gun.
I do not know anyone who would recommend using 22 or 223 caliber when hunting in wooded or brushy country, we agree on that point. You need a bullet with enough mass that it won't be deflected by a twig or leaf. OTOH, the 22 rimfire remains the tool of choice for subsistence hunters. But they either have learned how to arrange their hunts so they get excellent target presentations, or they soon get hungry and move to the city.
A 4 to 6 inch pattern sounds about right for buckshot from a gun fully choked for duck or goose hunting. Which would be a 12 or 10 gauge shoulder bruising mother: relatively heavy and awkwardly long for indoor use. But you know all about full chokes and semi chokes and open bores, since you have been throwing so much buckshot down range. You know, for instance, that a goose gun is intended to reach way out there and put a string of shot a few yards long in front of that bird, so it will fly into it. You know that the ideal goose gun would deliver a pattern an inch in diameter and 10 yards long.
However you talk about aiming the shotgun, which bird hunters do not do; they point the gun where the bird is going to be when the shot gets out to that distance. The only shotguns I am aware of that have sights for aiming are those designed for east coast deer hunting. Which fits with your use of buckshot rather than birdshot. Though I would have thought that rifled slugs would be better for deer, but then I have never hunted deer with a smooth-bore gun.
A.410 or 20 gauge with an open choke and using pheasant loads will give a pattern of 8 to 12 inches at 21 feet. Most persons can point at things with much greater accuracy than that; the pattern is wide enough that pointing is sufficient and aiming the way one aims a rifle or handgun is not necessary, and often impossible. This kind of farm and field gun typically only has a bead for a front sight and no rear sight: you cannot aim it; but with much less practice than a handgun requires, you can get very good at pointing it when firing from the shoulder.
I kind of regret having said anything about firing from the hip. That cannot be safely learned just with practice or from reading up on it; like a martial art, a trainer who can assess and correct your form is needed. A light shotgun is the appropriate equipment, but no good without the trainer.
Agree fully with this. In an earlier post, I talked of needing to put 500 rounds through a hand gun to become proficient with it, and implied another 50 rounds every month to keep your skills up. But I was not clear, perhaps, that I was talking about pistols.
A shotgunner does not need to spend as much time on training. Gather up half a dozen empty milk jugs, fill them with water, and take them, your new gun, and a box or two of pheasant shot out to some place where your noise will not disturb anyone. Set the jugs out, back up a few paces, and blast away a few times. When you are hitting the target consistently, back up until you are at the distance of the longest room in your house, and keep practicing. Shooting from the hip more often than shooting from the shoulder. Get someone who knows what they are doing to show you how: there are a couple of tricks to locking the gun to your body so it will point where you are looking.
After that session, take the gun out a couple of times each year to get re-acquainted, and that will be sufficient.
This assumes that you will be using pheasant or duck loads at short distances in a gun with a pretty open bore. Many 12 gauge guns are choked so the shot leaves as a string; the intent is to put the string in front of the goose or duck so it flies into it. You don't want that kind of gun for a house gun; you want a varmint gun that sprays a wide pattern. Pheasant loads are a good compromise between pellets heavy enough to have stopping power yet numerous enough in each shell to give a wide pattern.
I too have concerns about the gun. Unless you and your fiancee are going to put in the time at the shooting range to get good with it (about 500 rounds each), and the monthly practice necessary to keep your skill levels up, the gun only increases your risks without providing any particular benefit. Unless, of course, you are talking about a light, short barrel shotgun (20 gauge or less), which is the only good point and shoot self defense tool for the home (no need to aim the thing-- easy to shoot from the hip. Effective range when loaded appropriately with pheasant shot is more than a room length, few worries about over penetration, will stop any aggressor who is not wearing body armor, maybe without even killing him-- saves you on lawyer costs. Mossberg has made a plastic stock 410 gauge 3 round pump action, which would be more than sufficient.)
Another point: you are talking about using lethal force in the face of property crimes. That kind of escalation suggests that any decisions you make now about defensive strategies should be reviewed in about three months when you are not reacting to the heat of the moment.
My pertinent background: living for nearly 30 years in a rural area beyond effective law enforcement patrols, but with a nearby freeway and intermittent periods of high transient crimes. German shepherds with loud barks were an excellent deterrent and a good friends and companions. However they do need several hours of attention daily, including walks in the country for exercise and in the town for socialization skills.
My background with firearms: a 30-06 as a very good deer rifle, a 22 pistol to deal with the occasional varmint-- skunks moving in under the barn; a raccoon who learned how to get into the garbage can, that kind of thing. A double barrel 20 gauge bird gun: I never had the opportunity to really learn how to bird hunt, but it was the gun that I kept in reach near the bed.
Now I don't live in a situation where I can keep a dog properly, and now I rely on a cell phone as a deterrent to crime: dialing a cell phone is much more effective than firearms ever were. Just look at the way crime rates have tumbled as cell phones have become more common. The correlation is too strong for there not to be a connection.
Can you take an Excel spreadsheet with internal macros and reliably run it in Libre/OpenOffice? Haven't tried myself, but if the answer is "no", you've just locked out every single company that's got some clever sod in Finance who's spent the last few years developing a whole bunch of clever spreadsheets.
Hint: This includes virtually every company that has a dedicated finance team.
I'm not going to get into the argument as to whether it's wise for that to have been allowed to happen; the fact is it has.
What you describe is a problem that was first talked about more than 15 years ago and at this point any company that has not taken appropriate measures to manage this risk is not being managed as a going concern. Perhaps it is being managed to maximize somebody's Christmas bonus, or otherwise being used as a steppingstone for clever people who will take what they can from the company's coffers before hopping to some better job. Your rebuttal fails since it is based on the practices of companies that are on the way to going out of business. Through bad management.
Companies that have managed the risks involved when employees are allowed to create critical macros without supervision would have no serious problems with converting from MS Office macros to OOo or LibreOffice macros. The work would be documented and the conversions easy to repair (or replicate from scratch).
There is more than a little stupidity, as well as great deal of mendaciousness, in arguing that OOo or LO is bad for business because it does not support bad business management practices.
Your second argument where you introduce the "third party developers" is bogus and demonstrates a failure to understand the technologies available to today's enterprises. When a company stores its data in open formats such as ODF, then even under Windows it is very easy to write one-shot scripts in any of the dozen languages that support regular expressions that can sift through mountains of files for just what is wanted. You cannot do that with MS Office files: the formats are proprietary and change in frequent and mysterious ways. With MS Office, you do have to rely on the APIs that MS has deigned to make public, so you would need to call in a third party developer who has skills in navigating those. But that is a limitation of the MS way of doing things that does not apply outside of MS's own little world.
I agree with your final point: users do not care an iota about the qualities of the office software they use. They just want to get the job done. OOo and LO recognize this and consistently avoid making changes in the user interface that would interfere with it. Microsoft, otoh, is primarily driven by profit and needs to churn out products that will compete successfully against their earlier versions, and one of the tricks they use is to change the user interface so it can be hyped as "better! because, you see, it's newer!!"
Hey! Now that's just not fair, you pointing out that OOo can easily do some wonderfully critical enterprise things that MS Office cannot do at all. In these kinds of discussions, you are supposed to limit yourself to just the arena that the MS shills know.
[/sarcasm]
It should also be pointed out somewhere in this thread that neither MS Office nor OOo will increase the user's typing speed or his reading comprehension, which remain, by several orders of magnitude, the primary bottlenecks in office computing. In short, the kind of speed comparisons being talked of here are inane; they are like comparing automobile performance by looking solely at the fuel pump output.
What would be interesting is comparing the time it takes an average office user to get up to speed again when a new version of the software is installed. Historically, OOo would have always won such comparisons. Another interesting comparison is the time it takes to develop and maintain internal macros. Microsoft used to be far better at this than OOo, but at this point OOo is at least as good. Maybe better: have not done this kind of programming for a long time, but it seems like OOo offers a stronger set of developer tools out of the box.
Yet another point of comparison is the ease with which external apps could be developed to work with the data files these office suites produce, such as grepping across ten years of archived files for any reference to a specific invoice number, etc. Oh, wait... you cannot do that on a Microsoft platform, the proprietary file formats get in the way...
So as a developer, it seems more fitting to change the entire OS than to spend the hour or so it would take to research alternative linux file managers, and the 3 minutes it would then take to change from Nautilus to something faster?
Nautilus is not particular fast. It was not built for speed. It was built for comfort.
Car analogy: Parent poster has spent his money on buying a brand new Chevy because the tyre noise of the Mercedes he used to drive was too annoying. So much easier to simply buy a new car than to shop for different tyres.
Calling that soup "water" is a bit misleading. That stuff is a witch's brew of highly active chemistry, "Alkahest" would be a more apt label: the name that alchemists used for the universal solvent.
Japan now has three cauldrons of the stuff bubbling away. One of the interesting things that might be learned from these mistakes is how, exactly, the calcium based chemistry of concrete will break down under long term exposure to corium cooked soup. ("long term" most likely being a matter of many months or a few short years.)
If only it was that simple. 50C is more than warm enough for chemical reactions that may eat through the concrete in the time it will take to develop the hardened equipment that could clean up this mess. Also note (fromTFA) these are the conditions found in the coolest of the three reactors that have melted down. The other two are too hot to probe.
Parent post approach is great for all those persons living in a dream world where you never miss your turn. In my real world, if I need a map to find my route from A to B, things are complex enough that I might well miss a turn. Maybe I'm in the wrong lane for it; maybe the turn is closed by construction; maybe it is raining or snowing so hard I cannot read the signs.
The GPS will tell you immediately when you have gotten off course. No more "I should have made that left turn in Albuquerque". Which is especially nasty when you realize that your screw-up has taken you 50 miles from the nearest gas station and you only have 30 miles left in the gas tank. The GPS will also find a corrective route for you (although you might learn that the most annoying word in the world is "Recalculating...").
GPS can be used appropriately and when done so, it makes safe drivers even safer. GPS in the hands of an unsafe driver can be yet another source of distraction, but the problem is not with the technology. It is with a mind that has not been properly trained to stay on task when operating a potentially lethal piece of equipment. NHTSA should focus its efforts on driver education: the dangers on the road all come back to the loose nut behind the wheel.
No paper map is going to tell you that you just missed your turn. Or calculate a corrective route for you, while you work your way across the lanes of traffic to some place where you can stop and figure out what to do next. And when you are pulled over, no paper map is going to tell you where the nearby gas stations, supermarkets, motels, and other necessities of road trips are located.
My Garmin GPS will not only do those things, it will also tell me what kind of traffic delays I can expect on my chosen route, and find an alternative route. Even a live navigator is not able to do that.
GPS units make driving safer for drivers who already have safe driving habits. They are not a substitute for learning proper driving skills and how to use good judgment when operating potentially lethal equipment. NHTSA has it all wrong: it should not be going after technologies that make driving safer for safe drivers; it should be focused on driver ed and licensing requirements, to make more drivers safe drivers. The single most dangerous mechanism in any moving vehicle is the loose nut behind the wheel. [PEBSWAS? Problem Exists Between Steering Wheel And Seat?]
Speedometers are a distraction while driving and constitute a real danger to both the driver and anyone in his immediate vicinity. NHTSA should focus its efforts on banning them, or at the least, blanking them (and all other dashboard instruments) while the car is in motion.
Also something needs to be done about drivers who are bobbing their heads around to the beat of the music they are listening to. They are clearly in a state of distraction and are also a distraction to other drivers. Cops should have the authority to pull them over, take their driver license on the spot, and assure that they will no longer pose an immediate hazard by confiscating the vehicle's sparkplug wires.
That piece of knowledge you learned so long ago: give it up, it is terribly out of date. Knowing how to take the cube root of an arbitrary number no longer has any usefulness since everybody who needs to do that has a calculator.
The world is changing. Do try to keep up with the group.
(mutters: Fortran, done that, best forgotten. Cobol, done that, best forgotten. Pascal, done that, best forgotten. awk, done that, oh the pain! Want to forget! Perl, done that, might need to do more. Python, haven't done that yet.)
Agree with parent. Elsevier has at least 15 years of practice in testing just how far over the line they can go before they get into immediately bad trouble. And this is an institution that knows very well how to do the submarine thing when its prey shows signs of becoming alarmed.
Gee, I don't think things have changed that much since the last time I looked at the academic publishing world.
I think it is still the case that the majority of academic research publication is done by non-tenured Professors who need to publish to avoid losing their source of income, and tenured Professors who are expected to publish to bring in more grant money to their institution.
(Comment applies to the USA, citizens of other countries may find that your mileage may vary.)
I know Elsevier from the other side, from managing the $40K/yr budget of a hospital's Medical Library before the turn of the century. Elsevier's charges and subscription bundling practices were rapacious then; their motto has always been "charge as much as the market will bear, and manipulate the market so we can charge even more."
On scanning my bookshelf, I see that I have picked up a number of books on Blender and 3D modeling that are published by a subsidiary of Elsevier: Focal Press. There are other ways I can get this information, so I will join the boycott and avoid buying books and magazines produced by the Elsevier octopus or any of its obvious subsidiaries.
Animating with Blender, Blender Foundations 2.6 (which is a misleading title since it is not a product of the Blender Foundation and does not describe v2.6 but some imaginary version the author thought was going to become v2.6), and Tradigital Blender are three such books. And, it turns out, all three were written by Roland Hess, whose prose style for some reason makes me sleepy even when he is describing a process I very much want to learn. Maybe avoiding Elsevier's slimy embrace will also cut down on the number of duds that end up in my reference library.
I urge other high tech hobbyists and early adopters to look at the publisher before buying that slick new book or magazine on digital photography, 3D modeling, game development, etc. And join the boycott against Elsevier. It is extremely unlikely that you will miss anything of value in doing so; there are always other sources of greater integrity that you can go to. And by joining the boycott, and talking about it, you would be helping to improve conditions for good health care and scientific research.
No mod points at the moment, alas, or I would have awarded either "insightful" or "funny" to parent post.
It needs to be noted, though, that while learning the details of commands in archaic interfaces is a mind clogging pursuit, learning how to learn that kind of detail, when you need to do it, is a critical skill in a changing world. And then of course there is the matter of acquiring the wisdom to know when it would be a good thing to study out the language, or when it makes more sense to just script out your profound new ideas in Perl or Python and get some dull minded C or C++ code monkey to do the scuttwork.
"Pizza" being the formula for the volume of a cylinder of radius z and height a, you can get as good a slice of that in Peoria as you can anywhere else, being as how analytical geometry is the same everywhere.
All this silliness over pi r squared. Everyone knows that pie are round. Strudels are square, sometimes. (Costco strudels are rectangular, but that's just Costco giving you a bit of extra).
Slashdot Mirror
According to TFA, Boundless is drawing only from open source material. Which means they have access to just about everything written by the programmers, early adopters, and companies that have developed open source ecosystems like Android, Apache, Firefox, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, etc, since the custom is to put explicit GPL similar licenses on all this material.
Other companies like Elsevier - Focal Press have been making piles of money by doing the same thing, lightly paraphrasing to make an easier read of it, and publishing the result as yet another how to do it book, perhaps as yet another title in a Dummies or Idiots series. These companies did some original, creative work in structuring chapters, fitting examples lifted from one open source users' blog to technical documentation published in another open source blog, and so forth. The original and creative parts deserve copyright, and you can bet that anything published by Focal Press or Elsevier is copyrighted to more than the full extent of the law (as expressly stated in the license). Boundless is doing the same kind of aggregation.
It is difficult to understand how Boundless can be sued under copyright for what is so clearly their own creative and copyrightable work Yes, the stuff is probably very similar to something published by Focal Press, since both have taken from the same open sources. But the creative part of doing the aggregation-- that is different and both companies are equally protected under current copyright law.
Not only agree with the above, but also want to point out, again, that the aggregation is creative work that is under copyright (either expressed or implied). The company is being sued for copyright infringement of its own created, and copyrighted, material.
There is something seriously wrong here. The lawyers involved in making this suit-- well, it is clearly a case of not enough sand....
If I read TFA correctly, only open source materials are used, and they are being cited properly. There is some creative re-arrangement being done, and I would hope that the company that is doing so is copyrighting their art (similar to the copyright one can put on an anthology). The stuff should be going out under some equivalent of the GPL (which if you will recall is a use of copyright).
So what strikes me as odd is that the company is being sued for copyright infringement of what is, very clearly, their own creative work. This should not just get thrown out of court, but all the lawyers involved in filing this suit should be permanently disbarred for malpractice. Every lawyer allowed before the bar has a duty to the Court to uphold the law, which transcends any contractual or for-hire duties they may otherwise take on. We do not need, nor can we afford to have, lawyers who do not understand this basic ethic practicing in this country.
I have a definite allergic reaction to HFCS: wheezing, shortness of breath, the works. It made no sense, since HFCS should be no more of an allergen than sugar. Meaning, not at all.
But if there is enough residual pesticide in HFCS to cause bee colony collapse, then there is enough that it could affect my asthma. It is a matter of purity; evidently the makers of HFCS are allowing more contaminants to get through to the end product than is good for bees or people with allergies.
Since the stuff has no nutritional or health value, I would not be opposed to seeing it be banned. The economic impact would be minimal: every company from Nabisco to Gator Ade that uses the stuff could go back to sugar without any major hit to the bottom line.
An easier solution: use a KVM switch: one desktop that you can swap from a Windows box to a Linux box instantaneously, with the tap of a hot key (typically Fn-Break). I have been doing this for a couple of years, between my business computer (mostly spreadsheets and journaling) and my graphics computer (set up for fast rendering and not terribly stable, especially when I am exploring the very latest new shiny). While I am currently running versions of Ubuntu on both right now, I had no problem with Ubuntu on the graphics monster and WinXP on the meek business machine.
But I learned long ago not to get out the rototiller when granddaddy's old hoe would weed the row faster and easier. Dual booting has its place, but sometimes a KVM makes life easier.
Back in the day when I used to hunt, the 30-06 was my best choice as I was hunting blacktail deer (light animals in dense brush at short range using 125 - 135 grain bullets and fast burning powders), and elk (very heavy animals at various ranges, 200 grain bullets and slow powders), and I had hopes of getting some mule deer hunting in (long range with 150 - 170 grain bullets) but the logistics never worked out. Better deer guns like the .270 are limited in the cartridge loads and bullet weights while a 30-06 can manage the entire gamut from bear killers down to long distance varmint loads (110 grain with sabots, IIRC-- I never used them). Also, 30-06 brass is very massive compared to the charges that are used in hunting, so you can reload your fire-formed brass and get excellent patterns. I was consistently shooting tight, 4 inch patterns at 100 yards with carefully prepared reloads; could not get close to that with factory loads. And I was not a particularly good shot.
Anyone who worries about damaging too much meat from hunting with too much of a round should be worrying instead about taking wasteful shots instead of waiting for a clean shot at vital areas and passing up those opportunities that would waste meat and cause a slow, painful death rather than a humane quick kill. Whether the animal is wasted depends on what is in the hunter's mind, not what he has chambered in his gun.
I do not know anyone who would recommend using 22 or 223 caliber when hunting in wooded or brushy country, we agree on that point. You need a bullet with enough mass that it won't be deflected by a twig or leaf. OTOH, the 22 rimfire remains the tool of choice for subsistence hunters. But they either have learned how to arrange their hunts so they get excellent target presentations, or they soon get hungry and move to the city.
A 4 to 6 inch pattern sounds about right for buckshot from a gun fully choked for duck or goose hunting. Which would be a 12 or 10 gauge shoulder bruising mother: relatively heavy and awkwardly long for indoor use. But you know all about full chokes and semi chokes and open bores, since you have been throwing so much buckshot down range. You know, for instance, that a goose gun is intended to reach way out there and put a string of shot a few yards long in front of that bird, so it will fly into it. You know that the ideal goose gun would deliver a pattern an inch in diameter and 10 yards long.
However you talk about aiming the shotgun, which bird hunters do not do; they point the gun where the bird is going to be when the shot gets out to that distance. The only shotguns I am aware of that have sights for aiming are those designed for east coast deer hunting. Which fits with your use of buckshot rather than birdshot. Though I would have thought that rifled slugs would be better for deer, but then I have never hunted deer with a smooth-bore gun.
A .410 or 20 gauge with an open choke and using pheasant loads will give a pattern of 8 to 12 inches at 21 feet. Most persons can point at things with much greater accuracy than that; the pattern is wide enough that pointing is sufficient and aiming the way one aims a rifle or handgun is not necessary, and often impossible. This kind of farm and field gun typically only has a bead for a front sight and no rear sight: you cannot aim it; but with much less practice than a handgun requires, you can get very good at pointing it when firing from the shoulder.
I kind of regret having said anything about firing from the hip. That cannot be safely learned just with practice or from reading up on it; like a martial art, a trainer who can assess and correct your form is needed. A light shotgun is the appropriate equipment, but no good without the trainer.
Agree fully with this. In an earlier post, I talked of needing to put 500 rounds through a hand gun to become proficient with it, and implied another 50 rounds every month to keep your skills up. But I was not clear, perhaps, that I was talking about pistols.
A shotgunner does not need to spend as much time on training. Gather up half a dozen empty milk jugs, fill them with water, and take them, your new gun, and a box or two of pheasant shot out to some place where your noise will not disturb anyone. Set the jugs out, back up a few paces, and blast away a few times. When you are hitting the target consistently, back up until you are at the distance of the longest room in your house, and keep practicing. Shooting from the hip more often than shooting from the shoulder. Get someone who knows what they are doing to show you how: there are a couple of tricks to locking the gun to your body so it will point where you are looking.
After that session, take the gun out a couple of times each year to get re-acquainted, and that will be sufficient.
This assumes that you will be using pheasant or duck loads at short distances in a gun with a pretty open bore. Many 12 gauge guns are choked so the shot leaves as a string; the intent is to put the string in front of the goose or duck so it flies into it. You don't want that kind of gun for a house gun; you want a varmint gun that sprays a wide pattern. Pheasant loads are a good compromise between pellets heavy enough to have stopping power yet numerous enough in each shell to give a wide pattern.
I too have concerns about the gun. Unless you and your fiancee are going to put in the time at the shooting range to get good with it (about 500 rounds each), and the monthly practice necessary to keep your skill levels up, the gun only increases your risks without providing any particular benefit. Unless, of course, you are talking about a light, short barrel shotgun (20 gauge or less), which is the only good point and shoot self defense tool for the home (no need to aim the thing-- easy to shoot from the hip. Effective range when loaded appropriately with pheasant shot is more than a room length, few worries about over penetration, will stop any aggressor who is not wearing body armor, maybe without even killing him-- saves you on lawyer costs. Mossberg has made a plastic stock 410 gauge 3 round pump action, which would be more than sufficient.)
Another point: you are talking about using lethal force in the face of property crimes. That kind of escalation suggests that any decisions you make now about defensive strategies should be reviewed in about three months when you are not reacting to the heat of the moment.
My pertinent background: living for nearly 30 years in a rural area beyond effective law enforcement patrols, but with a nearby freeway and intermittent periods of high transient crimes. German shepherds with loud barks were an excellent deterrent and a good friends and companions. However they do need several hours of attention daily, including walks in the country for exercise and in the town for socialization skills.
My background with firearms: a 30-06 as a very good deer rifle, a 22 pistol to deal with the occasional varmint-- skunks moving in under the barn; a raccoon who learned how to get into the garbage can, that kind of thing. A double barrel 20 gauge bird gun: I never had the opportunity to really learn how to bird hunt, but it was the gun that I kept in reach near the bed.
Now I don't live in a situation where I can keep a dog properly, and now I rely on a cell phone as a deterrent to crime: dialing a cell phone is much more effective than firearms ever were. Just look at the way crime rates have tumbled as cell phones have become more common. The correlation is too strong for there not to be a connection.
Can you take an Excel spreadsheet with internal macros and reliably run it in Libre/OpenOffice? Haven't tried myself, but if the answer is "no", you've just locked out every single company that's got some clever sod in Finance who's spent the last few years developing a whole bunch of clever spreadsheets.
Hint: This includes virtually every company that has a dedicated finance team.
I'm not going to get into the argument as to whether it's wise for that to have been allowed to happen; the fact is it has.
What you describe is a problem that was first talked about more than 15 years ago and at this point any company that has not taken appropriate measures to manage this risk is not being managed as a going concern. Perhaps it is being managed to maximize somebody's Christmas bonus, or otherwise being used as a steppingstone for clever people who will take what they can from the company's coffers before hopping to some better job. Your rebuttal fails since it is based on the practices of companies that are on the way to going out of business. Through bad management.
Companies that have managed the risks involved when employees are allowed to create critical macros without supervision would have no serious problems with converting from MS Office macros to OOo or LibreOffice macros. The work would be documented and the conversions easy to repair (or replicate from scratch).
There is more than a little stupidity, as well as great deal of mendaciousness, in arguing that OOo or LO is bad for business because it does not support bad business management practices.
Your second argument where you introduce the "third party developers" is bogus and demonstrates a failure to understand the technologies available to today's enterprises. When a company stores its data in open formats such as ODF, then even under Windows it is very easy to write one-shot scripts in any of the dozen languages that support regular expressions that can sift through mountains of files for just what is wanted. You cannot do that with MS Office files: the formats are proprietary and change in frequent and mysterious ways. With MS Office, you do have to rely on the APIs that MS has deigned to make public, so you would need to call in a third party developer who has skills in navigating those. But that is a limitation of the MS way of doing things that does not apply outside of MS's own little world.
I agree with your final point: users do not care an iota about the qualities of the office software they use. They just want to get the job done. OOo and LO recognize this and consistently avoid making changes in the user interface that would interfere with it. Microsoft, otoh, is primarily driven by profit and needs to churn out products that will compete successfully against their earlier versions, and one of the tricks they use is to change the user interface so it can be hyped as "better! because, you see, it's newer!!"
Hey! Now that's just not fair, you pointing out that OOo can easily do some wonderfully critical enterprise things that MS Office cannot do at all. In these kinds of discussions, you are supposed to limit yourself to just the arena that the MS shills know.
[/sarcasm]
It should also be pointed out somewhere in this thread that neither MS Office nor OOo will increase the user's typing speed or his reading comprehension, which remain, by several orders of magnitude, the primary bottlenecks in office computing. In short, the kind of speed comparisons being talked of here are inane; they are like comparing automobile performance by looking solely at the fuel pump output.
What would be interesting is comparing the time it takes an average office user to get up to speed again when a new version of the software is installed. Historically, OOo would have always won such comparisons. Another interesting comparison is the time it takes to develop and maintain internal macros. Microsoft used to be far better at this than OOo, but at this point OOo is at least as good. Maybe better: have not done this kind of programming for a long time, but it seems like OOo offers a stronger set of developer tools out of the box.
Yet another point of comparison is the ease with which external apps could be developed to work with the data files these office suites produce, such as grepping across ten years of archived files for any reference to a specific invoice number, etc. Oh, wait... you cannot do that on a Microsoft platform, the proprietary file formats get in the way...
So as a developer, it seems more fitting to change the entire OS than to spend the hour or so it would take to research alternative linux file managers, and the 3 minutes it would then take to change from Nautilus to something faster?
Nautilus is not particular fast. It was not built for speed. It was built for comfort.
Car analogy: Parent poster has spent his money on buying a brand new Chevy because the tyre noise of the Mercedes he used to drive was too annoying. So much easier to simply buy a new car than to shop for different tyres.
Calling that soup "water" is a bit misleading. That stuff is a witch's brew of highly active chemistry, "Alkahest" would be a more apt label: the name that alchemists used for the universal solvent.
Japan now has three cauldrons of the stuff bubbling away. One of the interesting things that might be learned from these mistakes is how, exactly, the calcium based chemistry of concrete will break down under long term exposure to corium cooked soup. ("long term" most likely being a matter of many months or a few short years.)
If only it was that simple. 50C is more than warm enough for chemical reactions that may eat through the concrete in the time it will take to develop the hardened equipment that could clean up this mess. Also note (fromTFA) these are the conditions found in the coolest of the three reactors that have melted down. The other two are too hot to probe.
Parent post approach is great for all those persons living in a dream world where you never miss your turn. In my real world, if I need a map to find my route from A to B, things are complex enough that I might well miss a turn. Maybe I'm in the wrong lane for it; maybe the turn is closed by construction; maybe it is raining or snowing so hard I cannot read the signs.
The GPS will tell you immediately when you have gotten off course. No more "I should have made that left turn in Albuquerque". Which is especially nasty when you realize that your screw-up has taken you 50 miles from the nearest gas station and you only have 30 miles left in the gas tank. The GPS will also find a corrective route for you (although you might learn that the most annoying word in the world is "Recalculating...").
GPS can be used appropriately and when done so, it makes safe drivers even safer. GPS in the hands of an unsafe driver can be yet another source of distraction, but the problem is not with the technology. It is with a mind that has not been properly trained to stay on task when operating a potentially lethal piece of equipment. NHTSA should focus its efforts on driver education: the dangers on the road all come back to the loose nut behind the wheel.
No paper map is going to tell you that you just missed your turn. Or calculate a corrective route for you, while you work your way across the lanes of traffic to some place where you can stop and figure out what to do next. And when you are pulled over, no paper map is going to tell you where the nearby gas stations, supermarkets, motels, and other necessities of road trips are located.
My Garmin GPS will not only do those things, it will also tell me what kind of traffic delays I can expect on my chosen route, and find an alternative route. Even a live navigator is not able to do that.
GPS units make driving safer for drivers who already have safe driving habits. They are not a substitute for learning proper driving skills and how to use good judgment when operating potentially lethal equipment. NHTSA has it all wrong: it should not be going after technologies that make driving safer for safe drivers; it should be focused on driver ed and licensing requirements, to make more drivers safe drivers. The single most dangerous mechanism in any moving vehicle is the loose nut behind the wheel. [PEBSWAS? Problem Exists Between Steering Wheel And Seat?]
Speedometers are a distraction while driving and constitute a real danger to both the driver and anyone in his immediate vicinity. NHTSA should focus its efforts on banning them, or at the least, blanking them (and all other dashboard instruments) while the car is in motion.
Also something needs to be done about drivers who are bobbing their heads around to the beat of the music they are listening to. They are clearly in a state of distraction and are also a distraction to other drivers. Cops should have the authority to pull them over, take their driver license on the spot, and assure that they will no longer pose an immediate hazard by confiscating the vehicle's sparkplug wires.
You guys are losing sight of what is important here.
What is truly important about this news is that I can lose some weight by moving toward equator.
That piece of knowledge you learned so long ago: give it up, it is terribly out of date. Knowing how to take the cube root of an arbitrary number no longer has any usefulness since everybody who needs to do that has a calculator.
The world is changing. Do try to keep up with the group.
(mutters: Fortran, done that, best forgotten. Cobol, done that, best forgotten. Pascal, done that, best forgotten. awk, done that, oh the pain! Want to forget! Perl, done that, might need to do more. Python, haven't done that yet.)
Agree with parent. Elsevier has at least 15 years of practice in testing just how far over the line they can go before they get into immediately bad trouble. And this is an institution that knows very well how to do the submarine thing when its prey shows signs of becoming alarmed.
Gee, I don't think things have changed that much since the last time I looked at the academic publishing world.
I think it is still the case that the majority of academic research publication is done by non-tenured Professors who need to publish to avoid losing their source of income, and tenured Professors who are expected to publish to bring in more grant money to their institution.
(Comment applies to the USA, citizens of other countries may find that your mileage may vary.)
This should have been done 15 years ago.
I know Elsevier from the other side, from managing the $40K/yr budget of a hospital's Medical Library before the turn of the century. Elsevier's charges and subscription bundling practices were rapacious then; their motto has always been "charge as much as the market will bear, and manipulate the market so we can charge even more."
On scanning my bookshelf, I see that I have picked up a number of books on Blender and 3D modeling that are published by a subsidiary of Elsevier: Focal Press. There are other ways I can get this information, so I will join the boycott and avoid buying books and magazines produced by the Elsevier octopus or any of its obvious subsidiaries.
Animating with Blender, Blender Foundations 2.6 (which is a misleading title since it is not a product of the Blender Foundation and does not describe v2.6 but some imaginary version the author thought was going to become v2.6), and Tradigital Blender are three such books. And, it turns out, all three were written by Roland Hess, whose prose style for some reason makes me sleepy even when he is describing a process I very much want to learn. Maybe avoiding Elsevier's slimy embrace will also cut down on the number of duds that end up in my reference library.
I urge other high tech hobbyists and early adopters to look at the publisher before buying that slick new book or magazine on digital photography, 3D modeling, game development, etc. And join the boycott against Elsevier. It is extremely unlikely that you will miss anything of value in doing so; there are always other sources of greater integrity that you can go to. And by joining the boycott, and talking about it, you would be helping to improve conditions for good health care and scientific research.
No mod points at the moment, alas, or I would have awarded either "insightful" or "funny" to parent post.
It needs to be noted, though, that while learning the details of commands in archaic interfaces is a mind clogging pursuit, learning how to learn that kind of detail, when you need to do it, is a critical skill in a changing world. And then of course there is the matter of acquiring the wisdom to know when it would be a good thing to study out the language, or when it makes more sense to just script out your profound new ideas in Perl or Python and get some dull minded C or C++ code monkey to do the scuttwork.
"Pizza" being the formula for the volume of a cylinder of radius z and height a, you can get as good a slice of that in Peoria as you can anywhere else, being as how analytical geometry is the same everywhere.
This comment brought to you by National Pi Day.
All this silliness over pi r squared. Everyone knows that pie are round. Strudels are square, sometimes. (Costco strudels are rectangular, but that's just Costco giving you a bit of extra).