Bloom County was my favourite cartoon for years, but I gradually went off it in the Outland series. I have most of the BC books and still have a couple of the T-shirts, slightly faded: "Don't blame me, I voted for Bill'n'Opus" and one with a slightly squashed Bill the Dead Cat. The T-shirts almost still fit me - I blame too many washes for making them shrink.
I think there's still potential for Breathed to extract something from the older material. The video "A Wish for Wings that Work" featuring Opus (Bill in a supporting role) with was excellent. The BC themes could also be used to inspire videos with Senator Bedfellow, Milo, Oliver, & Binkley.
I was not allowed to join a closed mailing list for malware researchers due to the fact that I am not googleable. Had I spread my identity all over the net, had a personal homepage that accurately described me and my skills, had spread comments on my thoughts to various topics of my interest under my real name on the net etc. I probably would have been accepted.
Not everybody is easily googled, even if they put a lot of personal information on the net. Suppose, for instance, your name was very common, (e.g. "John Smith"), or was the same as that of a famous or historical person (e.g. "Martin Luther"), or both common and famous (e.g. "James Brown"). A google based only on your name would be useless. The search would need to be crafted with other terms unique to you and not likely to be shared with any namesake or appear anywhere in a page containing a reference to a namesake. That can be remarkably difficult (it is in my case, since I share my name with a notable person).
Of course, if you explicitly give someone your email address and web site address, then they can find your online information. But it may be difficult to find merely through search engines using your name and a few personal details.
Preparing breakfast/lunch/dinner, or cleaning up from it
Making phone calls for needed appointments
Cleaning the kitchen, or bathrooms, or...
Did I mention the laundry?
I could go on. See anything there that a really little kid can help with?
Quite a lot that a kid could help with. In fact, most small kids enjoy helping their parents - it gives them a sense that they are doing something important.
The 5-year-old can certainly help bringing his/her own clothes to the laundry basket. He/she can also help YOU sort the laundry into whites, various colors, etc. for different wash programs. Whether you have a tumble dryer, or whether you dry your clothes on an outside line, a 5-year-old can certainly help transfer clothes from the washing machine to the drying machine/line. He/she can also help sort out the clean clothes according to whose they are after they are washed & dried, and can bring them to the appropriate bedroom etc.
Small kids enjoy helping with cleaning, whether it is vacuuming floors, dusting furniture, washing dishes (or loading a dishwasher). They also enjoy helping with food preparation, to the extent that they can (i.e. no knives, high temperatures, etc.). You'd be amazed by the assistance on offer for gardening, such as planting seeds or watering flowers. I could go on. Don't expent them to do these things by themselves unsupervised, but don't exclude them from activities where they are willing and able to contribute.
Our kids did all of that when they were five (and more besides). They helped with a few of those things even at three years of age.
And you know what? That's spending time with your kids, giving them a sense of importance and achievement. It's even imparting a few life skills to them. In other words, it's parenting.
IMO, all short trades should be naked. I'd prefer to see the lending of stocks prohibited. And short traders would not be able to cancel deals retroactively just because they could not buy what they had already contracted to sell (unlimited liability in this instance).
Uh, it's been a while since I actually was in math class, but shouldn't it be:
1 base pi
Nope. 1 base X is 1, 10 base X is X, 100 base X is X*X, and so forth. Oh, and 0.1 base X is 1/X.
Many years ago, before the dawning of the age of calculators, I spent hours in school math classes converting numbers to base pi (or e or phi or gamma or other interesting number) by hand. I was one of the first to finish in-class assignments, which left me with lots of time to kill. Did you know that e base pi is approximately 2.20212010021 for instance?
Can any of them handle books with equations (including math inside sentences) yet? How about vector diagrams? Until both are handled (oh, and bitmap illustrations), then I'm not interested.
There was even more agitation over the chemistry prize, awarded jointly to rival teams - one from the United States which determined Coca-Cola to be an effective spermicide and one from Taiwan which proved it is not.
I don't see how any self-respecting scientist can sleep at night until this situation is rectified. I know I can't!
Apparently, Coca Cola in the US is not quite the same as Coca Cola in several other countries. In the US, corn syrup is used as the sweetener. In many other countries, syrup from sugar cane is used. The two syrups' particular sucroses and admixed flavourings (impurities) are not the same. Perhaps the difference is just enough.
Hey, corn syrup as a spermicide! What an idea for a research proposal! Next year, maybe I'll get an Ig!
Blame HP, not microsoft. The driver for my all in one Brother laser installed perfectly in Vista x64. If it's possible for one company to do it correctly and make it easy for the user then it's possible for any company to do it. It sounds like HP dropped the ball. What is your logic for blaming it on Vista?
Well my HP All-In-One installed perfectly in Ubuntu. All functions working, available via the network to any PC in the house. HP provides pretty good driver packages which install effortlessly in my experience, whether on Linux or Windows. If blame for a non-functioning printer is to be assigned to either HP or MS, my guess would be that software issues are MS's fault, and hardware issues are HP's (maybe there's a borked connector or something).
BTW I also programmed IBM and DEC mainframes in the late 70's, DEC PDPs and VAXen in the 80's, and had an original IBM PC (before the PC-XT or PC-AT existed). Actually, I used the Commodore PET even before the IBM PC existed.
However, there is an old method for improving cheap whisky which is traditionally used on scotch stuff. Just add a few drops of cold tea, and the tannins have much the same effect as an extra few years in the barrel. The improved whisky is then transferred to a bottle with a better label, and typically served "on the rocks" to morons who can't taste the difference anyway.
It would not work on whiskey, since that is usually consumed at room temperature (perhaps with a drop of water, but no ice), and the slight imbalance of flavours due to addition of tea might well be detected by a knowledgeable palate.
I have 1GB RAM on my 6-year-old PC at home, and allocated a 2GB swap partition. Monitoring swap usage suggests that the system rarely uses much of it, and the largest swap usage I have noticed is only 300MB. In principle, I could have allocated an even smaller swap partition, but since it's on a 400GB drive, the lost space is negligible.
The situation is quite similar on my 5-year-old laptop, which also has 1GB RAM, and a 1.5GB swap partition on its 80GB disk.
If I had more RAM, I'd have less need for swap space (except for suspend to disk on a laptop).
I renamed the win.com file in Windows 3.x to be lose.com instead. Then you got the esthetically satisfying possibility:
C>win
Bad command or file name
C>lose
Starting Microsoft Windows
Then again, I was already sick of Windows at 3.0, having tried Windows 1, Windows 2, Windows 286, and Windows 386, and hated them all for being so stupid and unreliable. The first version of Windows that I almost liked was the one in OS/2 2.0, because you could run several instances of them and kill them if they didn't actually kill themselves.
Incidentally, the shareware graphical shell Aporia gave a sort of Windows 95 look to Windows 386 in the late 1980s (before Windows 3.0). It had icons for tools, drag+drop worked, there was a trashcan, and so forth. I wonder what happened to it...
Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes CO2 from the atmosphere.
As a Canadian, I have to say I'm disappointed in my fellow countrymen. Just when you thought global warming would make our climate mildly tolerable, they go and mess it all up.
You're disappointed? How do you think Finns and Icelanders will feel about this dreadful news? At least you Canadians get some kind of summer in Toronto & Montreal, and even in Winnipeg & Edmonton.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now?
It's a two-step process, but not too arduous:
1. Create a selection of any kind (oval, rectangle, freeform, whatever), then replace it with its border,
2. Fill selection with chosen color & degree of transparency.
The "replace selection with border" operation might not be obvious at first, but it soon becomes second nature. The keyboard shortcut for it in Gimp 2.4 is alt-s r.
Don't we have a device that removes CO2 from the air? I thought they were called "trees."
Well, yes... but the rate at which trees remove CO2 from the air is not very high. Moreover, left to nature, much of that CO2 is usually released again at the end of the tree's life, when it usually rots slowly. If, however, the tree is harvested for human use, most of the CO2 may be released rapidly (firewood), or some of it may be stored for decades to centuries (construction, paper).
Either way, the net rate of fixation of CO2 is rather limited, and far less than the rate of release of fossil carbon. Nature required many millions of years for plants to convert CO2 into reserves of fossil hydrocarbons.
CO2 has also been removed from the atmosphere via the oceans. Many shelly organisms use dissolved CO2 to build their shells. On death, some of these sink, eventually forming carbonate sediments. Geologic processes have been releasing CO2 from carbonate sediments at a similar (but probably lower) rate.
In modern times, industry has been releasing fossil carbon as atmospheric CO2 at a rate some orders of magnitude faster than the net rate of removal of CO2 by plants and shelly creatures. There's the rub. To reverse the buildup of atmospheric CO2, we need something beyond mere forests and diatoms.
The mass extinction at the end of the Permian has been attributed to numerous causes. One of the prime theories also has to do with rapid release of methyl hydrates from ocean-floor clathrates.
The theory goes along the lines that oceanic overturning (exchange of bottom waters with surface waters) was limited in the Permian (even after the end of the Permo-Carboniferous glacial period), allowing accumulation of clathrates in oceanic sediments. However, overturning increased in the late Permian due to changes in oceanic circulation. This is conjectured to have caused massive releases of methane from methyl hydrates, with consequent large rapid swings in climate on land and in sea.
The evidence is not conclusive, but is strong. Most of it is derived from studies of marine fossils and isotope ratios. Discussion of the evidence and assessment of this and other theories for the extinction may be found, for example, in:
D.H. Erwin, The Great Paleozoic Crisis: Life and Death in the Permian, Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1993. ISBN:0715301306.
Of course, oceanic overturning is much stronger in the modern world, with deepwater formation especially strong in the North Atlantic and at the margins of Antarctica. This suggests the potential for clathrate release is probably rather less than it was in the late Permian, but not necessarily negligible. Another conjectured effect of global warming is slowing of oceanic overturning
The degree to which evidence supports these conjectures regarding ancient disruptions to climate is open to interpretation.
I configured Opera to clear all cookies at the end of every session. Occasionally, I also clear them during a session.
In Epiphany, I regularly clean out all cookies manually. I do this before and after visiting any e-commerce or financial site, even if I don't conduct any transactions.
The White House doing something that isn't brain-dead stupid?
The reptilian brain of a bureaucracy does not work in quite the same way as a human's brain. Lack of movement does not mean the reptile is dead or ignoring events around it.
usable and feature-complete software which is just undergoing stringent testing for subtle defects and bugs
You missed the last part of that, which reads by a limited number of testers.
If an app is delivered to end users, then it's not beta.
Copyright may be granted for "limited times" according to the US Constitution, which SCOTUS has interpreted as being any finite period specified by Federal legislation.
Strictly speaking, the entire human population would constitute a limited number of testers.
Slashdot Mirror
Bloom County was my favourite cartoon for years, but I gradually went off it in the Outland series. I have most of the BC books and still have a couple of the T-shirts, slightly faded: "Don't blame me, I voted for Bill'n'Opus" and one with a slightly squashed Bill the Dead Cat. The T-shirts almost still fit me - I blame too many washes for making them shrink.
I think there's still potential for Breathed to extract something from the older material. The video "A Wish for Wings that Work" featuring Opus (Bill in a supporting role) with was excellent. The BC themes could also be used to inspire videos with Senator Bedfellow, Milo, Oliver, & Binkley.
I was not allowed to join a closed mailing list for malware researchers due to the fact that I am not googleable. Had I spread my identity all over the net, had a personal homepage that accurately described me and my skills, had spread comments on my thoughts to various topics of my interest under my real name on the net etc. I probably would have been accepted.
Not everybody is easily googled, even if they put a lot of personal information on the net. Suppose, for instance, your name was very common, (e.g. "John Smith"), or was the same as that of a famous or historical person (e.g. "Martin Luther"), or both common and famous (e.g. "James Brown"). A google based only on your name would be useless. The search would need to be crafted with other terms unique to you and not likely to be shared with any namesake or appear anywhere in a page containing a reference to a namesake. That can be remarkably difficult (it is in my case, since I share my name with a notable person).
Of course, if you explicitly give someone your email address and web site address, then they can find your online information. But it may be difficult to find merely through search engines using your name and a few personal details.
...was made sublime when Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. It became downright ethereal when Yasser Arafat received one in 1994.
Cleaning the unending flow of dirty dishes
Handling the unending flow of laundry
Preparing breakfast/lunch/dinner, or cleaning up from it
Making phone calls for needed appointments
Cleaning the kitchen, or bathrooms, or ...
Did I mention the laundry?
I could go on. See anything there that a really little kid can help with?
Quite a lot that a kid could help with. In fact, most small kids enjoy helping their parents - it gives them a sense that they are doing something important.
The 5-year-old can certainly help bringing his/her own clothes to the laundry basket. He/she can also help YOU sort the laundry into whites, various colors, etc. for different wash programs. Whether you have a tumble dryer, or whether you dry your clothes on an outside line, a 5-year-old can certainly help transfer clothes from the washing machine to the drying machine/line. He/she can also help sort out the clean clothes according to whose they are after they are washed & dried, and can bring them to the appropriate bedroom etc.
Small kids enjoy helping with cleaning, whether it is vacuuming floors, dusting furniture, washing dishes (or loading a dishwasher). They also enjoy helping with food preparation, to the extent that they can (i.e. no knives, high temperatures, etc.). You'd be amazed by the assistance on offer for gardening, such as planting seeds or watering flowers. I could go on. Don't expent them to do these things by themselves unsupervised, but don't exclude them from activities where they are willing and able to contribute.
Our kids did all of that when they were five (and more besides). They helped with a few of those things even at three years of age.
And you know what? That's spending time with your kids, giving them a sense of importance and achievement. It's even imparting a few life skills to them. In other words, it's parenting.
IMO, all short trades should be naked. I'd prefer to see the lending of stocks prohibited. And short traders would not be able to cancel deals retroactively just because they could not buy what they had already contracted to sell (unlimited liability in this instance).
...and the bankers flipped.
Uh, it's been a while since I actually was in math class, but shouldn't it be:
1 base pi
Nope. 1 base X is 1, 10 base X is X, 100 base X is X*X, and so forth. Oh, and 0.1 base X is 1/X.
Many years ago, before the dawning of the age of calculators, I spent hours in school math classes converting numbers to base pi (or e or phi or gamma or other interesting number) by hand. I was one of the first to finish in-class assignments, which left me with lots of time to kill. Did you know that e base pi is approximately 2.20212010021 for instance?
Can any of them handle books with equations (including math inside sentences) yet? How about vector diagrams? Until both are handled (oh, and bitmap illustrations), then I'm not interested.
Compute the value of pi to the final digit.
Easy, it's 10, base pi.
There was even more agitation over the chemistry prize, awarded jointly to rival teams - one from the United States which determined Coca-Cola to be an effective spermicide and one from Taiwan which proved it is not.
I don't see how any self-respecting scientist can sleep at night until this situation is rectified. I know I can't!
Apparently, Coca Cola in the US is not quite the same as Coca Cola in several other countries. In the US, corn syrup is used as the sweetener. In many other countries, syrup from sugar cane is used. The two syrups' particular sucroses and admixed flavourings (impurities) are not the same. Perhaps the difference is just enough.
Hey, corn syrup as a spermicide! What an idea for a research proposal! Next year, maybe I'll get an Ig!
Blame HP, not microsoft. The driver for my all in one Brother laser installed perfectly in Vista x64. If it's possible for one company to do it correctly and make it easy for the user then it's possible for any company to do it. It sounds like HP dropped the ball. What is your logic for blaming it on Vista?
Well my HP All-In-One installed perfectly in Ubuntu. All functions working, available via the network to any PC in the house. HP provides pretty good driver packages which install effortlessly in my experience, whether on Linux or Windows. If blame for a non-functioning printer is to be assigned to either HP or MS, my guess would be that software issues are MS's fault, and hardware issues are HP's (maybe there's a borked connector or something).
BTW I also programmed IBM and DEC mainframes in the late 70's, DEC PDPs and VAXen in the 80's, and had an original IBM PC (before the PC-XT or PC-AT existed). Actually, I used the Commodore PET even before the IBM PC existed.
$man woman
No manual entry for woman
Whiskey? Probably not.
However, there is an old method for improving cheap whisky which is traditionally used on scotch stuff. Just add a few drops of cold tea, and the tannins have much the same effect as an extra few years in the barrel. The improved whisky is then transferred to a bottle with a better label, and typically served "on the rocks" to morons who can't taste the difference anyway.
It would not work on whiskey, since that is usually consumed at room temperature (perhaps with a drop of water, but no ice), and the slight imbalance of flavours due to addition of tea might well be detected by a knowledgeable palate.
I have 1GB RAM on my 6-year-old PC at home, and allocated a 2GB swap partition. Monitoring swap usage suggests that the system rarely uses much of it, and the largest swap usage I have noticed is only 300MB. In principle, I could have allocated an even smaller swap partition, but since it's on a 400GB drive, the lost space is negligible.
The situation is quite similar on my 5-year-old laptop, which also has 1GB RAM, and a 1.5GB swap partition on its 80GB disk.
If I had more RAM, I'd have less need for swap space (except for suspend to disk on a laptop).
I renamed the win.com file in Windows 3.x to be lose.com instead. Then you got the esthetically satisfying possibility:
C>win
Bad command or file name
C>lose
Starting Microsoft Windows
Then again, I was already sick of Windows at 3.0, having tried Windows 1, Windows 2, Windows 286, and Windows 386, and hated them all for being so stupid and unreliable. The first version of Windows that I almost liked was the one in OS/2 2.0, because you could run several instances of them and kill them if they didn't actually kill themselves.
Incidentally, the shareware graphical shell Aporia gave a sort of Windows 95 look to Windows 386 in the late 1980s (before Windows 3.0). It had icons for tools, drag+drop worked, there was a trashcan, and so forth. I wonder what happened to it...
Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes CO2 from the atmosphere.
As a Canadian, I have to say I'm disappointed in my fellow countrymen. Just when you thought global warming would make our climate mildly tolerable, they go and mess it all up.
You're disappointed? How do you think Finns and Icelanders will feel about this dreadful news? At least you Canadians get some kind of summer in Toronto & Montreal, and even in Winnipeg & Edmonton.
Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now?
It's a two-step process, but not too arduous:
1. Create a selection of any kind (oval, rectangle, freeform, whatever), then replace it with its border,
2. Fill selection with chosen color & degree of transparency.
The "replace selection with border" operation might not be obvious at first, but it soon becomes second nature. The keyboard shortcut for it in Gimp 2.4 is alt-s r.
Don't we have a device that removes CO2 from the air? I thought they were called "trees."
Well, yes... but the rate at which trees remove CO2 from the air is not very high. Moreover, left to nature, much of that CO2 is usually released again at the end of the tree's life, when it usually rots slowly. If, however, the tree is harvested for human use, most of the CO2 may be released rapidly (firewood), or some of it may be stored for decades to centuries (construction, paper).
Either way, the net rate of fixation of CO2 is rather limited, and far less than the rate of release of fossil carbon. Nature required many millions of years for plants to convert CO2 into reserves of fossil hydrocarbons.
CO2 has also been removed from the atmosphere via the oceans. Many shelly organisms use dissolved CO2 to build their shells. On death, some of these sink, eventually forming carbonate sediments. Geologic processes have been releasing CO2 from carbonate sediments at a similar (but probably lower) rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
In modern times, industry has been releasing fossil carbon as atmospheric CO2 at a rate some orders of magnitude faster than the net rate of removal of CO2 by plants and shelly creatures. There's the rub. To reverse the buildup of atmospheric CO2, we need something beyond mere forests and diatoms.
In post-Soviet Russian army, your General Direktion farts at you!
The mass extinction at the end of the Permian has been attributed to numerous causes. One of the prime theories also has to do with rapid release of methyl hydrates from ocean-floor clathrates.
The theory goes along the lines that oceanic overturning (exchange of bottom waters with surface waters) was limited in the Permian (even after the end of the Permo-Carboniferous glacial period), allowing accumulation of clathrates in oceanic sediments. However, overturning increased in the late Permian due to changes in oceanic circulation. This is conjectured to have caused massive releases of methane from methyl hydrates, with consequent large rapid swings in climate on land and in sea.
The evidence is not conclusive, but is strong. Most of it is derived from studies of marine fossils and isotope ratios. Discussion of the evidence and assessment of this and other theories for the extinction may be found, for example, in:
D.H. Erwin, The Great Paleozoic Crisis: Life and Death in the Permian, Columbia University Press, New York NY, 1993. ISBN:0715301306.
Of course, oceanic overturning is much stronger in the modern world, with deepwater formation especially strong in the North Atlantic and at the margins of Antarctica. This suggests the potential for clathrate release is probably rather less than it was in the late Permian, but not necessarily negligible. Another conjectured effect of global warming is slowing of oceanic overturning
The degree to which evidence supports these conjectures regarding ancient disruptions to climate is open to interpretation.
On my whois, with the database record marked as updated today, it shows like this:
Domain Name: GOLDENCASINO.COM
Registrar: DIRECTI INTERNET SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD. D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
Referral URL: http://www.publicdomainregistry.com/
Name Server: NS1.SURF4SPEED.COM
Name Server: NS2.SURF4SPEED.COM
Status: ok
Updated Date: 25-sep-2008
Creation Date: 27-oct-1997
Expiration Date: 18-nov-2010
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:14:54 EDT
I configured Opera to clear all cookies at the end of every session. Occasionally, I also clear them during a session.
In Epiphany, I regularly clean out all cookies manually. I do this before and after visiting any e-commerce or financial site, even if I don't conduct any transactions.
It's no more fanatical than using a condom.
...for setting aside other judgments
The White House doing something that isn't brain-dead stupid?
The reptilian brain of a bureaucracy does not work in quite the same way as a human's brain. Lack of movement does not mean the reptile is dead or ignoring events around it.
usable and feature-complete software which is just undergoing stringent testing for subtle defects and bugs
You missed the last part of that, which reads by a limited number of testers.
If an app is delivered to end users, then it's not beta.
Copyright may be granted for "limited times" according to the US Constitution, which SCOTUS has interpreted as being any finite period specified by Federal legislation.
Strictly speaking, the entire human population would constitute a limited number of testers.