I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup.
Two suggestions. First, if you're mixing your own posion (Raid + borax + syrup) then you might have simply made the mix too strong.
Second, there are sugar ants and fat ants. (I'm sure this is entomologically a gross oversimplification but I think it's fair when talking about invading household ants.) Sugar ants want sweet stuff, fat ants want fat. It might be that your invaders were sugar ants, but now they're fat ants. Try putting a little peanut butter in front of them to see how they react.
Tupelo honey costs 2-3x as much and is considered the superior honey, but honestly I can't tell the difference between it and clover.
Tupelo honey is more valuable to me because it's much less prone to crystallize (due to the sugars in it). Clover honey seems to crystallize if you do so much as look at it funny.
But as the grandparent post alluded to, the Model M has only two bottom row meta keys (Ctrl and Alt), while all modern keyboards have three. I still have a 90s-era Model M and it still works great. But my daily keyboard is from pckeyboard.com just because of the meta key issue.
I've been a keyboard jockey for many years. It's been my experience that
holding any single position for hours at a
stretch hurts something -- back, shoulders, wrist, spine, or all of the above.
The "best position" is usually "something other than the one I've been in for
the past 60 minutes".
To address this,
I recently got a
sit-stand
workstation. I love being able to stand up occasionally while I work.
Standing relieves the pressure from my sit bones and legs, and since standing
takes more energy I feel more awake and alive. I find I stand for an hour or
two of every eight hour day. I don't like to sit all day, and I can't imagine
standing all day.
The particular product I linked to above has its drawbacks. I love the ease
of the transition between sitting and standing. I hate the mouse tray. It's
too small for a regular mouse so I switched to a trackball. But regardless of
which I use, my arm receives no support while using it. Holding my arm
in the air so much stresses my
shoulder. The only time I'm completely comfortable using a mouse is when all
of my arm from the elbow forward is resting on a flat surface. The mouse tray
on this product demands the exact opposite. My shoulder hurts enough that I
know I can't continue
using this, but I plan to work out something so that I can easily swap between
sitting and standing. They offer similar products that might work better for
me.
I'm also lucky enough to work from home, so I have six positions
in which I regularly work: 1) sitting at the desk, 2) standing at the desk,
3) sitting
at the kitchen table, 4) sitting in the living room, 5) sitting on the table
on the porch, and 6) here in the hammock. (I have a Mayan style hammock hung
on my screened-in porch.) I
spend most of my time at 1, 2, and 6. When I'm away from the desk, I have to
use the laptop keyboard which isn't great for my wrists. But the tradeoff is
worth it. The hammock supports my back beautifully.
In short, I find that the best position for me to be in is a new one.
We weren't made to work at a keyboard for 6-12 hours/day, and the best way to
make your body forgive you while you do this is to spread the abuse around
to different body parts. And after work, make it up to your body -- do yoga,
go for a swim, run, or ride a bike.
And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
What do you think happened when the last sentient species figured this out, about.. oh, 13.7 billion years ago..
And the last thing heard in that previous universe was a scientist saying "Hey guys, watch this!"
Can't say I've ever had kale. I enjoy collard greens, does that count?
Amazingly enough (getting way OT now), broccoli, kale, collard greens, cauliflower and cabbage are all the same species. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Brassica oleracea.
What evidence is there that porn is bad for children?
I would argue that porn destroys children. My definition of childhood includes a period of innocence, or a freedom from some knowledge that's usually difficult for people to make sense of. For instance, we don't confront children with knowledge of death (if we can avoid doing so), because death is difficult even for adults. Why burden a child with something that many adults can't bear? Children exposed to enough "adult" concepts (death, sex, violence, etc.) aren't children for long.
Porn, specifically, is even harder for kids to make sense of since it is about sex and kids (I assume we're talking about prepubsecents here) have yet to undergo the hormonal change that will radically shift their opinion about sex. How in the world to do expect a prepubsecent to understand sex, let alone the stylized sex frequently depicted in porn?
Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about personal interaction from "reality" TV. It's true that kids need to learn about sex eventually, but if they learn about it from porn they're going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about sex.
For an eloquent argument about how knowledge and childhood are intimately related, have a look at Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood".
Mass transit is better suited to the higher population densities of European cities, much of the USA is too spread out.
And yet good mass transit encourages dense cities. Modern sprawl in the USA is largely a result of public policy decisions, not geography or destiny. We can change that.
Cycling doesn't work in some parts of USA due to weather extremes. You can't bike when its 40 below zero wind chill, or on snow and ice.
(and parts of the south are too hot.)
It's not 40 below and icy anywhere in the USA for six months out of the year, and when it is that cold, the rest of the country is no longer "too hot" for cycling. You can't reject the idea just because it doesn't work for everyone 365 days of the year.
There is so much in your post that's incorrect that it's hard to know where
to start making corrections. I'll just choose a few items.
As to the idea that a vegan eschewing supplements would "[die] from the
most basic of food diseases, scurvy, after 2-3 months" -- scurvy a deficiency
of vitamin C which is abundant in certain fruits and vegetables. Someone
eating a plant-based diet would be pretty much the last person to get
scurvy.
...plants do not contain all 9 of the essential amino acids
That's false. Quoth Wikipedia, "Nearly all foods contain all twenty amino
acids in some quantity." Plant foods often don't supply a lot of the essential
amino acids (esp. lysine) but they provide some. Citing Wikipedia again,
"...amaranth,...buckwheat, hempseed, meat, poultry, Salvia hispanica,
soybeans, quinoa, seafood, and spirulina also are complete protein foods".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein
They're a successful consumer electronics company trailing a part of the business they hang on to for nostalgia.
Maybe the $5.1B in revenue (17.8% of total revenue) they got from their desktop/laptop lines in the most recent quarter has something to do with it too. Or the 14% YoY growth in units sold. Especially when the industry as a whole grew at just 2.6%.
We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter.
I wish I could be as sure. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed does a nice job of documenting societies that, when faced with the same choice, picked collapse. Granted, they didn't have Jared Diamond's book to read beforehand, but neither did they have our capacity for self-immolation.
Mac computers will one day be every bit as closed off as iPhones and iPads, with all software having to come through the Mac app store the same way it has to now with the iPhone/iPad app stores. Everything Apple will then be a walled garden, with Apple as gatekeepers.
I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense to me. What works for the iPhone & iPad doesn't necessarily work for the Mac, and vice versa. That's why Apple developed iOS instead of just slapping OS X on the iDevices. There's no guarantee that the Mac and iDevices are headed for the same destination.
Have they acquired some similar features? And will they acquire more? Sure. For one, that boosts the halo effect since anyone who has used an iThing will feel right at home using a Mac and vice versa. And the more similar that Apple can make iOS and OS X (while still retaining the features that make each appropriate for their respective platforms), the less code they have to maintain. This is just sensible business, it doesn't have to be about lockdown and control.
What's more, the Mac is a popular tool for non-Windows developers. It's a certified Unix and has all the command line goodies one would expect, like grep, sed, awk, ssh, etc. not to mention more complex tools like Apache, gcc, gdb, sqlite, Python, Perl and Ruby. Apple is raking in cash from the iProducts line of business but the Mac was still nearly
20% of Q1 revenue. If they lock down OS X, then they can kiss goodbye to the Unix certification and all the developers who want access to a command line (which would be about 95% I'd think).
Those developers might only make up a small chunk of the $5.4b in Mac sales but if Apple alienates its 3rd party developers, then who is going to create all of the content for the App Store? And how are those devs going to write code if Macs morph into iPads with built-in keyboards?
Apple has more to lose than to gain by making the Mac into another iDevice. I just don't see it happening anytime soon. I have no doubt they'd do it in a heartbeat if they thought it was to their benefit. I just don't think it is.
One would expect that the attendees of a software developer conference would be rife with early adopters of all things digital. Well, at PyCon this year, old school, dead tree business cards were alive and well. I don't think anyone there would have had the reaction described in the summary -- "A business card. How precious." If they're on the way out, it was not evident there.
Try putting in a bogus zip if you don't believe me.
I live in the USA. When I first encountered a gas pump that asked for my zip code, I was traveling with some Europeans who couldn't use their credit card in the pump because it demanded a zip code. As an experiment, I put my card in the pump and entered a fake zip code. My card was refused. Tried the same card, entered the correct zip code, the pump was happy.
Maybe it just didn't read my card correctly the first time. But the conclusion I drew from that small sample size is that the zip code matters, at least sometimes.
Trouble is...raise those fuel taxes..and virtually everything we have would go up on price on a huge scale. I'm talking basic necessities like FOOD, clothing and housing. How do you think all that stuff gets transported around. People bitch about taxation hitting the poor, well this one alone would target them more than any other tax raise.
You talk as if someone proposed a huge increase in the fuel tax. If the fuel tax went up one cent per gallon, I doubt you or anyone else would notice the change in prices at the pump or at the grocery store, hardware store, etc.
Besides, unless you believe that the USA can continue living with its addiction to fossil fuels, people need to be given some incentive to use less fuel. Any incentive you pick is going to make someone unhappy. We can't just sit on our hands and wait for cold fusion to come true.
People like to think that raising fuel taxes would solve SO much...but the repercussions are far reaching.
I'd change "but" to "because". Those far-reaching repercussions are exactly why many people believe increasing the fuel tax can solve or at least ameliorate a number of problems.
Pypi seems to install crap from all over the place, it could pull from someone's personal website, sourceforge, wherever.
A minor quibble -- PyPI doesn't install anything from anywhere. PyPI stands for Python Package Index, the key word there being "index". It's a catalog that tells you where to find packages. Once PyPI points you to the package, it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to install it.
My 1997 Saturn SC has driver & front passenger airbags, front/rear crumple zones and side door beams, although no ABS. It has enough power to let me pass people without shifting out of 5th gear, and I still get 40MPG (5.88 l/100km) on the highway. When it was new, it was a mid-priced passenger car and not
what you'd call state-of-the-art.
The auto industry has had 13 years to improve on that and has very little
to show for it, especially in the USA. They did come out with a bunch of Hummers though. My suspicion is that the lack of improvement on fuel efficiency stems not from lack of ability but from lack of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the "Robo Singers" should be in prison
I don't like Autotune either, but your solution is a bit harsh.
I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup.
Two suggestions. First, if you're mixing your own posion (Raid + borax + syrup) then you might have simply made the mix too strong.
Second, there are sugar ants and fat ants. (I'm sure this is entomologically a gross oversimplification but I think it's fair when talking about invading household ants.) Sugar ants want sweet stuff, fat ants want fat. It might be that your invaders were sugar ants, but now they're fat ants. Try putting a little peanut butter in front of them to see how they react.
Tupelo honey costs 2-3x as much and is considered the superior honey, but honestly I can't tell the difference between it and clover.
Tupelo honey is more valuable to me because it's much less prone to crystallize (due to the sugars in it). Clover honey seems to crystallize if you do so much as look at it funny.
Partnering with Microsoft is like partnering with Smaug.
no government in its right mind willfully withholds food from its population
I beg to differ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
But as the grandparent post alluded to, the Model M has only two bottom row meta keys (Ctrl and Alt), while all modern keyboards have three. I still have a 90s-era Model M and it still works great. But my daily keyboard is from pckeyboard.com just because of the meta key issue.
I've been a keyboard jockey for many years. It's been my experience that holding any single position for hours at a stretch hurts something -- back, shoulders, wrist, spine, or all of the above. The "best position" is usually "something other than the one I've been in for the past 60 minutes".
To address this, I recently got a sit-stand workstation. I love being able to stand up occasionally while I work. Standing relieves the pressure from my sit bones and legs, and since standing takes more energy I feel more awake and alive. I find I stand for an hour or two of every eight hour day. I don't like to sit all day, and I can't imagine standing all day.
The particular product I linked to above has its drawbacks. I love the ease of the transition between sitting and standing. I hate the mouse tray. It's too small for a regular mouse so I switched to a trackball. But regardless of which I use, my arm receives no support while using it. Holding my arm in the air so much stresses my shoulder. The only time I'm completely comfortable using a mouse is when all of my arm from the elbow forward is resting on a flat surface. The mouse tray on this product demands the exact opposite. My shoulder hurts enough that I know I can't continue using this, but I plan to work out something so that I can easily swap between sitting and standing. They offer similar products that might work better for me.
I'm also lucky enough to work from home, so I have six positions in which I regularly work: 1) sitting at the desk, 2) standing at the desk, 3) sitting at the kitchen table, 4) sitting in the living room, 5) sitting on the table on the porch, and 6) here in the hammock. (I have a Mayan style hammock hung on my screened-in porch.) I spend most of my time at 1, 2, and 6. When I'm away from the desk, I have to use the laptop keyboard which isn't great for my wrists. But the tradeoff is worth it. The hammock supports my back beautifully.
In short, I find that the best position for me to be in is a new one. We weren't made to work at a keyboard for 6-12 hours/day, and the best way to make your body forgive you while you do this is to spread the abuse around to different body parts. And after work, make it up to your body -- do yoga, go for a swim, run, or ride a bike.
Personally, I can't imagine needing more than Vim offers. What compelling features do other editors offer?
Modeless editing.
And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
What do you think happened when the last sentient species figured this out, about.. oh, 13.7 billion years ago..
And the last thing heard in that previous universe was a scientist saying "Hey guys, watch this!"
Can't say I've ever had kale. I enjoy collard greens, does that count?
Amazingly enough (getting way OT now), broccoli, kale, collard greens, cauliflower and cabbage are all the same species. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Brassica oleracea.
What evidence is there that porn is bad for children?
I would argue that porn destroys children. My definition of childhood includes a period of innocence, or a freedom from some knowledge that's usually difficult for people to make sense of. For instance, we don't confront children with knowledge of death (if we can avoid doing so), because death is difficult even for adults. Why burden a child with something that many adults can't bear? Children exposed to enough "adult" concepts (death, sex, violence, etc.) aren't children for long.
Porn, specifically, is even harder for kids to make sense of since it is about sex and kids (I assume we're talking about prepubsecents here) have yet to undergo the hormonal change that will radically shift their opinion about sex. How in the world to do expect a prepubsecent to understand sex, let alone the stylized sex frequently depicted in porn?
Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about personal interaction from "reality" TV. It's true that kids need to learn about sex eventually, but if they learn about it from porn they're going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about sex.
For an eloquent argument about how knowledge and childhood are intimately related, have a look at Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood".
Mass transit is better suited to the higher population densities of European cities, much of the USA is too spread out.
And yet good mass transit encourages dense cities. Modern sprawl in the USA is largely a result of public policy decisions, not geography or destiny. We can change that.
Cycling doesn't work in some parts of USA due to weather extremes. You can't bike when its 40 below zero wind chill, or on snow and ice. (and parts of the south are too hot.)
It's not 40 below and icy anywhere in the USA for six months out of the year, and when it is that cold, the rest of the country is no longer "too hot" for cycling. You can't reject the idea just because it doesn't work for everyone 365 days of the year.
There is so much in your post that's incorrect that it's hard to know where to start making corrections. I'll just choose a few items.
As to the idea that a vegan eschewing supplements would "[die] from the most basic of food diseases, scurvy, after 2-3 months" -- scurvy a deficiency of vitamin C which is abundant in certain fruits and vegetables. Someone eating a plant-based diet would be pretty much the last person to get scurvy.
...plants do not contain all 9 of the essential amino acids
That's false. Quoth Wikipedia, "Nearly all foods contain all twenty amino acids in some quantity." Plant foods often don't supply a lot of the essential amino acids (esp. lysine) but they provide some. Citing Wikipedia again, "...amaranth,...buckwheat, hempseed, meat, poultry, Salvia hispanica, soybeans, quinoa, seafood, and spirulina also are complete protein foods".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein
In fact, tempeh (soybeans + mushroom) does pretty well at supplying essential amino acids.
There is one substance that contains all required nutrients for a human being : meat (raw meat).
This dramatically oversimplifies human nutritional requirements. You get to work on that 100% raw meat diet and let us know how that works for you.
They're a successful consumer electronics company trailing a part of the business they hang on to for nostalgia.
Maybe the $5.1B in revenue (17.8% of total revenue) they got from their desktop/laptop lines in the most recent quarter has something to do with it too. Or the 14% YoY growth in units sold. Especially when the industry as a whole grew at just 2.6%.
Note that the $5.1B in revenue is just for Q3 desktop/laptop sales, which almost equal to the entire company's annual revenue 10 years ago.
We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter.
I wish I could be as sure. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed does a nice job of documenting societies that, when faced with the same choice, picked collapse. Granted, they didn't have Jared Diamond's book to read beforehand, but neither did they have our capacity for self-immolation.
You just described my local delicatessen.
Mac computers will one day be every bit as closed off as iPhones and iPads, with all software having to come through the Mac app store the same way it has to now with the iPhone/iPad app stores. Everything Apple will then be a walled garden, with Apple as gatekeepers.
I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense to me. What works for the iPhone & iPad doesn't necessarily work for the Mac, and vice versa. That's why Apple developed iOS instead of just slapping OS X on the iDevices. There's no guarantee that the Mac and iDevices are headed for the same destination.
Have they acquired some similar features? And will they acquire more? Sure. For one, that boosts the halo effect since anyone who has used an iThing will feel right at home using a Mac and vice versa. And the more similar that Apple can make iOS and OS X (while still retaining the features that make each appropriate for their respective platforms), the less code they have to maintain. This is just sensible business, it doesn't have to be about lockdown and control.
What's more, the Mac is a popular tool for non-Windows developers. It's a certified Unix and has all the command line goodies one would expect, like grep, sed, awk, ssh, etc. not to mention more complex tools like Apache, gcc, gdb, sqlite, Python, Perl and Ruby. Apple is raking in cash from the iProducts line of business but the Mac was still nearly 20% of Q1 revenue. If they lock down OS X, then they can kiss goodbye to the Unix certification and all the developers who want access to a command line (which would be about 95% I'd think).
Those developers might only make up a small chunk of the $5.4b in Mac sales but if Apple alienates its 3rd party developers, then who is going to create all of the content for the App Store? And how are those devs going to write code if Macs morph into iPads with built-in keyboards?
Apple has more to lose than to gain by making the Mac into another iDevice. I just don't see it happening anytime soon. I have no doubt they'd do it in a heartbeat if they thought it was to their benefit. I just don't think it is.
One would expect that the attendees of a software developer conference would be rife with early adopters of all things digital. Well, at PyCon this year, old school, dead tree business cards were alive and well. I don't think anyone there would have had the reaction described in the summary -- "A business card. How precious." If they're on the way out, it was not evident there.
I disagree. She was not a decent novelist.
Try putting in a bogus zip if you don't believe me.
I live in the USA. When I first encountered a gas pump that asked for my zip code, I was traveling with some Europeans who couldn't use their credit card in the pump because it demanded a zip code. As an experiment, I put my card in the pump and entered a fake zip code. My card was refused. Tried the same card, entered the correct zip code, the pump was happy.
Maybe it just didn't read my card correctly the first time. But the conclusion I drew from that small sample size is that the zip code matters, at least sometimes.
I've used spamgourmet for years and never had the address refused anywhere.
Trouble is...raise those fuel taxes..and virtually everything we have would go up on price on a huge scale. I'm talking basic necessities like FOOD, clothing and housing. How do you think all that stuff gets transported around. People bitch about taxation hitting the poor, well this one alone would target them more than any other tax raise.
You talk as if someone proposed a huge increase in the fuel tax. If the fuel tax went up one cent per gallon, I doubt you or anyone else would notice the change in prices at the pump or at the grocery store, hardware store, etc.
Besides, unless you believe that the USA can continue living with its addiction to fossil fuels, people need to be given some incentive to use less fuel. Any incentive you pick is going to make someone unhappy. We can't just sit on our hands and wait for cold fusion to come true.
People like to think that raising fuel taxes would solve SO much...but the repercussions are far reaching.
I'd change "but" to "because". Those far-reaching repercussions are exactly why many people believe increasing the fuel tax can solve or at least ameliorate a number of problems.
Pypi seems to install crap from all over the place, it could pull from someone's personal website, sourceforge, wherever.
A minor quibble -- PyPI doesn't install anything from anywhere. PyPI stands for Python Package Index, the key word there being "index". It's a catalog that tells you where to find packages. Once PyPI points you to the package, it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to install it.
To be fair you should note that your quote is from the Rolling Stone article. The NY Times magazine article (first link in TFS) is quite good.
My 1997 Saturn SC has driver & front passenger airbags, front/rear crumple zones and side door beams, although no ABS. It has enough power to let me pass people without shifting out of 5th gear, and I still get 40MPG (5.88 l/100km) on the highway. When it was new, it was a mid-priced passenger car and not what you'd call state-of-the-art.
The auto industry has had 13 years to improve on that and has very little to show for it, especially in the USA. They did come out with a bunch of Hummers though. My suspicion is that the lack of improvement on fuel efficiency stems not from lack of ability but from lack of interest.