underwater basketweaving with a computer:) I'll be sure to mention that to the relevant parties.
And regarding the personal circumstances, no I had a step dad with a sadistic streak so I figured I'd be safer elsewhere than at home.
I worked carrying mail for a while for a bank, applied to every job in automation that I could find until someone gave me a chance. Then I launched my own company, wrote the first 'live webcam' software and ended up ok.
that's the whole point right ? normally wars have an objective, this one doesn't have any, or at least not any consistent one that I can detect. You can not enforce peace by waging war, that's the most stupid premise there is. You can defend from an aggressor, that's an objective. Then you decide to restore the borders that were or take a punitive amount of land to show you didn't like it (or as reparations). Alternatively you can start a war of aggression but then you'll have a very bloody occupation on your hands. In spite of the most brutal punishments (mowing down whole villages) the germans never were safe in any part of europe except for their home country during world war II. All the governments had capitulated or had been overrun long ago, the underground *never* stopped picking them off by ones and twos (rarely threes). Old ladies became ruthless killers. It's amazing how people seem to dislike being 'occupied'.
so, play that by me again but slow, consider me a moron:
Just because there is a graph somewhere with a bunch of numbers on it I an now draw the conclusion that less people die in a war than in peacetime ?
And here I was thinking 4000 Americans died in combat *alone*, the other deaths, let's call them the baseline would have happened anyway, in anything but the most wild coincidence I'd expect the two numbers to add up to something like combat deaths + baseline - overlap. Or am I missing something here ?
I can assure you that it is not. If I would have continued my education (which got sidetracked due to 'personal circumstances' as it is euphemistically called) I would have probably gone on to study informatics. Looking at my friends who followed that route I'm quite happy I didn't.
I read somewhere that education has a left wing bias, and from my personal experience (which is quite limited) I can verify it at least to some extent.
sorry for losing track of the conversation for a while... I don't have any stuff from before roughly the middle of '86, and by that time I was well underway in programming in C. Also the storage medium of the day (compact cassette tape) does not lend itself to easy backing up or transfer to new media. A friend of mine (Henri Groeneweg) may have some stuff stashed away from those days but I certainly don't. Two intercontinental moves and a pretty hectic life have parted me with most of my belongings older than a couple of years with the exception of a saxophone and a couple of books. You sure learn how to not get attached to stuff though:)
I'll see what I can recover. The funny thing is I still remember a whole bunch of details from the assembly code to this day, I don't think there is other code that I studied that hard. jmp (159) indeed:)
It is hard for me to see where the value would lie though, unless it is to get a kids version of a computer in a box that you can run under a larger machine. I've given my son a linux machine with "Brandy" on it (a bbc model 'B' basic interpreter for linux) and that seems to serve some of the purposes that I would have for a functioning color computer emulator.
you are so wrong it's not even funny. When applying for the dutch nationality you have to present proof that you have applied to lose your old one, this is from personal experience. (Polish wife).
no, but the point is that not having a cell phone to detonate an IED will simply cause you to use some other available means. I could probably hack together a remote control with a 10 mile range for less $ than it costs to get the cellphone. And no chance of someone setting off your IED while you're planting it by a wrong number call either.
If the transition had been a little milder than it was then the crime bosses in Russia would not have been able to grab as much as they did. The last thing the new 'vlasti' want is to have their playground taken away from them. This is going to be an extremely tense time for Russia.
I can't connect all the dots either, but the point about the 100 K vs ungodly sums of money is well made. If that was bin ladens stated goal then he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In many ways Iraq *is* the same for the US as Afghanistan was for the Russians. Including a desire to 'pacify' it.
hehe, lol. thank you:) ok, make that a vietnam vet. And seriously if I ever should get in a barfight I hope to have him by my side, I'll just get out of the way. He's not exactly a spring chicken any more but I would certainly hate to take him on, there is no substitute for hand to hand combat experience.
exactly. It's like my friend (a vet) says, he walks in to a diner and sees weapons everywhere, other people just see the diner. Apparently once you've been in a war zone it is very hard to snap out of the mode that causes you to evaluate each and every item in your life as a potential weapon. One mans cellphone is another mans detonator.
the germans did pretty good with old technology, and I think that even today they'd make most smaller countries think twice about attacking them if they 'only' had wwII era weaponry.
In fact all that tech is quickly becoming a weakness.
Think about South Korea, more afraid of North Koreas conventional weaponry and artillery then of their nuke (assuming they really do have one).
I've lived off the grid in canada for 2 years, and in my experience if you are careful about your useage you can get by with surprisingly little input power. We used wood heat for all heating purposes, about 1700 watts of solar and a 2KW wind turbine. With that combination the generator was used once every 2 months or so to equalize the batteries. We did the laundry in the community laundry hall. The total cost of the system was quite substantial but the experience alone is priceless. The golden rule of homepower: conservation is cheaper and easier than production.
the shortages in California that have been on record were during the Enron period, look for the movie 'Enron, the smartest boys in the room' using your favourite bit torrent site for more info. The short version is that those outages where engineered to drive up the price of energy.
second that. and while we're at it can we get rid of the 'you have to wait this long before you can reply' requirement. I type fast and I'm sick and tired of having that thrown at me.
the biggest factor in matching wind power to the grid is not interconnecting them, the grid does that just fine, but stabilizing power output, and there are some pretty impressive solutions out there involving superconductors. Another problem is that wind power is traditionally generated best where there are by pure coincidence *no* transmission lines at all.
To offset demand you simply need overcapacity, interconnections are obvious, if the power is not brought to the grid you might as well not generate it in the first place.
If anything stabilizing the power using superconductors would be worth an article (or two) because it is one of the few current applications of superconductors in 'normal engineering' that I'm aware of.
I've seen one of these units up close (as close as the fence would let me get), it is packaged in a 40' container and has a bunch of very impressive wiring coming out of it. This was in western canada near the ridge.
I think harry was definitely *not* in a trumpet playing band:
"And a crowd of young boys they're fooling around in the corner Drunk and dressed in their best brown baggies and their platform soles The don't give a damm about any trumpet playing band It ain't what they call rock and roll And the Sultans played Creole"
ask any small business how they'd like to be *DOWN* for two weeks. what an absolutely idiotic argument. the backup time gets smeared out over the years, the two weeks happens *ALL AT ONCE*.
backup daily. Even if it costs you that 1/8th of a day, just do it at night and automated, that's what computers are for.
here's an excellent chance to excercise your scripting skills.
http://rndpic.com/ don't clikc, not safe for work *and* addictive. you've been warned;)
I think bees (or ants) should get the all-time patent rights to clustering a number of not so intelligent nodes into something that exhibits a higher degree of intelligence.
It's still quite hard to come up with stuff that is not in some way already present in nature. If you are prepared to accept a certain level of metaphor.
Slashdot Mirror
underwater basketweaving with a computer :) I'll be sure to mention that to the relevant parties.
And regarding the personal circumstances, no I had a step dad with a sadistic streak so I figured I'd be safer elsewhere than at home.
I worked carrying mail for a while for a bank, applied to every job in automation that I could find until someone gave me a chance. Then I launched my own company, wrote the first 'live webcam' software and ended up ok.
that's the whole point right ? normally wars have an objective, this one doesn't have any, or at least not any consistent one that I can detect. You can not enforce peace by waging war, that's the most stupid premise there is. You can defend from an aggressor, that's an objective. Then you decide to restore the borders that were or take a punitive amount of land to show you didn't like it (or as reparations). Alternatively you can start a war of aggression but then you'll have a very bloody occupation on your hands. In spite of the most brutal punishments (mowing down whole villages) the germans never were safe in any part of europe except for their home country during world war II. All the governments had capitulated or had been overrun long ago, the underground *never* stopped picking them off by ones and twos (rarely threes). Old ladies became ruthless killers. It's amazing how people seem to dislike being 'occupied'.
so, play that by me again but slow, consider me a moron:
Just because there is a graph somewhere with a bunch of numbers on it I an now draw the conclusion that less people die in a war than in peacetime ?
And here I was thinking 4000 Americans died in combat *alone*, the other deaths, let's call them the baseline would have happened anyway, in anything but the most wild coincidence I'd expect the two numbers to add up to something like combat deaths + baseline - overlap. Or am I missing something here ?
I can assure you that it is not. If I would have continued my education (which got sidetracked due to 'personal circumstances' as it is euphemistically called) I would have probably gone on to study informatics. Looking at my friends who followed that route I'm quite happy I didn't.
yup :) And a typing diploma to boot.
I read somewhere that education has a left wing bias, and from my personal experience (which is quite limited) I can verify it at least to some extent.
sorry for losing track of the conversation for a while... I don't have any stuff from before roughly :)
:)
the middle of '86, and by that time I was well underway in programming in C. Also the storage medium of the day (compact cassette tape) does not lend itself to easy backing up or transfer to new media. A friend of mine (Henri Groeneweg) may have some stuff stashed away from those days but I certainly don't. Two intercontinental moves and a pretty hectic life have parted me with most of my belongings older than a couple of years with the exception of a saxophone and a couple of books. You sure learn how to not get attached to stuff though
I'll see what I can recover. The funny thing is I still remember a whole bunch of details from the assembly code to this day, I don't think there is other code that I studied that hard. jmp (159) indeed
It is hard for me to see where the value would lie though, unless it is to get a kids version of a computer in a box that you can run under a larger machine. I've given my son a linux machine with "Brandy" on it (a bbc model 'B' basic interpreter for linux) and that seems to serve some of the purposes that I would have for a functioning color computer emulator.
you are so wrong it's not even funny.
When applying for the dutch nationality you have to present proof that you have applied to lose your old one, this is from personal experience. (Polish wife).
no, but the point is that not having a cell phone to detonate an IED will simply cause you to use some other available means. I could probably hack together a remote control with a 10 mile range for less $ than it costs to get the cellphone. And no chance of someone setting off your IED while you're planting it by a wrong number call either.
ah, yes, excuses that was ambiguous. Of course I meant old technology by todays standards. For their time it was hot shit.
If the transition had been a little milder than it was then the crime bosses in Russia would not have been able to grab as much as they did. The last thing the new 'vlasti' want is to have their playground taken away from them. This is going to be an extremely tense time for Russia.
I can't connect all the dots either, but the point about the 100 K vs ungodly sums of money is well made. If that was bin ladens stated goal then he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In many ways Iraq *is* the same for the US as Afghanistan was for the Russians. Including a desire to 'pacify' it.
hehe, lol. thank you :) ok, make that a vietnam vet. And seriously if I ever should get in a barfight I hope to have him by my side, I'll just get out of the way. He's not exactly a spring chicken any more but I would certainly hate to take him on, there is no substitute for hand to hand combat experience.
exactly. It's like my friend (a vet) says, he walks in to a diner and sees weapons everywhere, other people just see the diner. Apparently once you've been in a war zone it is very hard to snap out of the mode that causes you to evaluate each and every item in your life as a potential weapon. One mans cellphone is another mans detonator.
the germans did pretty good with old technology, and I think that even today they'd make most smaller countries think twice about attacking them if they 'only' had wwII era weaponry.
In fact all that tech is quickly becoming a weakness.
Think about South Korea, more afraid of North Koreas conventional weaponry and artillery then of their nuke (assuming they really do have one).
http://rndpic.com/
I've lived off the grid in canada for 2 years, and in my experience if you are careful about your useage you can get by with surprisingly little input power. We used wood heat for all heating purposes, about 1700 watts of solar and a 2KW wind turbine. With that combination the generator was used once every 2 months or so to equalize the batteries. We did the laundry in the community laundry hall.
The total cost of the system was quite substantial but the experience alone is priceless.
The golden rule of homepower: conservation is cheaper and easier than production.
the shortages in California that have been on record were during the Enron period, look for the movie 'Enron, the smartest boys in the room' using your favourite bit torrent site for more info. The short version is that those outages where engineered to drive up the price of energy.
second that.
and while we're at it can we get rid of the 'you have to wait this long before you can reply' requirement. I type fast and I'm sick and tired of having that thrown at me.
the guy is clueless.
the biggest factor in matching wind power to the grid is not interconnecting them, the grid does that just fine, but stabilizing power output, and there are some pretty impressive solutions out there involving superconductors. Another problem is that wind power is traditionally generated best where there are by pure coincidence *no* transmission lines at all.
To offset demand you simply need overcapacity, interconnections are obvious, if the power is not brought to the grid you might as well not generate it in the first place.
If anything stabilizing the power using superconductors would be worth an article (or two) because it is one of the few current applications of superconductors in 'normal engineering' that I'm aware of.
I've seen one of these units up close (as close as the fence would let me get), it is packaged in a 40' container and has a bunch of very impressive wiring coming out of it. This was in western canada near the ridge.
I think harry was definitely *not* in a trumpet playing band:
"And a crowd of young boys they're fooling around in the corner
Drunk and dressed in their best brown baggies and their platform soles
The don't give a damm about any trumpet playing band
It ain't what they call rock and roll
And the Sultans played Creole"
I already have unlimited free lifetime access to wikipedia.
:)
leaves you to wonder if that's wikipedia's lifetime or mine but that is not really relevant here
that's a good one
;)
ask any small business how they'd like to be *DOWN* for two weeks. what an absolutely idiotic argument. the backup time
gets smeared out over the years, the two weeks happens *ALL AT ONCE*.
backup daily. Even if it costs you that 1/8th of a day, just do it at night and automated, that's what
computers are for.
here's an excellent chance to excercise your scripting skills.
http://rndpic.com/ don't clikc, not safe for work *and* addictive. you've been warned
thank you, that was a very interesting read.
I was following you until the 'god' bit... somehow that is a turn-off for me in any argument.
I think bees (or ants) should get the all-time patent rights to clustering a number of not so intelligent nodes into something that exhibits a higher degree of intelligence.
It's still quite hard to come up with stuff that is not in some way already present in nature. If you are prepared to accept a certain level of metaphor.