There have been people in the United States, too, who relied blindly on their GPS, went astray in the desert, ran out of fuel, and some ended up dying before being found (the article I recall predates the Apple fiasco.)
The lesson to be taken from all of these situations is that people ought to check the path that the GPS offers before they set out, especially if there is a chance that they are going through, or even headed into a distant wilderness. There's no substitute for a healthy dose of caution, or even skepticism where your life or comfort may be at stake.
I remember rather fondly typing on a Model M way back, but I could not use one at home these days because of the racket. If there were one with (most of) the tactile feedback, but nice and quiet, I'd be sold. Any suggestions?
IANAL, but the spirit of the law is no vacuous concept. When the letter of the law subverts the spirit, the result is a bad law that invites violations. In this case, Apple refuses to comply with the of the judge's decisions: A simple, clean apology is demanded, but while Apple says "so sorry," they also lift the middle finger. Twice.
I there any company that has so swiftly turned from the path of innovation to litigation, and proven itself a more sore loser than Apple? The cynic in me says that Apple is on the swift, sure way to suicide.
Well said. In fact, the blanket claim that some institution (company, government, etc.) is evil, takes people out of the equation, absolves them of blame, and simultaneously detracts from the fact that any solution must involve people. I think it is for that reason that freedom of speech and the use of protest actually are so important. Without such tools in the hands of the population the perpetrators (let's simply call them misguided, sloppy, and/or too caught up in their work) cannot even be made aware of the fact that they ought to look up, look around, and perhaps realize that their actions may be way out of line.
Indeed, during the press conference the following figures were stated at least twice:
Exit altitude: 128100 ft (39045m) [record] Free fall time: 4m 20s Free fall distance: 119826 ft (36529m) Max velocity: 373 m/s (1342.8 km/h, 833.9 mph, Mach 1.24) [record]
A third record would be the maximum distance of ascent with a human-occupied balloon, which may exceed the 39045m of exit altitude, as the balloon appeared to descend somewhat before Baumgartner exited. Actually, if the telemetry information displayed on the feed can be trusted then he reached at least 39068m (128177 ft) at the time that he was first sticking his feet out into the open.
No matter the numbers, this is an impressive achievement!
Yes indeed, retarded snot suckers are editing this shit: Why are Michigan University students forging U.S. currency? Who is proposing the use of invisible nano QR codes? No answer is even hinted at in the summary:
Invisible nano QR codes have been proposed as a way to stop forgery of U.S currency by students of Michigan University.
WinXP was Microsoft's very first operating system worthy of not being called a turd. Windows Vista had some good ideas, but was a terrible (horrible, vile) implementation. Windows7 seems to have fixed a lot of the aggravation that was Vista. It's the new XP. Windows8 looks to be worse than vile. You cannot pay me to abuse myself with it. We'll see what Window9 will bring, but at the current rate it will not redeem Microsoft.
I'm no fontographer, but I really like Gentium, and have for many years. It's capitals are not as tall as the ascenders, and the bow of h and n give a distinctive flavor to the text. With Gentium the two letters r and n run together (rn) look nothing like the letter m, but with Baskerville it is difficult to distinguish them.
Seems to me that when the government can violate the law with impunity, it is aiming for despotism. The law of the land is respected only so long as everybody (the government included) is held accountable by it equally.
I agree that hasty tweets differ from formal responses from the corporate ranks. The distinction does not invalidate the fact, however, that a well-formulated message invariably reflects more positive on the originator than a sloppy one. By what means the message was composed and disseminated should not need to be taken into account.
And if the spelling police doesn't come across as an obvious jerk, a correction may well be appreciated as a learning opportunity. I have suffered corrections at times, and even if they were intended as a pedantic thrill, I have usually taken the lesson and been glad for it.
Use of proper grammar is an indicator that the originator of the message cared about the message, and would rather have the message be heard loud and clear, than allow presentation to distract from its poignancy.
Whenever I read things like "id like to by a new car," I cringe inside, imagine some grunting ape who happened across a keyboard, and move on without thinking about the attempted message. If that was the intended effect, then "buy all means," have at it, folks!
Obviously I've had plenty of cold beer and should have been more... useful with my prior posting, so I'll respond to myself...
Althought today is not as bad as it has been, temperatures in the Washington D.C. area have been rather ugly in the past few days (today is relatively cool) with temperatures hitting 100F (38C) most of this week. Our thermostat is part of the in-house A/C system that measures inside and outside temperatures, but it doesn't report anywhere except to us.
Local power (Pepco) failed for 35 hours with Friday's Derecho storm. Because this kind of multi-day power failure hits us at least once a year, we spent a small fortune on a whole-house natural gas driven power generator that made our life quite comfy (except for the internet (Comcast) outage, but Comcast went out after the power went down, and came back before Pepco restored it, yay!) Although a whole-house generator is probably overkill (what you *need* is something to keep core services running: refrigerator, AC/heat, and water if you're running on (tasty) well water).
We have two A/C units in our house, and the generator knows how to alternate between them, so only one of them runs at any one time, which keeps the peak usage down. For the curious, this setup cost us between about $10-11k but the ability to weather this kind of situation in almost perfect comfort was (and will continue to be) worthwhile. The power supplied by the generator is not necessarily optimal: Our A/C units freaked out a few times, complaining about bad power quality, system failure, and whining about the filters needing replacement, but after regular power came back they went back to normal. No, not optimal, but far, far better than getting baked in the heat. The generator kicks in about 30s after the power grid dies, and keeps running for about 2 minutes after regular power comes back. For your computers you really want a UPS to tide you over the short glitches.
No, according to my google-fu, Karlsruhe does NOT get 45C temperatures along with 90+% humidity for weeks or even months on end, not even close. Let's exchange weather for one month, and you'll be on your knees begging for air conditioning!;-)
With high humidity the human body cannot take effective advantage of evaporation cooling. It's not just that you're soaked in sweat which will not evaporate (a rather unpleasant feeling), but you dehydrate fast as well because the body is desperately trying to sweat more in order to effect the much-needed cooling (but which keeps failing). If you can't stay cool (preferably immobile in the shade), and hydrated under such extreme conditions (which are a normal for summer on the US East Coast), you can get heat-related deaths rather quickly.
Power out for a couple of hours a day is one thing, but take out the power for two, five, or fifteen days at a time and you see an entirely different class of problems. Funny thing is that this kind of outage is almost completely avoidable, if power lines were underground. As far as I am concerned that is the real issue here.
More like.99 reliability, actually, and for a number of people it's even worse than that (nearly as bad as.9). If the outages were spread across the year as one hour here, and two hours there, it would be highly annoying but would not result in all your food rotted in the fridge twice a year, requiring you to compete with tens of thousands of other people for hotel rooms to escape the boiling heat, spend a extra money eating out every meal of the day, and go to work all moist and stinky.
See, if this were a backwater republic in the steppes of Africa (no offense intended, Africa!) then sure, what can you expect? But the US is supposed to be an advanced and modern nation (we have super computers, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and we send probes across the freaking solar system, yo!), but our basic utilities are so shaky that people pay small fortunes to install backup generators on their houses... What's wrong with that picture?
Good for you, but the key is that your power lines are under ground, and there are probably no above-ground lines between you and the nearest distribution center that were taken down to cut you off. There are plenty of areas in Maryland, too, where that happens to be the case, but I think Virginia as a whole got hammered just as hard as Maryland, and had at least as many customers in the dark. Above-ground lines need to go, or this kind of fustercluck is going to repeat.
Precisely. The number of trees that Pepco chopped down, and how that uglified (fuglified!) the neighborhoods is quite astounding, but it did not seem to have much of any effect on the resilience of the power infrastructure. That's because trees are not the only force that can damage the lines. There is wind, too, and ice/snow in the winter, for example. And those poles get snapped in two by storms even without the help of trees. It seems to me that cutting all the trees down to the roots didn't do nearly as much as Pepco had hoped it would.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been people in the United States, too, who relied blindly on their GPS, went astray in the desert, ran out of fuel, and some ended up dying before being found (the article I recall predates the Apple fiasco.)
The lesson to be taken from all of these situations is that people ought to check the path that the GPS offers before they set out, especially if there is a chance that they are going through, or even headed into a distant wilderness. There's no substitute for a healthy dose of caution, or even skepticism where your life or comfort may be at stake.
Dammit, now you guys owe me a new keyboard!!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow.
Precisely, instead of a Glow In The Dark super power, they should have gone for Immunity To Fire. Cockroach Fail, methinks. ;-)
I remember rather fondly typing on a Model M way back, but I could not use one at home these days because of the racket. If there were one with (most of) the tactile feedback, but nice and quiet, I'd be sold. Any suggestions?
IANAL, but the spirit of the law is no vacuous concept. When the letter of the law subverts the spirit, the result is a bad law that invites violations. In this case, Apple refuses to comply with the of the judge's decisions: A simple, clean apology is demanded, but while Apple says "so sorry," they also lift the middle finger. Twice.
I there any company that has so swiftly turned from the path of innovation to litigation, and proven itself a more sore loser than Apple? The cynic in me says that Apple is on the swift, sure way to suicide.
Well said. In fact, the blanket claim that some institution (company, government, etc.) is evil, takes people out of the equation, absolves them of blame, and simultaneously detracts from the fact that any solution must involve people. I think it is for that reason that freedom of speech and the use of protest actually are so important. Without such tools in the hands of the population the perpetrators (let's simply call them misguided, sloppy, and/or too caught up in their work) cannot even be made aware of the fact that they ought to look up, look around, and perhaps realize that their actions may be way out of line.
Indeed, during the press conference the following figures were stated at least twice:
Exit altitude: 128100 ft (39045m) [record]
Free fall time: 4m 20s
Free fall distance: 119826 ft (36529m)
Max velocity: 373 m/s (1342.8 km/h, 833.9 mph, Mach 1.24) [record]
A third record would be the maximum distance of ascent with a human-occupied balloon, which may exceed the 39045m of exit altitude, as the balloon appeared to descend somewhat before Baumgartner exited. Actually, if the telemetry information displayed on the feed can be trusted then he reached at least 39068m (128177 ft) at the time that he was first sticking his feet out into the open.
No matter the numbers, this is an impressive achievement!
Yes indeed, retarded snot suckers are editing this shit: Why are Michigan University students forging U.S. currency? Who is proposing the use of invisible nano QR codes? No answer is even hinted at in the summary:
Nothing to see here, move along!
There are times when I feel that a .44 Magnum can fix anything!
Yeah, not being able to delete a folder of files sucks big-time:
Win7: "You need permission to do that"
Me: "Oh yeah? Why do you then FAIL TO ASK me when I'M ALREADY THE F-ING ADMIN?"
Win7: <shrug> <grin>
/me resorts to deleting files one at a time by manually descending through dozens of directories and mumbling, "f---ing retard O/S"
I think I'll stick with WinXP for the few things that still require Windows...
Linux FTW.
WinXP was Microsoft's very first operating system worthy of not being called a turd.
Windows Vista had some good ideas, but was a terrible (horrible, vile) implementation.
Windows7 seems to have fixed a lot of the aggravation that was Vista. It's the new XP.
Windows8 looks to be worse than vile. You cannot pay me to abuse myself with it.
We'll see what Window9 will bring, but at the current rate it will not redeem Microsoft.
I'm no fontographer, but I really like Gentium, and have for many years. It's capitals are not as tall as the ascenders, and the bow of h and n give a distinctive flavor to the text. With Gentium the two letters r and n run together (rn) look nothing like the letter m, but with Baskerville it is difficult to distinguish them.
Any other takers for Gentium?
Seems to me that when the government can violate the law with impunity, it is aiming for despotism. The law of the land is respected only so long as everybody (the government included) is held accountable by it equally.
I agree that hasty tweets differ from formal responses from the corporate ranks. The distinction does not invalidate the fact, however, that a well-formulated message invariably reflects more positive on the originator than a sloppy one. By what means the message was composed and disseminated should not need to be taken into account.
And if the spelling police doesn't come across as an obvious jerk, a correction may well be appreciated as a learning opportunity. I have suffered corrections at times, and even if they were intended as a pedantic thrill, I have usually taken the lesson and been glad for it.
Use of proper grammar is an indicator that the originator of the message cared about the message, and would rather have the message be heard loud and clear, than allow presentation to distract from its poignancy.
Whenever I read things like "id like to by a new car," I cringe inside, imagine some grunting ape who happened across a keyboard, and move on without thinking about the attempted message. If that was the intended effect, then "buy all means," have at it, folks!
Obviously I've had plenty of cold beer and should have been more ... useful with my prior posting, so I'll respond to myself...
Althought today is not as bad as it has been, temperatures in the Washington D.C. area have been rather ugly in the past few days (today is relatively cool) with temperatures hitting 100F (38C) most of this week. Our thermostat is part of the in-house A/C system that measures inside and outside temperatures, but it doesn't report anywhere except to us.
Local power (Pepco) failed for 35 hours with Friday's Derecho storm. Because this kind of multi-day power failure hits us at least once a year, we spent a small fortune on a whole-house natural gas driven power generator that made our life quite comfy (except for the internet (Comcast) outage, but Comcast went out after the power went down, and came back before Pepco restored it, yay!) Although a whole-house generator is probably overkill (what you *need* is something to keep core services running: refrigerator, AC/heat, and water if you're running on (tasty) well water).
We have two A/C units in our house, and the generator knows how to alternate between them, so only one of them runs at any one time, which keeps the peak usage down. For the curious, this setup cost us between about $10-11k but the ability to weather this kind of situation in almost perfect comfort was (and will continue to be) worthwhile. The power supplied by the generator is not necessarily optimal: Our A/C units freaked out a few times, complaining about bad power quality, system failure, and whining about the filters needing replacement, but after regular power came back they went back to normal. No, not optimal, but far, far better than getting baked in the heat. The generator kicks in about 30s after the power grid dies, and keeps running for about 2 minutes after regular power comes back. For your computers you really want a UPS to tide you over the short glitches.
There, I hope this is useful for someone :)
96F (36C) outside today. Keeping the shades down, drinking cold beer, and being all cool on /. of course!
No, according to my google-fu, Karlsruhe does NOT get 45C temperatures along with 90+% humidity for weeks or even months on end, not even close. Let's exchange weather for one month, and you'll be on your knees begging for air conditioning! ;-)
With high humidity the human body cannot take effective advantage of evaporation cooling. It's not just that you're soaked in sweat which will not evaporate (a rather unpleasant feeling), but you dehydrate fast as well because the body is desperately trying to sweat more in order to effect the much-needed cooling (but which keeps failing). If you can't stay cool (preferably immobile in the shade), and hydrated under such extreme conditions (which are a normal for summer on the US East Coast), you can get heat-related deaths rather quickly.
Power out for a couple of hours a day is one thing, but take out the power for two, five, or fifteen days at a time and you see an entirely different class of problems. Funny thing is that this kind of outage is almost completely avoidable, if power lines were underground. As far as I am concerned that is the real issue here.
More like .99 reliability, actually, and for a number of people it's even worse than that (nearly as bad as .9). If the outages were spread across the year as one hour here, and two hours there, it would be highly annoying but would not result in all your food rotted in the fridge twice a year, requiring you to compete with tens of thousands of other people for hotel rooms to escape the boiling heat, spend a extra money eating out every meal of the day, and go to work all moist and stinky.
See, if this were a backwater republic in the steppes of Africa (no offense intended, Africa!) then sure, what can you expect? But the US is supposed to be an advanced and modern nation (we have super computers, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and we send probes across the freaking solar system, yo!), but our basic utilities are so shaky that people pay small fortunes to install backup generators on their houses... What's wrong with that picture?
Good for you, but the key is that your power lines are under ground, and there are probably no above-ground lines between you and the nearest distribution center that were taken down to cut you off. There are plenty of areas in Maryland, too, where that happens to be the case, but I think Virginia as a whole got hammered just as hard as Maryland, and had at least as many customers in the dark. Above-ground lines need to go, or this kind of fustercluck is going to repeat.
Precisely. The number of trees that Pepco chopped down, and how that uglified (fuglified!) the neighborhoods is quite astounding, but it did not seem to have much of any effect on the resilience of the power infrastructure. That's because trees are not the only force that can damage the lines. There is wind, too, and ice/snow in the winter, for example. And those poles get snapped in two by storms even without the help of trees. It seems to me that cutting all the trees down to the roots didn't do nearly as much as Pepco had hoped it would.