Oh, please! The US had one single very minor terrorist attack and everything there went to shit.
In the UK we were dealing with US-funded terrorism for a good five decades before that. Why should we be worried about a different set of right-wing extremist weirdy religious wackos this time?
Now, that car you drove, did it have a little picture of a glass bulb-and-tube thermometer on the dashboard, possibly next to a little warning light or on the dial of a gauge? Now, when have you *ever* used a thermometer to measure the coolant temperature in a car? Assuming you're not doing some extremely specific tests on the cooling system.
It gets worse, though. My car has no fewer than three little thermometer warning lights. One has a wavy line across it to show it's for water temperature (because it looks like waves on the sea, which is water, presumably). One has a little drop beside it - what the hell is that? Oh, it's oil temperature, and it blinks if you give it the berries when the oil is cold and comes on steady if the oil gets too hot. The final one has a pair of gears beside it. Gearbox temperature? No, hydraulic oil temperature, with the gears symbolising a gear pump - odd, since it actually uses a swashplate pump but I guess that's harder to do in a little white icon on a red lamp cover.
The one thing they have in common is that if they light up, another red warning lamp twice the size with the word "STOP" written on it comes up as well.
I think the worst example of an icon I saw on a piece of software was some radio GPS locator stuff. When it was trying to connect to the radio it showed a little animated icon of a plug going into a socket, over and over - cheesy, but I guess it makes the point.
What totally baffled me about it was this - if it couldn't connect to the radio the icon changed to a guy with a black-and-white striped shirt waving his arms. Now, since the software was pretty crap this happened quite a lot. "Aw, no, it's gone stripey-shirt-guy" was the frequent complaint.
It was only months later that I mentioned this to someone at the company that produced the software, a company somewhere in the US. "Oh, that means it's timed out", the guy said. "Really? How do you figure that?" "Ah well it's a baseball umpire signalling time out, you see, having the icons saves having to translate all the error messages"
Yeah, maybe it works in the US, but in the rest of the world where no-one plays baseball it falls over pretty badly.
Actually, in the US, the beef cattle are typically fattened up with corn, often with offal mixed in, along with antibiotics and hormones.
Yeah, I mean you're not even allowed to do that in Europe. I think if I lived in the US, I'd be vegetarian - except for all the horrible chemicals and hormones sprayed onto the plants.
In modern farming, what percentage of cows do you think are fed using only scrubby grass land as a food source? We're talking here about land that is so useless that it can't be used to grow any human consumable crops like rice, wheat, potatoes etc.
That would be pretty much all the farming in the Scottish Highlands, for example. You can do pretty well with grazing animals on land that would be damn near impossible to cultivate, because it's too wet, too rocky, too vertical or just plain the wrong sort of soil.
You know that Aberdeen Angus beef you like so much? Guess what kind of farmland the cows are grazed on?
Cows and sheep eat grass. Humans cannot eat grass. It's pretty simple. It doesn't matter how much grass and scrubby plants cows need to eat to produce a kilo of beef, because it won't do us a bit of good if they don't.
Unless you've got some genius idea, of course, for how we can suddenly grow an additional stomach and majorly rejig our gut bacteria. That could work too.
Only in the US. It's uneconomic to feed cows soya. In most countries, where soya and wheat isn't subsidised quite as strongly as in the US, you tend not to find that.
None of the cows round here eat soya. They eat grass, or silage in the winter.
If we were all vegetarian, we'd starve until the seas rose. There isn't enough arable land for that to hold up, and the carbon emissions from arable farming are *ridiculous*. Have you any idea how much oil it takes to produce a kilo of soya?
I don't know about you, but I always see something different every day on my drive to work. This morning it was a herd of deer eating the grass that's grown up in the rich fertile soil around a loch that's been draining slowly over the past six months. A couple of days before, some swans showed up in the loch.
I used to commute around 200 miles a day. It didn't really get boring, but then I actually (gasp, shock horror) like driving. I guess the majority of people on this site are in the US, though, and don't drive anything like the distances we do in the UK.
The "fast lane" is really an overtaking lane. In civilised countries, you don't stay in it because you'll get ticketed. If you do stay in the overtaking lane and someone drives up your backside and hassles you to get out of the way, you get ticketed for causing an obstruction and they get ticketed for driving badly.
Well theoretically they could all stop at the same time, more-or-less. The front car detects an obstacle in the road, and the message propagates back over the mesh network between cars.
If you were really clever what you'd do is make the line of cars slow down, then only speed up again once they'd increased their gaps a bit. This would absorb the sudden "bump" in traffic flow and prevent that "what the hell are we slowing right down for, there's absolutely nothing!" thing happening.
Exactly. Why would you *pay* for TV services, and then have adverts shown all the time? American TV is the worst for this, with about five minutes of programme for every ten minutes of obnoxiously loud adverts.
I don't really watch a lot of TV, but loud intrusive adverts put me off watching what little I do watch. BBC iPlayer is just about perfect.
It's pre-RSS, but what it's actually called has gone out of my head. The repeaters MC-Compacts, and I have a couple of MC-Micros and M110s for my own nefarious purposes. Even a 286 is a bit too quick for the software.
I don't care about narrowbanding, because I spend all day every day contravening FCC rules.
At work, we use an old Toshiba T1100 laptop to program 20-odd-year-old radio equipment. Nothing newer will run the DOS-based software, and the programming cable requires a proper +12/-12V swing from the RS232 port. I've often thought that it can't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format of the data in the little 256-byte EEPROMs that store the channel information.
On the MicroVAX, there is one large petrochem site I visit quite often that has several MicroVAX 3100s tucked away in a rack controlling various processes. They are *pristine*, looks like they've been racked up, the cabinet door closed, and left for what, 20 years? Closer to 30? They still have the little plastic protective film on the badge on the front...
My daily commute is about 15 miles round trip. While I'm actually working, though, I can easily clock up four or five hundred miles depending on what has broken and where.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, please! The US had one single very minor terrorist attack and everything there went to shit.
In the UK we were dealing with US-funded terrorism for a good five decades before that. Why should we be worried about a different set of right-wing extremist weirdy religious wackos this time?
We have the same unfair and unjust libel laws as the US, where the plaintiff has no protection against a defendant with deep enough pockets?
Now, that car you drove, did it have a little picture of a glass bulb-and-tube thermometer on the dashboard, possibly next to a little warning light or on the dial of a gauge? Now, when have you *ever* used a thermometer to measure the coolant temperature in a car? Assuming you're not doing some extremely specific tests on the cooling system.
It gets worse, though. My car has no fewer than three little thermometer warning lights. One has a wavy line across it to show it's for water temperature (because it looks like waves on the sea, which is water, presumably). One has a little drop beside it - what the hell is that? Oh, it's oil temperature, and it blinks if you give it the berries when the oil is cold and comes on steady if the oil gets too hot. The final one has a pair of gears beside it. Gearbox temperature? No, hydraulic oil temperature, with the gears symbolising a gear pump - odd, since it actually uses a swashplate pump but I guess that's harder to do in a little white icon on a red lamp cover.
The one thing they have in common is that if they light up, another red warning lamp twice the size with the word "STOP" written on it comes up as well.
I think the worst example of an icon I saw on a piece of software was some radio GPS locator stuff. When it was trying to connect to the radio it showed a little animated icon of a plug going into a socket, over and over - cheesy, but I guess it makes the point.
What totally baffled me about it was this - if it couldn't connect to the radio the icon changed to a guy with a black-and-white striped shirt waving his arms. Now, since the software was pretty crap this happened quite a lot. "Aw, no, it's gone stripey-shirt-guy" was the frequent complaint.
It was only months later that I mentioned this to someone at the company that produced the software, a company somewhere in the US. "Oh, that means it's timed out", the guy said.
"Really? How do you figure that?"
"Ah well it's a baseball umpire signalling time out, you see, having the icons saves having to translate all the error messages"
Yeah, maybe it works in the US, but in the rest of the world where no-one plays baseball it falls over pretty badly.
I wish I could post and mod in the same thread ;-)
Hell, you can barely force me to mow my lawn :)
Stick a sheep on it. Once you get to about November, stick it in the freezer. Simple.
Actually, in the US, the beef cattle are typically fattened up with corn, often with offal mixed in, along with antibiotics and hormones.
Yeah, I mean you're not even allowed to do that in Europe. I think if I lived in the US, I'd be vegetarian - except for all the horrible chemicals and hormones sprayed onto the plants.
In modern farming, what percentage of cows do you think are fed using only scrubby grass land as a food source? We're talking here about land that is so useless that it can't be used to grow any human consumable crops like rice, wheat, potatoes etc.
That would be pretty much all the farming in the Scottish Highlands, for example. You can do pretty well with grazing animals on land that would be damn near impossible to cultivate, because it's too wet, too rocky, too vertical or just plain the wrong sort of soil.
You know that Aberdeen Angus beef you like so much? Guess what kind of farmland the cows are grazed on?
Cows and sheep eat grass. Humans cannot eat grass. It's pretty simple. It doesn't matter how much grass and scrubby plants cows need to eat to produce a kilo of beef, because it won't do us a bit of good if they don't.
Unless you've got some genius idea, of course, for how we can suddenly grow an additional stomach and majorly rejig our gut bacteria. That could work too.
Only in the US. It's uneconomic to feed cows soya. In most countries, where soya and wheat isn't subsidised quite as strongly as in the US, you tend not to find that.
None of the cows round here eat soya. They eat grass, or silage in the winter.
If we were all vegetarian, we'd starve until the seas rose. There isn't enough arable land for that to hold up, and the carbon emissions from arable farming are *ridiculous*. Have you any idea how much oil it takes to produce a kilo of soya?
I don't know about you, but I always see something different every day on my drive to work. This morning it was a herd of deer eating the grass that's grown up in the rich fertile soil around a loch that's been draining slowly over the past six months. A couple of days before, some swans showed up in the loch.
It's all there if you look.
I don't drive in bumper to bumper rush-hour traffic. Maybe you need to examine your life choices, if you find yourself doing that.
I used to commute around 200 miles a day. It didn't really get boring, but then I actually (gasp, shock horror) like driving. I guess the majority of people on this site are in the US, though, and don't drive anything like the distances we do in the UK.
I work when - guess what - I'm at work. I'm not going to do an extra couple of hours work for free every week by working in my car.
In any case, I like driving. What kind of sad boring person would you have to be to sit with your nose in your laptop ignoring everything around you?
The "fast lane" is really an overtaking lane. In civilised countries, you don't stay in it because you'll get ticketed. If you do stay in the overtaking lane and someone drives up your backside and hassles you to get out of the way, you get ticketed for causing an obstruction and they get ticketed for driving badly.
It works.
Well theoretically they could all stop at the same time, more-or-less. The front car detects an obstacle in the road, and the message propagates back over the mesh network between cars.
If you were really clever what you'd do is make the line of cars slow down, then only speed up again once they'd increased their gaps a bit. This would absorb the sudden "bump" in traffic flow and prevent that "what the hell are we slowing right down for, there's absolutely nothing!" thing happening.
Exactly. Why would you *pay* for TV services, and then have adverts shown all the time? American TV is the worst for this, with about five minutes of programme for every ten minutes of obnoxiously loud adverts.
I don't really watch a lot of TV, but loud intrusive adverts put me off watching what little I do watch. BBC iPlayer is just about perfect.
It's pre-RSS, but what it's actually called has gone out of my head. The repeaters MC-Compacts, and I have a couple of MC-Micros and M110s for my own nefarious purposes. Even a 286 is a bit too quick for the software.
I don't care about narrowbanding, because I spend all day every day contravening FCC rules.
73s de MM0YEQ
At work, we use an old Toshiba T1100 laptop to program 20-odd-year-old radio equipment. Nothing newer will run the DOS-based software, and the programming cable requires a proper +12/-12V swing from the RS232 port. I've often thought that it can't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format of the data in the little 256-byte EEPROMs that store the channel information.
On the MicroVAX, there is one large petrochem site I visit quite often that has several MicroVAX 3100s tucked away in a rack controlling various processes. They are *pristine*, looks like they've been racked up, the cabinet door closed, and left for what, 20 years? Closer to 30? They still have the little plastic protective film on the badge on the front...
Seems more like "DOG! EAT IT! QUICK BEFORE IT GETS AWAY!"
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING
ZOMG! Slashdot is censoring me just like Facebook!
It would have been nice to see it without having a full-screen pop-up ad telling me to subscribe to instructables whenever I click on a link.
... how, exactly?
Have you actually tried to post on Slashdot recently?
Exactly. I just wanted to make the point that the commute isn't everything...
My daily commute is about 15 miles round trip. While I'm actually working, though, I can easily clock up four or five hundred miles depending on what has broken and where.
I don't know what it's like in England, that's a different country. I guess they could organise someone to run rural broadband in your part of Mexico.