Where I live seems like every squad on the force lights out in pursuit; no one looks at a map so no exit points blocked. Just a parade of cop cars 'giving chase', until those fleeing crash, run out of gas, or the county mounties block them on a country road.
Gotcha, and the wry sarcasm, and got a nice laugh; I thank you. I wonder, tho, if there's a nifty way to read old LPs with no contact. I might have missed it. Do you know?
About slabs - I should have made clear I had in mind more than US. Aware of frost heave and personally prefer basement wherever possible. A dodge is below-frost-line footings or piers, and that will depend on local conditions, budget, and need. I've seen it done, and well, but it's agin my druthers.
Being an old fart, and having worked a fair bit with it, I like and prefer wood for many things but no longer for basic structure, and that's not what I had in mind for that para. To me structure ought be strong, durable, and as maintenance-free as reasonable to do, which is why I favor steel, concrete, foam. Leave wood for parts of interior, furniture.
Pre-fab got a bad name in the middle of last century, sometimes earned. Done well it's a beautiful way to go. I've come across some modular design-and-build stuff over last twenty years that look quite appealing while keeping costs down. A few are significantly more affordable than stick-built, while keeping the main criteria I gave above for structure. Given some of the choices now available, one might consider structure as fixed cost, the variables being site prep, utilities hook-up, and permits, inspections, taxes.
I'm a nut about one thing: while I've seen some pre-fabs that do well with respect to utilities in panels, my own preference is to run all utilities inside - conduits become part of decor; main electrical, water, waste done from central core, along with stairs/elevator/lift for multi-level dwelling. Once built, I don't ever want to have to dig around in a wall, ceiling, floor to fix something. Only exception would be for concrete floors where one runs pipes for radiant heating. (A friend on mine did the latter in his hand-made* custom build, and it works quite well. Working fluid is a synthetic oil.)
*Contractor hired for basement excavation; small crane for some of the I-beams. It's a tri-level built into a hillside on a river overlook, anchored in bedrock. It's far enough from Madras fault and known subsidiaries that it may be largely unaffected by next big one.)
If you are determined to design your own home it's your responsibility to cover all those codes and caveats. One approach I've seen work in a couple of cases is to hire an architect for his expertise to look over your design, point out gotchas and give a few pointers. You don't get an architectural sign-off, he doesn't get full fee, but you've got a workable design - if you've done your homework. It's not an easy thing to do, tho; you've got to dig into materials, loads, and codes. It's not a task for the faint of heart, the lazy, or the shallow.
Modified for wind, earthquake, frost heave, and the like, the better, if labor intensive approach would be the suitable blend of ferro-cement and reinforced concrete. Otherwise, unless thoroughly inappropriate for local conditions, a proper stone house with thatched roof is the way to go. A good thatch roof can last easily a century and more. Otherwise, slate.
Two other approaches that look interesting to me are some of the better modular homes, and another modular line that uses shipping containers.
Admittedly, I've long had a soft spot for a good log cabin. (Disclaimer: I got a set of Lincoln logs in '51.) Saw a home done by a company out of Plymouth, Wisconsin back early '80s; I literally stopped in my tracks and ogled for a good five minutes.
Simplest, many places, one could pour a reinforced slab, steel frame and block or adobe, steel roof, insulate and utilities, and be up and living in it in short order. Here in the States, there are some excellent guides to the owner-built home from the USDA, from plans to using found materials, suitable for every region. Prices range from free to cost of printing.
I like the idea of being able to get a range of standard designs, customize a bit, order up the parts, and having a house-assembly party; to be able to bring together your personal choices of blend of techs suited for locale and budget and crank out a house is to me a big step onward from the simple pre-fab kits one could get from Sears catalog almost a century ago.
"It's like genetic profiling, you only hold back from getting a genetic test done if your guilty or an idiot, the innocent offer them up in heart beat and never look back."
No. It's mine and you can't have it. If you are in custody no permission is necessary - they will get a sample by force. If you're on probation or parole, they will coerce you - "give us a sample or go back in." They may also charge you for it, as much as $1200 in my area.
I will voluntarily give a DNA sample when the tech exists, and I can afford it, to reliably make and install replacement parts for failing ones.
I attended my first high school in '61. There were around 400 freshmen. No way they even gave much serious thought to trying to keep track of us. Attended second high school starting '62; there were 52 freshmen. Everyone knew or at least recognized everyone else. No problem.
The shit going on today? Crazy. Way they're going, might as well start by chipping everybody and be done with it. I don't suppose we're that far away from near-field brain-wave pattern gathering as well.
Very neat stuff, indeed. I recall chem classes in early '60s where we were introduced to trying to calculate bonding energies in single and double bonds, then on to forces in crystals. Along the way, many of us thought "gee, wouldn't in be neat if we could not only see the bonds but measure them as well?" To see this, and the work leading up to it over the years, has amazed me.
Given the number of times I played some of my LPs, would have been good to have had a no-contact stylus.
Um, well, we don't know that for a fact and won't until the experiments are done. We don't know where consciousness lives. Is it a process in the flesh, or of the connections of the flesh? We can make all manner of assertions, but right now have no way to truly test any of them that I'm aware of (and I'd be happy for those in the relevant fields to jump in here with what they know so far about this.)
Seems to me DRM is a scam anyway; it doesn't do what it's claimed to and in the end only screws customers. I'm not bright enough to understand the benefit to us for including a hook for it as part of a web standard. (Yes, I read all the stuff to get this far, and it still doesn't make sense to me.)
What the people pushing DRM to the naive don't seem to understand, on the surface, is that some people will pay for what they want, and some people won't pay for what they want but find a way to get it anyway. DRM doesn't change this.
I first met DRM in '89 via a game on floppy. Floppy got a bad sector, I'm out a game, 'cuz an archive copy wasn't allowed and could not be made from the standard desktop. (Well, there is a difference between allowed and possible, so I did have a backup; otherwise I was out the price of the game.) It was an instructive meeting, and I've seen nothing yet to change my first opinion of DRM. It's wrong-headed.
Never had much of a budget for books, yet roughly a third of any money I made was spent of them. Only time I could reliably afford new paperbacks was the few years late '80s I worked winding transformer coils. In the "olden" days most of the towns and cities I lived in had at least a used-bookstore or two; current city had three when I moved here in '88 and now they are all gone, along with the used record store and the surplus outlet for clothing and gear. (Civic improvement, don'cha know.)
I've never begrudged an author his due, yet was happy to be able to buy books used, where he got nothing at all, having presumably gotten his 'cut' from the first sale. In slimmer times, it was a one of my rituals, one or more times a month, with a scavenged five or tenner from the last paycheck to hike down to the booksellers, spending hours finding items for the next batch of reading. It was usually heavy on science fiction, spy novels (the great run from late '60s-early '70s up through the end of the Cold War) and a bit of 'most everything else - history, biography, explorer's stories, even the odd textbook or three.
But my most favorite memories are from reading the slew of books from a panoply of writers (or is that the other way 'round?) who told the stories of 'what if' science and beyond, the great mind-stretch of possibles and the people and tales within. I miss my books, and I miss the people who wrote them.
What people at the farther end of getting older don't talk about much is the sadnesses that accompany the simple celebration of friends, family, books as all of them vanish in the race to the end. So read, enjoy, remember, and try to pass on the thrill and passion of discovery that starts with page 1.
Don't know about the "something quite recent"; from my own experience circa '79, it was a natural outgrowth of the whole character and delving bit that we'd have some interesting yarn-spinning and negotiations going on; these started partly as a carry-over from our diplomatic discussions while playing double-board Risk. For that matter, at the several GenCons I was at in late '80s (our computer club ran Midi-Maze), saw some of the D&D folks show up for a game all in costume, and the play of the play seemed almost as important as the play itself.
I read the first chapter, and liked it enough so that I might want to read the entire book. But I bought it on Google Play, and at 99 cents per chapter, that's $13 for 400 pages and change; $11.04 at Amazon for Kindle (or Kindle desktop reader). Seems to me that's a bit high (given my estimate of word-count) for a novella.
Baxter is definitely cool. It's great for repetitive tasks done while fixed in place.
Not that there's not some neat stuff left to work on with it, it doesn't lend itself so well to many of the research activities possible with the PR2, best I can figure. PR2 is also mobile, a big advantage.
Depending on what students and profs might be into, I can see where both could find use; I don't see them competing for the same dollars or uses.
Nope. Seems to me the distance of some server is no reason not to consider it one my own drives, one of my desk drawers or a folder in a file cabinet out in my garage. Whether by payment of money, or by social contract or gentleman's agreement, I'm renting such a place on some mail provider's disk drive. Opening an electronic letter is in no way equivalent to taping it to the mailbox down at the end of my driveway - I've read it and left it in my folder.
My email is not in plain sight, ever. It takes a physical act for anyone to read it, whether it be traveling along a line or sitting in a buffer as a mess of packets, or in the file folder on a drive somewhere. Somebody has to hit keys and read from a screen. When we all have computer implants, it may not be a physical act entirely but it will still be a separate volitional act to access and read my email, and still bears no resemblance to it being in plain view to the odd passerby.
I had two classes in "Fortran for Engineers" in '66-'67, but can't say I really learned how to program.
Later, I helped in a very small way some friends put together, write an OS and some programs for an Altair kit. Later, on our Compucolor, ported games found on mainframes in various languages (mostly Fortran, COBOL, a couple others whose names I can't recall just now). Started learning about program logic and thinking about design, and really learned about bugs and how to stomp them.
In '81, on an Atari 800, designed, coded, and sold a program commissioned by a small corporation. Had no "ins" and wasn't that bright, so never worked in the field.
Thanks for the compliment. I intended for them to be accurate words.
You're right to the extent that once in the system your goal is to get out of it. If you can show by whatever means that you did not do or could not have done what you've been arrested for or are later charged with doing then you're out. Usually.
Once you've been convicted and imprisoned even at a county-jail level, if you can show that you did not or could not have committed the crime then there is no guarantee of release. When things do work properly it can still take years to be released. Generally the system would rather keep an "innocent" man in jail than admit it made a mistake.
Finally, freedom once re-gained, even if you manage to have records expunged, the simple truth is that "once in the system, always in the system". No matter how rich you are or however well connected there will remain at least some physical or electronic scraps as well as the memories of some cop, prosecutor, judge.
Once you've been processed, no matter who you are, in the eyes of the system you are tainted. Even if you've never had so much as a parking ticket before there will always be the question in a cop's mind, "What's he hiding?" or, "Well, maybe he didn't do this one, but what has he done?"
Again, you may be able to prove that you "didn't do it" but you can never prove that you are innocent. Even though you and I understand the word to mean just that, in the eyes of the system you are just "not guilty" - this time.
It might be helpful to understand this one simple truth: once you've been handcuffed -ever- you are from then on and forever fair game.
Just a reminder, one does not prove one's innocence under US law, even if possible to do so. One strives to prevent conviction by establishing sufficient reasonable doubt of guilt.
Ah, cool, hadn't seen this before, and thanks for the info. So, we're talking titanium then, but the quote isn't clear. In one part of the sentence it says "precious alloy" and later, "base metal." Titanium is an element, no? Now I'm confused, again. (Not that that's an unusual state of mind, mind.)
Further, I can't quite reconcile 'smuggled from Russia' with 'one of the world's leading exporters [presumably of titanium]' Seems to me buying something on the open market, even if you're disguising the buyer's identity, is a far cry from smuggling something across controlled borders.
"that it was built from exotic smuggled Russian metals."
Say what? Just what 'exotic smuggled Russian [sic] metals' were used to build the A-12? Are you saying Lockheed and its contractors didn't make their own stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
And if no helicopter?
Where I live seems like every squad on the force lights out in pursuit; no one looks at a map so no exit points blocked. Just a parade of cop cars 'giving chase', until those fleeing crash, run out of gas, or the county mounties block them on a country road.
"there are no groups that need help that nobody does"
May be so from your viewpoint. Truth is it's bullshit. I see it and live it every day.
Gotcha, and the wry sarcasm, and got a nice laugh; I thank you. I wonder, tho, if there's a nifty way to read old LPs with no contact. I might have missed it. Do you know?
About slabs - I should have made clear I had in mind more than US. Aware of frost heave and personally prefer basement wherever possible. A dodge is below-frost-line footings or piers, and that will depend on local conditions, budget, and need. I've seen it done, and well, but it's agin my druthers.
Being an old fart, and having worked a fair bit with it, I like and prefer wood for many things but no longer for basic structure, and that's not what I had in mind for that para. To me structure ought be strong, durable, and as maintenance-free as reasonable to do, which is why I favor steel, concrete, foam. Leave wood for parts of interior, furniture.
Pre-fab got a bad name in the middle of last century, sometimes earned. Done well it's a beautiful way to go. I've come across some modular design-and-build stuff over last twenty years that look quite appealing while keeping costs down. A few are significantly more affordable than stick-built, while keeping the main criteria I gave above for structure. Given some of the choices now available, one might consider structure as fixed cost, the variables being site prep, utilities hook-up, and permits, inspections, taxes.
I'm a nut about one thing: while I've seen some pre-fabs that do well with respect to utilities in panels, my own preference is to run all utilities inside - conduits become part of decor; main electrical, water, waste done from central core, along with stairs/elevator/lift for multi-level dwelling. Once built, I don't ever want to have to dig around in a wall, ceiling, floor to fix something. Only exception would be for concrete floors where one runs pipes for radiant heating. (A friend on mine did the latter in his hand-made* custom build, and it works quite well. Working fluid is a synthetic oil.)
*Contractor hired for basement excavation; small crane for some of the I-beams. It's a tri-level built into a hillside on a river overlook, anchored in bedrock. It's far enough from Madras fault and known subsidiaries that it may be largely unaffected by next big one.)
If you are determined to design your own home it's your responsibility to cover all those codes and caveats. One approach I've seen work in a couple of cases is to hire an architect for his expertise to look over your design, point out gotchas and give a few pointers. You don't get an architectural sign-off, he doesn't get full fee, but you've got a workable design - if you've done your homework. It's not an easy thing to do, tho; you've got to dig into materials, loads, and codes. It's not a task for the faint of heart, the lazy, or the shallow.
Modified for wind, earthquake, frost heave, and the like, the better, if labor intensive approach would be the suitable blend of ferro-cement and reinforced concrete. Otherwise, unless thoroughly inappropriate for local conditions, a proper stone house with thatched roof is the way to go. A good thatch roof can last easily a century and more. Otherwise, slate.
Two other approaches that look interesting to me are some of the better modular homes, and another modular line that uses shipping containers.
Admittedly, I've long had a soft spot for a good log cabin. (Disclaimer: I got a set of Lincoln logs in '51.) Saw a home done by a company out of Plymouth, Wisconsin back early '80s; I literally stopped in my tracks and ogled for a good five minutes.
Simplest, many places, one could pour a reinforced slab, steel frame and block or adobe, steel roof, insulate and utilities, and be up and living in it in short order. Here in the States, there are some excellent guides to the owner-built home from the USDA, from plans to using found materials, suitable for every region. Prices range from free to cost of printing.
I like the idea of being able to get a range of standard designs, customize a bit, order up the parts, and having a house-assembly party; to be able to bring together your personal choices of blend of techs suited for locale and budget and crank out a house is to me a big step onward from the simple pre-fab kits one could get from Sears catalog almost a century ago.
"It's like genetic profiling, you only hold back from getting a genetic test done if your guilty or an idiot, the innocent offer them up in heart beat and never look back."
No. It's mine and you can't have it. If you are in custody no permission is necessary - they will get a sample by force. If you're on probation or parole, they will coerce you - "give us a sample or go back in." They may also charge you for it, as much as $1200 in my area.
I will voluntarily give a DNA sample when the tech exists, and I can afford it, to reliably make and install replacement parts for failing ones.
I attended my first high school in '61. There were around 400 freshmen. No way they even gave much serious thought to trying to keep track of us. Attended second high school starting '62; there were 52 freshmen. Everyone knew or at least recognized everyone else. No problem.
The shit going on today? Crazy. Way they're going, might as well start by chipping everybody and be done with it. I don't suppose we're that far away from near-field brain-wave pattern gathering as well.
Very neat stuff, indeed. I recall chem classes in early '60s where we were introduced to trying to calculate bonding energies in single and double bonds, then on to forces in crystals. Along the way, many of us thought "gee, wouldn't in be neat if we could not only see the bonds but measure them as well?" To see this, and the work leading up to it over the years, has amazed me.
Given the number of times I played some of my LPs, would have been good to have had a no-contact stylus.
"...once the little lump of flesh fails..."
Um, well, we don't know that for a fact and won't until the experiments are done. We don't know where consciousness lives. Is it a process in the flesh, or of the connections of the flesh? We can make all manner of assertions, but right now have no way to truly test any of them that I'm aware of (and I'd be happy for those in the relevant fields to jump in here with what they know so far about this.)
A quibble, if you will. Netflix runs on my Linux desktop via a tweaked Wine, and Amazon ebooks work via Kindle for the desktop.
Seems to me DRM is a scam anyway; it doesn't do what it's claimed to and in the end only screws customers. I'm not bright enough to understand the benefit to us for including a hook for it as part of a web standard. (Yes, I read all the stuff to get this far, and it still doesn't make sense to me.)
What the people pushing DRM to the naive don't seem to understand, on the surface, is that some people will pay for what they want, and some people won't pay for what they want but find a way to get it anyway. DRM doesn't change this.
I first met DRM in '89 via a game on floppy. Floppy got a bad sector, I'm out a game, 'cuz an archive copy wasn't allowed and could not be made from the standard desktop. (Well, there is a difference between allowed and possible, so I did have a backup; otherwise I was out the price of the game.) It was an instructive meeting, and I've seen nothing yet to change my first opinion of DRM. It's wrong-headed.
Apologies - finger twitched, clicked wrong button, so un-edited mistakes. As for the rest, it was on my mind, FWIW, or isn't.
Never had much of a budget for books, yet roughly a third of any money I made was spent of them. Only time I could reliably afford new paperbacks was the few years late '80s I worked winding transformer coils. In the "olden" days most of the towns and cities I lived in had at least a used-bookstore or two; current city had three when I moved here in '88 and now they are all gone, along with the used record store and the surplus outlet for clothing and gear. (Civic improvement, don'cha know.)
I've never begrudged an author his due, yet was happy to be able to buy books used, where he got nothing at all, having presumably gotten his 'cut' from the first sale. In slimmer times, it was a one of my rituals, one or more times a month, with a scavenged five or tenner from the last paycheck to hike down to the booksellers, spending hours finding items for the next batch of reading. It was usually heavy on science fiction, spy novels (the great run from late '60s-early '70s up through the end of the Cold War) and a bit of 'most everything else - history, biography, explorer's stories, even the odd textbook or three.
But my most favorite memories are from reading the slew of books from a panoply of writers (or is that the other way 'round?) who told the stories of 'what if' science and beyond, the great mind-stretch of possibles and the people and tales within. I miss my books, and I miss the people who wrote them.
What people at the farther end of getting older don't talk about much is the sadnesses that accompany the simple celebration of friends, family, books as all of them vanish in the race to the end. So read, enjoy, remember, and try to pass on the thrill and passion of discovery that starts with page 1.
Thank you, Sir or Madame, for my first good laugh of a long day.
To the main subject: Thank you, Jack, for everything - the stories, the instruction, the laughs, and the language. Oh! the language.
Don't know about the "something quite recent"; from my own experience circa '79, it was a natural outgrowth of the whole character and delving bit that we'd have some interesting yarn-spinning and negotiations going on; these started partly as a carry-over from our diplomatic discussions while playing double-board Risk. For that matter, at the several GenCons I was at in late '80s (our computer club ran Midi-Maze), saw some of the D&D folks show up for a game all in costume, and the play of the play seemed almost as important as the play itself.
Yes, and the latter is easily turned off, the others, no. Not that I care much for opt-out defaults.
I read the first chapter, and liked it enough so that I might want to read the entire book. But I bought it on Google Play, and at 99 cents per chapter, that's $13 for 400 pages and change; $11.04 at Amazon for Kindle (or Kindle desktop reader). Seems to me that's a bit high (given my estimate of word-count) for a novella.
Baxter is definitely cool. It's great for repetitive tasks done while fixed in place.
Not that there's not some neat stuff left to work on with it, it doesn't lend itself so well to many of the research activities possible with the PR2, best I can figure. PR2 is also mobile, a big advantage.
Depending on what students and profs might be into, I can see where both could find use; I don't see them competing for the same dollars or uses.
Nope. Seems to me the distance of some server is no reason not to consider it one my own drives, one of my desk drawers or a folder in a file cabinet out in my garage. Whether by payment of money, or by social contract or gentleman's agreement, I'm renting such a place on some mail provider's disk drive. Opening an electronic letter is in no way equivalent to taping it to the mailbox down at the end of my driveway - I've read it and left it in my folder.
My email is not in plain sight, ever. It takes a physical act for anyone to read it, whether it be traveling along a line or sitting in a buffer as a mess of packets, or in the file folder on a drive somewhere. Somebody has to hit keys and read from a screen. When we all have computer implants, it may not be a physical act entirely but it will still be a separate volitional act to access and read my email, and still bears no resemblance to it being in plain view to the odd passerby.
I had two classes in "Fortran for Engineers" in '66-'67, but can't say I really learned how to program.
Later, I helped in a very small way some friends put together, write an OS and some programs for an Altair kit. Later, on our Compucolor, ported games found on mainframes in various languages (mostly Fortran, COBOL, a couple others whose names I can't recall just now). Started learning about program logic and thinking about design, and really learned about bugs and how to stomp them.
In '81, on an Atari 800, designed, coded, and sold a program commissioned by a small corporation. Had no "ins" and wasn't that bright, so never worked in the field.
Thanks for the compliment. I intended for them to be accurate words.
You're right to the extent that once in the system your goal is to get out of it. If you can show by whatever means that you did not do or could not have done what you've been arrested for or are later charged with doing then you're out. Usually.
Once you've been convicted and imprisoned even at a county-jail level, if you can show that you did not or could not have committed the crime then there is no guarantee of release. When things do work properly it can still take years to be released. Generally the system would rather keep an "innocent" man in jail than admit it made a mistake.
Finally, freedom once re-gained, even if you manage to have records expunged, the simple truth is that "once in the system, always in the system". No matter how rich you are or however well connected there will remain at least some physical or electronic scraps as well as the memories of some cop, prosecutor, judge.
Once you've been processed, no matter who you are, in the eyes of the system you are tainted. Even if you've never had so much as a parking ticket before there will always be the question in a cop's mind, "What's he hiding?" or, "Well, maybe he didn't do this one, but what has he done?"
Again, you may be able to prove that you "didn't do it" but you can never prove that you are innocent. Even though you and I understand the word to mean just that, in the eyes of the system you are just "not guilty" - this time.
It might be helpful to understand this one simple truth: once you've been handcuffed -ever- you are from then on and forever fair game.
Just a reminder, one does not prove one's innocence under US law, even if possible to do so. One strives to prevent conviction by establishing sufficient reasonable doubt of guilt.
Ah, cool, hadn't seen this before, and thanks for the info. So, we're talking titanium then, but the quote isn't clear. In one part of the sentence it says "precious alloy" and later, "base metal." Titanium is an element, no? Now I'm confused, again. (Not that that's an unusual state of mind, mind.)
Further, I can't quite reconcile 'smuggled from Russia' with 'one of the world's leading exporters [presumably of titanium]' Seems to me buying something on the open market, even if you're disguising the buyer's identity, is a far cry from smuggling something across controlled borders.
Interesting story, nonetheless.
"that it was built from exotic smuggled Russian metals."
Say what? Just what 'exotic smuggled Russian [sic] metals' were used to build the A-12? Are you saying Lockheed and its contractors didn't make their own stuff?