We've seen strange swarm behavior here in Southern California the past two years. Anecdotes follow:
Last year, we had a swarm that probably lost its Queen (or didn't have one to begin with). They maintained a big ball in the tree for nearly four months, gradually all dying off. They made no honeycomb, just a few weird strands of propolis. In the past, when swarms failed to form a new hive, they didn't continue to go and harvest pollen and function like a hive, but all died off much more rapidly.
This year, we had a swarm ball up in a tree mid-afternoon. They hadn't found a hive by the next morning. By the next evening, they were all falling to the ground and writhing as if poisoned or something. By the second day, there were just heaps of dead bees all around the garden.
I don't claim to be any expert (although my Dad kept several hives when I was a kid). Still, I haven't seen this before. I don't know the cause of either phenomenon.
When I first saw the pictures (and didn't know who was piloting) I was not surprised. A lot of weekends that (or another similar) yellow PT-22 has been hotdogging over Mar Vista - flying too low and being overly exuberant with wing waggles.
I'm in the Mar Vista "return path" area south of KSMO, and about a year ago, I tried phoning the FAA when he (or a similar PT-22) flew at about half the altitude that the normal traffic uses. Engine was backfiring and really making a hell of a noise. Not surprisingly, FAA wasn't interested. After all, I'm just estimating elevation (true), I'm not a professional pilot (true), and there are a lot of spurious complaints (not true in this case).
Apropos Surfridge... good luck clearing West Los Angeles. I don't have major objections to the air traffic, but when someone flies low enough to shake my house on the turn-around, it makes me want to join one of the anti groups.
Totally irrelevant nitpick that has no bearing on your point:
You're leaving out a substantial period where composers sold their compositions as sheet music, and made big money on it. That era lasted longer than the recording era.
Yeah, as I understood it, the objection is that it forces farmers to buy seeds yearly. That's fine in a first world economy, but subsistence farmers need to be able to re-seed with their own crop yield. Many of them may never see enough cash to buy seeds in the first place, but there was concern about "first crop is free!" type promotions.
I don't know how realistic the concerns were in this particular case, but the history of companies like Nestle and their milk formula scheme is enough to give pause to a lot of people.
This has me more concerned than some of the other recent bugs, primarily because it's so easy to exploit by script kiddies.
Plus, there are huge, vast, barely conceivable numbers of network-attached embedded devices that use the gethostbyname() call. What percentage of these are remotely update-able? What percentage of these will have their firmware re-flashed?
This one seems like it gives black-hats the ideal way to get a swarm army of (relatively) weak and/or dumb devices. Yet even these weak, dumb devices should be sufficient to set up warrens of ssh tunnels, nodes for DDoS attacks, etc.
No, I had a Teac DSDD drive on my TRS-80 Model I. I had to build a custom disk controller to support it though. This was in '80, so it predated the IBM PC by about a year and a half. Also, the PC used soft sectors, didn't it? The TRS-80 drive controllers were all hard sector.
I also had a Shugart 35-track SSDD drive, if I remember correctly.
It's obviously been a while, but I remember 35 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSDD, and the brilliant Holy Grail of 40 track DSDD.
The sad thing is that now that everything's back up, it'll be business as usual.
I grudgingly subscribed to Adobe Creative cloud when I found that buying Illustrator would have cost me $750 for a legal copy, or $30/month and also include the rest of the CC package. I already own a legal copy of Photoshop CS5, which is good enough for me, so I haven't downloaded that, but I've had two projects that required video editing (so I downloaded Premier) and extracting difficult text from a PDF (so I downloaded Acrobat Pro after spending hours with PDFtk and PDFBox).
Before I subscribed, I found a torrents for a cracked version of Illustrator, which I used to determine that the program would solve the problem I was working on. After that, I bought the subscription. Adobe is really annoying; the software nags me a lot, and it opens a million network connections. Still, if I'm using their software to make money, I feel like I need to pay them.
Given the choice, I'd still rather have stand-alone versions of everything, but I can't afford to spend that much for programs I won't use very frequently.
Back in the day (1980s), I helped run an emergency food pantry in Southern California. At the time, Sol Price (founder of Price Club, which I believe is one of the constituent chains that merged to become CostCo) donated pallets of dried milk to us to redistribute. In general, these were pallets where there had been damage, so some of the packages were not usable - the vast majority of the packages, however, were fine.
At our pantry, that donation made up a substantial part of what we gave out to people, especially those with children.
I always thought it was both generous and great business sense for them to donate that food. After all, Price Club got a tax write off, there was less waste, and the hungry people got food without it impacting Price Club's sales.
Uh, it's perfectly possible to be a sociopath and also do good and important things.
The personality part is interesting because it shows that Assange's personality is both what enabled him to accomplish all he did with WikiLeaks, and what sabotaged his efforts to make WikiLeaks into something even bigger and more powerful. His fallings-out with other WikiLeaks people predates much of the external pressure. Based on many sources, he strikes me as a deeply flawed individual who has accomplished great things. It's sad that he has not been able to accomplish more.
My guess is that history will show him as paving the way for Snowden and other future leakers. He'll be remembered more for the way his actions changed the discourse and environment for transparency than for his actual technical accomplishments. His personality will be an afterthought.
Snark aside, it's also advantageous to prevent Apache/nginx/whatever from being able to run/interpret/process PHP/Perl/Python code outside of a carefully restricted set.
So now "between and man and a woman" is now "men paired with women." Even you can see those aren't the same thing.
But read up on it. You'll find that there have been Western institutions of pairing a man with multiple women. There have been institutions of pairbonding of men (specifically monks). There have been institutions of spouse ownership. You only have to go back a short way to find that the "traditional marriage" is a fairly recent invention. Again, read Coontz (yes, I know you won't, but she has a hell of a lot more documentation than I'm going to post here).
And hey, if we're going for "tradition," why not go whole-hog? Let's bring in all of the possible traditions. Widows must marry their brothers-in-law. Adulterers must be killed. Anyone who disgraces the family honor must be stoned. These are marriage traditions that go back thousands of years too.
I think what we can say is that marriage has been between a man and a woman for thousands of years.
You think wrong. Marriage has been a quite varied institution even within the narrow stricture of "Western" culture over the past few thousand years. A good starting point if you want to learn is Stephanie Coontz's book. But there is a great deal of actual research on the subject, which would be well worth your time to look into.
It has nothing to do with political correctness to point any of this out. It's simple fact.
For the more enlightened of us self-important, hippie, too-cool-for-you douchebags, coffee breath is an *aphrodisiac*. Although I would concur that the crap at McBuck's doesn't rate.
Over the weekend, I got a lot of spurious charges on the credit card I use for my Linode account. Charges from several different countries, for various amounts that looked like automated "is this card valid?" type probes. The bank shut it down, but not before I got paged a bunch of times.
Then again, the odds are just as good that a waiter at some restaurant uploaded my number to some IRC channel to get back at me for my guest's order being too complicated or something.
How can you possibly cast an informed ballot before the first debate?
You don't serious think that the "debates" are actually debates, do you? If that's where you got your information about the candidates, you're going to be just as ignorant as the people basing their votes on TV News and other scripted sound bites.
Your only reasonable way of assessing a candidate is to look at a) voting records and/or legislation sponsorships as applicable, b) primary campaign funding sources, and c) all the other spin. This gives you some insight into what (if anything) they've done, who they're beholden to, and, lastly, what they want you to think they represent.
The problem with this study is that it's from the US-ian perspective that lumps several separate and unequal groups into one uncomfortable amalgam. "Conservatives" can be one or more of the following: a) fiscal conservatives (e.g., "Chamber of Commerce Republicans"), b) social conservatives (e.g., the "bring back the pre-60s culture" crowd), c) small-government conservatives (i.e., libertarians), or d) religious lunatics bent on theocracy.
Groups like "d" are going to be fundamentally anti-science, for obvious reasons. Others may or may not be anti-science; for example, libertarians are generally against "big science" funded by the government.
Note that "Liberals" also comprise a similar hodge-podge of groups with different beliefs (some of which share a knee-jerk anti-science response), but that's another topic.
Yeah, it tells me my Mac-based Firefox doesn't "benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against structured exception handling overwrite attacks?"
Oddly, it thinks that I do derive benefit from "Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution" and "Windows Operating System features that randomize the memory layout to make it harder for attackers to find their target."
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We've seen strange swarm behavior here in Southern California the past two years. Anecdotes follow:
Last year, we had a swarm that probably lost its Queen (or didn't have one to begin with). They maintained a big ball in the tree for nearly four months, gradually all dying off. They made no honeycomb, just a few weird strands of propolis. In the past, when swarms failed to form a new hive, they didn't continue to go and harvest pollen and function like a hive, but all died off much more rapidly.
This year, we had a swarm ball up in a tree mid-afternoon. They hadn't found a hive by the next morning. By the next evening, they were all falling to the ground and writhing as if poisoned or something. By the second day, there were just heaps of dead bees all around the garden.
I don't claim to be any expert (although my Dad kept several hives when I was a kid). Still, I haven't seen this before. I don't know the cause of either phenomenon.
Uh, fair has never meant "weaker" in the English language. The phrase "fairer sex" refers to the definition of "fair" as pleasing to the eye or mind.
When I first saw the pictures (and didn't know who was piloting) I was not surprised. A lot of weekends that (or another similar) yellow PT-22 has been hotdogging over Mar Vista - flying too low and being overly exuberant with wing waggles.
I'm in the Mar Vista "return path" area south of KSMO, and about a year ago, I tried phoning the FAA when he (or a similar PT-22) flew at about half the altitude that the normal traffic uses. Engine was backfiring and really making a hell of a noise. Not surprisingly, FAA wasn't interested. After all, I'm just estimating elevation (true), I'm not a professional pilot (true), and there are a lot of spurious complaints (not true in this case).
Apropos Surfridge ... good luck clearing West Los Angeles. I don't have major objections to the air traffic, but when someone flies low enough to shake my house on the turn-around, it makes me want to join one of the anti groups.
Totally irrelevant nitpick that has no bearing on your point:
You're leaving out a substantial period where composers sold their compositions as sheet music, and made big money on it. That era lasted longer than the recording era.
Yeah, as I understood it, the objection is that it forces farmers to buy seeds yearly. That's fine in a first world economy, but subsistence farmers need to be able to re-seed with their own crop yield. Many of them may never see enough cash to buy seeds in the first place, but there was concern about "first crop is free!" type promotions.
I don't know how realistic the concerns were in this particular case, but the history of companies like Nestle and their milk formula scheme is enough to give pause to a lot of people.
This has me more concerned than some of the other recent bugs, primarily because it's so easy to exploit by script kiddies.
Plus, there are huge, vast, barely conceivable numbers of network-attached embedded devices that use the gethostbyname() call. What percentage of these are remotely update-able? What percentage of these will have their firmware re-flashed?
This one seems like it gives black-hats the ideal way to get a swarm army of (relatively) weak and/or dumb devices. Yet even these weak, dumb devices should be sufficient to set up warrens of ssh tunnels, nodes for DDoS attacks, etc.
Yuck.
No, I had a Teac DSDD drive on my TRS-80 Model I. I had to build a custom disk controller to support it though. This was in '80, so it predated the IBM PC by about a year and a half. Also, the PC used soft sectors, didn't it? The TRS-80 drive controllers were all hard sector.
I also had a Shugart 35-track SSDD drive, if I remember correctly.
It's obviously been a while, but I remember 35 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSDD, and the brilliant Holy Grail of 40 track DSDD.
The sad thing is that now that everything's back up, it'll be business as usual.
I grudgingly subscribed to Adobe Creative cloud when I found that buying Illustrator would have cost me $750 for a legal copy, or $30/month and also include the rest of the CC package. I already own a legal copy of Photoshop CS5, which is good enough for me, so I haven't downloaded that, but I've had two projects that required video editing (so I downloaded Premier) and extracting difficult text from a PDF (so I downloaded Acrobat Pro after spending hours with PDFtk and PDFBox).
Before I subscribed, I found a torrents for a cracked version of Illustrator, which I used to determine that the program would solve the problem I was working on. After that, I bought the subscription. Adobe is really annoying; the software nags me a lot, and it opens a million network connections. Still, if I'm using their software to make money, I feel like I need to pay them.
Given the choice, I'd still rather have stand-alone versions of everything, but I can't afford to spend that much for programs I won't use very frequently.
Yeah, ONE SPECIFIC arrangement that photographers have been using for many, many decades.
Back in the day (1980s), I helped run an emergency food pantry in Southern California. At the time, Sol Price (founder of Price Club, which I believe is one of the constituent chains that merged to become CostCo) donated pallets of dried milk to us to redistribute. In general, these were pallets where there had been damage, so some of the packages were not usable - the vast majority of the packages, however, were fine.
At our pantry, that donation made up a substantial part of what we gave out to people, especially those with children.
I always thought it was both generous and great business sense for them to donate that food. After all, Price Club got a tax write off, there was less waste, and the hungry people got food without it impacting Price Club's sales.
Uh, it's perfectly possible to be a sociopath and also do good and important things.
The personality part is interesting because it shows that Assange's personality is both what enabled him to accomplish all he did with WikiLeaks, and what sabotaged his efforts to make WikiLeaks into something even bigger and more powerful. His fallings-out with other WikiLeaks people predates much of the external pressure. Based on many sources, he strikes me as a deeply flawed individual who has accomplished great things. It's sad that he has not been able to accomplish more.
My guess is that history will show him as paving the way for Snowden and other future leakers. He'll be remembered more for the way his actions changed the discourse and environment for transparency than for his actual technical accomplishments. His personality will be an afterthought.
cgi-data?
Is this a time-traveling web server from the 90s?
Snark aside, it's also advantageous to prevent Apache/nginx/whatever from being able to run/interpret/process PHP/Perl/Python code outside of a carefully restricted set.
*sigh*
So now "between and man and a woman" is now "men paired with women." Even you can see those aren't the same thing.
But read up on it. You'll find that there have been Western institutions of pairing a man with multiple women. There have been institutions of pairbonding of men (specifically monks). There have been institutions of spouse ownership. You only have to go back a short way to find that the "traditional marriage" is a fairly recent invention. Again, read Coontz (yes, I know you won't, but she has a hell of a lot more documentation than I'm going to post here).
And hey, if we're going for "tradition," why not go whole-hog? Let's bring in all of the possible traditions. Widows must marry their brothers-in-law. Adulterers must be killed. Anyone who disgraces the family honor must be stoned. These are marriage traditions that go back thousands of years too.
I think what we can say is that marriage has been between a man and a woman for thousands of years.
You think wrong. Marriage has been a quite varied institution even within the narrow stricture of "Western" culture over the past few thousand years. A good starting point if you want to learn is Stephanie Coontz's book. But there is a great deal of actual research on the subject, which would be well worth your time to look into.
It has nothing to do with political correctness to point any of this out. It's simple fact.
States started with the marriage licenses to prevent brothers and sisters from marrying each other.
Incorrect. Marriage licensing, historically, is directly related to inheritance.
I'll see your Dyncorp, and raise you Dryco. Worry not. Wonder not.
For the more enlightened of us self-important, hippie, too-cool-for-you douchebags, coffee breath is an *aphrodisiac*. Although I would concur that the crap at McBuck's doesn't rate.
Over the weekend, I got a lot of spurious charges on the credit card I use for my Linode account. Charges from several different countries, for various amounts that looked like automated "is this card valid?" type probes. The bank shut it down, but not before I got paged a bunch of times.
Then again, the odds are just as good that a waiter at some restaurant uploaded my number to some IRC channel to get back at me for my guest's order being too complicated or something.
And an especial win for those of us who are skilled in the arts of video editing and compositing...
How can you possibly cast an informed ballot before the first debate?
You don't serious think that the "debates" are actually debates, do you? If that's where you got your information about the candidates, you're going to be just as ignorant as the people basing their votes on TV News and other scripted sound bites.
Your only reasonable way of assessing a candidate is to look at a) voting records and/or legislation sponsorships as applicable, b) primary campaign funding sources, and c) all the other spin. This gives you some insight into what (if anything) they've done, who they're beholden to, and, lastly, what they want you to think they represent.
The problem with this study is that it's from the US-ian perspective that lumps several separate and unequal groups into one uncomfortable amalgam. "Conservatives" can be one or more of the following: a) fiscal conservatives (e.g., "Chamber of Commerce Republicans"), b) social conservatives (e.g., the "bring back the pre-60s culture" crowd), c) small-government conservatives (i.e., libertarians), or d) religious lunatics bent on theocracy.
Groups like "d" are going to be fundamentally anti-science, for obvious reasons. Others may or may not be anti-science; for example, libertarians are generally against "big science" funded by the government.
Note that "Liberals" also comprise a similar hodge-podge of groups with different beliefs (some of which share a knee-jerk anti-science response), but that's another topic.
Yeah, it tells me my Mac-based Firefox doesn't "benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against structured exception handling overwrite attacks?"
Oddly, it thinks that I do derive benefit from "Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution" and
"Windows Operating System features that randomize the memory layout to make it harder for attackers to find their target."
Whatever, dude.
Is it morally worse to kill and eat an intelligent creature than to kill and eat an unintelligent creature? Why?
Or, as Gordon Bell allegedly said in the 90s, "in ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables."
The ten years may not be exactly right, the the overall sentiment is.
Flickr's nice for JPEGs, but they won't handle RAW images.
I have a USB drive backup at home, and a drive at the office a few miles away. I swap 'em at least weekly to minimize the risk.