I'm just a bit disappointed because my congresscritters aren't on that bill. So I just sat around yesterday and thought about how nice it would be to have a say in these things. Oh well. At least it was staved off for a while.
Funny thing about your sig---I just noticed that, as your wishlist is on Amazon.co.uk, the items say things like "Usually dispatched within 24 hours". In US English, we say 'shipped' instead of 'dispatched'. I never knew that was a UK-ism.
On the other hand, you could just go grab a Livejournal account, join the communities "kaizersoze125" and "show_your_boobs", and marvel at the quantity of amateur porn folks throw out there for free.
Seriously. There's some high quality out there. Some of it's not even members-locked (earningtails, for instance).
But that doesn't make any sense. They talk about needing to replace drives, and opting out of the use of hotswap, saying that it caused more problems than it solved... but JBOD means no redundancy at all. (And with that many drives, there will be frequent failures, as TFA also stated.) So how do they deal with data failure? There has to be some solution for redundancy; what is it? Okay, so RAID 5 didn't scale---I'd think they'd use a sort of hierarchical RAID, but JBOD isn't any sort of enterprise-level solution.
Was that Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Batman: Hush? It sounds a bit familiar; I don't remember the bit about dropping people off a building, just Lois and just once.
I skimmed it in Borders; couldn't get over my distaste for the shiny/bulgy Image Comics aesthetic that Jim Lee does so well. Kevin O'Neill, Sam Kieth and Dave Sim really have spoiled me.
I'm in a state not on that list. What can I do? Do I just wait for the bill to make it to the Senate proper? I doubt senators from Texas are going to care what I think, since I wouldn't be voting for them anyway.
You know, I don't understand why there's not an assassination market for people like Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay.
I mean, Michael Ross killed eight people, right? Lay and Skilling impoverished thousands of people. Why does Ross deserve to die, but not these two scumbags?
Bah; they're captains of industry, right? Real American heroes and so forth. Nearly Secretary of Energy, and all.
No. You're wrong. Where did you get that idea from?
The President of the United States was briefly granted this power in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996. It was used once before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan declared it unconstitutional on February 12, 1998. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998 by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Clinton v. City of New York.
Oh, don't be a dick, just tell them how much your time costs and see if they still want your help.
I worked for a department sysadmin for more than a year as I was getting my MS, and we wound up diagnosing and fixing hardware, just as part of the job.
Yes, we learn a lot than how to "fix your computer", but it almost always comes in handy at some point.
You'd think so, but no. I guess the market's kinda saturated right now; in a few months of dropping out resumes every week, I've gotten one interview, and while I was their second choice out of a hundred applicants, I got just as much job as the hundredth.
I'm working a call center helpdesk which I'm way overqualified for right now (most of my coworkers have high school diplomas; they're retrained welders and soldiers), and while it leaves me plenty of time to surf Slashdot, do distributed proofreading and edit Wikipedia, the pay leaves something to be desired, and the bennies are nonexistent. My troubleshooting skills have measurably improved, but I'd rather be working as a sysadmin.
I suppose that leaves the 'complete moron' possibility. Ho, ho.
Baldrick: My Uncle Baldrick was in a play once. Edmund: Really? Baldrick: Yeah. It was called Macbeth. Edmund: And what did he play? Baldrick: Second codpiece. Macbeth wore him in the fight scenes. Edmund: So he was a stunt codpiece? Baldrick: Yeah. Edmund: Was it a large part? Baldrick: Depended on who was playing Macbeth.
I don't remember there ever being a kinder, gentler version of the Joker.
Then you missed the time between the introduction of the comics code and The Dark Knight Returns. (Well, mostly just up to the late 60s.) I quote:
Throughout the evolution of the Batman universe, interpretations and incarnations of the Joker have taken two forms. The original and currently dominant image is of a sadistic, fiendishly intelligent psychopath with a warped sense of humor, deriving pleasure from inflicting grotesque, morbid death and terror upon innocent people. In this interpretation, he is a textbook example of antisocial personality disorder; In a sense he is Charles Manson cursed with a clown's grinning face and a grotesque sense of showmanship. The other interpretation of the Joker, popular in the late 1940s through 1960s comic books as well as the 1960s television series, portrays the Joker as an eccentric but harmless prankster and thief. The 1990s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series is notable for blending these two aspects, but most interpretations tend to embrace one characterization or the other.
Goddamn right. All-powerful heroes are a bitch to write, so they turn into a boring-ass wankfest like The Authority after Warren Ellis left. (And, to some extent, like it was while he was still writing for it.) Where the plot is: bad guys come in, blow something up, kill a whole bunch of civilians and knock over some cities, The Authority comes in, 0wnz0rz everyone, Apollo and Midnighter are adorably gay, the end.
To get around this, even superheroes with nominally great powers are nerfed. So that Superman, despite his mighty strength, super-speed, super-knitting and so forth, has the brain of a tapeworm. He's a tool, an ingenue, ready to follow whatever flag or president comes along to give him orders. See Superman: Red Son.
Because Batman survives mainly by his wits, those wits must be substantial, which is why he'd kick Superman's ass any day of the week. (See The Dark Knight Returns.)
And now you can't do anything even faintly techy in SF television without people yelling "treknobabble! oh noes!".
Case in point: Season three of Babylon 5. We've seen jump gates for more than two years. They're floating pylons in space that can open a gate into hyperspace. (Which is vaguely but consistently explained as a sort of macrospace, where a mile there is like a light-year in normal space, or whatever.) We've seen jump points, which are opened by capital ships---apparently they take a lot of energy---and do pretty much the same thing as a jump gate, but without the need for an expensive and hard-to-move piece of space construction.
Anyway, the bright idea was to open a jump point while inside an active jump gate. There was mad fan complaint, because they smelled "verteron pulse! reverse the chronoton flux polarity!" not far behind. It's a damn shame.
Sounds a bit like an extension of Ursula K LeGuin's 'Ekumen'. Humans send out colonies, and the colonies genetically engineer themselves to adapt to their environments. So when a collection of worlds starts up a loose federation for trade and cultural exchange, they meet all sorts of weird people who really are just people with bumpy foreheads.
I don't know that much about it---only read The Left Hand of Darkness---but it seemed interesting.
Whee. Another locked-down, proprietary codec. Yeah, my pants are frickin' aglow with joy right now.
Me, I'm still hoping that Dirac turns out well. It's on v0.5.2 now; I haven't given it a shot, but I've heard good things. Also, y'know, it's unencumbered. Give me Dirac (or whatever shows up as a promising, free next-generation video codec) and Vorbis in a Matroska package any day.
Hey, I'm right with you on wondering why, even if the oil all vanished tomorrow, it'd be a calamity for anything apart from transportation.
Well, petroleum is used in the production of plastics, so that's important. And pretty much all the goods in the United States, at least, are transported for a good portion of their journey via diesel truck. (What do container ships use for propulsion?)
I suppose this is another reason to love the idea of electric cars---much easier to move the energy generation somewhere easier to replace than an enormous fleet of cars.
'Course, all this'd go away if we had fusion. Pfeh.
It takes energy to split water. We get a lot of energy from oil. Oil scarcity will, the OP claims, make it difficult to acquire energy, and thus to acquire anything---LOX, steel, aluminum---that requires energy. Fabrication of the Shuttle also requires a great deal of energy.
I always thought people would just stop grousing about nuclear power so much once oil became prohibitively expensive, but I guess that's just me. We'll see what happens.
I wouldn't expect to buy a new (well, new to me) car every year either; that's ridiculous. I do assure you that there's a middle ground between paying a third of the sticker price for that "new car smell" (given that the car loses a third of its value once driven off the dealer's lot) and having to get out and push half the time.
I suppose I just can't justify the up-front expense of getting a new (or newer) car. My history of car trouble in the seventy thousand miles or so I've owned a car has been (a) one of my tires blew out on the highway, (b) my fuel pump fell into the gas tank, requiring a trip to the mechanic, and... that's actually it. I routinely took 600 mile road trips in it, and I'd still be driving the first car if I hadn't gotten into an accident and had it crushed into a small metal cube.
How many tows or breakdowns have you had in your last seventy thousand miles?
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I'm just a bit disappointed because my congresscritters aren't on that bill. So I just sat around yesterday and thought about how nice it would be to have a say in these things. Oh well. At least it was staved off for a while.
--grendel drago
Funny thing about your sig---I just noticed that, as your wishlist is on Amazon.co.uk, the items say things like "Usually dispatched within 24 hours". In US English, we say 'shipped' instead of 'dispatched'. I never knew that was a UK-ism.
Learn something new every day, I suppose.
--grendel drago
Yeah, but how many of them would you want to see naked? Unless you have a chub fetish, you're unlikely to find the US demographic pool particularly attractive.
On the other hand, you could just go grab a Livejournal account, join the communities "kaizersoze125" and "show_your_boobs", and marvel at the quantity of amateur porn folks throw out there for free.
Seriously. There's some high quality out there. Some of it's not even members-locked (earningtails, for instance).
--grendel drago
But that doesn't make any sense. They talk about needing to replace drives, and opting out of the use of hotswap, saying that it caused more problems than it solved... but JBOD means no redundancy at all. (And with that many drives, there will be frequent failures, as TFA also stated.) So how do they deal with data failure? There has to be some solution for redundancy; what is it? Okay, so RAID 5 didn't scale---I'd think they'd use a sort of hierarchical RAID, but JBOD isn't any sort of enterprise-level solution.
--grendel drago
Was that Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Batman: Hush? It sounds a bit familiar; I don't remember the bit about dropping people off a building, just Lois and just once.
I skimmed it in Borders; couldn't get over my distaste for the shiny/bulgy Image Comics aesthetic that Jim Lee does so well. Kevin O'Neill, Sam Kieth and Dave Sim really have spoiled me.
--grendel drago
I'm in a state not on that list. What can I do? Do I just wait for the bill to make it to the Senate proper? I doubt senators from Texas are going to care what I think, since I wouldn't be voting for them anyway.
--grendel drago
You know, I don't understand why there's not an assassination market for people like Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay.
I mean, Michael Ross killed eight people, right? Lay and Skilling impoverished thousands of people. Why does Ross deserve to die, but not these two scumbags?
Bah; they're captains of industry, right? Real American heroes and so forth. Nearly Secretary of Energy, and all.
--grendel drago
Ah, but Durbin made these allegations by flapping his face-meat, not by the subtle click-clack of keys. Godwin's Law lives on the Internet.
--grendel drago
No. You're wrong. Where did you get that idea from?
The President of the United States was briefly granted this power in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996. It was used once before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan declared it unconstitutional on February 12, 1998. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998 by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Clinton v. City of New York.
--grendel drago
Thank you for posting that. It's goddamned brilliant.
--grendel drago
Oh, don't be a dick, just tell them how much your time costs and see if they still want your help.
I worked for a department sysadmin for more than a year as I was getting my MS, and we wound up diagnosing and fixing hardware, just as part of the job.
Yes, we learn a lot than how to "fix your computer", but it almost always comes in handy at some point.
--grendel drago
You'd think so, but no. I guess the market's kinda saturated right now; in a few months of dropping out resumes every week, I've gotten one interview, and while I was their second choice out of a hundred applicants, I got just as much job as the hundredth.
I'm working a call center helpdesk which I'm way overqualified for right now (most of my coworkers have high school diplomas; they're retrained welders and soldiers), and while it leaves me plenty of time to surf Slashdot, do distributed proofreading and edit Wikipedia, the pay leaves something to be desired, and the bennies are nonexistent. My troubleshooting skills have measurably improved, but I'd rather be working as a sysadmin.
I suppose that leaves the 'complete moron' possibility. Ho, ho.
--grendel drago
You know, that's really clever. Now, all we need to make it really tin-foil-hattish is to figure out a way for it to target only brown people.
Seriously, though, did you just come up with that, or did you hear it somewhere else?
--grendel drago
Heh.
Baldrick: My Uncle Baldrick was in a play once.
Edmund: Really?
Baldrick: Yeah. It was called Macbeth.
Edmund: And what did he play?
Baldrick: Second codpiece. Macbeth wore him in the fight scenes.
Edmund: So he was a stunt codpiece?
Baldrick: Yeah.
Edmund: Was it a large part?
Baldrick: Depended on who was playing Macbeth.
Then you missed the time between the introduction of the comics code and The Dark Knight Returns. (Well, mostly just up to the late 60s.) I quote:
--grendel drago
Goddamn right. All-powerful heroes are a bitch to write, so they turn into a boring-ass wankfest like The Authority after Warren Ellis left. (And, to some extent, like it was while he was still writing for it.) Where the plot is: bad guys come in, blow something up, kill a whole bunch of civilians and knock over some cities, The Authority comes in, 0wnz0rz everyone, Apollo and Midnighter are adorably gay, the end.
To get around this, even superheroes with nominally great powers are nerfed. So that Superman, despite his mighty strength, super-speed, super-knitting and so forth, has the brain of a tapeworm. He's a tool, an ingenue, ready to follow whatever flag or president comes along to give him orders. See Superman: Red Son.
Because Batman survives mainly by his wits, those wits must be substantial, which is why he'd kick Superman's ass any day of the week. (See The Dark Knight Returns.)
--grendel drago
And now you can't do anything even faintly techy in SF television without people yelling "treknobabble! oh noes!".
Case in point: Season three of Babylon 5. We've seen jump gates for more than two years. They're floating pylons in space that can open a gate into hyperspace. (Which is vaguely but consistently explained as a sort of macrospace, where a mile there is like a light-year in normal space, or whatever.) We've seen jump points, which are opened by capital ships---apparently they take a lot of energy---and do pretty much the same thing as a jump gate, but without the need for an expensive and hard-to-move piece of space construction.
Anyway, the bright idea was to open a jump point while inside an active jump gate. There was mad fan complaint, because they smelled "verteron pulse! reverse the chronoton flux polarity!" not far behind. It's a damn shame.
--grendel drago
Sounds a bit like an extension of Ursula K LeGuin's 'Ekumen'. Humans send out colonies, and the colonies genetically engineer themselves to adapt to their environments. So when a collection of worlds starts up a loose federation for trade and cultural exchange, they meet all sorts of weird people who really are just people with bumpy foreheads.
I don't know that much about it---only read The Left Hand of Darkness---but it seemed interesting.
--grendel drago
Currently #22. For a DVD released in December 2003, that's pretty goddamn impressive.
If it's not worth it to Fox to bring back something this popular, then the economics of television production are seriously fucked.
--grende drago
Whee. Another locked-down, proprietary codec. Yeah, my pants are frickin' aglow with joy right now.
Me, I'm still hoping that Dirac turns out well. It's on v0.5.2 now; I haven't given it a shot, but I've heard good things. Also, y'know, it's unencumbered. Give me Dirac (or whatever shows up as a promising, free next-generation video codec) and Vorbis in a Matroska package any day.
--grendel drago
As an earlier poster pointed out, it's nothing new.
--grendel drago
Hey, I'm right with you on wondering why, even if the oil all vanished tomorrow, it'd be a calamity for anything apart from transportation.
Well, petroleum is used in the production of plastics, so that's important. And pretty much all the goods in the United States, at least, are transported for a good portion of their journey via diesel truck. (What do container ships use for propulsion?)
I suppose this is another reason to love the idea of electric cars---much easier to move the energy generation somewhere easier to replace than an enormous fleet of cars.
'Course, all this'd go away if we had fusion. Pfeh.
--grendel drago
It takes energy to split water. We get a lot of energy from oil. Oil scarcity will, the OP claims, make it difficult to acquire energy, and thus to acquire anything---LOX, steel, aluminum---that requires energy. Fabrication of the Shuttle also requires a great deal of energy.
I always thought people would just stop grousing about nuclear power so much once oil became prohibitively expensive, but I guess that's just me. We'll see what happens.
--grendel drago
Oh shit! That means that if you offend the BSA, the terrorists have already won.
--grendel drago
I wouldn't expect to buy a new (well, new to me) car every year either; that's ridiculous. I do assure you that there's a middle ground between paying a third of the sticker price for that "new car smell" (given that the car loses a third of its value once driven off the dealer's lot) and having to get out and push half the time.
I suppose I just can't justify the up-front expense of getting a new (or newer) car. My history of car trouble in the seventy thousand miles or so I've owned a car has been (a) one of my tires blew out on the highway, (b) my fuel pump fell into the gas tank, requiring a trip to the mechanic, and... that's actually it. I routinely took 600 mile road trips in it, and I'd still be driving the first car if I hadn't gotten into an accident and had it crushed into a small metal cube.
How many tows or breakdowns have you had in your last seventy thousand miles?
--grendel drago