They may be fine in Arizona, but they're all kinds of fun to navigate when the road is icy, making every time you turn an invitation to start sliding. Did anyone not notice that roundabouts are a continuous turn? (Which is why I saw lots of accidents at the roundabouts I had to regularly use during an Idaho winter.)
One theory is that Smith was writing a fantasy novel (tho from what else I've read, his own grasp on reality was a trifle suspect... so as to whether he believed it??) Thus:
Structurally, the Book of Mormon is in line with other fantasy manuscripts of its era: publishers didn't think readers would buy that a crazy adventure was happening to the narrator in realtime, but a secondary narrator relaying the adventure via a framing story was acceptable. Given that structure, the angel Moroni showing Smith the tablets is the framing story; the rest is the fantasy.
As an example we know for sure was meant to be fantasy, E.R. Eddings' The Worm Ouroboros also uses this framing story structure (tho the author drops it after a few chapters and tells the story directly, tho I got the feeling he'd gotten caught up in the story and flat forgot to use it).
Acutely summed up in this quote from the Crichton lecture:
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
I'd noticed long before Win7+ that once in a while my HOSTS file seemed to get ignored. Don't recall specifics offhand, but at least back as far as Win98 (at least, once TurboTax forcibly applied IE5.5, which also fucked up Win98's resource management. -- That was also the last time I bought TurboTax.)
Or maybe Sgt.Burke is really saying, "Not all of us want to store your data forever. But some do. So we compromise by dragging our fiscal feet to make it difficult to retain more of your data."
Let's see what happens at the next budget appropriations session in Oakland... then we'll find out who's on the side of privacy or bureaucracy.
In my latest testing spasm, I found that there's far less customization available (at least as offered by the distro's tools) in KDE5, to the point that I could not get things sufficiently restful to my eyes, and that launcher-style menu just pisses me off. Didn't crash on me, but I only had the thing up an hour or so on the test box, running off a LiveCD (well, LiveUSB). Crashy would get it nixed here real quick too, tho.
I like KDE4 for the most part, and... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Thanks for the recommendation; in my latest testing adventure, I'd overlooked this one. Downloading now.:)
One of my bugaboos from a usability standpoint is the common inability to set system colors that override individual apps, as we can do in Windows. Some KDE apps will respect system settings, but most don't... and that usual default white app background hurts my eyes after a while. And included themes tend to be not much better. So no long-term usage for me so long as a given desktop/app doesn't allow workspace colors to be set, or doesn't make theme creation stupid-easy. (Seriously, I don't know what the heck some of your widget *names* refer to; what's wrong with pick-and-click like WinXP-and-before colors does it?)
Same here. Every iteration of Windows inspires me to a spasm of examining linux distros, but until now I've always gone away disappointed. Mint's current incarnation, while not quite up to the WinXP that's still my preferred Windows, is very encouraging. And while I still generally prefer the KDE desktop, Cinnamon is going in the right direction for everyday usability. I liked Mint well enough to install it on one of my frankenputers for further review. (Now if only GRUB hadn't committed suicide at age 2 days...)
So with the advent of Windows 10, I've been looking at lots of current distros via an Easy2Boot setup running them off a USB stick (so they all have identical resources to start with, and no waiting for either a DVD to load or an install to HD) and it was interesting to compare bootup and performance times. The system is a quad-core 2.5GHz with 4GB RAM, onboard video, and no hard disk. On average, startup time is around 55 seconds from boot to desktop (worst was OpenSuSE at 105 seconds), and LibreOffice takes 8 to 14 seconds to start. Shutdown time tends to be proportional. But Mint starts in about 25 seconds, and LibreOffice on Mint takes only 4 seconds, plus shutdown is RIGHT NOW, no waiting. Big difference, far as I can tell (not being a linux guru) is that Mint doesn't load near as much crap that really isn't useful for the desktop user. At shutdown, according to an included sysinfo tool, only one module was running, not 50 or 200 like the more typical distro.
By coincidence, last night I was messing with my "old" laptop, a P150 with 32mb RAM, wondering if it was worth spending $35 to get it a new battery (it's one of those damn Dells that has to have a battery with at least a little charge, or it won't finish booting up, and that original battery is half a breath from dead). It still works fine otherwise (tho the screen has gotten dim) and it's perfectly good for running DOS or Win95, or maybe Puppy linux.
Yeah, I can buy a whole new monkey that's 20 times as fast for the same $35, thanks to eBay, but I hate to ditch working hardware.:( And this'un is handy for testing IDE HDs, as it seems to support absolutely anything and everything (320GB? no problem) and the drive bay is a snap to get to.
Anyway I was using it to test a pile of old laptop HDs, and what should come up on one of 'em but WFWG 3.11. Sure is nice to have INSTANT responsiveness from the desktop!! Dang, been so long I almost can't remember how to run this thing... where's my right-click? that's THE feature that let Win95 steal me away in the first place!
A few years back when I had one of my spasms of testing linux distros, the one I liked best was Mandrake 7.2 with KDE. Got it all tweaked up to suit myself, and was amused to discover I'd recreated Win95.
Seriously, you're right -- there's good reasons why the basic Win95 desktop not only took off, but dominated for so long. Personally I'm not happy with the recent shift toward the smartphone-style desktop, I find it completely unusable... please tell me KDE5 can be tweaked to be like KDE4....
You could if you used the DOS startup hack, *and* the game had its own memory manager (eg. CWSDPMI). Even hacked for the system to start in DOS, that version of DOS did not support EMM386, and I forget the details but its HIMEM.SYS was also broken.
WinME itself....Initially mine was so bad it didn't even crash properly; it would get hung up halfway and sputter-and-fart its way to an eventual graceless shutdown. But I applied 98Lite in default mode, turned off System Restore (which was the real culprit), and after that -- in the two years I had it up 24/7 as the media-playing and heavy-lifting box, it never crashed again (in fact, it never even required a restart). Only got retired because WinXP came out and had some better features.
I think the Vista devteam must have started life as the WinME devteam. A lot of it feels the same, same kinds of virtues (driver handling) and broken spots (interface quirks). Yep, that explains a lot.
I knew a guy who ran Win95 on a 16MHz 386 with 16mb RAM. He said it took 5 minutes to start up and was laggy as hell, but stable.
Back a few, er, a lot of years I had a 486DX4-100 that I used as a RAM-and-HD tester. One day when it happened to have 8mb in it, I hooked up the wrong HD and found myself watching Win2K booting up. It took about 5 minutes to get fully booted up, but once it got there, it ran well enough to be usable (a little sluggish but not particularly laggy). I was amazed.
Side note: I'd previously set that Win2K to have no swapfile. I tried letting it have a swapfile with this 8mb setup, and that made it run about 3x *slower*!!
Numbers of pathogens matter. In crude terms, one antibody unit kills one virus or bacterium. Your immune system can cope with a lot, but if the defenses it has to hand get "used up" faster than it can make more, that's when a pathogen will overwhelm you.
So if the number of pathogens in the water are reduced by 99%, or even by 90%, it's that much more chance your immune system has to stay ahead in this numbers game, and kill off whatever pathogens are still in the water before they can reproduce in your body (which is when you get sick).
This is basically how modern water treatment works to prevent the spread of disease. What comes out of the tap isn't sterile or pathogen-free. But it's clean enough that a reasonably-normal immune system has no trouble keeping ahead of the game.
Folding a flat sheet into a cone is easy; anyone can learn to do it. A cone fits into the mouth of a plastic jug, which is a common way for these folks to carry water home from the common source.
And I expect it's a helluva lot cheaper than LifeStraw, which I've seen offered at around $13 a pop. We're talking about the daily water for millions of people here, not one guy on a weekend hike.
Just print it on every page, like we already do with some stuff that's bulk-packaged. That way pages can be torn out and handed around without needing separate instructions.
And print a copy on the inside cover, which is far less likely to get lost than is a separate pamphlet. Be sure to use nontoxic ink.:)
How much water would those reservoirs have today if they hadn't dumped out so much of it in the name of saving a fish? From what I've heard, there went about 2/3rds of CA's stored water.
(fish that arguably aren't native in the first place, but that's a different topic)
Using a Samsung dumb-as-rocks phone myself, $12 at Walmart. It's been banged around and nearly crushed a few times and you can't tell it's ever been out of the packaging.
You can also get small portable solar panels made specifically for charging devices like phones. They start at around $18, including the battery unit.
I got a $10 gadget called a "Pocket Juice" that can be used as a direct power source and is small enough to hold in the same hand as my phone, and it can fully recharge the phone four times before I have to recharge it (which I can do from any USB port or charger). And my only criteria were "cheap" and "small". Basically I picked the cheapest and smallest unit at the checkout counter at Walmart, and it's perfectly good for the purpose. Turns out as a bonus it does a fast recharge on my phone, unlike the wall charger which takes hours. And it doubles as a flashlight.
A friend who works for LADWP said a few years ago that because of the reaction you cite, they had to find some way to cover the reservoirs to keep out sunlight. The alternative was building a dome.... which would have been orders of magnitude more expensive. (Giant tarps really aren't viable.)
I can tell you from firsthand experience, that tough black plastic lasts forever. I used black plastic barrels in the desert, and they are still like new after 25 years in the desert sun (likewise those that sat where they were always wet underneath). I'd guess, given that mine have not become at all friable (in fact I can still whack them with a stick as hard as I can hit without causing any damage) that this plastic is not "leaking" anything into the water, either.
If the surface is covered with anything solid, evaporation is a relative non-issue anyway, and will certainly be reduced compared to not covered at all. I recall a study that found as much as 90% of the water that comes down the L.A. Aqueduct was lost to evaporation enroute.
My mom did that with phone/long distance rate plans for years, and generally paid about 1/4th the standard rate as a result.
Then she did it with cellphones until she wound up on a permanent plan no one can beat.
I've attempted it with my ISP, and got about a 50% reduction as a result. But I did have to fib a bit about the one available alternative (which exists but would be very costly to bring in).
It's a good tactic when competition exists. Not so great when it doesn't.:(
I've already run into that -- network was down, so the meatspace store (I've forgotten what one), which relied on some network app for all transactions cash or otherwise, could not take my money. Or anyone else's. Not Good.
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They may be fine in Arizona, but they're all kinds of fun to navigate when the road is icy, making every time you turn an invitation to start sliding. Did anyone not notice that roundabouts are a continuous turn? (Which is why I saw lots of accidents at the roundabouts I had to regularly use during an Idaho winter.)
One theory is that Smith was writing a fantasy novel (tho from what else I've read, his own grasp on reality was a trifle suspect... so as to whether he believed it??) Thus:
Structurally, the Book of Mormon is in line with other fantasy manuscripts of its era: publishers didn't think readers would buy that a crazy adventure was happening to the narrator in realtime, but a secondary narrator relaying the adventure via a framing story was acceptable. Given that structure, the angel Moroni showing Smith the tablets is the framing story; the rest is the fantasy.
As an example we know for sure was meant to be fantasy, E.R. Eddings' The Worm Ouroboros also uses this framing story structure (tho the author drops it after a few chapters and tells the story directly, tho I got the feeling he'd gotten caught up in the story and flat forgot to use it).
Acutely summed up in this quote from the Crichton lecture:
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
I'd noticed long before Win7+ that once in a while my HOSTS file seemed to get ignored. Don't recall specifics offhand, but at least back as far as Win98 (at least, once TurboTax forcibly applied IE5.5, which also fucked up Win98's resource management. -- That was also the last time I bought TurboTax.)
Or maybe Sgt.Burke is really saying, "Not all of us want to store your data forever. But some do. So we compromise by dragging our fiscal feet to make it difficult to retain more of your data."
Let's see what happens at the next budget appropriations session in Oakland... then we'll find out who's on the side of privacy or bureaucracy.
In my latest testing spasm, I found that there's far less customization available (at least as offered by the distro's tools) in KDE5, to the point that I could not get things sufficiently restful to my eyes, and that launcher-style menu just pisses me off. Didn't crash on me, but I only had the thing up an hour or so on the test box, running off a LiveCD (well, LiveUSB). Crashy would get it nixed here real quick too, tho.
I like KDE4 for the most part, and ... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Thanks for the info. I've had people asking about this, and I don't use the updates myself, so I had not kept track.
I'm thinkin' there'll have to be a different update route for corporate customers, cuz no way in hell are they going to open themselves up like that.
Do updates come from a specific IP or subdomain, and can you allow "just one" ??
What happens if you block the reporting-destination in HOSTS or your router? do things stop working?
Does HOSTS even work properly? (it could be iffy in previous Windows, depending.)
Thanks for the recommendation; in my latest testing adventure, I'd overlooked this one. Downloading now. :)
One of my bugaboos from a usability standpoint is the common inability to set system colors that override individual apps, as we can do in Windows. Some KDE apps will respect system settings, but most don't... and that usual default white app background hurts my eyes after a while. And included themes tend to be not much better. So no long-term usage for me so long as a given desktop/app doesn't allow workspace colors to be set, or doesn't make theme creation stupid-easy. (Seriously, I don't know what the heck some of your widget *names* refer to; what's wrong with pick-and-click like WinXP-and-before colors does it?)
Same here. Every iteration of Windows inspires me to a spasm of examining linux distros, but until now I've always gone away disappointed. Mint's current incarnation, while not quite up to the WinXP that's still my preferred Windows, is very encouraging. And while I still generally prefer the KDE desktop, Cinnamon is going in the right direction for everyday usability. I liked Mint well enough to install it on one of my frankenputers for further review. (Now if only GRUB hadn't committed suicide at age 2 days...)
So with the advent of Windows 10, I've been looking at lots of current distros via an Easy2Boot setup running them off a USB stick (so they all have identical resources to start with, and no waiting for either a DVD to load or an install to HD) and it was interesting to compare bootup and performance times. The system is a quad-core 2.5GHz with 4GB RAM, onboard video, and no hard disk. On average, startup time is around 55 seconds from boot to desktop (worst was OpenSuSE at 105 seconds), and LibreOffice takes 8 to 14 seconds to start. Shutdown time tends to be proportional. But Mint starts in about 25 seconds, and LibreOffice on Mint takes only 4 seconds, plus shutdown is RIGHT NOW, no waiting. Big difference, far as I can tell (not being a linux guru) is that Mint doesn't load near as much crap that really isn't useful for the desktop user. At shutdown, according to an included sysinfo tool, only one module was running, not 50 or 200 like the more typical distro.
By coincidence, last night I was messing with my "old" laptop, a P150 with 32mb RAM, wondering if it was worth spending $35 to get it a new battery (it's one of those damn Dells that has to have a battery with at least a little charge, or it won't finish booting up, and that original battery is half a breath from dead). It still works fine otherwise (tho the screen has gotten dim) and it's perfectly good for running DOS or Win95, or maybe Puppy linux.
Yeah, I can buy a whole new monkey that's 20 times as fast for the same $35, thanks to eBay, but I hate to ditch working hardware. :( And this'un is handy for testing IDE HDs, as it seems to support absolutely anything and everything (320GB? no problem) and the drive bay is a snap to get to.
Anyway I was using it to test a pile of old laptop HDs, and what should come up on one of 'em but WFWG 3.11. Sure is nice to have INSTANT responsiveness from the desktop!! Dang, been so long I almost can't remember how to run this thing... where's my right-click? that's THE feature that let Win95 steal me away in the first place!
A few years back when I had one of my spasms of testing linux distros, the one I liked best was Mandrake 7.2 with KDE. Got it all tweaked up to suit myself, and was amused to discover I'd recreated Win95.
Seriously, you're right -- there's good reasons why the basic Win95 desktop not only took off, but dominated for so long. Personally I'm not happy with the recent shift toward the smartphone-style desktop, I find it completely unusable... please tell me KDE5 can be tweaked to be like KDE4....
You could if you used the DOS startup hack, *and* the game had its own memory manager (eg. CWSDPMI). Even hacked for the system to start in DOS, that version of DOS did not support EMM386, and I forget the details but its HIMEM.SYS was also broken.
WinME itself ....Initially mine was so bad it didn't even crash properly; it would get hung up halfway and sputter-and-fart its way to an eventual graceless shutdown. But I applied 98Lite in default mode, turned off System Restore (which was the real culprit), and after that -- in the two years I had it up 24/7 as the media-playing and heavy-lifting box, it never crashed again (in fact, it never even required a restart). Only got retired because WinXP came out and had some better features.
I think the Vista devteam must have started life as the WinME devteam. A lot of it feels the same, same kinds of virtues (driver handling) and broken spots (interface quirks). Yep, that explains a lot.
I knew a guy who ran Win95 on a 16MHz 386 with 16mb RAM. He said it took 5 minutes to start up and was laggy as hell, but stable.
Back a few, er, a lot of years I had a 486DX4-100 that I used as a RAM-and-HD tester. One day when it happened to have 8mb in it, I hooked up the wrong HD and found myself watching Win2K booting up. It took about 5 minutes to get fully booted up, but once it got there, it ran well enough to be usable (a little sluggish but not particularly laggy). I was amazed.
Side note: I'd previously set that Win2K to have no swapfile. I tried letting it have a swapfile with this 8mb setup, and that made it run about 3x *slower*!!
Numbers of pathogens matter. In crude terms, one antibody unit kills one virus or bacterium. Your immune system can cope with a lot, but if the defenses it has to hand get "used up" faster than it can make more, that's when a pathogen will overwhelm you.
So if the number of pathogens in the water are reduced by 99%, or even by 90%, it's that much more chance your immune system has to stay ahead in this numbers game, and kill off whatever pathogens are still in the water before they can reproduce in your body (which is when you get sick).
This is basically how modern water treatment works to prevent the spread of disease. What comes out of the tap isn't sterile or pathogen-free. But it's clean enough that a reasonably-normal immune system has no trouble keeping ahead of the game.
Folding a flat sheet into a cone is easy; anyone can learn to do it. A cone fits into the mouth of a plastic jug, which is a common way for these folks to carry water home from the common source.
And I expect it's a helluva lot cheaper than LifeStraw, which I've seen offered at around $13 a pop. We're talking about the daily water for millions of people here, not one guy on a weekend hike.
Just print it on every page, like we already do with some stuff that's bulk-packaged. That way pages can be torn out and handed around without needing separate instructions.
And print a copy on the inside cover, which is far less likely to get lost than is a separate pamphlet. Be sure to use nontoxic ink. :)
How much water would those reservoirs have today if they hadn't dumped out so much of it in the name of saving a fish? From what I've heard, there went about 2/3rds of CA's stored water.
(fish that arguably aren't native in the first place, but that's a different topic)
Are they actually hi-res cameras, or just high interpolation? I'm guessing they're mostly the latter.
Using a Samsung dumb-as-rocks phone myself, $12 at Walmart. It's been banged around and nearly crushed a few times and you can't tell it's ever been out of the packaging.
You can also get small portable solar panels made specifically for charging devices like phones. They start at around $18, including the battery unit.
I got a $10 gadget called a "Pocket Juice" that can be used as a direct power source and is small enough to hold in the same hand as my phone, and it can fully recharge the phone four times before I have to recharge it (which I can do from any USB port or charger). And my only criteria were "cheap" and "small". Basically I picked the cheapest and smallest unit at the checkout counter at Walmart, and it's perfectly good for the purpose. Turns out as a bonus it does a fast recharge on my phone, unlike the wall charger which takes hours. And it doubles as a flashlight.
A friend who works for LADWP said a few years ago that because of the reaction you cite, they had to find some way to cover the reservoirs to keep out sunlight. The alternative was building a dome.... which would have been orders of magnitude more expensive. (Giant tarps really aren't viable.)
I can tell you from firsthand experience, that tough black plastic lasts forever. I used black plastic barrels in the desert, and they are still like new after 25 years in the desert sun (likewise those that sat where they were always wet underneath). I'd guess, given that mine have not become at all friable (in fact I can still whack them with a stick as hard as I can hit without causing any damage) that this plastic is not "leaking" anything into the water, either.
If the surface is covered with anything solid, evaporation is a relative non-issue anyway, and will certainly be reduced compared to not covered at all. I recall a study that found as much as 90% of the water that comes down the L.A. Aqueduct was lost to evaporation enroute.
My mom did that with phone/long distance rate plans for years, and generally paid about 1/4th the standard rate as a result.
Then she did it with cellphones until she wound up on a permanent plan no one can beat.
I've attempted it with my ISP, and got about a 50% reduction as a result. But I did have to fib a bit about the one available alternative (which exists but would be very costly to bring in).
It's a good tactic when competition exists. Not so great when it doesn't. :(
I've already run into that -- network was down, so the meatspace store (I've forgotten what one), which relied on some network app for all transactions cash or otherwise, could not take my money. Or anyone else's. Not Good.