I'm wondering if global-averaging was the wrong thing to do -- I'm reminded that the northern hemisphere has most of the planet's land mass, which itself has a significant effect on climate patterns.
Greenland was relatively de-iced about a thousand years ago, too... that's when a certain bunch of Viking types briefly settled it. As I recall, they were eventually defeated by the worsening climate.
"From the 1960s onwards, Brandt collected clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence matters. In the 1980s, through his company Micro Associates, he sold a database of citations of these clippings, books, government reports, and other publications."
Hothead:) In the interests of science, I just took my temp (with a known-accurate digital thermometer), and it's presently 96.9F. My normal temp is in the 97.0 to 97.5 range; akin to what someone below says, at 98.6, I'm feverish and don't feel well.
The lowest I've ever seen it go was 94.something, after too many hours out in -40F weather... wasn't yet properly hypothermic, but sure felt a need for a gallon of hot tea.:)
I have an exaggerated cold reflex too, which doubtless serves to better preserve core body heat under extreme conditions.
I'm of 50% Norwegian extraction (the other half being Scot/Irish/Welsh/English, not exactly sauna climates either) and my =normal= body temp is in the 97.0F to 97.5F range; at the moment it's 96.9F. If my body temp hits 98.6F, I'm actually feverish.
A friend who is German, English, and IIRC Norwegian, has the same trait.
We're both from long-lived farming bloodlines that age very well.
Oh yeah, I'm also related to about half the folk in northern Minnesooooota, and I can say Ja and Ufda with the best of 'em:)
I wonder what implications this has for those humans whose *normal* body temperature is BELOW the standard 98.6F??
Frex, mine is typically around 97.5F or even a little lower; at 98.6F, I'm actually running enough of a fever to *notice* that I don't feel well.
[Consults thermometer known to be accurate] At the moment, it's 96.9F, which starts to border on a feeling of "I could use a hot cuppa," but I'm not yet really chilled.
A friend also has naturally low body temp, and the other things we have in common is that we both come from long-lived bloodlines, and can readily pass for 15 years younger than we really are. Coincidence?
I think the reason we have the current political climate is exactly *because* the various nuts are being balanced against one another, so everything just gets more and more extreme -- from BOTH ends.
Averaging a pair of equal and opposite psychoses does not create a result of sanity. It just makes you twice as nutty.:(
I'm not a coder, so I may be making up nonsense, but wouldn't it be possible to have a HAL-like layer that would sit between the kernel and the binary drivers? The drivers would only have to speak to a single stable interface, and that interface could be changed as needed to let it speak to the kernel.
Exactly my gripe. I'm not a novice PC user; I can make DOS and Windows jump thru hoops. I've been trying to find a linux disty that both I and my clients can live with, and it's been frustrating as hell, largely for the same reasons you list.
I'm long past the "fun with twiddling the guts" stage; if how to do something can't be found in the Help or inferred from the interface, it's not worth my time to figure out. Windows is pretty good about showing me "Here's what you just did". In linux, stuff just... disappears.
I recently installed Mandriva 2007, and if something wasn't already on the menu, I had no idea where to find it -- and surely something that fills four CDs and took an hour to set up didn't install just that handful of apps that are on the default menus?!! Where the heck did [insert apps I was used to in MDK7 here] go to??
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the people who whine about "Windows is hard to install" have shit hardware that won't play nice with its own drivers, let alone Windows' native drivers. So of course things go wrong. D'oh!!
In my role as the local user group's hardware guru, I routinely install Win98 and XP Pro as a dual boot, and in almost all cases it's just a matter of throw CD at drawer, walk away for a while, then install video driver if card happens to be ATI (since ATI drivers are not usually included with Windows). Once in a while I get an argument from some machine, but it's always one that has a variety of problems, and not just with Windows. And mind you, we get totally random hardware, of every era and quality.
When some piece of ordinary hardware doesn't work in Windows, it's usually fairly obvious, and fairly trivial to fix. Sure, there are exceptions, but they're not typical.
The newer linux disties do indeed "just work" out of the box, and =when= they work, they work fine. But what I see over and over, is that IF something doesn't work, you've got to be a true-blue linuxhead to diagnose and solve the problem, because the "surface area" presented to the average user's eyes lacks any clues as to what's wrong or how to go about fixing it. You don't get Device Mangler whining at you; you just get... nothing.
Kinda like being an auto mechanic... with the slick new engines [linux], there's not much to fix, and stuff either works or is dead, and only an expert trained in that particular area can diagnose or repair it. That old-fashioned engine [Windows] may not be as efficient and it's sure not as pretty, but when something is broken it's pretty obvious WHAT needs fixing, even to a shade-tree mechanic.
And what happens when you have to swap components around a dozen times to discover which one isn't playing nice? that might easily be seen as a dozen "major hardware changes".
I haven't seen figures that high. More like around 3% recidivism rate, both for males (vasectomy) and females (tubes tied). I did see a recommendation that concerned males should have a sperm check done once a year or so, just to be sure.
Regardless, the point is it's not perfect and it's not necessarily forever, so it still pays to be careful.
Or maybe they were just too far ahead of its time. Nowadays there are plenty of graphic artists who are used to working in 3D on a computer screen (movie artists and the like), and ISTM this is just an extension of their existing training.
[fiddles with air-drawing a box and a chair] Well, *I* don't seem to have any problem with doing it (and I'm not a 3D artist, or any sort of artist), but compared to most folks, I have mondo space-relations accuracy.
Keyword being "afford", no doubt. In some markets, like California, you can blithely pass costs on to your customers and no one will blink. In more rational markets... ha, no way. Will be great when it becomes cheaper and more commonly available, tho.
[My sister is a partner in one of the biggest architecture firms on the west coast...]
Hmm... you could probably generate some fairly interesting pseudo-classical sculpture that way.
Man, does that ever open a can of copyright worms... Methinks you'd have to be careful to start with a photograph you own the rights to, or that you've already licensed "derivative works" rights to.
I'm thinking this has other uses, such as feed it a wireframe graphic of anything you like (would be handy for architects) and out the other end comes a ready-made model of your building, object, or what-have-you.
Occurs to me that should the National Guard (or whatever forces) be sent across state lines without the consent of the receiving state, that state's governor would be within his rights to mobilize his own state's NG to seal his borders.
Which may well be necessary to maintain states' rights, and worst case, might eventually lead to civil war.
I know it's fun to blame Bush for everything, but what folk here seem to forget is that the President doesn't just magically invent and sign legislation all by himself. He's the final rubber stamp, but the legislation first had to be created and voted through Congress.
If Congress had the balls to resist ideas like this one, the legislation would never get out of committee, let alone as far as the President's desk.
Well then! We need only convince them that blogs are merely ordinary magazines, printed with extremely poor-quality ink.:)
Actually, that might make a reasonable argument: print out the blog on the one hand, and have the online version onscreen on the other, and ask them to define the practical difference: "How does this text differ from that text? It doesn't? Horrors!!"
Oh, okay. I thought I heard that IE7 would be pushed out by WU as of last Tuesday, but maybe not. I don't use IE so I don't really pay that much attention.:)
I had a similar thought: how many of the rash of IE7 downloads were done by Windows automatic update? I'd guess the majority, since most average-users don't have any idea that you can switch your browser, let alone where updates come from.
I'd be very sad to see your blogs go away.. they're a valuable resource. If you're not careful, you'll give lawyers a good name:)
[Actually, most of the lawyers I know are good people.]
I am wondering if this ruling sticks, if it could be extended to affect sites like GrokLaw, or anyone directly employed by a lawyer (your employees aren't allowed to "advertise" by collaring folks on the street either, right?)
ISTM all that's really needed is a boilerplate disclaimer that the blog is a personal endeavour and is not representative of nor advertising for your professional life, or something to that effect. Surely you blogging-lawyer types could collectively come up with some such verbiage that would make TPTB happy??
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I'm wondering if global-averaging was the wrong thing to do -- I'm reminded that the northern hemisphere has most of the planet's land mass, which itself has a significant effect on climate patterns.
Greenland was relatively de-iced about a thousand years ago, too ... that's when a certain bunch of Viking types briefly settled it. As I recall, they were eventually defeated by the worsening climate.
From the Wiki article:
"From the 1960s onwards, Brandt collected clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence matters. In the 1980s, through his company Micro Associates, he sold a database of citations of these clippings, books, government reports, and other publications."
Pot, kettle, hello.....??!
Hothead :) In the interests of science, I just took my temp (with a known-accurate digital thermometer), and it's presently 96.9F. My normal temp is in the 97.0 to 97.5 range; akin to what someone below says, at 98.6, I'm feverish and don't feel well.
:)
The lowest I've ever seen it go was 94.something, after too many hours out in -40F weather... wasn't yet properly hypothermic, but sure felt a need for a gallon of hot tea.
I have an exaggerated cold reflex too, which doubtless serves to better preserve core body heat under extreme conditions.
Your sample is now three:
:)
I'm of 50% Norwegian extraction (the other half being Scot/Irish/Welsh/English, not exactly sauna climates either) and my =normal= body temp is in the 97.0F to 97.5F range; at the moment it's 96.9F. If my body temp hits 98.6F, I'm actually feverish.
A friend who is German, English, and IIRC Norwegian, has the same trait.
We're both from long-lived farming bloodlines that age very well.
Oh yeah, I'm also related to about half the folk in northern Minnesooooota, and I can say Ja and Ufda with the best of 'em
I wonder what implications this has for those humans whose *normal* body temperature is BELOW the standard 98.6F??
Frex, mine is typically around 97.5F or even a little lower; at 98.6F, I'm actually running enough of a fever to *notice* that I don't feel well.
[Consults thermometer known to be accurate] At the moment, it's 96.9F, which starts to border on a feeling of "I could use a hot cuppa," but I'm not yet really chilled.
A friend also has naturally low body temp, and the other things we have in common is that we both come from long-lived bloodlines, and can readily pass for 15 years younger than we really are. Coincidence?
I think the reason we have the current political climate is exactly *because* the various nuts are being balanced against one another, so everything just gets more and more extreme -- from BOTH ends.
:(
Averaging a pair of equal and opposite psychoses does not create a result of sanity. It just makes you twice as nutty.
I'm not a coder, so I may be making up nonsense, but wouldn't it be possible to have a HAL-like layer that would sit between the kernel and the binary drivers? The drivers would only have to speak to a single stable interface, and that interface could be changed as needed to let it speak to the kernel.
Exactly my gripe. I'm not a novice PC user; I can make DOS and Windows jump thru hoops. I've been trying to find a linux disty that both I and my clients can live with, and it's been frustrating as hell, largely for the same reasons you list.
I'm long past the "fun with twiddling the guts" stage; if how to do something can't be found in the Help or inferred from the interface, it's not worth my time to figure out. Windows is pretty good about showing me "Here's what you just did". In linux, stuff just... disappears.
I recently installed Mandriva 2007, and if something wasn't already on the menu, I had no idea where to find it -- and surely something that fills four CDs and took an hour to set up didn't install just that handful of apps that are on the default menus?!! Where the heck did [insert apps I was used to in MDK7 here] go to??
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the people who whine about "Windows is hard to install" have shit hardware that won't play nice with its own drivers, let alone Windows' native drivers. So of course things go wrong. D'oh!!
... nothing.
In my role as the local user group's hardware guru, I routinely install Win98 and XP Pro as a dual boot, and in almost all cases it's just a matter of throw CD at drawer, walk away for a while, then install video driver if card happens to be ATI (since ATI drivers are not usually included with Windows). Once in a while I get an argument from some machine, but it's always one that has a variety of problems, and not just with Windows. And mind you, we get totally random hardware, of every era and quality.
When some piece of ordinary hardware doesn't work in Windows, it's usually fairly obvious, and fairly trivial to fix. Sure, there are exceptions, but they're not typical.
The newer linux disties do indeed "just work" out of the box, and =when= they work, they work fine. But what I see over and over, is that IF something doesn't work, you've got to be a true-blue linuxhead to diagnose and solve the problem, because the "surface area" presented to the average user's eyes lacks any clues as to what's wrong or how to go about fixing it. You don't get Device Mangler whining at you; you just get
Kinda like being an auto mechanic... with the slick new engines [linux], there's not much to fix, and stuff either works or is dead, and only an expert trained in that particular area can diagnose or repair it. That old-fashioned engine [Windows] may not be as efficient and it's sure not as pretty, but when something is broken it's pretty obvious WHAT needs fixing, even to a shade-tree mechanic.
As you imply, freedom doesn't mean "free only when you play nice the way *I* want you to".
GPL is good for preventing code-hoarding, but BSD is better for being truly free of all encumbrances (other than acknowledging antecedents).
And what happens when you have to swap components around a dozen times to discover which one isn't playing nice? that might easily be seen as a dozen "major hardware changes".
I haven't seen figures that high. More like around 3% recidivism rate, both for males (vasectomy) and females (tubes tied). I did see a recommendation that concerned males should have a sperm check done once a year or so, just to be sure.
Regardless, the point is it's not perfect and it's not necessarily forever, so it still pays to be careful.
Or maybe they were just too far ahead of its time. Nowadays there are plenty of graphic artists who are used to working in 3D on a computer screen (movie artists and the like), and ISTM this is just an extension of their existing training.
[fiddles with air-drawing a box and a chair] Well, *I* don't seem to have any problem with doing it (and I'm not a 3D artist, or any sort of artist), but compared to most folks, I have mondo space-relations accuracy.
Keyword being "afford", no doubt. In some markets, like California, you can blithely pass costs on to your customers and no one will blink. In more rational markets... ha, no way. Will be great when it becomes cheaper and more commonly available, tho.
[My sister is a partner in one of the biggest architecture firms on the west coast...]
Hmm... you could probably generate some fairly interesting pseudo-classical sculpture that way.
Man, does that ever open a can of copyright worms... Methinks you'd have to be careful to start with a photograph you own the rights to, or that you've already licensed "derivative works" rights to.
I'm thinking this has other uses, such as feed it a wireframe graphic of anything you like (would be handy for architects) and out the other end comes a ready-made model of your building, object, or what-have-you.
Occurs to me that should the National Guard (or whatever forces) be sent across state lines without the consent of the receiving state, that state's governor would be within his rights to mobilize his own state's NG to seal his borders.
Which may well be necessary to maintain states' rights, and worst case, might eventually lead to civil war.
I know it's fun to blame Bush for everything, but what folk here seem to forget is that the President doesn't just magically invent and sign legislation all by himself. He's the final rubber stamp, but the legislation first had to be created and voted through Congress.
If Congress had the balls to resist ideas like this one, the legislation would never get out of committee, let alone as far as the President's desk.
Well then! We need only convince them that blogs are merely ordinary magazines, printed with extremely poor-quality ink. :)
Actually, that might make a reasonable argument: print out the blog on the one hand, and have the online version onscreen on the other, and ask them to define the practical difference: "How does this text differ from that text? It doesn't? Horrors!!"
Oh, okay. I thought I heard that IE7 would be pushed out by WU as of last Tuesday, but maybe not. I don't use IE so I don't really pay that much attention. :)
Sounds like the way it probably was, yeah... a bit of "shut that guy up" coupled with non-techies hunting flies with howitzers.
Would there be any problem with simply applying the same standards you're held to in print media?
I had a similar thought: how many of the rash of IE7 downloads were done by Windows automatic update? I'd guess the majority, since most average-users don't have any idea that you can switch your browser, let alone where updates come from.
I do hope you're right. Rather strange that it's so fuzzy-broad to begin with, unless there was some other agenda behind it.
I'd be very sad to see your blogs go away.. they're a valuable resource. If you're not careful, you'll give lawyers a good name :)
[Actually, most of the lawyers I know are good people.]
I am wondering if this ruling sticks, if it could be extended to affect sites like GrokLaw, or anyone directly employed by a lawyer (your employees aren't allowed to "advertise" by collaring folks on the street either, right?)
ISTM all that's really needed is a boilerplate disclaimer that the blog is a personal endeavour and is not representative of nor advertising for your professional life, or something to that effect. Surely you blogging-lawyer types could collectively come up with some such verbiage that would make TPTB happy??