I did a double-take, mostly because the article handled the fact of his orientation so matter-of-fact-ly. Instead of prefacing it with a sensationalist, "and there's something else odd about him as well," the author just... said it. Classy.
A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
As a gay, formerly-churchgoing, neurotic genius (i.e. a bit like like him but not as "out there"), I'm jealous that he has a boyfriend.
This isn't sensationalism. It's a brain-dead reflexive babbling.
The article poster shrieked that taxing people by the mile is "punish[ing] people who aren't using enough gasoline"? Nonsense. It's switching from a gas-use tax to a road-use tax. Those of us who save gasoline the old-fashioned way (by not driving our cars hither and yon) wouldn't be punished by it at all. And since gas taxes have traditionally been justified as being necessary for road construction/repairs, switching to a road-use tax makes a certain kind of sense. Granted, there are privacy issues and the whole "user fee" approach to taxes still deserves to be debated, but this hysterical response to the idea of changing the model by which the user fee is calculated is just silly.
Also, cooking them in water until the water evaporates is the equivalent of steeping tea leaves then throwing out the water and eating the leaves once the water has absorbed all the flavour, and more importantly, the nutrients.
If the water is evaporating (rather than being poured out as a liquid), it probably isn't taking the flavor or nutrients with it, but leaving them behind.
Of course you're right that carrots are just fine uncooked as well.
Such research is dangerous for the researchers because they are working with live HIV.
Working with HIV is actually a lot less dangerous than a lot of other infectious agents. HIV is fairly hard to contract, compared to airborne or contact-transmitted diseases. For example, it dies pretty quickly when exposed to plain old air. It's only HIV's incurability and eventual fatality that makes it so hazardous.
Memory tells me that nurses dealing with high-risk patients are prescribed AZT in order to prevent infection. Can anyone confirm my memory?
That seems pretty unlikely, because AZT is pretty damn toxic. You wouldn't want to take it just as a precaution. It is true that health care workers who've been exposed (e.g. needle prick from an HIV patient) go on a short-term drug cocktail intended to weaken the virus enough for their immune systems to handle it before it gains a foothold.
But the OS and BIOS are only so deep themselves. The architecture goes all the way down to actual hardware, where cables are plugged in, jumpers are set, etc. A "computer guy" who doesn't know which socket a PS/2 keyboard plugs into (i.e. not the mouse port) is one with too narrow a background.
The fact that the author is suggesting that Verisign do this points out why it's such a bad idea, a cure worse than the disease. Who here trusts Verisign? So why should we make them (or even let them become) arbiters of whom to trust?
Teaching individual users to be more informed and responsible about whom they trust may be difficult, but it's better than entrusting a private, unaccountable, quasi-monopoly (let alone one with a history of un-trust-worthy behaviour) with that decision.
Going to school is supposed to broaden your horizons (or in more mercenary terms: build up your resume), and that's not going to happen if you cling to your PowerBook like a life preserver. In my college years in the neolithic period I got exposed to TRS-80s (Z80 assembly), IBM PCs, DEC VAXen, a *nix box of some kind, and the C64 in my dorm room, and that diversity of experience made me a better geek... the kind who today is comfortable with OS X, MacOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, EPOC, PalmOS, and just about anything else I might find in front of me.
Look, eventually your architecture of choice is going to die off or fade into irrelevancy. (And I'm not saying that because it's an Apple; they'll probably be around in 20 years, but they won't still be using OS X on PPC). You'll have to adapt. So you might as well start making yourself cross-platform now, before you end up as just a one-trick pony.
A year or three ago I set up a Color QuickCam 2 running on a stock Mandrake 9.2 install (kernel 2.4) with cqcam 0.91 (still the current version). It took a little work to get it functioning, but that was more about me not knowing what I was doing, rather than actual complications.
Most of the things I've done are either obvious (F/OSS instead of MS, refurb instead of replace, buy used instead of new), shortsighted (cut staff training, support contracts, salaries), or specific to our particular situation. So not much I can really suggest.
Depending on your political clout, it sounds like it might be time to start cutting services (evening/weekend tech support, high-speed internet, etc).
There are far too many variables to this equation to even estimate the solution. There's the local cost of living (NYC vs. RFD is like 10:1), your level of qualification, the nature of the work, their ability to pay, your personal relatioship to them, etc.
The only thing I can suggest is to start with "What's my time worth to me?" and take it from there.
"For some reason, many of these pads have "tap for click" turned on."
Yea, they should. For someone with a real inability, it's easy to turn off.
Yea, right, and Windows should come pre-installed with IIS turned on and port 80 open. It's easy to for people who don't like that to turn it off.
Or not.
The default settings in any system should be the safest ones, whether we're talking about cracking, user error, or whatever. Tap-to-click is an advanced feature that's easy to mess up or trigger accidentally, and as such it is only appropriate for those who are adept enough at trackpadding to do it accurately. Especially because the people most likely to have problems with it are also the least likely to know that it can (usually*) be turned off. As a support person, I've had a number of new laptop users frustrated as hell with their trackpads, only to become (relatively) happy once I turned off tap-to-click for them. (They don't become truly happy until I give them a real mouse to use instead.)
*Although the trackpad on my laptop can have tap-to-click disabled under Windows, the Linux driver for it doesn't appear to support that ability.
Just adding 7 persons to the front-end of the shuttle would undoubtedly shift the C of G of an unladen craft quite a way forward. The only obvious solution to the C of G problem would be pumping liquid stores and / or Hydrazine aft.
This is not a tricky problem to solve. In round, rather generous numbers, let's say those 7 people mass 1400lbs. They routinely carry and drop off cargo several times as massive than that, and the orbiter itself weighs nearly 200x that. If 1400lbs is really enough to shift the craft's balance too far forward, NASA could simply stow that much mass in sandbags (or any other form of ballast) in the rear of the ship, where it would behave as just another payload on launch, and rebalance the craft easily on re-entry without exceeding its mass limits for that phase (which allow returning big pieces of equipment from orbit, after all).
The other issue with bringing back more than seven would be adequate seating to prevent the inevitable injuries which could occur during re-entry for an un-restrained person.
I'm just speaking for myself, but if given a choice between A) staying on a doomed spacecraft, B) making one of my colleagues stay, and C) the almost-certain breaking of limbs, ribs, etc. by letting someone sit on my lap for the ride home on a rescue shuttle, I'm pretty sure I'd go with the last option.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that the shuttle was designed to carry 10, so a rescue crew of 3 and a typical crew of 7 castaways wouldn't pose a seating problem.
I remember back at the tail end of the Apollo program, there was discussion (at least in principle) of the two countries providing rescue assistance to each other in the event of a mishap in space. The Apollo-Soyuz docking mission was a proof-of-concept for that.
Now that Russia and the U.S. are sometime partners in space exploration instead of bitter rivals, and each country is actually capable of launching rescue missions on fairly short notice (i.e. we usually have functional vehicles on hand), I'd hope that NASA and the RKA are also including each other in their contingency planning. (To say nothing of the several other countries/companies capable of getting craft and/or equipment up to orbital altitudes.) Because after a craft is damaged is not the time to start asking around to see if anybody might have anything they might be able to do to help.
You should be able to do everything without using the damn mouse at all - does that mean that PCs should be shipped without a mouse to make sure?
I don't know about making it a requirement, but that certainly did the job. If I remember correctly, a mouse was merely "recommended" for Windows 1.0, and as a result, nearly every element of the early Windows UI could be accessed via the keyboard. OK, so those underlined Alt-letters get ugly (which is why MS is now hiding them by default), but if you care about efficiency, they're a godsend.
By contrast, every Mac ever sold came with a mouse (until very recently, that is), so the UI neglected to include decent keyboard support. It wasn't until OS X (and not even the first version) that it finally became possible to access the pull-down menu with the keyboard (and even so, it's still off by default... and even requires the use of a mouse to enable it).
Coincidentally, I learned a few weeks later from an older coworker that he'd once worked for DEC, and had done the case design for... of all things... the VT-100, a device which - as much as the $ prompt - was central to my computing experience in college. He seemed pleased to hear that... but less than thrilled about what it implied about his age.:)
{sigh} Last summer I had to explain this to my new 24-year-old coworker, who thought it was funny that one of our computer labs was full of old computers that bragged (with the above logo) about being "digital", as if that was some kind of fancy feature or something. The first computer I ever logged into was a PDP, I got most of my formal CS education using VAXen, and I even went to DECUS back in the early 90's, so it was a bit painful having to explain to him what DEC was, and that it was founded back when "digital equipment" was something pretty fancy.
It's a bit pricey, it's based on WinCE, and it's on its fourth or fifth "focus shift", redesign, and/or corporate parent since I first found it years ago (researching alternatives to WebTV), but the iCEBOX may be the last remaining "internet appliance" on the market.
You could hollow out one of those 20-pound Ghirardelli chocolate bars they sell at Trader Joe's for $20 with a dremel tool and put the guts of a Mac mini in there.
Not quite the same thing, but it occurs to me that the Mini would make it much easier for me to create the Mac I've been wanting to build for a few years now: an OS-X-capable "classic" Mac. I have an SE case available, and the Mini provides a trivially-easy means of fitting the necessary electronics in it. All I need now is an affordable and compatible 10" LCD, and I can finally build my Mac SE-X.
I have no idea which version will make for a better film, but this one has Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary writing the script for it as well.
Doesn't that pretty much answer the question right there? I mean... no disrespect to the Icelander and his crew making the other film, but... Gaiman's shopping lists are more entertaining than most screenwriters' final drafts, and hardly anyone writing for any medium today does legend/mythology better.
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A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
As a gay, formerly-churchgoing, neurotic genius (i.e. a bit like like him but not as "out there"), I'm jealous that he has a boyfriend.
The article poster shrieked that taxing people by the mile is "punish[ing] people who aren't using enough gasoline"? Nonsense. It's switching from a gas-use tax to a road-use tax. Those of us who save gasoline the old-fashioned way (by not driving our cars hither and yon) wouldn't be punished by it at all. And since gas taxes have traditionally been justified as being necessary for road construction/repairs, switching to a road-use tax makes a certain kind of sense. Granted, there are privacy issues and the whole "user fee" approach to taxes still deserves to be debated, but this hysterical response to the idea of changing the model by which the user fee is calculated is just silly.
If the water is evaporating (rather than being poured out as a liquid), it probably isn't taking the flavor or nutrients with it, but leaving them behind.
Of course you're right that carrots are just fine uncooked as well.
Working with HIV is actually a lot less dangerous than a lot of other infectious agents. HIV is fairly hard to contract, compared to airborne or contact-transmitted diseases. For example, it dies pretty quickly when exposed to plain old air. It's only HIV's incurability and eventual fatality that makes it so hazardous.
Memory tells me that nurses dealing with high-risk patients are prescribed AZT in order to prevent infection. Can anyone confirm my memory?
That seems pretty unlikely, because AZT is pretty damn toxic. You wouldn't want to take it just as a precaution. It is true that health care workers who've been exposed (e.g. needle prick from an HIV patient) go on a short-term drug cocktail intended to weaken the virus enough for their immune systems to handle it before it gains a foothold.
But the OS and BIOS are only so deep themselves. The architecture goes all the way down to actual hardware, where cables are plugged in, jumpers are set, etc. A "computer guy" who doesn't know which socket a PS/2 keyboard plugs into (i.e. not the mouse port) is one with too narrow a background.
Teaching individual users to be more informed and responsible about whom they trust may be difficult, but it's better than entrusting a private, unaccountable, quasi-monopoly (let alone one with a history of un-trust-worthy behaviour) with that decision.
Going to school is supposed to broaden your horizons (or in more mercenary terms: build up your resume), and that's not going to happen if you cling to your PowerBook like a life preserver. In my college years in the neolithic period I got exposed to TRS-80s (Z80 assembly), IBM PCs, DEC VAXen, a *nix box of some kind, and the C64 in my dorm room, and that diversity of experience made me a better geek... the kind who today is comfortable with OS X, MacOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, EPOC, PalmOS, and just about anything else I might find in front of me.
Look, eventually your architecture of choice is going to die off or fade into irrelevancy. (And I'm not saying that because it's an Apple; they'll probably be around in 20 years, but they won't still be using OS X on PPC). You'll have to adapt. So you might as well start making yourself cross-platform now, before you end up as just a one-trick pony.
A year or three ago I set up a Color QuickCam 2 running on a stock Mandrake 9.2 install (kernel 2.4) with cqcam 0.91 (still the current version). It took a little work to get it functioning, but that was more about me not knowing what I was doing, rather than actual complications.
Depending on your political clout, it sounds like it might be time to start cutting services (evening/weekend tech support, high-speed internet, etc).
The only thing I can suggest is to start with "What's my time worth to me?" and take it from there.
Unfortunately, my naked eyes will probably degenerate enough by 2029 that I won't be able to see it that way. {pout}
Yeah, but what then? My Honda has a back seat.
Just the thing to rul3 them all... just the thing to f1nd them...
Yea, they should. For someone with a real inability, it's easy to turn off.
Yea, right, and Windows should come pre-installed with IIS turned on and port 80 open. It's easy to for people who don't like that to turn it off.
Or not.
The default settings in any system should be the safest ones, whether we're talking about cracking, user error, or whatever. Tap-to-click is an advanced feature that's easy to mess up or trigger accidentally, and as such it is only appropriate for those who are adept enough at trackpadding to do it accurately. Especially because the people most likely to have problems with it are also the least likely to know that it can (usually*) be turned off. As a support person, I've had a number of new laptop users frustrated as hell with their trackpads, only to become (relatively) happy once I turned off tap-to-click for them. (They don't become truly happy until I give them a real mouse to use instead.)
*Although the trackpad on my laptop can have tap-to-click disabled under Windows, the Linux driver for it doesn't appear to support that ability.
This is not a tricky problem to solve. In round, rather generous numbers, let's say those 7 people mass 1400lbs. They routinely carry and drop off cargo several times as massive than that, and the orbiter itself weighs nearly 200x that. If 1400lbs is really enough to shift the craft's balance too far forward, NASA could simply stow that much mass in sandbags (or any other form of ballast) in the rear of the ship, where it would behave as just another payload on launch, and rebalance the craft easily on re-entry without exceeding its mass limits for that phase (which allow returning big pieces of equipment from orbit, after all).
The other issue with bringing back more than seven would be adequate seating to prevent the inevitable injuries which could occur during re-entry for an un-restrained person.
I'm just speaking for myself, but if given a choice between A) staying on a doomed spacecraft, B) making one of my colleagues stay, and C) the almost-certain breaking of limbs, ribs, etc. by letting someone sit on my lap for the ride home on a rescue shuttle, I'm pretty sure I'd go with the last option.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that the shuttle was designed to carry 10, so a rescue crew of 3 and a typical crew of 7 castaways wouldn't pose a seating problem.
Now that Russia and the U.S. are sometime partners in space exploration instead of bitter rivals, and each country is actually capable of launching rescue missions on fairly short notice (i.e. we usually have functional vehicles on hand), I'd hope that NASA and the RKA are also including each other in their contingency planning. (To say nothing of the several other countries/companies capable of getting craft and/or equipment up to orbital altitudes.) Because after a craft is damaged is not the time to start asking around to see if anybody might have anything they might be able to do to help.
I don't know about making it a requirement, but that certainly did the job. If I remember correctly, a mouse was merely "recommended" for Windows 1.0, and as a result, nearly every element of the early Windows UI could be accessed via the keyboard. OK, so those underlined Alt-letters get ugly (which is why MS is now hiding them by default), but if you care about efficiency, they're a godsend.
By contrast, every Mac ever sold came with a mouse (until very recently, that is), so the UI neglected to include decent keyboard support. It wasn't until OS X (and not even the first version) that it finally became possible to access the pull-down menu with the keyboard (and even so, it's still off by default... and even requires the use of a mouse to enable it).
(see subject line)
They used to sell them (or an earlier version) for less. Apparently nobody wanted them at that price, either.
Coincidentally, I learned a few weeks later from an older coworker that he'd once worked for DEC, and had done the case design for... of all things... the VT-100, a device which - as much as the $ prompt - was central to my computing experience in college. He seemed pleased to hear that... but less than thrilled about what it implied about his age. :)
{sigh} Last summer I had to explain this to my new 24-year-old coworker, who thought it was funny that one of our computer labs was full of old computers that bragged (with the above logo) about being "digital", as if that was some kind of fancy feature or something. The first computer I ever logged into was a PDP, I got most of my formal CS education using VAXen, and I even went to DECUS back in the early 90's, so it was a bit painful having to explain to him what DEC was, and that it was founded back when "digital equipment" was something pretty fancy.
It's a bit pricey, it's based on WinCE, and it's on its fourth or fifth "focus shift", redesign, and/or corporate parent since I first found it years ago (researching alternatives to WebTV), but the iCEBOX may be the last remaining "internet appliance" on the market.
Not quite the same thing, but it occurs to me that the Mini would make it much easier for me to create the Mac I've been wanting to build for a few years now: an OS-X-capable "classic" Mac. I have an SE case available, and the Mini provides a trivially-easy means of fitting the necessary electronics in it. All I need now is an affordable and compatible 10" LCD, and I can finally build my Mac SE-X.
Doesn't that pretty much answer the question right there? I mean... no disrespect to the Icelander and his crew making the other film, but... Gaiman's shopping lists are more entertaining than most screenwriters' final drafts, and hardly anyone writing for any medium today does legend/mythology better.
And you then respond, trying to justify yourself like this on some Internet message board? Pot. Kettle. Pathetic. :P