There will soon be, however, autonomous passenger carrying drones (APCDs, aka ApeSeeds) that will travel point to point, evade each other, and adhere to the flight corridors defined by each municipality.
I know nothing about PCOS ---I just now googled to find it is "Polycystic Ovary Syndrome". Since one of the women in my social circle comes down with every estrogen related polysyllabic disease with an abbreviation within a short time of its first appearance on the intarwebs she frequents, I will undoubtedly soon be made familiar with the litany of PCOS' signs and symptoms. If you don't know any women with this particular form of Munchhausen syndrome, I envy you.
But does PCOS lead to the inability to hold down a job for longer than the first annual performance review, where questions of whether the woman had completed any of the assigned tasks without fudging somewhere arise? A resume of more than 12 jobs in the last decade is probably not a part of whatever PCOS is, but is common among CCLs (Crazy Cat Ladies, abbreviation introduced here to keep pace with the PMAs ---Pseudo Medical Abbreviations--- that are being floated around). Does PCOS lead to the inability to get reasonable car insurance because of an excessive number of bizarre accidents ("I was sure that I could squeeze into that space")?
CCL from the toxo parasite is associated with these behaviors, as well as with the sexual promiscuity.
I did some reading up on toxoplasmosis about a decade ago, when a friend's twenty-something son got mixed up with a crazy woman in her forties who was a classic "crazy cat lady" (except she was not old and she looked and acted like an oversexed teenager). Not much had been published in the medical journals at that time, and I doubt that much has been added since then.
There had been several studies on toxoplasmosis in rats. Some of the findings were that infected rats became greater risk-takers who would explore potentially hostile environments sooner, and more often, than healthy rats. They were attracted to cat urine, where healthy rats avoid that odor. They were more sexually active than uninfected rats.
There was conjecture at that time that "crazy cat ladies" did not experience the odor of cat piss the same way other people did, which is why they tolerated, and sometimes seem to prefer, to live in rooms that reeked of cat piss. There was conjecture that these women were promiscuous and as a group tended to have intense sexual relationships that did not last long. It seemed like as a group they had more automotive crashes than the norm, and that they were more frequently fired for abusing sick leave and other job perks, or fudging the paperwork. These are indicators of a greater degree of risk-taking.
Conclusions: In the specific case, the boy got dumped and the girl moved out of state, so that was resolved. My personal conclusion is to avoid any relationship with women who live with cat stink, or own more than two cats. I will not venture any more general conclusion.
It is a little scary that somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 adults tests positive for exposure to T. gondii. However there is no way to determine whether any of these positives is an active carrier, or whether the parasite has gotten into their brain.
Now if I were going to write a zombie apocalypse story, I would probably use a mutant strain of T. gondii as the agent.... But I don't write that kind of story.
The number of new PHP users who are publishing new Wordpress plugins and themes each month is astounding. In an afternoon you could learn enough MySQL to use the C-Panel tools to query your Wordpress database about that post about that spotted dog that somebody did sometime last year, or you could spend only $4.95US right this minute to get a plugin written by some high school kid as his first PHP project that would do the work for you! Such a deal! It will even find all the posts about orange cats!
Wordpress, MySQL, Cpanel, and PHP have enabled this huge number of spanking-new programmers, who have written code that works, and done so without any mental corruption from structured programming techniques, object-oriented programming, or the higher levels of subroutine and function construction. PHP enables the unwashed masses and lets them call themselves programmers!
Who can argue with that? Who cannot say that this is a good thing?
Well, it is pretty easy to assess the quality of any given piece of Python code. Just determine the ratio of whitespace to printable characters. Experienced Python programmers make these estimates all the time, just by eyeballing the code, and often without even thinking about what they are doing.
This seems to be a big part of Python's popularity: the ability to look at someone else's code and instantly form an opinion about whether "this is crap" or "this is the good stuff" without ever having to parse a single line is priceless.
Contrast this with Perl where a competent programmer can do the work of a hundred page COBOL program in a dozen lines and a couple of regular expressions, but it would take an equally competent Perlista half a week to read those dozen lines.
Python for the win! There is no other language that can make the printouts of your source look so good!
No, that article is talking about policies that began much later. About 70 years after the extinction policies that involved massive killing of buffalo and the deliberate efforts to cause smallpox epidemics in the First Nations populations. Vaccinations and quarantine were known, and effective, tools in controlling smallpox outbreaks, but no effort was made to provide these to the tribes.
Trying to force kids to assimilate into the dominant euro-american culture through boarding schools and isolation from their families and social supports is also repugnant.
If you had read past the one paragraph abstract, you would have seen the last paragraph of the introduction:
Given the politicization of this topic, it seems necessary to acknowledge at the outset that far too many instances of the U.S. Army committing outrages against various Indian tribes can be documented. A number of these were explicitly genocidal in intent. It is not the intention of this author to deny that simple fact. However, as the eminent Cherokee sociologist Russell Thornton has observed of Ward Churchill's fabricated version of the 1837 smallpox epidemic: "The history is bad enough—there's no need to embellish it" (Jaschik, 2005). That the U.S. Army is undoubtedly guilty of genocidal outrages against Indians in the past in no way justifies Ward Churchill's fabrication of an outrage that never happened.
All that has been debunked is the shoddy scholarship of one "researcher". And while there are perhaps a dozen who, like you, are citing that one instance to whitewash the whole issue, that is merely one more example of the Internet acting as an echo chamber. It remains the case that the oral history of several tribes in both the USA and Canada agree that a man named Carter who was a functionary or possibly a policy maker in the US Office of Indian Affairs around 1870 arranged for blankets taken from a smallpox hospital to be distributed to Indians on at least one occasion.
The problem with written history is that any faction with access to the records can erase it at any time. Which is probably why there are no Canadian records of General Gage and General Amherst arranging for smallpox infected blankets to be given to Indians in 1753, while in the USA one record of that correspondence, complete with request to authorize reimbursement for the blankets taken from the smallpox hospital, still exists. Oral histories have their own problems, but when the oral histories of several distinct tribes speaking different languages agree that something happened, then it most likely did happen.
And most of them really weren't nations in the modern sense.
True enough, if your mindset is limited to the "old stone age, new stone age, bronze age, iron age, steam age" mentality.
Other measures of nationhood and civilization exist, such as intra-group, and inter-group cooperation, trade agreements, and treaties. By many of those measures, the precolumbian peoples of North America were much more advanced than European contemporaries, and arguably more advanced than contemporary euroamerican peoples. This is definitely true when it comes to the careful crafting and continued maintenance of treaties between tribal nations, such as those that supported a significant level of transcontinental trade for untold thousands of years.
Someone else mentioned the Trail of Tears. But what should also be mentioned, since it is directly relevant to parent post, is the Carter Extermination Policy and the use of blankets from the beds of soldiers dying from small pox as trade goods, which is one of the earliest documented forms of germ warfare. "Blankets for land, what a bargain indeed" as Buffy Sainte Marie sings it. There are numerous other examples that USA school history books gloss over.
Genocide by germ warfare is still genocide. Much of the diseases that the First Nations tribes suffered were deliberately introduced by agents of the USA government.
Wordpress, and Google, are both pretty savvy about "narrative" (probably true for Go Daddy, too, but I don't know Go Daddy). Being savvy about narratives is part of their corporate cultures.
So what has changed between before the death of Heather and after it? The words on the websites had not changed significantly. The narratives are the same.
What changed is the inescapable recognition that the words had motivated 700+ loose nuts to pick up assault weapons and march on Charlotteville, and one loose nut to use a car as a lethal weapon.
There are limits to free speech. Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is beyond free speech protection. Getting a few dozen Good Old Boys drunk on mob hysteria, pointing them at some group and telling them "Let's you and them fight!" is also beyond the limits of free speech.
So that is what has changed. Go Daddy, Google, and Wordpress now recognize that they can be used as megaphones to incite violence, and that violates their TOSs as well as their collective corporate conscience.
There is a legion of white men between 30 and 60 years old who have been disenfranchised; the American Dream they had been promised is no more. Passed along from grade to grade during their school years since staying with their peers was more important than getting a solid education, their promised lifestyle of living like their Dad had, putting in forty hours a week on an assembly line until retirement but having their evenings for poker games and bowling leagues and their weekends for barbeques, has died with automation and computers. There is no way that America can send this vast horde back to school, there are simply too many of them to get them all retrained for today's decent jobs. This is a huge pol of anger and resentment that can be manipulated by persons who are unencumbered by ethical considerations, such as Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Donald Trump.
It is critical that web hosts, Twitter, and similar services that can act as megaphones recognize their potential for inciting violence and enforce their TOSs.
"Z-80" sounds right. It was definitely running CP/M. I bought it because by that point I was well aware that Apple was going for a high end market that was too expensive for me. Much as I wanted to get into Pascal, I could not justify the cost of the hardware.
When I was forced out of my first career by a broken back, I got an early no-name IBM PC clone and learned DOS down to the "Int 21" level. I developed saleable skills in custom building IBM clones, and with several varieties of DOS, and Windows from 3.0 to Win98. But early on I recognized that I did not want to hitch my waggon to Microsoft, not when they deliberately did not fix the bug in the Win30 Calculator app when Win31 came out (and it was still there in Win311, and the sexy little vampish MS Rep with the supertight teeshirt and jeans was telling my boss that this was a sales feature to encourage customers to buy Excel).
By about 2005 Linux had matured enough to do everything I needed, and wanted, and much more. I've been using one or another variant of Ubuntu since then and I haven't looked back. I am now retired but I am still occasionally asked to do the magic guru thing and get someone's machine out of an MS hellhole and back into working order. I usually do that by installing Ubuntu MATE as a dual boot, and showing them how to open the MS based files and save in an ODF format.
The Apple ][ used wide, unshielded, parallel cables between the computer and the external floppy drives. The worms were worst after I added the first floppy box, and much worse after I added the second one. Made the TV 2 rooms and 30+ feet away unusable, even when watching Betamax tapes. (My mother-in-law would record Sesame Street for her grandkid and STNG and some other shows for her daughter and I; we were living out in the boonies where there were no local TV stations and a satellite link would need a honking big dish that we did not want on our hobby farm).
I lucked into a used Apple ][ I could afford in 1980, but I hung around with kids who were using Trash-Eighties. They all had major problems with keyboards and were expert at fixing them. I had major problems with the limitations of Applesoft BASIC and envied their BASIC (it seemed more capable). Also the TRS-80 didn't put worms on any nearby TV the way the Apple, with its lack of shielding, did.
Whether Apple or Trash-Eighty, we all got hooked on the incredible high of getting a 100 line program to run. The TRS-80 demented a lot of kids, turned them into programming nerds. The Apple also, but it cost much more so its impact was less. Looking back, the TRS-80 was better designed, but the Apple was better built.
What was way-cool was that around 1984 someone was making an extension card for the Apple with an 8088 CPU and firmware CP/M, that used the Apple IO devices and memory. I taught myself WordStar on that, and did several papers on an Okidata dot-matrix printer using laserperf pin-fed paper. Bursting those sheets was kind of fun. Turning in computer printed assignments when all my classmates did their work on the school's IBM Selectric typewriters was neat.
Geanie is good, but an IDE is overkill for much of my work, such as composing wikitext off line. Gedit has been great for that kind of work.
I'm in the process of migrating from Ubuntu Studio (an excellent product) to Ubuntu MATE augmented with the Studio packages that I actually use (I don't have any need for a sound studio, etc).
It looks like Pluma will be a good replacement for gedit. I hope its search and replace supports regex at least as well as gedit did.
I was rather amazed at the score GP post got, as well.
This points out the problem with the Slashdot rating system. There are now way too many slashdotters (daughters of Slash?) who haven't got a clue but who have managed to get moderator points.
Let me make a modest proposal: Slashdot's quality would improve dramatically if one of the requirements for mod points was a 10+ history of activity on Slashdot. At the very least, that would exclude most of the K-8 crowd.
It was cost efficient back in the day, when waste management was never part of anyone's bookkeeping--- since no industry did waste management. But from the 1970s through the 1990s those dirty, filthy, anticapitalist environmentalists convinced most of the country that dumping untreated waste into our rivers and lung diseases caused by emitting smog into our urban air was not a good thing. And industries for the most part have responded through waste management measures, and that is what has pushed up the costs of just about everything.
One industry where waste management costs are not yet well accounted for is the nuclear power industry. And a big part of the reason for that is that to date, in the USA (but maybe not France) nuclear waste is not being managed, it is only being stored. An earlier post talked of the problem of a horse barn where manure was stored in an empty stall rather than disposed of. This post is another look at the same horse shit.
They have been running reliably for 40 years and have produced more clean power than solar and wind will for a long, long time.
It is a horse barn truism that you cannot call the stable clean if for the last forty years you've been shovelling the manure into a stall rather than hauling it away. In the US spent fuel rods, the hottest type of nuclear waste, are stored in pools on site because so far there is no place to haul them to. Any knowledgeable prospective buyer of a horse ranch would want to see the costs of manure disposal show up in the accounting books and would turn away if told that there are no costs. But the nuclear industry doesn't track the costs of disposing of its waste, arguing that those costs belong to the future so we ain't going to account for them today.
To come to the point, parent post is so much horse shit. It perpetuates the myths that nuclear power is clean and cheap, when in reality it is "clean" only in the sense that the industry is not yet doing the cleanup that has to be done sometime. Putting off costs until tomorrow is a cute accounting trick, but it doesn't reduce the total cost.
In summary, to use the technical language of nuclear industry marketeers, the argument presented in parent post is so much horse shit.
Amateurs. There was always the kid who would use his "calibrated elbow" instead of a torque wrench, then wonder why his hot rod's engine blew up the first time he shifted from first to second gear.
I put two disk drives on my Apple ][+, both could handle SSDD, but I had to cut notches so I could flip them and use the back side of the disks. The notch cutter was a simple thing like a stapler that cost way too much for what it was, but when a box of ten SSDD Elephant brand disks cost $30, it was worth the price.
Things have changed mostly for the better. (Trump is probably a temporary aberration)
A lot of that time was spent waiting for stuff to be developed. FOSS is usually faster and always produces a less buggy product than commercial software houses can do. But Windows had a 25 year head start, and it took roughly five years for Ubuntu, et al, to catch up and take the lead.
Now if you want to do anything useful on the web you will be relying on Linux products like Apache, and if you want to be addressing the universe of desktop computing, you will need to do it with a Linux box that can be kept up to date with the latest advances in FOSS. Torvalds once said that Linux is not out to destroy Microsoft; that will happen as an unintended side effect. And that's what's happening.
Slashdot Mirror
There will never be flying cars.
There will soon be, however, autonomous passenger carrying drones (APCDs, aka ApeSeeds) that will travel point to point, evade each other, and adhere to the flight corridors defined by each municipality.
Outside of Britain, the world speaks Ameriglish. The Brits really do need to catch up.
I know nothing about PCOS ---I just now googled to find it is "Polycystic Ovary Syndrome". Since one of the women in my social circle comes down with every estrogen related polysyllabic disease with an abbreviation within a short time of its first appearance on the intarwebs she frequents, I will undoubtedly soon be made familiar with the litany of PCOS' signs and symptoms. If you don't know any women with this particular form of Munchhausen syndrome, I envy you.
But does PCOS lead to the inability to hold down a job for longer than the first annual performance review, where questions of whether the woman had completed any of the assigned tasks without fudging somewhere arise? A resume of more than 12 jobs in the last decade is probably not a part of whatever PCOS is, but is common among CCLs (Crazy Cat Ladies, abbreviation introduced here to keep pace with the PMAs ---Pseudo Medical Abbreviations--- that are being floated around). Does PCOS lead to the inability to get reasonable car insurance because of an excessive number of bizarre accidents ("I was sure that I could squeeze into that space")?
CCL from the toxo parasite is associated with these behaviors, as well as with the sexual promiscuity.
I did some reading up on toxoplasmosis about a decade ago, when a friend's twenty-something son got mixed up with a crazy woman in her forties who was a classic "crazy cat lady" (except she was not old and she looked and acted like an oversexed teenager). Not much had been published in the medical journals at that time, and I doubt that much has been added since then.
There had been several studies on toxoplasmosis in rats. Some of the findings were that infected rats became greater risk-takers who would explore potentially hostile environments sooner, and more often, than healthy rats. They were attracted to cat urine, where healthy rats avoid that odor. They were more sexually active than uninfected rats.
There was conjecture at that time that "crazy cat ladies" did not experience the odor of cat piss the same way other people did, which is why they tolerated, and sometimes seem to prefer, to live in rooms that reeked of cat piss. There was conjecture that these women were promiscuous and as a group tended to have intense sexual relationships that did not last long. It seemed like as a group they had more automotive crashes than the norm, and that they were more frequently fired for abusing sick leave and other job perks, or fudging the paperwork. These are indicators of a greater degree of risk-taking.
Conclusions: In the specific case, the boy got dumped and the girl moved out of state, so that was resolved. My personal conclusion is to avoid any relationship with women who live with cat stink, or own more than two cats. I will not venture any more general conclusion.
It is a little scary that somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 adults tests positive for exposure to T. gondii. However there is no way to determine whether any of these positives is an active carrier, or whether the parasite has gotten into their brain.
Now if I were going to write a zombie apocalypse story, I would probably use a mutant strain of T. gondii as the agent.... But I don't write that kind of story.
The number of new PHP users who are publishing new Wordpress plugins and themes each month is astounding. In an afternoon you could learn enough MySQL to use the C-Panel tools to query your Wordpress database about that post about that spotted dog that somebody did sometime last year, or you could spend only $4.95US right this minute to get a plugin written by some high school kid as his first PHP project that would do the work for you! Such a deal! It will even find all the posts about orange cats!
Wordpress, MySQL, Cpanel, and PHP have enabled this huge number of spanking-new programmers, who have written code that works, and done so without any mental corruption from structured programming techniques, object-oriented programming, or the higher levels of subroutine and function construction. PHP enables the unwashed masses and lets them call themselves programmers!
Who can argue with that? Who cannot say that this is a good thing?
Agreed. PHP is by far the fastest growing language in terms of new users.
WordPress.
Well, it is pretty easy to assess the quality of any given piece of Python code. Just determine the ratio of whitespace to printable characters. Experienced Python programmers make these estimates all the time, just by eyeballing the code, and often without even thinking about what they are doing.
This seems to be a big part of Python's popularity: the ability to look at someone else's code and instantly form an opinion about whether "this is crap" or "this is the good stuff" without ever having to parse a single line is priceless.
Contrast this with Perl where a competent programmer can do the work of a hundred page COBOL program in a dozen lines and a couple of regular expressions, but it would take an equally competent Perlista half a week to read those dozen lines.
Python for the win! There is no other language that can make the printouts of your source look so good!
No, that article is talking about policies that began much later. About 70 years after the extinction policies that involved massive killing of buffalo and the deliberate efforts to cause smallpox epidemics in the First Nations populations. Vaccinations and quarantine were known, and effective, tools in controlling smallpox outbreaks, but no effort was made to provide these to the tribes.
Trying to force kids to assimilate into the dominant euro-american culture through boarding schools and isolation from their families and social supports is also repugnant.
If you had read past the one paragraph abstract, you would have seen the last paragraph of the introduction:
Given the politicization of this topic, it seems necessary to acknowledge at the outset that far too many instances of the U.S. Army committing outrages against various Indian tribes can be documented. A number of these were explicitly genocidal in intent. It is not the intention of this author to deny that simple fact. However, as the eminent Cherokee sociologist Russell Thornton has observed of Ward Churchill's fabricated version of the 1837 smallpox epidemic: "The history is bad enough—there's no need to embellish it" (Jaschik, 2005). That the U.S. Army is undoubtedly guilty of genocidal outrages against Indians in the past in no way justifies Ward Churchill's fabrication of an outrage that never happened.
All that has been debunked is the shoddy scholarship of one "researcher". And while there are perhaps a dozen who, like you, are citing that one instance to whitewash the whole issue, that is merely one more example of the Internet acting as an echo chamber. It remains the case that the oral history of several tribes in both the USA and Canada agree that a man named Carter who was a functionary or possibly a policy maker in the US Office of Indian Affairs around 1870 arranged for blankets taken from a smallpox hospital to be distributed to Indians on at least one occasion.
The problem with written history is that any faction with access to the records can erase it at any time. Which is probably why there are no Canadian records of General Gage and General Amherst arranging for smallpox infected blankets to be given to Indians in 1753, while in the USA one record of that correspondence, complete with request to authorize reimbursement for the blankets taken from the smallpox hospital, still exists. Oral histories have their own problems, but when the oral histories of several distinct tribes speaking different languages agree that something happened, then it most likely did happen.
And most of them really weren't nations in the modern sense.
True enough, if your mindset is limited to the "old stone age, new stone age, bronze age, iron age, steam age" mentality.
Other measures of nationhood and civilization exist, such as intra-group, and inter-group cooperation, trade agreements, and treaties. By many of those measures, the precolumbian peoples of North America were much more advanced than European contemporaries, and arguably more advanced than contemporary euroamerican peoples. This is definitely true when it comes to the careful crafting and continued maintenance of treaties between tribal nations, such as those that supported a significant level of transcontinental trade for untold thousands of years.
Citation needed.
Someone else mentioned the Trail of Tears. But what should also be mentioned, since it is directly relevant to parent post, is the Carter Extermination Policy and the use of blankets from the beds of soldiers dying from small pox as trade goods, which is one of the earliest documented forms of germ warfare. "Blankets for land, what a bargain indeed" as Buffy Sainte Marie sings it. There are numerous other examples that USA school history books gloss over.
Genocide by germ warfare is still genocide. Much of the diseases that the First Nations tribes suffered were deliberately introduced by agents of the USA government.
Yeah, well you can fool all the people some of the time....
Trump is an artful marketeer. He ranks right up there with P.T. Barnum for great hype.
As to actually making anything or providing any service ---not so much. Nada. Zilch. Nothing to see here.
Wordpress, and Google, are both pretty savvy about "narrative" (probably true for Go Daddy, too, but I don't know Go Daddy). Being savvy about narratives is part of their corporate cultures.
So what has changed between before the death of Heather and after it? The words on the websites had not changed significantly. The narratives are the same.
What changed is the inescapable recognition that the words had motivated 700+ loose nuts to pick up assault weapons and march on Charlotteville, and one loose nut to use a car as a lethal weapon.
There are limits to free speech. Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is beyond free speech protection. Getting a few dozen Good Old Boys drunk on mob hysteria, pointing them at some group and telling them "Let's you and them fight!" is also beyond the limits of free speech.
So that is what has changed. Go Daddy, Google, and Wordpress now recognize that they can be used as megaphones to incite violence, and that violates their TOSs as well as their collective corporate conscience.
There is a legion of white men between 30 and 60 years old who have been disenfranchised; the American Dream they had been promised is no more. Passed along from grade to grade during their school years since staying with their peers was more important than getting a solid education, their promised lifestyle of living like their Dad had, putting in forty hours a week on an assembly line until retirement but having their evenings for poker games and bowling leagues and their weekends for barbeques, has died with automation and computers. There is no way that America can send this vast horde back to school, there are simply too many of them to get them all retrained for today's decent jobs. This is a huge pol of anger and resentment that can be manipulated by persons who are unencumbered by ethical considerations, such as Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Donald Trump.
It is critical that web hosts, Twitter, and similar services that can act as megaphones recognize their potential for inciting violence and enforce their TOSs.
"Z-80" sounds right. It was definitely running CP/M. I bought it because by that point I was well aware that Apple was going for a high end market that was too expensive for me. Much as I wanted to get into Pascal, I could not justify the cost of the hardware.
When I was forced out of my first career by a broken back, I got an early no-name IBM PC clone and learned DOS down to the "Int 21" level. I developed saleable skills in custom building IBM clones, and with several varieties of DOS, and Windows from 3.0 to Win98. But early on I recognized that I did not want to hitch my waggon to Microsoft, not when they deliberately did not fix the bug in the Win30 Calculator app when Win31 came out (and it was still there in Win311, and the sexy little vampish MS Rep with the supertight teeshirt and jeans was telling my boss that this was a sales feature to encourage customers to buy Excel).
By about 2005 Linux had matured enough to do everything I needed, and wanted, and much more. I've been using one or another variant of Ubuntu since then and I haven't looked back. I am now retired but I am still occasionally asked to do the magic guru thing and get someone's machine out of an MS hellhole and back into working order. I usually do that by installing Ubuntu MATE as a dual boot, and showing them how to open the MS based files and save in an ODF format.
The Apple ][ used wide, unshielded, parallel cables between the computer and the external floppy drives. The worms were worst after I added the first floppy box, and much worse after I added the second one. Made the TV 2 rooms and 30+ feet away unusable, even when watching Betamax tapes. (My mother-in-law would record Sesame Street for her grandkid and STNG and some other shows for her daughter and I; we were living out in the boonies where there were no local TV stations and a satellite link would need a honking big dish that we did not want on our hobby farm).
I lucked into a used Apple ][ I could afford in 1980, but I hung around with kids who were using Trash-Eighties. They all had major problems with keyboards and were expert at fixing them. I had major problems with the limitations of Applesoft BASIC and envied their BASIC (it seemed more capable). Also the TRS-80 didn't put worms on any nearby TV the way the Apple, with its lack of shielding, did.
Whether Apple or Trash-Eighty, we all got hooked on the incredible high of getting a 100 line program to run. The TRS-80 demented a lot of kids, turned them into programming nerds. The Apple also, but it cost much more so its impact was less. Looking back, the TRS-80 was better designed, but the Apple was better built.
What was way-cool was that around 1984 someone was making an extension card for the Apple with an 8088 CPU and firmware CP/M, that used the Apple IO devices and memory. I taught myself WordStar on that, and did several papers on an Okidata dot-matrix printer using laserperf pin-fed paper. Bursting those sheets was kind of fun. Turning in computer printed assignments when all my classmates did their work on the school's IBM Selectric typewriters was neat.
Geanie is good, but an IDE is overkill for much of my work, such as composing wikitext off line. Gedit has been great for that kind of work.
I'm in the process of migrating from Ubuntu Studio (an excellent product) to Ubuntu MATE augmented with the Studio packages that I actually use (I don't have any need for a sound studio, etc).
It looks like Pluma will be a good replacement for gedit. I hope its search and replace supports regex at least as well as gedit did.
I was rather amazed at the score GP post got, as well.
This points out the problem with the Slashdot rating system. There are now way too many slashdotters (daughters of Slash?) who haven't got a clue but who have managed to get moderator points.
Let me make a modest proposal: Slashdot's quality would improve dramatically if one of the requirements for mod points was a 10+ history of activity on Slashdot. At the very least, that would exclude most of the K-8 crowd.
It was cost efficient back in the day, when waste management was never part of anyone's bookkeeping--- since no industry did waste management. But from the 1970s through the 1990s those dirty, filthy, anticapitalist environmentalists convinced most of the country that dumping untreated waste into our rivers and lung diseases caused by emitting smog into our urban air was not a good thing. And industries for the most part have responded through waste management measures, and that is what has pushed up the costs of just about everything.
One industry where waste management costs are not yet well accounted for is the nuclear power industry. And a big part of the reason for that is that to date, in the USA (but maybe not France) nuclear waste is not being managed, it is only being stored. An earlier post talked of the problem of a horse barn where manure was stored in an empty stall rather than disposed of. This post is another look at the same horse shit.
They have been running reliably for 40 years and have produced more clean power than solar and wind will for a long, long time.
It is a horse barn truism that you cannot call the stable clean if for the last forty years you've been shovelling the manure into a stall rather than hauling it away. In the US spent fuel rods, the hottest type of nuclear waste, are stored in pools on site because so far there is no place to haul them to. Any knowledgeable prospective buyer of a horse ranch would want to see the costs of manure disposal show up in the accounting books and would turn away if told that there are no costs. But the nuclear industry doesn't track the costs of disposing of its waste, arguing that those costs belong to the future so we ain't going to account for them today.
To come to the point, parent post is so much horse shit. It perpetuates the myths that nuclear power is clean and cheap, when in reality it is "clean" only in the sense that the industry is not yet doing the cleanup that has to be done sometime. Putting off costs until tomorrow is a cute accounting trick, but it doesn't reduce the total cost.
In summary, to use the technical language of nuclear industry marketeers, the argument presented in parent post is so much horse shit.
"sublunatanian"
Oh you came so close to getting a gold star for that!
Should've been "sublunarian"...
Amateurs. There was always the kid who would use his "calibrated elbow" instead of a torque wrench, then wonder why his hot rod's engine blew up the first time he shifted from first to second gear.
Gosh that goes back to times best forgotten.
I put two disk drives on my Apple ][+, both could handle SSDD, but I had to cut notches so I could flip them and use the back side of the disks. The notch cutter was a simple thing like a stapler that cost way too much for what it was, but when a box of ten SSDD Elephant brand disks cost $30, it was worth the price.
Things have changed mostly for the better. (Trump is probably a temporary aberration)
A lot of that time was spent waiting for stuff to be developed. FOSS is usually faster and always produces a less buggy product than commercial software houses can do. But Windows had a 25 year head start, and it took roughly five years for Ubuntu, et al, to catch up and take the lead.
Now if you want to do anything useful on the web you will be relying on Linux products like Apache, and if you want to be addressing the universe of desktop computing, you will need to do it with a Linux box that can be kept up to date with the latest advances in FOSS. Torvalds once said that Linux is not out to destroy Microsoft; that will happen as an unintended side effect. And that's what's happening.