EnvironmentalChemistry.com think they can stop people blocking advertisements. Unless, of course, said people are using Firefox with Javascript disabled and View -> Page Style > No Style.
Does anybody else here think it would be worth applying for a patent on a foolproof ad-blocker-stopping method, and then signing the patent over to an anti-advertising group?
Well, I live in a country where healthcare is free {for people} and nobody here has a problem with that. Yes, it's all paid for out of taxes. And yes, the government sometimes spends taxpayers' money on stupid things {like illegal and unnecessary wars and ridiculous ID card schemes that will create more problems than even exist to be solved}. But if you want things like free healthcare, free education, paved roads and so forth, you have to pay taxes. For my part, though, I would like to see job advertisements show the wages after tax.
You're saying the US government have the money to spend on new ways of blowing things up in order to blow people up. Fantastic.
How come they can't provide universal free healthcare, and universal free veterinary care for cats and dogs? It's recognised that pet owners are generally healthier and longer lived than non-pet owners. This should be expected, since pet ownership provides physical exercise, companionship and mental stimulation. A small investment in a dog or cat pays dividends in terms of fewer visits to the doctor.
Maybe it's time for a new international treaty banning the use of any kind of space weapons altogether.
Yeah, yeah, I know, methane {CH4} is not what causes the smell in farts -- that's caused by hydrogen sulphide and thiomethanol {CH3SH}. Methane is a paraffin and you wouldn't expect it to smell. However, I also know that not many people know that. So I was just going for a cheap "funny" mod. It's not even karma whoring, really, because funny mods don't help your karma {though "overrated" ones do harm it, so it's not all that cheap}.
BTW, to view pages from EnvironmentalChemistry.com without advertisements, turn off JavaScript {which will get around their christian banner-block ban redirection attempt} so you get a "javascript is required" warning; then use view -> page style -> no style.
Instead of rewarding recycling, start punishing pollution.
Some people claim they "can't be bothered" to recycle -- bullshit. I say, then make the fuckers bothered! Most supermarkets have recycling centres in their car parks. Well, if you fetched the fucking full containers home from the supermarket, why the fuck can't you take them back there when they're fucking empty? Dickheads.
It's not fucking rocket science. Different kinds of waste don't magically mix themselves up. It takes human effort to combine metals, glass, plastics, organics and non-recyclables in a way that makes them difficult to separate. You open a tin of beans: now you have the empty tin and its lid, which are recyclable, and the beans, of which any remaining uneaten are compostable. {The paper label isn't the problem you think: it will burn up completely long before the steel melts and, since it's giving out energy, reduce the fuel requirement for the process a little}. The stuff doesn't mix itself up. People mix it up -- well, ignorant, lazy, selfish cunts do.
Your local authority is having to pay good money right now to bury stuff in landfill that it could have been selling to earn revenue. That is money that they can't spend on police, schools, home helps and so forth. It comes out of your pockets. Your rates went up this year; how much do you think they would have gone down by if every one of those selfish, lazy, ignorant, stupid cunts who put recyclables in their rubbish had separated their rubbish and recyclables properly in the first place?
I propose a fine equivalent to a week's wages for a first offence, six months' imprisonment for a second offence and the death penalty for the third offence. Really. It's not harsh, because anybody can avoid it.
Open vented lead-acid batteries rock. They are the nearest thing that exists to a perfect current source, and are highly tolerant of abuse -- if you try to overcharge them, then the excess energy simply goes into separating the water in the electrolyte into hydrogen and oxygen. At the end of their life, they are close to 100% recyclable; just melt the lead down, skim off the impurities {some lead will come out with them, but you can save the stuff up and recover this electrochemically when you have enough} and re-cast it. And lead has a sufficiently high intrinsic value that it's definitely worth recovering. Leave an old car battery lying around for long enough, and some hobo will cart it off and weigh it in to buy booze.
Lead has had a bad press lately. It's just a metal, FCOL! I suspect a money trail somewhere.
The space before the / is only required for older browsers (*cough* IE *cough*) which don't understand XHTML properly {It's valid XHTML with or without it but it's not necessarily valid HTML with it}. Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Konqueror 3.5.2 behave fine without it. They also treat upper and lower case tags as equivalent; upper case is no longer strictly valid XHTML. Of course, the rules also say you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce.....
(5) Maybe the Brits don't like to report they have a disease and americans exaggerate. (Note that the incidence rate was self reported.)
Quite likely. We invariably ask one another how we are feeling immediately on meeting, and invariably answer "fine" no matter how untrue that may be. Americans, on the other hand, seem to take a perverse pride in having something wrong with them. Could be to do with the fact that despite our reputation for reserve, we are actually highly tolerant of self-expression {or rather, if somebody were expressing themself e.g. by shopping in Sainsburys bollock naked except for a red and white spotted handkerchief, we would consider it none of our business}; such behaviour would be less likely to be tolerated in the USA, which is becoming more and more conformist by the day. Illness, both physical and mental, seems to be the last legitimate avenue of self-expression remaining open to Americans.
But British chips are generally about 15mm. on a side, as opposed to American ones which are more like 6-7mm. Absorption of fat depends upon surface area, which increases with the breadth of the chip; but the quantity of potato depends upon cross sectional area, which increases with the square of the breadth of the chip. If four American "french fries" will fit into the space of one British chip, then {assuming that each chip is much longer than it is wide} the British chip has half the total surface area and therefore will absorb half as much fat from cooking.
Vegetarianism is not the natural state for humans -- it is indicative that you are living in denial of your mortality and fondly but mistakenly hope that if you do not eat anything dead, you yourself will not die. Mortality-denial is in turn often a symptom of a deeper psychological condition such as leading a shallow, unfulfilled life.
Humans have several distinct kinds of teeth, a short digestive tract and are adapted to hunting, which are typical traits of omnivores. About the only change we have undergone since caveman times is that the pH of our stomach acid seems to have gone up a point, and that can be attributed to cooking food.
Food doesn't stay in your body for 4 days. It stays in for less than eight hours. Prove it to yourself with a can of sweetcorn. {Note; sweetcorn is not shat out undigested. The soft starchy inside of the kernels is decomposed to glucose inside the body. The yellow outer envelope is not hydrolysed during the short human digestive transit. On its journey through the alimentary canal, it fills up with digested matter. Not many people examine once-eaten sweetcorn closely, though, so the myth persists.}
If you assume that we are all really cave people {most of whom didn't actually live in caves; but caves are the only early dwellings that have survived, and the name has stuck}, which we pretty much are on the inside, and take away everything modern {which includes agriculture -- you have to pick what you can find growing wild}, you would never survive for long on a vegetarian diet. Cavemen were hunter-gatherers, not just gatherers, and for a reason.
Note also that some humans have a birth defect which renders them unable to manufacture taurine {a protein found only in animal sources but which many animals, including humans, require for survival}. The entire cat family, from fluffy kittens to Siberian white tigers, are also unable to manufacture taurine: if you don't feed a cat meat and it doesn't get the opportunity to hunt for itself, it will go blind and die in horrible agony over the course of a couple of years. Extrapolation of these figures to human beings, based on the assumption that every mammal's heart beats the same number of times in a lifetime, is left as an exercise for the reader.
If you can listen to a song even just once, you can store it. It's just a bunch of ones and zeros, right? Just a sequence of binary numbers which, when processed appropriately, translate into another sequence of numbers which tell the machine where to put the speaker cones at any moment in time. And whatever's on The Far End has no way to know what is happening to those numbers it is sending out. You could be processing them to turn into music, storing them on disc or spitting them to/dev/null.
That's why I so liked WordStar {DOS}, ProText {Amiga, Amstrad NC100} and Wordwise Plus {BBC}. You typed the text, and the computer took care of the formatting. WW+ even used a 40-column screen for typing.
I suppose I'll have to get into LaTeX because it sounds like it would appeal to my mindset. Can you recommend a good website with some tutorials and examples? I'm quite happy with the command line; prefer pico to vi, though!
Too many people think it's OK just to use rows of spaces for formatting.
The worst example of this I ever saw was a document where the page numbers were typed, by hand, aligned using spaces, within the page themselves {not in the footer}; and there were no page breaks, just loads of hard returns. I was tasked with fixing a minor spelling mistake. This should have been an easy job; but the correctly-spelt word was one letter longer, which caused the line to wrap -- thus making an utter arse of the formatting.
I fixed it, but I got a bollocking for taking too long. I suppose I would have got just as big a bollocking for messing up the formatting.
I think a great service would be done if word processing software could detect attempts at such manual formatting, warn the user there is a better way to do it; and then do it properly, automagically. It can't be that hard. I'll concede that spaces and hard returns do have a place, but that place is far away from proportionally-spaced fonts.
Oh yes, one more thing. Bring back Wordstar/Protext-style rulers which can be inserted into the document anywhere, not just one ruler at the top of the screen which changes as you move from one paragraph to another. It's as confusing as fuck and it's probably half the reason why people use spaces for formatting in the first place.
Maintaining binary compatibility across releases is only desirable if you wish to support closed-source code, and even then is still doomed to be sub-optimal -- unless you are 100% certain that there is nothing that could ever be done a better way, but would break compatibility if it were to be done that way.
The Linux kernel developers have their ends clearly defined {be the best, fastest, least-buggy, open source kernel}, and are at liberty to choose any means to achieve those ends. If some of those goals conflict with supporting closed-source then so be it.
I installed Debian linux on my backup computer about 3 months ago. For my convenience, it comes with the GUI already installed. However, to install the drivers for my graphics card, I have to exit the graphical shell. I still can't figure out how to do that.
Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and wait for the text mode screen to come up.
At the login: prompt type root.
At the Password: prompt, type your root password.
You haven't said whether you are running xdm, gdm or kdm, but it doesn't matter anyway, the pre-install scripts will take care of stopping and restarting _dm for you. Just install the package as normal.
And then there's the installation of the.deb packages. To get those to work, I have to download the package, open up the command window and type in the installation manually.
Don't download.deb files and expect to install them. Just open a root terminal window {the way to communicate with the computer in the language it understands best} and type # apt-get install foo where foo is the package you want to install {minus version numbers and.deb suffix; e.g. apt-get install k3b}. Now, this sounds cheesy but you must believe it: you will come, in time, to regard this process as being no more awkward than a double-click. Packages installed straight from Debian's repository will also update your menus in all window managers, unless you have messed around with things in a non-Debian-like way {and therefore abandoned your Debian-ness}. Even better, try # aptitude install foo -- aptitude is the "new" package manager. Basically, it combines the functionality of the old dselect package manager and the apt-get we all know and love with a neat text-mode UI. If you've not got it, use # apt-get install aptitude to get it.
Except that half the time, after it installs, I have no clue where to find it, and end up using the file manager to dig it out of the Bin folder.
A word to the wise. Keep a terminal open at all times. If you know the name of the program you want to run, just type its name followed by a space and an AND sign;
$ firefox &
The & sign runs the program in the background so you get the $ prompt back straight away; without it, you will have to quit the program before you get the prompt back. Note that any messages produced might cause the prompt to appear to disappear, and anything you were typing with it, but it's still there. Try pressing cursor-up, cursor-down to get it back.
No, they wouldn't need all that. They would just need a law saying "Release the fucking driver specs or don't sell the fucking card, it's that fucking simple".
To an average, non-technical user, the notion that a driver is not available simply because the specs aren't open is completely meaningless; no driver = no driver.
Which is why we need a law mandating hardware manufacturers to release their specs if they want to be allowed to sell their product. They won't do it without a bit of force. nVidia have reverse-engineered everything ATI ever made, but they aren't keen to let anything slip that might give ATI a clue how to get a better result in some meaningless benchmark {beyond shagging the reviewer}. Likewise, ATI know nVidia's products inside-out yet wouldn't divulge what power supply voltage their cards needed if it wasn't obvious, for fear that nVidia might gain an advantage over them.
This paranoia can only be fixed by issuing an ultimatum: quit with the secrecy and risk losing a couple of percent of your market share, or keep it up and lose 100% of your market share.
Be there any hardware that was well supported under Windows '95/98 and Linux, but unsupported under 2000 and XP..... until someone ported a Linux driver over to XP?
Oh yes indeed! I remember running Pads-Perform* on Windows 3.11. It could not have been less user-friendly if it poked you in the eye with a blunt stick. However, what the software actually did was bloody hard anyway. It could not have been half as functional if it was any easier to use; and when it was replaced by Pads-PowerPCB, with a radically different UI, there was a lot of re-learning, wailing and gnashing of teeth &c.
But we were technicians**; part of our job was to learn how to do the job, not just how to use one particular tool.
* I seem to remember there used to be UNIX versions of Pads-Logic and Pads-Perform. Anyone know any more about these? Do they run on the modern Unix-alikes?
** technician: one who knows just as much as an engineer, works just as hard as an engineer, yet earns half as much as an engineer.
The problem is that the human organism has two modes of learning. Babies tend to learn by blind repetition and obedience; older children and adults tend to think more in terms of abstract concepts and underlying reasons. This makes sense from a survival point of view: it's more important for a toddler not to fall off a cliff / get eaten by a bear / drown &c., than to understand why not.
It seems that some adults are simply frightened of computers, and this is triggering a change in their behaviour around computers. The Eternal N00b is reduced to the status of a three-year-old playing near a pit of deadly vipers. The computer's error messages are interpreted akin to the strident warnings barked out by a nearby adult. The E.N. learns nothing about the way computers work, only that certain courses of action are proscribed. A real child probably would eventually come to understand what is so dangerous about the snakes, or leave them alone altogether. In fear born of ignorance, the Eternal N00b never understands computers or software, only learns by rote what not to do; and so will remain evermore a n00b.
EnvironmentalChemistry.com think they can stop people blocking advertisements. Unless, of course, said people are using Firefox with Javascript disabled and View -> Page Style > No Style.
Does anybody else here think it would be worth applying for a patent on a foolproof ad-blocker-stopping method, and then signing the patent over to an anti-advertising group?
Well, I live in a country where healthcare is free {for people} and nobody here has a problem with that. Yes, it's all paid for out of taxes. And yes, the government sometimes spends taxpayers' money on stupid things {like illegal and unnecessary wars and ridiculous ID card schemes that will create more problems than even exist to be solved}. But if you want things like free healthcare, free education, paved roads and so forth, you have to pay taxes. For my part, though, I would like to see job advertisements show the wages after tax.
You're saying the US government have the money to spend on new ways of blowing things up in order to blow people up. Fantastic.
How come they can't provide universal free healthcare, and universal free veterinary care for cats and dogs? It's recognised that pet owners are generally healthier and longer lived than non-pet owners. This should be expected, since pet ownership provides physical exercise, companionship and mental stimulation. A small investment in a dog or cat pays dividends in terms of fewer visits to the doctor.
Maybe it's time for a new international treaty banning the use of any kind of space weapons altogether.
Yeah, yeah, I know, methane {CH4} is not what causes the smell in farts -- that's caused by hydrogen sulphide and thiomethanol {CH3SH}. Methane is a paraffin and you wouldn't expect it to smell. However, I also know that not many people know that. So I was just going for a cheap "funny" mod. It's not even karma whoring, really, because funny mods don't help your karma {though "overrated" ones do harm it, so it's not all that cheap}.
BTW, to view pages from EnvironmentalChemistry.com without advertisements, turn off JavaScript {which will get around their christian banner-block ban redirection attempt} so you get a "javascript is required" warning; then use view -> page style -> no style.
No.
Instead of rewarding recycling, start punishing pollution.
Some people claim they "can't be bothered" to recycle -- bullshit. I say, then make the fuckers bothered! Most supermarkets have recycling centres in their car parks. Well, if you fetched the fucking full containers home from the supermarket, why the fuck can't you take them back there when they're fucking empty? Dickheads.
It's not fucking rocket science. Different kinds of waste don't magically mix themselves up. It takes human effort to combine metals, glass, plastics, organics and non-recyclables in a way that makes them difficult to separate. You open a tin of beans: now you have the empty tin and its lid, which are recyclable, and the beans, of which any remaining uneaten are compostable. {The paper label isn't the problem you think: it will burn up completely long before the steel melts and, since it's giving out energy, reduce the fuel requirement for the process a little}. The stuff doesn't mix itself up. People mix it up -- well, ignorant, lazy, selfish cunts do.
Your local authority is having to pay good money right now to bury stuff in landfill that it could have been selling to earn revenue. That is money that they can't spend on police, schools, home helps and so forth. It comes out of your pockets. Your rates went up this year; how much do you think they would have gone down by if every one of those selfish, lazy, ignorant, stupid cunts who put recyclables in their rubbish had separated their rubbish and recyclables properly in the first place?
I propose a fine equivalent to a week's wages for a first offence, six months' imprisonment for a second offence and the death penalty for the third offence. Really. It's not harsh, because anybody can avoid it.
Open vented lead-acid batteries rock. They are the nearest thing that exists to a perfect current source, and are highly tolerant of abuse -- if you try to overcharge them, then the excess energy simply goes into separating the water in the electrolyte into hydrogen and oxygen. At the end of their life, they are close to 100% recyclable; just melt the lead down, skim off the impurities {some lead will come out with them, but you can save the stuff up and recover this electrochemically when you have enough} and re-cast it. And lead has a sufficiently high intrinsic value that it's definitely worth recovering. Leave an old car battery lying around for long enough, and some hobo will cart it off and weigh it in to buy booze.
Lead has had a bad press lately. It's just a metal, FCOL! I suspect a money trail somewhere.
The space before the / is only required for older browsers (*cough* IE *cough*) which don't understand XHTML properly {It's valid XHTML with or without it but it's not necessarily valid HTML with it}. Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Konqueror 3.5.2 behave fine without it. They also treat upper and lower case tags as equivalent; upper case is no longer strictly valid XHTML. Of course, the rules also say you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce .....
Because it is a right. A civilised society is one which looks after its members.
So let's turn the question around. What gives you the impression that healthcare is a privilege?
But British chips are generally about 15mm. on a side, as opposed to American ones which are more like 6-7mm. Absorption of fat depends upon surface area, which increases with the breadth of the chip; but the quantity of potato depends upon cross sectional area, which increases with the square of the breadth of the chip. If four American "french fries" will fit into the space of one British chip, then {assuming that each chip is much longer than it is wide} the British chip has half the total surface area and therefore will absorb half as much fat from cooking.
Vegetarianism is not the natural state for humans -- it is indicative that you are living in denial of your mortality and fondly but mistakenly hope that if you do not eat anything dead, you yourself will not die. Mortality-denial is in turn often a symptom of a deeper psychological condition such as leading a shallow, unfulfilled life.
Humans have several distinct kinds of teeth, a short digestive tract and are adapted to hunting, which are typical traits of omnivores. About the only change we have undergone since caveman times is that the pH of our stomach acid seems to have gone up a point, and that can be attributed to cooking food.
Food doesn't stay in your body for 4 days. It stays in for less than eight hours. Prove it to yourself with a can of sweetcorn. {Note; sweetcorn is not shat out undigested. The soft starchy inside of the kernels is decomposed to glucose inside the body. The yellow outer envelope is not hydrolysed during the short human digestive transit. On its journey through the alimentary canal, it fills up with digested matter. Not many people examine once-eaten sweetcorn closely, though, so the myth persists.}
If you assume that we are all really cave people {most of whom didn't actually live in caves; but caves are the only early dwellings that have survived, and the name has stuck}, which we pretty much are on the inside, and take away everything modern {which includes agriculture -- you have to pick what you can find growing wild}, you would never survive for long on a vegetarian diet. Cavemen were hunter-gatherers, not just gatherers, and for a reason.
Note also that some humans have a birth defect which renders them unable to manufacture taurine {a protein found only in animal sources but which many animals, including humans, require for survival}. The entire cat family, from fluffy kittens to Siberian white tigers, are also unable to manufacture taurine: if you don't feed a cat meat and it doesn't get the opportunity to hunt for itself, it will go blind and die in horrible agony over the course of a couple of years. Extrapolation of these figures to human beings, based on the assumption that every mammal's heart beats the same number of times in a lifetime, is left as an exercise for the reader.
If you can listen to a song even just once, you can store it. It's just a bunch of ones and zeros, right? Just a sequence of binary numbers which, when processed appropriately, translate into another sequence of numbers which tell the machine where to put the speaker cones at any moment in time. And whatever's on The Far End has no way to know what is happening to those numbers it is sending out. You could be processing them to turn into music, storing them on disc or spitting them to /dev/null.
Thanks. That seems to be just what I need.
Try looking here.
Trust me, you need at least sed, awk {aka gawk} and grep if you are working with plain text files.
Why do you use an interactive editor to do piddling changes? That's what sed(1) was invented for, surely?!
That's why I so liked WordStar {DOS}, ProText {Amiga, Amstrad NC100} and Wordwise Plus {BBC}. You typed the text, and the computer took care of the formatting. WW+ even used a 40-column screen for typing.
I suppose I'll have to get into LaTeX because it sounds like it would appeal to my mindset. Can you recommend a good website with some tutorials and examples? I'm quite happy with the command line; prefer pico to vi, though!
Yes ..... you know, the phone company O2 was originally going to be called CH4 but there was a bit of a stink about it .....
Too many people think it's OK just to use rows of spaces for formatting.
The worst example of this I ever saw was a document where the page numbers were typed, by hand, aligned using spaces, within the page themselves {not in the footer}; and there were no page breaks, just loads of hard returns. I was tasked with fixing a minor spelling mistake. This should have been an easy job; but the correctly-spelt word was one letter longer, which caused the line to wrap -- thus making an utter arse of the formatting.
I fixed it, but I got a bollocking for taking too long. I suppose I would have got just as big a bollocking for messing up the formatting.
I think a great service would be done if word processing software could detect attempts at such manual formatting, warn the user there is a better way to do it; and then do it properly, automagically. It can't be that hard. I'll concede that spaces and hard returns do have a place, but that place is far away from proportionally-spaced fonts.
Oh yes, one more thing. Bring back Wordstar/Protext-style rulers which can be inserted into the document anywhere, not just one ruler at the top of the screen which changes as you move from one paragraph to another. It's as confusing as fuck and it's probably half the reason why people use spaces for formatting in the first place.
Maintaining binary compatibility across releases is only desirable if you wish to support closed-source code, and even then is still doomed to be sub-optimal -- unless you are 100% certain that there is nothing that could ever be done a better way, but would break compatibility if it were to be done that way.
The Linux kernel developers have their ends clearly defined {be the best, fastest, least-buggy, open source kernel}, and are at liberty to choose any means to achieve those ends. If some of those goals conflict with supporting closed-source then so be it.
At the login: prompt type root .
At the Password: prompt, type your root password.
You haven't said whether you are running xdm, gdm or kdm, but it doesn't matter anyway, the pre-install scripts will take care of stopping and restarting _dm for you. Just install the package as normal. Don't download
No, they wouldn't need all that. They would just need a law saying "Release the fucking driver specs or don't sell the fucking card, it's that fucking simple".
This paranoia can only be fixed by issuing an ultimatum: quit with the secrecy and risk losing a couple of percent of your market share, or keep it up and lose 100% of your market share.
Which brings up an interesting question.
..... until someone ported a Linux driver over to XP?
Be there any hardware that was well supported under Windows '95/98 and Linux, but unsupported under 2000 and XP
Oh yes indeed! I remember running Pads-Perform* on Windows 3.11. It could not have been less user-friendly if it poked you in the eye with a blunt stick. However, what the software actually did was bloody hard anyway. It could not have been half as functional if it was any easier to use; and when it was replaced by Pads-PowerPCB, with a radically different UI, there was a lot of re-learning, wailing and gnashing of teeth &c.
But we were technicians**; part of our job was to learn how to do the job, not just how to use one particular tool.
* I seem to remember there used to be UNIX versions of Pads-Logic and Pads-Perform. Anyone know any more about these? Do they run on the modern Unix-alikes?
** technician: one who knows just as much as an engineer, works just as hard as an engineer, yet earns half as much as an engineer.
Exactly.
The problem is that the human organism has two modes of learning. Babies tend to learn by blind repetition and obedience; older children and adults tend to think more in terms of abstract concepts and underlying reasons. This makes sense from a survival point of view: it's more important for a toddler not to fall off a cliff / get eaten by a bear / drown &c., than to understand why not.
It seems that some adults are simply frightened of computers, and this is triggering a change in their behaviour around computers. The Eternal N00b is reduced to the status of a three-year-old playing near a pit of deadly vipers. The computer's error messages are interpreted akin to the strident warnings barked out by a nearby adult. The E.N. learns nothing about the way computers work, only that certain courses of action are proscribed. A real child probably would eventually come to understand what is so dangerous about the snakes, or leave them alone altogether. In fear born of ignorance, the Eternal N00b never understands computers or software, only learns by rote what not to do; and so will remain evermore a n00b.