Fruit juice concentrate and powdered alcohol on a backpacking trip, in the ISS, or shipped to Antarctica comes to mind. Sometimes weight really does matter a lot.
Synthehol was one of those dumbass things that can only exist in Star Trek fantasy land
Why would you say that? Humans have been testing random drugs in a rather scattershot manner for the last several tens of thousands of years. It's only recently that any sort of methodology has begun to be applied to studying chemical effects on the brain. I actually would be very surprised if something were not found in the next few years that gave a similar high to alcohol but without the nasty hangover.
Try something besides grapes for your wine. You have fairly decent peaches in that area if I'm not mistaken, and peach wine can be quite pleasant if you don't over-sugar it (which I tend to do). Just keep in mind that while commercial wines stop fermenting when the PH changes or they run out of sugar, homemade wines with wild yeasts stop fermenting when they've poisoned themselves with too much alcohol.
Everyone raise your hand if you're competent to analyze hardware-level firmware and the calls it makes to modules in the control and configuration software! That's right kiddies, if you're not a fairly high-level firmware programmer you're not going to be able to make heads or tails of the code even if you do attempt to read it.
They had a fairly good idea that the surface temperature was well above the boiling point of water by 1940, so I'd hardly say "the only one."
Just found out that Velikovsky was a proponent of the Electric Universe quackery as well. I guess if you're going to be wrong you may as well be extravagantly wrong.
Know what? I don't give a flying fuck, I'm not a coder so I still wouldn't know what it was doing. Even if I was, I wouldn't spend hours on end going over every line of every piece of software that I installed, so I still wouldn't know. And even if I did take that amount of time, there is no way that I could be so marvelously talented that I would recognize what every line of firmware did, especially when its calling some subroutine from some other portion of some other piece of software so I still wouldn't know.
Yet the books of bible have better attestation than any other works older than 1900 years.
Actually there are Buddhist and Hindu works of considerably older antiquity for which much better documentation. IIRC, Shinto as well. Of course Christians don't know about those.
The Drake Equation didn't come with any numbers pre-decided. Some of the numbers, such as rate of star formation, were known. Some, such as percentage of stars with planets and percentage of planets in the 'Goldilocks Zone', are only becoming known now. Others, such as the percentage of planets that give rise to life, are still unknown. You can plug any numbers you want into any of the variables.
Thanks, that makes more sense. I also was wondering how the hell they managed to crunch the numbers for a grid that size, which from TFS sounds like what they were doing.
You've never spent any time with actual working animals, have you? You read your propaganda and decide you know, but really have no clue. I've raised hunting dogs, my dad grew up with draft horses, our friend raised sled dogs. You probably believe we must be horrible, cruel people, our animals would disagree.
The left made a serious mistake creating gun control laws that nibble at the edges of the 2nd Amendment rather than do the heavy lifting going head-on to revoke or change it. It opened the door for the Right to attack other portions of the Constitution from the side as well.
Don't ski, for me reaching my watch has only been a matter of turning back the outer jacket cuff and maybe the mitten. When you're fishing the gloves are off a lot of the time anyway.
Are you really stupid enough to think that the bozos in Nevada would have had a chance against a Hellfire missile? You really think that the reason the gov't didn't send in an attack drone is because the loonies were armed with popguns? Damn, the ACs are getting dumber all the time.
Starting in the late '60s to early '70s US companies started hiring MBAs straight out of college into management positions regardless of experience in their field of business. The tradition of moving up within a company/industry, gradually acquiring experience and competency, culminating in a CEO position, rather suddenly went out the window. Henry Ford made Edsel work on the assembly line for a year before he let him into management. Today most of the people running the Big Three automakers have never done an actual day's work in their lives, having gone straight from college into management, and those who have experience actually making something have to hide that fact from their peers. I would say the same thing about most of the rest of the US business community, for example the last person in the executive suites at Target who had actually worked on the sales floor at some point just retired a couple of years ago. No one who runs the world's second-largest retailer has actually worked in one of their stores.
If your next set of computers don't have parallel ports get an older HP PrintJet printer server and drop it on your network. Finally gave mine away with the HP LJ III in 2010 when my wife decided it took up too much room.
Friend of my folks once told me, "Do you know why a '56 Chevy is so expensive? Because they were such pieces of crap that people would just abandon them by the side of the road after they broke down the 100th time. The replacement parts in the few that survive are ten times the quality of the originals."
Kind of sad that the cars my generation learned to drive on hardly survive at all. For that matter, the whole concept of a Pinto, Vega or Gremlin being a "classic car" just seems absurd.
Had an LJ III printer for most of a decade, after one of the executives at my work decided that he wanted a BubbleJet because it took less space (joke was on him). The company had bought a couple of them when they first went into production. When I didn't need to print new resumes every year or two any more my wife finally made me get rid of it in 2010 because it took too much space. Put it on the curb with a sign that said "Works" and it was gone in under an hour. Would not be at all surprised to hear that it's still still pumping out tax returns and kids' homework today.
We bought our Sony stereo in 1992, when we first bought our house. Almost all the writing is worn off the remote control but we know what buttons are which by now. It has the last functioning cassette tape player in the house.
My oldest piece of tech gear though is the microscope my folks bought me second hand in 1974. They got it from a retiring college professor and it was at least 20 or so years old then. Can't remember the brand unfortunately, but I can see the label on its wooden box in my head, Lux-something.
A former customer has a Win98 desktop machine that runs their security system. Thing hasn't been turned off since a power outage in 2005 (UPS hiccuped), and hadn't been restarted in the previous five years. There's no way to get the data off the machine except to take the 250 mb hard drive out and stick it in some other ancient machine that has an IDE controller.
Screw that, I grew up in Traverse City. I know what the weather is like, the last year that we lived there the first week in February the temperature never got above 10 below, and six months later the first week in August never got below 97 (even at night). Now that I know what decent weather and good food is like the only time you get me back there is for weddings and funerals.
Nowhere that the temperature regularly exceeds 100 degrees could possibly be considered a "great place to live" IMNSHO. (Which is also a strike against Detroit.) And anywhere that you can stand on the roof of a three story building and see 20 miles in every direction is just plain depressing to contemplate. Give me mountains, give me rain, give me trees, give me frost in winter and warmth in summer. When people actually go stay at a hotel because their air conditioning is broken that should be a sign that the place is inherently unlivable.
OTOH, there are people who for some reason think that Des Moines, Iowa is a wonderful place to live.
As they always have? Sorry, but "always" includes a period much longer than the past 20 years. Detroit was the economic powerhouse of the United States for decades until its business leaders caught the 'MBA Disease' and managed their companies into the ground.
I still remember when I was a kid and Indira Gandhi spent a gazillion dollars on upgrading the Indian university system with an emphasis on computers. Pretty much everyone that wasn't laughing were outraged that she was "wasting" that money instead of feeding the poor. I wonder where India would be now if she were still alive.
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Fruit juice concentrate and powdered alcohol on a backpacking trip, in the ISS, or shipped to Antarctica comes to mind. Sometimes weight really does matter a lot.
Synthehol was one of those dumbass things that can only exist in Star Trek fantasy land
Why would you say that? Humans have been testing random drugs in a rather scattershot manner for the last several tens of thousands of years. It's only recently that any sort of methodology has begun to be applied to studying chemical effects on the brain. I actually would be very surprised if something were not found in the next few years that gave a similar high to alcohol but without the nasty hangover.
Try something besides grapes for your wine. You have fairly decent peaches in that area if I'm not mistaken, and peach wine can be quite pleasant if you don't over-sugar it (which I tend to do). Just keep in mind that while commercial wines stop fermenting when the PH changes or they run out of sugar, homemade wines with wild yeasts stop fermenting when they've poisoned themselves with too much alcohol.
Everyone raise your hand if you're competent to analyze hardware-level firmware and the calls it makes to modules in the control and configuration software! That's right kiddies, if you're not a fairly high-level firmware programmer you're not going to be able to make heads or tails of the code even if you do attempt to read it.
They had a fairly good idea that the surface temperature was well above the boiling point of water by 1940, so I'd hardly say "the only one."
Just found out that Velikovsky was a proponent of the Electric Universe quackery as well. I guess if you're going to be wrong you may as well be extravagantly wrong.
Know what? I don't give a flying fuck, I'm not a coder so I still wouldn't know what it was doing. Even if I was, I wouldn't spend hours on end going over every line of every piece of software that I installed, so I still wouldn't know. And even if I did take that amount of time, there is no way that I could be so marvelously talented that I would recognize what every line of firmware did, especially when its calling some subroutine from some other portion of some other piece of software so I still wouldn't know.
Yet the books of bible have better attestation than any other works older than 1900 years.
Actually there are Buddhist and Hindu works of considerably older antiquity for which much better documentation. IIRC, Shinto as well. Of course Christians don't know about those.
The Drake Equation didn't come with any numbers pre-decided. Some of the numbers, such as rate of star formation, were known. Some, such as percentage of stars with planets and percentage of planets in the 'Goldilocks Zone', are only becoming known now. Others, such as the percentage of planets that give rise to life, are still unknown. You can plug any numbers you want into any of the variables.
Thanks, that makes more sense. I also was wondering how the hell they managed to crunch the numbers for a grid that size, which from TFS sounds like what they were doing.
Velikovsky? How does his foolishness fit with your 'Electric Universe' foolishness?
You've never spent any time with actual working animals, have you? You read your propaganda and decide you know, but really have no clue. I've raised hunting dogs, my dad grew up with draft horses, our friend raised sled dogs. You probably believe we must be horrible, cruel people, our animals would disagree.
Bush was a leftist? Who knew?
The left made a serious mistake creating gun control laws that nibble at the edges of the 2nd Amendment rather than do the heavy lifting going head-on to revoke or change it. It opened the door for the Right to attack other portions of the Constitution from the side as well.
Don't ski, for me reaching my watch has only been a matter of turning back the outer jacket cuff and maybe the mitten. When you're fishing the gloves are off a lot of the time anyway.
Are you really stupid enough to think that the bozos in Nevada would have had a chance against a Hellfire missile? You really think that the reason the gov't didn't send in an attack drone is because the loonies were armed with popguns? Damn, the ACs are getting dumber all the time.
Starting in the late '60s to early '70s US companies started hiring MBAs straight out of college into management positions regardless of experience in their field of business. The tradition of moving up within a company/industry, gradually acquiring experience and competency, culminating in a CEO position, rather suddenly went out the window. Henry Ford made Edsel work on the assembly line for a year before he let him into management. Today most of the people running the Big Three automakers have never done an actual day's work in their lives, having gone straight from college into management, and those who have experience actually making something have to hide that fact from their peers. I would say the same thing about most of the rest of the US business community, for example the last person in the executive suites at Target who had actually worked on the sales floor at some point just retired a couple of years ago. No one who runs the world's second-largest retailer has actually worked in one of their stores.
If your next set of computers don't have parallel ports get an older HP PrintJet printer server and drop it on your network. Finally gave mine away with the HP LJ III in 2010 when my wife decided it took up too much room.
Friend of my folks once told me, "Do you know why a '56 Chevy is so expensive? Because they were such pieces of crap that people would just abandon them by the side of the road after they broke down the 100th time. The replacement parts in the few that survive are ten times the quality of the originals."
Kind of sad that the cars my generation learned to drive on hardly survive at all. For that matter, the whole concept of a Pinto, Vega or Gremlin being a "classic car" just seems absurd.
Had an LJ III printer for most of a decade, after one of the executives at my work decided that he wanted a BubbleJet because it took less space (joke was on him). The company had bought a couple of them when they first went into production. When I didn't need to print new resumes every year or two any more my wife finally made me get rid of it in 2010 because it took too much space. Put it on the curb with a sign that said "Works" and it was gone in under an hour. Would not be at all surprised to hear that it's still still pumping out tax returns and kids' homework today.
We bought our Sony stereo in 1992, when we first bought our house. Almost all the writing is worn off the remote control but we know what buttons are which by now. It has the last functioning cassette tape player in the house.
My oldest piece of tech gear though is the microscope my folks bought me second hand in 1974. They got it from a retiring college professor and it was at least 20 or so years old then. Can't remember the brand unfortunately, but I can see the label on its wooden box in my head, Lux-something.
A former customer has a Win98 desktop machine that runs their security system. Thing hasn't been turned off since a power outage in 2005 (UPS hiccuped), and hadn't been restarted in the previous five years. There's no way to get the data off the machine except to take the 250 mb hard drive out and stick it in some other ancient machine that has an IDE controller.
Screw that, I grew up in Traverse City. I know what the weather is like, the last year that we lived there the first week in February the temperature never got above 10 below, and six months later the first week in August never got below 97 (even at night). Now that I know what decent weather and good food is like the only time you get me back there is for weddings and funerals.
Nowhere that the temperature regularly exceeds 100 degrees could possibly be considered a "great place to live" IMNSHO. (Which is also a strike against Detroit.) And anywhere that you can stand on the roof of a three story building and see 20 miles in every direction is just plain depressing to contemplate. Give me mountains, give me rain, give me trees, give me frost in winter and warmth in summer. When people actually go stay at a hotel because their air conditioning is broken that should be a sign that the place is inherently unlivable.
OTOH, there are people who for some reason think that Des Moines, Iowa is a wonderful place to live.
As they always have? Sorry, but "always" includes a period much longer than the past 20 years. Detroit was the economic powerhouse of the United States for decades until its business leaders caught the 'MBA Disease' and managed their companies into the ground.
I still remember when I was a kid and Indira Gandhi spent a gazillion dollars on upgrading the Indian university system with an emphasis on computers. Pretty much everyone that wasn't laughing were outraged that she was "wasting" that money instead of feeding the poor. I wonder where India would be now if she were still alive.