Memories, eh? You must be about 35 years old, too, and grew up watching Gunsmoke on CBC television, back in the days when the only channels were broadcast signal.
Remember Ms. Kitty? When I was five, I was in love with her. I only found out that she was a woman of ill-repute (or at least some questionable sexual mores) when I was in my twenties....
Damn. Googled it. It was Marshall Dillon, not Matt.
Ah, hell. what's a few letters difference between friends anyway?
"Also, I don't know of any long-term studies on whether the teeth are damaged in any way, or more susceptible to decay/etc., so that question is still up in the air."
And there's the kicker: you may get white teeth, but in doing so, you might also end up destroying them in the long run.
Faced with the choice of yellowish teeth 'til I die, or no teeth starting at age 55, I think I'll take the yellowish teeth for $300, Alex.
So if you're unhappy with working directly wit XML -- lord knows I am: it obscures the content far too much -- use a formal structured human readable markup system like DocUtils or ASCIIDoc.
They're both quite robust, well-suited to documenting APIs, writing technical manuals, etcetera. They can both pump out DocBook-XML from the plaintext, lightly-formatted input.
The beauty of these formats is that they are simple and often intuitive.
You emphasize text by wrapping it in *asterisks*, just like you used to do in the old days. You create a title by
Underlining ===========
* bullets
1. numbered sequences
- and all that jazz.
I'm on the verge of completing a 50+ page hardware reference manual. The source files are plaintext, using ReST (DocUtils) markup. They are transformed straight into DocUtils XML, and my XSL/XSL-FO stylesheets digest that into PDF using FOP. It's a thing of beauty.
More difficult than laying out a publication using Ventura Publisher or FrameMaker? Yes: it's certainly not WYSIWYG. More flexible, in terms of allowing any git to subsequently update the manual? Yes, far and away easier.
Anyway, mark me down as happy with ReST structural markup, XSL/XSL-FO transformations, and FOP PDF creation!
...is that the geeks carry duck/duct tape in their wallets, and the swingers carry a condom.
Re:Yeah, thats super. We all need more of this.
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 1
And then there are sound frequencies that supposedly induce bowel movements.
The person who invents the radio/radar/whatever gun that can have a car's stereo make the driver drop a load in his pants is going to make a lot of money.
Just imagine. You're stopped at the red light. Some schmuck pulls up with his bass-thumping crap rap music spewing mofo lyrics at everyone within six blocks distance. You punch The Big Red button. The EMP fires off. And middle-class whitey gangsta-wannabe shits his pants.
Oh, please, please -- someone invent this device already!
Re:Yeah, thats super. We all need more of this.
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 1
There's radio override built into CD Players now. Or, at least, some: there's a formal "emergency response" radio frequency that better players are supposed to recognize and use to alert drivers of oncoming fire/ambulance vehicles.
I also suspect that one could beam a timing-signal frequency that would override/bugger-up the CD player's timing circuits.
What you really want is a way to induce a very large square wave into the speakers. zapem!
Yes, let's all jump on board and support yet another mega-billion project designed to kill people. Because, you know, we need more of that in this world.
Ever notice that most of those people who are in power are ex-lawyers?
Ever notice that contract language has grown increasingly more complicated over the years, as a means of ensuring lawyer income?
Ever notice the increase in responsibility-declaiming lawsuits over the years, as lawyers take any bullshit to court as a means of ensuring their income?
Ever notice that judges are allowing more and more of these cases, as a means to ensure their continued employment?
It's the slow death of a society, crushed by the weight of a useless population of lawyers who can only feed off the harm they cause to others.
We want to save ourselves, we gotta fire up those frickin laser beams already. Time for some BBQ!
You *can not* not have "Give Me the Brain". It's the second-best card game in existence (the best being the game of "Bartog", which has a Calvinball set of rules.)
The new full-colour laminated deck for GMtB is awesome. Expensive, but with forty new cards, including some that introduce some hilarious new modes of play. It's even more challenging and, at the same time, more silly.
I have tested the car on ice, wet, and gravel. I buy high-end Michelin tires. No one can stop instantaneously, so I'm unsure what you mean. I scan under cars looking for little feet, though, so I can best be prepared. I do not drive in excess of the posted limit + 10% (and that only because it seems to be the average speed around here, where one doesn't pass and doesn't get passed continuously).
Defensive driving isn't driving 30 below the limit on only rainy Sundays. It's being aware of the traffic flow both ahead and behind, planning one's route in advance, driving speeds appropriate to the conditions, maintaining one's car, respecting traffic lights, and maintaining one's cool. I deliberately practice all these things.
And the red-light runner did not cause me to crash. I reacted immediately and took evasive action, which kept us from being involved in a collision. My sole accident was forever and a day ago, at age 16, when I was a young and stupid driver. It changed my habits, making me extremely aware of the potential for damage and the need to work at being a better driver all the time.
Re: red light cameras -- in BC, they are not a revenue-generation device. The monies do not go to the municipality nor the cops; they go toward camera maintenance, and barely cover that cost.
Team 'em to drive and get serious about dealing with violations, yah, that's probably enough to do the trick.
I was being deliberately over-the-top. It instigated a good thread!
I have several reasons for believing I'm a better than average driver. Driver training, for one. Motorcycle rider training, for another, which teaches you a lot about safe driving (there's nothing quite like the vulnerability of a motorcycle to make you aware of surrounding traffic!) A dedicated effort to better my skills and increase my awareness of traffic flow, for yet another. And no accidents and no near accidents for a long, long time.
All of which are factors most drivers can't lay claim to.
I mean anything. Traffic accidents are one of the biggest killers in America (#1 killer of kids, I do believe). And yet it is so unnecessary to allow driving to continue being so dangerous.
Regular driving exams, say every three to five years: great idea.
Graduated licensing programs: great idea.
Mandatory driver training: great idea.
Black boxes reporting accident data: great idea.
Automatic safety systems: great idea.
Photo radar: great idea.
Hell, GPS tracking of vehicles would, if it reduced traffic deaths by a few percent, would be well worth the loss of privacy.
I'm at the maximum safe driver discounts. I haven't even been close to being in an accident in some fifteen years (arsehole ran a red light!). I maintain an attitude of defensive driving.
I'm not worried that I'll be the cause of an accident. But I'm scared shitless of your driving, because you are, in all probability, one of the drivers who is a threat to my continued well-being.
I'm quite willing to jump through some annoying hoops -- the repeated testing, the black box, the privacy invasions -- in order to save my life. I treasure my freedoms and privacy, I detest government interference, etcetera... but I value my life more than all that.
So bring it on.
Let's get our streets safe.
Re:Personal experiences with ADHD, mood swings, et
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
Excellent post. Thanks for sharing; it was very insightful.
* If SCO wins, what can be done? What will the consequences be?
If SCO wins, the OS community bands together to learn from every OS-design mistake and issue over the past decade, learns from every other alternative OS design (Plan9, BeOS, OS/2, QNX, etc), and creates the be-all and end-all of OSes, thoroughly stomping shit out of every closed-source OS.
And does it in a year, because they're really, really pissed about it.
For example I really wish there was some way to do gradiated speed limits.
Good god, no. The worst thing is to have traffic at varying speeds.
The happiest, safest driving I've experienced was when the BC Government allowed traffic cameras. For a solid year, almost everyone on the highways was doing within 10% of the speed limit. There was seldom any need to pass anyone, and one was seldom passed. Speeds were nice and consistent, and most everyone was safely seperated by a good 2+ seconds gap.
Then the government changed, the cameras were axed, and we have mayhem. The cops threw up their hands in disgust and basically stopped speed-reading at all. We now have a huge, wide range of speeds on the highways, with people traveling anywhere from the posted limit to at least 30+% above. If you do the speed limit, you inevitably end up with some asshole riding up your tailpipe; if you pick up the pace, you inevitably end up having to pass someone at the same time some 120kmh lunatic is passing you.
It's a mess, accident rates are up, and driving is considerably more stressful.
Hell, no. She pulled into traffic having seen the asshat 4x further away than required for her to safely pull out, had he been driving the speed limit. He was 2x the distance required had she correctly identified that he was speeding far in excess.
She's only at fault for not having identified that he was travelling so far beyond the speed limit that he was in danger of becoming a tachyon. She's at fault for not assuming he was an insane maniac with intent to kill.
I don't think there are very many drivers who, having seen the oncoming traffic is several blocks away, would feel it is unsafe to pull out.
Why, oh why, should we care whether some arsehole doing 114mph in a residential area self-incriminates? He's a murderer. This was no accident: he deliberately chose to go over 4x the speed limit through a neighbourhood with children and pedestrians. He chose to kill anyone that stepped out into the road.
Self-incrimination is a damn fine thing when it comes to that sort of reckless irresponsibility. We could use a lot more of it. I, for one, just hate being killed by assholes who get off on technicalities.
How the FUCK did the board justify a penny-per-share incentive package? Where's the fucking incentive? That asshole could sell Sun for a plateful of shit and still profit by hundreds-fold.
It's time for shareholders to get angry. Really, really angry with jackass boards of directors who are intent only on lining their own pockets with gold. It's outright fucking theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Memories, eh? You must be about 35 years old, too, and grew up watching Gunsmoke on CBC television, back in the days when the only channels were broadcast signal.
...
Remember Ms. Kitty? When I was five, I was in love with her. I only found out that she was a woman of ill-repute (or at least some questionable sexual mores) when I was in my twenties.
Damn. Googled it. It was Marshall Dillon, not Matt.
Ah, hell. what's a few letters difference between friends anyway?
To put the final nail in the coffin, SuSE/IBM ought to bring the project in under the accepted bid price. That would wake up a LOT of PHBs.
"Also, I don't know of any long-term studies on whether the teeth are damaged in any way, or more susceptible to decay/etc., so that question is still up in the air."
And there's the kicker: you may get white teeth, but in doing so, you might also end up destroying them in the long run.
Faced with the choice of yellowish teeth 'til I die, or no teeth starting at age 55, I think I'll take the yellowish teeth for $300, Alex.
So if you're unhappy with working directly wit XML -- lord knows I am: it obscures the content far too much -- use a formal structured human readable markup system like DocUtils or ASCIIDoc.
They're both quite robust, well-suited to documenting APIs, writing technical manuals, etcetera. They can both pump out DocBook-XML from the plaintext, lightly-formatted input.
The beauty of these formats is that they are simple and often intuitive.
You emphasize text by wrapping it in *asterisks*, just like you used to do in the old days. You create a title by
Underlining
===========
* bullets
1. numbered sequences
- and all that jazz.
I'm on the verge of completing a 50+ page hardware reference manual. The source files are plaintext, using ReST (DocUtils) markup. They are transformed straight into DocUtils XML, and my XSL/XSL-FO stylesheets digest that into PDF using FOP. It's a thing of beauty.
More difficult than laying out a publication using Ventura Publisher or FrameMaker? Yes: it's certainly not WYSIWYG. More flexible, in terms of allowing any git to subsequently update the manual? Yes, far and away easier.
Anyway, mark me down as happy with ReST structural markup, XSL/XSL-FO transformations, and FOP PDF creation!
...is that the geeks carry duck/duct tape in their wallets, and the swingers carry a condom.
And then there are sound frequencies that supposedly induce bowel movements.
The person who invents the radio/radar/whatever gun that can have a car's stereo make the driver drop a load in his pants is going to make a lot of money.
Just imagine. You're stopped at the red light. Some schmuck pulls up with his bass-thumping crap rap music spewing mofo lyrics at everyone within six blocks distance. You punch The Big Red button. The EMP fires off. And middle-class whitey gangsta-wannabe shits his pants.
Oh, please, please -- someone invent this device already!
There's radio override built into CD Players now. Or, at least, some: there's a formal "emergency response" radio frequency that better players are supposed to recognize and use to alert drivers of oncoming fire/ambulance vehicles.
I also suspect that one could beam a timing-signal frequency that would override/bugger-up the CD player's timing circuits.
What you really want is a way to induce a very large square wave into the speakers. zapem!
It also sounds like an easy way for rip-offees to get the info for the rip-off artists who screwed them.
I think I'll start marketing a booklet on faking letterhead, with a baseball bat included. "How to Revenge EBay Scam Artists in Three Easy Steps."
Yes, let's all jump on board and support yet another mega-billion project designed to kill people. Because, you know, we need more of that in this world.
Does that not tell everything you need to know about the quality of person they can attract for minimum-wage security jobs?
"Six bucks an hour? Sure, I'll risk blowing myself up for that kind of dough!"
Gah.
Ever notice that most of those people who are in power are ex-lawyers?
Ever notice that contract language has grown increasingly more complicated over the years, as a means of ensuring lawyer income?
Ever notice the increase in responsibility-declaiming lawsuits over the years, as lawyers take any bullshit to court as a means of ensuring their income?
Ever notice that judges are allowing more and more of these cases, as a means to ensure their continued employment?
It's the slow death of a society, crushed by the weight of a useless population of lawyers who can only feed off the harm they cause to others.
We want to save ourselves, we gotta fire up those frickin laser beams already. Time for some BBQ!
You *can not* not have "Give Me the Brain". It's the second-best card game in existence (the best being the game of "Bartog", which has a Calvinball set of rules.)
The new full-colour laminated deck for GMtB is awesome. Expensive, but with forty new cards, including some that introduce some hilarious new modes of play. It's even more challenging and, at the same time, more silly.
I have tested the car on ice, wet, and gravel. I buy high-end Michelin tires. No one can stop instantaneously, so I'm unsure what you mean. I scan under cars looking for little feet, though, so I can best be prepared. I do not drive in excess of the posted limit + 10% (and that only because it seems to be the average speed around here, where one doesn't pass and doesn't get passed continuously).
Defensive driving isn't driving 30 below the limit on only rainy Sundays. It's being aware of the traffic flow both ahead and behind, planning one's route in advance, driving speeds appropriate to the conditions, maintaining one's car, respecting traffic lights, and maintaining one's cool. I deliberately practice all these things.
And the red-light runner did not cause me to crash. I reacted immediately and took evasive action, which kept us from being involved in a collision. My sole accident was forever and a day ago, at age 16, when I was a young and stupid driver. It changed my habits, making me extremely aware of the potential for damage and the need to work at being a better driver all the time.
Re: red light cameras -- in BC, they are not a revenue-generation device. The monies do not go to the municipality nor the cops; they go toward camera maintenance, and barely cover that cost.
Team 'em to drive and get serious about dealing with violations, yah, that's probably enough to do the trick.
I was being deliberately over-the-top. It instigated a good thread!
Yah, yah, I've read the study previously.
I have several reasons for believing I'm a better than average driver. Driver training, for one. Motorcycle rider training, for another, which teaches you a lot about safe driving (there's nothing quite like the vulnerability of a motorcycle to make you aware of surrounding traffic!) A dedicated effort to better my skills and increase my awareness of traffic flow, for yet another. And no accidents and no near accidents for a long, long time.
All of which are factors most drivers can't lay claim to.
I mean anything. Traffic accidents are one of the biggest killers in America (#1 killer of kids, I do believe). And yet it is so unnecessary to allow driving to continue being so dangerous.
Regular driving exams, say every three to five years: great idea.
Graduated licensing programs: great idea.
Mandatory driver training: great idea.
Black boxes reporting accident data: great idea.
Automatic safety systems: great idea.
Photo radar: great idea.
Hell, GPS tracking of vehicles would, if it reduced traffic deaths by a few percent, would be well worth the loss of privacy.
I'm at the maximum safe driver discounts. I haven't even been close to being in an accident in some fifteen years (arsehole ran a red light!). I maintain an attitude of defensive driving.
I'm not worried that I'll be the cause of an accident. But I'm scared shitless of your driving, because you are, in all probability, one of the drivers who is a threat to my continued well-being.
I'm quite willing to jump through some annoying hoops -- the repeated testing, the black box, the privacy invasions -- in order to save my life. I treasure my freedoms and privacy, I detest government interference, etcetera... but I value my life more than all that.
So bring it on.
Let's get our streets safe.
Excellent post. Thanks for sharing; it was very insightful.
Sigh. And I started browsing only 'cause I couldn't fall asleep in the first place.
* If SCO wins, what can be done? What will the consequences be?
If SCO wins, the OS community bands together to learn from every OS-design mistake and issue over the past decade, learns from every other alternative OS design (Plan9, BeOS, OS/2, QNX, etc), and creates the be-all and end-all of OSes, thoroughly stomping shit out of every closed-source OS.
And does it in a year, because they're really, really pissed about it.
For example I really wish there was some way to do gradiated speed limits.
Good god, no. The worst thing is to have traffic at varying speeds.
The happiest, safest driving I've experienced was when the BC Government allowed traffic cameras. For a solid year, almost everyone on the highways was doing within 10% of the speed limit. There was seldom any need to pass anyone, and one was seldom passed. Speeds were nice and consistent, and most everyone was safely seperated by a good 2+ seconds gap.
Then the government changed, the cameras were axed, and we have mayhem. The cops threw up their hands in disgust and basically stopped speed-reading at all. We now have a huge, wide range of speeds on the highways, with people traveling anywhere from the posted limit to at least 30+% above. If you do the speed limit, you inevitably end up with some asshole riding up your tailpipe; if you pick up the pace, you inevitably end up having to pass someone at the same time some 120kmh lunatic is passing you.
It's a mess, accident rates are up, and driving is considerably more stressful.
At fault for pulling into moving traffic?
Hell, no. She pulled into traffic having seen the asshat 4x further away than required for her to safely pull out, had he been driving the speed limit. He was 2x the distance required had she correctly identified that he was speeding far in excess.
She's only at fault for not having identified that he was travelling so far beyond the speed limit that he was in danger of becoming a tachyon. She's at fault for not assuming he was an insane maniac with intent to kill.
I don't think there are very many drivers who, having seen the oncoming traffic is several blocks away, would feel it is unsafe to pull out.
Why, oh why, should we care whether some arsehole doing 114mph in a residential area self-incriminates? He's a murderer . This was no accident: he deliberately chose to go over 4x the speed limit through a neighbourhood with children and pedestrians. He chose to kill anyone that stepped out into the road.
Self-incrimination is a damn fine thing when it comes to that sort of reckless irresponsibility. We could use a lot more of it. I, for one, just hate being killed by assholes who get off on technicalities.
Could you do a write-up/web page on this, or mail it as a suggestion to loony Sam, or somesuch? I'd love to see some information on all this.
Guh. c/Sun/SCO/
I should proofread when I'm upset.
How the FUCK did the board justify a penny-per-share incentive package? Where's the fucking incentive? That asshole could sell Sun for a plateful of shit and still profit by hundreds-fold.
It's time for shareholders to get angry. Really, really angry with jackass boards of directors who are intent only on lining their own pockets with gold. It's outright fucking theft.