Write your MP, phone him (long distance rates are TOO cheap). Do the same to the Prime Minister Locate them here. Write your newspaper. Sign up in the consultation. Talk to others who care.
Be respectful and clear. Here are some potential talking points: 1. The levy should be enough. 2. Ordinary citizens keep opposing this, don't keep re-introducing it. 3. If a politician wants to reverse alienation of young voters, come out vocally against bills like this.
Unlike parent I am not being funny but I thought NLP was "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" not Natural Language Processing. This link gives a bunch of other options. Would studying a trip to some place in South Africa help? I doubt it.
Having been married for 21.5 years, but not to a geek, my #1 recommendation is to follow the "Platinum Rule":
"Do unto [your spouse] as you would have them do to you -- if you were them."
Without adding that last clause, the Golden Rule can become a little thin. It's arguable that the extra clause is implied in the rest of the Golden Rule but it's better to put it bluntly, out there. If you don't realize that your spouse does not have exactly the same set of thoughts, dreams, desires, wishes etc., your attempts to apply the Golden Rule will be clumsy and probably do more harm than good.
All the best to you! This is the second toughest job you'll ever love (parenting is the toughest one -- sorry military; your job is tough, too, but your deployment comes to an end, parenting doesn't).
cheers...ank
1994 Corolla with over 400,000km most with 10%Eth
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 1
If "Ethanol destroys engines" as a general rule, why have I gotten most of the way to the moon in my 14 year old car when, so long as it was practicable I consistently put 10% Ethanol in the tank?
Let's give up on the FUD, folks. One important point is: is your engine engineered for Eth? Nowadays most car engines are designed for up to 15% Eth. The other point is can we produce the Eth in ways that don't deprive others of food AND don't use up more energy than that in the Ethanol they produce.
So let's make sure of its effects: cleaner burn in the engine? cleaner exhaust? and if it passes, find all the otherwise-non-food and net-green sources of Eth we can and run our engines on this annually renewable resource.
Science over FUD please. We can't afford stupid decisions so well as we once thought we could.
I think the fact that this post has been up for almost an hour and has only 33 follow-ons shows what the software community thinks of D.
One has to acknowledge that Back in The Day, Walter Bright did all of us a great service in producing the first PC-based C++ compiler (Zortech) which effectively forced Borland and Microsoft to take the language seriously.
Unfortunately, for all of us, he seems to be better at invention than collaboration but that doesn't devalue the contribution he made (structurally) to get us to where we are.
... as a software developer. Some of the comments about "work product" instead of certifications refers more to developers, not network techs. bctechnology.com's career pages are your friend.
This last quarter, the Canadian economy contracted by 0.1% but grew by 1.7% if you take the ailing auto industry, joined at the hip with the ones in the US out of the numbers. I suspect the central bank may soon do things that are good for Ontario and bad for everyone else but for now that has not happened.
I'm not sure what you meant about "hoops". Of course you need to get a "work visa", "landed immigrant status" or be a citizen, to start with but more than that...?
Were you planning on drifting from contract to contract or settling down at some company? There are a number of companies in the Greater Vancouver area that will want your skills in either case and you should be able to find a good placement with or without the help of an agent. On being hired full-time, you may find yourself routinely on three month probation but after that, short of incompetence or a business downturn, your place should be pretty secure. If you are laid off ("made redundant") you should get a pay-out of a fortnight's (or more usually a month's) pay per year of service. (If you get less, a lawyer can be of assistance unless there just ain't no more blood in that stone.)
Greater Vancouver includes North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and Burnaby, as sort of an "inner ring". That's where most of the jobs are, and that's where housing is more expensive. Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Surrey, Langley, Delta and White Rock are all still technically inside Greater Vancouver, and some jobs (many of them with local government agencies) are out there along with more affordable housing.
Personally, I commute from Langley to Burnaby and have done so in the past by bus. After a recent move, I'm out beyond the pale for transit, so I do it by car and have had mixed success pooling. Fortunately, my employer is quite flexible about work-at-home and I do that several days per week. I know another guy at work took a 20% pay cut to work four days a week some years ago and the company went with that as well.
I have been in the developer market for over twenty years and have had tenures from 10 months through 7 years, mostly depending on market conditions (1992 and 2001 were particularly bad years).
All these things can be managed and juggled pretty well. Welcome to BC and maybe we'll cross paths eventually.
I have a B.Sc. (Applied Math/Computing Science) degree that included some physics and I once tried to plow through Misner-Thorne-Wheeler's Gravitation (Differential Topology without a tutor while I was also working as a software developer, trying to be a good hubby/dad was tough) which I received one year as a birthday gift from my wife.
I downloaded the paper and read through it -- with my teenage boys alongside. I think he may be on to something because of the quantity of unexplained and partially explained phenomena he can give a simple explanation for -- it may be wrong, but it sounds simple, feels elegant. I especially liked the idea of getting rid of the "tuning-fork" model of classifying galaxies which seemed arbitrary enough to invoke Ole's Law: wrongness = ugliness * hardness.
But again, let me emphasize: I don't know enough about the rest of the science behind the classification to give good reasons beyond æsthetic ones regarding why I didn't like it.
As soon as I saw the title of this subject, it got me thinking about Mayer's paper. I'm sorry to see the thing has gotten shut down this hard. The chain of events that led to him losing his (visible) guest access shows that his ideas struck a lot of our truth-sense nerves as being on. It'll be interesting to see if his notions are borne out in the end.
The poster did link to the whole thread, so I think the charge of misquotation is quite thin.
You talk somewhat in that thread about low-risk vs. risk-free code in regard to patent infringement. If there are technologies about which Microsoft has already been known to sabre-rattle over in a standard (OOXML), then implementing code that conforms to that standard can never be even low-risk, never mind risk-free.
But patent risk isn't even the bottom line problem with the groklaw folks, if you've bothered to read what they're writing about OOXML: There are things in the OOXML standard which have no clear specification outside of "That's how [a particular version of MS-Word] does it. Just reverse engineer what it does and you'll be correct." That kind of garbazh doesn't belong in a standard.
Fuzzy logic belongs in speculative laboratories, not in standards, any standards whether open or closed. Fuzzy logic that can only be resolved by running closed-source software (whose EULA includes, if memory serves, a covenant not to reverse engineer!) really doesn't belong in any standards, but it's particularly odious in open standards.
If you don't get that, that's pretty sad.
Re-read what you're saying with RMS' four freedoms in the back of your mind (and yes, they're admirable even if you don't buy everything that RMS says, as I don't) and maybe, just maybe a little bit of understanding will slip in? At least, understanding what people objected to in what you wrote. All of it. In context.
If the iTunes helper service only watches for iPods being connected and disconnected, then I'm being needlessly paranoid. But my paranoia is well-earned with all the other things a Windoze box does and does not do.
I've never been called an elitist snob about my music, though. That is a new one. I'm actually quite accepting and exploratory of other musical styles. In fact, my musical tastes are more youthful than those of my kids -- drives them crazy: I have more to talk about on new music with their friends than they do. As far as I'm concerned, almost anything is worth at least one listen.
As for your organizational criteria with iTunes, it sounds like what you really need is a custom SQL database. I will be glad to craft such a thing for you at an hourly rate to be determined. Oh forgive me, I'm teasing.
Me cool? pshaw... I'm a 44 year old geek, married once (19 years and counting), father of three sons, long-term bus rider and ex-member of five failed carpools. Any pretensions I had to believing myself "cool" disappeared around the time I tipped the scales past 14 stone. All I wanted (in this sphere of interest) was some way of easily digitizing my music and playing it without having the files messed with. iTunes didn't do it for me, so if people are being encouraged to upgrade to it from what sounds like loathly things happening to MusicMatch, I thought it worth a couple of minutes to put my oar in and rebut.
I will say, thought, that I've been amused at the selection of responses my post garnered. I'll be chuckling well into next week at this rate.
... that whenever I talk to doctrinaire iTunes/iPod users, the existence of the store is one of the first five topics that come up. I was simply trying to say, that the existence of the store wasn't a selling point for me.
(: And I did invite all and sundry to write me off as a curmudgeon...:)
iTunes is not a good enough option. Here are reasons I dislike running iTunes on Windows and will not go back to it there:
It installs a "helper" program as a service. I've got enough services running on my computer. Given how little control I have over my Windows box by default, I'd just as well not have another service running.
I don't like the idea of buying individual songs. I'd rather let the artist speak his/her/their whole album to me at once. It seems a little obscene, a little violating to the artistic process to cherry-pick. And if I'd done so in the past, I would have missed some real gems. Yes, I also loathe top-40 radio.
Garbage in my MP3s. Open the Info view of some MP3 file you've ripped from your own collection of CDs, tapes and (yes!) vinyl (like the Alt-3 view in WinAmp 2.8). Add a comment. Now manage that MP3 file in iTunes. Open the Info view again. What's all that hexadecimal goo in the Comment field!? Bad program. Bad, bad program. Leave user data as you found it!
Write me off as a curmudgeon but when I run an MP3 player, I expect something that launches, plays MP3s (and leaves their content alone) and quits nicely when it leaves. iTunes doth not answer the bell, methinks, and its music purchase model doesn't do it for me either.
Okay. So it's news. Someone else has officially jumped into the plutonium-laced hot tub built by MS & Novell. But folks, Dell has been a Microsoft shill for so long that this really isn't that surprising. The only aspect of this story whose betting outcome was in doubt until now was how long before they joined it.
Meanwhile, be sure not to use breakpoints or linked lists unless you're running on Dell hardware, or running an operating system from Microsoft or Novell. Especially now that you know that there are patents out on them -- paying a bill three times is three times as annoying. Oh yeah. That's the kind of world I wanted this to end up being. (Note: this paragraph was meant to be sarcasm and satire, without sufficient connection with legal realities to be taken as advice or even a valid warning)
Doesn't mentioning Scientology in a non-Scientology setting put you at risk of copyright infringement lawsuits? Call your lawyer, now! Still, it's a funny line, with a grain of truth
Linux has its weaknesses, yes. But its number one strength is brain-share, not brain-ownership. As a developer, stick with Microsoft and you're in a proprietary language on a proprietary platform (C#,.NET). Stick with Apple and you're in a different nearly proprietary language on another proprietary platform (Objective-C 2, Cocoa/Carbon). I don't want to be beholden to either party. I, as a developer want a wider market, not a narrower one, and not one where someone can charge me a vigorish just to keep doing what I love to do: write useful software that lots of people will want to use.
A non-cow produces no milk or anything good of that ilk. With no cud to chew what else can it do but spew fud for the Redmond-based bilk.
If you're going to ask for an article to be called trollish, at least have the decency to stand behind your name. Oh, whoops. You must be Mr. Enderle. So pleased to meet you at last...
(incidentally for the humour-challenged, the first words of that limerick was a contraction of "Anonymous Coward")
I have yet to see "warm" fluorscent bulbs that didn't ultimately make me feel like a cave dweller. Thank goodness there're options -- as you did mention. Then again, perhaps you have access to a supplier that I do not. I'll keep looking, I suppose...ank
I find myself feeling like I'm confined in an underground cavern with insufficient light (see C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, 2nd last chapter), whenever I'm in a room lit up entirely by CFLs. Weak fluorescents and/or bad ballasts may flicker but flat fluorescent output with Hg-spectrum spikes is a short sweet way of turning us all into disgruntled trolls.
Of course, Californians won't notice much because their winter days don't shorten by as much as those from Whatcom County, WA, Maine, or Alaska (and I'm broadening things because As Goes Cally-4-nia...) but I think they'd best get ready to face crankier neighbours from the rest of their grand country if this goes through. Either that or candle consumption that goes through the roof to make up for the lack.
beware of unintended side effects!...ank ps: I admit, black-body radiation is a REALLY inefficient way to produce light. Trying to improve this is a good thing. pps: then again, there's always the white-LED-array solution -- with its built-in dimmer-switch analog: how many lights are on now?
What do you expect an antenna (whether chip or tattoo pattern) to do but receive all that EM energy and convert it to a small, localized, but sub-dermal and therefore very painful burn.
Hmmm... I don't think the military want it and I don't think any human in their right mind want it either (Implicit question regarding the sanity of those already implanted intentional).
Who needs to be a so-called "Revelation nutter" not to want to shun this? (And talk about "argumentum ad hominem - abusive" label! not that slashdot has ever been about sane, reasoned dialog <grin>)
Too bad for you he doesn't need your vote for another SIX!! years. You gotta wonder just who's been contributing to these guys' campaign funds. "Fair use" must be like meat in North Korea to these guys!
Preamble: As I was watching Hacking Democracy, I was struck, on the final hack, with how at least the last voting problem could be prevented procedurally. It might be time-consuming, and unless carried out by volunteers from all sides, expensive, but doing things right often is: To get a bunch of people in a room to zero and watch being zeroed all the memory cards for one precinct, which then go into signed/sealed containers and only cards from those containers are inserted into voting machines, verifiably by polling-station workers. etc. The problems with the hackability of GEMS as demonstrated in the program would still exist, of course, but...
Question:...do you think it's impossible for the current crop of voting machines and tabulators to be "rescued" from total malleability by more layers of human checks and balances? (I think it isn't but you've seen more of the ugly details than I have, what do you say?) Are such layers feasible? Does it take a higher level of volunteerism to make them so?
Follow-on rambling: If so, of course the problem still remains for those human checks and balances to be mandated across the whole US. Aside from the interesting technical ways of doctoring elections that the voting machines allow, I was struck, as a Canadian, with the inherent weakness of a system where standards are so patchwork and the mechanism of gauging political outcomes is itself so open to influence by regional players in the political process. Some things, like inter-regional highways, national defense and the conducting of elections are best handled centrally, no matter how loudly the regions yammer to the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
Write your MP, phone him (long distance rates are TOO cheap).
Do the same to the Prime Minister
Locate them here.
Write your newspaper. Sign up in the consultation.
Talk to others who care.
Be respectful and clear. Here are some potential talking points:
1. The levy should be enough.
2. Ordinary citizens keep opposing this, don't keep re-introducing it.
3. If a politician wants to reverse alienation of young voters, come out vocally against bills like this.
Maybe one day this will stop coming back?
Please... mod-up parent. This is so true.
Unlike parent I am not being funny but I thought NLP was "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" not Natural Language Processing. This link gives a bunch of other options. Would studying a trip to some place in South Africa help? I doubt it.
Having been married for 21.5 years, but not to a geek, my #1 recommendation is to follow the "Platinum Rule":
"Do unto [your spouse] as you would have them do to you -- if you were them."
Without adding that last clause, the Golden Rule can become a little thin. It's arguable that the extra clause is implied in the rest of the Golden Rule but it's better to put it bluntly, out there. If you don't realize that your spouse does not have exactly the same set of thoughts, dreams, desires, wishes etc., your attempts to apply the Golden Rule will be clumsy and probably do more harm than good.
All the best to you! This is the second toughest job you'll ever love (parenting is the toughest one -- sorry military; your job is tough, too, but your deployment comes to an end, parenting doesn't).
cheers...ank
If "Ethanol destroys engines" as a general rule, why have I gotten most of the way to the moon in my 14 year old car when, so long as it was practicable I consistently put 10% Ethanol in the tank?
Let's give up on the FUD, folks. One important point is: is your engine engineered for Eth? Nowadays most car engines are designed for up to 15% Eth. The other point is can we produce the Eth in ways that don't deprive others of food AND don't use up more energy than that in the Ethanol they produce.
So let's make sure of its effects: cleaner burn in the engine? cleaner exhaust? and if it passes, find all the otherwise-non-food and net-green sources of Eth we can and run our engines on this annually renewable resource.
Science over FUD please. We can't afford stupid decisions so well as we once thought we could.
cheers...ank
I think the fact that this post has been up for almost an hour and has only 33 follow-ons shows what the software community thinks of D.
One has to acknowledge that Back in The Day, Walter Bright did all of us a great service in producing the first PC-based C++ compiler (Zortech) which effectively forced Borland and Microsoft to take the language seriously.
Unfortunately, for all of us, he seems to be better at invention than collaboration but that doesn't devalue the contribution he made (structurally) to get us to where we are.
cheers...ank
... as a software developer. Some of the comments about "work product" instead of certifications refers more to developers, not network techs. bctechnology.com's career pages are your friend.
This last quarter, the Canadian economy contracted by 0.1% but grew by 1.7% if you take the ailing auto industry, joined at the hip with the ones in the US out of the numbers. I suspect the central bank may soon do things that are good for Ontario and bad for everyone else but for now that has not happened.
I'm not sure what you meant about "hoops". Of course you need to get a "work visa", "landed immigrant status" or be a citizen, to start with but more than that...?
Were you planning on drifting from contract to contract or settling down at some company? There are a number of companies in the Greater Vancouver area that will want your skills in either case and you should be able to find a good placement with or without the help of an agent. On being hired full-time, you may find yourself routinely on three month probation but after that, short of incompetence or a business downturn, your place should be pretty secure. If you are laid off ("made redundant") you should get a pay-out of a fortnight's (or more usually a month's) pay per year of service. (If you get less, a lawyer can be of assistance unless there just ain't no more blood in that stone.)
Greater Vancouver includes North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and Burnaby, as sort of an "inner ring". That's where most of the jobs are, and that's where housing is more expensive. Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Surrey, Langley, Delta and White Rock are all still technically inside Greater Vancouver, and some jobs (many of them with local government agencies) are out there along with more affordable housing.
Personally, I commute from Langley to Burnaby and have done so in the past by bus. After a recent move, I'm out beyond the pale for transit, so I do it by car and have had mixed success pooling. Fortunately, my employer is quite flexible about work-at-home and I do that several days per week. I know another guy at work took a 20% pay cut to work four days a week some years ago and the company went with that as well.
I have been in the developer market for over twenty years and have had tenures from 10 months through 7 years, mostly depending on market conditions (1992 and 2001 were particularly bad years).
All these things can be managed and juggled pretty well. Welcome to BC and maybe we'll cross paths eventually.
cheers...ank
I downloaded the paper and read through it -- with my teenage boys alongside. I think he may be on to something because of the quantity of unexplained and partially explained phenomena he can give a simple explanation for -- it may be wrong, but it sounds simple, feels elegant. I especially liked the idea of getting rid of the "tuning-fork" model of classifying galaxies which seemed arbitrary enough to invoke Ole's Law: wrongness = ugliness * hardness.
But again, let me emphasize: I don't know enough about the rest of the science behind the classification to give good reasons beyond æsthetic ones regarding why I didn't like it.
As soon as I saw the title of this subject, it got me thinking about Mayer's paper. I'm sorry to see the thing has gotten shut down this hard. The chain of events that led to him losing his (visible) guest access shows that his ideas struck a lot of our truth-sense nerves as being on. It'll be interesting to see if his notions are borne out in the end.
to truth...ank
The poster did link to the whole thread, so I think the charge of misquotation is quite thin.
You talk somewhat in that thread about low-risk vs. risk-free code in regard to patent infringement. If there are technologies about which Microsoft has already been known to sabre-rattle over in a standard (OOXML), then implementing code that conforms to that standard can never be even low-risk, never mind risk-free.
But patent risk isn't even the bottom line problem with the groklaw folks, if you've bothered to read what they're writing about OOXML: There are things in the OOXML standard which have no clear specification outside of "That's how [a particular version of MS-Word] does it. Just reverse engineer what it does and you'll be correct." That kind of garbazh doesn't belong in a standard.
Fuzzy logic belongs in speculative laboratories, not in standards, any standards whether open or closed. Fuzzy logic that can only be resolved by running closed-source software (whose EULA includes, if memory serves, a covenant not to reverse engineer!) really doesn't belong in any standards, but it's particularly odious in open standards.
If you don't get that, that's pretty sad.
Re-read what you're saying with RMS' four freedoms in the back of your mind (and yes, they're admirable even if you don't buy everything that RMS says, as I don't) and maybe, just maybe a little bit of understanding will slip in? At least, understanding what people objected to in what you wrote. All of it. In context.
cheers...ank
If the iTunes helper service only watches for iPods being connected and disconnected, then I'm being needlessly paranoid. But my paranoia is well-earned with all the other things a Windoze box does and does not do.
I've never been called an elitist snob about my music, though. That is a new one. I'm actually quite accepting and exploratory of other musical styles. In fact, my musical tastes are more youthful than those of my kids -- drives them crazy: I have more to talk about on new music with their friends than they do. As far as I'm concerned, almost anything is worth at least one listen.
As for your organizational criteria with iTunes, it sounds like what you really need is a custom SQL database. I will be glad to craft such a thing for you at an hourly rate to be determined. Oh forgive me, I'm teasing.
Me cool? pshaw... I'm a 44 year old geek, married once (19 years and counting), father of three sons, long-term bus rider and ex-member of five failed carpools. Any pretensions I had to believing myself "cool" disappeared around the time I tipped the scales past 14 stone. All I wanted (in this sphere of interest) was some way of easily digitizing my music and playing it without having the files messed with. iTunes didn't do it for me, so if people are being encouraged to upgrade to it from what sounds like loathly things happening to MusicMatch, I thought it worth a couple of minutes to put my oar in and rebut.
I will say, thought, that I've been amused at the selection of responses my post garnered. I'll be chuckling well into next week at this rate.
cheers...ank
... that whenever I talk to doctrinaire iTunes/iPod users, the existence of the store is one of the first five topics that come up. I was simply trying to say, that the existence of the store wasn't a selling point for me.
:)
(: And I did invite all and sundry to write me off as a curmudgeon...
cheers...ank
- It installs a "helper" program as a service. I've got enough services running on my computer. Given how little control I have over my Windows box by default, I'd just as well not have another service running.
- I don't like the idea of buying individual songs. I'd rather let the artist speak his/her/their whole album to me at once. It seems a little obscene, a little violating to the artistic process to cherry-pick. And if I'd done so in the past, I would have missed some real gems. Yes, I also loathe top-40 radio.
- Garbage in my MP3s. Open the Info view of some MP3 file you've ripped from your own collection of CDs, tapes and (yes!) vinyl (like the Alt-3 view in WinAmp 2.8). Add a comment. Now manage that MP3 file in iTunes. Open the Info view again. What's all that hexadecimal goo in the Comment field!? Bad program. Bad, bad program. Leave user data as you found it!
Write me off as a curmudgeon but when I run an MP3 player, I expect something that launches, plays MP3s (and leaves their content alone) and quits nicely when it leaves. iTunes doth not answer the bell, methinks, and its music purchase model doesn't do it for me either.cheers...ank, curmudgeon, I!
The real one? Or Robert Sawyer's fictional, deceased (I believe it was) Huntington's sufferer? (see FrameShift)
Okay. So it's news. Someone else has officially jumped into the plutonium-laced hot tub built by MS & Novell. But folks, Dell has been a Microsoft shill for so long that this really isn't that surprising. The only aspect of this story whose betting outcome was in doubt until now was how long before they joined it.
Meanwhile, be sure not to use breakpoints or linked lists unless you're running on Dell hardware, or running an operating system from Microsoft or Novell. Especially now that you know that there are patents out on them -- paying a bill three times is three times as annoying. Oh yeah. That's the kind of world I wanted this to end up being. (Note: this paragraph was meant to be sarcasm and satire, without sufficient connection with legal realities to be taken as advice or even a valid warning)
cheers...ank
Yeah... I fell into ranting mode and started getting inaccurate. It comes of talking with/about trolls.
Doesn't mentioning Scientology in a non-Scientology setting put you at risk of copyright infringement lawsuits? Call your lawyer, now! Still, it's a funny line, with a grain of truth
.NET). Stick with Apple and you're in a different nearly proprietary language on another proprietary platform (Objective-C 2, Cocoa/Carbon). I don't want to be beholden to either party. I, as a developer want a wider market, not a narrower one, and not one where someone can charge me a vigorish just to keep doing what I love to do: write useful software that lots of people will want to use.
Linux has its weaknesses, yes. But its number one strength is brain-share, not brain-ownership. As a developer, stick with Microsoft and you're in a proprietary language on a proprietary platform (C#,
cheers...ank
A non-cow produces no milk
or anything good of that ilk.
With no cud to chew
what else can it do
but spew fud for the Redmond-based bilk.
If you're going to ask for an article to be called trollish, at least have the decency to stand behind your name. Oh, whoops. You must be Mr. Enderle. So pleased to meet you at last...
(incidentally for the humour-challenged, the first words of that limerick was a contraction of "Anonymous Coward")
cheers...ank
When I saw this article on slashdot, I had to check my calendar. Nope. April 1 is still 23 days away.
back to work...ank
I have yet to see "warm" fluorscent bulbs that didn't ultimately make me feel like a cave dweller. Thank goodness there're options -- as you did mention. Then again, perhaps you have access to a supplier that I do not. I'll keep looking, I suppose...ank
I find myself feeling like I'm confined in an underground cavern with insufficient light (see C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, 2nd last chapter), whenever I'm in a room lit up entirely by CFLs. Weak fluorescents and/or bad ballasts may flicker but flat fluorescent output with Hg-spectrum spikes is a short sweet way of turning us all into disgruntled trolls.
Of course, Californians won't notice much because their winter days don't shorten by as much as those from Whatcom County, WA, Maine, or Alaska (and I'm broadening things because As Goes Cally-4-nia...) but I think they'd best get ready to face crankier neighbours from the rest of their grand country if this goes through. Either that or candle consumption that goes through the roof to make up for the lack.
beware of unintended side effects!...ank
ps: I admit, black-body radiation is a REALLY inefficient way to produce light. Trying to improve this is a good thing.
pps: then again, there's always the white-LED-array solution -- with its built-in dimmer-switch analog: how many lights are on now?
parent is not a troll, just a failure to perceive the latest iteration in the "Soviet Canuckistan" joke.
Slava k partiy i lyoodyamn, tavarishchi! (long live babelfish)
Hmmm... I don't think the military want it and I don't think any human in their right mind want it either (Implicit question regarding the sanity of those already implanted intentional).
Who needs to be a so-called "Revelation nutter" not to want to shun this? (And talk about "argumentum ad hominem - abusive" label! not that slashdot has ever been about sane, reasoned dialog <grin>)
cheers...ank
sheesh...ank
Aww... you beat me to it!
just remember, the enemy's gate is down...ank
Preamble: As I was watching Hacking Democracy, I was struck, on the final hack, with how at least the last voting problem could be prevented procedurally. It might be time-consuming, and unless carried out by volunteers from all sides, expensive, but doing things right often is: To get a bunch of people in a room to zero and watch being zeroed all the memory cards for one precinct, which then go into signed/sealed containers and only cards from those containers are inserted into voting machines, verifiably by polling-station workers. etc. The problems with the hackability of GEMS as demonstrated in the program would still exist, of course, but...
...do you think it's impossible for the current crop of voting machines and tabulators to be "rescued" from total malleability by more layers of human checks and balances? (I think it isn't but you've seen more of the ugly details than I have, what do you say?) Are such layers feasible? Does it take a higher level of volunteerism to make them so?
Question:
Follow-on rambling: If so, of course the problem still remains for those human checks and balances to be mandated across the whole US. Aside from the interesting technical ways of doctoring elections that the voting machines allow, I was struck, as a Canadian, with the inherent weakness of a system where standards are so patchwork and the mechanism of gauging political outcomes is itself so open to influence by regional players in the political process. Some things, like inter-regional highways, national defense and the conducting of elections are best handled centrally, no matter how loudly the regions yammer to the contrary.