Also heard that one at Space Camp, circa 1993-94. They never specified which STS flight it was, which makes me think it's astronaut legend. (Besides, IIRC, the orbiter WCS isn't user-serviceable except for minor maintenance while on-orbit, so a total failure like an improperly installed slinger fan would probably result in a mission abort.)
Amusingly enough, one of the failure modes the mission directors threw at my Academy II team during our "long mission" was a rupture of the sanitation system holding tank on the space station. It was quite enough of a mess with the counselors throwing TP and wadded-up pantyhose everywhere to simulate the, *ahem,* products of the rupture. I wouldn't even want to think about what a disaster zone the ISS guys would have had to contend with in microgravity.
The best answer I've been able to come up with is the knock-on effects to the rest of the economy if the airlines fail. Airlines don't just move people, they move cargo - lots and lots and lots of cargo. When airlines go out of business, that significantly hampers other businesses' ability to obtain the goods they need to build their widgets and their ability to move their widgets to market.
Flying people is not and never has been a money-making proposition, and by itself, no, it probably doesn't deserve a bailout. The problem is, it comes bundled with flying cargo, which does make money, so by saving one, you're stuck with the other.
I did the same analysis in my undergrad days (ca 2001) for a round-trip from Boston to Detroit. Northwest could have me home in two hours (hour-thirty in the air plus thirty minutes from the airport), while Amtrak took 28 hours, involved three train changes and a bus transfer, and was a bit more expensive ($259 for NWA vs. $365 for Amtrak, IIRC).
Rail only works well when you have several large cities within a relatively short distance of each other (let's put an arbitrary cap on it and say 200 mi) and few major terrain features in the way. Coincidentally, most of Europe and the Japanese home islands share those features, which is why rail is such a huge deal there. Here, where major cities can be anywhere from 300 to 3,500 mi apart and you have two major mountain chains, several major rivers and a handful of Great Lakes (pun intentional) to dodge, rail fails, as even the best of the high-speed trains can't hope to compete with air on either a time or a cost basis.
Harvey Milk was a San Francisco city supervisor (their name for city council member) who was shot and killed by another supervisor, Dan White, who basically went postal and killed Mayor George Moscone and Milk back in the late 70s. However, the jury gave White seven years with parole for the two murders, allegedly because he was mentally incompetent, but in actuality because Milk was gay and they figured it was one less homo to worry about.
Two nights and a massive riot later, the bigots figured out exactly why they'd been worrying. (Evidently they were incapable of taking a lesson from New York's experiences at Stonewall.)
Incidentally, People v. White also marked the first use of the Twinkie defense - in this case, White's attorneys claimed that he had consumed large amounts of junk food immediately prior to the murders, and wasn't responsible for any actions he might have performed while on a massive sugar high.
+1. In this state, driving with passengers under the age of 18 IS a crime if the driver is under 18 him/herself, and IMHO, that's a Good Thing.
The one on-road accident I've been in over my ten years of solo driving (not counting being bumper-dinged in parking lots) was caused by a teenager with five of his best buddies shoehorned into a Ford Escort (!), blaring the radio while eating Mickey D's while yakking on the cell phone. He pulled out of a subdivision at 35 MPH, swerved across two lanes of rush-hour traffic, and T-boned into the right side of my Explorer. To boot, the kid had just gotten his license back after having it suspended for - you guessed it - reckless driving and teenage passenger violations. Suffice to say, it was gone for good as soon as the police arrived on-scene.
Normally I'd be the last one to call for government intervention in personal conduct, but I think they ought to require chauffeur's licenses for anyone who intends to transport more than one passenger on any regular basis. Especially when the passengers are juveniles, it's just too damned easy to get distracted, cause an accident and possibly injure or kill somebody.
+1, although I'm a sport fisherwoman with a sometime interest in diving. I'd LOVE to have an accurate, easily accessible map of reefs, shoals, deep holes and other near-shore features, particularly for fishing travel. Most of the same places that interest divers also interest fisherpeople, for a lot of the same reasons - they have easily accessible, unique bottom structure that attracts interesting fish.
I seem to recall reading something very like that in a Tom Clancy novel a long time ago. In that scenario, a bunch of guys on an American SSN modded the boat's sonar suite to broadcast whale distress calls, and then they went around following Japanese whaling boats with the system turned to full crank. (I guess they had nothing better to do with their $2B super-sub, but I digress.) As one of the sailors put it, "No whale in his right mind is going to get within fifty miles of another whale screaming that he's being mugged."
I suspect there's not a great deal of scientific accuracy to the idea, but it was good for a grin.
In nursing, we call it lateral violence, or "pink on pink" (as opposed to "white on pink," which is a physician going after a nurse). It's a major problem, particularly in critical care specialties like xICU (MICU, SICU, NICU, etc), perioperative and trauma/burn. Much like the situation described in the article, these people make life hell for the rest of the unit and may actually be endangering patients by their behavior, yet can't be disciplined either because the administrator is afraid of the bullies him/herself, or because he/she refuses to acknowledge that a problem exists at all.
Interestingly, the units that see the most of that kind of behavior are also where the absolute worst of the healthcare shortage is. Hmmm...
::chuckles:: Well, since our state tree is the highway barrel, we've got ourselves a matched set.;)
Actually, I have been to Pennsylvania, and while the roads were certainly interesting, they weren't quite as bad as ours. In particular, the Penn Turnpike was a dream cruise compared to I-94 (our major east-west interstate).
Otherwise, there are very few makes of onboard 802.11x currently in circulation that don't have at least one open-source driver available. See http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/ for a list of supported makes and models. I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
A final note: there's no need to be unpleasant to those who disagree with you. For the record, I'm an OS agnostic, as I have one of each major OS represented in my home, and I can't say that I've suffered any massive problems, wireless or otherwise, with any of them. I and the other posters you've replied to were simply pointing out exceptions to your blanket statement that no wireless cards work under Linux. I don't think I or anyone else ever claimed that anyone who has or has had difficulties with wireless under Linux must be lying. Moreover, the cards that tend to give trouble under Linux also tend to give similar trouble under Windows and other operating systems - the problems lie with poorly written drivers, not Vista, Linux or any other OS.
I guess this post must be a figment of my imagination, then, since there's no way I could possibly be writing from a laptop that's been happily running Ubuntu with Intel wireless since 6.06....Seriously, can we please stop spreading this "Linux systems can't use 802.11x" FUD? It stopped being true for the vast majority of users several major distributions ago.
Re:Interesting
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The DIY Tank
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, even if it were full size it'd still be smaller than any of the "Ford F-Off" (tm Achromatic1978) giant-sized trucks and SUVs that you're apt to see people driving in Flint. (The Panzer was about a foot shorter than a Suburban/Yukon XL/Escalade ESV.)
I don't think the meter maids would complain so much as the road commission. Treads aren't nice to asphalt, and Michigan already has the worst-maintained roads in the nation...
I agree that the OS Wars had their place a long, long time ago and need to end, sooner rather than later. Frankly, the whole enterprise of bashing a program - ANY program - and/or the people who use it is just stupid. Some people like Red Bull, some like Bawls - does that make the RB people corporate sellouts, or the Bawls crowd socially inept sheep? No, it's simply a matter of taste. Drink what you like, buy what you like and run the software you like. There's plenty of bitspace for all of us.
As for Windows being buggy and/or insecure, I've dealt with Windows since 3.1, which I think tracks with the parent's experience. I agree with the parent that a modern Windows install, by which I mean 2000 or later, can be made crash-free and (relatively) malware-free by a reasonably skilled user. Where modern Windows falls down is on three levels: 1) given its sheer popularity as a malware target, it requires a great deal of effort and (usually) cash to secure a Windows system relative to a comparable MacOS or Linux box; 2) Windows allows lots and lots of less-than-stable 3rd party code, which is what usually generates the crash problems disenchanted Windows users cite; and 3) the Windows Registry, either through user error or poorly written uninstall regimes, tends to become congested over time, slowing the machine to the point that it needs a re-image (and most users say "This POS is getting old" and buy a new system). Little of that occurs on the other "big" OS formats, and that combined with a healthy dose of stick-it-to-the-Man self-righteousness leads people to treat Windows like the herald of the Apocalypse, when really it's not anything more or less than a decent, relatively stable, relatively user-friendly operating system.
If you'd like a car analogy, since Slashdotters seem to be all over those lately, Windows is a Chevy - decent value, does many things at a midrange level but no one thing well. Mac is the German luxury sedan, with high performance and social cachet but expensive and not user-serviceable, while Linux is the street rod you built yourself from parts. In the end, though, they all get from point A to point B. Nothing more or less.
When you turn your computing choices into a political statement or acting like some other person is lower than you for using some program you don't like, you accomplish nothing other than giving the rest of your fellow users, and by extension the rest of the computer-savvy community, a bad reputation. It needs to stop.
Rant over - we now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdotting.
(Full disclosure: The author runs Ubuntu Linux. Other machines in her home run Windows XP and Mac OS X.)
Damn, you caught me. I could hook up a VCR at three (no diagrams necessary, just color matching - red plug goes in red hole, white plug in white, yellow plug in yellow, power has a funny plug and only goes one way), but it was actually more like 3 1/2 before I could program it. Mom saw how my TV-parented cousins turned out and took the exact opposite approach to me, namely teaching me to read and do basic math as early as possible, so I could read simple Dr. Seuss (Hop On Pop, One Fish Two Fish, etc) and do single-digit math (2+2, 6-3, etc) by age 2 1/2.
As for programming the VCR, I was set once I figured out I could copy the numbers off the digital clock in my parents' room to set the current time. The VCR had two timers, "start" and "stop" with switches for AM and PM. If a show came on when the clock said 3:00 and ended at 3:30, I set the timers to read 0300P and 0330P and put a blank tape in the deck. Presto, instant Sesame Street. (PBS was all I was allowed to watch as a kid. It still shows.)
This young man reminds me overwhelmingly of myself at the same age, except in my case, it was maintaining a "shadow network" of some 35 Apple IIe and II+ machines that my school moved to the classrooms when our lab got upgraded to brand-spanking-new 486/33s, maintaining the PC network when our admin wasn't available (which was frequently, as he ran five other schools too), and managing the student Web access program. I didn't figure out Mom's work computers till age 5, though I could program a VCR and hook up a NES or a 2600 at age 3.
Glad to see that precocious geekery hasn't died out with this generation. Kudos to you, kid!
I'm reminded of "Robin Hood: Men in Tights", in which the blind servant Blinkin is reading "Ye Olde Playboy" (on a scroll, and the "centerfold" is a bas-relief of a nude woman) while sitting in the outhouse.
"Master Robin! You've lost your arms in battle!...But you grew a nice set of boobs..."
I've run into some truly spectacular idiocy from the local TSA, including losing a portable barcode scanner because "the laser could blind someone" (?!?) and losing a fishing rod because it came in a metal travel tube (this despite the fact that the clowns took the rod out and then X-rayed and bomb-swabbed everything separately). Maybe we just have stupider-than-average screeners at DTW.
My personal favorite incident in that line, though, was the time I had to explain the difference between scissors and hemostats. (Hemostats - also known as Kelly or mosquito clamps - are a kind of surgical forceps that look like a cross between scissors and needle-nosed pliers, and the handles have a ratcheting mechanism that lets you lock the hemostat's jaws on something, such as a blood vessel or a suture needle.) I had two pairs of them in my first-aid kit, and the TSA agent tried to confiscate them on the grounds that they were scissors and hence banned. I demonstrated for him AND his supervisor that they were not in fact scissors, but both of them refused to believe me, and we went back and forth for a good five minutes until the soldier overseeing the screening area quietly informed the agents that he was a combat medic, that the hemostats were not scissors and were perfectly legal, and that I should be let go.
That probably explains why the Mac set are so heavily represented in emergency departments. Go to any university hospital on a Saturday night and you'll see at least a half-dozen Mac-philes in the waiting room, all typing and two-tapping away while sporting various combinations of cuts, contusions and what we used to charmingly abbreviate as "N/V->EtOH." Linux users tend to present with burns (both thermal and chemical) and lacerations from hardware projects, while the Windows set don't come in at all, as their buddies simply prop them up in some corner and go back to their XBox deathmatching. I should write a paper on that sometime: "Technical Proficiency as a Predictor of Trauma Risk."
...Seriously, this was spot on and a laugh to read.:-)
I took that statement to mean that since KDE 4.0 is still a very new thing and still has a few bugs that haven't yet been shaken out, Canonical isn't supporting it just yet. Once they get it playing nicely with everything else that comes in a typical Kubuntu distribution, they'll rejoin the two fork paths, but for now they're pushing KDE 4.0 support out to the Kubuntu community.
For my $.02, that's probably a smart move, as I played around with the Kubuntu 7.10/KDE 4.0 community release and it's definitely not ready for prime time. Looks beautiful, but the wheels start falling off once you try to do something with it. KDE 3.5 programs break their KDE 4.0 counterparts and vice versa, laptop support is... well, let's call it "less than optimal," installing and uninstalling from the repositories is an exercise in masochism, and God help you if you try to install or use a GNOME-optimized program. I'm sure it will be spectacular once they get the worst of the bugs out, but for now, if I were a tech manager at Canonical, I wouldn't support it either.
Funny, that - you already use metric, if not daily, then at least whenever you're feeling under the weather. When was the last time you saw medications prescribed or sold in grains or scruples? (Those were still in use when my dad went to medical school, circa 1960. One grain is 64 mg; baby aspirin used to be one grain, adult was five.)
Speaking for myself, my brain has run on metric ever since WQRS went off the air and I had to start listening to CBC Radio Two for my daily classical fix. Hearing the weather report in degrees Celsius with barometric pressure in kilopascals and wind speed in kilometers per hour every morning is a great way to get yourself used to metric in daily life.
Temperature: 0 C = 32 F, freezing; 15 C = 59 F, pleasant spring day; 30 C = 86 F, warm summer day; 37 C = 98.6 F, human body temperature; 100 C = 212 F, boiling.
Weight: 1 kg = 2.2 lb. One ounce is 28.3 g. A 5-lb bag of potatoes is a bit more than 2 kg. For a quick and dirty conversion, halve the weight in pounds to get kilograms.
Distance: 1 cm = 0.44 in; 1 m = 39 in (quick-n-dirty conversion, 1 m = 1 yd); 1 km = 0.6 mile. To use another ammunition example, 9 mm is 0.35 in or.38 caliber. The usual freeway speed limit of 60 MPH corresponds to 100 KPH. Track races, with the exception of the marathon, are all run in meters or kilometers nowadays. 400 meters = 440 yards = quarter mile; 1600 meters = one mile; 5 km = 3.2 miles.
Liquid volume: 1 mL =.03 oz; 30 mL = 1 oz; 473 mL = 1 pt; 1 L = 1.05 qt (quick-n-dirty, 1 L = 1 qt); 3.94 L = 1 gal. A 20-gallon gas tank in a car holds approximately 79 liters. If you donate blood, the standard unit is 500 mL, a bit more than a pint.
A system of healthcare exactly like what you described existed in the developed world from antiquity up until 1930 or so. There was no insurance, no regulation, no licensure, no anything; healthcare was exactly like any other trade, and those who would provide healthcare competed solely on the basis of price and advertising. The result was nothing short of miserable. Those who could afford it had the best medical and surgical treatment they could buy, although that generally wasn't much (no training requirements, remember?) Those who couldn't relied on folk remedies (what we now call "alternative medicine") and their own physiological reserves, and if they became seriously ill or injured, too bad. Oh, and the average lifespan was about 35 years give or take, and the sick were left to rot on the public streets - or, if they were very, very lucky, they were taken in by charitable groups and largely treated with benign neglect. I sincerely hope that you can figure out why we abandoned that model of healthcare.
In public health, it has been proven hundreds of times that when you have large numbers of sick people in circulation, the general health of the population tends to decline, and the diseases they suffer tend to increase in severity. In short, sick people make the people around them sick as well. If nothing is done about the sick (i.e. they're left to die), the population's health rapidly becomes so severely compromised that any suitable crisis - a plague, a famine, a drought, whatever - can kill off the entire population in one shot. Luckily, though, the reverse is also true: when a population is maintained at a certain level of health, the illnesses suffered by each individual tend to be less severe than they would be otherwise, and the lifespan, working capacity and general health of that population tends to increase. Thus, from a pure cost-benefit standpoint, you'd actually be smarter to provide a certain, basic level of healthcare to each individual out of the common treasury, since it costs far, far less to treat the minor illnesses than the severe illnesses, and it also results in massive net gains in productivity when everyone is healthy enough to work. Everything else, of course, the individual can pay for, but providing basic care - an annual physical, immunizations, emergency care when necessary, etc - ought to be a no-brainer.
Our current system is far from perfect - anyone will tell you that. However, throwing it out the window for some mythical "free-market" solution is just as foolish and ultimately even more harmful than single-payer care could hope to be. It is true that people in good health, who can be expected not to incur any particularly egregious health expenditures in their lifetimes, would pay less for their care at first. However, people in poor health, who not only cost more to care for but generally aren't physically capable of working hard enough or long enough to earn the required amount of money to pay for their healthcare and all their other expenses, will be in even worse straits. Meanwhile, thanks to the masses of sick people in circulation, now all of a sudden the healthy people are getting sick more often and more severely, which throws your putative cost savings right out the window. You're right back to the Middle Ages - either the sick would be rotting on the streets, or you'd be asking physicians, nurses and allied health providers to shoulder those patients' costs through charity care. How is that fair to me and my colleagues, for us to subsidize a tax break for you? Are we not entitled to the fruits of our labors?
I find it amusing how you and your ilk tout the wonders of the free market, without ever realizing that what you propose is neither free nor market-driven. You're just demanding that someone else pay the bill for you, whether through taxes or charity. Funny how that's so often true - the people who yell the loudest about free markets are also the ones who demand the biggest handouts, breaks and subsidies from said markets.
I'll thank you to take your trolling elsewhere, and good day to you, sir.
(Full disclosure: The author is a healthcare professional.)
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Also heard that one at Space Camp, circa 1993-94. They never specified which STS flight it was, which makes me think it's astronaut legend. (Besides, IIRC, the orbiter WCS isn't user-serviceable except for minor maintenance while on-orbit, so a total failure like an improperly installed slinger fan would probably result in a mission abort.)
Amusingly enough, one of the failure modes the mission directors threw at my Academy II team during our "long mission" was a rupture of the sanitation system holding tank on the space station. It was quite enough of a mess with the counselors throwing TP and wadded-up pantyhose everywhere to simulate the, *ahem,* products of the rupture. I wouldn't even want to think about what a disaster zone the ISS guys would have had to contend with in microgravity.
Flying people is not and never has been a money-making proposition, and by itself, no, it probably doesn't deserve a bailout. The problem is, it comes bundled with flying cargo, which does make money, so by saving one, you're stuck with the other.
Rail only works well when you have several large cities within a relatively short distance of each other (let's put an arbitrary cap on it and say 200 mi) and few major terrain features in the way. Coincidentally, most of Europe and the Japanese home islands share those features, which is why rail is such a huge deal there. Here, where major cities can be anywhere from 300 to 3,500 mi apart and you have two major mountain chains, several major rivers and a handful of Great Lakes (pun intentional) to dodge, rail fails, as even the best of the high-speed trains can't hope to compete with air on either a time or a cost basis.
Harvey Milk was a San Francisco city supervisor (their name for city council member) who was shot and killed by another supervisor, Dan White, who basically went postal and killed Mayor George Moscone and Milk back in the late 70s. However, the jury gave White seven years with parole for the two murders, allegedly because he was mentally incompetent, but in actuality because Milk was gay and they figured it was one less homo to worry about.
Two nights and a massive riot later, the bigots figured out exactly why they'd been worrying. (Evidently they were incapable of taking a lesson from New York's experiences at Stonewall.)
Incidentally, People v. White also marked the first use of the Twinkie defense - in this case, White's attorneys claimed that he had consumed large amounts of junk food immediately prior to the murders, and wasn't responsible for any actions he might have performed while on a massive sugar high.
+1. In this state, driving with passengers under the age of 18 IS a crime if the driver is under 18 him/herself, and IMHO, that's a Good Thing.
The one on-road accident I've been in over my ten years of solo driving (not counting being bumper-dinged in parking lots) was caused by a teenager with five of his best buddies shoehorned into a Ford Escort (!), blaring the radio while eating Mickey D's while yakking on the cell phone. He pulled out of a subdivision at 35 MPH, swerved across two lanes of rush-hour traffic, and T-boned into the right side of my Explorer. To boot, the kid had just gotten his license back after having it suspended for - you guessed it - reckless driving and teenage passenger violations. Suffice to say, it was gone for good as soon as the police arrived on-scene.
Normally I'd be the last one to call for government intervention in personal conduct, but I think they ought to require chauffeur's licenses for anyone who intends to transport more than one passenger on any regular basis. Especially when the passengers are juveniles, it's just too damned easy to get distracted, cause an accident and possibly injure or kill somebody.
So, we need to build a series of massive deep-space rings that, when activated, will kill every troll-feeder in the galaxy?
(Forgive me the gratuitous Halo joke, but the image of trolls as Flood was too funny - and too scarily accurate - to pass up.)
Bring on the Google Oceans maps!
I seem to recall reading something very like that in a Tom Clancy novel a long time ago. In that scenario, a bunch of guys on an American SSN modded the boat's sonar suite to broadcast whale distress calls, and then they went around following Japanese whaling boats with the system turned to full crank. (I guess they had nothing better to do with their $2B super-sub, but I digress.) As one of the sailors put it, "No whale in his right mind is going to get within fifty miles of another whale screaming that he's being mugged."
I suspect there's not a great deal of scientific accuracy to the idea, but it was good for a grin.
Otherwise known as Immense Isotope...
Clippy just got a whole new lease on life...
"It looks like you're trying to shoot an insurgent. Would you like help?"
Interestingly, the units that see the most of that kind of behavior are also where the absolute worst of the healthcare shortage is. Hmmm...
::chuckles:: Well, since our state tree is the highway barrel, we've got ourselves a matched set. ;)
Actually, I have been to Pennsylvania, and while the roads were certainly interesting, they weren't quite as bad as ours. In particular, the Penn Turnpike was a dream cruise compared to I-94 (our major east-west interstate).
Otherwise, there are very few makes of onboard 802.11x currently in circulation that don't have at least one open-source driver available. See http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/ for a list of supported makes and models. I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
A final note: there's no need to be unpleasant to those who disagree with you. For the record, I'm an OS agnostic, as I have one of each major OS represented in my home, and I can't say that I've suffered any massive problems, wireless or otherwise, with any of them. I and the other posters you've replied to were simply pointing out exceptions to your blanket statement that no wireless cards work under Linux. I don't think I or anyone else ever claimed that anyone who has or has had difficulties with wireless under Linux must be lying. Moreover, the cards that tend to give trouble under Linux also tend to give similar trouble under Windows and other operating systems - the problems lie with poorly written drivers, not Vista, Linux or any other OS.
Thank you for your consideration.
I guess this post must be a figment of my imagination, then, since there's no way I could possibly be writing from a laptop that's been happily running Ubuntu with Intel wireless since 6.06. ...Seriously, can we please stop spreading this "Linux systems can't use 802.11x" FUD? It stopped being true for the vast majority of users several major distributions ago.
Well, even if it were full size it'd still be smaller than any of the "Ford F-Off" (tm Achromatic1978) giant-sized trucks and SUVs that you're apt to see people driving in Flint. (The Panzer was about a foot shorter than a Suburban/Yukon XL/Escalade ESV.)
I don't think the meter maids would complain so much as the road commission. Treads aren't nice to asphalt, and Michigan already has the worst-maintained roads in the nation...
I agree that the OS Wars had their place a long, long time ago and need to end, sooner rather than later. Frankly, the whole enterprise of bashing a program - ANY program - and/or the people who use it is just stupid. Some people like Red Bull, some like Bawls - does that make the RB people corporate sellouts, or the Bawls crowd socially inept sheep? No, it's simply a matter of taste. Drink what you like, buy what you like and run the software you like. There's plenty of bitspace for all of us.
As for Windows being buggy and/or insecure, I've dealt with Windows since 3.1, which I think tracks with the parent's experience. I agree with the parent that a modern Windows install, by which I mean 2000 or later, can be made crash-free and (relatively) malware-free by a reasonably skilled user. Where modern Windows falls down is on three levels: 1) given its sheer popularity as a malware target, it requires a great deal of effort and (usually) cash to secure a Windows system relative to a comparable MacOS or Linux box; 2) Windows allows lots and lots of less-than-stable 3rd party code, which is what usually generates the crash problems disenchanted Windows users cite; and 3) the Windows Registry, either through user error or poorly written uninstall regimes, tends to become congested over time, slowing the machine to the point that it needs a re-image (and most users say "This POS is getting old" and buy a new system). Little of that occurs on the other "big" OS formats, and that combined with a healthy dose of stick-it-to-the-Man self-righteousness leads people to treat Windows like the herald of the Apocalypse, when really it's not anything more or less than a decent, relatively stable, relatively user-friendly operating system.
If you'd like a car analogy, since Slashdotters seem to be all over those lately, Windows is a Chevy - decent value, does many things at a midrange level but no one thing well. Mac is the German luxury sedan, with high performance and social cachet but expensive and not user-serviceable, while Linux is the street rod you built yourself from parts. In the end, though, they all get from point A to point B. Nothing more or less.
When you turn your computing choices into a political statement or acting like some other person is lower than you for using some program you don't like, you accomplish nothing other than giving the rest of your fellow users, and by extension the rest of the computer-savvy community, a bad reputation. It needs to stop.
Rant over - we now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdotting.
(Full disclosure: The author runs Ubuntu Linux. Other machines in her home run Windows XP and Mac OS X.)
As for programming the VCR, I was set once I figured out I could copy the numbers off the digital clock in my parents' room to set the current time. The VCR had two timers, "start" and "stop" with switches for AM and PM. If a show came on when the clock said 3:00 and ended at 3:30, I set the timers to read 0300P and 0330P and put a blank tape in the deck. Presto, instant Sesame Street. (PBS was all I was allowed to watch as a kid. It still shows.)
Glad to see that precocious geekery hasn't died out with this generation. Kudos to you, kid!
"Master Robin! You've lost your arms in battle! ...But you grew a nice set of boobs..."
My personal favorite incident in that line, though, was the time I had to explain the difference between scissors and hemostats. (Hemostats - also known as Kelly or mosquito clamps - are a kind of surgical forceps that look like a cross between scissors and needle-nosed pliers, and the handles have a ratcheting mechanism that lets you lock the hemostat's jaws on something, such as a blood vessel or a suture needle.) I had two pairs of them in my first-aid kit, and the TSA agent tried to confiscate them on the grounds that they were scissors and hence banned. I demonstrated for him AND his supervisor that they were not in fact scissors, but both of them refused to believe me, and we went back and forth for a good five minutes until the soldier overseeing the screening area quietly informed the agents that he was a combat medic, that the hemostats were not scissors and were perfectly legal, and that I should be let go.
For my $.02, that's probably a smart move, as I played around with the Kubuntu 7.10/KDE 4.0 community release and it's definitely not ready for prime time. Looks beautiful, but the wheels start falling off once you try to do something with it. KDE 3.5 programs break their KDE 4.0 counterparts and vice versa, laptop support is... well, let's call it "less than optimal," installing and uninstalling from the repositories is an exercise in masochism, and God help you if you try to install or use a GNOME-optimized program. I'm sure it will be spectacular once they get the worst of the bugs out, but for now, if I were a tech manager at Canonical, I wouldn't support it either.
Speaking for myself, my brain has run on metric ever since WQRS went off the air and I had to start listening to CBC Radio Two for my daily classical fix. Hearing the weather report in degrees Celsius with barometric pressure in kilopascals and wind speed in kilometers per hour every morning is a great way to get yourself used to metric in daily life.
Temperature: 0 C = 32 F, freezing; 15 C = 59 F, pleasant spring day; 30 C = 86 F, warm summer day; 37 C = 98.6 F, human body temperature; 100 C = 212 F, boiling. .38 caliber. The usual freeway speed limit of 60 MPH corresponds to 100 KPH. Track races, with the exception of the marathon, are all run in meters or kilometers nowadays. 400 meters = 440 yards = quarter mile; 1600 meters = one mile; 5 km = 3.2 miles. .03 oz; 30 mL = 1 oz; 473 mL = 1 pt; 1 L = 1.05 qt (quick-n-dirty, 1 L = 1 qt); 3.94 L = 1 gal. A 20-gallon gas tank in a car holds approximately 79 liters. If you donate blood, the standard unit is 500 mL, a bit more than a pint.
Weight: 1 kg = 2.2 lb. One ounce is 28.3 g. A 5-lb bag of potatoes is a bit more than 2 kg. For a quick and dirty conversion, halve the weight in pounds to get kilograms.
Distance: 1 cm = 0.44 in; 1 m = 39 in (quick-n-dirty conversion, 1 m = 1 yd); 1 km = 0.6 mile. To use another ammunition example, 9 mm is 0.35 in or
Liquid volume: 1 mL =
Hope this helps!
A system of healthcare exactly like what you described existed in the developed world from antiquity up until 1930 or so. There was no insurance, no regulation, no licensure, no anything; healthcare was exactly like any other trade, and those who would provide healthcare competed solely on the basis of price and advertising. The result was nothing short of miserable. Those who could afford it had the best medical and surgical treatment they could buy, although that generally wasn't much (no training requirements, remember?) Those who couldn't relied on folk remedies (what we now call "alternative medicine") and their own physiological reserves, and if they became seriously ill or injured, too bad. Oh, and the average lifespan was about 35 years give or take, and the sick were left to rot on the public streets - or, if they were very, very lucky, they were taken in by charitable groups and largely treated with benign neglect. I sincerely hope that you can figure out why we abandoned that model of healthcare.
In public health, it has been proven hundreds of times that when you have large numbers of sick people in circulation, the general health of the population tends to decline, and the diseases they suffer tend to increase in severity. In short, sick people make the people around them sick as well. If nothing is done about the sick (i.e. they're left to die), the population's health rapidly becomes so severely compromised that any suitable crisis - a plague, a famine, a drought, whatever - can kill off the entire population in one shot. Luckily, though, the reverse is also true: when a population is maintained at a certain level of health, the illnesses suffered by each individual tend to be less severe than they would be otherwise, and the lifespan, working capacity and general health of that population tends to increase. Thus, from a pure cost-benefit standpoint, you'd actually be smarter to provide a certain, basic level of healthcare to each individual out of the common treasury, since it costs far, far less to treat the minor illnesses than the severe illnesses, and it also results in massive net gains in productivity when everyone is healthy enough to work. Everything else, of course, the individual can pay for, but providing basic care - an annual physical, immunizations, emergency care when necessary, etc - ought to be a no-brainer.
Our current system is far from perfect - anyone will tell you that. However, throwing it out the window for some mythical "free-market" solution is just as foolish and ultimately even more harmful than single-payer care could hope to be. It is true that people in good health, who can be expected not to incur any particularly egregious health expenditures in their lifetimes, would pay less for their care at first. However, people in poor health, who not only cost more to care for but generally aren't physically capable of working hard enough or long enough to earn the required amount of money to pay for their healthcare and all their other expenses, will be in even worse straits. Meanwhile, thanks to the masses of sick people in circulation, now all of a sudden the healthy people are getting sick more often and more severely, which throws your putative cost savings right out the window. You're right back to the Middle Ages - either the sick would be rotting on the streets, or you'd be asking physicians, nurses and allied health providers to shoulder those patients' costs through charity care. How is that fair to me and my colleagues, for us to subsidize a tax break for you? Are we not entitled to the fruits of our labors?
I find it amusing how you and your ilk tout the wonders of the free market, without ever realizing that what you propose is neither free nor market-driven. You're just demanding that someone else pay the bill for you, whether through taxes or charity. Funny how that's so often true - the people who yell the loudest about free markets are also the ones who demand the biggest handouts, breaks and subsidies from said markets.
I'll thank you to take your trolling elsewhere, and good day to you, sir.
(Full disclosure: The author is a healthcare professional.)