Posts by jake 26713 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"I would suppose that the necessary skills for dealing with bomb attacks fall most easily under the counter terrorism umbrella, rather than any other branch of the law enforcement services."
Every major city that I am aware of (and quite a few minor ones!) has had a Bomb Squad a lot longer than the current fad of calling anybody who sneezes at the wrong time a "terrorist" has existed.
"How do I test the theory of tectonic plates for myself?"
The old "making hot coco" variation is easy, and tasty. Probably on youtube, I can't be arsed to look.
Similarly, thawing out a pot of chicken stock over a point source of heat, such as the propane torch you use to sweat copper pipes together (or situate the pot so only one corner is over the hob). As the gelatin melts and starts moving around due to convection currents, the schmaltz on top mimics continental plates. When the pot is hot, skim off the fat (retain for roasting spuds!) throw in veg, meat and seasoning to taste and enjoy your tectonic soup.
Another: make a loaf of bread. Throw the water, yeast and a little sugar (honey, molasses, anything sweet) in the bottom of a bowl and whisk together. Float the flour evenly over the top of the liquid mixture and salt to taste. As the yeast proofs, you'll see cracking & rifting and upwelling and all kinds of other geological action. Then make the bread. Serve with the soup.
"but you'd have to have been there before to know where you are and how to get back?"
Nah. Just find a handful of quasars and/or pulsars and do a little easy trig. You can pinpoint yourself pretty much anywhere in known space. (The real known space, not the scifi version.) On the other hand, getting home might take a little more energy than remembering basic High School maths.
On the gripping hand, I wouldn't mind being on the first ride that would require the above. It would probably be either boring as shit, or the entire crew would be dead ... but what a story to tell if you survived!
"If it says I-280, it should be free."
Note to anyone visiting the SF Bay Area: Interstate 280 is NOT free, in fact it cost us tax payers quite a bit of money. However, there is NOT a per-use fee, so don't expect to find toll booths. We don't have those dratted things on most of the Left Coast, but the confused transplanted Right Coasties keep trying to foist them on us.
"There are still plenty of dead zones in cell coverage these days."
Indeed. I-280 has several of those. What, you expect both of the major roads that connect Silly Con Valley and San Francisco to have complete cell coverage?
"As for the software I have installed, I need every bit of it."
Do you really? Every bit of it? Did you use Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, Crux, or something else as the base? Or did you roll your own, perhaps a BSD varietal? Because you sure as hell won't be using one of the commercial kitchen-sinkware options if what you say is true ...
Concur on Eric's KDE stuff, and pretty much everything else that he has packaged for Slackware. (Alien BOB's real name is Eric Hameleers. He answers to both.)
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/
Running Slack-stable on a 16 year old HP laptop (zv5105, Radeon 9000 IGP) with 2gigs. It works just fine, rarely hits swap when doing normal office stuff. Note that it's still on Slack 14.2's version of KDE4, I don't plan on trying Plasma5 on it.
"the new standard for computing is smartphone"
No. The new standard for consumer haberdashery is the so-called "smart" phone. Computing is still done the old fashioned way. Consider, for example, the platform used to create "apps". It sure as hell isn't the mobile device they are targeted at.
"there is overwhelming interest in desktop technologies such as Ggnome and Wayland"
There is? From what I've seen, the people who use Gnome use it because it comes with their distro, not because they have actively chosen it. And does anybody care about Wayland? Is any important distribution[0] even fiddling about with Wayland anymore? Near as I can tell, Wayland is conspicuous by it's absence ... it's only in use in the Fedora world, the rest of us are over the idea.
"I have heard that he made the trains run on time."
That was Mussolini. And it was bullshit. Following WWI, the Italian train system was, to put it mildly, a piece of shit. Broken shit. During the post-war half decade, things improved as Italy went about rebuilding. By the time Il Duece came into power in 1922, most of the hard work had been done, his crowd had nothing to do with it. But they took the credit for it anyway. Sound familiar?
And as a point of fact, folks that actually lived in Italy during that time frame reported that the trains never ran on time, on the rare occasion that they ran at all.
Do you even know what Godwin's Law is? For your education, here it is in it's entirety: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". That's it.
Godwin himself further wrote "its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust."
Nowhere does it suggest never mentioning Hitler. On the contrary, in fact. All it suggests is that you think before posting. Windmill jousting, I know, but it's long been a hope.
Actually, Milton, most of the people who voted for the IdiotInChief voted for him because he was the republican candidate. They would have voted for ANYBODY who was the republican candidate.
Straight-ticket voters are the biggest problem in American politics today.
We really do need to instate a three part, 12 unit course in Critical Thinking and make passing it mandatory for high school graduation. Unfortunately, the politicians would never make it a law, because if they did every crooked one of them would be voted out of office within 8 years.
I seriously doubt that a new Declaration of Independence is the answer, Mark. And while revolution is always an option (hopefully the politicians know it!), I personally hope that that option isn't a requirement on my watch.
Voting is the only option we have. Unfortunately, cuts in education over the last half century have produced an electorate that is, for the most part, pig-ignorant and easily lead by sound-bites.
Bob, I wouldn't vote for an R in this day and age, not even if they were the only option on the ballet. But if it's any consolation, I dislike voting for that freak-show Feinstein, too. Ain't it 'orrible, the options we have? Freak-shows and corporate whores, and sometimes a combination of the two. Where the fuck did we lose our way here in the US? Because something is badly broken ...
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