PC World was junk even by 1986, but PC Magazine once had solid tech and good information. But by the early 1990s it had turned into a press release mouthpiece. Believe it or not, Computer Shopper once carried a lot of tech information, even though it was supposed to be an advertising venue.
A few new ones popped up during the 1990s. C Users Journal, Windows/DOS Developer, VB Tech Journal. I haven't seen the first two in quite a while; VBTJ turned "ad-supported", then went away, as far as I know. There were a handful of others that I only saw a few issues of - Midnight Engineering, ComputerCraft, Microsoft Systems Developer, etc.
What brought this on was cleaning up the spare room, where I found half a dozen issues of Byte magazine, from 1979, 1980, and one from 1982. Back when Byte was a serious chunk of paper you could hurt someone with. Byte managed to drag on longer than the others, but even by the late 1980s it had gone to a rigid editorial format and a hard-to-read page color with spidery fonts. Every article was edited until it read like it was all written by the same person.
Some Stalinist editor was probably pleased. Still, there was sometimes useful stuff, but the programming and tech content slowly slipped, to be replaced by product reviews. Byte never quite sank to "ad-supported" status, but it eventually went away, done in by its own offshoot, "Windows Magazine." But Byte rose from the grave, the only one I know of to do so. I haven't looked at a newsstand in a few years, so I don't know if it's still around. But in its last incarnation it was mostly reviews of computers and WIndows software.
Several editors have mentioned that ads carry the weight of printing and mailing a magazine, and they claim that subscription fees are only a small part of their cost. I still don't believe that, with cover prices over $5 for a lot of magazines nowadays. But even if advertising carries the freight, there comes a point where there's no other reason to buy the magazine - any computer magazine will do, once every year or so, assuming you don't just hit the World Wide Web and bypass paper entirely.
Mostly, those magazines folded because their editors were unable to distinguish useful content from filler. They were usually started by computer enthusiasts who knew their subjects. When they folded, most of them were being run by journalism grads or "professional editors." I'm sure every breathless review of an advertiser's wares was grammatically correct and formatted to the current standards of desktop publishing, but when you're selling a magazine that's targeted to programmers and developers, that's the same as a blank page. Worse; at least you could write notes on a blank page.
Much of the book was ordinary history of the KGB, available anywhere. Here and there were comments about whether the as-known events matched Mitrohkin's stuff. Every now and then there was some detail that was different, as would be expected. Nothing earthshaking.
The "nothing earthshaking" part, in a book printed in 1999, was disappointing. I also (I have a suspicious nature) had problems with Mitrokhin's story. Supposedly he was a highly-placed KGB officer who spent his whole career copying documents for some future use. Almost everything that went across his desk was supposedly retyped or handwritten - operational reports, personnel files, you name it. I don't see how the guy got any work done with all the copying he was doing. Then he stored decades worth of documents in a milk churn, and managed to get them out of the USSR. After 20-odd years, I'd imagine he'd need a pickup truck to move the mass of paper. Even granting Mitrohkin might have been... strange... the sheer quantity of material is hard to believe.
Furthermore, the KGB is broken down into directorates that not only don't overlap, but compete fiercely with each other. With their compartmentalization, I have problems believing so much different information went across Mitrokhin's desk. And that so little of it turned out to be unique.
Either the Brits and Mitrohkin's coauthor are sitting on all the good stuff, or Mitrokhin was a plant and the Brits don't want to look like fools. Either way, the book is a waste of your time, though at nearly three inches thick, it helped put me to sleep at night for several weeks...
> > The head of Engineering has been in product-definition meetings for two > > straight days, and every time he opens his mouth he's committing you and > > the rest of his staff to more work. It's been a month since he actually > > talked to any of his staff managers about their teams' workload. Do you > > (a) start coding, since everyone already knows what's coming (b) start > > canceling your vacation plans, figuring no one else will have *their* > > piece done on schedule and QA will be a disaster (c) start looking for > > another job, you've had enough death-marches?d) all of the above
If c), then b) hosed anyway. Ostentatiously canceling your plans shows that you are a team player.
a) shows you have initiative. Code any damned thing; nobody will be able to tell anyway. You probably needed a better porn-scraping tool for netnews or something.
While you're waiting for c) to pay off, management re-orgs could kill the project, or the keystone manager could quit, or the company could make that final slip into oblivion. At which point you hide any code you've written and pretend this is the first time you've ever heard of such a thing when the new manager comes in.
>> >> I also tend to write more comments than code. I seem to be >> >>unique in that regard, at least here at Chorus. > > I've heard several people i respect comment on this. Clearly people > > who code for the long haul, including moving into and out of existing > > environments, use LOTS of comments on everything.I do comments, flowcharts, and detailed project specs. Because the next schmuck who works on something I write is likely to be me, and it'll come back long after I no longer grok it in fullness, and it'll probably be an emergency of some sort.
Years ago AB took some programming courses, and I discouraged her from continuing, since I thought by 1990 everyone would be able to program and it would be a useless skill.
Boy, was I wrong on that one.
The only time anyone ever did anything with the stripe was a store clerk who swiped it through the credit card slot on the register, got a disgusted look, and keyed the information in by hand. That was several years ago. None have tried it since.
30 years ago, an Arkansas driver's license was a paper card with your name and number typed on it with a typewriter and your signature. Over the years, they added plastic lamination, my photograph (first from an instant camera, later digital), your *digitized* signature from the digitizer pad (I have a "special" signature for those), changed from paper to plastic, added my thumb print, added a hologram of the DMV seal, and now the mag stripe. I'm almost afraid to wonder what's coming next...
A few moments in the microwave will also do nicely for zapping most magnetic data strips.
>> your *digitized* signature from the >> digitizer pad (I have a "special" signature for those), > Hmm, sounds interesting, what is this special signature of which you speak?It's a right-handed scrawl that looks nothing like my legal signature, such as the one on my signature card at the bank.
>> > > It's a right-handed scrawl that looks nothing like my legal signature, >> > > such as the one on my signature card at the bank. > > And.....why? > > Is it a protest or fun?A digital signature, once recorded, can be attached to anything or printed out and presented as a real signature. With digitized copies of your signature all over the place, if someone *did* try something with your signature, you'd be hard pressed to prove it wasn't yours.
It's not a whole lot, but it's the best that can be done in these digital days.
> > I regularly screw up digital signatures, although I have learned > > to make it look vaguely similar (as in sorta the same # of bumps/ > > letters) to deal with the vendors who insist on comparing it to > > the signature on the back of the card.For my credit cards, I'm using a trick I got from watching by buddy Sean use his debit card - he has "CHECK ID" written in large black permanent marker where the signature strip is. He says people rarely check it, but the thought counts.
"What was that popping sound?"
"A paradigm shifting without a clutch"
Over the intervening time it hasn't gotten much better. There is some technical content, sort of, but it's so heavily slanted toward gosh-wow it's hard to get anything useful from it. The majority of the magazine shills consumer electronics. And the format is as close to MTV as I've seen a printed magazine get; it's worse than Wired. They must use ALL the fonts and ALL the colors and print odd-colored text over pictures and all of the crap they evidently teach as "good graphics" now. A fair percentage of the articles are simply unreadable due to this, and many of the others seem to be written by someone with the print equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome.
Let's just say I'm not motivated to fill out a subscription card.
> > What is the Cobalt competing against exactly? > > The Civic? The Corolla? > > I guess my argument against GM is that they do not make a car that attempts > > to compete at the level above the Civic/Cobalt. There is no GM or Ford car > > (that I am aware of) that competes directly with the 240hp V6 Accord or the > > V6 Camry. These two cars make up a huge portion of the market and the big 3 > > have opted out as far as I can tell.I guess I'm blind to the differences between that entire class of cars. Who cares? You're talking about a transportation appliance that's going to spend most of its operating time stuck in traffic. If it's not going to the track, not hauling lumber, or not towing something, who the hell cares?
Not a hell of a lot to ask for, is it?
Unfortunately *most* late model cars fail three or more of these simple tests. The few that pass are almost all pickup trucks or vans.
I also want the headlights and dome lights to turn *OFF* when I turn the switch or close the door. That's not an absolute deal-breaker, but it pisses me off every time I drove those vehicles.
> > reason, it's been a poor seller. With a market like that, it's almost a > > roll of the dice for what'll sell well. The Jap cars, have earned a > > reputation (right or wrong) as being reliable, and that's a big seller that > > transgresses body design or fit and finish.I don't think it's even a factor for the average buyer. Nor would most of them even know what a camshaft was, much less how many the car had. I've talked to several people who didn't even know if their car was a six or eight.
Well, theoretically. The local enormous Ford dealer has about 400 trucks, most of them white, a couple of Expeditions, three or four Mustangs, and a couple of Fuckii or something similar. I'm not kidding.
The local enormous Chevy dealer has more cars, but 75% of their lot is virtually identical pickup trucks.
Chances are, no matter what you *want*, you'll leave a local American car dealer with some kind of truck, because that's all they sell. If you want a small car that's half-decent, you'll probably wander to the next town to the Kia or Honda dealer, because you can't buy a "car" at the American dealer.
> > What I really want is to get a mill and lathe so that I can get on with > > my 1/2 scale titanium 1911 in .22 cal.Colt made a small-frame 1911-style in .380. Actually, two models - the first ones had the link-type action and the later ones were blowback. They were a bit under 3/4 scale if I remember right; it's been a long time since I've seen one.
> > Corporations exist to protect personal assets from the reach of > > creditors. That's it, end of story.Most of the corporations I know of went public to get capital for expansion, not to protect assets.
> > So they've give up on trying to make money?God, no! If you make money you have to pay tax on it!
With any modern compensation package, your own paycheck is completely independent of the corporation's finances if things go bad; if they go good, you should get a big bonus for your good work.
> I'm surprised it isn't federally illegal to persoanlly make and use any > > alternative fuel. Look at all that tax revenue lost....All that control lost...Britain's Inland Revenue people have been working on that; they're pissy about people paying road tax on synthetic Diesel or even straight vegetable oil if it's used in a motor vehicle.
"You! Where are you going with all that cooking oil? Fish fry, eh? Like we haven't heard that one before. Hands behind your head!"
Hell, I've been carded when buying spray paint recently; the data miners could track purchases of vegetable oil easily enough.
> > I bought my wife an iTrip to go with her iPod, and it works pretty well if you > > can find an FM frequency which isn't being used up.Back before I gave up on radio, the local area had 103, 104, 105, and 106. The asshats couldn't stay on their assigned channels worth a flip; 104 would wind up behind 105 and 106, etc. They'd all drift around and even the digital tuner I had couldn't keep a lock more than a few hours.
> Every worker in the US today had better be thinking > about how they are going to upgrade their skills to insure that > they can add value and work in an industry that has US presence.Workers have f-all to do with it. It's management that decides to run a business into the ground and cash in their bonuses, or outsource all their production to a foreign country, or any of the other usual tricks.
> Rudolph Hess (or his double Alfred Horn) was imprisioned in Spandau > all of his life, and was never allowed visitors IIRC.I have a book somewhere written by a British doctor who treated Hess over a period of years. The doctor said the "Hess" in Spandau lacked several scars that were on Hess' pre-WWII German medical records, among other discrepancies. He made a detailed case that the man in Spandau was *not* Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess.
It'll be another 40 years before the Brits unseal all their records of the Hess story. [sigh]
You guessed, didn't you?
The only marking on the bulb is "12V23W". I interpret that as 12 volts, 23 watts. Only Advance couldn't match it to anything. Neither could AutoZone or O'Reilly. None of them have any books, just what's hanging on the racks. Unfortunately, most of those are simply code numbers like "1157", which tells nothing about wattage.
I bought a pack of two 10W bulbs for $3 (!!) and tried one. The signal is dim and flashes very rapidly, but at least it's working, sort of.
I'll probably find the correct bulb online somewhere, and it'll be 37 cents plus $22.95 shipping, handling, and insurance... Or they'll only be available in packs of 48, or some other bizarre thing.
That's pretty well the essence of fangleage. The quote is from the Thumbelina main page.
I got them a domain at GoDaddy, which came with plenty of web space. No Konqueror there, either, but at least Firefox could use it. Flash and Java/Javascript. GoDaddy is so infected with dancing ads, pop-ups, Flash, etc. that it's hard to navigate. A few weeks after I set the site up, I was unable to access it any more. They'd "upgraded" everything to the NEW new Flash, etc.
I tracked things down to an incompatibility with the version of Java that was on Mandrake 2007 on my laptop at work. I could access the site on my SuSE 10.2 desktop at home, but not the laptop. So I wound up installing Mandrake 2008 on the laptop, since I ran into dependency hell trying to upgrade just the Java.
This kind of crap infuriates me. All I want is a freakin' ftp address somewhere, and rsync. All this dancing-Flash-Java stuff is for f*cktards.
Just as the Catholic Church is threaded through all of European history, Islam is threaded through the Middle East. This particular book talked a lot about the Saudi cultures and the attempts of their fundamentalist groups to block contact with the rest of the world. Some of it was religious intolerance, some was probably simple xenophobia... but to the Wahhabi of the 1950s, the only and the whole law was the Koran. You could argue interpretations, but nobody could drop whole categories of "law" onto you from out of nowhere, like the IRS or the EPA are prone to do.
I can fully understand why some Muslims living in the west try to ignore Western law and enforce the sharia, or Islamic religious law. Thirty years ago I went through the law library at the University of Arkansas. The Statutes of the State of Arkansas filled a sizeable room. The statutes of a state like California or New York would probably fill an entire library. And the acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court probably fill multiple libraries. That's why you pay through the nose for lawyers and accountants when dealing with the government.
Sharia, on the other hand, comes down to one book. There are people who can quote the whole thing from memory. One Koran's worth of paper wouldn't even make an index to an index to any state's laws, much less the (literal) tons of laws passed by the Fed. You can know where you stand with sharia; you need a dozen specialists to even fondle the edges of US law.
> I really get a kick out of ya'll with tank bags.... guys with "purses" > attached to your bike. that's sooooo CUTE!You betcha!
I have a very small tailbag for my Bandit. It has:
very small bottle of window cleaner
lens cloth for glasses and face shield
glasses repair kit
imodium
tylenol
Ace bandages for when my wrists start to hurt
plastic bag to put stuff in when it rains
metal plate and thong, for the sidestand
ear plugs
Handi-Wipes
bottle of water (frozen)
Arkansas highway map
small flashlight
Leatherman tool
cellular phone (remember, turn your phone OFF if you'll be leaving
your calling area - if you don't it'll run the battery down
trying to find a tower)
crash kit
if it's a very long ride, I'll toss in a couple of energy bars or something
crash kit: Mylar "space blanket" two packets of blood coagulant 3' of surgical rubber tubing two chemical light sticks cloth tape small roll of gauzeThe crash kit came about after a group ride with some guys from the Sport Touring.net forum back in summer of 2006. One guy ran off the road (we think it was a deer strike) and tangled with a road sign and a barbed wire fence; the sign cut off his right leg just below the knee. I was the first one on the scene, but fortunately a motorist stopped immediately who knew what to do; I was mostly having the unwelcome realization I had no freakin' clue what to do. The motorist applied a tourniquet and the guy lived, and I went on to make sure I would know what to do next time.
It was interesting. The obvious place to look was the Red Cross; several phone calls revealed the Red Cross no longer teaches first aid, just CPR and their new electroshock machine thingie. I called two local hospitals, the city fire department and county volunteer fire department, and a few other places. No first aid. There had been a First Aid merit badge when I was a Cub Scout in the 1960s; various Scouting sites on the web seemed to be mostly concerned with CPR, snakebite, and broken bones. I even checked with two local places that have EMT courses. An EMT isn't what I thought; I was thinking military-style paramedics, but an EMT is basically a remote for a "real doctor" back at a hospital somewhere. They have to learn a bunch of specialized jargon to spot and report symptoms, but basically all they're allowed to do on their own is clear airways or insert IVs.
My brother and I kicked the situation around for weeks, until he remembered the "combat medicine" courses he had had in the Air Force. He'd had the course every year for 20 years, but it was one of those things he had to sit through, parrot replies for the test, and then forget and go back to work. He dredged up what he remembered, and we worked through what would be applicable.
The basic scenario is:
A) someone is going to die if you don't do something
B) there isn't any 911
Motorcycle crashes tend to be bad, and we often ride in rural/mountainous areas where you might be half an hour from a land line, much less a cell tower.
What we came up with was a set of procedures that might be useful at a crash site, and a small assortment of items that would replace one of the two water bottles I normally carried on long trips.
Space blanket: This is basically a big mirrored plastic sheet. It squeezes down into about a two inch cube. Pieces can be cut to cover a sucking chest wound, it can provide some shelter from rain, and it can keep someone warm if they're going into shock. Rain or cold are quite likely at crash scenarios.
Blood coagulant: I found this at the local Ace hardware store. They're about the size of small Kool-Aid packets. They're designed for carpenters who cut limbs off with power tools. You rip the packet open and sprinkle it on the wound, and it's supposed to cause the arteries to contract instantly. When someone's leg is laying in the ditch on the other side of the road, this could be useful.
Surgical tubing: for tourniquets. The self-proclaimed medical types scream and moan about "keep pressure on the pressure points." Fine, except you can't stay there and do that, and ride off to get help too. If the magic coagulant powder doesn't work, hell, you're down to a stump anyway, a tourniquet isn't going to make much difference.
Light sticks: These are the big yellow chemical lights from the sporting goods department. Night is likely to be involved in a serious crash. I saw the guy go down in 2006, in broad daylight, but I still had a hard time finding him in the brush. At night, after maybe riding a dozen miles to get help or a phone signal, on roads I probably don't know... "yeah, there's an injured motorcyclist out there, really, you should keep on looking" isn't the right answer. I can leave the lights to mark the site.
Cloth tape: to anchor plastic over a sucking chest wound.
Gauze: basically for placebo or comfort, to keep someone from digging at a displaced eye, or to keep flies off a compound fracture.
I hope I never need any of this stuff, but at least it's there. The tailbag is basically part of the motorcycle; whenever I go anywhere, the tailbag is on the bike.
> > True enoughe. And those .5cc needles atr barely sensible. > > Of course the TV ads about how painful a finger stick is condition > > people to believe they are suffering!I had a hell of a time talking my allergist into giving me the gunk so I could take my own shots instead of driving across town and spending half a day in his office. Like I had time for that kind of crap twice a week.
He made a big deal out of it, but I told him if I could stick a
contact lens in my eye, sticking a tiny needle in my leg would be no
problem!
- Dave "watch the finger!" Williams
> > there is a shitload of inane irritating advertising on the SABC, on every > > channel. They normally have 6 adverts back to back about every ten minutes. > > That is a lot of income. Why do they need license fees as well? We have to > > pay for the privilege of watching someone else's adverts?They want your money, Duncan!
"Cable TV" arrived in this area in the 1970s. For a (substantial!)
fee, you got commercial-free TV. By the early '80s they were running
ads, mostly "subscribe to our cable TV service!" (like you could see
the ad if you weren't...) and shortly after, it looked pretty much like
ordinary broadcast TV.
Advertising is almost a religion in the USA. A half-hour TV show averages about 13 minutes; the rest is commercials. Stupid, repetitive commercials. There are "product placements" inside the programs themselves. And while the program is playing, up to half of the screen is covered with animated Web-style popup ads so you can't see anything anyway.
I've been TV-free for 22 years now, and friends still ask, "did you see (whatever) last night?"
They're placing advertising next to highway signs now, which has the result of making them very hard to find among the visual clutter. But that's a whole different rant...
> > Interesting factoid: private jets now account for 18% of all flights.Hunh. I would never have expected that... but on reflection, if I was a VIP of moderate wealth, even "first class" seating on a flying cattle car wouldn't be worth the Homeland Security crap, and my time would surely be better spent in transit than in sitting around a terminal for two hours before my flight.
I wonder how many months before the Gestapo tighten the screws on
private aircraft... after all, some guy tried to take out Klinton by
flying a plane into the White House.
The book describes the (literally) dozens of overlapping intelligence
agencies, which is quite a trick some they merged and reshuffled
regularly. According to Kahn, the Nazis were pretty good at tactical
intelligence on the battlefield, but not only were they almost
completely incompetent at strategic intelligence, the little they did
get didn't do them any good. For example, they had a spy who reported
everything the Americans were doing in Africa, but there was damn-all
Rommel could do about it. The Brits managed to catch every Nazi spy in England, (or so they claim) and turned most of them with their Double Cross program; these doubles fed the OKW all kinds of tasty, but incorrect, information.
Most of the book is fairly tedious; it's a scholarly tome, and in its struggle for completeness it describes many German intelligence agencies nobody ever heard of and nobody cared about anyway. The final chapter is a discussion of intelligence in general, and how bad intelligence can be much worse than no intelligence at all.
Right now I'm reading John Toland's "The Rising Sun." I'm about halfway through. I'd known that Cordell Hull was able to read the Japanese Ambassador's messages before the Ambassador himself saw them, thanks to MAGIC intercepts. What I didn't know was how badly some of those messages were garbled in translation. Hull was a head case to start with; he hated Japanese in general and the Japanese Ambassador personally, and with Roosevelt's time tied up with Lend-Lease and organizing for the coming war in Europe, Hull was basically making his own foreign policy, "interpreting" instructions from Roosevelt, and then adding his own capricious demands, which drove two successive Japanese cabinets half-crazy with confusion and frustration. Hull's hatred and paranoia were bolstered by the MAGIC intercepts and their translations. Toland has some of them listed side by side in columns; one side, what the Japanese sent, in an agreed-correct translation by interpreters working for the Congress during their Pearl Harbor investigation after the war, and the translations that were given to Hull, which were highly aggressive and sometimes bore much different meanings than the later translations of the same messages.
When the Ambassador showed up for each meeting, Hull, having read his instructions already, was either hostile or contemptuous during the meeting, and often had his reply already written out. Apparently the Ambassador never wondered how that came about... Hull was a poor negotiator anyway; every time the Japanese cabinet wired the Ambassador that terms were acceptable, Hull would add new demands. And finally, it all fell apart. Even with having all the Japanese diplomatic communications spread out in plain view wasn't enough to overcome the fact that Hull was a total asshole.
> > Allow me to be dull. Did Toland imply that Hull personally, and under is > > own will, sabotage the negotiations with the Japanese to draw them into a > > war?On his own, against direct instructions from Roosevelt, yes. To draw them into a war... it's hard to say, though a number of sources claim he hated the Japanese as a nation and the ambassadors personally.
Hull's name keeps cropping up in stuff I read about the European
theater, from other authors. Not in a good light there, either.
Woman from Corporate, out of Tennessee, tells us how much they value us, and by the way, we're toast. The whole department is fired, but they're offering an additional two weeks' "severance pay" if we work the next two weeks without quitting.
They've outsourced their deliveries to a company out of Florida called PCA, who will hire "independent contractors" to deliver the drugs. PCA wants people with 2004 or later minivans or SUVs who will buy their own uniforms, their own cellphones (for company use only), pay their own Social Security and unemployment insurance, and their own business-use insurance for their personal vehicles. And they'll pay 75 cents more than local minimum wage.
It apparently wasn't a joke. The sad thing is, there are schmucks out there who will hire on.
Ah, well, it was a fun year and a half.
Besides being easier to run a 1" pipe than a "soil pipe", such a
toilet could be used while all the main crapper pipes were ripped out
for remodeling... I've been dreading that job for years. It's all clay
tile pipe under there, and the toilet flange is some alien nonstandard
1940s stuff that the plumbing supply place swears they've never seen before.
The web pages I've found so far don't want to tell you how much one of their fancy crappers cost; they want you to talk to an "authorized dealer." That's usually a bad sign.
> > What she doesn't realize is that people > > will "just hop in the car and go" somewhere else to > > shop. This probably won't be passed, but if it is, no > > one would go downtown to spend money.Little Rock, among other cities, has tried the "pedestrian only downtown" concept. I guess it looks good when it's done on PowerPoint. In practice, nobody wanted to hike around downtown, dodging weirdos, winos, and muggers, while enjoying pleasant 110F summer days or windy, sleety winter days. Lots of smaller businesses went under before they dug the bollards out of the street and took the "PEDESTRIAN ONLY" signs down. Been several years now, downtown still hasn't recovered. Probably won't for a long, long time.
"They'll pry my keys out of my cold, dead fingers." - me
"My uncle has a country place
that no one knows about.
He says it used to be a farm
before the Motor Law.
And on Sundays I elude the Eyes,
and hop the turbine freight
to far outside the wire
where my white-haired uncle waits.
Jump to the ground
as the Turbo slows to cross the borderline.
Run like the wind
as excitement shivers up and down my spine.
Down in his barn
my uncle preserved for me an old machine.
For fifty-odd years
to keep it as new has been his dearest dream.
I strip away the old debris
that hides a shining car:
A brilliant red Barchetta
from a better vanished time.
I fire up the willing engine
responding with a roar.
tires spitting gravel,
I commit my weekly crime.
Wind
in my hair.
Shifting and drifting.
Mechanical music.
Adrenaline surge...
Well-weathered leather,
hot metal and oil,
The scented country air.
Sunlight on chrome,
the blur of the landscape,
every nerve aware.
Suddenly ahead of me
across the mountainside
a gleaming alloy air-car
shoots towards me, two lanes wide.
I spin around with shrieking tires
to run the deadly race.
Go screaming through the valley
as another joins the chase.
Drive like the wind.
Straining the limits of machine and man.
Laughing out loud with fear and hope
I've got a desperate plan.
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded at the riverside.
Race back to the farm
to dream with my uncle at the fireside."
-Rush, "Red Barchetta"
> > Given all this discussion about smoking and liberty, I wonder where > > everyone stands on the using a cell phone while driving debate -- the > > NTSB is currently considering prohibiting this for drivers with > > learner's permits. This seems like another discussion where the > > evidence seems ambiguous, and there are many slippery slopes. Does > > anyone feel real strongly one way or the other?Let them talk all they want. As long as they don't complain about needing the services of a proctologist to remove it if they involve me in a collision because they can't talk and drive at the same time.
I still don't understand why do many people look up and to the right
when talking on the phone; I'll see some of them darting quick glances
at the road while talking earnestly to the headliner.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
>>> Why not fine people for the real problem - reckless driving? >> Absolutely. We already have laws that address these things. >> Introducing more only complicates the legal system, and >> potentially exposes people to double jeopardy.There's no political goodness in enforcing existing laws. That only makes voters angry.
Politically, you want to identify a problem, publicize it, and then be
publicly seen doing something about it. Since all politicians can do is
pass legislation, they have to pass *new* legislation to be seen as
responsive to their electorate. Enforcing existing legislation isn't
even part of their job; that's what the police are for.
> > "These boys cannot read a newspaper and get the main point," Kleinfeld > > told LiveScience. "These boys cannot read directions for how to use > > equipment and follow them."That's not a good pair of examples. Newspapers are normally written in a "top-loaded" format, telling the reader some point the author wishes to make, then fills the rest of the space with supporting points in order of relevance. Sort of like top-posted newsreaders... the point being, a newspaper article is not necessarily a coherent beginning to end piece of text; it's basically a bulleted list without the bullets. I find them so annoying I seldom read them myself.
As for equipment instructions... that's another special case. Most
suck so bad they're useless, like the ones for my Nokia cellular phone,
which describes a phone with a substantially different firmware. Even
if your instructions aren't written in Chinglish, they're either written
by someone who didn't give a damn, or they're simply a list of safety
warnings, like "DO NOT INSERT MOBILE CELLULAR PRODUCT UP URETHRA." With
the suck factor so consistently bad, I, like most American males, seldom
bother to look at the instructions either.
> > "Many boys are disengaging from school," Kleinfeld says. "The U.S. > > Department of Education?s surveys of student commitment show that boys > > are far less likely than girls to do homework or to come to school with > > the supplies they need."I never did any homework, which resulted in a lot of Fs. I figured I was sitting there marking time most of the day, and their lack of skill and planning wasn't *my* problem, that I had to spend my own time on. As far as "supplies"... the only thing I was ever required to have was a pencil. I remember idiots who consistently didn't bring theirs; the teacher had to give them one every day. Still a "not my problem."
> > In an interview, one boy summed up the problem for Kleinfeld. He said: > > "Why would anyone want to read novels? They aren't even true!"Frankly, I'd be amazed that many teens could reliably differentiate between fact and fiction; it's a skill many adults seem to lack too.
> > "Why? In school, teachers emphasize reading literature and talking about > > character and feelings," she said. "This way of teaching reading does > > not turn boys on. Boys prefer reading nonfiction, such as history and > > adventure books.This diverges so widely from DaveWorld "educational experiences" across six states that I can't quite grasp it. History? She has to be out of her mind; history is coursework, and the schools make it so miserable damned few people will ever pick a history book up voluntarily. I'm not quite sure what she means by "adventure books," in DaveWorld those are usually fiction, not something like Peary's expedition to the Pole, which is pretty dry reading.
Most of the assigned reading in places I went to school was crap like
Dickens, or Hemingway, or other ancient authors who were from such
different cultures that their stories were hard to understand. In one
class, we spent THREE MONTHS boring through "Great Expectations", which
turned out to be an abridged version! It redefined my personal
definition of "boredom." To a kid raised on MTV and slasher movies,
it would probably be some kind of private hell. Teachers are taught
"classics," so, being the only things they know, that's what they teach,
in a nice self-perpetuating loop. If the stories were any good, they
wouldn't need courses in how to understand them, now would they?
I kind of get the impression the author's paper, should it ever be published, is going to on home schooling, not reading skills...
> > No Drivers ed.In 1977, there were only a handful of states that still had that. A majority of the nation had it in the 1950s. Lore has it that the insurance companies and various safety groups lobbied to have the courses removed, because the driver ed. classes were "promoting teen drivers" who were "driving up everyone's insurance rates and slaughtering people on the highways." So teens simply drove anyway, without any tiny benefit they might have had from the courses. Sort of like what happened to sex education.
> > But, you can take *Cooking 101*.I don't think they're doing real cooking on stoves any more. Too much chance one of the little bastards would throw boiling water on someone, or stab them with a carving knife.
> > What's needed is testing for the youngest students to find out what source > > of learning they actually use.Nobody cares, unless it matches up with whatever pet educational theory has ascendancy at the moment. If anyone *actually* gave a damn about "the children" the schools would be a hell of a lot different.
> > Not to mention > > there are a limited few that learn primarily through touch that killing the > > shop classes, totally ignores.The shop classes were doomed after the 1960s. First, "manual skills" became declasse as the schools started stressing managerial and secretarial skills. Parents objected to the shop classes, which they viewed as aimed at turning their chirrun into second-class citizens.
Next, the shop classes became the dumping ground for the unruly,
intractable, and ineducable riffraff who no longer fit in the "improved"
curriculum. None of those students wanted to learn to weld, or rebuild
a carburetor, or set up a lathe, they were just in the last step before
detention hall.
Then came the lawyers, and liability. Every year someone would smash a finger or run a drill through their thumb. When parents got the idea that schools should absolutely protect their children, it was the end. Hell, I remember when all the elementary schools removed their playground equipment in the late '70s, because some brat fell off a swing and its parents sued, and won. Some schools, they even took balls away, in case a kid chased one and fell, so they just wandered about their barbed-wire-fenced compounds like inmates in some kiddie prison. (the 10-foot fences went up in case packs of roaming child-stealers descended on the campus)
Most electronics, chemistry, and "science lab" stuff has gone away in the last couple of decades, too. There are various reasons, but mostly because we're in the second or third generation of feral children, who are likely to just reach out and brand someone with a soldering iron for no reason, or throw sulfuric acid because it might be fun.
> > While wandering around the Air Museum I notice that the Armed Services > > prefers bulkhead fittings on their aircraft. Very few lines run through > > grommets.1) aircraft hardlines tend to be very long; it's often not practical to move a 30-foot piece of tubing to service something.
2) aircraft assemblies try to be modular as much as possible; engines,
hydraulic units, etc. use bulkhead fittings at the firewall, so
everything on the hot side comes out without having to open other panels
to get to fittings on the other side of the bulkhead.
3) aircraft flex a lot more than cars; unless carefully engineered, a grommet can wear through, or simply deteriorate from age and extreme temperature variations. Bulkhead fittings don't care.