> > Hmmmm. . . I've read that the water system was for cash, with nozzle sizes > > installed depending on the use you bought. The book went into detail on > > the different water theft schemes that are found in the ruins.De Camp's "The Ancient Engineers" (which I'm re-reading at the moment) says that only Senators got water to their homes in the beginning, and later wealthy people could buy running water. What the average citizen got was water to his insula (apartment building) or neighborhood. Which was free.
I'd read De Camp's book before, and found it rather dull. This time, I'm finding it very annoying. He uses a bunch of odd spellings for Roman names that don't match the 1907 book I have, or more modern stuff.
And he uses a bunch of weirdball characters I've never seen before, like "s" and "q" with single or double dots. And then he uses bizarre spellings for ordinary words - "sovran" for "sovereign".
Mostly what annoys me is he professes to write a history of engineering, but most of it is a re-hash of the same old shit I can get from any history book. Yes, we know very little about the people who designed the Roman acqueducts. Okay, how about an engineering analysis of them? They used all kinds of tricks with siphons and stuff, he says, but no further explanation.
I'd like a little more detail. He gets bogged down in triremes and quinquiremes; how about something on how shipbuilding changed over the ages?
It's just a history book concentrating on civilizations with sizeable projects, with a slight slant to "engineering." Bah!
Since WWII, everyone wants to sit at their desks and tap phones, intercept mail, listen to radio broadcasts, and prepare detailed reports based on information they get from... newspapers. Um.
I wouldn't be surprised if what useful intelligence *is* collected winds up like what happened with the KGB - none of it ever gets to where it could do some good, either due to politics at the upper levels, people hanging on to critical information for some future use that might make them look better, or not passing on information for fear of looking foolish later.
No agency wants to have its information questioned. Nixon, in a couple of his books, talked of his problems with the FBI. They would tell him there was a 73% chance of so-and-so. Nixon didn't give a damn what their percentage was; he wanted to know where the information came from, so he could make his own judgement of how valid it might be. The FBI basically ceased to cooperate with the President due to that.
Hm, strange. All four pages concerned employment history... and, basically, nothing else. And a handful of loose pages to be filled out, releases for "personal information" for the last ten jobs you'd had.
I spent four hours filling it out - I had never filled out an application this detailed, nor kept track of exact dates of employment, names of supervisors, etc. About half the places I've worked no longer exist, or at least Google couldn't find them. I had to fill out an application for the pharmacy, but they were mainly concerned with my driving record and if I could pass a drug test.
I still thought it odd that the application didn't want to know anything relevant to my being able to actually perform the work. All they seemed to be concerned with was the detailed of who I had worked for. Weird.
With my irregular employment history I doubt I have any chance of getting as far as an interview, but it was a useful four hours, since I saved the employment history in a text file so I can copy it out to the next application.
Fortunately I'm in the position of not actually needing a job, which makes the application-merry-go-round much less stressful than it could otherwise be. In this case, they wanted an entry-level guy who could handle a mixed Windows/Linux network, knew a little SQL, and do backups and general scutwork. Basic admin stuff I can do in my sleep, within reasonable commuting distance, and though the pay is modest, the benefit package is very nice. So I figured I wouldn't turn it down if they made an offer, anyway.
I've been laid off before, but this was the first time I worked for two weeks after being notified. Yeah, it was a part-time job that paid only a little more than minimum wage, but I'd been considering it a "permanent" job to balance out my sometimes catastrophically irregular cashflow from being self-employed. Or self-unemployed, as I sometimes think of it.
Nice group of people to work with, nobody hassling you or breathing down your shoulder, no rigid schedules - just keep the paperwork in order and avoid the idiot deer who prance out into the road at night. Just drive along and talk on the cellphone or listen to audiobooks on the MP3 player; jobs don't get much easier than that.
> > Rolls was never in the aircraft business. They were and still are > > a big presence in the aero-engine business.There was Campini, and whatsisname in Germany, and Frank Whittle in England. The Air Ministry assigned Rolls-Royce to develop the Whittle design, which they did. It only took them a few years to develop something that was commercially practical. They then licensed that design and some subsequent ones to General Electric and Pratt & Whitney in the USA. These designs in turn were copied by Tumansky in the USSR.
There may have been some other original R&D somewhere, but as far as I know all current produiction turbojets and turboprops are descendants of the original Whittle/Rolls work.
So, yeah, they might know a little bit about jet engines...
I saw this in the paper this morning. I've seen similar things on billboards, and in magazines.
HEY, ASSWIPE! "Everyday" is not the same as "every day!"
"Every day" means "each time the sun comes up."
"Everyday" means ordinary or common.
One is an interval of time, the other is an adjective.
AAAARGH!
> We also allow pedestrians to cross the street where they want > as there is no 'jay walking' laws.Ah. I came from a rural area of the USA, and while there were probably jaywalking laws, I'd never encountered them, because the town's only traffic light was far away and there were no sidewalks anyway. I was quite surprised to find out you were only supposed to cross the street at intersections when in the big city; to me, that looked like the most dangerous place. Also, you're supposed to walk across the path of turning cars instead of direct traffic, so you can't see what's coming up behind you.
Little Rock used to have lights to tell you what you were supposed to do. They said WALK and DON'T WALK. Since few Americans can read any more, they've been replaced by ideographic displays which are absolutely clear to anyone, literate or not. They say "HAND JIVE" and "BACKACHE", though a few (possibly a diffferent manufacturer) say "JOSHUA TREE." Though I'm sure these ethnic, ageist, and Southwestern regional symbols cheer some people, they're useless for figuring out when you're supposed to cross the freakin' street...
> This used to work well, but with the mobile phone of invincibility and > traffic at a near crawl in many urban areas the lemmings seem to have > become more suicidal in their tendances.It amazes me that so many people utterly lose contact with reality when on the phone. I've seen them run into things while *walking.* I don't see that it's any different from talking to someone walking beside you or in the passenger seat; perhaps these people are that clumsy even *without* the phone?
> 'Where there is blame there is a claim' lawyers probably > haven't helped either.Dang, that sounds positively American. Reminds me of a friend in Britain who once commented he wanted to go to Miami, but he was afraid he would be shot. Then he decided to go another time, but he was afraid he would be sued...
Personally, I've been to Miami, and I'd pay money not to have to go again. Everyone there is from New Jersey or South America, and why go see imitations when you can go to Trenton or Bogota?
On the flip side, why are they so damned stingy with the friggin' tomato sauce?! They apply a layer about as thin as the gold vapor-plated on a spaceman's helmet. And most places have a notice somewhere, "available with no sauce." Well, give it to *me* then, dammit! And keep your cheese substitute...
Another "test" involved sticking a candle to a wall using a variety of provided items - a box of matches, paper clips, thumbtacks, string, etc. I managed to wedge the paper clips into the corner of the wall and stick the candle to them. I "failed"; the correct answer was "thumbtack the matchbox to the wall and sit the candle on top of it." I was angry at that one, too. My Mom would have killed me for putting thumbtack holes in her wall. Plus, the wall of the schoolroom was concrete block. Everybody "failed" that test that day.
A while ago I was trying to remember the "barometer test." As presented, you had to determine the height of a building using a variety of provided equipment. I don't remember what, just a list of trash that wouldn't do you any good, and an "expensive barometer." The proper solution was to give the barometer to someone if they would tell you how tall the building was.
The problem here should be obvious - you still don't know how tall the building is. All you know is how tall someone else thinks it is. Unfortunately, that seems to be a difference so subtle the test has been unchallenged for decades.
For that matter, you could probably get someone to tell you how high they thought the building was for free, or beat the information out of them. Then you could pawn the barometer and buy some crack, which you could then resell to the people who devise garbage "tests" like this...
Sometime later I took the "Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Profile." It is about a zillion multiple-choice questions designed to outline your personality. It asks the same basic questions over and over in slightly different phrasing and circumstances. The test is very specific: it wants to know if you are a Jesus freak, if you're a kleptomaniac, or if you're a homosexual. Which, I think, tells me more about the people who devised the test than they would ever learn from its results...
There's an old story about a behavioral psychologist who put a chimpanzee in a room full of toys. He peeked through the keyhole to see what the chimp was doing... and all he saw was the eye of the chimp looking out at him.
I put a recess in the puller so it could put tension on the joint while I popped it with the impact hammer, but the damned joint popped right apart as I was snugging the bolts down. [sigh] Well, at least the freakin' thing is off.
The wheel bearings are crunchy. Hopefully, the CV joints are not. I'm going to pull the axle and check the boots and joints while it's easily accessible.
This is another one of those eerie DaveWorld things. Yes, it's a deer body. But the head... the head closely resembles that of the Egyptian god Anubis. I'm not sure if that is what the original sculptor intended, but it's for damned sure not any kind of deer head...
I made some 3/8" thick spacers, countersunk them to the proper diameter, and got some countersunk Allen screws.
The screws wobbled around in the holes. They were bottoming out tight at the thread; the rim of the screw was quite a distance from the spacer.
Going through my catalogs, Machinery's Handbook, and older books, I find that although NOW the standard for a countersunk screw is 82 degrees, some of my 1940s books say "80 or 82 degrees." The countersinks I have on hand are 82 degrees. The hardware-store screws are 80 degrees. So are the ones from the local Fastenal store, and so are the plain old flathead countersunk screws. WTF!
To make a long story short, I can't find anyone anywhere who sells an 80 degree countersink or an 82 degree screw. So I made a fixture to hold the screws on the lathe so I can recut their countersinks... this revealed that the heads are neither square nor concentric to the threads.
[sigh] always some damned thing...
Now I have a bunch of customized screws. Fortunately, they'll be tack welded in place once the adapters are finished, so I won't have to worry about losing one...
> > I intend to keep a W2k machine in the darkroom, so I guess I'll do my > > taxes out there next year. My main concern is that MS will strong-arm > > the application writers to drop support for anything pre-Vista, and > > I'll be SOL.The simplest and least-aggravating way to run Windows apps on Linux is to stick an old W2K or XP box under the desk, headless, and use VNC to connect to it. You could even use it as a print/FAX server, firewall, music server, file server, disk mirror, or whatever.
I was fortunate enough that QuickPAR and Paint Shop Pro will run under Wine, so I don't have to do the VNC thing any more. I still run into PAR files that will *only* work with QP, and after you've used Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or GIMP are more trouble than they're worth for the sort of thing I do (rotate, crop, save - I don't have any other use for an image editor)
I'd forgotten how much I liked the movie. It had been a long time since I'd seen it, and I caught a lot more than I did last time. If you listen, there's all sorts of amusing stuff in the background chatter that's throughout most of the movie.
IMDB has this in their trivia section:
Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Last Action Hero" didn't do all that well, either. Not up to the usual Schwarzenegger figures, anyway. And it's roundly hated by a number of his fans.When I finally saw it I was entranced; it's one of his best movies. But it's a fantasy comedy , and I think a lot of people failed to understand what they were watching and kept thinking of it as straight SF or action, which it definitely isn't. That's the problem when you go off the beaten path.
> Anyway our question is: > What makes the valves rotate in a rocker activated engine? > What makes the valves rotate in a roller rocker engine?Generally, one side of the rocker is loaded more heavily than the other, and the rocker's wipe across the tip turns the valve a bit.
Most Ford engines theoretically have all their bits lined up parallel, so the only turning force would be from tolerance stackup, but engines line the small block Chevy have their rockers "knock-kneed" slightly, which promotes rotation.
Note, either the valve turns in the keepers (multigroove keepers are generally loose to allow this), or the retainer turns in the spring, or the spring turns in its pocket. Otherwise, the valve will rotate slightly going down, and then the spring will unwind as the valve closes and put the valve right back where it started.
Some (mostly GM) engines use ball-and-ramp positive rotation devices to force rotation. Small blocks put them on the rocker end of the spring, big blocks put them up against the head.
> > On another tangent, does anyone make a .45 ACP carbine that isn't a > > blowback actuated weapon.Uh... Borchardt made some toggle action .45 carbines for the US Cavalry once, over a hundred years ago... the Borchardt action evolved into the Luger.
There were a few hundred Lugers made in .45 ACP, also a century ago.
Some some demented reason, I've listed for one ever since I found out
they existed. You could probably swap a Ferrari for one.
There were also some Enfield SMLE carbines chambered in .45 ACP, but
they were silenced single-shot kit for commandos in WWII.
I didn't want to set up a computer out there, or buy an MP3-capable component for the stereo, so I was stalled for a while. Then I got the idea yesterday, "how about an MP3-capable boombox?" I figured I ought to be able to pick up something like that at the Wal-Mall for $30 to $40.
So, I head off to the Wall-Mall at 0400 and browse the electronics department. No (zero) MP3-capable boomboxes. One (1) cheap "component" stereo with MP3. Several of the boomboxes were prominently labeled "MP3", but on perusing the fine print on the box, this meant they were "MP3-capable", that is, they had a 1.5mm RCA jack somewhere that you could plug a player into.
Crap, I can do that with the big stereo, I would just have to walk halfway across the shop every time I need to pause it to take a phone call. Which would suck, but I shelled out $3.97 for a 1.5mm-to-phono-plug adapter, figuring with Wal-Mart vs. Radio Shmuck, the Wal-Mall was the lesser of two evils.
I was examining the receipt; that's Wal-Mart Store #0024. I call it "People's Merchandise Distribution Center #0024." One Party, One Leader, One Store... #24 would make it one of the first. I wonder if there's some kind of pecking order of Wal-Mart managers based on their store numbers?
We had a K-Mart for a while, but it committed what amounted to suicide. They wouldn't take checks without pre-approval by a manager, I don't think they ever swept or mopped the floors during the store's entire lifespan, they'd leave loaded pallets in the aisles so you had to squeeze around them to get anywhere, they had GIANT SPEED BUMPS in the parking lot, that would rip your transmission pan off if you didn't meet them at the right angle. Their prices were nothing special, not that I would have expected them to match the Wal-Mall, but I was willing to pay a slight premium just to avoid the Wal-Mall. The problem I kept running into was that they never had anything I wanted; I'd hike back to the automotive section, and they would be out of 10w40 motor oil. I'd go to the electronics department, and they never had any blank CDs. I'd look for shoes, and they only carried regular and narrow sizes - I take a wide. And so forth, ad nauseum. When the store finally closed, I hadn't been in there in several years.
http://www.taswegian.com/MOSCOW/4-71b.html
There really *are* people out there with too much time on their hands...
I'm sure if it came down to it, a birth certificate, passport, or
other form of ID would be acceptable in Indiana. Many places even take
the "not to be used for identification" Social Security card.
Indiana is famous for requiring ID to vote. Even I have heard about
it. For 12 Indiana residents to show up at the polls with no form of ID
isn't the jackbooted foot of the state repressing their rights, it's 12
people making a stupid political statement to get some time on the news.
There weren't that many all-metal aircraft before WWII, and they were
designed by rule-of-thumb with generous margins of excess strength.
Things got designed closer to the limits in WWII, but most of those
aircraft had a short lifespan.
The Comet was designed with the help of those new "computer" things,
to maximize the efficiency of a light aluminum stressed-skin structure.
There was not one thing wrong with DeHavilland's design.
What bit them was something nobody in the industry had forseen -
structural aluminum alloys are "solutions", not true alloys. They are
an aluminum alloy matrix with chunkies of zinc, silicon, etc. floating
around like chocolate chips in a cookie. Over time, some of the chips get
bigger, some get smaller, and stuff precipitates out of solution.
Eventually the metal loses strength and gets a tendency to crack. The
extremes of temperature seen by the jetliner accelerated the rate of
fatigue, and finally parts began to fail.
DeHavilland was bitten by a combination of chemistry and metal fatigue
that nobody had forseen. If it hadn't been them, it would have been one
of their competitors, more sooner than later.
We're still flying B-52s, but they're rated to less than half of their
original payload for that very reason. It's a big problem in the
aviation industry, and one of the things driving research in composites
and ceramics in aviation.
Every microgram of plutonium is recovered during processing; it's a
hundred times more valuable than gold, and it's actually useful for
something. Also radium U-235, thorium, and so forth. About the only
thing depleted uranium is good for is paperweights.
"Low temperatures" is evidently an opinion; uranium is in the
tungesten, vanadium, etc. group. In the 1930s you could buy
uranium-steel cutting tools.
I'd love to get my hands on some of those mythical bullets; I'm paying
$40 per slug for tungsten alloy for balancing crankshafts. You have to
be careful handling uranium because it's both toxic and pyrophoric, but
depleted uranium would be just the ticket for those bastard strokers.
The HR automatons and keyword-searching resume processing software are
at least as responsible for the sad state of software development as
offshoring or the Fed.
"Applicant MUST HAVE ALL OF THE FOLLOWING REQUIREMENTS:
[reply]
No, I'm not kidding.
Roosevelt was buggy on the "imperialist" thing, and the dissolution of
France' colonial holdings was one of the unspoken agreements everyone
tiptoed around in WWII. He also hammered at Churchill over Britain's
holdings, which probably came as close to driving Churchill to fits of
rage as anything, except he couldn't afford to alienate his only useful
ally. However, Churchill finally started tossing the "Philippine
Problem" back at Roosevelt when Roosevelt started in on him each time.
Rosie didn't care for that *at all*, so there was a lot of sullen
glaring on both sides
By the time Truman came in, the emancipation of the Philippines was a
done deal, politically. It just took another year or so for State to
finish dotting i's and crossing t's, and to whip up some kind of
Filipino government to hand things over to, since the Japanese had
hammered them pretty flat during the Occupation.
There was no bribery involved; the paperwork has been started before
MacArthur's idiocy lost the Philippines, and after that, there was no
organized government in the Philippines to offer bribes to anyway.
The people who claim the US has never been successfully invaded like to
sidestep around the War of 1812, but they just give blank looks when you
mention the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. The Philippines
were American territory, just like Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, or, for
that matter, the District of Columbia ... and the Filipinos were
American citizens. Not full voting citizens, but citizens nonetheless,
exactly like the ones who died at Pearl Harbor, which wasn't in a state either.
Yes, untied shoes will fall off. My buddy Tommy, who used to run a
wrecker service, had commented several times about how people would
leave their shoes behind in bad crashes. Because they had three feet of
laces trailing along behind and oversize tongues flopping like clown
shoes. Jeez.
As for the helmet, no full-face helmet is going to come off if it was
buckled on. It's a big deal for some idiots to "flaunt authority" by
perching the helmet loosely atop their head, or letting the straps fly
in the wind, or even dangle it from an elbow by the straps, which is
technically legal in most places. Hey, you pays your money and you
takes your chances, but the helmet didn't just "come off."
Old open-face helmets will rotate right off if they fit loosely, but a
full-face helmet isn't going to come off.
"The answers are out there..." Intelligence analysts and their
organizations like to sit on their information like chickens hatching
eggs. Even when they do share enough information between them to figure
things out, everything has to be filtered through their organizational
blinders. The Mossad absolutely refused to believe Egpyt was going to
attack, even though Sadat made no attempt whatsoever to hide anything.
The US refused to believe Japan would attack. The Brits refused to
believe the Argentines would hit the Falklands. Just having the data
doesn't help; it has to be interpreted - which is highly political -
then sent off to the correct authorities, who, likely as not, will file
it in the wastebasket without looking at it.
The vaunted KGB had this problem more than most agencies; "knowlege is
power", so each echelon sat tight on what it had rather than spread it
about where it might help the USSR. We now know the KGB had infiltrated
so deeply into the US defense structure they were having major problems
accomodating the flow of data, but best as I can tell, *none* of that
data ever was of practical use to the Soviet Union.
Marx and Lenin thought the enemy was capitalism, and in their
narrowness of focus, completely missed that the real enemies of the
people were the bureaucratic class, not the capitalist class.
"I'm here from the government, and I have these forms..."
My old driver's instruction manual I got in the mid '80s doesn't say a word about arrows, green or red, nor does my copy of the Arkansas Motor Vehicle Code. I've noticed local highway departments do a lot of things that aren't mentioned in those documents.
Driving in Little Rock used to be an adventure; the multiple-row racks of lights in the downtown area were turned sideways, and they had two or three of each color, apparently. But the Arkansas statutes don't mention anything about *where* the various lights have to be, just their colors, so I could never be sure what color those damned racks were. Like ~10% of all males, I'm red/green color blind. I've noticed there are only a couple of the racks left, last time I was downtown.
75 years ago, traffic lights often had shields that said "STOP" or "GO." I guess that was way too easy. And it expected people to know how to read.
The city of Jacksonville put a sign on Main Street some years ago. I'm graphic-image-impaired, I guess. To me, it looked like one of those religious things with hands tossing a dove up, or something. Just recently, I found out it's supposed to mean "library." The library isn't particularly close to the sign - maybe 200 yards. I don't know why an illiterate would care where the library was, and I couldn't understand why they couldn't put the word "LIBRARY" on the sign so the rest of us would know what the hell it was trying to say.
Then there was my old Yamaha Turbo, with the mystery icon on the LCD display. To me, it looked like "how to insert a rectal thermomenter." When I finally looked it up in the manual, it was supposed to mean "low brake fluid." Well, right. It's "intuitively obvious." To someone... and why is the ISO standard icon for "oil pressure" a freakin' gravy bowl?
These arrows may be something the ARDOT is doing all by itself, like the weird rows of triangles on the street, or the two stripes with no diagonals which are found at crosswalks now. Those aren't properly marked crosswalks, according to my DMV book.
Unless there's something newer than my book, green is green and red is red, and arrows don't mean jack.
Yes, boyzangurlz, the Communist Party of the USA. Well, sort of. The "real" CPUSA, the one you read about in J. Edgar Hoover's "You Can Trust the Communists", went completely defunct sometime in the 1960s due to utter lack of interest. The old joke was that it was mostly FBI agents reporting on other FBI agents.
Evidently someone has resurrected the name and put up a web site. I looked it over carefully, expecting it was a joke. I'm guessing not. Their "Constitution" is dated 1987.
Reading their Constitution, it looks like the only thing they're promoting is "abolition of capitalism." They don't seem particularly interested in promoting Communism; they say they're in favor of "socialism." That's a mighty wide brush; "socialism" means pretty much whatever you want it to mean, from the old CPUSSR to Uncle Adolf's National Socialist German Workers' Party.
One reason the old CPUSA died was that it no longer had a purpose.
Lenin's political platform during his proseletyzing days, before the
Kaiser shipped his ass back to Russia to make all his dreams of tsarlike
power come true, was based on the following tenets, among others:
et cetera, and so forth.
Note that almost all of Lenin's political platform was a reality in
the USA by Roosevelt's third term. The Democratic Party in the USA was shit-scared of the Communists, and after a flurry of Sedition Acts and anticommunist laws, they then proceeded to give the Commies everything they asked for. Which I don't have any particular objection to; by and large, these were reasonable things. I have dreams of becoming a dirty capitalist running-dog oppressor of the working class someday, so I naturally object to their policies against that sort of thing, but it's hard to argue against public schools, Social Security, and equal rights under the law.
On the other hand, these lamers state their goals are:
The Communist Party USA is an organization of activists in labor and all the people's movements with three main political aims:
1. Defeating the right-wing agenda of the Bush Administration.
Ri-ight. Note this is their numero uno goal. At this time Uncle George has about six months left of his second term. Focussing on the Bush Administration would seem to be short sighted.
Their dues are $60/year, with another $30 if you want a printed copy of their newsletter.
Looking through the articles on their web site, a lot of it looks like boilerplate straight from this web site: www.democrats.org Which is only reasonable, the Democratic Party has basically evolved into that the old CPUSA was trying to be.
As for me... I think the Republican Party is awfully far to the left nowadays. But that's a different topic.
I once wondered why the SMLE meant "Short Magazine Lee-Enfield" when
it had a big box o' ammo hanging below the receiver. I eventually found
out the full designation was "Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield". The commas
substantially change the meaning... the SMLE's barrel is long by modern
standards, but not by the black powder harpoons the Imperial Army lugged
around in the 1800s, and "magazine" referred to the detachable magazine,
which was a *big* deal - while Springfield and Mauser shooters were
fumbling with stripper clips, the Enfield guys were halfway through
their next magazine...
07/19/2008:
I wanted to be able to listen to MP3s out in the shop; I have stacks of MP3 audiobooks on CD. My portable player and earbuds aren't practical to wear while working. Plus the player's user interface sucks dead roadkill, and I hate the damned thing.
07/20/2008:
Styling and ergonomics of Soviet-era desk calculators.
07/21/2008:
> > How individuals identify themselves in our country grows more complex by the
> > year. Just last month, 12 nuns were turned away from voting booths during
> > the Indiana presidential primary because they lacked state identification
> > (none of them drives),
Arkansas, in its backwards way, has provided state ID cards since at
least 1972, when I got my driver's license and noticed such things. The
state ID card is a driver's license, except it says "NOT VALID FOR
VEHICLE OPERATION" or something like that.
> > a stark reminder that the recent Supreme Court ruling
> > that upheld Indiana's voter ID law poses lasting consequences to our
> > democracy.
If you want a part in selecting my government, I damned well want you
to prove you're a citizen legally entitled to vote. If you want
privacy, don't go to the polls.
07/22/2008:
> > For example, the world's first jetliner, the British built De Havilland
> > Comet, fell out of the sky due to metal failure.
The Comet is often used as an example of "bad design", but that's
serious after-the-fact spin doctoring.
07/23/2008:
> > Millions of Uranium Bullets to be used in Iraq because of their
> > penetrating power. Uranium bullets go right through Steal Plating
> > and Building Walls. These Radioactive bullets, however, burn up
> > because Uranium burns at low temperatures. The Uranium laced with
> > Plutonium then becomes a fine dust which is spread every where.
Plutonium! Oh, give me a break, my sides are hurting.
07/24/2008:
Shakespeare said "first we kill all the lawyers" because they didn't have
Human Resources Departments in the 17th century.
There are always a handful of these in the local paper. All of them
want you to fill out their online application at their web site, which
is so narrowly focused and inflexible it's a waste of time.
Now you know why there's a cottage industry in corporate
recruitment. Their main purpose is to bypass or sweettalk
HR. HR can be just as much a PITA from the inside perspective
as the outside.
07/25/2008:
> > Ironically enough we gave the Philippines back their
> > political independence on July 4 of 1946 as a favor for helping us out in WWII.
Not quite. Roosevelt was determined to shed the Philippines as part of
his anti-imperialist policy, so he started the paperwork and diplomatic
processes early on. He didn't seem to consider the occupation of
smaller zones likes Hawaii, USVI, Guam, etc. as "imperialist."
07/26/2008:
AB was watching one of those "true car crashes" shows a while ago, and
insisted on telling me about some motorcycle-vs-car wreck. Bike and
passenger mangled, knocked their shoes off, and knocked their helmets
off. I wheeled the chair over to the door and they were showing an
over-the-ankle high-top sneaker, laces untied, and a full-face helmet.
> > Ya might, some time, just for shitz and grins, get a bunch of your
> > buddies wearing their helmets, and got behind them and push straight up
> > on the back lip of the helmet and see what happens...
The chin bar goes down to your chest and the helmet stops.
07/27/2008:
[intelligence blunders]
07/28/2008:
> He had a green light also, but not a green arrow.
I've seen arrows before. There used to be one near the front gate of the air base in Jacksonville. It was, according to a friend, red in color. I saw the arrow come on and turned, apparently too close to some oncoming traffic for his comfort. When I got home I looked it up.
07/29/2008:
I just came up with an interesting URL:
http://www.cpusa.org/
07/30/2008:
> > As an aside, what good ever issued from the universal franchise?
It's a grand idea if you're a politician. By extending the franchise
down through the social structure, you're able to buy votes more cheaply
from the poor than from the rich. And the vote of a Welfare mother on
six different "entitlement" programs counts just as much as yours.
07/31/2008:
Simulacron-3 : ~/Documents
[ronin] fortune
Reisner's Rule of Conceptual Inertia:
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.