> http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/featureThis is another article by someone who is broadcasting from some alternate universe. Or they're a halfwit. Or even conceivably both. Quotes and commentary follow:
> This nostalgia is not harmless. Not only does it ignore the fact that > the Soviet Union was just as terroristic as Nazi Germany,Uh, not quite as terroristic as Nazi Germany.
> The re-Sovietization of Russia is possible because when the Soviet Union > fell, the new Russian state did not break irrevocably with its communist > heritage.The Russian Federation can't shuck off the heritage of the Soviet Union like dirty socks. You don't just change your government and waltz off free and clear, like an American bankruptcy.
The Soviets tried that very thing, denying the foreign debts of the Tsar; that didn't work before, and it won't work now, either. Which shows the RF is smarter than the CCCP was. Or at least, they learned from previous errors.
As far as "re-Sovietization" being practical... it certainly is. And I'd find nothing wrong with that. The problem wasn't the Soviet system, it was that Kerensky's revolution got hijacked by scumbags like Lenin and Stalin who immediately turned it into a dictatorship. After Stalin's death the Party successfully managed to block the accession of another dictator ("Comrade Beria? This way..."). However, they never managed to shake off the legacy of the Terror.
A new Party without that legacy, a country that's not shattered by war, a re-formed Soviet system, no worries about the occupied 'stans and their weird religions and languages... yeah, it could fly. Note that China is a chip off the Soviet block, and it's doing just fine. So were Czechoslovakia and Hungary, too, before the Soviets crushed them for ideological deviationism.
> To do this, it needed to define the communist regime as criminal and > the Soviet period as illegitimate;The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was recognized by every major and most minor powers. The USA, Britain, Germany, France, et cetera aren't going to want to be tarred as "collaborators of a criminal regime."
> open the archives, including the list of informers;...start the bloodbath. Half of the Soviet citizenry were stukachi for the KGB or the GRU; nobody liked them, but damned few of them had any choice, either. Who's going to pass judgement on those people? Half of any fairly-picked jury would have been standing in the same shoes. All opening the lists up would do is cause more trouble, which the RF doesn't need.
> and find all mass burial grounds and execution sites.Uh, why? And what's it to anyone else? Live Russians, dead Russians, if they don't feel like wallowing in American-style angst, more power to them.
> None of this was done and the consequences are being felt today.Relative peace vs. more bloody chaos for CNN's barking heads to breathlessly report on? I'd take those 'consequences' any time.
> There is still no legal evaluation of the Soviet regime: It has never > been declared criminal and no official has ever been tried for crimes > committed under communism.And it's never going to be, either.
> The result is that former communist leaders in Russia are viewed as > leaders first and criminals second (if at all), no matter how heinous > their actions.Like Yassir Arafat, who went from mass murderer to "great statesman" in the American press? That was enough to make me puke.
> Russians, thus, frequently lack the conviction, intrinsic to free > men, that an individual answers for his actions no matter what the > external conditions.Funny, many Westerners seem to have the same lack of conviction, particularly if they're flunkies for the media.
> Since the Soviet regime was not repudiated, the Russian government > became the Soviet regime's legal successor. This has meant that > millions of victims of repression were rehabilitated, usually > posthumously, by being cleared of official charges--rather than > have those charges voided as the product of a deranged system. > The regime, therefore, continued to judge its victims, rather than > the other way around.Uh, yes. The author needs to read up a little on how Soviet-style rehabilitation worked. A great number of those "rehabilitated" were never even formally charged in the first place, so it's hard to void something that didn't happen.
> In addition to not declaring the Soviet regime criminal, the new > Russian government did nothing to reveal the identities of KGB informers.Damn straight. Besides, they needed the KGB just as much as the Tsar and the Soviet did. Now they're the SvR and they're still around, despite much-reduced circumstances.
> Most important, Russian authorities made no serious attempt to find > and memorialize mass graves and execution sites.The nut who wrote this had a bug about that idea; this is the second time he brought it up in the same article...
> In August 2002, after a five-year search, the execution grounds for > the majority of the victims of the Great Terror in Leningrad were > discovered by Memorial volunteers in a firing range near the village > of Toksovo. It is estimated that the site holds 30,000 bodies, > making it possibly the largest on the territory of the former Soviet > Union. Neither the federal nor the local authorities have shown any > interest in excavating the site and analyzing the remains, let alone > memorializing the victims. Instead, they have cautioned the > volunteers not to interfere with the operations of the firing range.Correct. Just in case nobody noticed, the Russian Federation is stony broke, and they don't have the money to spend for the political equivalent of stabbing themselves in the eye with a sharp pencil. Those bodies aren't going anywhere, and chances are, they might decide they're better off anonymous. It's an internal Russian problem, and I doubt they give a damn what anyone else thinks.
> It is too late for President Bush to decline to go to Moscow as the > presidents of Lithuania and Estonia have done, citing Russia's > refusal to admit and apologize for crimes committed in the Baltics.He's the President of the United States, the USSR's major ally in WWII, taking part in a celebration of a *joint* victory over the Third Reich. I doubt he gives a damn about what some little zits on the map think about it.
> The Soviet Union did indeed achieve a great victory in defeating > Nazi Germany. The cost was 27 million dead. The failure to put the > victory in perspective and describe the true nature of the Stalinist > regime, however, means that the May 9 events, in addition to a > celebration of the victory, are also an exercise in propaganda that > glorifies the Soviet system. As a result, the visiting heads of > state risk endorsing with their presence a view of history that > works against the interests of Russia's democratic future.Gawd, I love it when I come across paragraphs like this. It looks like it means something profound, but when you read it closely, it's just like the stuff in the bottom of a birdcage.
> Mr. Satter, a Russian affairs specialist, is affiliated with the > Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins."In the Bozone, where the elk are made of metal..."
A "Russian affairs specialist," eh? Sounds like one of the ones who still mourns over the days when they analyzed pictures of the Presidium standing on top of Lenin's Tomb, pored over sanitized press releases from Tass, and made Grand Pronouncements about Soviet trends that seldom seemed to come true. You know, one of those guys who got caught by surprise when the whole thing came tumbling down in 1991 and left them with egg on their face.
> > 1) Exactly where does the world's current largest automaker, Toyota, > > illustrate innovation? ... > > They keep wrapping the same old > > technology in slightly revised sheet metal. The Corolla hasn't > > significantly changed in over a decade.Step back and look at that for a moment. Toyota is #1, not in the USA, but worldwide. Against, not just American competition, but all the competition there is.
They got there by providing adequate, reliable, modestly stylish vehicles in the correct market categories, at acceptable prices. They also do a good job at their dealer network, financing, maintenance, etc.
Innovation? If they need it, they can buy it from someone else... after it has been proven in service. After all, 99% of their buyers don't even know how many cylinders their cars have, much less care about the details of their automatic transmissions. Find the gas cap and the ignition, dial the cellphone, and drive.
You want to know where too many "innovative" companies are? Dead, that's where.
> > All 4 wheels on the Ikea carts swivel. Fooking Swedes and their stupid > > sense of humor.It's a Euro thing. Everyone I know who's been shopping in England curses their shopping carts. My brother was telling me they sell little wheel guides you can stoop down to put on the cart, so you can get it to go in the direction you're pushing. Maybe you'll remember to take it off when you leave...
> A well-designed 3-point is very comfortable.The one in my 1984 Mazda B2000 pickup is okay. The one in my 1980 Malibu is bearable only because I can give it a yank to get some extra slack, and it stays slack. Otherwise, it tries to saw through to my jugular like EVERY OTHER CAR I HAVE EVER DRIVEN.
Granted, my seating position is pretty radical - I sit straight up in the seat, instead of leaning way over with one elbow on the console, or leaning the seat back until I can barely peep over the dash, which seems to be how MOST people drive around here. So I guess the belts are designed for idiots.
That's not counting the reels that are simply insanely aggressive. When I borrow my Dad's Dodge pickup, I have to drive a nail through the webbing to keep the shoulder strap out so it doesn't choke off my air.
Then let's talk about the ones where the belt is mounted on the door, so you can't buckle up with the door open (Elbow City in many cars), or the ones where the buckle is on the console side under your asscheek, and you can't get both hands to it; you have to hold the limp latch and the limp belt together to make them go together. Then there are the motor-mouse belts, which seem to exist mostly to whip your $300 glasses onto the pavement, or put bloody gouges in your scalp.
> Looks to me like we're Vietnamising this war.What war?
We wasted Saddam's army seven years ago. Show the US military an enemy, and we will kill them. Guaranteed.
There's nothing we can do against the media's "insurgents", who are merely terrorists and criminals. There's no organization to take out. no command centers to hit, no infrastructure to capture or destroy. One raghead looks pretty much like another; short of killing them all - which would be simple and cheap - all we can do is keep them from kicking over the government we have set in place until that government is stable.
What the military is doing in Iraq is police work, exactly the same as what Metro PD does in the District of Columbia. Except per capita, the Metro PD guys are more likely to check out in a body bag, because DC is s festering shithole after dark.
> > Again, it's easy to whine about others not doing the right thing, or not > > being perfect enough, from the comfort of one's chair.They are paid to do the right thing. They are "trained professionals" with the authority of the State behind them.
The badge isn't just a get-out-of-jail-free card. It means responsibility, and with that responsibility, I hold them to higher standards than the average schmuck off the street. Otherwise, what the hell are we paying them for?
Nobody said the job was easy. But if they can't take it, nobody is forcing them to be cops. They're probably hiring at MacDonalds'.
Local autocrosses are the same way; SCCA Region 77 has often built courses that a Camaro or Mustang could not negotiate without stopping and backing up, (yes, that's prohibited by the Solo regs, but there's nothing you can do about it) and their local rule is to set the course up so the fastest cars do not exceed 35mph.
On such tight tracks, transient response and turn-in are the dominant handling characteristics, and since straights are so short, bite coming out of the corner is critical, and every corner is ABS. "Conservation of speed" is almost meaningless when every corner ends in a holeshot.
Over the years I've watched a lot of Formula-whatever and Porsche Cup cars show up for track events at Memphis, with their SCCA-Comp-License drivers strutting about how they're going to teach the street car guys a thing or two. And they most often turn into rolling roadblocks in the right sections; even I, definitely no kind of driver, have had to sit back there and drum my fingers on the roof waiting for these guys. Jay has probably had a dozen of these guys complain to the event steward about "tailgating" even though he's driving an absolutely bone stock 1990 Corvette with street tires and a 265 rated horsepower. (the PCA's take on tailgating: "if it bothers you, adjust your mirrors where you can't see it any more")
With any reasonable amount of power, you're always traction limited at autocrosses and at Memphis.
I think whenever I make it to one of the higher-speed tracks, I'll
have to learn a whole different technique. I'll just pretend I'm on the
freeway...
> > 3500ft is a LONG straight. Must be a brake-killer to slow down for a > > 30mph turn at the end.Staging lanes, dragstrip, runoff zone, and most of the Carrousel are WOT. Brake as the Carrousel tightens into Turn 2, which is negotiable at 40-ish. 2 feeds into the "M"s which are narrow and a bit faster, then a sixty foot or so straight until the Nineties, which will slow you below 35. The Nineties feed into a several hundred foot straight into the staging area, Grant's Tomb, which is an oil slick in between tall concrete walls. You drive straight at the far wall, then straighten out the turn as much as you can while turning about 270 degrees around the sharp corner and then up the rest of the staging zone up to the launch pad.
> > That's why I don't autocross. Granted, we've got clubs around here that > > do better than that.There are no long tracks in Arkansas. SCCA autocross, four drag strips, and maybe a dozen oval tracks. The track at Memphis is the closest, but since it got bought by Bruton Smith the price went too high there aren't many events held there any more.
Hallett is the next-closest, but it's closer to five hours away, and there's no direct route to it unless you pay the Kansas Turnpike Authority. I have major problems with paying a toll to use a road that has a federal Interstate Highway sign on it.
>>Timeline The novel, in fact, may improve as a movie;I liked the book; I've read it twice. The movie... it was well-filmed and had decent acting, but it had large areas of WTF? and huh? even though I knew what was supposed to be going on. Of course, a lot of stuff had to be edited out to cram it all into 90-odd minutes of video, but they cropped a lot of stuff that told you what was going on, while leaving in a bunch of footage of nothing-much-going-on, for some incomprehensible reason.
You can figure it out if you try, and it doesn't make much difference if you don't, but I get very annoyed when movies aren't internally self-consistent.
"The Hunt For Red October" was like that; it made no sense at *all*, even though I'd read one of the related books. Yeah, submarine guy, uh huh, but all the *why* got chopped out. Connery, fighting, whatever. Yawn.
As opposed to, "Star Trek: First Contact", which is not only far and away the best of the Trek movies, but it's internally consistent as a whole; it told you everything you really needed to know even if you'd never seen any of the previous movies or series. Hardcore Trekkies probably wondered why they wasted all that time going over "what everyone knows" though.
> > The Contour had IMO one fatal flaw: it had no room, particularly in > > back. It had a smaller back seat than its predecessor (Tempo) its > > competitors (Corsica, Stratus) and even a number of smaller cars (Jetta).That's the party line, but in anything smaller than a de Ville or Continental, the back seat is where you put children or lower management flunkies. I doubt many people who make a car purchase actually consider sitting in the back seat themselves.
> > In general, I do. Between our Bimmers and the Saab and the SHO I fit > > just fine in the back of all of 'em.I'll be damned if I'll ride in the back seat of my own freakin' car.
Whenever I start to feel down or depressed, I think of what my father told me so many times when I was a kid: "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and I'll start hitting you again, you ugly little retard." Simulacron-3 : ~/media/lists [ronin]
> > i) Is this a choice issue? > > ii) Are helmets a good idea. > > > > Two the second point, yes, I think helmets are a good idea. I wear all gear > > all the time. I'm not a p***y, I just don't want to do any more bodily harm > > than nessisary when I go down.Thanks to ABATE and their political activities, I no longer *have* to wear a helmet here in Arkansas. Which I thoroughly appreciate.
However, I continue to wear a full-face helmet. I've nailed birds with my face twice, a thrown bottle of beer (unopened) once, uncountable numbers of Arkansas rock-bugs approximately the size of my thumb, and far too many rocks and other debris thrown up by vehicles in front.
I prefer the full-face type because the bottom of the shield is well-supported, and doesn't bend in at high speed or with crosswind.
Also, anything over 30mph or so, and my eyes tear so badly I can
barely see, even with glasses. And the helmet also hides my
prohibited-by-state-law ear plugs.
Everyone has their own crash scenario. Many people concentrate on
head injuries. I worry about being turned into road pizza by the next
four or five Expeditions or Escalades behind me, with their drivers
talking on their cellphones while keeping one eye on their DVD players.
I could really care less if anyone wears a helmet or not. However, I strongly resented being forced to wear one.
I got a copy through Inter-Library Loan, from some library in Montana. It was brand new and had never been opened.
Yesterday it was due for return. I went down to Office Depot to make a copy of it. $25 worth of copies seemed better than $300 for a used book, anyway.
Office Depot has upgraded their copiers. Copy machines and I don't get along in general. Sometimes you can just press the "start" or "copy" button and get a copy, otherwise you're dumped into the VCR-from-Hell three lines of dim LCD 20 character display, designed by someone who should be fixed so they don't reproduce.
It took about fifteen minutes to get the first useable copy. The new copiers say "network scanner", and they have a slightly bigger display; a window into a world of submenus. You can't just put something on the machine and copy it; it must have various options set. And it will hold the options for, oh, about 30 seconds, so if you pause to make sure you didn't miss any pages, it resets itself to default.
I had my MP3 player with Terry Pratchett's "The Truth" queued up, so I managed to remain relatively calm. Once the machine thinks you're done copying - like if you pause more than 30 seconds - it spits out a "summary sheet", which you present to the cashier. I had quite a stack of "summary sheets" by the time I was done.
The old copiers, you could just set which paper tray and if you wanted enlargements, and keep pressing "COPY" while you moved the book. The new ones, EVERY SINGLE PAGE, popped up a menu asking "Are You Finished?" and "buttons" for NO and YES. If you say "YES", it resets to defaults and spits out a summary sheet.
I did this half a dozen times before I figured out the problem. It's a fscking Euro user interface. American equipment *always* asks "do another?" or "continue?" or something similar. You say YES. Euros ask if you're finished, you say NO.
Since the US default is YES, you could just keep poking the COPY button, since the default was YES. The machine only had to know when you didn't want to continue. The Euro asks EVERY time, assuming you only want to make ONE copy.
It sounds trivial, but I pressed "NO" 296 times in 2-1/2 hours, using the end of my tire gauge on the fscking touch screen after my thumb got sore. I couldn't get enough pressure with an index finger to even operate the thing.
I checked for a manufacturer name, but there was no name or logo visible on the top, front, or left side. Most copiers usually have a sticker or plaque attached by the local vendor; it didn't have one of those, either. Just a piece of tape with something that looked like a Windows share name. I guess if my user interface sucked that bad, I'd be embarrassed to put my name on the machine, too.
- Terry Pratchett
http://www.automagparts.com/
THE ORIGINAL AUTO MAG COMPANY IS FOR SALE
You get all the parts, inventoried, that we sell on this site. You get millions of dollars of the original tooling used to make the original pistol. You get 300 of the original Aristocrat brochure. You get everything my father had left from the AutoMag Company upon his passing. My mother does not want to do this any longer and frankly, the part sales just are not worth my time. So if you wanted to start production of the AutoMag again - this would be a good start. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of parts and tools. You get the rights that we gave to Galena and got back prior to their bankruptcy. You get all unfinished pistols that were being made for the Harry W. Sanford commemorative series. I know you are going to want to see an inventory of the parts and look over the tooling, so email me using this link and lets talk. The price stands at a firm and bargain $100,000.00 for my Father's legacy and would make you a famous pistol manufacturer, overnight. Once in a lifetime opportunity for the right person.
http://www.arborsmith.com/treecircus.html
Anyway, I kept the absorber and controls. The Clayton was very primitive - a torque convertor type hydraulic absorber, a loader valve, an unloader valve, a strain gauge, a Wheatstone bridge, and a giant (18"!) analog "horsepower" meter.
I decided it might make a useful accessory for my run stand. Running engines in is useful; breaking them in under load would be better, because some things don't show up until there's a load. Since the absorber had a bad ball bearing inside, I had to get it apart.
Disassembly was an adventure. I'd last tried, oh, maybe 1997. The rotor has three bolts and pulls off with a harmonic balancer puller. Except it wouldn't pull off. I got sidetracked, and it's been on my workbench ever since. Several of you have seen it there, next to the boring bar, gathering dust.
I put the puller back on, tightened it up, and hit it with penetrating oil daily for two weeks. No go. I tried the propane torch. Half an hour later, nothing. I tapped with the brass hammer, tried a tentative whack or two with the impact hammer on the puller (good way to strip a puller...), etc. Stuck solid.
There are some rubber seals and bits in there that probably don't like heat, but I'm now up to "it MUST come apart, or it's trash anyway" point. It's broken now, I can't make it any more broken. So I dragged it over to the torch, threaded on the rosebud tip, and proceeded to apply some serious heat.
I used candle wax after it got smoking hot. Wax often wicks in and helps dislodge stuck bits. I used the brass hammer. I got the rotor glowing a dull red. I used the impact hammer on the puller. I whacked with the brass hammer. The puller loosened slightly. An hour later, with the whole rotor glowing, I managed to hammer and pull the rotor off.
Didn't appear to have damaged anything. Now I have to build a special spanner wrench to unscrew the bearing carrier. Fortunately I have the service manual from Clayton. It looks like the bearings and seals are all standard bits. There's some erosion on the stator, but it appears to be a steel weldment, so I should be able to weld and grind it. It looked like cast iron on the outside, for some reason. Maybe a bit of corrosion.
The strain gauge and bits have been stored inside in a drawer. I don't expect there'll be any problem with those.
So, I can (after a little fabricating) load the run stand to "200hp." I guess I'll eventually find out what the torque rating is. I already have a tach, oil pressure, and coolant temp gauges, and I recently acquired a small portable Sun machine. Actually it's made by Snap-On, but it's an 8-cylinder scope with a forest of connector wires.
It occurred to me I'd never seen anyone use a Sun machine on a dyno. Looking at my old dyno sales information, from 1996-ish when I was thinking of buying one, it looks like all they came with was RPM, torque, and "HP". You had to buy an optional instrumentation package for fuel flow, air flow, and EGT... and that's as far as most of them went.
I guess if your only interest is a peak HP figure for sales or drag racing development that's fine, but it's interesting to see (after a little googling) that most dynos don't have much in the way of instrumentation.
I've been in half a dozen shops that have dyno cells that hadn't been used in a year or more, not counting the ones at Holman-Moody with yard furniture stored in them, or the ones at RHS full of cardboard boxes.
A little further googling showed that 10-bit, 10-channel A/D to USB adapters are down to under $150. At that price, there's not reason not to go nuts and log everything.
Anyway, the absorber has to be repaired first, and other projects completed, but this one is looking fun.
> > Lots of brouhaha was published in the media when Microsoft set up a > > development center in Vancouver, Canada. Bill Gates said that the > > Canadian office was necessary because it was so difficult and expensive > > to import H-1Bs into the U.S. Gates praised Canada because: *"The > > Canadian government makes it easier to bring in smart people from > > various countries.". *Microsoft used to maintain a major development center in Saudi Arabia. IBM used to use Ireland. This was back in the '80s; they did it more to protect key projects from headhunters than for security.
As far as I know they've shut those places down due to the advent of email and cheap telephone time.
I guess the new thing is centralization, so Microsoft wants all of their programmers under their thumb in Redmond instead of opening a subsidiary in Johore.
With a full-time broadband connection and modern (or sensibly designed) project and code management tools, there's no particular reason for a programming team to be in the same office, or even the same country. You can hold meetings online if needed, and your only evaluation of an employee is by his code, which you're not going to analyze with him sitting in front of you.
"Security" isn't a valid reason. I once interviewed at a place where the manager bragged about his security, "no floppy disks are allowed in this building!" He apparently had no idea you could download files into cameras, MP3 players, or some models of Timex watches. For that matter, a 4GB USB key rides around in my watch pocket, next to my motorcycle ignition key. If security is an issue, you only give the Big Picture to a handful of people and dole out the rest in modules, though "modular programming" harrows the souls of true-hacker-d00dz.
In fact, as far as I can see having foreign progammers on-site in Redmond has only liabilities without any tangible benefits to Microsoft. These people will cost more here than at home, both for wages and benefits. Microsoft takes "foreign invader" heat, they have to pay for office space for them, layers of management have to be added, reams of state and federal paperwork... all this? It makes no sense.
So, I decide to download the Windows version and see it it'll run under Wine. Unfortunately, Apple's download page only shows MacOS binaries; no Windows files. But I'm running Konqueror, and so many web development packages use f*tard hacks that are specific to Internet Explorer or Firefox, so I tried Firefox. Hmm, still only wants to let me download Mac binaries... but there's a big "Upgrade to QuickTime 7 Pro for $29.95" on the Konqueror screen, and the one on the Firefox screen (dual monitors are nice) says 44.95.
Well, well. A $15 price difference depending on which browser you hit their web site with. Isn't that interesting.
Ah, well, there's always IE4Linux, which is a nifty hack that lets you run Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (and Outlook!) on Wine. I had it installed for a previous employer, whose web site had been carefully designed to be useable *only* with Internet Explorer - even Firefox just saw blank pages.
Cut and paste the URL into Internet Explorer, and it comes up with big blank spaces and the status bar at the bottom says there are errors on the page. Looks like Apple needs to flog their web crew...
So, I google for a URL deeper into Apple-land. Apple's default download page is broken, but people have discovered other pages, some of which let you download QuickTime directly without having to take all the iCrap with it. I paste the new URL in, get a download page, download with IE6, tell it to execute the program... and it pops up a window saying QT 7.5 will only run on XP or Vista. Nice of Apple to mention that on their web site before I wasted my time... f*tards. Also probably bad programming; I don't see anything QT should be doing that would require XP or Vista. Any OS and display functions from 95 up should work for what it's doing. Likely, they used one of the dot-net compilers, which defaults to the latest versions of Windors in a cack-handed effort to force people to upgrade their Windows.
Okay, there's a way to get Wine to return a specific version number... ah, winecfg, that's it. Change the global setting from 98 to XP. Nope, still says "XP or later". Add "quicktimeinstaller.exe" specifically, and set to XP. Nope. They're ignoring the Windows version function all and looking at something else. Definitely a programmer problem here.
So, winecfg, set version, try again, and we're up. Turned out the video was useless. Ah, well, that's the nature of things in DaveWorld...
The computer stuff was all bullshit, sort of like the car stuff in "The Fast and the Furious." However, we did get a brief shot (or CGI) of the "big warehouse" set. I've been keeping track of that set ever since I noticed the "apartment building" in "Blade Runner" was the same as the warehouse in "Shaft's Big Score."
If you didn't know anything about computers it would be a fine action movie. And, though it's damning with faint praise, it's a hell of a lot better than Die Hard 2 or (gag) Die Hard 3.
Speaking of Die Hards, I thought the first one was excellent, and still do. And watching it again a couple of years ago, I caught something in one of the two or three millisecond pans across Holly's boss's office. Stop, back up, stop, back up - I wasn't kidding about a few milliseconds - and yes, there they are - a pair of five foot tall black monoliths. Carver "Amazing" loudspeakers, just like mine.
Last month I was rewatching "I Come In Peace" with Dolph Lundgren - another underrated movie - and in another out-of-focus millisecond sweep across Dolph's character's apartment... yes, another pair of Carvers. Hot damn!
> > is archived on the Partial Immortalization blog — the project was going > > to store, for free, some of the world's largest scientific datasets. In > > Trowbridge's slides, he points out the 120 terabyte Hubble Legacy > > Archive and the one terabyte Archimedes palimpsest.Uh. A terabyte hard drive costs $100. It would take 120 of them for the Hubble dataset, or $12,000. That's peanuts. It's a non-excuse.
NASA has gone on and on about how all the data they collected was "for all mankind", and bragged about sharing it with the Soviets, which pissed a lot of people off. There ought to be copies of all that data all over the world, at universities, institutes, and the "vast online databases" everyone talks about but can never seem to pinpoint.
So either "all the data has been lost" is another NASA lie, or they said they were making it available, but never did, which would be a different lie. I know the vast NASA web farm has precious little online; last time I checked, a majority of the images were just "artist's conceptions" and I never found anything that appeared to link off to raw data.
With a certain mindset, you could wonder if any of that vaunted telemetry had actually worked, or even existed...
[brutally ripped from elsewhere]I also worked for 5 years to figure out why beer goes in yellow and comes out clear, and yet water goes in clear and comes out yellow. I could have figured it out faster, but things were comming out clear at the time.
> > ...and how much of the world's money supply is actually dependent on gold?...or big stone wheels, or cows, or seashells?
Paper money is surely one of the larger "unintended consequences" of paper printing technology.
>> >> I'm short of background here. This Crimex thing is like a >> >> bank, and sold more gold than it actually had, and now >> >> they're falling short? > > Bingo. They trade many times more gold/silver than they can physically deliver > > (for a fee of course).Damn, I'm good...
I'd sort of wondered about those people who were claiming they had "invested in gold." Okay, where is it? Blank look. They shuffled some paper with a broker, and now they have some "gold" to go with their beachfront property in Oklahoma.
Given the portability of gold, and the reasoning behind using it as an investment, I'd buy a mix of coinage, like Krugerrands and American Eagles, and maybe some jeweler's wire, and split it between various safe places and a couple of safe deposit boxes.
As far as portable investment goes, I still think anyone putting their money into gems is nuts. There are already three different companies making artificial gem-grade diamonds, and more coming online. Meanwhile, sapphire, ruby, etc. are made by the pound.
I'd stay with metal - gold, silver, platinum... I'd feel guilty about platinum, though. Its value comes from its industrial uses, not jewelry.
The crossbow was apparently developed in or near Vietnam by most accounts, somewhere around 500 BC. It's part of their cultural mythology, like Amaterasu in Japan or Romulus and Remus to the ancient Romans.
The Chinese made extensive use of it, and the ancient Greeks and Romans picked them up around 200 BC. They were always known and used in the West, all the way up to the mass conversion to gunpowder. Oddly, there's very little mention of them in any of the military history I've read; it's all pikes and longbows until the arquebus comes along.
There are various European fables about magic swords, and I think there's at least one magic spear along in there somewhere, but Vietnam's magic crossbow is unique as far as I know. A conventional bow can be quite sophisticated in construction, but it comes down to sticks and string in the end; even the Bushmen and Eskimos used them. The crossbow, on the other hand, is a *much* more sophisticated thing; the levers and pivots of the trigger mechanism move it from "sticks" to "technology." The Chinese even had magazine-fed repeaters.
The really odd thing is, for all that it was such a step up from the ordinary bow, the crossbow's effect on history is, as far as I can tell, zip. There are a handful of battles where the longbow is credited with victory, but in the main, it looks like most killing was done with spears and swords.
> > What's the saying? "When every second counts, it's good to know the > > police are only minutes away!"Average response time for JPD was 35 minutes, last I heard.
The town is 30,000 and has 12 police cars, though only two are "patrol" cars, the others being perqs for the senior staff. Mostly they sit in Fort Jacksonville with their bars, cameras, and bulletproof glass. The station is just like a prison, except the inmates wear uniforms. On rare occasions they'll venture out of the station in their black Schutzstaffel uniforms and mirror sunglasses, climb into their patrol car with blacked-out windows, drive around a bit, then return to the station.
I view them as just a better-organized gang; certainly I spend more effort avoiding the "police" than I do the "criminals."
> > I believe a lot of US-market cars have their slushbox downshift > > strategies buggered for CAFE reasons, to make damn sure the thing will > > go straight to the highest gear possible and never, ever downshift > > during the EPA driving cycle.Driving a recent GM is more like driving one of those old electric golf carts than driving a car. They're drive-by-wire, so when you push the pedal down, the convertor unlocks, then it downshifts, then it downshifts again, then it downshifts a third time and the needle bumps off the stop on the tach as the engine hits redline, then it all slams back up to high gear and idle when you let up. Which makes for a looong delay before anything happens, then you get way more commotion than you wanted.
The old golf carts had a set of plungers into variable resistors, so you had different speed steps instead of variable speed. I guess too many people at GM were more familiar with golf carts than automobiles...
> > of patient records exposed, the federal government's National Institutes > > of Health is forbidding all employees who use Apple's MacBook laptops > > from handling sensitive data as of Friday, InformationWeek has learned. ... > > NIH imposed the no-MacBooks rule because there is no Apple-compatible > > version of Pointsec.Now that's vendor buy-in with a vengeance!
Some salesman at Checkpoint Systems probably got stock options and all the company hookers he could service for making that sale.
In DaveWorld, no sensitive data would ever be permitted on a laptop in the first place. In cases of extreme necessity for accessing data outside the office (I'd make them beg, and get permissions signed off from the President on down...) I'd let them log in remotely with SSH or a Citrix client.
Bulk Federal or corporate data should never be put on a freakin' laptop, USB key, CD, or anything that can be removed from the secured work area. We give them a desk, a chair, and a login, they can do their damned work between 8 and 5...
> > Hendrickson actually analyzed the IRS tax code and came to a > > stunning conclusion: Most Americans are not required by law to pay an income > > tax.Even if it was true, it would be irrelevant.
The IRS is empowered by Congress to make its own laws, they have their own courts, they have their own police, and they can do any damned thing they want, subject only to intervention from Congress, which is about as likely as Archangel Gabriel coming down to tell the IRS to leave you alone.
"IRS - We've Got What It Takes To Take What You've Got"
The mount command has become a mess lately; it has been changed considerably, not necessarily for the better, and the documentation hasn't kept up. I spent many hours before I found out the order of parameters is now positional for some purposes, like mounting SMB shares. And older fstab files simply barf on some newer systems.
SuSE 11.0 identified my drives by the new method, but worked with my old fstab. I guess 11.1 has been "improved."
Old method, which goes back 20 years or more:
/dev/sda4 /home/ronin/media/music xfs defaults 1 2
(well, "sda" was "ide" on older versions of Linux, and other things on BSD or AT&T, but the rest was much the same)
New mandatory method: /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST31000340AS_6QJ04E58-part4 xfs defaults 1 2
That identifies a particular hard disk, yes. But if I have a removeable drive, I don't care what the damned device is; whatever shows up as "sdb1" is what I want to mount, whether it's a USB key or another drive stuck onto the IDE cable. I guess they figure most people are running KDE or Gnome, and click on the "Open Microsoft Windows-Like My Little Pony Window to View With A File Manager" thingie. When you're trying to find a drive from the command line, it's just a pain in the ass. And no, I don't find "scsi-SATA_ST31000340AS_6QJ04E58-part4" easier to remember than "sda4." Who the hell does?
I'd move a little closer to the edge and look down, and there are places you could fall a quarter of a mile before you hit the rocks. There are *clouds* down there.
I looked at the guys going up sideways on loose dirt, and finally made the uncomfortable self-realization that I don't have the cojones to do that. Bouncing off the tirewall, or trees, or a building, or playing chicken with traffic, or the usual hazards, yes, but for most of the Peak, any major "off" would mean some athletic types with crampons and grapnels rappelling down to recover your remains.
> wife laying on the couch, totally naked. Soft music was > playing, and the aroma of perfume filled the room.You can tell a female wrote this. If a guy had written it, the stereo would have been cranked to KISS' "Shout It Out Loud" instead of some generic "soft music."
"Well, the night's begun and you want some fun
do you think you're gonna find it?
(think you're gonna find it!)
You got to treat yourself like Number One,
do you need to be reminded?
(need to be reminded!)
It doesn't matter what you do or say,
just forget the things that you've been told.
We can't do it any other way,
everybody's got to rock and roll!"
There wouldn't have been any gay-ass "perfume" stinking the place up, either. The scent of something beefalicious coming out of the kitchen would have been more than adequate.
Now, Seagate... back in the BBS days, I went through a LOT of Seagate ST4096s...
Last month I bought a 1000-gigabyte Seagate SATA drive for $109.