Posts by Marshalltown

Re: Idea

We did not nickname him "Moonbeam" because of any satellite proposals. He acquired the nickname because he was considered peculiar by many citizens, especially after Reagan.

Re: Not much of a chemist then?

US currency is paper not polymer.

Specious argument

A "fleeing" burglar is not by any visible evidence a "discouraged" burglar. Fleeing as an act exhibits no indication that he would not come back, either when confident you are not home, or better equipped to deal with you as an armed occupant. So, there is absolutely no reason to argue that planting a barb, or shooting a fleeing burglar or car thief in the ass is anything but reasonable self defense. The only person who would disagree is the thief and his personal injury attorney who hopes to profit from the non-pc approach to criminal justice. A jury of potential or active criminals might, and so might a jury narrowly instructed by the judge to consider only the immediate events. Frankly, I would argue that anyone injured while committing a crime should be held to have forfeited the protection of the law during that act. And, since the police regard fleeing a crime scene as a criminal act in itself, fleeing is not an automatic justification for arguing an injury acquired when fleeing TO AVOID THE CONSEQUENCES OF AN ATTEMPTED crime was not acquired in the course of committing the same crime.

Re: NASA: past its sell-by date

Here in the US, in most places, school-age kids are not supposed to carry pocket knives ever while at school. One Christmas gift exchange (Second Grade - so I would have been about six) I received pocket knife, a genuine "Davy Crockett," Barlow style, single bladed, pocket knife. The teacher did not immediately confiscate it. She told me I was not to carry it at school. I then carried it home. My dad taught me how to sharpen it on an oil stone and I thence forth completely ignored any injunctions about when and where I could carry it.

I never spent a day without a knife in my pocket until after 9/11 lead to the stupid, idiotic restrictions we now see these days. In fact, most of my teachers must have been aware I had one on me - the shape in my pocket was a dead give-away - and more than once over the years a teacher asked to use it, and I let them without loss of my knife. Thinking about it, the teachers borrowing it usually happened in class, and despite a fair number of brown-nosing tattle tales, I never got in trouble about it.

These days I carry a three-bladed "stockman" style and use it as a marking knife in the wood shop.

"In addition the need for a replaceable battery is much less than years ago ..."

Really? Consider how non-replaceable batteries recently affected Samsung. Think back to the trouble they have repeatedly caused other makers in the past - including Apple. Non-replaceablle batteries consumerize the electronics and maximize cash flow. Battery bad - you need a whole new phone/lap/tablet. Had stuff stored on there? Sorry, it's gone. You should have come in and bought a new one when you first saw signs or trouble. They don't benefit anyone but the maker - unless of course they are designed so they catch fire.

Clinton is pretty bad, but look at the other candidates. Johnson (the best of the bad) ignorant as the day is long. Stein, ick, really, really ick. Watch John Oliver's segment on them . Trump, far, far bigger crook than Clinton, a narcissist sociopath (at best) and a far worse history than Clinton, "admires" Putin, talks (and even sounds) like the Penguin in the second Batman movie, hated in Scotland, Mexico and wherever he decides he wants your land for his purposes. I hate to say it but for years now it has seemed like the US elections were a race to see just how egregious a candidate could get elected. I suspect given some of the parallels with classical Athens that it may be an endemic flaw in aging democracies. Jefferson plainly suspected it.

Re: do worry chaps 5 years we all be on mars

You probably think Bill Gates is a great programmer too. Musk doesn't need to know jack about space operations. All he needs is a staff that does, and that he has. So, why so bitter? He didn't hire you?

Re: Nonsense.

... It's a spectrum.

I believe that was actually their conclusion. The distribution is a Normal one and all other things being equal, your position on that curve is proportional to the effort you put into it. There is no bimodal curve, all the really gifted and the sadly lacking do is create the tails on the bell's skirt.

Electrons

I used to get a complaint every morning from the office manager. Some wasn't working, would mnot access, would not .... Of course, I would ask her to move out her chair, sit down and have her explain to me what she was doing, and things would be shiny. That would drive her bats ... screaming rage. She would ask what I did "different." I would tell her, 1) I had a cup of coffee before entering the office and 2) I was always polite and said "good morning" to the electrons. It was obvious that it paid off, since they never gave me trouble. She never did have a coronary, but some of the facial hues ... bright pink to deep blueish purple... wow!

Re: I have one reservation

Go through it again, slowly. The light may yet dawn. All the magistrate really said, the sentence was already handed down, was, in effect, "tough." She might very well have been pissed off, but all she told the whining little *&^% was that she was not going to change her mind. He clearly had not learned to grovel properly. If he is equally stupid inside, he may have a really different life when he leaves.

Re: 1bs

"1bs"

You do realize that back in the days of Courier and maybe san serif, people would be asking, "lbs? Do you mean avoir dupois, Imperial or Sterling?"

Re: He's right. Again.

"No rest until the domain admin account has a picture of my cat on every machine!"

You would have a point if Windows didn't work this way in general. Linux has had good support for some classes of hardware for years. USB thumb drives are an example, in contrast with Windows where each and every drive has its own little bit of software on the drive and Windows still announces it is "looking" for a driver. Trying to access the more useful capacities of a USB digital microscope on the other hand, or of Canon printers or scanners in linux has always been a painful process. But that is simply because they won't properly document the HW interface for fear that someone will start making hardware knock-offs that work nearly as well or better.

Re: @Is Just a Bloke ... Correlation does not imply causation

"..I discovered condoms actually have expiry dates.."

And just how much did that discovery cost?

Re: Hmm

"The fundamental cognitive dissonance is that Americans have lots of guns, yet still lost literally all their civil rights."

That reflects US views, but they rarely understand just how constrained humanity in the rest of the planet is.. Compared with other parts of the world, including some regarded as highly enlightened parts, the individual US citizen is well off as regards "rights' such as free speech, weapons, access to courts, presumed innocence, etc. The "rights" the US falls short on are more typically health, retirement, and other more "social" "rights." Your typical US citizen is deathly afraid of taxes and envisions themselves as only a tiny distance away from Trump and the Waltons, mistaken as that is, not quite grasping that someone like Trump OWNS the legistlators that pass the laws taxing the little guys and protecting individual people with the wealth of small nations..

Re: Neighborhoods vs cities

CO2 emitted by the US has reduced steadily as technology addresses efficient energy extraction from hydrocarbons. We aren't really short of hydrocarbon fuels, but the common belief is that we are and that most of our energy derives from overseas sources - it doesn't. In fact, the US continues to produce a large fraction of the energy it needs, and doesn't export oil despite the whinging demands that two-way trade in oil be opened up by the government. US energy is among the cheapest on the planet largely because of the lower need for the US to compete for foreign oil.

Also, when thinking about CO2 consider this. All that green stuff out the window, the chlorophyll-bearing plants are composed primarily of two chemical compounds: water and CO2. There are traces of other elements (nitrogen and a bit of magnesium for instance) many of which remain as ash when you burn a plant, but the immense bulk consists of CO2 and water converted to carbohydrates (e.g. potatoes and wood). Burning them returns the CO2 and water to circulation (you can fry and then metabolize the potato if you like - same difference). When you say "fossil fuel" you are saying that the water and CO2 that composes that fossil fuel has only recently become available once more for use by plants - and thus by other organisms as well. Anyone who has actually studied historical geology in the whole is not worried about CO2, unless perhaps they are concerned that current biologically available supplies are the lowest they have reached since the end of the Permian - 250-million years ago. Plants need CO2 and we need plants.

Re: Haven't heard of R

R is an open source variant of S-Plus. I started using it when I received a negative value for a variance from Excel. That was many moons ago now and Excel and most other spreadsheets have gotten much better at such things, BUT Excel (and SPSS, STATA and the like) still costs infinitely more (divide-by-zero error comparing costs) and has vastly less ready functionality. R is used in medicine, climate models, finance, geology, archaeology, paleontology, GIS mapping applications, and good old fashioned statistics. I've talked to recent grads that studied statistics (usually specialized areas) and the teachers are tending more to employing R because of the cost and because writing codes makes the student actually think about what they are doing. It's also handy for things like scraping tables in web sites. I can't see it competing with a more general purpose language though. Why bother?

Re: Everyone seems to have missed the point here......

Given what was possible, it seems unlikely he intended not to damage anything. Then too, Citi, you got remember it was Citi. They were the ones caught pushing "subprimes" and wound up losing three-quarters (or more) of the value of the stock back in the 'oughties. Performance? He might have a point about upper management.

Re: I wonder

Hmmm, at a local hospital a staff member received a call from a citizen living some 30 miles away - (50 km to those who don't travel in miles). It seemed that the said citizen's fax machine had begun spewing out the medical records of a patient at the hospital. The staff member receiving the call inquired and was interested to learn that the patient's records were *supposed* to have been printed out for a "hand carry" to a consulting doctor. The paper had never emerged from the printer.

Re: er

As regards a "point" - well, no. No, she doesn't. The evidence available, which is very limited thanks to the use of proprietary software and hardware _suggests_ that electronic voting is far easier to spoof than the normal voting booth, graveyard rousing approach. It is highly probable that backers of good 'ol dubbya highjacked the 2004 election in the US - at least, based on exit polls it is. The exit polls had Kerry win handily, yet strangely in many of those very same precincts where the electronic systems were used the machines told an entirely different story. So, did the voters lie to the pollsters, or did someone hack the machines? But that's now all litter under the Bush so to speak.

Meh - Fairbanks AK

A Mars year at the equator looks like winter in Fairbanks Alaska. There are worse places in the Siberian arctic.

Re: Curious minds want to know

The last time Burlington faced a military threat it was from the British Army and the soldiers were not equipped with jet fighters, or even multishot weapons. All an airbase would protect anyone from is Canada. Now Canada is not to sneered at. They built one of the very early hi-tech fighters ever built, though the soviets stole the plans, and the PM had every hull scrapped. But, still, as useful as those fighters might one day be, claiming to have freedoms left after the Patriot Act is perhaps a little rose colored in the lens department.