First he urged their selflessness and humility - then in the second case? He exhibited his own.

You are noble. In the best and most approving sense of the word.

There are people who haven't faced a fraction of your difficulty, who are yet to perform the level of introspection you've mustered to understand how they behave - and to derive from it a mission or a wish.

"but it is possible to be happy and depressed, the thoughts are not mutually exclusive."

Yes. Happiness is a real trip.

I don't know if we'd get along together in "real life" - but around this ASCII-space, I'm one of your real fans and supporters. And I'm glad to be.

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
-- Maya Angelou

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

I think maybe you read more into my post than was really there. For example, I never suggested we supply all drinks in pints, only milk and beer, because those are what most people are familiar with. Obviously we could sell, say, a half-litre of milk instead of a pint, but what benefit would that actually bring? Every child in the UK grows up knowing how much a pint of milk is, and every shop sells milk in pints, so changing units (and, realistically, slightly changing the familiar volumes as well) seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.

Except that in this country, almost literally everyone uses that system, and what the metricists are arguing for is the "standard" that almost literally no-one uses.

Losing the Mars mission was very unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as seeing, say, an extra hundred people dying on the roads the year after speed limits changed.

I wonder, do you think we self-absorbed holdouts should drive on the right as well?

...that it's still cheaper to fly jets like buses for the same kinds of routes a bullet train would cover.

Americans get all excited about this stuff without ever actually experiencing it firsthand. They never see the high prices or how it might be simpler just to rent your own car.

Bullet trains more of a glamour tech item like a Battleship or an Aircraft Carrier. They look good but they aren't nearly as practical as they seem.

If the US wants to act like it's in love with trains again, it would be far better to beef up CARGO capacity. However that's not sexy. No one gets exited about efficient cargo service.

"Cause more problems than you solve"? I don't think so - not for the more serious drugs like morphine, cocaine and the like. If we freely permitted use of some of the more problematic drugs then things would not be better than they are. Heroin is not the same thing as alcohol and should not be treated the same way. Same with many other drugs. There are some things we just cannot condone as a society even if doing so is costly. Are you seriously arguing that we should be ok with people addicted to illegal narcotics? I think it is a waste of resources to incarcerate adults for drug use unless they cause some other problem in the process. But that doesn't mean they should be legal to possess or that we should allow companies to sell addiction as a recreational product. It's bad enough with the cigarette companies - I can only imagine the problems that would arise if we allowed corporate interests to sell heroin for recreational use.

Prohibition does prevent a lot of use. Nobody's arguing that the prohibitions cannot be circumvented. To use an analogy, security against shoplifters doesn't eliminate shoplifting but it does help keep it from getting out of control. It keeps honest people honest so to speak. If someone really wants to use heroin then they will probably find a way but that doesn't mean we should make it easy or condone its recreational use. And we certainly should not have private companies selling morphine for recreational use.

Don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with responsible recreational use by adults of alcohol or other mild chemical substances like marijuana. If someone wants to get a little tipsy now and then and they do it in such a way that it doesn't hurt anyone then that is fine. (I also have no problem with companies refusing to hire people who use these chemicals for recreation.) But I see no way to allow certain substances to be used for recreational purposes. We can argue about exactly where that line should be drawn but there is and should be a line.

First of all, GEGL will definitely be in the next version of GIMP... second of all, once GEGL is complete (which is again slated for the next version of GIMP), virtually all of those additional features will suddenly become feasible to implement where the previous architecture of GIMP made them untenable (and why no progress has been made so far, or often very little), and they will probably come into play quite quickly afterwards, You may be right that not very many may get in for the next version, but because of what GEGL opens up the possibility to do within GIMP, the release cycle between 2,10 and future stable versions that implement such functionality will be much lower than the time frame between 2.8 and 2.10.

In other words, not very far at all.

Yes, as long as there are words, someone must define them: brilliant observation. If the president wishes to redefine the word "collection" to weasel around the law, everyone should ignore it. It should not be the government who decides what those words mean.

Every protocol that runs over RS232 has packets and some kind of ACK/NAK system on top. CTS,RTS,DCR,DTR, etc. are rarely used since most implementations are 3-wire RS232. ASTM is an example of such a protocol.

There's nothing magical about it. Skin is porous.... and if it's there long enough, some water on the skin can be absorbed into your body before it evaporates.

I like Serenity too, but in matters of law, what the law actually says and what actually takes place *ARE* typically quite similar. Exceptions may exist (I've heard people say that one can get ticketed for going the speed limit where everyone else is speeding, but I've never met or even heard of anyone specifically that has actually ever happened to), but I would honestly suggest that such occurrences are likely few and far enough between that getting a ticket for traveling the speed limit while everyone around you is speeding would probably be a manageable situation that would only land the officer who issued the ticket in a whole heaping lot of trouble when you go to court to challenge the ticket, I'd further suggest that the only kind of police officer that would do it is one who was either ignorant of how it would actually go down in court when you fight it, or else desperate enough to meet some kind of quota that they may have that they would gamble that you won't try to fight the ticket in the first place.

Thanks! That's helpful.

GNOME Terminal lists Ctrl+Shift+C in its edit menu (that's how I learned it) -- but the combinations you list work as well and better across different programs.

I've worked on-and-off in healthcare and the standards for transmitting *anything* are ancient and bad. Formats like HL7 and ASTM are ancient delimited-text formats with no UTF-8 support, no encryption, and even have RS232 ACK/NAK packets in the standard.

> A democracy is all fun and games, until you get shot in the head,

+ ...by a cop.