I think it's completely pointless.
At the latitude where I live, the sun sets after 2100 PDT in the summer. That would still be 2000 PST, with an hour and a half of twilight after that. What more do people want?
In the winter the sun sets at 1600 PST. Even 1700 PDT wouldn't buy much, particularly since that would mean sunrise at 0900 PDT.
...laura
I looked carefully at my viewing habits, concluded I was paying a fortune for the two or three channels I actually watched, and decided there had to be a better way. The major drop in the quality of the content didn't help.
I now have over-the-air TV for local news, iTunes, Netflix and Acorn, DVDs, and stream stuff. This includes a U.K. VPN account to circumvent BBC and ITV geoblocking. It all works fine.
...laura
There's probably a business in making retro computers as DIY kits. Sure, some company would have to re-manufacture the parts that couldn't be made at home and with small runs the parts wouldn't be cheap, but there is a hobbyist market out there.
There are often limits on authenticity, either due to parts availability (e.g. TTL ICs), or for convenience (modern monitors, keyboards).
...laura
I wonder how many metabolic studies have been done on male-to-female transsexuals. If you start with a dmab with a small frame, you don't have to discard much muscle tissue nor gain much body fat to reach a more efficient metabolic ratio. Plus, you don't have to worry about a menstrual cycle (emotional but also physical competitors) and gynecological health. You can tweak hormonal balance to control muscle mass, so that if you expect to need more heft in a few months,you can engineer just that!
(This isn't a troll, btw, if there's any doubt in anyone's mind)
As another example, in January 2013, I discovered a cheat code in the SNES RPG Breath of Fire 1 that allows you to create a save file at a few key locations in the story. This cheat code sat hidden for about 20 years, and it wasn't until I came along and reverse engineered the game that it showed up.
Link to it: click me. Sorry for the quality; it is a really difficult thing to record when your only recording device is an iPad and there was nobody home at the time. Not to mention how hard it is to do that controller sequence and record with only two hands.
Well, then you're a pretty crappy pilot if you don't have it memorized by now.
I've made a point of not memorizing checklists. Good pilots always work from their printed checklists. It lessens the chance of missing something.
...laura
The point is that claiming "things are worse than ever" is pretty silly in a country where it used to be common for people to own slaves.
Except that it was never common to own slaves. Slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats--your average white Southerner wasn't rich enough to afford one.
Still laughed, though. <3
My flying background must be showing. I always review the safety information card, confirm safety equipment in my vicinity, and, yes, I actually do pay attention to the safety briefing.
But that's just me.
...laura
I've seen some really cool ads that were right on target - like the time I played a James May video on YouTube and the ad that popped up was for an electron microscope. I couldn't begin to afford the one the advertiser wanted me to buy, but I actually did poke around eBay to see if there were any old ones out there I might be able to afford. I've hit paydirt many times when Amazon and others pointed out "people who bought this also bought..."
That's the way it's supposed to work.
Then there are the way off base ads. I wonder if they are genuinely being blasted out to everybody, or if I fall off too many if-then-elses for anything more relevant to come up. These ads are invariably back-of-the-comics and/or cable tv infomercial quality, like the perennial "weird trick for belly fat" ads. I suppose I get those because Facebook et al know I'm a woman.
That's the deal we made, I suppose. A quasi-free internet supported by advertising. And, like all things, 99% of internet advertising is crap.
...laura
I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.
The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting, merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust. Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.
Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make. I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).
...laura
Umm... JSON is a pretty significant force behind modern Web design. Without it, the Web would still be a pretty static place.
Judging by the number of broken web sites I've seen lately, we could use a bit more staticness and a bit less dynamicness.
...laura
I'm guided by the experience of the airlines. While you must, obviously, have the right sort of pilot's license, they also want a four year university degree. Not because it necessarily enhances your flying, but because it shows you can learn and accomplish things. If you can learn and accomplish things, and know your way around computers, I'd love to talk to you.
The big problem at most places I've worked is getting promising resumes past HR people who only count buzzwords.
...laura
I've followed Minix development with interest. The internal architecture is different from most OSs out there. Not different for the sake of being different, but different to show different solutions to problems. The way we do things in Linux et al is powerful, but it's not the only way.
I haven't come up with a compelling reason to use it in my work (yet...
...laura
We have trolleybuses here in Vancouver, too. Vancouver isn't as hilly as San Francisco, but it's far from flat. Our electricity is relatively cheap and comes from dams. So no carbon footprint.
The new diesel buses are all hybrids.
...laura
The quality of service no longer meets customer requirements, and customers are rebelling. The airlines and airports have done their best to remove any aspect of comfort or pleasure from air travel, and customers, the people who actually pay the bills, have had enough.
Entitled attitudes don't help. I ended up with bruised knees on a British Airways flight from the person ahead of me refusing to negotiate on seat reclining, with the flight attendants refusing to mediate. On a American flight the passenger next to me went ballistic and very loudly demanded to be reseated, because I was wearing perfume.
On my last long-haul flight (Vancouver to London) I did an on-the-spot upgrade to premium economy and had a good flight. I had cashed in credit card points for the ticket, so the extra $$$ was money well-spent.
I think diverting is a lousy way to handle customer disputes, but it scares me that the airlines may start accepting this as part of the cost of doing business...
...laura
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
