No. In the U.S. cartoon images ARE protected by the First Amendment. This was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002)). Sometimes our Supreme court DOES get it right!

Thanks for the cite!

I'm really happy to be proven wrong on this one.

Also, easier to buy Sudafed (or Meth) from drug dealers than to get Sudafed from a pharmacy.

*15-20 years, actually. Didn't start messing with Linux until around 1998, and then it still took a back seat to BeOS...

Erm, no? When I was having wireless issues on a new (to me) Thinkpad, I couldn't even get online to search for the problem. Installing a completely different distro ended up fixing those wireless issues. The Windows installation Linux replaced had no such issues. In fact, I can't think of a time when I *had* wireless issues with Windows, but I can recount many, many issues with wireless under Linux, from having to compile the kernel with things like PCMCIA support to support my old Orinoco Gold PCMCIA cards, etc etc etc. You're probably right: Had I had these same issues under Windows or MacOS, I'd be equally as lost, if not moreso. However, in 15 years of computing, that particular issue has not come up under Windows (although there have been many, many others). Hell, on some of my hardware, I can't even get Linux to install anymore (something about APIC (not APCI), etc) whereas the Windows XP install it came with is perfectly fine. And so on.

I love Linux, use it all the time, but when it's fucked it's good and fucked and my solution these days is just to keep all my data on a different mount just in case I just have to reinstall vs actually troubleshoot an issue.

A good friend of mine bought a south korean air rifle, 45 caliber, 1.000fps. He bought it with a few rebuild kits, figures if he every runs out of ammo he can cast bullets and use the air rifle almost indefinitely. He's already taken a Texas deer with it on his property so he knows it's effective. I'm not really into the prepper thing myself but I did love the simplicity of the setup if you are inclined in that direction.

Yeah, this is stupid. You can't sentence people for drawing and using a paper and pen, whatever the content of their drawing, ...

Sure "you" can. This was in the UK. They don't have First Amendment protections, so the law is what's passed and enforced.

Last I heard, some jurisdictions in the US have some similar anti-pornography laws, banning drawn images. In the US the anti-pornography laws are justified against the clear prohibition on such laws in the First Amendment by claiming the purveyors of pornography are part of a conspiracy with the pornographer who abused an underage child by photographing her.

Obviously this justification is bogus when the image is drawn. So while the prohibition is on the books, I understand the authorities are reluctant to actually enforce it against anyone who has enough money to appeal it. So they tend to use such laws only when they can't find (or plant) any actual child pictures on a target(s) they've raided, but still really want to jail them and seize their assets, or as a "pour on the counts" measure when knocking the law down wouldn't do much for the accused.

(I think the underage are underripe and have no personal interest in such fare. So I don't follow the issue closely, except when someone threatens to post such stuff on a system I administer. Maybe somebody else, with more reliable and/or up-to-date knowledge, can comment?)

21,200 gallons per day @19knots ~= 46.5gallons/nautical mile or .000042 gallons per ton/mile which is about the most fuel efficient way to transport something ever invented.

Even if the Nevada health department DID have an objection, what's wrong with having some ice bags in an insulated box at the counter and calling THAT a "cooler" or "icebox"? It wouldn't need to be powered, because it would be kept cold by the steady flow of fresh bags from the supply truck.

You'd have to run it as a FIFO, to avoid having bags sitting there for hours. (Bag porters put 'em in one end, clerks pull them out at the other - or put a moving partition in and run it as a circular buffer, so you don't have to slide them down. No additional communication between counter workers and bag-porters is necessary, because the available open space signals when more bags need to be toted. Only downside I see is that if/when the counter is about to close, you need to signal the porters to stop, to avoid having unsold bags in the cooler that need to be ported back to the truck to keep them from melting during the break.)

Such a local buffer would do all you want, without leaving the ice bags sitting on a counter in the desert. Also: The ice would be seen by the customers to be fresh, rather than partially melted while waiting to be picked up.

That would be incorrect, and switching just 7% of their fuel usage from 1%+ bunker fuel to 0,1% low sulphur fuel is expected to cost Maersk almost a quarter billion dollars, meaning that completely switching to the more processed fuel would cost on the order of $3.8B per year.

When you add in the fact that a warship is supposed to be able to go for at least weeks at a time without any replenishment

Weeks? Try 6+ months for everything but aviation fuel, and even that is around 10-20 days on active war footing (Nimtz class carries enough fuel for ~20 sorties from the full complement of jets)

Hmm, I actually felt bad for the guy who ran the NYC office at my previous employer, he made $115k a year and to be able to afford a three bedroom with a yard he had a two+ hour each way commute to work. He was driving a ten+ year old car and barely managing to save enough to put his kids through school, his own retirement fund was essentially nonexistent. He wasn't wanting for food, but the same salary here in Cleveland has you living fairly well with much more wiggle room.

And you already make 3-4 times what a teacher with an advanced degree does, or a nurse.

In what world? I make less than 150% of the average for a teacher with a masters or an RN in my part of Ohio and I'm pretty highly compensated (technical manager at a larger company) with over 15 years experience in the field. If someone in IT is making 300-400% of those positions then they're either a complete rockstar at a tech firm with tons of free cash or those positions are woefully underpaid in that part of the country and that should probably be fixed.

Depends on where you live, maybe. I can see wage depression here in Los Angeles. I'm loathe to go to SFO simply because of the sheer amount of douchebaggery that's up there, but then again, we have Hollywood here. Might not be much different.

I bet you're somewhere around 15W EIRP though..