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Comment Re:never forget (Score 1) 65

So... I own a copy of a very rare specialty book (25, maybe 26 copies known to still exist, of the original 300) that has a stated copyright of 1936, but AFAIK was never renewed, and the owner died in 1937 (and has no extant legal heirs).

When can I digitize the durn thing and make it public?

Comment Re:32 million acres out of 144 million acres is fi (Score 1) 181

You can have judicious logging, or you can have wildfires. Logging (done right) simulates wildfires by clearing out surplus growth.

You can't choose "none of the above" because then you get overgrowth, and litter buildup, and crown fires that kill everything instead of just thinning it, and soil that's glazed and sterilized, and a fire that isn't just a fire, it's a local catastrophe.

Was perusing satellite view of California not long after one of their Great Roaring Fires, and .... forested land in the path that was entirely logging-prohibited had burned down to the dirt. Conversely private land that had been logged still had standing trees (they'd left some trees, scattered enough that none touched another, in imitation of a healthy natural forest), and was no worse off than before.

Yeah, it's good to protect old-growth. It's not necessarily good to entirely prevent logging therein, or when (and it is when, not if) the younger too-packed trees go up, they'll burn the old ones with them.

Comment Re:Why reinstall at all? (Score 1) 111

Barring catastrophic hardware failure (which usually results in "Well, maybe now I'll upgrade the OS too"), in 30 years I have never done a reinstall of Windows on my own hardware, and have had some installs (most of them, actually) that were daily drivers or heavy lifters for over ten years without a single crash. (And some with uptimes measured in years, too.) However, I don't run it on crap hardware. Windows is very much canary in coal mine for shit hardware/drivers. If it crashes a lot, throw out the PC and get a better one.

Unfortunately I cannot say the same of my linux installs. The most stable has been PCLinuxOS, almost but not entirely trouble-free. Others need regular restarts (I'm lookin' at you, Fedora), or eventually become cranky, or GRUB eats itself (*cough* Mint), or suddenly I have "broken packages" for no reason (no changes since previous update, so WTF) or some other fail that's not easily recoverable, or needs a session with Timeshift.

Comment Re:How much will this cost? How long will it take? (Score 1) 109

How about instead California stops letting most of their rainwater and snowmelt run into the ocean? Snowpack on the Sierras alone averages 150% of the state's water needs (and some years much more than that). The past couple years have been mondo rainy, to the point of flooding, but 95% of the rainwater was allowed to simply run off. (Farmers wanted to pump some of it back into the aquifer, and were denied.) Money was allocated for more reservoirs 40-some years ago but none have been built. And so on. California's water crisis is not reality, it's politically created.

Comment Re:Why just eye drops? Should ban all homeopathics (Score 1) 177

My point is the term "homeopathic" has spread to stuff that is actual concentrates and extracts, and is no longer constrained to mean "homeopathic by the dilute until absent ritual magic".

Bullshit terms tend to have that sort of mission creep.

"Organic" has suffered a similar creep. A while back I saw shoes labeled "organic". (Well, I suppose they contained petroleum, being mostly plastic...)

Comment Re:Why just eye drops? Should ban all homeopathics (Score 1) 177

Except nowadays, anything that's not actually Rx might be labeled "homeopathic" -- frex, I've seen the term used for tea tree oil (which is somewhat toxic) and wolfsbane (which is mondo toxic). So in the market, it no longer necessarily means "diluted into oblivion" but rather "new agers come hither".

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