It sounds to me like the idea behind that law is to make it possible for parents to control what their children are able to use on the Internet while keeping enforcement for the most part up to the parents. That way, if the parents really want to prevent their children from seeing any adult content (Good luck with that!) they can keep their credit cards and other ID away from them and let them register at those sites if they have a more relaxed attitude about it.

To give you an idea where I'm coming from, I went through puberty and adolescence in the '60s well before there was a WWW that random people had access to. Dad had a subscription to Playboy, and didn't care if I read it. I didn't realize until later that the reason that all of the adult pictures had the model's pubic region concealed was to avoid censorship issues with some of the more restrictive jurisdictions.

I do. Of course, I've been retired for almost fifteen years and don't have to use IMAP for work or because it's the only protocol offered. IMAP can be great if you need to have all of your email available on multiple boxes in various locations but at this point I've got no use for that.

I wonder if Putin has decided yet which kindergarten or hospital he's planning to bomb in "retaliation"?

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that he simply drew a location out of a hat and bombed it.

I can well remember the LA County Health Dept. offering to give any resident who had standing water on their property a breeding stock of some species of small fish (I don't remember them ever specifying which species.) that preys on mosquito larvae to keep them under control. Does anybody know if health departments are still doing that?

I take it, then, that you've never run across Destination Gobi, an early 50s movie about a Navy weather station in Inner Mongolia early in the Pacific War. It's based (loosely) on a true story, and may have been the inspiration for McHale's Navy. I don't know if it's available any more, but it was quite popular in the 50s when many TV stations used old movies to fill out their schedules.

I'll add the Arctic Convoys to that, with most of their actions taking place inside the Arctic Circle including several actions big enough to be named and at least one German battleship, the Scharnhorst, being sunk by the Duke of York. Also, some of the ports in the White Sea were near enough to Occupied Norway that the Germans were able to bomb them with short range bombers.

And as far as South America goes, the U-Boats were ordered to "punish" Brazil for cooperating with the USN, and did such a good job that Brazil declared War on Germany.

No. The main character's name is Ralph Kramden and he's a bus driver in New York.

To get proper context, you need to know that this was from the '50s TV show The Honeymooners and was Ralph Kramden's (Jackie Gleason) regular reply to his wife's (Audrey Meadows) put downs or sarcastic remarks. And, the line always started with "One of these days, Alice, one of these days..." Yes, he'd generally make a fist as he said it, but he never threw a punch. Many of the episodes revolved around his get rich quick schemes, and he once told Alice that they were all to give her the better life that she deserved.

Red Hat is still pretty independent. Call them Big Purple Hat on a forum or Reddit and you'll get Red Hat engineers bristling.

How about if I call them DeadRat? Is that OK?

A most impressive explanation why buses don't have or need seat belts. Thanx.

I'm told that another reason not to need seat belts is that the COG on a bus is such that it's almost impossible to topple one even by T-Boning it.

North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Does that mean it's a democratic country?

North Korea's name give me examples of two of my rules. First, I strongly believe that any nation that calls itself a "People's Republic" cares nothing about their citizens and second that any nation that feels the need to tell the world that it's democratic isn't. And, from what I've seen over the years about North Korea gives me no reason to change my mind.

You need to be able to pay for talent, and often that's antithetical to union philosophy.

My father worked in the retail grocery industry in LA in the '50s and '60s. Always in union shops, and once he'd established himself the never worked for scale. He always negotiated a higher rate and his bosses will willing to negotiate because his reputation was that good. Eventually, he moved up into management, but he kept his union membership for the medical and pension benefits. I might add that as he was now management, he was no longer expected to honor strikes or picket lines and the union never bothered him about it because that was now part of his job.

Thanks to my severance package, I can't collect unemployment right now, so I'm not counted.

And that right there is one of the dirty little tricks that the DOL's been using for the last several decades to keep the unemployment statistics artificially low: they don't count how many people are out of work or looking for jobs, they only count how many people are getting unemployment payments. And, if your unemployment benefits run out, you're considered to have left the workforce and are no longer counted even if you're still looking for a job.

That might be true if the reason was insufficient buses to get them all to school and back home at the same time, but it's not. If that were he reason, Junior High and High School would end an hour earlier than they do. The reason they start earlier is to make their school day one hour longer than Elementary School. And. the last time it was tried, it was so hated that it didn't even last one full year. Why do you think it would be different now?

Yeah, but no shrimp or mixed fiber fabrics.

No, you're mixing up Orthodox Judaism and God Fearing Christianity. Shrimp, of course, is non-Kosher, like all shellfish. Mixing two fibers is forbidden twice, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. It doesn't say why, but it may refer to various pagan customs that were well enough known at the time that they didn't need to be spelled out. However, in both places it specifies wool and linen, meaning that blends of other fibers is OK. If you're curious, you can find more detail here.