Posts by jake 26683 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
One of the barns over in Petaluma put a couple hidden cams in a tackroom to catch the party rifling the coat pockets and purses of riders out taking lessons. We haven't had a need for such a thing here, but I can assure you that I'll have something similar installed at the slightest sign of that kind of breach of trust.
People don't change clothes in the tackrooms, though ... they use the restrooms and/or the showers.
What is sadder?
Being a congenitally lying orange-arsed small handed vulgarian?
Being a supporting act for the congenitally lying small-handed vulgarian?
Being an anonymous coward, happily slurping up the lies of the small handed vulgarian's supporting acts, and then parroting them?
Note: There is more than one kind of lie, some more heinous than others.
Why waste the time and energy converting it to gasoline when every gasoline powered car on the planet runs just fine on the very easily produced Ethanol? (Sometimes with a little rework that amounts to nothing more than replacing seals and slightly increasing the amount of fuel entering the combustion chamber).
"Theres something serious wrong that you need to drive 500+ miles ?"
Nothing wrong with getting out and exploring. It's what humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years. It's embedded in our very genetics to go find out what's over that next hill.
"Maybe its me, but that basically limits the number of times you can actually goto a nice place, because well 500+ miles means you cant do that every weekend..."
If you've found a "nice spot" to stagnate in, enjoy! Personally, I much prefer going over that next hill.
"But hey if you think driving 1000 miles is great, i feel sorry that you prison yourself like that."
Let me get this straight ... I'm in prison because I like getting out and about and seeing new places, but you are free because you sit in one place and don't go anywhere? Ohhh-kayyyyy ...
Are you on a crusade against ICE, or are you on a crusade against atmospheric CO2?
The corn is a great extractor of carbon, only a portion of which is (easily) converted to alcohol.
I'm not extracting fuel from food. I grow the food elsewhere on the farm (I give my excess away. too.), Sometimes I grow food in the same space as the corn, alternating a soybean crop with the corn crop improves the productivity of both.
Yes, the bugs decomposing bio produce methane (itself a fuel; don't think I haven't been thinking about this aspect ... ), however the bulk of the carbon still remains in the ground. Dig into any compost heap, anywhere. and do the analysis for yourself.
I'm doing my part, and this place has effectively become a net carbon sink.
The world's overpopulation problem is WAY outside the scope of my little farm. The only answer that I am aware of is truly effective and freely available birth control, and women being in charge of their own bodies. Sadly, the pandemic called "religion" will never allow either to happen.
"Making fermented corn mash into 190 proof whiskey -- which is what corn ethanol pretty much is -- takes a lot of energy."
Yep. Fortunately I have a planet full of free energy. I use a GSHP to provide heat for mashing, fermenting and distilling. The various electronic bits are powered by a solar+battery setup.
"after one takes into account fertilization, mechanized field work, harvesting, and conversion to fuel"
My fertilizer is produced by cows, sheep, hogs, horses and chickens, and I alternate soy beans and corn (25 acres of each. The beans are sold to artisan tofu and soy sauce makers). The field work is done by gasoline to ethanol converted tractor (itself a potential hazard, admittedly, especially when it comes to combining), and I've already addressed conversion. Note that I'm only producing about 175 bushels of corn per acre. I could easily up that to around 250 or more with modern seed, fertilizer and pest control techniques ... but I'm experimenting with near-zero input costs. Even my seed is the family varietal, developed by my Grandfather in the 1920s for animal feed and sour mash whiskey.
Bottom line: With the current setup, it takes under 250 gallons of fuel to produce 12,000 gallons of fuel on 25 acres. If I cared enough, I could probably drop that to well under 200 gallons.
WE are doing exactly that.
Grow corn[0]. Corn takes carbon out of the atmosphere. Harvest corn, leave all but the kernels in the field. Plow the trash under, thus sequestering most of the plant's carbon[1]. Mash the corn. Ferment it. Distill it. Presto: Fuel from the atmosphere that virtually any petrol/gasoline engine can be run on.
Not only fuel, but fuel that sequesters far more carbon than it re-introduces to the atmosphere when burned, and is thus a net carbon sink.
[0] In the coming year I'll be experimenting with a corn/sorghum hybrid that promises more fermentables.
[1] Seriously. Try weighing a complete dried corn/maize plant (including roots!) against the kernels produced by that plant. We're talking over 90% being carbon-filled trash. (Perhaps you don't know that most corn stalks, which can easily top 8 feet, only produce a single ear of corn?)
"ICEs will always consume a finite resource"
My over-the-road fleet of formerly petrol/gasoline powered ICEs now all run on ethanol, made from corn/maize grown here.
"but "space" in the atmosphere to put the resulting CO2"
I put far more carbon into the ground (I leave the trash in the fields when combining) than I exhaust out of the vehicles, making the running of those ICE vehicles a net carbon sink. At 175 bushels per acre, each bushel of which can make about 2.75 gallons of alcohol, my little 25 acres of corn can provide about 12,000 gallons of fuel, which is much, much more than we need. Rocket surgery it ain't.
To answer the obvious question, no, I'm not aging the excess fuel in oak barrels. Yet. Need the licenses first.
This is all about weapon launch and delivery research.
Consider that there are several commercial operations that'll sell the Norks pretty pictures of pretty much anywhere at far better resolution than they can likely manage ... and for a LOT less money than they just spent on that satellite. Shit, I'll bet go ogle has better resolution than they can manage, and for free.
"and you'd never know."
YOU might not ever know, but I certainly would.
Apple's OSes based on Darwin are certainly Unixes, by almost any metric, being based on, working like (mostly), and feeling very much like BSD, (by way of NexTSTEP in some cases) (if you allow them to come out of their Apple-inflicted iShell).
ChromeOS and Android are clearly Linux distributions, because they use the Linux Kernel, and as such are clearly flavo(u)rs of Unix.
Arguing otherwise is dancing on the head of a pin territory.
"And Linux is UNIX™."
"Linux" is the kernel. It is not today, and never will be, certified to use the UNIX trademark.
Some distros have been so certified, but not all of them, not by a long shot.
A Linux distribution is a Unix, but very, very few are certified to use the term UNIX™.
"I don't think that says anything at all about the friendliness of the OS."
I didn't say it did. What I said was that the friendliness (or lack thereof) of the OS is not important when the system as a whole is setup by somebody who understands the needs of the enduser. Another example: For almost twenty years now, my computer-illiterate DearOldMum has been quite happy running the cut-down version of Slackware that I built for her ... and Slack is supposedly one of the "hard" distros.
"For me, Inferno was friendlier than Plan 9, but it is even more obscure."
I fiddled about with Inferno on and off from very late '96 until the early 2000s, but found it rather pointless other than as a learning environment for concepts.
"I am researching a possible future article on it."
Looking forward to your take on it.
All OSes are friendly ... but most are quite picky about who their friends are.
The first one is "Plan 9".
The second is proof that the world's writers have completely lost the script, and have been reduced to remaking old classics. Honestly, ask yourself if the film industry as a whole has done anything new in the last quarter century. I usually use Tristar's release of Godzilla in 1998 as the point where Hollywood officially went TITSUP (Total Idiocy To Sucker an Underbred Public).
Odd thing that I've noticed ... The people selling "organically grown" and "certifiably organic" and the like will be far more likely to show you around their farm than somebody with an official "Organic" certification. One wonders what the latter are hiding.
"Neither was Unix until Mac OS X."
I beg to differ. For example, many Vet clinics ran on SCO Unix[0] starting in the mid '80s. There aren't many groups of professionals that are less computer literate that Vets and their staff, but the PSI/IDEXX Veterinary Practice Management system worked quite nicely for them, with minimal training.
It's all in the wetware of the software's distribution management. They understood what Vet Clinics needed, and provided it. The core OS for most people doesn't matter, it's all about the application software they are running, and proper training for same.
Yes, one could say the same for Plan9 ... once PSI/IDEXX starts making practice management software for it. Which will in all likelihood never happen.
For the record, I actually like Plan9 ... but IMO, it's a solution looking for a problem. I hope it finds one. Or many.
[0] Note to the youngsters: That's the proper, original SCO, not the later, perverted SCO of litigation fame.
"The legalistic definition of Unix would exclude research Unixes though, so how good a definition is it really?"
Ah. I see where you are going now.
Linux, BSD, Apple's Darwin-based contributions, Android and ChromeOS are all Unix in scope and feel.
What they are not is examples of UNIX[tm], unless they have paid to use that trademark.
Kind of like the definition of "organic" food, which means the farmer has paid a state agency a fee to verify that said food was grown to a certain standard. Personally, I refuse to pay that rather high fee (which I would have to pass on to my customers), so I can't sell it as "Organic", even though it is, in fact, grown to that exact same standard (some would say better, actually).
However, there is nothing stopping me from marketing it as "organically grown".
UNIX[tm] is "Organic" ... Unix is organically grown. Two like products, one of which has paid money for an additional virtually meaningless tag ... the cost of which needs to be passed along to the consumer.
... "if you can really come up with a better idea, demonstrate it! (See Plan9, for example.) But if/when your potential users collectively say "YUCK!", perhaps leave it on the shelf until the rest of the planet is as enlightened as you are. (See Plan9, for example.)"
It's a good OS, it works, and if you're a techie it is well worth fiddling about with. But it's not for everybody, nor does it pretend otherwise.
Note that a proper TAB is NOT a set number of spaces, it is the distance to the next TAB stop on a page.
K&R weren't addicted to TABs for formatting. See original K&R code for init here.
Back in roughly 1975, one of my Big Iron mentors had a bumper-sticker:
Tabs are for typewriters!
A woman from the typing pool who much preferred Fresca to Tab took exception to the comment, so he offered to buy her lunch in compensation for the perceived slight. They are still married.
A few years later, another mentor opined "Feelthy TABs are the devil's work, unless you are using them on your Smith Corona".
Personally, I prefer spaces, but I'll use tabs where required. When in Rome & all that.
Now, my Spanish is not as good as I'd like it to be, but even I know that nova in espanol means the same thing it means in English, to wit the astronomical event.
One of my field hands has a Mexican made and sold Nova that he is in the process of restoring The car is badged Nova, and all the documentation (including original Spanish language shop manual) refers to it as a Nova.
Long and short? The "no va" story is an urban myth.
"I can assure everyone that English laws are scrutinised down to the level of individual words"
Of course they are, by those with a vested interest. However, this doesn't address the statement, to wit "Most legislators don't read the Laws they vote for anyway". See those first two words? They are important.
"Sucks to be able to touchtype and be doing so whilst reading a paper doc only to realise that you've just shut down the computer because some stupid popup stole focus..."
I hang a so-called "dumb terminal" off a serial port and send it a login. Makes this kind of problem go away entirely.
It's also kinda handy when the GUI goes TITSUP[0], although that's rare today (outside the development boxen).
Just to make it more eccentric, I usually login as "write", which uses vi as my shell ...
[0] Total Inability To Show the Usual Pr0n^H^H^Hictures
The 10,000 was hyperbole.
However, it wouldn't surprise me if a toy like this had somewhere in the range of a few thousand individual wires for the care and feeding of it's multiple disparate parts. Note that it's not really "point to point", the wires are built as a series of harnesses, which are individually tested before installing on the machine.
Yes, I know, that's a pic of Curiosity, not the much less complicated Spirit.
... it looks to me like the folks filing are bitching about not being given an equal opportunity to make money off the backs of children('s parents).
What this brings up is how the hell was Roblox managing to make money WITHOUT parents being in the loop? Last time I checked, here in the United States a child is not legally allowed to enter into a contract without the consent of a parent or guardian. Shirley each and every so-called "micro transaction" is a new and separate contract requiring explicit consent from the parent?
"Ergo, EV sales are rising faster than ICE."
Starting from zero, one can only go up. Sell one car today, and four next week and the Whitehouse will breathlessly proclaim "EV sales up 400%!".
The real question is what percentage of new car sales are EV, and what percentage ICE. Now plot that over the last ten years .... and predict the next ten.
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