“Well, as often as minor updates of python broke my scripts, I stopped migrating to newer versions and instead rewrite them in perl. Much less (maintenance) effort in the long run.”
— Nishanth Menon on Python 3 as a moving targetBits, bytes, platters, and drives, how many were going to St. Ives?
Four complete and total morons in Los Angeles (redundant, I know) are suing computer manufacturers for reporting hard disk capacity using international standard prefixes. Even better, they are not suing the companies who actually make and label the disks with these capacities.
“Your Honor, I’d like to submit as evidence this disk drive, taken from a Dell computer. Note the name M-a-x-t-o-r on the label, right above the advertised capacity in gigabytes.”
“Right. Bailiff, take these four clowns out back and sterilize them for the good of humanity.”
Please, Mr. Darwin, take them away
I think this guy has demonstrated his lack of fitness for membership in the gene pool; he just failed the IQ test. His girlfriend should be put on probation for five years as well.
- become a youth pastor.
- acquire a sixteen-year-old girlfriend (you're thirty).
- videotape yourself having sex with her.
- put sex tapes in trunk of car.
- put girlfriend in trunk of car.
- drive across international border, failing to declare smuggled underage girlfriend.
Under other circumstances, I might be willing to believe that a sixteen-year-old is mature enough to be dating a much older man. Our laws on the subject are pretty arbitrary, after all, using date of birth as a convenient proxy for physical and emotional maturity. Many sixteen-year-olds are adults, and should be treated as such. Many people over eighteen, on the other hand, shouldn’t be trusted with wet matches.
These two? Not a chance. “Hey, sweetheart, now that we’ve been dating for a while, let’s take a road trip from Illinois to Alaska, and I’ll hide you in the trunk of the car to keep the Canadian border guards from getting suspicious.” “Gosh, Michael, what a swell idea. You’re sure the rest of the youth group won’t miss us?”
Still, nothing can top the bass player from Phish coaxing the 9-year-old daughter of a Hell’s Angel out to a deserted boathouse at 1am for “art photos”. Now that’s stupid.
Courting Davis
The Democrats of the “selected, not elected” crowd were extremely unhappy about the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. Democrat Gray Davis has just been saved (temporarily) from those nasty election-stealing Republicans (not to mention the rest of us) by the 9th Circuit Court, who cited Bush v. Gore as precedent.
Apparently, the best way to protect voters from the heartbreak of hanging chads is to stop them from voting at all…
“Only Democrats and Dictators are afraid of elections.” — James D. Hudnall
iObey
Okay, most of them are lame, and many will grate on the nerves of anyone who has two brain cells to rub together, but this one was worth it.
Today is a good day
New PowerBooks are out. Must wet pants with joy. They all look good, but I’m leaning slightly toward a 15” model with an 80GB disk and 1GB of RAM; not sure I’m ready for a 17” boat anchor.
Yesterday, on the other hand, was definitely not a good day. For some time now, I’ve been installing Panther betas on my iBook with the Archive & Install option, which preserves almost all of my applications and customizations while completely replacing the OS. I’ve always backed up my home directory first, but haven’t bothered with an extra full backup. Cuts the total upgrade time down to about an hour, most of which is spent watching the disks spin.
On another day, I’d consider including a comparison to my last Windows upgrade horror story. Unfortunately, things went terribly wrong this time. Twelve hours later, my iBook is almost back to normal.
Low-hanging chads
A while back, the folks at Making Light recoiled in horror when I casually commented that I thought Bush had been legitimately elected. Several of them hijacked the discussion to focus on what was, to me, much smaller than the issue being discussed. Because they seemed to be otherwise reasonable people, I promised to give a fair hearing to any comprehensive references they were willing to point me to on the subject.
It was like pulling teeth to get those references, and the ones I got needed to be filtered for obvious bias, but heat eventually gave way to light. Sadly, I suspect that when they hear I have not embraced their position 100%, they will conclude that I never took their arguments seriously, and write me off as some sort of Bush-loving “freeper”, “looter”, or “theocrat”. I guess they’d rather be righteous and wrong than accept that someone can be a reasonable human being without passionately despising the President.
What do I think now about the 2000 elections, particularly in Florida?
Nothing about 9/11
Although you have to admit, as reasons to hate the West go, half-naked pop-tarts are a more plausible explanation than most. Beats blaming it all on Bush.
Would we get off so easily?
(Via Instapundit). Florida State Attorney John Tanner tried to fly with an undeclared handgun in his luggage. He was required to buy a lock-box for the gun and take a later flight. I don’t believe for one moment that an ordinary citizen would have been treated so gently.
His excuse is that it was “his first hunting trip since security was increased at airports,” but that doesn’t wash, because it’s been a long time since you could just toss a firearm into your luggage and not mention it at check-in. Long before 9/11, you were required to put the unloaded gun into a locked case and declare it. They then attached a brightly-colored tag to the case, to make sure that baggage inspectors knew it had been declared and inspected.
Of course, as one of the Special People, it’s quite possible that he never had to obey the old regulations due to “professional courtesy,” but I’d like to think that a State Attorney would have at least a basic grasp of the law.
