Steve Simmons

Steve Simmons

  • Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
    You'll note that the link between sports and the military is near-universal and crops up in the most unexpected places. Norman Dixon makes this point in detail in "The Psychology of Military Incompetence." Some of his psychological theory is out...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    Wisconsin has made me a happy camper. If Trump wants a recount, he has to pay a cool $7.3 million up front. Based on what happened when the Green party requested a recount a few years ago, he could get...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    I used SCSI drives at home long after most home users switched, in no small part due to getting amazingly high-performance drives discarded from servers at work. Ah, the joys of 14400-rpm drives with low seek times and caching controllers...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    Pretty pussy-cats. Lynx are beautiful & can certainly be semi-domesticated from kittens In my youth we lived in a pretty rural area. I had a cat which was probably one-quarter bobcat, aka lynx. In coloration and markings he looked just...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    In my admittedly cynical opinion, software vendors are all in favor of CUIs so long as their application is (a) an exception, or (b) their bindings can override everybody else, or (c) both. In the case of (b), if their...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    The problem with just looking at the superficial numbers -- that is, how many seats must be defended -- there are a decreasing number of Senate seats that are truly in play...The power of incumbency is hard to overcome, but...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    OGH asked in #2How hard is it to add states to the Union? If the Democrats win all three power groups - the House, the Senate, and the White House - then it's not horribly difficult. On the US side,...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    As folks have said above, DC is primed to become the 51st state. That will almost surely add two Democratic senators to the mix, making that hold more solid. There's another interesting inflection point coming two years from now. 34...
  • Commented on Upcoming Attractions!
    That animated first page reminds me of a period where I wrote device drivers for pen plotters. It looked a lot cooler in 1981 than it does now....
  • Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
    Need an Italian academic to write a sequel to "Foucault's Pendulum", incorporating Q-Anon, Birthers, anti-Vaxxers, etc....
  • Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
    Graydon@8 wrote:It's been (for me, off in the moody corners) the year of two Warren Zevon songs... Speaking as a guy a couple of years younger than Zevon, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Now I gotta find my...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    Rocket J @1277:Even the greediest of vultures has to know that a total collapse would mean the end to the gravy train. But perhaps I am overoptimistic about the intelligence of sociopaths. Perhaps the nature of sociopaths is that it's...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    Elderly Cynic wroteI have a horrible feeling that Trump is going to try to force a 'short victorious war' with Iran before he is pushed out of office.OGH wrote:The good news is, he doesn't have time. A bombing/cruise missile strike:...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    ...I blame the loss of Virginia, and the tumor in his head, for that self-indulgent bs. Virginia outlived him by a number of years, and at least according to the recent biographies, was an active editor of his work to...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    Different tariff structures mean that here in the UK it's rather expensive to cold-call a mobile number, so there's very little mobile phone spam. As one who must answer a phone during work hours, I deal with phone spam a...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    Martin wrote: I think that the primary sources prove you utterly wrong; and that the best sources by far, are the political declarations of each State as to exactly why they had chosen to secede. Martin is correct. I've read...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    whitroth wrote: ...The "official hearing aids" run $3k-$6k in the US... but they do things like automatically adjusting volumes in different ranges of audio spectrum, etc... I've been using a set of those for about 3.5 years, and am very...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    In re The Iron Dream: The critical essay at the end is a riot. It takes the satirical theme of the novel and cranks it up another octave....
  • Commented on Dead plots
    The recent Netflix show The Umbrella Academy has avoided the cellphone problem by being set in an alternate timeline where among other things cellphones either don't exist or haven't come into wide use. But that's not a twist every SF...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    Sadly, if you live in the rural US there are still lots of places where cellphone service ranges from bad to non-existent. This depends somewhat on your carrier, tho. We picked our carrier by asking folks at our house to...
  • Commented on No comment necessary
    D0n't people use anything but seeds in their bird feeders in the USA? Depends on the person, but my wife has put out pretty much all the variants you mention and more. Including a Baltimore oriole feeder, which involves oranges...
  • Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
    In re package managers:The missing link is that when Apple nicked package managers from the freenix world, it called it an App Store.So, embrace and extend? Or "pollute and pervert," which I thought more accurate? After watching Apple's shabby use...
  • Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
    Re COBOL popularity measurement and methodology:That IEEE survey is measuring vacant posts, not full ones.From what I've seen in the technical press, COBOL jobs are hard to fill and thereby stay open for a while. I wonder if a job...
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    I wroteI know and work with a dozen or so policemen semi-regularly, a couple of them I know quite well. None match those feeling of contempt. and Mos replied: I hope there's a strong selection bias operating. I assume you...
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    That was Admiral Grace Hopper. Look here for more detail....
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    Unfortunately all the events where I'd normally be working with them have been cancelled or are more than six months out. Sorry....
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    Returning to Peel's Principles might be a good starting point. I don't know how successful Peel was in producing a police force with those principles, but in the US today we're pretty much failing on all fronts. (Depressing whining about...
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    I used y as a vowel as well, but aside from that we did pretty much the same thing. There's also some Unix-to-Unix differences as well. I used your pattern and found 46 on my mac and 66 on RedHat...
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    I always wondered why people joined the police. Apparently it's feelings of contempt.Wow. Fine job of throwing gas on the fire. I know and work with a dozen or so policemen semi-regularly, a couple of them I know quite well....
  • Commented on Cough Cough
    Tht's ntrstng, bcs n nglsh t dsn't mk ll tht mch dffrnc. True sometimes. Sometimes not, eg,Thts mn mn mn.Which is "That's a mean moan, man." with no punctuation as well. Which I vaguely recall was also a 'feature' of...
Subscribe to feed Recent Actions from Steve Simmons

Following

Not following anyone

Specials

Merchandise

About This Page

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Propaganda