As you celebrate Independence Day today, please take a moment to think about the men and women of our armed forces, past and present, who have willingly risked, and all too often lost, everything to defend our freedom. I worry about America, but there can be nothing very wrong with a country that continues to produce men and women like them.
The coast apparently got nailed pretty badly, but we’ve seen no effects at all from the hurricane. No rain, no wind, not even any clouds. We’re not doing anything special for the holiday. Barbara is doing stuff in the yard and later maybe some kit stuff. She’s meeting her sister and a friend for dinner and then going to watch the fireworks. Colin and I will watch Heartland reruns until Barbara returns. He’s terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks, so I’ll keep the sound turned up and let him cower on the sofa beside me until Barbara gets home.
https://www.numbersusa.com/news/not-my-backyard-feds-efforts-relocate-illegal-aliens-border
Why not a tent city in DC? All of these illegals are going to cause skyrocketing costs here in the Great State of Texas with schools, healthcare, etc, etc, etc.
Why can we not run them right back across the river? Oh I forgot, our incompetent president needs to adjudicate each one of them. They all need lawyers, judicial hearings, court transcripts, etc. We are way past the crazy level on this, the army needs to be involved at the border. Grab them and just run them across the nearest international bridge on a bus.
Down with the rebels! Long live Her Majesty!
“Google Orders Terminator Robots Not To Kill Founders Brin & Page”
http://searchengineland.com/google-orders-terminator-robots-kill-larry-sergey-195759
“Long live Her Majesty!”
Sure, man, whatever. She could go to 100 like the late Queen Mum. Whatever. Y’all like yer billions-per-year monarchy, have at it. Next up…maybe…King Charles III. Then who…uh, King William V, right? Hard to keep track.
Still, when all is said and done, I’d take any of them over any of ours going back to Garfield.
I’d feel a lot more smug about our superiority over the Brit monarchy if we didn’t have a tyrant of our own. The US federal government has a judiciary and a legislature which in theory check a runaway tyrant, but in practice do no more than nibble around the edges and get their faces in front of TV cameras, respectively.
I’d take Richard I, Edward I, or Edward III over all but a handful of our presidents. At least during The Current Situation.
He’s making Che and Fidel look good.
We had a good fireworks show around here for several hours. It rained about an inch at about 7pm and I think that people tried to compete with mother nature’s thunderbooms. Several of the mortars really got our house to shaking good. Ah, the joys of living in “the sticks” with LOTS of rednecks who like blowing things up. One of these days Sugar Land is going to annex our little piece of heaven here and they will take the homegrown fireworks away when we get citified.
Been watching the new “Tyrant” show on the FX channel. Obummer definitely would love to be this guy with no checks and balances. And the ability to send out the army into a neighborhood and shoot every man there for denying his right to reign.
I’d feel a lot more smug about our superiority over the Brit monarchy if we didn’t have a tyrant of our own. The US federal government has a judiciary and a legislature which in theory check a runaway tyrant, but in practice do no more than nibble around the edges and get their faces in front of TV cameras, respectively.
The problem is that half of Congress, especially the Senate, is in cahoots with him. Heck, Obummer is fairly restrained for some of the senators. Very Roman, they are. They are giving out bread now, where is the circus?
I got home at 12:05 from a late night grocery run and the locals still had the fireworks going, accented by the penned-up dogs that were near enough to add their 2c worth.
Why do Windows installations rot? My main machine is Ubuntu 12.04, but for a couple of games and a couple of applications (InDesign) I dual boot into Windows 7. So the installation is maybe 4 years old, but doesn’t get much use. It is rotting anyway.
I discovered last week that VBScript no longer works – you can run scripts in InDesign, but apparently I now have to write them in JavaScript. Also new: after booting, for the first 5 minutes or so, keyboard characters are only accepted at the rate of about 1 every 2 seconds. They aren’t lost – they stack up in a buffer somewhere – but the computer is still essentially unusable for the first few minutes.
Based on past experience, this is a bad sign – it means that things will continue to break at an increasing rate until I do a new install. But this was OEM Windows – I am pretty sure that I did not receive an install disk with the system, and whether the license key will reactivate if I install from a download is anybody’s guess. Plus reactivating an old Adobe CS installation is also no picnic…
Anybody have a magic wand?
Neither is getting my HP LJ1200 laser printer working with Mint 17 a picnic. It either does nothing but flash green (receiving job) or prints a page saying ‘image error’. My son also has an LJ1200 on Ubuntu 12.04 and it does not work, either.
Edit: Why does EVERYTHING Linux have to be so difficult? It is like they do it on purpose. Installed the GUI for the HPLIP driver (which HP claims does not exist) that was in the default repositories in my Mint 17 Software Manager. Started that and it claimed there was no printer installed. Installed it (the software found it automatically) and presto! — printing! Made that the default printer; deleted the Mint-installed printer and another problem killed.
Fun times! Ain’t pooters wonderful?
And yeah, Windoze rots even when you don’t use it! Isn’t that great? Insanely great?
I’ve personally booted up RHEL and VMS machines that had lain dormant for YEARS, and nary a problem.
Rich rednecks up here had some pretty good fireworks going from dusk to around ten or so; visible around the bay and out on one of the Champlain islands; peeps here tend to knock off about then and the nights are pretty quiet after that. Probably some more tonight; some of the amateur works I’ve seen approach the “official” town and city shows in quality, volume and length; must be nice to have loads of cash available to light ’em off for hours and hours. Plus I wonder if they know what they’re doing. The heavier ordnance can be tricky.
Tomorrow is “Bay Day,” the annual festival of fireworks, live bands in the park behind us, etc. They’ll close the roads here between 09:00 and 1:00 for a road race, and then light off a bunch of fireworks off the pier at the end of our street after dark. After which the amateurs will kick in for a few more hours and last year the bands kept going till around 11 or midnight, but once a year doesn’t bother us, and it’s mainly oldies rock stuff anyway.
Was it Chuck who was trying to get an Epson V30/V300 scanner running on Linux. If so, I know it can be done (or at least could be done with an earlier Ubuntu; it stopped working when I installed Mint on Barbara’s system) because I had one operating on Barbara’s Linux system. IIRC, it was a pain in the ass, downloading the Linux driver from Epson and editing config file(s) manually, but I did get it running.
I mention this, because Barbara’s Linux system is still sitting on her desk running just in case we need anything that’s on it, but she’s converted to using a Windows 8.1 laptop. Just now, she wanted to scan the invoice from the company that installed the garage doors this week. I disconnected the scanner from her Linux system and plugged it into her Windows 8.1 laptop, expecting everything to just work. Nope. Windows recognized that the scanner was connected and even knew that it was an Epson V30/V300 (it’s actually a 300). But it couldn’t find a driver for it. So I went to the Epson website and downloaded an .exe file that contained drivers for Windows, but only up to 7. I clicked the .exe file and it installed the drivers and the Epson scanning app. After rebooting (I’d forgotten how obnoxious Windows is about rebooting…) I clicked on the icon for the scanning app, but Windows told me it couldn’t run it. So I was sitting there wondering what to do next, the scanner initialized and the app popped up. I ran a scan of the document at default settings, which were supposedly 300 dpi. When I told it to print it to the IP printer in my office, it sent the print job but all I got from the printer was an error page. So Barbara emailed me the file, which should have been something like 2,500 pixels wide but was only 500-some. So I printed a (very) low-res page, which Barbara was happy with.
whether the license key will reactivate if I install from a download is anybody’s guess. Plus reactivating an old Adobe CS installation is also no picnic…
You should have made, or need to make, recovery discs that will restore your system to factory condition. If you cannot make the discs contact the vendor and they will be provided for a fee.
Activation of old CS is no problem. It is better if you deactivate first. If not call Adobe and they will accommodate you. Adobe is better than they have been in the past when they were real assholes.
Also you can now Photoshop CS2 for free, no activation required. Several versions old but for some it is enough to do what the person needs.
Why does EVERYTHING Linux have to be so difficult?
And that will continue be a problem. Even Windows which seems to have more success than Linux when dealing with devices, falls down. I support several people that have a small business with a few computers. Not enough to need servers. Even those people have difficulty and they are running windows.
The biggest problem that I have seen is that they get a notice about an update for some software and they download it and install. But hidden in that download package is a crappy toolbar, AV software or some other piece of crap.
Sun with their Java and Adobe with Flash and Reader are two of the worst. Especially Adobe which makes lots of money on their software has no business including crappy software with downloads for updates for their software.
The problems are across the industry. Linux benefits from the geeks but that does not translate well to the average desktop user. Windows benefits from the mass of the installed base. Apple benefits from their stores which are always crowded with people that are having problems.
Yeah, me with the V30. Still have not gotten that one figured, but with the printer now functioning, I am still on-track with Mint 17 replacing the discontinued XP. I spent a good 3 hours on the scanner. If you got it working, then I will continue to put in what it takes to get it going. Or get another scanner that is known to work with Ubuntu Trusty (Mint 17).
Actually, several posts in various help forums noted that particular scanner worked out-of-the-box with Mint 16, but refuses to budge on 17. It is really too bad that the Linux developers do not openly share how and where config files interface with operations. Lots of people enquire, but developers are stone silent and only the occasional person who stumbles on the answers surfaces in help forums. After seeing developers’ attitudes on a number of forums, I have concluded they are mostly scumbags with questionable motives. They certainly are not in it to make users’ experiences better. They frequently come just one word short of ‘fuck you!’ to honest problems. This one is typical — unlike XMPlay in Windows, VLC does not try to reconnect to streams if they get dropped, whatever the reason:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vlc/+bug/790216
I am past the point of turning back. Mint 17 is better than Windows 95, and back then, we had no other reasonable choice. Actually, it is probably close to Win2k, before XP. That was no piece of cake. XP and Office2k3 were the demarcations of Windows finally working so one could focus on the apps and forget about the OS. Too bad M$ strangled OS2. That might have been the best of them all. I used it for about 8 months at one point — until Gates pulled his people out.