No one expects the Spanish Inquisition

Man - I've been away from Slashdot too long. I forgot how intelligent the conversations here can be. No really!

The honest truth is that I have no clue whether it's happening or not, but it is refreshing to hear it debated based on data and math. So much of this conversation gets framed around "You're an idiot to believe that" or "You're a fool to deny it" rather than "The evidence seems to be pointing toward something, but we're still trying to figure out what".

What these people never think about is the fact that these animals being edible is what keeps people breeding, raising and feeding them. Cows, pigs and chickens have never been endangered species because they are (or make) good food. I own 30 or so chickens that I buy food for, built a safe coop for, let out into a pasture every morning and close in each night. I do this because they make yummy eggs.

The bison is no longer endangered because people started raising them for meat. A hundred years ago, there were 800 or so. Now there are over 300,000.

If you couldn't use cows for milk or meat, who would spend the money on fencing, irrigation and hay to keep a herd around?

Or you could... you know - read books.

Just sayin'

Or we could - you know - boost the voltage a transformer and transfer the power over small conductors with relatively low losses,

And for longer runs we could use High Voltage DC

But liquid nitrogen and sapphire would work too...

FWIW - I found a great project a while ago that makes it pretty easy to make a USB drive image. It's the Linux Live USB Creator.

You might have her try out Edubuntu. It is pretty different than just another OS, but I think it does a good job of showing how Linux can fit a specific niche in a really interesting way.

They also have a "Weblive" version where you can play with it for 2 hours online before even downloading. That's here

Sometime around 1993 or 1994, I took a day trip to San Francisco with some of my college room mates. I remember going to Seacliff, overlooking the old Bath House and there being an arcade museum in one of the buildings up on the hill. There were some games that at the time were classics - like Battle Zone and such - and you could actually play them, which was incredibly cool.

Am I the only one that remembers this?

From what I remember of a recent Steve Jobs announcement, all you have to do is have a room full of reporters using laptops.

The existing version of chat has an option to do audio chat with another Gmail user.

Starting a voice chat requires a separate connection hand shake. So I can be text chatting with someone and if they try to move to voice and I don't want to, I just don't answer the call. If you need an excuse, it's that you don't have a microphone on your machine, or whatever.

My guess is that this will work in a similar fashion.

I started working for HP shortly after Carly came in, and I had the privilege to work with a number of 30+ year HP employees. They had worked for (and in several cases personally met) Bill and Dave and they had nothing but praise for them. They also had an amazing loyalty to the company - a loyalty that took one beating after another under Carly's leadership.

Maybe you're right that no employee of a tech company has anything good to say these days, but it wasn't the case at HP for many years.

As to the current situation, I know a number of people that still work there and they are miserable - far more so than when I left 5 years ago. Things were tough when I left, but it sounds like they've gotten far worse over time.

I'm sure that Ruby on Rails could have a fully functional web site made from this data in about half an hour.

The downside is that if more than two people try to access the data, it will display a whale suspended by balloons.

(Please Note: This post is a joke, and not an attempt to start a flame war).