The current Nova Scotia provincial government is downright nasty against anyone whom they perceive as against them, or who make them look bad. It's easily the worst bunch of cynical assholes who've ever held office in the ~15 years I've lived here. The worst part is, they just got reelected last year with another majority government, so we're stuck with them until at least 2021.

This province is swirling the drain, and the general populace barely seems to notice, doesn't care, and/or doesn't think things can be any better. That's Atlantic Canada in a nutshell for you, sadly.

The cops will no doubt deny it, but they probably got some pretty stern "suggestions" from up high in the provincial cabinet to make an example of this kid, for the cardinal sin of making the Liberals look bad.

It sounds plenty fucking fair. Architects & engineers don't get paid royalties for years & years on work we did ages ago. We certainly don't continue to get paid after we're dead. And if we fuck up, things fall apart. People can get hurt. People can die. If a screenwriter fucks up, nothing of any consequence happens.

If you did the work 20 years ago, tough shit. Welcome to the world of everybody else.

Yes.

Marvel Comics lost its creativity many years ago, probably no later than the time that the first Spider-Man movie debuted in the theaters (though I'd say a good 5-7 years prior). Ever since then, they 'shuffle the deck chairs' around, but nothing ever sticks. The characters always eventually revert to status quo. They make much, much more money from their licensing than they ever will on the comics, and they really don't want to kill that golden goose. Thor will be back as his usual self by the time Avengers 2 hits theaters. Bank on it.

I would have loved to been a fly on the wall in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office when this non-decision was announced. Obama has once again taken the cowardly way out and punted a tough decision. He wants to continue to fundraise from environmentalists by saying "We're being tough on the Keystone pipeline and insisting it meets our environmental standards!" and then do the same with the big business crowd by saying, "We haven't said no to Keystone, we just want to make sure it meets our environmental standards." He doesn't actually want to make the decision, because then one crowd or the other will tell him to pound sand. Even though the entire job of being President of the United States is about making those decisions!

Worst president of my lifetime. Not even close.

"FUCKING SUCKS" really says all that needs to be said.

Even better: install the latest Internet Explorer cumulative security update manually, then re-run Windows Update. It seems that if IE is fully up-to-date, WU can chew through the remaining updates much faster. Then you're good for another month.

That's funny, I must have missed the part in Economics 101 where it says the goal of business is to earn zero profit, and that the accompanying goal of the government is to tax the business so as to encourage that outcome. Was it in the section about Marxism, perhaps?

How does tripe like this get modded to +5?

Limit switches, solenoids, pushbuttons, motor contactors, relays, pilot lights, current transmitters, modulating control valves, even robotic motion controls -- good luck replacing all that gear with 'smart' versions that now have to understand text instead of simple electrical signals and not losing so much as a millisecond of response time.

I probably ought to give you some benefit of the doubt in that you meant "the PLC's data that passes to/from the SCADA" but you used the word "output" and that has a meaning to control engineers, a meaning you apparently don't grasp since you are quite ignorant on this subject.

So just stop now. Just admit you do not know what you are talking about and move on. It took me years of engineering school, mentoring, and in-field experience to understand my field, and I learn more every day. I really don't have the interest in trying to distill it into a /. comment for you.

Ignorant IT people who think they know better than control engineers how to design & operate control systems. The rant about OPC was beautiful, in its own ignorant way, and completely exposes the GP as someone who's probably never seen a control system in his life, probably never will see one, and wouldn't have the first clue how to program, troubleshoot, or maintain it.

There's historically been a certain amount of tension between control engineers and IT folks for that very reason; the smartest IT folks are the ones who ask the control engineers what they need to do their jobs, provide it, then stay the hell out of our way. The rest make our blood boil.

Hell if you didn't know better your first thought on seeing those scrawls would probaby be "Is that an Etch-a-Sketch?" Maybe Apple oughta sue them too...

KMail (used to?) store its email in the maildir format, meaning they're all just plain text files. It could fall back on plain old 'find' commands in the shell and return the results. But from what I'm reading, it's so wedded to "semantic desktop" now that it can't even do that? Ugh. I guess I really will have to ditch it for good on this upgrade (moving from Mint 9 LTS to Mint 13 LTS shortly).

As an engineer I have to fight the tendency to assign acronyms to things that don't need them, or even discard/alter acronyms that come out "wrong". GIMP does not get off the hook for having a silly name because it's an acronym. In fact the full name of the program looks like it was chosen to create the acronym - which is doubly silly.

Bemoan it all you want, but GIMP is a stupid name and it ought to change if it wants to be taken seriously.

Makes you an outlier, perhaps one of the _extreme_ outliers that the GP suggested. Multiple 1080p streams? Really? Just how many TV shows & movies are out there worth watching these days, let alone all at once?

If there were a "comment of the week" feature I'd nominate this for the sheer laugh-out-loud absurdity of it. If we were talking about Farmville or the Sims the /. crowd would pretty openly sneer at it. Make it part of an RPG though and it's gaming goodness. Spock could use this to short out a few androids!

Interestingly, Wil wrote on his blog that he had a blast playing "evil Wil Wheaton", as he called the character, and loves going back to Big Bang for guest spots.