adavies42

> If it's serious, like assault, you're out.

i've seen some examples that suggest it might not be as cut-and-dry as that. i don't have the url handy, but some time ago someone in one of this discussions linked to a publicly-accessible record of clearance decisions. the one that jumped out at me had a guy who'd been a drug addict and involved in dealing in the past--he was clean now and fully informed them about it during the screening, and was approved.

i guess the new digg is the old reddit....

i went to academic summer camps basically from sixth grade on (Duke TIP-affiliated stuff), and one year i took chemistry class. one of the three weeks was "uncontrolled oxidation" week. lots of fun. :) the biggest takeaway was that potassium perchlorate plus almost anything equals cool. i think my favorite was equal parts potassium perchlorate and sugar in a half-coke can. take outside and add a couple drops of sulfuric acid--ten-foot cone of flame.

for reference this would be, hmm, i think 1995? somewhere between 94 and 97, anyway.

ethanol burns relatively cool (as do (some of?) the other alcohols). the problem is that it often burns above the ignition point of its carrier substance, which itself burns much hotter. e.g. calcium acetate/isopropyl alcohol gel (lab sterno) is perfectly safe to burn in your hand, but only until the alcohol runs out--it will light the calcium acetate, which is not remotely safe to burn in your hand.

hand sanitizer is usually an alcohol in water and a thickener (glycerin, etc.). i'd worry a bit about the same effect. (not that i actually know what the ignition and flame temps of glycerin are....)

"Users may be experiencing issues" is not the passive voice (not that you explicitly said it was, but IMAO you implied it), it's the continuous aspect, modified by whatever an auxiliary like "may" does. (this is where my grammar vocabulary starts to run out. conditional continuous maybe?)

passive would be "Issues may be being experienced by users".

istr a ds9 novel (yes, i read some) where they had to replicate some machine guns to deal with invaders who had perfect shielding, but only against energy weapons. there were security overrides involved, but it had a large collection of projectile weapons to choose from once it was unlocked.

you ever see American Graffiti? one thing that really stuck with me was the bit at the end where they're boarding a plane--it was just walk out onto the runway, present your ticket and walk up the stairs.

to do that nowadays you have to be flying private....

i've flown international business class on luxury airlines twice (once on singapore on the company dime, and once on qatar through a random complimentary upgrade). the service is just staggering--never mind the full-flat bed-seats, the unlimited free liquor, the gourmet food, or the entertainment center with a full array of power outlets and usb and video ports so i could run any device and content i wanted, what really impressed me was the rose in a vase on my table when i boarded, and the pajamas in the care package (with the slippers and eyemask and so on).

i'm splurging and flying "premium coach" (or w/e the hell they call it on Virgin) on my next vacation; we'll see how it compares....

ever work on a non-gnu box? (old solaris, *bsd, stock os x, etc.) there's a decent chance they don't have -r at all.

this is traditional: they almost always undershoot the over-expectations

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...]

I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Hank Rearden in TFA.

a few years ago i moved into an apartment in NYC that somehow didn't have a phone line. at all. like there wasn't a wall jack in the entire apartment. (it was a hundred-year-old building, i have no idea how this was possible.)

i discovered this when i finally gave up on cable internet (insanely unreliable there) and needed about five calls and three visits to get verizon to understand that someone would have to drill a hole in my floor and run wire into the basement before my DSL could be hooked up, because yes, i really didn't have a phone line.

> What exactly is the "violence" that Austin would do to competitors?

To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke: If you run your own cable, you'll need a permit. If you do it by negotiating with the landowners without a permit, you'll be blocked. If you do it anyway, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot.

Rand also liked Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane.

If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite short (by her standards at least--about 200 pages).

> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)

Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifesto http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.)

Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical http://www.amazon.com/dp/0271014415 considers her from a perspective that sounds similar to yours. (I haven't read it myself.)

it's old printers' stuff to do with physical properties of lead type, i think. as to why it won't go away, i have no idea. i happily ignore it in almost all my writing....

no, just illiterate. the original author and the commenters here all made allowances for non-native speakers of english, which apparently you couldn't be bothered to read....

> For example if you have a zero tolerance policy for it's vs its, or for commas making things confusing, the framers of the US Constitution would fail the test.

that's a question of knowing something about history. i wouldn't hire anyone with perfect grammar and style who was too dim to know that both are subject to change over time.

they have their place. i saw a lovely translation recently of a french request to "tutoyer" (address in the familiar) as "i must be thee to thou".

There's also Lenin's famous line "Who? Whom?", which is a lot harder to translate without a "whom" available....

There's an Allan Sherman song ("When I Was a Lad") where one of the rhymes depends on who/whom:

I learned who was going out with whom

And who had the keys to the powder room

relatedly, there's a little-used rule that lets you use a semi-colon as your list separator if the individual elements contain commas: "My favorite law firms are Dewey, Cheatem & Howe; Robinall, Widowes, & Laffin; and Sue, Grabbitt, & Runne."

is it clear that there were any such standards?

proofreading to match a style guide is completely different from grammar. learn the difference between grammar and style....

note that you can't actually make them work, no matter what the contract says (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_performance). (you can sue them for compensation though.)

> We used to imprison people for publicly supporting Communism and/or publicly denouncing wars

also note that the leadership in doing this came from Lincoln and Wilson....

> Who would have thought that Obama would bring back the Espionage Act?

liberals politicians increase police power, conservative politicians increase social spending. their bases let them get away with it because they're "on their side", and their opposition let them get away with it because it's what they wanted anyway.

i'd also point out that it was the 50's and they were probably all smokers....

> For people who want to have real friendships as adults, maybe what we need is some kind of structure in our lives that more closely resembles what people have earlier in life.

If you're willing to dedicate time to a weekly (not monthly, that's not going to work) meetup, that should do it. Otherwise, you're probably stuck with your neighbors and cow-orkers as your only source of new friends....

sounds like asker/guesser striking again (<http://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-betw...). i've had a job implode, and endless relationship friction, because i'm an asker all the way (as i expect are most people here).

are you and your gf (and the people you ask for advice) from different cultures at all? (could be america/canadia, new york/midwest, or just that you're a normal geek and she isn't.)