Sunday, Mrs. Fungus spent her evening at a transvestite revue with some friends from the office. I spent that time with one her friends' husband, who's in the process of rebuilding a 3.5 V6 for a Chrysler 300--the older curvy model from the 90s--and I do believe we had a pretty fair time of it.
He's taken a big diesel V8 from a school bus--7-odd liters' displacement--and put it into a Chevy pickup truck. It looks like it belongs there. Then again this guy's a professional mechanic from a family of pros.
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Leftists are always hypocrites. "One standard for thee, another for me, monseur." Of course the problem extends to other prominent socialists in France. It's not going to be just this guy; there will be plenty more who have offshore accounts to shelter their wealth against France's punitive tax rates.
I honestly don't know why anyone is surprised or shocked by this. It's like being surprised that a rattlesnake has fangs.
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Gun control stuff:
New York State is confiscating guns. We were told this wouldn't happen, but it's happening. The end goal of liberal gun control is an unarmed populace, which is why no one who supports the civil right to self defense can ever believe the leftists when they say they promise double-pinky-swear that they're not going to confiscate guns.
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Pat Quinn, idiot governor of Illinoistan, doesn't like being told that Illinoistan must allow concealed carry. Illinoistan is the last holdout for Democrat gun control, and the Supreme Court has struck down its ban on carrying weapons.
Myself, I desperately hope that the Illinoistan government will fap around and do nothing and thus give us Constitutional carry--but I'm not going to hold my breath, and in fact I expect we'll end up with a hyperregulated system similar to Massachusetts, where you have to pick your jurisdiction carefully if you want to be able to get a CCW permit.
Further, I bet they'll make the laws draconian enough that if anyone can see your gun (such as if you bend over and it "prints" through your clothing) you go to jail and lose your rights, and open carry will still be illegal.
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College gun scare in Rhode Island, where campus security guards are disarmed. And Ace says:
The good news though is the heavily armed state police (who showed up only 20min after the call) confiscated a Nerf gun from some student, although nobody knows if that's what set off the panic...but they took it anyway just to be sure.Yep! You can't be too careful. Why, that lad with the Nerf gun might be a danger to, uh, well...something.
*rolleyes*
So there you have it: if you're a college student who intends to go on a shooting spree, Rhode Island has the softest targets in the country. Not even the campus security guards have guns and it takes nearly half an hour for the police to show up after the campus has been locked down. And since the security guards don't have guns, naturally the students will all be disarmed, too.
What a load of rot, foisted on us by rot-headed morons who think we live in a fantasy world.
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An 80386 in a building. That's the short form; this is an article about a network of computers built by the US government to coordinate defenses from airborne bombers armed with nuclear weapons and the technology of the day required that a very large building be filled with tubes and transistors to get the require computational power.
It's never a bad idea to remind yourself just how far computer technology has come since 1945.
The one thing I take exception to in that article--and it's not much exception--is where the guy discusses how this single 80386 ran everything in the building and could do all these complex things. This computer was programmed with the philosophy that every instruction cycle was sacred; running at a clock speed of 75 kHz the machine did not have power to throw away. It's probable that it was programmed in machine code, which was painstakingly optimized to waste absolutely no processor time whatsoever.
Contrast that with the modern desktop computer. Computer cycles are so cheap that we find ways for our computers to waste them even when we're at work. (Ever have one of those little animated kittens following your mouse pointer around?) A modern computer has power to burn, which is why in 2001 I was able to sit at my computer composing text while simultaneously using the computer to play music (via headphones)...and at that the computer was still loafing, spending a majority of its processor cycles in an idle loop, simply waiting for instructions.
Same here; when I'm not actually pressing down on a key, this computer is doing nothing other than OS housekeeping, so the people who wrote the OS did not spend a lot of time on minimizing OS overhead. There's no need to.
If you took a modern computer and programmed it the way the SAGE computers had been programmed, you could get a lot of work out of a single CPU...and you'd end up wasting a spectacular amount of time, too. Much more than it's worth, considering how cheap processing power is these days.
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Mrs. Fungus and I slept right through voting hours yesterday. It doesn't seem to have made a difference, at least in the Representative race, because a Chicago Democrat won the election...of course. And that person did not win by a margin of one or two votes.
I just have to wonder if my parents voted for him. *sigh* Such is life (and death) in the Peoples' Demokratik Republik of Illinoistan.
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Monday's weather was gorgeous, and to our surpise on Tuesday the daffodils had bloomed. I didn't even see the buds coming up; then again I hadn't really looked for them--so it was extra-surprising to see the brilliant yellow blooms Tuesday.
Surprising, and welcome, believe me. This has been a very chilly spring; they're predicting "wintry mix" for Friday. Well, I guess that's how the global warming cookie crumbles.
Incidentally, not long ago I saw something about how the oceans were soaking up all the global warming, which is why the atmosphere hasn't warmed in 17 years--and again I must point to the Laws of Thermodynamics which demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt THAT SHIT IS PATENTLY IM-FUCKING-POSSIBLE. You cannot have two connected systems in disequlibrium; you especially cannot have THAT EQUILIBRIUM GET WORSE.
Unless there's some magical refrigerator somewhere, pumping heat out of the atmosphere and into the oceans. Entropy tends towards a maximum, not a minimum. If these guys were actually scientists, they might understand that.
But it's been a chilly spring, and not just here; it's been particularly bad in Europe. They got feet of snow in northern England over Easter weekend. There's a huge system crawling across the US which pasted the Rockies with more snow.
...and it's nearly mid-April and I've heard one peeper. One. I should have heard them by the ton on Monday evening, when it was so warm here we had most of the bunker's windows open; but the ground has to thaw and get warm down far enough that the things bestir from their hibernation, and apparently that hasn't happened yet. Usually those buggers are out and done with mating by April; not so this year.
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I just don't know what else to say. I can't figure out the last time I posted a Garfield Without Garfield strip, either.
Looks like it was in December, so let's get caught up!
Now we're getting somewhere.