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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

Don Edwards

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Everything posted by Don Edwards

  1. Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

    But not as tricky as keeping their heirs benevolent.
  2. Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

    I must point out, though, that there have been two attempts to assassinate a candidate in this election cycle, and both targeted Trump. Making it implausible that the criminals were Trump-fanatics, but plausible that they may have been Harris-fanatics. (There are fanatics, and other forms of nut-case, on both sides. Not necessarily in similar proportions.)
  3. Discussion of Military, real or fictional

    Yeah, and in 1854 there was a poem published wherein Russian artillery played a major part.
  4. Discussion of Military, real or fictional

    Somebody needs to remind the Russian leadership that while it's ok to eat steak when there's a chicken in every pot, keep eating steak while your people have nothing and pretty soon you start to look like a chicken.
  5. Things That Are Just Annoying

    mlooney, have you considered moving somewhere warmer & drier?
  6. Technology that works or doesn't

    Useful for post-mortem dumps in bombs. Prof, a couple of things: 1) Backing up large amounts of stuff to SSDs: they tend to get hot and slow down. If you're backing up to an external SSD, dangle it over the edge of a table (so it has air on all sides) and point a fan at it (more air to cool it more). This helps. 2) AFAIK you can't do this with a true image backup, but a file backup you can and a lot of modern backup software does: use hard links to do incremental backups, but make them look like full backups. ("Hard link" is what we call it in Linux-land. I know NTFS can do it too but it's probably called something different because, you know, Microsoft. What it is, is a single file sitting there occupying disk space and having multiple directory entries pointing at it and saying "that's my contents, right there!" The file remains as long as at least one surviving directory entry points at it.) Every backup run (except the first, which has to copy everything in scope and therefore takes a comparatively long time) compares the subject data against the previous backup, and copies only the new and changed files - but also copies the complete directories (minus any files that no longer exist on your "live" disk) from the older backup. Full image every 12 hours? A small selective backup job does all my writing and a bunch of related stuff every 15 minutes. (Granted, the relevant files that get changed are a lot smaller than your music files, and the editing process is rather less sensitive to twentieth-of-a-second delays..)
  7. Comic for Friday, Nov 1, 2024

    There are similar issues... [img url=/] [img url=] (Hopefully all this works. For some reason when I try to edit one of my posts, the existing content doesn't show up on my screen.)
  8. Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

    I consume very little mainstream media, but today on the way home from shopping I turned on the radio. Supporters of a certain candidate (details omitted because they don't matter) compared an opposing candidate to a wolf I must protest. A wolf never tells the rabbit that the wolf is chasing them for the rabbit's own good. A wolf never tells the rabbit that the rabbit is better off for having been eaten. A wolf never tells the rabbit how much better it is to be eaten by a wolf rather than a mountain lion. Clearly, a wolf is morally superior to the typical politician.
  9. Things That Are Just Annoying

    Badgers are not known for waiting patiently before eating.
  10. Technology that works or doesn't

    Could be more embarrassing. If I recall correctly, it was the school system in the English city of Scunthorpe that installed a filter to block profanity and vulgarity - after which the school's computers for student use couldn't access the school's computer systems. Or the city's. When they figured out why, it went down in history as "the Scunthorpe problem." It has cropped up in quite a few other contexts too. (In the case of Scunthorpe, the problem was the second through fifth letters of the name.)
  11. Things that have impacted the cast's lives

    For Tedd, I'd add his mother leaving.
  12. Comic for Monday, Oct 28, 2024

    We make a lot of northwestern-Europe-based assumptions. If the well in question is in the Middle East, it's entirely possible that it was there first and the hill grew around it. This sort of structure is called a "tel" and is why a great many villages in that area are called "Tel something-or-other." (In Hebrew or Arabic, of course.) (But not the city of Tel Aviv. That city was founded in 1909 as a suburb of an existing large city - the two have since merged.) The process runs something like this. A well gets dug. As sources of water are less than commonplace, a village grows up around it. The main building material is clay bricks, because they have a lot more dirt than any other building material. Shit happens, as it tends to when local rulers think killing their neighbors is a good tactic (a regretfully common view pretty much everywhere), and the village is destroyed - the remains adding some small amount to the height of the soil around the well. But the well is still there, and sources of water are still less than commonplace, a village grows up around it. Shit happens... rinse and repeat a few dozen times...
  13. Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

    Yeah. "Which general survives the civil war" is also a basis for government. Some bases are less horrific than others.
  14. Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

    My opinion: anyone who seeks elective government office is either corrupt, insane, or power-hungry, or some combination thereof, and therefore presumably unfit for office. And wanting the voters to think of them as a member of either major US political party is, um, not exactly evidence to the contrary. (My father said his great-uncle told him that anyone who gets elected twice is a crook. During said relative's fifth term in the state legislature.) The catch is, government is a necessary evil. So we gotta get somone in there running it.
  15. Things That Are Just Annoying

    So this person you've muted can respond to you with a few dozen abusive garbage posts, and everyone who reads your stuff will see these replies - but you won't? Yeah, that sounds like a good reason to mute Twitter.\ (But I don't have to - I never set up an account in the first place.)
  16. What Are You Ingesting?

    If you can't sleep because of gas cramps, peppermint tea would probably help.
  17. Technology that works or doesn't

    Last package I had go astray was USPS, but I strongly suspect I know why (and it ended up being returned to sender). The RV park I was in is in a rather steep area, such that street level is the third floor of the chalet, while the office is in a separate building level with the first floor, and the majority of the park is about a half-floor below that (and 3/4 of a floor above the river). There's one worker in the local post office who apparently has a history of refusing to drive down the driveway to the office to make a delivery - if a package needs a signature and nobody responds at the street-level door, in mid-day when everyone's working, it's not deliverable. That same worker has no trouble driving down the driveway and parking by the office when the park is hosting a barbecue, though.
  18. Comic for Tuesday, Oct 15, 2024

    And Jerry Pournelle once had to spend time in an IRS office trying to convince an auditor that, as an author, he had a legitimate business use for a computer. (He's generally credited with being the first person to write a novel entirely on computer and get a major publishing house to publish it. Of course, by then he was established enough that the big publishers would grab anything he put his name on. I've never seen it identified which of his novels it was.)
  19. Comic for Monday, Oct 14, 2024

    I doubt that Hope is less powerful than she was, beyond the extent to which all Immortals are now less powerful than they were before the change. However, she could be less aware of her power, less skilled in applying it, or less knowledgeable about the world to know when and where to apply it. Or some two of those. Or all three.
  20. Comic for Monday, Oct 14, 2024

    Zeus: I am such a powerful being! Hope: I am such a messed-up confused being!
  21. Comic for Saturday, Oct 12, 2024

    The only v-tuber that I follow at all - and that only indirectly - puts her own face on camera. But then, she's got a rather distinctive face.
  22. Comic for Friday, Oct 11, 2024

    That appears to be unnecessary - Sarah apparently figured out who Hope is. (Although she may not be certain yet.)
  23. Other Random Comics

    Cecil the seasick sea serpent.
  24. Comic for Wednesday, Oct 2, 2024

    There's a passenger train that runs about 700 miles across northern Montana. The largest urban area it stops in has fewer than 10,000 people, and is the 12th-largest city in the state. This passenger-rail route is obviously not intended to provide much inter-city travel for residents of Montana. Rather, it's for people traveling back and forth between Seattle and Chicago. But that's a straight-line distance of over 1700 miles, and the train's route is not exactly straight. Normally a 45-hour jaunt (can be much longer in winter - one time I rode it, it was 18 hours late getting to a city near the middle of North Dakota), with fares from US$180 to $600. You'll probably want about 6 meals plus a few beverages; those cost extra. In comparison, one can fly between Seattle's Sea-Tac Airport and Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a flight of about 6 hours, for about $120. Some beverages and the one maybe-needed meal probably included. Gee, I wonder why passenger rail isn't more popular in the US...
  25. Comic for Wednesday, Oct 2, 2024

    The article I linked to discusses multiple factors about railroad operation and track design that contribute to Europe's low freight-rail usage. Train-length rules, functionally allowable train height... ... doesn't mention that western Europe doesn't have the vast quantities of nothing that can be found in the central US, central & northern Canada, eastern Russia, western China, most of Australia... (I'm currently near the north end of a 70-mile stretch of US federal highway, running through desert, that has a single-digit number of stop signs - and no traffic lights - facing down intersecting roads. Most of which aren't paved, have no identifying signs, and have no buildings near them that are visible from the highway.)