skydiver30960

Complete eradication has been attempted, and it didn't go too well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt WRT the traps: I've heard and experienced great results from the commercial propane-fired ones. I haven't tried the converted 2L bottle ones yet, but others seem to like them. Set them up away from you, UNLESS you have an obvious source of mosquitoes. For example if you're partying it up at a bonfire that's a short distance from a riverside, set the trap up between the bonfire and riverside. The mosquitoes will be drawn to the light and heat of the fire but will hopefully be drawn to the trap before they get to you. OR, move to Arizona. Not a damn one of the blood-suckers to be found. Elvisio "we do have scorpions, though" Rodriguez

Could have been SOOOOO much worse. When I saw the title of the article I had a MUCH larger price tag in mind than just $225. Elvisio "add a few zeroes" Rodriguez

I am very very proud of the DZ.com community, getting a whole 15 posts into this conversation without it getting bounced into SC. Elvisio "there's hope for you all yet" Rodriguez

... right, sure. You're just saying that to avoid buying . Elvisio "pony up!" Rodriguez

The wife and I are heading to Belize on Wednesday for ten days, including a week of SCUBA diving. We actually have a pretty good flight itinerary, but I'm always a knot of nerves until we're on the ground, at the destination, WITH our gear undamaged by the TSA gorillas. Elvisio "" Rodriguez

...I agree, which is why I usually don't pull this trick in very urban areas or really dense traffic. In situations like that, there is too much room for someone I'm NOT pissed with to decide that my honk was meant for them, and have things get ugly. On quieter roads, it's more obvious that yes, this was intended for THIS specific asshat. Elvisio "smart phones make us dumb" rodriguez

I've taken up a similar habit... I do most of my driving on relatively sparsly-driven Interstate 10 (Southern AZ). This means fewer cars, but also a greater sense of complacency in drivers, and ergo LOTS of texting and talking while driving. I will usually give a pass to someone who is just talking on the phone and who also seems to be driving in a reasonably safe manner. BUT, if your talking is making you weave like a douche, or if you are looking at your phone for ANY reason as I pass you (none of this "I was using Siri" shit), I just lean on my horn. No friendly "tap-tap" on the horn and friendly smile as I make the "hang up and drive" hand signal. I just put my weight on the horn and leave it there until I'm done passing. This usually gets the point across, gets the driver's attention, and at a minimum disturbs them from their task for as long as I'm on the horn. If you're going to risk my life by texting while driving on the same road as me, I'm damn sure going to relish interrupting your train of thought and (if I'm lucky) scaring the shit out of you in the process. Elvisio "better than dying" Rodriguez

And at the same time, just upstream on the Bonfire list, I see a thread from Billvon about him refurbishing an Altair 8800.... Coincidence? I THINK NOT! Elvisio "It's a conspiracy!" Rodriguez

Growing up, we had an Apple IIe with all the trimmings: double floppy drive, color monitor, 512K RAM extension, mouse, joystick, massive color dot matrix printer, the whole shebang. It was still getting regular use in 1991-2 when I was typing essays for college applications. Print Shop (couldn't get enough of those cheesy graphics), LodeRunner, The King's Quest series, Police Quest (ALMOST got them to get me Leisure Suit Larry, but no go), and more ill-gotten games than I could count. A few years ago, long after I moved out, in a fit of house cleaning, my mother... set it all on the curb. ...it was gone in MINUTES. A huge chunk of my childhood, gone in an instant. Elvisio "I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out, and were silenced" Rodriguez

I am a greedy bastard: I believe I deserve both security and liberty(privacy)... AND I believe that I should be able to expect my country to provide me with both. Which is to say, I should not have to allow my country to break one law in order for it to uphold another. I felt the same way a few months ago when we were talking about the Constitutionality of the "near but not on the border" Border Patrol Checkpoints. I thought (and still do) it fair to demand that my country protect my borders without surrendering my own Constitutional rights. Another way: I'm not saying "don't do this," I'm saying "do it right." Same thing here, in a different light. Elvisio "seems simple" Rodriguez

...but it is Chinese, so once it does run a calculation... ...it just has to run it again an hour later. Elvisio "hellbound" Rodriguez

It's a Fetzer Valve, sho nuff. Elvisio "Fletch says so" Rodriguez

The Oatmeal and XKCD are my two favorite online comics, hands down. Elvisio "funny pages that make me feel ignorant" Rodriguez

One of these absolutely NUKED my credit rating a couple years ago. It was about $300 for a medical test for which they were sending the bill to an address that was YEARS out of date. What I found in my experience goes directly against a couple suggestions on this thread: 1.) It WAS a big deal. Dropped my credit rating from 800+ to around 600. "They say" that the higher your credit rating is, the worse the hit, FWIW. 2.) Paying the debt does make it show "paid in full" on your credit report but it does NOT remove it or make it all better. It will be there for the next seven years, as is. 3.) Two years later, it's still a drag on my credit rating. I've only recovered to around 700, with an otherwise EXEMPLARY credit history. 4.) I spent DAYS getting in contact with all three credit agencies, talking to countless people with Indian accents, and filed a grievance (or whatever they call it) WRT this collection because I was never actually billed for the service (as far as I was concerned). All three agencies noted the greivance, and it didn't help one bit. Pay the bill, but don't expect much in return. Our credit reporting system is AWFUL, IMO. There is little to no opportunity for the little guy to fight. My wife and I had to buy our home with only her on the loan. We're both on the title, so that's cool, but part of me WEEPS every time I think about how this crap went down. Elvisio "credit sucks" Rodriguez

I'm using TouchPal Keyboard for my Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It's a pretty nice keypad, and it has a fun feature that I'd guess most other smartphones do as well: whenever I'm typing in any app, pressing the spacebar at the end of a word brings up a list of suggested words as the phone tries to guess what I'm saying. Selecting one of those words will in turn bring up another list of possibilities. In this way, for example, I can text my wife "How's your day so far" by only typing "How's" and then just tap the words. Here's how the game of this thread goes. Start by typing any word you want, then pick only from the phone's suggested options to come up with the best sentence you can. My best so far: "I am awesome to look at if you have no friends." Elvisio "my phone can go eat a bag of dicks" Rodriguez

Thanks for the recommendation, it was interesting to watch. I feel like we're trying to force Western ideals and law on a society to which those ideals and laws are absolutely alien. A great example in this film is the first scene, where a man had kidnapped four brothers of a man who had kidnapped HIS brother. He did this as retribution. The voice of "western reason" tried to explain how this was against (our) laws and (our) morals, but to the Afghani it made perfect sense because it was totally within his laws and morals to do so. We in the U.S. have lived in our culture for two hundred years, and can't imagine living any other way. Imagine how someone who has lived their life in a culture thousands of years old must feel. We thought they'd just smack their heads and say "Oh right! We've been doing it wrong! We just didn't see it. Thanks for the help." They're no more likely to change their minds than we would be if someone rolled into our home town and told us the Afghani way of life was the right one for us. Elvisio "what is it about a horse to water?" Rodriguez EDIT: Friggin' grammar

Don't be embarrassed. User "sharimcm" also had a thing for cops. Banesanura did too. Must've tied into her whole "authority" thing... Elvisio "handcuffs?" Rodriguez

Although probably not what Andy meant, my first thought after reading his comment was: you don't have to work to hard to aim a grenade or a block of C4. Not exactly easy to define (or use) as a "self defense" weapon, but it would definitely make for reasonably affordable guided weapons. Elvisio "if my neighbor doesn't turn down his damn car stereo and leaves it parked in the street again..." Rodriguez

Stuck at home today with a nasty cold, I passed some time reading up on 419 scams. One page postulated that the crappy grammar and bad spelling was by design, or at least not worried about. They suggested that by making the scam at least reasonably transparent that only the most gullible of suckers would be drawn into their net, limiting the amount of time spent working on marks who would eventually figure it out. When you send out thousands of emails a day, it pays to have your targets "self-select" so you only have to deal with the REALLY low wattage bulbs. Elvisio "interesting" Rodriguez

Sorry, nope. I did a few searches on keywords here to try and stumble across it but no such luck. I was intrigued by the idea that the human brain was plastic (adaptable) enough to essentially change the way it works. I was also bothered by the idea that "how smart we are" may one day be linked to how quickly we are able to Google something. Elvisio " or , not sure which" Rodriguez

I noticed that too. Interesting correlation. I would imagine (although I also would not be surprised to be wrong in this assumption) that there is some solid data backing up the relationship between reaction time and intellegence, or the data would be thrashed under peer review. JUST considering changes in reaction times to visual stimuli over the years: I can imagine how, back when our lives depended on quick reaction times, this would be a trait that was very much selected: those slow to respond to the carnivore that just jumped out of the bushes are more likely to be dinner. I can see how this trait would be less needed in today's society, and so slower reaction times would creep back into being. I'm also interested that we're seeing SLOWER reaction times. My thought would be that in today's "point and click" society, where virtually all of us were raised on Atari, Nintendo, and XBox, that such reaction times are actually lower rather than faster. There was another similar thread here about another article that discussed the way our minds were changing from an organ of information storage to one of information sorting. That is, our brains were less and less concerned with knowing everything and more interested with knowing where to go to find information. I found this interesting, and it seems to jive with the state of things nowadays. I was always impressed when I read Edgar Allen Poe: for a man of his time, he knew a reasonable amount about just about everything. Foreign languages, science, history, medicine... he was a very learned man. But nowadays, the depth of human knowledge is so great, a person can spend their entire life studying one niche of our understanding, and still not know it all. It goes to figure that as we learn more and more, the truly "intelligent" ones will be the ones that can properly access AND USE that information rather than be overwhelmed by it. Elvisio "skydiving is a stimulus-response experiment: bowling is the control group" ROdriguez

My one (probably hopeless) attempt to bring this tread back on topic follows: What if, instead of banning certain words, we just developed another heavily-modified thread type similar to the "on topic" experiment? Call it a "non-partisan" or "non-party line" style... one that allows people to express conservative or liberal views, but only as individual arguments that specifically don't immediately dismiss an entire party. So, for example, a post that says "I believe such-and-such a proposal by the GOP is hurtful to the nation because..." would be fine but "This is just what we should expect from republiscum" would be moderated to the round file. ETA: Basically, allowing partisan discussion while trying to reign in the party-bashing that seems to kill nearly every thread in this forum after about four posts. Elvisio "seeking the cherished middle ground, ending up skewered on the fence" Rodriguez

USED ammo. Whenever I read one of these things, I wonder: who could possibly fall for this crap? How can the effort be worthwhile? ...and then I think of my mom. She is so pitifully techno-backward that the only thing saving her from being scammed on a daily basis is that she doesn't even know how to "check email" without help from me or my sister. If she ever DOES start online shopping, or get on Facebook, or any other kind of online activity I imagine I'll have to have an "internet birds and the bees" talk with her where I explain 419 scams, spoofing, phishing, all that crap. Elvisio "no mom, they DON'T really think you need that kind of pill" Rodriguez

It seems to me a guy named "Squeak" should be able to just ask the squirrels. Maybe it's not the SAME language but it should be close. Like it would be if I was in Wales... or the deep South. Elvisio "didn't understand a word of that but you're smiling, so I will just smile and nod back" Rodriguez

Thanks for the suggestions! The ball is rolling on a couple of them already, but... Writing more letters and getting more involved in (local, at least) politics is something I need to do. WARNING, THREAD DRIFT!: Your comment about watching country of origin on products purchased is one of my hot topics. I know that we'll never get a major chain to go back to "Made in the USA only in our store!" but I think it would be awesome if they made a different looking price tag for products made in the USA and overseas. This seems win-win to me: it allows them to keep the cheap crap on their shelves so the store doesn't feel it is going to lose customer base, but it also allows a discriminating shopper to more easily shop for U.S. made merchandise. Elvisio "next CEO of Walmart" Rodriguez