Hoskins

Little late to the conversation but... I'm not an immigrant. I was born here. Most of my ancestors from about 1700 onward were born here too. Not a lick of Native American ancestry in there, either. At what point do I get to call myself "American"? At some point, we stop being from the old country and start being from, you know, here. Where is that point? I'm absolutely opposed to what trump is doing, but man, people don't like to acknowledge their American heritage. My sisters went to Ireland and were nearly thrown out of a pub for saying they were "Irish". We're not Irish. We barely have any Irish heritage. But say that to them and it's like I've just ruined their childhoods. so yeah. Not an immigrant.

I've done the 23andme test. I'm as white as mayo :) The sexual orientation information is collected from users through the use of surveys they conduct as part of signing up users, and as part of the "experience". The surveys ask any number of widely varied questions - one of today's questions is "When you were a child, did you ever have febrile seizures?" There's also a full "cholesterol" survey running. It would take about a half hour to take it, I don't have time. 23andme used to market their test as a way for you to predict your health and future illnesses based on genetic markers, which is something they were not certified to do - they never ran it by the FDA and consequently the FDA banned them from marketing their tests as a health service. They are attempting to get the FDA to let them do that, but it's going to take years, if it ever is actually proven that you can use gene markers to predict future health, which isn't at all clear is even possible. The FDA keeps a close eye on how they market their service and on how they report results. The DNA tests at 23andme now focus on genetic heritage and on relative matching. My results, for example, highlight a period of about 23,000 years ago and report that I have genetic markers that suggest my ancestors lived in a now-submerged area of Europe called "Doggerland", and at the same time has matched my DNA to several known relatives who also took their test. It's pretty cool, but anything they report outside of genetic results should be treated as self-reported, and carefully curated to not step outside the guidelines set down by the FDA. Since sexual orientation isn't something the FDA cares about, you see a lot of those types of surveys and results. I've done a fair bit of research on 23andme because there have been concerns among privacy advocates that 23andme would sell information about users, and surveys, and DNA tests to third parties, and the future of privacy is something I care about very much. The company has a reputation for being pretty free about selling email addresses of users, and they've been kind of under the microscope lately.

WHY IS THERE A COMMA BETWEEN REPAIR AND THE BRACKET

I honk it's time to activate the Mobile Toenail Pulling Squad, myself. You don't want to see what they have in their van.

It won't matter once they find the alien base and are reduced to carbon atoms, anyway.

I thought it was a great story too. I could have done with about half of the meal descriptions though...

Wouldn't it be "Round the bend" in Britishian?

Berkeley Breathed bright back Bloom County. He has an opinion. http://i.imgur.com/Td1AQLM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/a9C7qrr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/DbZSEA2.jpg

I went to the hearing where she reversed her decision and allowed the kids to go to camp instead of staying in state care. The statement she read to the court was one of the most self serving, ass-covering pieces of journalism - it clearly wasn't a legal opinion - I've ever heard. It had more to do with how angry she feels about being portrayed as a baddie in the news than it did about, you know, what's right for the kids and family. To sum up, she's an asshole. She needs to be removed from the bench or at the very least censured for her actions. I think she acted out of frustration that she's been trying to get these kids together with their father and they're having none of it, so she popped a gasket. Which is fine, we're all allowed to be frustrated once in a while except that she's a goddamn judge who's supposed to be impartial. One of the people there was going to start a petition to have the case removed from her docket, and have her behavior assessed. I hope they find she needs to go to camp.

Mid to late 60's elementary school in michigan, we were taught all aspects of cursive writing, using pencils and ball point pens. We weren't allowed to erase, though. Since then, after like, 10th grade in high school (so mid 70's), I haven't used it since except when signing my name.

...and then he turns to his right and says that children must have heterosexual parents: http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/one_day_after_thousands_march_in_rome_gay_pride_pope_says_kids_must_have_heterosexual_parents The pope is a politician pandering to a problematic papist population.

I've read all but the short story, several times. It's a really well done series, and I can only hope it does well on syfy, except, you know, syfy. I really recommend it, too.

And please apply any Java updates that are pending - "a new java update is available" - you know, that little orange box in your system tray. These websites use java vulnerabilities to inject code into ads. When the ads are presented, you get malware if your java version contains a vulnerability, which is most of the time. When you apply your java update, don't forget to uncheck any "offers" for the ask toolbar or yahoo web search. I hate java.

I had a house that was on Ruth Ave. It was at the intersection of Ruth and Hazel. The address was 69 Ruth.

Parents lost control when the FCC deregulated broadcast news, and local news stations were able to take a cost center - broadcast news - and turn it into a profit center. When TV stations can make money by getting your eyeballs to stick to their commercials, they can make a lot of money. What gets your eyeballs to stick through the commercial breaks? Fear. Fear that your house is full of radon gas. Fear that your child will be taken. Fear that there's a child molester in your neighborhood. Fear that your schools aren't all that great. A strange vehicle has been spotted in neighborhoods around town! Tune in after the break to find out where (pro tip: not usually your neighborhood). I'm not saying that's the only reason, but I think it's a big root cause for why we live in such a paranoid condition about kids. Once that ball got rolling, well, now people in positions of "authority" (like Nancy Grace, right?) can leverage those fears remarkably well. If you immunize your children, they'll get autism! If you don't immunize your children, thousands of schoolchildren will die at your hands! There should be laws about this! Which is where politicians come in, because pandering to the Fear means votes and cash for supporting laws that criminalize parental decisions that, in generations past, would have been laughed off the platform. The Fear State has resulted in laws that are there to "protect" the child at the cost of the family and the parents, because of course, every parent is perfect in the raising of their kids, but obviously every other parent is doing it wrong. Parents are now judged by their ability to control their children (but no slap on the butt in the grocery store, that's abuse! And no leaving your kid in a locked, cool car in a parking lot for five minutes, because that's abandonment). Along with the Fear State came, paradoxically, the mindset that (a) when a kid is in school, it's the school that's responsible for the kid, including all aspects of their behavior, and (b) parental monitoring of anything where the kid might come into contact with others, to ensure that the child gets what they're entitled to, which is, of course, entirely subjective to the parent and usually at odds with point (a), because it couldn't be MY perfect child that's been bullying others, or is just plain bad at math. That's a failing on the part of the school. So what do we get? School administrators that run their schools according to the whims of the insurance lawyers. Schools that teach to the test, so that everything is "fair" and no child is just "bad at math". Police departments that are keenly watching for parenting "outside the box", because to fail to enforce petty laws against free range parenting is to expose the department to bad PR and of course, lawsuits. It's all based in fear. 100% manufactured fear.

King Gyros in Fort Wayne Indiana has this in their front window: http://imgur.com/dKIWjeg What's good for the goose...

Chris, Canadian bacon comes from the loin cut - the center of the pig's back.

Your back bacon is very similar to Canadian bacon. In Ontario, peameal bacon is pretty popular : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peameal_bacon Your rashers - streaky bacon - looks the same as American bacon, and you're right about the thickness, although I get it thick sliced which is a lot closer to 1/10 of an inch than 1/20. At butcher shops you can also get American bacon with the rind on, which adds a little flavor but is a little tough.

Here's glsen's snapshots for the 29 states for which they exist, showing summary information from their National School Climate Survey about harassment and assaults in schools: http://glsen.org/statesnapshots To sum it up, the amount of kids that report verbal harassment is around 85% nationally. About 9,000 students participated in the study. Here's a PDF of the executive summary: http://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/NSCS_ExecSumm_2013_DESIGN_FINAL.pdf You can download the PDF of the full report here: http://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/2013%20National%20School%20Climate%20Survey%20Full%20Report.pdf And here is the website for the survey: http://glsen.org/learn/research/national-school-climate-survey I think it's really easy to say "it's getting better" after seeing lots of positivity on the news and in the media. The truth is a bit rougher. Just browsing the state snapshots, I'd say that the east and west coasts fare a bit better than the flyover states, but we still have a long way to go before it really gets better for kids in school. I also think it's really easy to pin this on the homophobic conservatives and the fag-baiting Christians. We do like to keep things in their little boxes. But I think it's a lot more gray than being able to categorize things so simplistically. I'm glad this kid isn't in that school anymore.

Oh and by the way - I slagged Vista in my post for it's troubles on release. After the last service pack (minor update), and running on modern hardware, it's not a bad operating system at all. It's pretty responsive, pretty stable, and pretty functional. I don't think windows 8/8.1 will ever get to that point. So, to Chris's first sentence (if it ain't broke, don't fix it): it IS broke, and fixing it is a good idea. :)

I agree that installing the tech previews is premature unless you're installing it in a virtual machine or on a PC you don't care about. It's still too twitchy and I don't think they've really finalized the upgrade/installation process yet. We won't see that until late summer. We won't even have a release date for the release-to-manufacture (aka the final version that gets distributed for "real") until the Build Conference in April. And yeah, I've found some glitches too. The nice thing (for me) is that I can pretty much banish the modern apps and work in the desktop environment (pretty much, there are some gotchas there still). Also, Chris, you're right that installing a new OS on day 1 after release is a pretty bad idea. I usually wait at least two months, usually something like three or four months, before I start rolling out a new OS to clients or even for production in my shop. So I should amend and say - yes, it's going to be worth it to upgrade, but I would wait until a couple of months after the final release is available.

1. Windows XP was Windows version 5.1, built on windows 2000. 2. Windows Vista was Windows version 6.0. 3. Windows 7 was version 6.1. 4. Windows 8 was version 6.2. 5. Windows 8.1 was version 6.3. 6. Windows 10 will be version 6.4. Each release of Windows since Vista has been enhancements to the same core operating system. They are all "enhancements" of the same code base. Which is interesting, but not my main point. Just file it away for a moment. Windows Vista was a terrible operating system, because it a. Had limited driver support, meaning your printer suddenly stopped working when you upgraded from XP to Vista; b. Had rotten graphics/display performance because most video cards of the time weren't up to the performance required; and c. Had major bugs, most of which were caused by a bloated code base required for backward compatibility. Those factors turned into Vista getting the worst reputation of any Windows OS since Windows Me, a reputation that it held until the release of Windows 8. Windows 7 was nothing more than a point-level upgrade to Vista. It didn't really add anything new. It just supported more devices and fixed the driver issues, had a rewritten graphics engine so it "acted" faster, and had a stripped down code base to improve performance. It was really just a service pack. It was a very good service pack, though. Bear with me. Windows 8 was released. Again, it's an upgrade to 7, with the glaring revamp of the user interface, and a lot of removal of bloated code that wasn't needed anymore (because they stopped supporting windows XP - aged code). The code base is very, very similar to Windows 7. But the removal of the start menu (easily replaced with a $5.00 piece of software) caused it to gain the worst reputation of any Windows release. Ever. And it was deserved, because the "modern" interface is terrible. And yes, it did have bugs. Because the guy running the Windows division within Microsoft was a major tool, who rushed the beta and did not allow bugs to be fixed before release. Windows 8.1 was a bandaid, released by the people brought in to replace the idiot, and it fixed a lot of the bugs and corrected some user interface issues. Like spackling on a "start menu" that isn't really a start menu. Things like that. Windows 10 will be a major service pack to windows 8.1. It will put the (real) start menu back. It's different than the 7 start menu, but it's there in spirit and is quite functional, unlike the 8.1 start menu. It will allow multiple windows of the same application (which was a major fail in Windows 8 and 8.1). It will allow you to boot to the desktop, skipping the Modern interface. It will restore the windows 7 search functionality lost in Windows 8/8.1, this time with voice-activated capability. It will include a very, very nice web browser. It's code named Spartan, and it really rocks. It far exceeds Internet Explorer 11 or 12 and is reputed to be better at memory management than google chrome (which is saying a lot). Now here's the kicker: you paid for each and every upgrade to your operating system, even if it was a bad upgrade. They charged you full price for the upgrade, too, until Windows 7. Microsoft had never even OFFERED upgrade pricing until Windows 7, and they only did that to get people moving off the XP bandwagon and skip Vista. NOW, they want you off Windows 7 (because it is aging), and they want you off Windows 8 (because it sucks) and they want you off 8.1 (because it sucks too). Windows 8 and 8.1 are costing Microsoft dearly from lost sales and because original equipment manufacturers refuse to let go of 7, which is delaying their ability to retire it, and because providing tech support for 8 and 8.1 issues is costing them a lot of money. And 7 is expensive internally because it's another set of headaches, support-wise. If everyone is running the most current OS offered, Microsoft makes more dough. Simple as that. And so they are willing to upgrade you for free, for the first time ever, to get you running a current operating system. I've been running the preview release of 10 for a while. It's fast, even on my 6 year old laptop. It has supported every device I've plugged into it. It handles memory really well and for a preview release, is pretty crash free. Since it doesn't have all the features of the final release, I can't say it will be perfect right out of the box, but it's certainly better than the Windows 7 preview version was at the same stage in its development. So why should you upgrade? - your machine will run faster and more reliably than it does under Windows 8. - when Windows 8 and 8.1 are retired (which will be at the latest the middle of 2016), you won't have to worry about being out of support. - it truly is an improvement, in many ways, to the user interface in Windows 8. Most of those improvements are being implemented by restoring functionality lost with the update from 7 to 8. Sorry this was so long, but you asked...

Also for what it's worth, I just trolled through about six college websites looking at requirements for homeschooled applicants, and the bar is significantly higher for those applicants than other students. Things like having to submit tests and scores, lesson plans, along with higher expectations on ACT and SAT scores. http://learninfreedom.org/colleges-home-schooled-students.html

Because we're a free country and denying people the option to get a higher education is fundamentally against that? Because homeschooling is not always based on religious reasons, but may be a reaction against the public schools in their area and private schools aren't an option? Because for some families and people, a school setting for learning is a terrible idea? Because for those homeschooled students that need a way OUT, going away to college is a great way to get them out of that environment? All due respect, but I don't think you've thought your position through, here. And I don't think a Salon article is a good place upon which to form an opinion about homeschooling.

I liked his work, he was a good writer. In all honesty though, I could have done with less...amputations.