unclevlad

So now Flores is saying he left a massive chunk of cash on the table as he left, refusing to sign anything that included nondisclosure language. The Dolphins have responded with another round of denials in...IMO anyway, farcical terms. You can thereby guess where I stand. Does anyone buy the 'Fins' story? Flores' lawyers showed a screenshot of a draft that suggested NDA language. Not that I need this, but if it does go to court...... The Fins are sounding like every other 2-bit cheap shot artist. Hamilton. Floyd Landis (another TdF winner). Bonds. Clemens. The list is so long that we forget the names. And abysmal owners like Dan Snyder.

I've got Windows games that won't run properly in a shell. And Linux has its own frustrations...but it also runs on a LOT less hardware. The ID thing is retarded because, as a site pointed out, you can just create a throwaway. Yeah, if you want to it? There can be benefits, for sure. Oh and I didn't mention but...it also requires that you have an active internet connection. That site also said a LOT of people are seriously POd about it. The whole freaking point is monetizing in more and more ways. And let's be fair; they aren't alone. Apple's as bad. Amazon Fires are as bad or worse. Gads...another thing with 11. Seriously intrusive security "alerts" Like, had to turn off Firewall to share a folder. ALERT!! ALERT!! Installing BitDefender...had a free license slot anyway. Halfway up but not quite done...ALERT!!! ACTIVATE ANTI-VIRUS!! ALERT!!! ACTIVATE ANTI-VIRUS!!!! Damn it, I CAN'T JUST YET!!! STUPID!! Good thing I only check my blood pressure in the morning. CRT: yeah, but I'm too concerned with the largely complete lack of security. Plus, Win 7 won't run on anything close to recent hardware, so....that wouldn't work for me. I did get a Win 7 laptop for a very specific reason but...that didn't work out. I just dumped the Windows and put Linux Mint on it.

Yep. Did anyone ever NOT understand why Trump was so buddy-buddy with Putin? It is said, there can only ever be two. Master and apprentice. I think they're onto something...

For various reasons, decided it was time to upgrade. The new box arrived early this afternoon. OK, awesome! Had the keyboard/mouse ready. Find the right video cable...oh, good, glad I bought a bunch of different ones a long time ago, this one will work. Fire it up. Joy, rapture, BOOT! Win 11 pro was pre-installed; I dislike the hassle of loading drivers. Great. Set up the main account. Wait. What? *(@&#$!@&#_&##$)#&$@# ($*&@#(_$*&)(**^#$%_)(&%*&$*(!@# (&!@#(&$_(@*&#$*!@)($*@)#(*%&% On Windows 11, you MUST!!!! log in via a Microsoft account. No if, and, or buts. NO workarounds. 100% REQUIRED. Fine. Lessee...I think...yeah, I have a Google account I set up but decided I didn't really need. Fine, that's perfect. Oh, but connecting everything? HOLY MOTHER OF GREMLINS, the security BS is *insane*. Not just Microsoft, Google's too. Email verifications. Text message verification codes. ARGH!! That took WAY too long. Fine, there it goes. Next up...WTF are all these freaking WIDGETS? You know how you can never, ever delete ALL of Facebook's Friends suggestions? That's the feeds in the *@&#$ widgets. First suggestion to shut them off...was written improperly. Oh, THAT will do it. ARGH!!!!! So, ok, get Chrome. Log in...more security BS. But the good news is, that brought my password manager across...it's a Chrome extension. And the password vault. Cool. That, as you can imagine, is essential. Start getting stuff...Java, Eclipse, Libre Office, la de da, this will be a while. No big. But for a lot of stuff...both the old main box and this new one are sharing my 4-port switch, so they should be visible trivially. But......guess what. Windows 11 REALLY, REALLY wants any user login to have......yes indeed...a Microsoft account. AAAAARGHHH!!!!!! More obscenities follow. Good thing I've got my beer poured. Oh, ok, do it *that* obscure way, and no Microsoft account needed. FINE. OK, there it goes. Oh, have to tweak permissions. Ugh. But nothing new there. Yay!! Everything copied. Lots and lots more stuff to load and configure. I so hate setting up a new, main box. That beer was most helpful. North Coast Brother Thelonius. YUMM.....

Well, the whole thing was reality TV, FOX style, so paying for the lawyer was probably cheap.

Many of them need no more reason than that it's advocated by Authority.

Howard decision came fast. Suspended 5 games...rest of the regular season. Can return for the conference tournament and NCAAs, if the team makes it in. Also fined $40K.

On Medina Spirit.... It's late February now. The Derby was last May. So 10 months? Is there any sport that can reach a verdict in anything CLOSE to a reasonable manner? It's a freaking joke. A sidelight coming up here is that those who bet on Medina Spirit, get to keep their winnings. Fine; getting it back from them would likely be VERY hard, if the tickets were bought with cash. But, those who bet on the horse declared the winner, are stuck with losers. They aren't happy about that, and they shouldn't be. They've filed a class action lawsuit. The prize money was held back all this time...but not the bet payouts. I think Churchill Downs is about to be stuck for the bill. NYT story also suggests that Bob Baffert may see some SERIOUS heat now. Multiple failed blood tests in the last, IIRC, 13 months. NY racing assoc is looking to suspend him.

20 years ago, I would've LOVED to be physically 18 again, while mentally retaining the things I'd learned. Now? No way. That hand basket is just too close.

Another side of the Valieva issue. Note that this applies to gymnastics as well, most likely. (Going back to Olga Korbut.) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/figure-skating-eating-disorders-body-image-winter-olympics_n_6212196ce4b0f2c343f599cc On the skier: I caught parts of the biathlon, snowboarding, and ski jumps here and there, and yeah, the weather was COLD. The fact that it was shortened greatly is a compelling argument. Last for now: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/olympics-troubled-ioc_n_62128a5ee4b0f93b261a18c8 Key point: viewership was down 42% from 2018...also in Asia, so the time differential issues wouldn't be new. And apparently 2018 didn't do great either. We brought this up earlier, and...yes, if permanent sites can't be found, I think the Winter Games is in serious trouble, and the Summer Games not that much better off...they're SO MUCH bigger and more expensive.

Yeah, seen that video a few times. Heard Howard's *lack* of apology/acceptance of blame later. Gard said he didn't want his backups to get rattled. This isn't the first time he's had issues. Personally? Conference should suspend him for the rest of the regular season and the conference tournament. Probably? More like 1, maybe 2 games. Secondary question is, does Michigan fire him, or plausibly enough, let him come back after the suspension but put him on probation. If this happens again? Fired for cause...so guarantees voided. I doubt he'll be fired, but there might be issues we don't know about. edit: reported during FS1's basketball coverage...Michigan AD and president have apologized to their Wisconsin counterparts, and a "completely unacceptable" press release has been issued. Not the mealy-mouthed "we're investigating first and apologizing eventually." While that isn't per se a bad sign for Howard, it's not a good one.

HD is just a jar. Java can open and run a jar file, typically in its own thread, instantiating a variable. There's an option to open in headless (no GUI) mode that's probably what you'd need to do. That should give you the main dialog's controls to do things to open files, export, etc. It's probably easier to just use HD unless you intend to do that a lot. Option 2: .HDC files are just XML. It would take some work, but building a parser for them wouldn't be too bad. OK, I did this for data analytic purposes for several years, so my notion of "not too bad" might be different. It might have to be a constant work in progress, depending on what you want to support...I'm thinking things like auto-calculating (and displaying) adjusted height and/or weight based on the powers that tweak them (DI, alternate Desolid if you incorporate it, Growth, Shrinking). Or something I'd probably do: show net speed, for running, swimming, or flight, both combat and non-combat, or similarly distance covered for leap or teleport. Especially if you, like me, maybe slap a Naked Advantage onto Teleport, for MegaScale. Because by the rules, a Teleport with MegaScale is *always* non-combat, and thus takes an extra phase. Doesn't work real well in combat. Same with Flight, given that I have a High Scale advantage that's similar to MegaScale, but not as ludicrously fast. The parsing is easy enough. I'm used to SAX parsing so that's what I'd do. Linking up the info...that'll take some thought but the mechanisms are there to do it. I wouldn't say this is for a novice coder, but it won't be rocket science either. And it need not be Java, if there's some other language you prefer for text processing, with good XML support. I would say, if you don't know Java, you'll have some problems. The attribute names aren't always self-explanatory; how they combine is, at times, less than clear. Having the code base helps...but only if you can read it. You also need the template for some specifics, too; for example, in the HDC file, for characteristics, there's Levels (how much did you buy up) but the Cost Per Level isn't there. That's in the template. The template has the full, but empty, power/skill/characteristic object; the HDC file has the user-specified data to fill it out. Now, OK, maybe you don't need to export the costs; for play purposes, you may not need them, or need only easy ones to look up. But that's why this might be a long-term work-in-progress. And it's not nearly as bad as refactoring the entire HD code base. THAT is a royal PITA.

So the NBA All-Star game is tonight. Massive ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZs mostly...can't remember the last time I watched more than an occasional bit...but hey, Vegas sets lines on everything. The Over-Under for the game is set at 324. Very much, yes, there is no D in NBA. At least today. Meanwhile, one of my favorite weeks is almost here...conference championship week. Love the games in the smaller/lower ranked conferences. They'll mostly just be light snacks in the tournament, and many are one-bid leagues, so the conference championship is often THE big deal.

Don't like the Pittsburgh home unis; the orange shoulders are pretty bad. Don't like the Stars' unis at all; red-yellow combos often clash, they're both too bright. Michigan...yeah, the sky blue is out of place. For me, tho, it's the road pants. The home pants are an old gold...love it. The road pants are, what, salmon? Love the blue shade the Breakers are using. All in all? Not bad. They look professional.

Probably not, but what's happened in the past is bad enough. Think Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places. That pretty much HAS happened if you fail. Gymnastics, skating, and chess for the USSR, for sure; swimming for East Germany. It's not pretty. Also, don't think it doesn't happen here. It's only VERY recently that verbal abuse started getting called out at the college level.

So, a British Olympic relay team was stripped of its silver medal today. A medal earned in *Tokyo*. OK, it was last summer rather than 2020, but still. First, the decision was confirmed by the CAS back in November. 3 months? At best that feels like the upper bound of acceptable. But it wasn't announced until now. WHY??? These guys move almost as slowly as the NCAA. Another point about Valieva is concerns about how Russian coaches are treating their competitors. Valieva got *reamed*. The silver medalist felt so much pressure...and that has to start with the coaches...that she still felt like quitting, well after the initial disappointment. Now of course, one can argue whether our standards should be imposable on them. But...geeze, 15? What is acceptable?

I'd side with the players IF the additional money will give them a substantial raise. I'd also like to see minor leaguers get more, especially given that the owners seem to be shafting the entire structure. Overall, yeah, I think there are far too many owners trying to squeeze out as much as they reasonably can. Not to the point of penny ante BS a la Major Leagues, but in other ways where they can get away with it. Looking...since 2000, there are 7 teams that have made the playoffs 2 or 3 times. The Twins have made it 9 times...and won *1* series. The A's have made it 11 times...and won 2 series. 3 more teams (Mets, Rockies, Reds) have made it 4 times...and the Reds have no series wins. They're the only team with no playoff series wins; the aforementioned Twins, Pirates, and Padres have won 1. Actually, the Pirates are probably the poster children for being dirt cheap and not caring. Not quite the worst record in this stretch...close. But so many lost seasons. The Orioles are the recent poster children...in the last 3 full seasons, an average of *111* losses. Not counting 2020, of course. There's a complete...heck, that's not a dumpster fire, that's the entire dump site burning. MLB has substantial revenue sharing...PLUS local broadcasting rights. The national broadcasts give em a $1.5B pie...so that's $50M per team right there. Then there's out of market revenue, such as MLB Network games, where the lower-revenue teams get MORE. THEN we get into local broadcasting rights, plus game-generated revenue. 2021 revenues were estimated at over $10B, up 11%; player salaries at a touch over $4B, DOWN 4%. And consistently down, not just due to funky Covid issues. So it's really easy to see why the players are irate. EDIT: oh yeah, and the consequence? Spring training game postponements have started. Was 26 Feb; pushed back to 5 March. Beginning to think it'll be February all right...of 2023....

There's a classic story: a king makes a deal with a man for a service. The man takes out a chess board. He puts 1 grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the 3rd, and asks for double the number of grains each day, until the checkerboard is completed. The king accepts gleefully...this service will cost him nothing. Yes, welll... There are about 7000 grains of rice per pound, according to Google. On day 11...we're at 1000 grains. On day 14, we're at 8000 grains...let's call that a pound. So on day 25, we're up to a ton. By 35, a kilonton. By 45, a megaton. By 55, a gigaton. That's about double the entire world annual production. Yes, some of this is showing how insane exponential growth is. But it's also about how things add up. Or, go back to basic calculus and infinite series. Take 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7 + ..... As you keep on going, does this cap out? is there a max value? The full integral is integral (1 to infinity) of 1/x and the answer is...the natural log of x, which is unbounded. So there's lots and lots and lots of little tiny adders...but they all add up. Simpler? What would you rather have, $25M, or a penny from every man, woman, and child on the planet? According to WorldOMeters, the latter is worth a bit under $80M. And I just said a single stupid penny. Heck, if I said just a dime from everyone in the US and Europe...it'd be notably over $100M.

I don't believe that's the key. Understand: --US gas consumption is ~300 million gallons. --a gallon of gas has about 5.5 pounds of carbon, therefore produces about 20 pounds of CO2. (Oxygen has a higher molecular weight.) So *every day in the US alone* about 3 MILLION TONS of CO2 get generated. Just from burning gasoline, not from any of the other ways. I mention that to note that people don't understand the scope. Each and every day. From USGS: https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate So fossil fuels aren't small. Quite the opposite; they are, I believe, THE LARGEST single factor. This is a prime example of the ecological problem. No, one person, 100 people, even 10,000 people don't have that much influence. But there's 7 billion people. And their cars, and industry, and animals. https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/food/animal-agricultures-impact-on-climate-change/ It's the scale that people can't comprehend. Now...forest fires? The massive fires we've seen the last few years? Not sure, but actually, it wouldn't surprise me that those are also worse than volcanoes, because not only do they emit massive amounts of CO2, they destroy a significant amount of carbon capture. This is also a major concern with the rain forest destruction. To Mr. P's point: if you want the most obvious examples of how much man can do, it's probably the major dams like Hoover. Lake Mead covers about 250 square miles. Its overall impact on weather might be hard to say, but its creation *massively* impacted obviously the lake area, and the entire downstream area. Granted, that isn't on a planetary scale; it's one dam. It can't have influence over that large an area. But people are everywhere...so they can.

Unless you're the Knicks, in which case you're the dogs, and everyone else is the porcupines.... Which also fits for trees too. Stupid 'pines love to eat the bark near the top of a tree. A full ring. Kills the top. But apropos of that, ESPN reported the new estimate on AD is 4 weeks. Not surprising. They've got 24 games left; that covers about half of em. The schedule gets crowded after the All Star break; their first game back is Feb. 25th, their last game is April 10th. So 24 games in 44 days. They may still make the play-in stage. Right now they're 9th, 2 up on Portland in the loss column. Spurs and Pelicans are the chasers for those spots; they're each 2 back in the loss column to Portland. So 5 up in the loss column with 24 left. The 9 seed means they host the 10 seed, with the winner hosting the loser of the 7-8 game. The winner of *that* gets the #1 seed, which is highly likely to be the Suns...they're 7 clear of the Warriors in the loss column. They probably won't lose 7 games. So at best...or worst, if you prefer...the Lakers won't be around for long, and maybe, JUST MAYBE, the LeBron Hype Train quiets down for a while. EDIT: Lakers did this to themselves. Next year's salary cap is $121 M; they're stuck with a player option on Westbrook, and James and Davis. Those 3 combined: $129M. They have exactly 2 other players signed for more than minimum, neither being overly high, but taking them to $144M, with the luxury tax kicking in at $147M. And the vets' minimum is about $2.6M per. So anyone they want to sign is going to, I believe, cost double...there'll be a serious luxury tax charge as well. While ok, a Big Three is great, it can't be the sum total of your team. And one can't call that trio a Big Three in anything but salary costs any more. EDIT 2: A clarification. It's being reported Davis' ankle will be re-evaluated in 4 weeks, so he's gone for longer.

The nay-sayers will downplay it, saying they change their projections every week. So, while some things may be done, they'll be half-hearted at best, and nowhere near enough.

Further on the non-negotiations... Deadline to retain opening day: Feb. 28th. Jeff Passan commenting on SC...both sides are heading for a cliff, because there's no institutional memory. They've forgotten how ugly things were after the '95 strike. Snide comment from Kevin Negandhi...the session today lasted less time than many innings.

Anthony Davis hurts his ankle. Again. Out "at least 2 weeks." Which usually means more, and Davis' reaction apparently also suggests it could be more. Came up just now on PTI; Kornheiser's reaction was they should be used to it. Yeah...an article from the start of the season notes he'd missed 153 games in 10 seasons. He's missed 21 already this season. Lakers are toast. I'd pass tissues around, but I rather suspect no one is going to be shedding any tears.

In other baseball news, the jury took little time finding Eric Kay guilty in the death of Tyler Skaggs. Min sentence is 20 years, max is life. I suspect testimony from players, especially Matt Harvey's, was damning. Harvey as much admitted that his testimony might well end his career.

Not their call. Court for Arbitration in Sports said, let her. From what I read, I'm not sure the whole process had run its course, and that was a factor. So was her age. To me, one noteworthy aspect of this is that the process bites. it's too slow. Not like this is unusual. On the human side, tho...an aspect of the CAS ruling was that not letting her compete could do her irreparable harm. Yes, well, it's not a reach to suggest the criticism weighed on her. She messed up early and lost it completely...it happens. Especially in skating and gymnastics, and even moreso in the Russian programs. (The 17 year old who took the silver was SERIOUSLY upset she didn't get gold. Yes, she's Russian.) So, how much damage will THIS result do to her, long term? And I don't think this is pure hindsight. IMO the system failed everyone involved.