So you owe someone a little money?

Rest easy.

The US National Debt has been officially-officially pegged at over USD$12 TRILLION ($12,000,000,000,000.00).

A former Comptroller General stated as fact last year that it had really topped $60 TRILLION, which is more than the entire world’s Gross Domestic Product. About USD$480,000.00 per household. Which is probably not all of the debts (guesstimate around 3× to 5× that).

Which means it will be repaid when?

The budget shortfall was predicted at $1.6 TRILLION but worked out to "only" $1.4 TRILLION, which means that they are spending USD$180,000,000.00 per hour more than they earn.

Hey, I want pay-rates like that! (-:

It’s not a wonder that President Obama wants to sign away all political/financial/religious rights (so, responsbility) to the UN at Copenhagen... but why is Prime Minister Rudd just as eager?

It becomes increasing obvious that free-as-in-price means about squat. Free-as-in-available will, I think, come to mean everything — not just in software.

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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