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eftychia at 12:04am on 2004-03-26I just heard something on the television news referring to a study that showed alcohol is "the substance most frequently used by Maryland high-school students".
Excuse me? "Substance"? Most frequently used substance? More frequently than air, water, paper, or cotton?
Oh, right, they mean "consumed" ... leave air and water on the list and add sugar ...
No, as everybody getting annoyed at my refusal to get the point by now knows, they mean the most frequently used drug. But they can't say the word "drug" to refer to alcohol. So, ah, what's another way to say "drug"? "Illegal substance", right? (Of course that itself is a bit of verbal gymnastics that forgets about prescription drugs and properly used OTC medications on one side, and weapons-grade radioactive materials on the other.) And since alchohol isn't illegal, it's just a "substance". But by that point "substance" has become a shorthand for "drug", so paper, water, cotton, steel, and chocolate are not substances any more.
Dammit, I wish they'd just say what they mean, call it what
it is, and say that alcohol is the drug used most
often by students in Maryland. The fact that it's legal does
not make it any less of a drug (at least not when it's being
used as one). It's only the strange connection of "drug" and
"illegal" in so many people's minds, and the more understandable
(especially in light of various propogpublic
relations campaigns) connection between "drug" and "bad" that
make it dangerous to refer to alcohol as a drug in any medium
that accepts advertising money from brewers.
It ought to be simple: not all drugs are illegal, not all drugs are bad, even legal drugs can be misused, some things have both drug and non-drug uses (solvents, textiles, propellants, ...), some drugs are used recreationally, and alcohol is a drug. But as a culture, we've invested so much in this "Drugs Are BAD" message that we can no longer safely use the word "drug" for many things that are drugs without sticking a qualifier ("legal", "prescription", "OTC") in front, and other drugs we can't call drugs at all.
And now alcohol is the "substance" kids use most, and I suppose that means books, pencils, clothes, television sets, dishes, cars, food, and sporting equipment have now become insubstantial.
I've got Sheepie's Win98 box as good as it's going to get for a while. I never got it to talk properly to my LAN, which will be a problem ifwhen she ever wants to network the computers in her house; the printer thinks it's printing in colour but only black gets printed (maybe it's as simple as a colour cartridge that dried up -- we can hope); the screen can now be set to different resolutions and colour depths, and I think I managed not to break anything that wasn't already broken.
And I've got a headache of immense scale, other plans for the week are now several days behind, I've got a new set of gripes about Microsoft with which to fill lulls in dinner table conversation, and I remember why I was so glad I didn't have to install Win95 or WinNT myself on those two machines (and why I don't upgrade or change a running installation of Windows unless something breaks first). I'll install MacOS or Linux from scratch, and I'll muck about with upgrades and tweaks, but as far as I'm concerned, as useful as Windows can be, it's most useful when somebody else deals with keeping it in shape. Unfortunately, this time I got to be somebody's "somebody else". Whoops. I'm seeing what a good decision it was to punt when a different friend asked me to solve a more complicated Windows problem a while back.
Okay, one gripe that can't wait for a lull: If I click a "download" button and wait an hour and a half for the target to download, I expect the downloaded file to be the thing I want to install, not an install program that then has to reach out to the web for the thing I wanted to install. If it's just an install script, shouldn't it be smaller? If it took an hour and a half to download, why weren't the components I actually needed included in that mess?
#include <gripes/windows-telnet>
#include <gripes/broken-download-links>
I think I mis-diagnosed the recently-donated Win98 machine (which, unlike Sheepie's box, appears to have no trouble talking to my LAN (though I'll have to crib the syntax for mapping network drives off of one of the other Windows machines)). It's not the screen resolution that's incompatible with my monitor, I think it's the refresh rate. When this headache goes away, I'll try it on the monitor upstairs from the Win95 machine and see whether that'll cope better than the monitor that's usually attached to one of: a) the file server, b) the PPP gateway, or c) whatever machine is temporarily on the test bench. Now that I'm done with Sheepie's machine, I'll be needing to return her monitor.
I have not yet begun to sort out why my Win95 box stopped booting a couple of weeks ago. And I've gotten thoroughly sidetracked from finishing installation/configuration of Linux on the other recently-donated machine. (Both the new computers are in the 350 MHz range, which makes them not quite twice as fast as my current "fast Linux box" and more than three times the speed of nearly everything else in the house. That's going to have to wait a while; I've got someplace to go that I've been wanting to get to for a while now. (More importantly, someone to see.)
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That would be a "yes". :)
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That would be Internet Explorer 5, right? Win95 comes with IE 3, maybe 4 and Win98 comes with IE 4 if I remember correctly.
I discovered that some of modems I bought have extra 'goodies' programs on their setup disks. One of them was IE 5. So whenever I have to re- setup a Win machine I dig out that disk.
-m
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Monitor refresh rate: I thought that Win98 would not allow you to set a resoluteion/refresh combination that the attached monitor doesn't support? I'm assuming you're setting it through the "display" option under "control panel", rather than by hacking the registry or whatever it is you do if you want to skip the control panel. Though now that I think about it, I suppose there are two variables here, the monitor itself and the graphics card. Maybe the control panel only queries the card? This is way beyond what I actually know about, unfortunately, so I'll just throw out the question.
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Device Manager (or whatever its name is) lists both a card and a monitor. It can sanity-check what kind of card I claim it has by querying the card's ROM, but AFAIK there's no way for the box to know what kind of monitor is attached other than having a human tell it. So I'm guessing I'd have to go into the Device Manager, manually delete the existing monitor and add a new one, and hope it doesn't ask me for a CD I don't have. (If I do that, I'll check for the presence of C:\Windows\Options\Cabs first or wait for a copy of a Win98 installation CD.)
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If you're printing a color item and only the black parts on the page show up in the printout, that sounds like a dried up color cartridge.
If you're printing a color item and it print in grayscale, it could be that the printer setup says black/gray instead of color.
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Assuming you meant what you typed when you wrote "dried up", there's my Clue. So when I hand the equipment back, I'll tell them to pick up a new ink cartridge and see if it suddenly starts printing in colour again.
Amen
It's also far easier to push the whole "zero tolerance" BS than it is to teach such useful ideas as use vs abuse, risks vs perceived benefits, and, G*d forbid, moderation.
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Is it? Does it beat out Ritalin?
Saying what they mean might open up all sorts of cans of worms....
drugs
If we're talking about high-school students, and the drinking age is 21, then alcohol is illegal for them. And while on the subject of drugs, what about the evil weed tobacco? (Hmmm, maybe more teenagers drink than smoke.)