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dude, what "global warming nutjob"s? Even *BUSH* admits it.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/cb0c3b94-ee84-11d9-98e5-0 0000e2511c8.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2005/07/ 04/bush_makes_climate_change_concession.html
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20050704/bushcli mate.html
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/070705EB.shtml
http://www.geopoliticalreview.com/archives/001076b ush_admits_global_warming.php
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/09/g8_global_ snoring/

Although I admit, it's better to say "climate change" because temps drop in some areas and raise in others so the "average" is misleading (even though it's going up), but that's really splitting hairs.

You know I am in Australia, just changed to 100% wind power from my utility, costs me $16 AUD extra per month. People aren't changing because they don't want to change, because they are lazy. It's easier to keep spending money on junk food, cigarettes etc.

What's needed in the short term is:
Quick move to pebble bed nuclear with serious money (actual money, put aside in an account that can't be touched, not empty promises of safety) invested in stable multi-thousand year storage. Change all older cars over to ethanol and biodiesl. Ban/Tax out of existence SUVs for non-farming/ultraremote citizens rather than give them tax breaks like americans do ("light truck" catergory so it isn't classified as a "car") . Solar water heaters. Carbon trading (put a real price on a commons and it will be worth money). Put money geosequestering remaining coal/fossil fuel plant pollution. And oh, I dunno, plant a tree for every one you cut down? Not an unreasonable proposition I think.

Long term projects:
Public Transport, money put into getting wind and solar up to 40% of power provision in a decade and develop ways to manage their flutuating supply. Serious money into hydrogen and battery tech. Control population growth - why should there be infinite population growth on a finite planet? Sure you can increase the population when you terraform mars, but there should be a cap on earth's population, there is nothing morally good about having more people, it just means we all get a thinner slice of the pie. We passed six billion in 1999 we are almost at 6.5 billion in 2005, totally unsustainable rate of growth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

You're right. I remeber an episode of mythbusters where they used really strong eletro-magnets to wipe credit cards to bust the myth that eel skin wallets could wipe a credit card.

Apparently, I am the only person here that watches the Discovery Health channel. Some time ago, DH ran a documentary on face transplants that profiled an event 10 years ago when an Indian girl had her face and scalp amputated by a grass cutting machine. The doctors in India were able to reattach her face. The success gave other doctors the incentive to begin researching the possibility of transplanting faces for the severely disfigured.

I offer no judgements about whether the procedure is a good idea or not. I just know that I wouldn't deny a well informed individual the right to the surgery.

Dunno how long the longest individual tube is, but they've certainly made long sheets.

Consider another explanation. Pretend the folks who developed the brush worked at the MIT Media Lab. Pretend that they had spent a lot of time thinking about the whole "brush thing". They do a lot of thinking up there - kinda famous for it. If they DID have good reasons for the design, instead of just being "silly", then surely they would have published some sort of academic paper. Them being at MIT and all. They could be very highly accomplished people who have worked on other projects like this one. Could even be in a museum. Or on the Discovery Channel Website. Pretending that all those things were true, wouldn't it also be true that the brush was probably not an "unimaginative copy "which was "silly at best", probably not a "necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults" and not really designed to "make the kids feel at ease" after all. Consider that someone describing the project in those terms either didn't try to or was incapable of understanding the project. Consider that publicly suggesting that they half-assed their interface, compromised for monetary and political reasons, and wound up with something that is little more than a toy is both rude, stupid and illustrates a complete lack of understanding.

This project, particularly the way it addresses sensory/cognitive synthesis has implications in many fields - not the least of which are child development, digital art, interface design, artificial intelligence and the study of how physical reality and abstract thought interact. It also makes REALLY cool pictures. Take a look at one of the videos (at the bottom) and all will become clear. And don't worry about us adults impeding the children's progress - they're already way ahead of us.

"(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)"

billy - "what do expect on /." my ass

Well, at the very least, it might make for a moderately amusing Myth Busters episode as they try various ways to electrocute buster with Van De Graaf generators.

Do you know what that word means? Humpty Dumpty does. Lewis Carroll wrote "Alice in Wonderland"(1865) and "Through the Looking Glass"(1871) as books for young children. In America today, it is considered material for grades 9-12. Critique his post if you like, it does not invalidate his assertion. In this case, it actually helps to prove his point. Now that you've googled it, quiz your peers at work tomorrow. See what percentage of the college 'educated' adults answer correctly. Feel free to point out grammatical errors in my post as well. I also received a very poor education in literature in America's public school system.

Well, you're in luck. After 30 minutes of straining my brain, googling, and searching Discovery.com, I've found the series.

  http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/servlet/Produ ctDisplay?catalogId=10000&storeId=10000&langId=-1& productId=52514

It's the Greatest Clashes ... World War II disc that I was talking about. Probably worth the money if this stuff interests you. :)

If these displays are combined with flat bendable speakers and the economics of scale, we could have a whole new era of interactive user interfaces.

African hunting and gathering tribes survive by working 3 to 4 hours a day.

They're only able to survive on such little work because they're supported by the industrialized world around them. A few dollars worth of T-shirts, stainless-steel knives, and discarded soft-drink bottles replaces equipment that would've taken years of labor to construct from local natural materials.

They're not subsidized in any way whatsoever;

It's likely that the Discovery Channel TV crews try to steer you away from looking closely at the reliance on alien artifacts. But it is there.

Archeologically, it is well documented that the transition from hunter/gather to stationary agriculture greatly increased average leisure.

they said it verbatim on today's episode of Going Tribal

Surely you jest; that show is a parade of romantasized misdirection.

Mythbusters covered this already... your pee isn't coming out in a solid stream. if you slow it down with a high speed camera, you can see the liquid "breaking up" instead of forming a solid stream, so electricity wouldn't be conducted up to your junk.

no wonder they were advertising this show on the Discovery Channel:

http://dsc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?epis ode=0&cpi=24927&gid=0&channel=DSC

At 8:15am on August 6th, 1945 the first experimental atom bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy' was released from the Enola Gay at a height of six miles over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Viewers see what it meant to be struck by a nuclear bomb and survive.

I don't mean to be unSlashdotly and stray from important topics like sexbots or anything, but why is it that Japanese scientists (presuming that this guy is an average example thereof) are so much cooler looking than our scientists? I mean, I get the impression that if you go to a robot club meeting here in the U.S. of A, you're not going to see any svelte, black clad anglo men with flowing hair like that. Maybe we need a special nerd episode of What Not To Wear so we can all get some fashion tips.

More seriously, can any Japanese Slashdotter (or anyone familiar with Japan) tell me if they have a nerdy professer stereotype in their mainstream culture? I know they dig robots and all, but what is the general attitude towards scientists?

We all know you love the Shuttle and NASA ThreeeP and you are going to trash anyone and everyone who is trying to do something better and cheaper. You can trash SpaceShopOne all you want but the people who designed and built it accomplished their objectives, as modest as they were, and they did it with a small number of people, pretty much on budget and on schedule. That is indication of good engineering, versus the mess that is NASA, which is probably what the parent was alluding to.

Scaled Composites' whole budget was equal to about 1/50th of the real cost of a single Shuttle launch. In particular watch the Discovery documentary on it, Black Sky: The Race for Space". It will restore your excitement for space exploration, instead of demoralize you like the Shuttle and NASA did this week. In the 60's and 70's lots of kids wanted to be astronauts. I wonder if its true today. I doubt it, NASA has managed to make being an astronaut tedious, uninteresting and unexciting which was really hard to do.

Let's look at the object of your affection, the Shuttle. Its is once again indefinitely grounded. From one press conference I heard the intermittent failure in the ET sensor has been yet another long running glitch in the Shuttle they never fixed and it just bit them in the ass, thankfully not during a launch. The glitch if it had happened in 2 or more sensor during launch could have either resulted in a premature cut off or running the engines dry at which point they might fly apart and cause fatal damage. NASA as only NASA can do has no less then TWELVE teams working the problem, TWELVE. I could see three maybe four, one for the ET/sensor, one for the wiring to the shuttle and one or two for the shuttle processing the data. I guess you can do TWELVE teams when you have an army of like 6,000 on you payroll who are getting paid whether they launch or not, though one wonders why they couldn't find at least 6 teams to fix it before now before it bit them in the ass.

LAUNCH RATE - The shuttle was supposed to launch every month if not more often. Over its lifetime it has averaged 4 launches a year and its launch rate has gone down every year. It now:

- can't launch at night
- can only launch to the ISS and there are daylight windows to the ISS only part of the year
- can't launch if there are any clouds in the area with water drops large enough to damage the times
- can't launch with wind shear in the area
- is launched in Florida where there are perpetually clouds, rain and thunderstorms in the area, especially during the day which is the only time the shuttle can launch

And of course the Shuttle has spent nearly 5 years grounded. The only reason the ISS hasn't been abandoned is the Russians have been supplying it and ferrying astronauts to it at their expense(because NASA wont pay them due to a Congressional boycott against Russia over a reactor in Iran). Russia just recently said enough is enough and aren't going to ferry any more U.S. astronauts, or U.S. supplies to the ISS unless the U.S. pays for it. You see NASA has bad credit bordering on deadbeat status as far as the ISS goes. If the Shuttle continues to fail to fly the U.S. involvement in ISS is in immediate trouble.

COST - The shuttle was supposed be cheap to launch becuase it was so reusable. In fact it is one of the most expensive launchers in history. Counting everything the Shuttle is averaging $1.3 Billion per launch. Part of the problem is there is a full time army of around 6,000 on the direct payroll and even more at contractors providing parts. As the Shuttle remains grounded and its launch rate continues to fall that payroll stays the same so it gets ever more expensive per launch. Amazingly Congressman are mandating they all stay employed during the transition to CEV, NASA being a jobs program, with the possible conclusion CEV will be just as expensive to launch as the Shuttle.

RELIABILITY -

The Mythbusters tackled this one. They came up with two explinations.

1) Toast nocked off a table tends to flip only once before landing.

2)When buttering toast, you tend to compress the center of the toast, forming an airfoil alowing the toast to glide down, butter side down.
Sure, it's not hard science, but it's good television.

Gotta say this first, enough with the weekly Slashdot stories about some sorry ass committee saying the shuttle might fly, though there is another committe meeting next week at which point maybe it wont. Can we wait until:

A. It launches
B. it land safely

and stop the week by week coverage of the pathetic bureaucracy that is today's Shuttle program.

If you want to salvage your faith in American ingenuity and space farering try to catch the Discovery documentary Black Sky: The Race for Space and its sequel, Black Sky: Winning the X Prize. Discover Science ran it a few times in the last few weeks and never tired of watching it over and over. Not sure how it would play with young people but I sure would like to see schools showing it in science classes. Kids with a science and math aptitude and dreams of space travel would probably dig it. Its an interesting and real picture of what its like to work on an engineering team doing something hard and solving hard problems.

I particuarly like the Scaled Composites aero engineer, he had a great sense of humor. He caught a trim problem, in real-time, in the middle of one of the flights that prevented a disaster. He sure looked like he knew his stuff and he designed big parts of SpaceShipOne solo.

He had a line I wish I could quote exactly about how we have all been trained to think we can't do anything amazing any more unless we are part of big government or big business. A key thing The Scaled Composites team wanted to prove is that 20 people working as a close knit team could still do something hard and amazing.

Contrast this with NASA's manned space program, and army of like 10,000 which is squandering billions every year and can't do anything amazing any more, they can't even do things they did 10, 20 and 40 years ago. This is what happens when you take the amazing Apollo team and turn it in to an entrenched bureaucracy, a jobs program, and corprate welfare for Boeing and Lockheed. Its an institution just trying to preserve itself and its tax payer funding and not do anything amazing any more.

GO SCALED COMPOSITES!!!

I don't care if my landline is tied up most of the time, I have a cellphone finally (just got my first a few months back)

"The majority of the shuttle program has been a public relations campaign and politics."

You left out, giant welfare/jobs program. They are cool high paying tech jobs for the most part ... well ... and lots of people pushing giant piles of paper from point A to point B, but it is still basicly just a jobs program. The jobs program includes:

- All the NASA civil servants in the manned space program, civil servants being hard to fire once you hire them you pretty much have to make work for them and their number almost never gones down but instead creeps up.

- All the people working for the prime contractor which as I recall is a consortium made up of a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed. (Note Boeing and Lockheed should be vitter rivals and competing with each other but since they formed a consortium for the Shuttle and just announced a parternship for expendable boosters they successfully eliminated all pretense of competition and are now a defacto space flight monopoly and the DOD and NASA have to pay whatever they feel like charging. Those two companies are really formidable lobbyiest so they can almost single handedly arm twist a bunch of Congressmen in to keeping the funds flowing to Shuttle and the ISS most of which goes in to their pockets, and interestingly they make just about as much with the shuttle grounded as if its flying. Most of the people in the manned space program probably don't actually care if it flies because their paychecks keep coming anyway and its less nerve wracking if they don't fly. Maybe their paychecks should be contingent on successful launches with all their salaries for a period being revoked in the event of catastrophic failure, then maybe they would get serious about spaceflight.

- All the people working in all the NASA centers and facilities, all the prime contractor plants, and a vast army of small contractors. Interestingly they are intentionally spread through nearly every congressional district and there are big centers in politically powerful states like Texas, Florida and California. The work was spread all over just so Congressmen had to back the space program no matter how screwed up or wasteful it got because it meant jobs someplace in their district. Sen. Bill Nelson in particular is a huge supported because he is of course from Florida.

Maybe all this is what you meant by "political" but I'm inclined to say the manned space program was pretty much doomed when LBJ put Johnson in Houston. He did it purely to heap prestige, jobs and dollars on to his home state of Texas. It also insured the Texas congressional delegation would back manned space flight from that point on. Practicly though its insane that everything done at Johnson isn't done at Kennedy. Much of the bad communication leading to both Challenger and Columbia could be traced to the fact half the people team was at Kennedy and half was at Johnson and the communications between the two warring centers is inevitably bad not to mention the bills they must run up constantly traveling between the two places.

If you want to restore your faith in people who are in aerospace for the love of it, the Discovery channels runs Black Sky; The Race for Space" once in a while. Someone with a camera roamed around Scaled Composites as they worked on SpaceShipOne, the first private launch of a man in to space to win the Ansari X prize. Its great stuff for geeks and engineers. The head aero engineer is a new hero of mine. He really knew his job and they have footage of him spotting a trim problem that would have lead to a fatal crash if he hadn't caught it in realtime. He has a great, dry sense of humor too, and looked to be a great role model for young people who want to go in aerospace or engineering. Towards the end he had a great comment I can only paraphase. He pointed that we've reached the point that people feel like they can't do anything amaz

You know, you might have identified a niche husbandry consulting market.

Look, Donald Trump's toilet!

"You're saying that people are born to want a certain body shape."

Yes, I'm saying that there are certain characteristics which we are *hardwired* to find attractive.

e.g.
http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/humanface/art icles/mask.html

"That women are looking for providers implies their only function in life is to serve man and squat out their babies every few years. That's BS, and completely sexist."

"Serve man". I didn't say anything about serving.

You think that a male's purpose is anything other than to impregnate females? Life has no meaning, the *sole* purpose for *all* life is to have children and pass the genes on to the next generation.

the results were pretty damn spectacular.

Read this for when an animal is considered extinct.

Read this quote from here:

"It is important to emphasize that I am talking about complete extinctions, not mere reduction in numbers; if left alone, populations almost always make a comeback, no matter how badly their stock is depleted. In other words, despite the fact that the American bison, pronghorn, African and Indian elephants, and all whales have suffered tremendous population depletions thanks to human depredations, all have made it back to sustainability (including the right whale). For the continents and oceans, such examples are the rule rather than the exception. For islands, things have gone in various directions, although mostly downhill (i.e., toward complete extinction). This is why I maintain that the biodiversity crisis has already come and gone for the world's islands -- susceptible species were pinched out during the initial spread of humans to these places. Continental extinctions seem to be quite a different deal. At least for mammals and birds, there have been relatively few of them in the last 500 years. (E.g., no mammal extinctions at the species level at all in Eurasia; one or two in the Americas; perhaps a dozen or more in Australia, the island continent.)"

Now tell me this isn't a fscking lark.
MSnbc is running an article about "Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born?" just days before Discovery Channel's "Greatest American"
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/greatestameri can/greatestamerican.html
Which is voted on by people. I wouldn't be suprised to see about a hundred or so more of these "stories" about ole' Billy Gates.

Or, maybe I just watch too much TV.

Am I the only one who thinks NASA / JPL needs to outsource the next rovers to a Monster Garage* build team?

*Monster Garage is a reality show on The Discovery Channel in which a team of professional and hobbyist mechanics build a vehicle related contraption in 5 days.

it's interesting to compare this team to the single high school kid profiled on, i believe, this episode of "the science of star wars" on the discovery channel. he appeared to be building everything himself based on an a.t.v., but i missed some of the beginning.

Furthermore, even monkeys know what is sufficient compensation for the privilege of being able to view created works (of monkey porn, in this case). http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050207/monk ey.html They are smart enough to know that good, pleasing artistic works are deserving of a sufficient payment, yet also that viewers should be paid to watch other not so pleasing works. Aren't you smarter than a monkey?

Screw bills....we'll drop pennies [xmission.com] on them.


MythBusters has already shown a penny dropped from an extremely tall building won't do much to someone standing on the street.

How many pennies would it take to do damage to someone and how you would keep them close enough together to actually do damage? (put them in sandwich baggies?) And how many people could you inflict some serious damage to with a single payload? I think they (MythBusters) would say, "This Myth is busted.".

I truly believe low-space flight has the same motivation as letting the Hubble go to seed: they're tired and bored with all of the old toys and games - they're trying to justify asking Santa to put a new, bright, shiny toy under their Christmas Tree come December 25th. That is as simple[1] as it gets.

If I paid you the same pay as the pilots and you were given a VW Bug to drive around the Indy 500 track here in Indianapolis, how long would it take for you to get bored and wish you had a different car or a different track and basically needed something something to relieve your boredom?

Simpletons will say if the pay is right it won't matter.

They can stay in the IT field (for lying) and continue to "not be bored": ==> Go to Directly to Data Entry ==> Do not pass Go! Do not collect $200.

________________________________________
[1]"Make things simple, not simpler." -Erasmus

Two organizations can have the same abbreviation trademarked too, they just can't be in the same categories

There's a happy medium somewhere... Haven't you ever watched Animal Face Off on the Discovery Channel?

Solomon Chang

mastered long ago by the Chinese official, Wan Hu. He clearly has prior art.

According to these guys it's more likely that he had third degree burns rather than prior art.

"Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), which can also be Stage stage III or Stage stage IV breast cancer, is the least common but most aggressive type of breast cancer.

While only 1 to 4 percent of newly diagnosed cases are IBC, 60 to 70 percent of all women with the disease do not live five years beyond their diagnosis. "

Discovery HD

I'm not really running a text-byte for it, I'm just saying I don't watch Sopranos and Law and Order and all the shit that the rest of the spectrum covers.

There's some outstanding things to see on Discovery HD, and the 1280x1080i really makes all the difference. Looking at that link, they've got Egypt (and you can see it without worry of getting your head chopped off), Lewis and Clark, insects, evolution, and the Himalayas. Granted, it's not Louis and Clark with Terri Hatcher in tight leather, but there probably some hot American Indian chicks it in.

If I watch fifteen hours of television per week, at least 14 of those are off Discovery HD...

Not bullshit. Their citizens don't go bankrupt because their bodies happened to be unfortunate enough to get cancer. Nor are they denied organ transplants because they're poor.

(sarcasm)No, their governments just seize the money they do have just because of their race or political stance. All while the US has programs independent of the government to help those in need.(/sarcasm)

I should know.

The part I left out of my original post was that I was born with a condition known as Tetrology of Follot (pronounced "Fa-loh"). I was an oddity, a condition that was very rarely seen in the medical profession. Correcting my heart condition would also have been very expensive if the doctor hadn't waved his cost and a childhood disease help organization step in to cover much of the cost. There are a lot of people I owe my very existence to, not the least of them a lot of people who were praying for me.

My end point is that the US bases its society on basic human decency and not on what the public infrastructure can provide. Our society works better than any others because of it, and all the other factors of our success flow from it.

I honestly don't care what the rest of the world is doing to "make themselves important". Neither should any other American. We've always worried about life, liberty, and happiness inside our borders and allow in anyone else who wants to join. If the rest of the world is becoming a better place, good for them. But America is and will continue to be a superpower as long as we are based on freedoms, decency, self-motivation, and a lot of help from above.

The African exodus I think is pretty well understood. Although, there seems to have been multiple exodi (?) of hominid species that did not survive in the long term (such as the Neanderthal in Europe).

From what I understand, the story gets harder to piece together in the last part of the European migrations from Central Asia.

A couple of interesting TV shows on this were The Real Eve (which does the mitochondrial trace through maternal ancestral lines), and Journey of Man, which relates to the more difficult task of tracing mutations in the Y chromosome handed done through paternal lines.

One of the earlier pioneers in the field, Brian Sykes of Oxford, started up a side business where you can send swabs to obtain information about maternal and paternal markers in your genetic makeup (IIRC, about US$225).

A few years ago I got the analysis done and sent the results back to Ma 'n Pa for Mother's Day and Father's Day gifts.

... [insert cleaning agent company here].
It might be a new spin on the story story by using an epidemiologist in a hospital, but it has all the hallmarks of the "dangerous germs found in public places" myth (and killed by [insert brand name here.])

What they fail to mention is this obsession with sterilizing everything in the home is actually breeding superbugs that eat [brand name] for breakfast, just like overuse and misuse of antibiotics and breeding the antibiotic-resistant superbugs mentioned in the article. The fact that keyboards are germ-heaven should be irrelevant if medical staff are performing the correct hygiene procedures.

The Mythbusters did an interesting test of the "potty mouth toothbrushes" myth, which alleges that toilet water aerosols contaminate toothbrushes. Even their control toothbrushes, never used in a different room, contained (shock, horror) faecal bacteria in small amounts, but there was no difference between the different toothbrushes in the experiment. Busted!

Supposedly the inventor Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse by the Romans used large mirrors that focused/concentrated sun light into an intense enough laser beam that it burned invading Roman ships. There was an episode of Myth Busters on this subject (Season 2 Episode 4).

Here's what the Myth Busters guys did to test the theory:

- The crew build half a trireme and balanced it in the water.

- The crew built 400 sq ft mirror built from 300 individual mirrors. They were arranged in a cicle and were all focused at the same point.

- They aimed the giant mirror such that the focal point of the indvidual mirrors was directly on the trireme.

- They were only able to get the temperate up to 280 degrees even with all of their efforts.

- They just couldn't get the ship to burn, so they used Molotov cocktails instead just so they could destroy something.

Simply put, this is a myth. It is very unlikely it happened.

Pankaj Arora
Homepage
Free Cursors

Didn't they build this on MythBusters and it didn't work? It was a pretty cool project though. Must have taken forever to make.

It's really only a "death ray" if you're really really tiny. Mythbusters did a great job of blowing the myth apart, with a much larger mirror array arranged in a proper fresnel configuration. It douldn't set fire to much of anything, even when they put gasoline on the target.

I KNOW that somewhere I've seen someone else constructing buildings with this inflation method but I can't recall where.

I remember seeing an episode of "Extreme Engineering" that talked about a city in a pyramid, and during the episode they showed a way to raise the four outer supports of a pyramid by inflating a balloon underneath them. I think they also showed concrete domes being erected with inflation. Maybe that's where you saw it -- just a shot in the dark.

In the 1600s, breast-baring was popular fashion in the Netherlands and England. However, when it came to exposing womens' bare shoulders and bare legs -- who would think of the children! -- children had to be protected from such indecencies.

Janet Jackson's boob was a wardrobe malfunction, right? So what was she punished for? Having nipples? This is sad.

It looks like there is a discovery science special on wednesday night with him in it. http://science.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp? episode=0&cpi=111524&gid=0&channel=SCI

The welsh were the likly culprits who erected the first stone henge (well THE stone henge) as noted hyah, hyah, and hyah (cartman)

5005 years ago.

Welsh builder: alrigh' butty, you see we is going to be building dis 'ere, ok now, tell me again, what the fuck are these big sticky out ones

Foreman: stones...

Welsh builder: aye, stoaoaoaones. we have some of them in the valley. OK, whose coat is that jacket?

Foreman: listen how long with this take?

Welsh builder: not long, I have to be home to watch the sheep dog trials you see. Want some lavabread?

Foreman: So I hear the .nz's are building one of these too...

Welsh builder: what!? you don't say, well I'll finish this one first is my name is not daffydddd myffanwwwyy evans-jones.

Foreman: ok look, gerrard, how long is this rouse going to last, your NOT FUCKING WELSH.

Gerrard: eeeh, you fooking enleesh piiig. I speet on your choontree.

Foreman: choontree?

Gerrard: Cooon-treee.

Foreman: cooowwwn--treeez?

Gerrard: oh for pete sake old chap, country, bloody country, ok, fuck, i'd do anything not to be a plain old brit, this stiff upperlip is giving me sever jip.

Foreman: right, look lively, lovely jub.

Gerrard: cockney fucker.

-----------

Of course, this transcript from the discovery channel has not been verified, but the maxell cassettes did look old.

Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp

I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/

The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002175.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002215.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002260.png

I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.

The worlds largest popcorn popper (as seen on Big!)
BIG! Episodes
Follow the link and click on "Popper"

I keep that link by my bedside at all times. Funny that you think I'm joking. I honestly do.

You obviously don't watch Monster Garage.

So back then I'm sure that humans could have been having the same debate... "If grandparents hang around that much longer- an extra 30 years- won't they get bored? What if they can't hunt or gather? Where will they live?" Humanity handled it then. We'll learn to handle having our great and great-great grandparents around (or do we really wish them dead? Do we want to keep hearing our grandparents talking about all the friends they've lost, while we ourselves dread the 3am call to hear that a great-aunt or grandparent is dead?)

True, the medical advances of the 20th century got us to a more reliable 75-85 year lifespan. I think its reasonable now to ask medicine to get rid of the worst aging processes which can really degrade the last 10-15 years. If as a side-effect that gets us to, say, 90 years of healthy life followed by 10 years of standard senescence that'll be a respectable gift to give our parents. And then to build up to 130 years of healthy life, followed by 5 years of standard senescence: that'd be a great gift for our kids.

.... but here you are talking about biochemistry and the fossil record, and more shamefully, asking about predictions based in evolutionary theory.

Just for starters:

Darwin's moth. This appeared in National Geographic magazine a few months ago.

I better refer you to a better explanation that puts your claims to shame

At least that's how I see it. And I'm not even a file trader.

Consider: The industry has been utterly unable to stop P2P to date, and a whacked-out move like this will probably be countered in a matter of days as the authors of SpyBot and AdAware catch on and release updated signature files.

Why go to the trouble of doing something that at least some in the industry know will be easily counteracted unless they're so flustered that they're not thinking straight?

The other indicator that makes me think this is sheer desperation are the comments from Marc Morgenstern. "Just deserts?" Criminys... He sounds like a grumpy kid who got his favorite marbles taken away or something.

Remember that at least one legislator, under pressure from the RIAA, once floated the idea of hiring system crackers to do their level best to try to sabotage P2P networks. The idea withered at the time, mainly because it would have run afoul of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

However, it is evident that the RIAA was not so easily dissuaded. They've found a sneaky way to deliver what they, in their deluded way, think is going to be a knockout punch. Adware and spyware are not (yet) illegal that I know of. What better loophole to try and pull the stunts the industry's been wanting to pull all along?

How's it all going to end? Well, this kind of move will make all the file sharers and sharing networks even more mad at the industry than they were before (assuming that's possible). It will serve as yet another wedge driven between an industry that is clearly too greedy to see past the end of its collective noses, and God knows how many people who might have been customers under different conditions.

The biggest irony to me is that they STILL haven't gotten it through their thick skulls that their music sales are down mainly because they're putting out slop that no one really wants to buy.

Example: I used to buy at least a dozen CD's a month in the early-to-mid 90's. However, in the last six years, I've bought maybe half a dozen. If that. I'm just not hearing the raw talent that I used to.

Seems to me that the industry is a victim of their own delusions. I think a line from Adam Savage, found in the opening credits for Mythbusters, hits the issue spot on: "I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"

I predict an entertainment industry implosion, due primarily to pissed-off customers and a consequent reduction in sales, within the next decade.

Keep the peace(es).

Geese!!! There's so much out there other than these "Top ten reasons..."....