Maybe it is, but I had heard that the Romans were able to grow grapes on their northern border in the north of England (around Hadrian's wall). It's not an area noted for its vineyards today.
OTOH, there HAS been an English wine growing industry for the past 50 or so years. Australia wasn't noted for ITS vineyards until very recently, either. OTTH, Greece is only noted for its vineyards in the sense that most people cannot believe anyone can make wine that badly and still manage to have a "wine industry".
Actually, the double negative behaving in a Boolean manner rather than an intensifying manner (as with most Indo-European languages) is a fairly recent thing. Chaucer would not have dreamed of it, and I doubt that either Spenser or Shakespeare would have been to sure which way was "correct" -- blame the 18th century dictionary writers for creating/codifying rules in a more complicated fashion to allow more complicated thoughts (on paper, at least -- in speech it just gets confusing).
French grammar had almost no influence on English grammar, which is mainly a result of the pidginization that occurred when Old Norse/Danish came in contact with Old English, and all the agglutenate prefixes and postfixes were different while the roots were mainly the same. French words were hoovered up like crazy, but the grammar was ignored.
I handed the cashier a credit card, since I have not been to an ATM in quite a while, and he gave me a dirty look.
Probably because he could not under-report his tip on the meal, when he made out his taxes, later. I have had no problems paying for small purchases at the grocery store or McDonald's, despite the fact that the transaction cost is a higher percentage of those sales than when I buy the weekly grocery list or McD dinners for a large party on my (or my company's) treat.
Platinum is rarer and has more uses (as a catalyst etc) so will never lose value.
A huge platinum strike will lower the value of platinum, just as huge gold strikes have lowered the value of gold. Play a DVD of Bullwhip Griffin, Support Your Local Gunfighter, or Paint Your Wagon to see the local crash in the value of gold in the boom towns.
Obviously, the value I mean is the value of a fixed amount of the metal, not the total supply taken as an aggregate. Thus, if someone actually found a diamond as big as the Ritz (to use F. Scott Fitzgerald's story), the value of any pre-discovery diamonds would have crashed.
Garak WAS a security officer, from the elite Cardassian Obsidian Order (think, KGB but nastier). He only became a tailor when he screwed up, politically, and was unable to return home until after the Dominion was expelled.
Aside from drugs, stolen property, freshly dead bodies in shallow graves, cash in excess of a certain amount ($10,000 I think) without an easily obtained license, lock picks (unless you are a registered locksmith), yeah. Oh, and a movie of a robbery or assassination if you are on film as a participant. And probably a few other cases that I can think of, if given more time.
Well, he WAS semi-jokingly called the "first black President" before Obama announced that he was running. ~1992 - 2007 - that is 15 or so years of being "black" by my handwaving calculation.
No, state legislators chose the Senators. Each legislature could vote a method of selecting electors, which was usually popular vote selecting one of the various slates. Said popular vote could include people not required by the then-current Constitution to be able to vote, such as non-property owners or women in a number of Western states.
Ah, you don't understand. Herman Cain didn't win the nomination only because he was black; that he had a simplistic plan for taxation that would never pass unless he had a landslide more extreme than Obama was gifted with, and had no government experience, had nothing to do with it.
Of course, then they are racists because they don't vote for Democrats.
You mean that the percentage of blacks automatically voting for Democrats was dropping (BTW, since 1994 or 1996?), and all of a sudden shot up again to 98% from 88% the election before? Obviously, no blacks were voting on a racial basis, the numbers clearly prove that. NOT.
BTW, no objections from this Republican. Voting in the first black President is something too attractive for them, like voting in the first Linux using President would be for some of slashdot (or Mac-using, or whichever) would be. Now that they have their moment in the sun, I hope that they return to weighing the actual pros and cons, just as the monolithic Catholic vote vanished once Kennedy had won.
Rather like H. Ross Perot, who started out doing fairly well until he dropped out then got back in again. Also, rather like Harry Truman.
OTOH, his reputation as a railroad lawyer might have hurt him (if the translation from the 1850s and '60s includes translation to something modern, like maybe working for a private equity firm).
First, the rats do not set off mines, or your minefield would self-clear too quickly from common field mice, squirrels, etc.
As far as clearing a minefield without rats, there was something in WWII called a Flail Tank, that had a long boom with a rotating cylinder at the end. On the cylinder were lengths of chain that beat the ground to trigger the mines. The exploding mine usually didn't harm the chains or the cylinder, so it wasn't difficult to clear an entire minefield once its edges were roughly known. I do not know if Bouncing Betty-type mines are more dangerous to the cylinder, though. Also, fuel-air explosives produce enough overpressure to trigger most mines, even if a bit hard on the locale.
As to whether minefields are evil, are poisonous snakes evil? Placing a minefield may be a matter of necessity, in which case it is no more evil than anything else in war (see comments by Sherman, William T. for expert opinion on that), or it may have been placed to deliberately target the civilians, in which case it is no more evil than deliberately killing them with bullets. In any case, the mines aren't evil, being inanimate objects that cannot target anything by themselves, although the mine placers may be.
Frankly, that sounds less scientific than the Germano-Norse idea than the world was built from Ymir's body, which was licked from the ice by a big cow. A "retard fish crawled out and had butt sex with a squirrel or something" -- ok, from where did the squirrel come, and since when did "butt sex" work for reproduction? Just because the fish step seems the same does not make the AC a master of paleontology or evolutionary history.
Re:What about genomic testing before marriage/mati
on
Sequencing the Unborn
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· Score: 1
In the future, will couples get genetically screened during pre-marital counseling, to see if they have good compatibility (in terms of not having high risk of genetic problems in offspring)?
Commonly done now, for Ashkenazi Jews to check for certain endemic problems (Cystic Fibrosa, I think), and it was certainly discussed for Sickle Cell Anemia.
Sounds terribly un-romantic, doesn't it?
No more unromantic than making up a pre-nup. Marriage contracts used to be common for guildsmen, let alone nobility. And, at 40+% divorce rate, maybe "romantic" is a tad over-rated.
I'd enjoy hearing the explanation behind how women's minds work.
Wrong age group for that. Just going into puberty, I doubt that they can figure out how their OWN minds work, let alone someone who thinks differently who also cannot figure out how her won mind (or body) is working from moment to moment.
Except that Stuxnet distributes itself, without human intervention. Somewhere, some human probably distributed a copy (is leaving a USB stick around where someone will steal it legally classed as distributing its contents, BTW? Entirely possible that no one distributed it in the legal sense), but you have to identify that person to sue him.
No, buy embracing supplying gambling to people descended from those who forced them onto the reservations. Much like selling people the rope with which to hang themselves, it is evil from the outside and just vengence from the inside.
Seriously? Uncle Martin from My Favorite Martian (the series, not Christopher Lloyd from the movie version) was the scariest evil leader, then? Sorry, dude, but the Borg beat 8472 by a long shot. We could negotiate with 8472 once we had a good enough weapon, but the Borg was kill them, be assimilated, or be exterminated (Seven Of Nine only survivable because of being alone and magically transformed into a semi-human hotty), all the live-and-let-live of the shark from Jaws.
BTW, best security officer was Garak, the Cardassian tailor (in the sense that Uncle Felix was the best head of Soviet Intelligence/Internal Security, and Reinhart Heydrich was the best/scariest Nazi leader). Seriously, would you want to tangle with him? Odo had limits. The Vulcan couldn't keep Voyager uncaptured for one season, and it took a psychopath (Brad Dourif - forgot the character's name) to retake it. Garak would torture your 4th cousins to death to work his way up your family tree to you, and 100 of your closest friends just to be certain to excise your disloyalty to Cardassia, and explain it so that Dr. Bashir would agree, to his horror, that Garak had the most efficient and/or effective way to do it.
And Matt Decker beat the crap out of Captain Wait-for-his-officers-to-get-the-right-idea-then-say "Let It Be So", let alone James Tiberius Kirk, the boy-genius of commanders. Take THAT, you whipper-snapper.
Oh, and DS9 was plaigerized from Babylon 5, and Kosh or Lorn both beat Whoopy Goldberg as Best Wise Archetypes. BTW, in ST-TOS they didn't have the crutch of wise archetype on tap, and had to think the problem out by themselves (or have Kirk seduce the alien woman, whichever worked best).
OTOH, you don't get to be a general if you cannot maintain a poker face. The main problems with looking through the atmosphere were probably solved after Hubble and the two obs. spy satellites were designed and the mirrors ground.
Actually, during the Stalin era, the Russians got some great work from scientists in the Gulag under suspended death sentences. If someone slacks off or goofs up, no nasty problem with paying unemployment after termination with prejudice. And it saves on feeding the guard dogs.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it is, but I had heard that the Romans were able to grow grapes on their northern border in the north of England (around Hadrian's wall). It's not an area noted for its vineyards today.
OTOH, there HAS been an English wine growing industry for the past 50 or so years. Australia wasn't noted for ITS vineyards until very recently, either. OTTH, Greece is only noted for its vineyards in the sense that most people cannot believe anyone can make wine that badly and still manage to have a "wine industry".
Better, use the Churchillian ", stupid!" to append to the sentence.
Actually, the double negative behaving in a Boolean manner rather than an intensifying manner (as with most Indo-European languages) is a fairly recent thing. Chaucer would not have dreamed of it, and I doubt that either Spenser or Shakespeare would have been to sure which way was "correct" -- blame the 18th century dictionary writers for creating/codifying rules in a more complicated fashion to allow more complicated thoughts (on paper, at least -- in speech it just gets confusing).
French grammar had almost no influence on English grammar, which is mainly a result of the pidginization that occurred when Old Norse/Danish came in contact with Old English, and all the agglutenate prefixes and postfixes were different while the roots were mainly the same. French words were hoovered up like crazy, but the grammar was ignored.
I handed the cashier a credit card, since I have not been to an ATM in quite a while, and he gave me a dirty look.
Probably because he could not under-report his tip on the meal, when he made out his taxes, later. I have had no problems paying for small purchases at the grocery store or McDonald's, despite the fact that the transaction cost is a higher percentage of those sales than when I buy the weekly grocery list or McD dinners for a large party on my (or my company's) treat.
Platinum is rarer and has more uses (as a catalyst etc) so will never lose value.
A huge platinum strike will lower the value of platinum, just as huge gold strikes have lowered the value of gold. Play a DVD of Bullwhip Griffin, Support Your Local Gunfighter, or Paint Your Wagon to see the local crash in the value of gold in the boom towns.
Obviously, the value I mean is the value of a fixed amount of the metal, not the total supply taken as an aggregate. Thus, if someone actually found a diamond as big as the Ritz (to use F. Scott Fitzgerald's story), the value of any pre-discovery diamonds would have crashed.
Garak WAS a security officer, from the elite Cardassian Obsidian Order (think, KGB but nastier). He only became a tailor when he screwed up, politically, and was unable to return home until after the Dominion was expelled.
Aside from drugs, stolen property, freshly dead bodies in shallow graves, cash in excess of a certain amount ($10,000 I think) without an easily obtained license, lock picks (unless you are a registered locksmith), yeah. Oh, and a movie of a robbery or assassination if you are on film as a participant. And probably a few other cases that I can think of, if given more time.
Well, he WAS semi-jokingly called the "first black President" before Obama announced that he was running. ~1992 - 2007 - that is 15 or so years of being "black" by my handwaving calculation.
No, state legislators chose the Senators. Each legislature could vote a method of selecting electors, which was usually popular vote selecting one of the various slates. Said popular vote could include people not required by the then-current Constitution to be able to vote, such as non-property owners or women in a number of Western states.
Ah, you don't understand. Herman Cain didn't win the nomination only because he was black; that he had a simplistic plan for taxation that would never pass unless he had a landslide more extreme than Obama was gifted with, and had no government experience, had nothing to do with it.
Of course, then they are racists because they don't vote for Democrats.
You mean that the percentage of blacks automatically voting for Democrats was dropping (BTW, since 1994 or 1996?), and all of a sudden shot up again to 98% from 88% the election before? Obviously, no blacks were voting on a racial basis, the numbers clearly prove that. NOT.
BTW, no objections from this Republican. Voting in the first black President is something too attractive for them, like voting in the first Linux using President would be for some of slashdot (or Mac-using, or whichever) would be. Now that they have their moment in the sun, I hope that they return to weighing the actual pros and cons, just as the monolithic Catholic vote vanished once Kennedy had won.
Rather like H. Ross Perot, who started out doing fairly well until he dropped out then got back in again. Also, rather like Harry Truman.
OTOH, his reputation as a railroad lawyer might have hurt him (if the translation from the 1850s and '60s includes translation to something modern, like maybe working for a private equity firm).
So the Khmer Rouge were not evil, just their mines? Seriously?
First, the rats do not set off mines, or your minefield would self-clear too quickly from common field mice, squirrels, etc.
As far as clearing a minefield without rats, there was something in WWII called a Flail Tank, that had a long boom with a rotating cylinder at the end. On the cylinder were lengths of chain that beat the ground to trigger the mines. The exploding mine usually didn't harm the chains or the cylinder, so it wasn't difficult to clear an entire minefield once its edges were roughly known. I do not know if Bouncing Betty-type mines are more dangerous to the cylinder, though. Also, fuel-air explosives produce enough overpressure to trigger most mines, even if a bit hard on the locale.
As to whether minefields are evil, are poisonous snakes evil? Placing a minefield may be a matter of necessity, in which case it is no more evil than anything else in war (see comments by Sherman, William T. for expert opinion on that), or it may have been placed to deliberately target the civilians, in which case it is no more evil than deliberately killing them with bullets. In any case, the mines aren't evil, being inanimate objects that cannot target anything by themselves, although the mine placers may be.
Or wasn't growing up but is now (sort of a reverse Mel Gibson - probably rants about how the Arabs own everything when he gets drunk).
Or was shifting his dialect to match his guess of where the post to which he replied originated.
Or (given his comma usage) was politely suggesting that his OP mate (frel in Farscape-ese) with himself.
Frankly, that sounds less scientific than the Germano-Norse idea than the world was built from Ymir's body, which was licked from the ice by a big cow. A "retard fish crawled out and had butt sex with a squirrel or something" -- ok, from where did the squirrel come, and since when did "butt sex" work for reproduction? Just because the fish step seems the same does not make the AC a master of paleontology or evolutionary history.
In the future, will couples get genetically screened during pre-marital counseling, to see if they have good compatibility (in terms of not having high risk of genetic problems in offspring)?
Commonly done now, for Ashkenazi Jews to check for certain endemic problems (Cystic Fibrosa, I think), and it was certainly discussed for Sickle Cell Anemia.
Sounds terribly un-romantic, doesn't it?
No more unromantic than making up a pre-nup. Marriage contracts used to be common for guildsmen, let alone nobility. And, at 40+% divorce rate, maybe "romantic" is a tad over-rated.
I'd enjoy hearing the explanation behind how women's minds work.
Wrong age group for that. Just going into puberty, I doubt that they can figure out how their OWN minds work, let alone someone who thinks differently who also cannot figure out how her won mind (or body) is working from moment to moment.
I'm certain he would, if asked nicely by men surrounded by other men with guns at their command.
Except that Stuxnet distributes itself, without human intervention. Somewhere, some human probably distributed a copy (is leaving a USB stick around where someone will steal it legally classed as distributing its contents, BTW? Entirely possible that no one distributed it in the legal sense), but you have to identify that person to sue him.
No, buy embracing supplying gambling to people descended from those who forced them onto the reservations. Much like selling people the rope with which to hang themselves, it is evil from the outside and just vengence from the inside.
Scariest Alien Race: Species 8472
Seriously? Uncle Martin from My Favorite Martian (the series, not Christopher Lloyd from the movie version) was the scariest evil leader, then? Sorry, dude, but the Borg beat 8472 by a long shot. We could negotiate with 8472 once we had a good enough weapon, but the Borg was kill them, be assimilated, or be exterminated (Seven Of Nine only survivable because of being alone and magically transformed into a semi-human hotty), all the live-and-let-live of the shark from Jaws.
BTW, best security officer was Garak, the Cardassian tailor (in the sense that Uncle Felix was the best head of Soviet Intelligence/Internal Security, and Reinhart Heydrich was the best/scariest Nazi leader). Seriously, would you want to tangle with him? Odo had limits. The Vulcan couldn't keep Voyager uncaptured for one season, and it took a psychopath (Brad Dourif - forgot the character's name) to retake it. Garak would torture your 4th cousins to death to work his way up your family tree to you, and 100 of your closest friends just to be certain to excise your disloyalty to Cardassia, and explain it so that Dr. Bashir would agree, to his horror, that Garak had the most efficient and/or effective way to do it.
And Matt Decker beat the crap out of Captain Wait-for-his-officers-to-get-the-right-idea-then-say "Let It Be So", let alone James Tiberius Kirk, the boy-genius of commanders. Take THAT, you whipper-snapper.
Oh, and DS9 was plaigerized from Babylon 5, and Kosh or Lorn both beat Whoopy Goldberg as Best Wise Archetypes. BTW, in ST-TOS they didn't have the crutch of wise archetype on tap, and had to think the problem out by themselves (or have Kirk seduce the alien woman, whichever worked best).
OTOH, you don't get to be a general if you cannot maintain a poker face. The main problems with looking through the atmosphere were probably solved after Hubble and the two obs. spy satellites were designed and the mirrors ground.
Military comes first, science gets the scraps.
Can't do science from the Gulag.
Actually, during the Stalin era, the Russians got some great work from scientists in the Gulag under suspended death sentences. If someone slacks off or goofs up, no nasty problem with paying unemployment after termination with prejudice. And it saves on feeding the guard dogs.
Hubble is just a Keystone spy sat turned the wrong way.
Key hole satellite, you mean.