> I bought the car from Honda through the dealer. I gave them money, they gave me a car - fee for service.
Did you insist that the dealer remove the Honda logos from the vehicle, as well? After all, you bought the car from Honda, without specifying that you would advertise their product in any way, didn't you?
Not that I don't sometimes agree with your sentiment. My father damaged our Chevy Citation, two weeks after he bought it from the dealer, and insisted on paying $24.95 for the replacement Chevy emblem when we could have just filled the locator holes with a little bondo, instead, and I berated him for it the whole night that we spent fixing the damage.
If we change "just to make a profit" to "just to get what they or their clients want, regardless" then I expect that the answer is: at least back to the time of Cicero. The only nice thing about lawyers is that, before they took over, people used to get what they wanted by hiring mobs (or demagoguing them, ala Mark Anthony's Ovation in Julius Caesar, or Cicero's Against Catiline) to kill their opponents (and, usually, their families, as well).
Mother nature called. . . , and stopped making excuses about imaginary friends that live in the sky.
As opposed to imaginary friends that run nature (and complain about certain margarine brands, as I recall)?
This is Ford complaining about the propriety of GM producing Corvettes that can reach double the maximum speed limit, and announcing that they will be reintroducing the Shelby GT, in the same announcement (to give the required car analogy).
500 million is in the script of the relevant TV episode.
Yes, it seems low, given that Khan Noonian Singh started off ruling India and environs, and he LOST. Maybe it only includes the military casualties, and leaves off delayed and civilian deaths, just as WWI statistics ignore the Spanish Flu, which killed about as many as WWI proper, and supposedly was incubated in the military hospitals.
It's a daunting amount of SF out there, and a lot of it is crap,
Would you say, perhaps, 90%? (aka, Sturgeon's Law, after famed SF writer Theodore Sturgeon who declared, on a talk show, that 90% of EVERYTHING is crap, after the other guest, an English professor, claimed that 90% of [then-]current [ie, late 50's] SciFi was crap)
Seriously, a lot of the crap can be good, too, if approached in the right mood. E. E. "Doc" Smith produced some utterly laughable crap that is fun to read, just as Plan 9 From Outer Space (generally acclaimed as the Worst Movie Ever) is fun to watch. Since John Carter of Mars is coming out soon, you might check out Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series, which is a ripping good tale that has no realism at all to weigh it down. Just remember that most SF before the mid-1960's was written for nerdy 12-15 year-olds who thought that crystal radios were cool and something like transistor radios were Buck Rogers stuff, and judge it charitably.
The precession of the equinoxes and proper motion of stars means we'll have a new north star long before either happens. A series of them, actually.
Not that a pole star is actually necessary anyway. There isn't a decent south polar star currently.
The North Star is a fairly recent thing. Isaac Asimov used "Shakespeare" quoting Julius Caesar calling himself as constant as the North Star to "prove" that Francis Bacon couldn't have ghosted that play, at least, because Bacon would have known that, due to the precession of the equinoxes, in Roman times the nearest star to the pole spot covered half of the range from horizon to zenith each night, and thus would never be called "the North Star." Of course, Asimov then pointed out that that argument also proved that he, Isaac Asimov, could not have written one of his juvenile books published under an alias, because of an equally simple mistake that surely a science writer as good as he was could never make (except that he did).
Anyway, if Polaris was eaten by an interstellar space goat sometime in the past so that its light disappears tomorrow, we can still use the method which has worked since the Neolithic. The two stars in the pan of the Big Dipper (aka, the Wain or Wagon in The Odyssey) farthest from the handle (or tongue of the Wagon) line up to point to the pole point more exactly than a fairly dim star in a fairly dim constellation ever have, and will continue to do so for thousands of years more. One can also use two stars in Cassiopia to line up with the pole, but I cannot remember which two without being outside on a clear night (and thus away from this keyboard and my wifi signal).
Actually, if the guests would be coming from several continents if they could all come, that does not sound all that lame.
Of course, I may be influenced by all the stories of my parents' wedding being snowed out, and over half the family being stuck on turnpikes before the state police in the two states hit worst sending everybody back home. Almost no one was able to make the retry, the next week, due to vacations already taken, etc.
Seeing as Dotcom was arrested in NZ, you may want to fly to a less US-friendly locale. I hear Venezuela is lovely this time of year.
However, you may wish to relocate somewhere that has a reasonable economy and fewer ill feelings towards the US or its citizens. Accordingly Brazil might be a better choice since it has traditionally given the finger to US extradition requests.
If you are escaping US jurisdiction I can think of few places better than someplace that hates the US government. At least according to Venezuelan propaganda, they do not dislike US citizens, just the government (of course, that is also what the Iranian mullahs say).
> Because we sure as hell don't have any privacy left anymore.
No, because email has no way to enforce correct ID, including legal sanction (at least in most jurisdictions). Ask anyone who ever received mail from god@heaven.org or the like. Add PGP or GPG or the equivalent and you can at least guarantee that no one has altered the email between you and another credentialed account (unless someone had a few moments of physical access, or was careless transferring their credentials, or reused the one-time pads [no, wait, that was the Soviet Union back in the late 1940s, until one of the Cambridge Ring passed knowledge of the mistake back to his not-English bosses]).
Email is the secrecy-equivalent of communicating via postcards. Any privacy or security is only because of additional encryption, which may be illegal in some otherwise respectable countries (e.g., France at least as recently as 1999, which was the last time that I checked, not that I think they legalized anything secure in the meantime).
More likely, it occurred once, and the first species ate the primordial soup until conditions (mainly nutrient density, I expect) dropped below the level that allowed abiogenesis to repeat. All that is required is that the expected time between abiogenesis events is longer than the time for first life to reproduce and spread throughout the world (or at least that part where the event could reoccur), and you have just one life event per planet (at least for most planets - statistically at least a few times the events must occur too frequently for only one type to dominate).
Obviously not a reader of HPL or Clark Ashton Smith. THAT is purple prose. The famous paragraph that started with "It was a dark and stormy night" was, in contrast, written as if by an Irish Setter with almost human intelligence and no thing about squirrels, stream of consciousness if thought by an ADHD sufferer on crack and LSD.
Bob Newhart was an accountant. Do not discount their humor (unless they are auditing your taxes at the time).
And there certainly WAS humor (at least at the start of LoTR, it tends to disappear after Rivendell, then reappears briefly at the Battle of Helm's Deep when Legolas and Gimli are competing to see who can kill the most orcs), just written so dryly that it tends to be missed. Reading it aloud might help, since it got started as tales that he told his children, not as a written work.
If I had better writing skills, I would love to be the one to re-write all of the stories.
skipping...
Kinda like the modernization of the Bronte sisters with vampires and such, I've seen those in the bookstore.
I cannot wait to see the great works of high art that you would produce..sarc off
Anyway, the fun of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith is in the language, then the richness of the background. The plots and characterization were about what one would expect from a hack writer working for the pulps, which oddly enough is exactly what HPL would have called himself.
You missed: AM-5PM Matinee Discount (sometmes until 4PM, lately I have seen 6PM at several theaters) Movie Tuesday Discount (where one theater charged matinee prices all day for its slowest day)
Do not mistake me, I think the Iranians are well and truly mad..
Mad in the modern British sense of insane, or in the older (and current US and Canadian) sense of angry beyond limits of prudence? We have a possible case of division by a common language, here.
..the more they bluster, the more controlling the pipeline passing through Syria into the med seems palatable to the Saudis,
Given that Syria is effectively an Iranian client state at this point, how will the Saudis manage this trick?
Also, the Iranians are Shiites, and the Sunni Arab ruled countries (i.e., all of them except post-Saddam Iraq and Syria) would like to see them smacked down for that reason, as well.
In fact, the Iranians are so unpopular with the rulers of the Sunni Arabian countries in the area that they occasionally talk about preferring an Israeli attack on Iran to the current situation. Now, for Arabs, THAT is hatred!
> The estimate of an hour in the original post seems optimistic
I doubt that it is. It took all night for us to kill only 1/3 of their navy the last time, when we also accidentally knocked down one of their airliners.
We later paid wergeld for the passengers, but not the naval personnel.
NATO will probably join in, the same way they joined in for Libya--as cheerleaders on the sidelines, letting us spend ourselves to death acting as their military while they spend the savings on universal healthcare and higher education for their citizens.
Um, the USA stood in the background, supplying intelligence and logistic support to the rest of NATO, which did the actual missions in support of the anti-Khadafi forces (can't call the the opposition, anymore, I guess). The only people we had getting near the combat were some Special Forces trainers, who occasionally watch their trainees go into combat as closer observers than ordered.
One can despise Obama for all sorts of reasons, but he fought the Libyan Civil War on the cheap; of course, when the Muslim extremists get power we will wish that Muammar was still there to kick around.
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> I bought the car from Honda through the dealer. I gave them money, they gave me a car - fee for service.
Did you insist that the dealer remove the Honda logos from the vehicle, as well? After all, you bought the car from Honda, without specifying that you would advertise their product in any way, didn't you?
Not that I don't sometimes agree with your sentiment. My father damaged our Chevy Citation, two weeks after he bought it from the dealer, and insisted on paying $24.95 for the replacement Chevy emblem when we could have just filled the locator holes with a little bondo, instead, and I berated him for it the whole night that we spent fixing the damage.
If we change "just to make a profit" to "just to get what they or their clients want, regardless" then I expect that the answer is: at least back to the time of Cicero. The only nice thing about lawyers is that, before they took over, people used to get what they wanted by hiring mobs (or demagoguing them, ala Mark Anthony's Ovation in Julius Caesar, or Cicero's Against Catiline) to kill their opponents (and, usually, their families, as well).
Mother nature called. . . , and stopped making excuses about imaginary friends that live in the sky.
As opposed to imaginary friends that run nature (and complain about certain margarine brands, as I recall)?
This is Ford complaining about the propriety of GM producing Corvettes that can reach double the maximum speed limit, and announcing that they will be reintroducing the Shelby GT, in the same announcement (to give the required car analogy).
Marvin, is that you? Got caught up in another time loop, I guess. Did you ever get that diode fixed?
well why did the soviets want to get to the moon? would they have planned to go to the moon if it wasn't for america trying to get there?
Actually, they claimed that they didn't want to go there, and had never wanted to go there. Of course, they announced that well after they lost :-)
500 million is in the script of the relevant TV episode.
Yes, it seems low, given that Khan Noonian Singh started off ruling India and environs, and he LOST. Maybe it only includes the military casualties, and leaves off delayed and civilian deaths, just as WWI statistics ignore the Spanish Flu, which killed about as many as WWI proper, and supposedly was incubated in the military hospitals.
But the videos would have had a better soundtrack.
I think you spelt it wrong.
No, he spelled "it" correctly.
It's a daunting amount of SF out there, and a lot of it is crap,
Would you say, perhaps, 90%? (aka, Sturgeon's Law, after famed SF writer Theodore Sturgeon who declared, on a talk show, that 90% of EVERYTHING is crap, after the other guest, an English professor, claimed that 90% of [then-]current [ie, late 50's] SciFi was crap)
Seriously, a lot of the crap can be good, too, if approached in the right mood. E. E. "Doc" Smith produced some utterly laughable crap that is fun to read, just as Plan 9 From Outer Space (generally acclaimed as the Worst Movie Ever) is fun to watch. Since John Carter of Mars is coming out soon, you might check out Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series, which is a ripping good tale that has no realism at all to weigh it down. Just remember that most SF before the mid-1960's was written for nerdy 12-15 year-olds who thought that crystal radios were cool and something like transistor radios were Buck Rogers stuff, and judge it charitably.
The precession of the equinoxes and proper motion of stars means we'll have a new north star long before either happens. A series of them, actually.
Not that a pole star is actually necessary anyway. There isn't a decent south polar star currently.
The North Star is a fairly recent thing. Isaac Asimov used "Shakespeare" quoting Julius Caesar calling himself as constant as the North Star to "prove" that Francis Bacon couldn't have ghosted that play, at least, because Bacon would have known that, due to the precession of the equinoxes, in Roman times the nearest star to the pole spot covered half of the range from horizon to zenith each night, and thus would never be called "the North Star." Of course, Asimov then pointed out that that argument also proved that he, Isaac Asimov, could not have written one of his juvenile books published under an alias, because of an equally simple mistake that surely a science writer as good as he was could never make (except that he did).
Anyway, if Polaris was eaten by an interstellar space goat sometime in the past so that its light disappears tomorrow, we can still use the method which has worked since the Neolithic. The two stars in the pan of the Big Dipper (aka, the Wain or Wagon in The Odyssey) farthest from the handle (or tongue of the Wagon) line up to point to the pole point more exactly than a fairly dim star in a fairly dim constellation ever have, and will continue to do so for thousands of years more. One can also use two stars in Cassiopia to line up with the pole, but I cannot remember which two without being outside on a clear night (and thus away from this keyboard and my wifi signal).
Actually, if the guests would be coming from several continents if they could all come, that does not sound all that lame.
Of course, I may be influenced by all the stories of my parents' wedding being snowed out, and over half the family being stuck on turnpikes before the state police in the two states hit worst sending everybody back home. Almost no one was able to make the retry, the next week, due to vacations already taken, etc.
Seeing as Dotcom was arrested in NZ, you may want to fly to a less US-friendly locale. I hear Venezuela is lovely this time of year.
However, you may wish to relocate somewhere that has a reasonable economy and fewer ill feelings towards the US or its citizens. Accordingly Brazil might be a better choice since it has traditionally given the finger to US extradition requests.
If you are escaping US jurisdiction I can think of few places better than someplace that hates the US government. At least according to Venezuelan propaganda, they do not dislike US citizens, just the government (of course, that is also what the Iranian mullahs say).
> Because we sure as hell don't have any privacy left anymore.
No, because email has no way to enforce correct ID, including legal sanction (at least in most jurisdictions). Ask anyone who ever received mail from god@heaven.org or the like. Add PGP or GPG or the equivalent and you can at least guarantee that no one has altered the email between you and another credentialed account (unless someone had a few moments of physical access, or was careless transferring their credentials, or reused the one-time pads [no, wait, that was the Soviet Union back in the late 1940s, until one of the Cambridge Ring passed knowledge of the mistake back to his not-English bosses]).
Email is the secrecy-equivalent of communicating via postcards. Any privacy or security is only because of additional encryption, which may be illegal in some otherwise respectable countries (e.g., France at least as recently as 1999, which was the last time that I checked, not that I think they legalized anything secure in the meantime).
More likely, it occurred once, and the first species ate the primordial soup until conditions (mainly nutrient density, I expect) dropped below the level that allowed abiogenesis to repeat. All that is required is that the expected time between abiogenesis events is longer than the time for first life to reproduce and spread throughout the world (or at least that part where the event could reoccur), and you have just one life event per planet (at least for most planets - statistically at least a few times the events must occur too frequently for only one type to dominate).
Mod parent as Informative. I would do it, myself, had I not replied to something above.
I believe that Bulwer-Lytton is the canonical definition of purple prose. ;) ( http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ )
Obviously not a reader of HPL or Clark Ashton Smith. THAT is purple prose. The famous paragraph that started with "It was a dark and stormy night" was, in contrast, written as if by an Irish Setter with almost human intelligence and no thing about squirrels, stream of consciousness if thought by an ADHD sufferer on crack and LSD.
Bob Newhart was an accountant. Do not discount their humor (unless they are auditing your taxes at the time).
And there certainly WAS humor (at least at the start of LoTR, it tends to disappear after Rivendell, then reappears briefly at the Battle of Helm's Deep when Legolas and Gimli are competing to see who can kill the most orcs), just written so dryly that it tends to be missed. Reading it aloud might help, since it got started as tales that he told his children, not as a written work.
If I had better writing skills, I would love to be the one to re-write all of the stories.
skipping ...
Kinda like the modernization of the Bronte sisters with vampires and such, I've seen those in the bookstore.
I cannot wait to see the great works of high art that you would produce. .sarc off
Anyway, the fun of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith is in the language, then the richness of the background. The plots and characterization were about what one would expect from a hack writer working for the pulps, which oddly enough is exactly what HPL would have called himself.
You missed:
AM-5PM Matinee Discount (sometmes until 4PM, lately I have seen 6PM at several theaters)
Movie Tuesday Discount (where one theater charged matinee prices all day for its slowest day)
Do not mistake me, I think the Iranians are well and truly mad..
Mad in the modern British sense of insane, or in the older (and current US and Canadian) sense of angry beyond limits of prudence? We have a possible case of division by a common language, here.
..the more they bluster, the more controlling the pipeline passing through Syria into the med seems palatable to the Saudis,
Given that Syria is effectively an Iranian client state at this point, how will the Saudis manage this trick?
Do not mistake me, I think the Iranians are well and truly mad.
"Mad" in the modern British sense of insane, or the older (and current American and Canadian) sense of angry?
Given that Syria is now pretty much an Iranian client state, how will the Saudis manage this?
> who else?).
Well, the AC to whom you responded, if he/she/it could, for one.
Also, the Iranians are Shiites, and the Sunni Arab ruled countries (i.e., all of them except post-Saddam Iraq and Syria) would like to see them smacked down for that reason, as well.
In fact, the Iranians are so unpopular with the rulers of the Sunni Arabian countries in the area that they occasionally talk about preferring an Israeli attack on Iran to the current situation. Now, for Arabs, THAT is hatred!
> The estimate of an hour in the original post seems optimistic
I doubt that it is. It took all night for us to kill only 1/3 of their navy the last time, when we also accidentally knocked down one of their airliners.
We later paid wergeld for the passengers, but not the naval personnel.
NATO will probably join in, the same way they joined in for Libya--as cheerleaders on the sidelines, letting us spend ourselves to death acting as their military while they spend the savings on universal healthcare and higher education for their citizens.
Um, the USA stood in the background, supplying intelligence and logistic support to the rest of NATO, which did the actual missions in support of the anti-Khadafi forces (can't call the the opposition, anymore, I guess). The only people we had getting near the combat were some Special Forces trainers, who occasionally watch their trainees go into combat as closer observers than ordered.
One can despise Obama for all sorts of reasons, but he fought the Libyan Civil War on the cheap; of course, when the Muslim extremists get power we will wish that Muammar was still there to kick around.