I don't commonly see color Lasers with more than 4 colors: CMYK. And the degree to which they can be proportioned and mixed on the page tends to be less than ink jets too. On the other hand, I commonly see ink jets with 6 or 7 colors and since it is fluids being shot at the page can mix those to more shades than laser will manage.
That said, I still hate ink jets. You may as well just buy another one once the ink runs out and you'll basically find you can run to the drugstore and print color cheaper than what they'll do overall. Even if that isn't true for color photo printing all by itself it is true if you also use the ink jet for things like driving directions or printing out forms. I think you're better off owning a B&W laser and doing color printing at the photo processor. If you MUST print color at home, a color laser is good enough for things that need a bit of color but aren't going in a photo album like a diagram or map.
And I'm restraining myself by not getting started on the pigware drivers that come with inkjets......
Even fat desktops have to interact with some sort of network datastore to be productive with many things. Except for editing local documents that switch going down is going make near bricks of them anyway.
MS doesn't even have to that. They could simply refrain from patent aggression and having their highest officers make asses of themselves with veiled legal threats.
Not necessarily. Much open source isn't copylefted and often the only real requirement you have is to preserve a copyright notice. These days Apache style licensing is getting more popular. That isn't copylefted either but now has poison pills against patent aggression. I can see how MS wouldn't like that.
I suspect that political and business "power families" have grasped this immediately. Of course, those teenagers are teenagers like any other but at least awareness and pressure to say little online is there.
Of course, this is yet another reason to never vote for a Kennedy, Bush, or Huffington. These people are practically born professional politicians and they don't care about YOU. You ain't even number two.
But overall they are targeted to 8-15 year olds. Just like the previous set. It was truly a rinse and repeat.
I see this repeated over and over again. It really isn't so. It was the first set of movies I ever saw where adults (unaccompanied by children in many cases) saw them three or four times. Prior to the video rental store, it wasn't uncommon to see a really bitchen movie several times to burn it in your brain because it would be who knows how long until you see it again.
At the time old, young, and in-between were literally lined up around the block to see these movies. The way movies are made, promoted, and the advent of the PG-13 rating have changed the typical audience and the way they are consumed. The Ewoks in Return of the Jedi were truly the start of aiming Star Wars at solely at young kids. It got the laser like focus on kiddies you're thinking about with the prequels. Understand also I speak of the un "enhanced" versions of the originals. Han shooting second really IS kiddieization.
You mainly expanded one point I made "social mores would have to change" and your culture seems more able to consider these issues in a less brain damaged way. In the US, if a few teens experimented with drugs to disastrous consequences, the drum beat for Prohibition would just start up again. US drug laws mainly have their origins in racism. The first local laws against weed, opiates, and cocaine were enacted out of fear that doped up black people would have their way with the pure white women. Our thinking about drugs hasn't risen much above that level of sophistication since.
Though it does occur to me that the ammunition may be harder. One would have to be skilled indeed to make brass casings but that isn't the super hard part. The really sticky bit are the primers and powder. Both involve chemistries that aren't tolerant of sloppiness or errors. You won't be firing black powder out of AK though the Mythbusters showed that mixing up your own black powder and getting it right isn't trivial either.
AK-47s are made from stamped parts and deliberately designed around loose tolerances. A moderately skilled gun enthusiast machinist could probably turn out a respectable version given good plans.
Mexico legalizing won't do a damn thing if that is what you mean. The narco traffickers profit from the US' prohibition. I mostly agree with you if that is what you mean though there is something of a zero sum game in effect; easier access to hard drugs mean more will do it and we'll have to put up with more tweakers, cokeheads, and smackheads wrecking their lives and making everyone around them miserable. More would have to change then simply being able to buy hard dope in any Krogers. And some of those changes would have to be in social mores since all the government can do is fail Econ101 and put billions into the traffickers' hands. Only a fool would think inducing a 15000% markup in a product that only costs a few dollars a pound to create won't have consequences.
The theist generally sincerely believes whatever it is he is trying to convince you of. Theists believe that convincing converts is a positive gain for them. Most people who have reached out to me religiously didn't have a collection plate in their hands. The scammer lacks any real sincerity. The scammer fully intends to trick you out of your money or some other valuable thing for little or nothing in return and knows it.
From a militant atheist's point of view, the end result may be the same but the atheist often won't recognize that by his own lights the theist has a positive intent. This gets you asses like Richard Dawkins who look like The BoogeyMan to theists and inspires them even more fervently to "bring the light" to others.
Even rank and file Scientologists think they doing something wonderful for new parishioners. Hubbard was definitely a highly successful scammer but it doesn't follow that everyone in Scientology is a scammer. There is much that is contemptible about the CoS leadership and methods but people giving the "personality tests" and running the E-Meters really do think they are being of help to someone else. Approaching Scientologists or anyone else committed to a belief system as a con-man won't do anything helpful IMHO.
However, be careful just how derisively you treat that attitude. The vast majority of "sceintifically-minded" people treat the big bang in exactly the same way. "Oh, that was the beginning; alright then."
Yep but the scientifically-minded are just philosophizing like the rest of us when they talk spirituality rather than science. Isaac Newton spent more of his time and effort on questions of religion rather than physics and math. It is the physics and math that he is remembered for. Also, there is a quite of lot of "Why's that, then?" on the Big Bang, the Hubble Expansion, and any number of other Big Questions in cosmology right now. The Big Bang itself is not exempt from becoming just another explained phenomenon.
If the camera is bobbing around a lot and the whole thing basically looks like an un light filtered home movie that hasn't had any real editing then chances are you are watching an amateur capturing something really nasty. At least you can be reasonably sure you're watching something that really happened with bad production values even if you can't be completely sure coercion is involved.
You forgot about Greenland. If melted all at once it would raise sea levels 7.2 meters. Greenland meltage alone would require NYC to build dikes. I'm not saying it is about to melt but it is clearly a significant volume of land based ice.
As for global warming/climate change, I don't automatically believe in the apocalyptic scenarios but that it isn't to say we can't have notable consequences in the near to medium term. Agricultural growing areas could shift north or perhaps require more irrigation. There may be some small displacement of some island populations. It isn't as dramatic as Manhattan being underwater but you the price of produce going up a bit would have importance. So I agree with you that gutting our economies in the short term for a debatable Chicken Little scenario is stupid but there IS merit in developing the ability for dispassionate long term climate projection. If for nothing else, deciding what and for how long we can grow things where.
There is little effort to exploit thorium. Some research would have to go into finding the best way to refine and burn the fuel but we already know it is possible. There is at least 5 times as much thorium available as uranium and it is well distributed about the planet so no nasty relying on people who dislike you for fuel.
The second issue is even supplies of uranium aren't short if we stop being so wasteful with the fuel. So-called spent fuel has over 90% of it's energy content remaining but would have to be reprocessed in nice politically incorrect breeder reactors.
The only real problem with nuclear power is will. Check back in a few decades when non-speculator forces drive oil prices high and keep them there. Faced between no rocks for the scotch and making nimbies and hippies happy, guess what?
I think BP is pretty open-source at the moment. They're sharing their good with every living thing in the Gulf right now, for free, though they might not remain a billion-dollar company for long...
Those are boring and done to death. I always wanted to see one over "Who is the biggest dog? Commander Riker or Captain Kirk?"
For my part, it is Riker by a long shot. He got into a really plain looking hermaphrodite and was even addicted and used to push a mind altering "game" on the rest of crew by another notch on his bedpost. Kirk just chased green skinned women around.
The Nazis weren't nerds but they employed some of the best nerds. Germany had a history of being very very good at chemistry and mechanical engineering at the time WWII started. So Germany had an early start and funding and developing rockets and jet engines. As the war started to go badly, Hitler had high hopes for "Wonder Weapons" that would allow Germany to reverse their losses in a flash of uber wizardry so things like the V2 rocket, the ME-262 jet fighter, and the Sturmgewehr assault rifle were designed, produced, and fielded on a forced march. On the drawing boards and prototype stages were things like the "America Bomber" and flying wing aircraft. I sometimes wonder if Germany might have held out a bit longer if they concentrated more on proven weapons systems and didn't spend so much resources on "Wonder Weapons"; an ME-262 is a heller of an aircraft but what it took to develop it probably would have put 10 ME-109s in the air.
Germany was also good but not the best at electronic warfare and codebreaking. But the British put considerable effort into those areas. Everyone here knows about Alan Turing and his team of codebreakers. The British also had an anti-submarine radar that operated at a wavelength the Germans considered impractical to achieve. The Germans thought the British were detecting U-boats by excessive EM emissions and put a lot of useless countermeasures into place for that. Late in the war, they shot down an antisub bomber and were shocked when they got into the radar. There was much much more of this sort of thing.
Other than the bomb, the US did some of this too. We figured out how to build miniaturized tube electronics that could survive being fired out of a gun a high percentage of a time. Late in the war, we had radio proximity fused anti-aircraft shells and field artillery shells. The AA shells were deadly and were estimated by Vannevar Bush to be 7 times more effective than the old 5-inch AA shells.. The electronics only survived and operated correctly a relatively low percentage of the time but even so were vastly superior to shells that detonated on contact or at specific altitudes. The field artillery version was equally deadly as they exploded at pre-set heights; Patton loved "those funny shells" by all accounts.
Another thing i should say is that i was simply unlucky in the end. There were approximately 20 people there in the court fighting tickets, and 10 of them got to go scott free as their respective cops didnt even show up. No show = automatic win if you show up. So it is worth fighting every ticket and pleading not guilty, at least initally. Just dont expect to win if the cop shows up.
I'll add two things to that excellent point. Ask the officer, "Can I just plead guilty and pay the fine by mail?" They'll of course point out the instructions to do so are on the back of the ticket. But if the cop is indifferent about showing up at traffic court then you've pegged yourself as one he doesn't have to worry about.
Also, make a note of the officer's appearance and the name on his tag. Oftentimes, a veteran cop will bully a rookie into showing up at traffic court for him. If you successfully point out that isn't the cop who pulled you then that is also an instant win.
I think FZ would have been more than capable of appreciating and maybe even lampooning some of the pathologies associated with I.T. but I wouldn't go so far as to speculate what tools he'd use today. My brother in law used to run a small recording studio and he told me about a really effective 8 track Tascam reel-to-reel tape that had lots of editing features (SMTPE, ability to control which tracks played/recorded from a panel, etc and it was relatively inexpensive. It was basically intended to semi-pros and the RIAA goons put the pressure on to have it killed. Apparently, they feared a reduced need for recording studios. FZ didn't lampoon that and I'm sure lots of that sort of thing went on. Just didn't seem to be up his alley.
For the sake of argument, let's say communism is no better or worse than a Western democracy. The Engels quote is still not all that powerful. Planned economies have demonstrated an ability to wreck the environment at least as powerful as the Western economies. The Soviets had areas where anthrax and who knows what else got loose. Imagine driving down the highway when see a sign that says: "Roll up your windows and cross the next 200km as quickly as possible." Weapons programs aside, concern for the environment wasn't a priority in the crash industrialization programs of both the Soviets and the Chinese.
And, yes, someone is going to reply that the USSR didn't have the true communism. Well, nowhere else did either. Everywhere it was tried descended into dictatorship and then, if they were lucky, into oligarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't commonly see color Lasers with more than 4 colors: CMYK. And the degree to which they can be proportioned and mixed on the page tends to be less than ink jets too. On the other hand, I commonly see ink jets with 6 or 7 colors and since it is fluids being shot at the page can mix those to more shades than laser will manage.
That said, I still hate ink jets. You may as well just buy another one once the ink runs out and you'll basically find you can run to the drugstore and print color cheaper than what they'll do overall. Even if that isn't true for color photo printing all by itself it is true if you also use the ink jet for things like driving directions or printing out forms. I think you're better off owning a B&W laser and doing color printing at the photo processor. If you MUST print color at home, a color laser is good enough for things that need a bit of color but aren't going in a photo album like a diagram or map.
And I'm restraining myself by not getting started on the pigware drivers that come with inkjets......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8qT9Xop5k
Even fat desktops have to interact with some sort of network datastore to be productive with many things. Except for editing local documents that switch going down is going make near bricks of them anyway.
MS doesn't even have to that. They could simply refrain from patent aggression and having their highest officers make asses of themselves with veiled legal threats.
Not necessarily. Much open source isn't copylefted and often the only real requirement you have is to preserve a copyright notice. These days Apache style licensing is getting more popular. That isn't copylefted either but now has poison pills against patent aggression. I can see how MS wouldn't like that.
To answer your question: yes, he would not be sending those twats all by himself, there would be the necessary resources allocated for that work.
Interesting! How do I get Kim Jong-Il to send me some of that twat?
I suspect that political and business "power families" have grasped this immediately. Of course, those teenagers are teenagers like any other but at least awareness and pressure to say little online is there.
Of course, this is yet another reason to never vote for a Kennedy, Bush, or Huffington. These people are practically born professional politicians and they don't care about YOU. You ain't even number two.
But overall they are targeted to 8-15 year olds. Just like the previous set. It was truly a rinse and repeat.
I see this repeated over and over again. It really isn't so. It was the first set of movies I ever saw where adults (unaccompanied by children in many cases) saw them three or four times. Prior to the video rental store, it wasn't uncommon to see a really bitchen movie several times to burn it in your brain because it would be who knows how long until you see it again.
At the time old, young, and in-between were literally lined up around the block to see these movies. The way movies are made, promoted, and the advent of the PG-13 rating have changed the typical audience and the way they are consumed. The Ewoks in Return of the Jedi were truly the start of aiming Star Wars at solely at young kids. It got the laser like focus on kiddies you're thinking about with the prequels. Understand also I speak of the un "enhanced" versions of the originals. Han shooting second really IS kiddieization.
You mainly expanded one point I made "social mores would have to change" and your culture seems more able to consider these issues in a less brain damaged way. In the US, if a few teens experimented with drugs to disastrous consequences, the drum beat for Prohibition would just start up again. US drug laws mainly have their origins in racism. The first local laws against weed, opiates, and cocaine were enacted out of fear that doped up black people would have their way with the pure white women. Our thinking about drugs hasn't risen much above that level of sophistication since.
Though it does occur to me that the ammunition may be harder. One would have to be skilled indeed to make brass casings but that isn't the super hard part. The really sticky bit are the primers and powder. Both involve chemistries that aren't tolerant of sloppiness or errors. You won't be firing black powder out of AK though the Mythbusters showed that mixing up your own black powder and getting it right isn't trivial either.
AK-47s are made from stamped parts and deliberately designed around loose tolerances. A moderately skilled gun enthusiast machinist could probably turn out a respectable version given good plans.
Mexico legalizing won't do a damn thing if that is what you mean. The narco traffickers profit from the US' prohibition. I mostly agree with you if that is what you mean though there is something of a zero sum game in effect; easier access to hard drugs mean more will do it and we'll have to put up with more tweakers, cokeheads, and smackheads wrecking their lives and making everyone around them miserable. More would have to change then simply being able to buy hard dope in any Krogers. And some of those changes would have to be in social mores since all the government can do is fail Econ101 and put billions into the traffickers' hands. Only a fool would think inducing a 15000% markup in a product that only costs a few dollars a pound to create won't have consequences.
What part of a religion isn't a confidence scam?
The theist generally sincerely believes whatever it is he is trying to convince you of. Theists believe that convincing converts is a positive gain for them. Most people who have reached out to me religiously didn't have a collection plate in their hands. The scammer lacks any real sincerity. The scammer fully intends to trick you out of your money or some other valuable thing for little or nothing in return and knows it.
From a militant atheist's point of view, the end result may be the same but the atheist often won't recognize that by his own lights the theist has a positive intent. This gets you asses like Richard Dawkins who look like The BoogeyMan to theists and inspires them even more fervently to "bring the light" to others.
Even rank and file Scientologists think they doing something wonderful for new parishioners. Hubbard was definitely a highly successful scammer but it doesn't follow that everyone in Scientology is a scammer. There is much that is contemptible about the CoS leadership and methods but people giving the "personality tests" and running the E-Meters really do think they are being of help to someone else. Approaching Scientologists or anyone else committed to a belief system as a con-man won't do anything helpful IMHO.
However, be careful just how derisively you treat that attitude. The vast majority of "sceintifically-minded" people treat the big bang in exactly the same way. "Oh, that was the beginning; alright then."
Yep but the scientifically-minded are just philosophizing like the rest of us when they talk spirituality rather than science. Isaac Newton spent more of his time and effort on questions of religion rather than physics and math. It is the physics and math that he is remembered for. Also, there is a quite of lot of "Why's that, then?" on the Big Bang, the Hubble Expansion, and any number of other Big Questions in cosmology right now. The Big Bang itself is not exempt from becoming just another explained phenomenon.
I rather like this for quick and simple things:
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
It's under active development again. The "preview snapshot" is quite nice.
If the camera is bobbing around a lot and the whole thing basically looks like an un light filtered home movie that hasn't had any real editing then chances are you are watching an amateur capturing something really nasty. At least you can be reasonably sure you're watching something that really happened with bad production values even if you can't be completely sure coercion is involved.
You forgot about Greenland. If melted all at once it would raise sea levels 7.2 meters. Greenland meltage alone would require NYC to build dikes. I'm not saying it is about to melt but it is clearly a significant volume of land based ice.
As for global warming/climate change, I don't automatically believe in the apocalyptic scenarios but that it isn't to say we can't have notable consequences in the near to medium term. Agricultural growing areas could shift north or perhaps require more irrigation. There may be some small displacement of some island populations. It isn't as dramatic as Manhattan being underwater but you the price of produce going up a bit would have importance. So I agree with you that gutting our economies in the short term for a debatable Chicken Little scenario is stupid but there IS merit in developing the ability for dispassionate long term climate projection. If for nothing else, deciding what and for how long we can grow things where.
Two issues:
There is little effort to exploit thorium. Some research would have to go into finding the best way to refine and burn the fuel but we already know it is possible. There is at least 5 times as much thorium available as uranium and it is well distributed about the planet so no nasty relying on people who dislike you for fuel.
The second issue is even supplies of uranium aren't short if we stop being so wasteful with the fuel. So-called spent fuel has over 90% of it's energy content remaining but would have to be reprocessed in nice politically incorrect breeder reactors.
The only real problem with nuclear power is will. Check back in a few decades when non-speculator forces drive oil prices high and keep them there. Faced between no rocks for the scotch and making nimbies and hippies happy, guess what?
I think BP is pretty open-source at the moment. They're sharing their good with every living thing in the Gulf right now, for free, though they might not remain a billion-dollar company for long...
And the Valdez incident killed Exxon...
Those are boring and done to death. I always wanted to see one over "Who is the biggest dog? Commander Riker or Captain Kirk?"
For my part, it is Riker by a long shot. He got into a really plain looking hermaphrodite and was even addicted and used to push a mind altering "game" on the rest of crew by another notch on his bedpost. Kirk just chased green skinned women around.
Churchill called it the Wizard War.
http://www.vectorsite.net/ttwiz.html
The Nazis weren't nerds but they employed some of the best nerds. Germany had a history of being very very good at chemistry and mechanical engineering at the time WWII started. So Germany had an early start and funding and developing rockets and jet engines. As the war started to go badly, Hitler had high hopes for "Wonder Weapons" that would allow Germany to reverse their losses in a flash of uber wizardry so things like the V2 rocket, the ME-262 jet fighter, and the Sturmgewehr assault rifle were designed, produced, and fielded on a forced march. On the drawing boards and prototype stages were things like the "America Bomber" and flying wing aircraft. I sometimes wonder if Germany might have held out a bit longer if they concentrated more on proven weapons systems and didn't spend so much resources on "Wonder Weapons"; an ME-262 is a heller of an aircraft but what it took to develop it probably would have put 10 ME-109s in the air.
Germany was also good but not the best at electronic warfare and codebreaking. But the British put considerable effort into those areas. Everyone here knows about Alan Turing and his team of codebreakers. The British also had an anti-submarine radar that operated at a wavelength the Germans considered impractical to achieve. The Germans thought the British were detecting U-boats by excessive EM emissions and put a lot of useless countermeasures into place for that. Late in the war, they shot down an antisub bomber and were shocked when they got into the radar. There was much much more of this sort of thing.
Other than the bomb, the US did some of this too. We figured out how to build miniaturized tube electronics that could survive being fired out of a gun a high percentage of a time. Late in the war, we had radio proximity fused anti-aircraft shells and field artillery shells. The AA shells were deadly and were estimated by Vannevar Bush to be 7 times more effective than the old 5-inch AA shells.. The electronics only survived and operated correctly a relatively low percentage of the time but even so were vastly superior to shells that detonated on contact or at specific altitudes. The field artillery version was equally deadly as they exploded at pre-set heights; Patton loved "those funny shells" by all accounts.
Another thing i should say is that i was simply unlucky in the end. There were approximately 20 people there in the court fighting tickets, and 10 of them got to go scott free as their respective cops didnt even show up. No show = automatic win if you show up. So it is worth fighting every ticket and pleading not guilty, at least initally. Just dont expect to win if the cop shows up.
I'll add two things to that excellent point. Ask the officer, "Can I just plead guilty and pay the fine by mail?" They'll of course point out the instructions to do so are on the back of the ticket. But if the cop is indifferent about showing up at traffic court then you've pegged yourself as one he doesn't have to worry about.
Also, make a note of the officer's appearance and the name on his tag. Oftentimes, a veteran cop will bully a rookie into showing up at traffic court for him. If you successfully point out that isn't the cop who pulled you then that is also an instant win.
I think FZ would have been more than capable of appreciating and maybe even lampooning some of the pathologies associated with I.T. but I wouldn't go so far as to speculate what tools he'd use today. My brother in law used to run a small recording studio and he told me about a really effective 8 track Tascam reel-to-reel tape that had lots of editing features (SMTPE, ability to control which tracks played/recorded from a panel, etc and it was relatively inexpensive. It was basically intended to semi-pros and the RIAA goons put the pressure on to have it killed. Apparently, they feared a reduced need for recording studios. FZ didn't lampoon that and I'm sure lots of that sort of thing went on. Just didn't seem to be up his alley.
For the sake of argument, let's say communism is no better or worse than a Western democracy. The Engels quote is still not all that powerful. Planned economies have demonstrated an ability to wreck the environment at least as powerful as the Western economies. The Soviets had areas where anthrax and who knows what else got loose. Imagine driving down the highway when see a sign that says: "Roll up your windows and cross the next 200km as quickly as possible." Weapons programs aside, concern for the environment wasn't a priority in the crash industrialization programs of both the Soviets and the Chinese.
And, yes, someone is going to reply that the USSR didn't have the true communism. Well, nowhere else did either. Everywhere it was tried descended into dictatorship and then, if they were lucky, into oligarchy.
Should I start looking for cats and dogs living together amidst mass hysteria?