I'm no fan of megastores in any case, especially not the white trash variety like Wal-Mart and Tar-jay, but in Wal-Mart's defense, it _was_ the only place where a bunch of drunken idiots could buy ammo at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Chico, California.
So, if I get this right, global dimming and global warming are compatible, possibly complementary phenomena. This would mean that the world is getting warmer & darker.
Now, I'm not a scientist, but this sort of implies to me that things will get more humid as well. So, we're setting up for living in a big ole' sauna. So, let's look at the ups and downs:
Good: We'll all have great skin for starts.
Bad: Lots of very fat men walking around in flip-flops with small towels around their waists.
Good: Girls will wear less clothing to cope with the heat & humidity--we'll have a population of nice-skinned chicks dressed like the love-slaves from planet Triton. Misquoting Mary Carey: "Global warming? Never heard of it, but I guess we'll all have to wear less". Woo!
Bad: Killer hangovers, massive ring around the collar.
Re:Kind of emphasizes a major point.
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
You forgot the four elephants in-between. Get your geology straight, you thick-head. Sheesh, kids these days, don't learn anything useful in schools.
Anyway, anyone _really_ educated would be able to tell you in a second that the earth is banana-shaped.
So, every time you talk about the "Asian" market, you obviously mean Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia,...and Bhutan, right?
Get over yourself. The OP was referring to western Europe. This sort of thing does not happen in Western Europe (except apparently in the UK.)
And the whole "snob" thing could pretty quickly be turned around to Americans being seen as fat annoying idiots. (By the way, I'm a citizen of both the US and a European country.)
Guantanamo Bay. There are actually only two physical Region 8 DVDs in existence; they're a copy of "Gigli" which is shown to "enemy combatants" to break down their willpower, and one of "Ishtar", which they get to watch as a reward for spilling the beans.
I've read a few articles expounding on this; the point wasn't _just_ that it violates a principle of privacy and sovereignty, but also puts forward the question, "do you realize exactly what kind of data airlines collect on you?"
Think about it. Dietary habits, travel patterns. Possibly medical history. What else? What do you think ticket agents are writing on those screens you can't see during checkin, when they're frantically typing away? I don't know, do you? The consensus appeared to be that airlines keep some pretty quirky stuff on file about you, including the occasional nasty comment.
What kind of information do you give away when signing up for frequent flyer programs, including that airline miles credit card? Bang, there go your spending habits.
Not sure I'm comfortable with Uncle Sam having that as a matter of routine.
I was also referring to region 1 DVDs, not just the content; get a grip, dude.
It's analogous to "UK-only release" CDs in the states. You do get them, they just cost more. And while yes, it may be illegal to sell them unrated in the UK, it certainly isn't throughout most of the continent.
I don't know where you get "FUD" from, but I was under the impression that if your DVD player uses region-coding, it will not play uncoded discs? Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
OK, so lets refer to commercial releases--the US isn't by far the only country creating big-budget cinema. I can't imagine that, say, an Italian commercial film that's released abroad, wouldn't be region coded. If your local distributor only decides to release a dubbed version, well, too bad.
Good point you make. Unfortunately, that's not entirely an option for a lot of us.
Bush aside (a lot of this horseshit's been going on for years before he entered the picture--think "war on drugs", "encryption export controls", etc.) there's a long-running problem a lot of Europeans have with the dichotomy of "US the beacon of liberty and progress" and US home of John Ashcroft & his ilk."
I'm a US-Swiss dual citizen living in Europe--I've seriously considered giving up my US passport due to ideological concerns. I haven't done so, as I have a lot of close family in the US, whom I like to see, and stand to inherit some property. Sort of a conundrum, no?
Likewise, it's not much of a choice if you live in a country which has something like biometric identification in its passports mandated by the US departmen of . What if I never wanted to enter the US, but maybe decided to head over to France for the weekend? Tough cookies, please place your retina here.
What country is this? Moldova and Byelorussia do not count as part of "Europe" as the rest of us understand it, really. I don't know what part of "Europe" you've been hanging out in, but this statement is just plain silly.
Since when does Ebay shut down auctions of DVDs? Doing a search for 'DVD' on ebay.com yields about 170,000 results.
Customs searches your bags for narcotics and guns and kiddy porn and such. Do you really believe they have that much free time?
Of course you can buy American DVDs in Europe. The same goes for American games nd American paperbacks--they just cost a bit more if bought retail, and your shipping charges are slightly higher if ordered.
Point taken, but this is relevant primarily to big-studio, big-name releases.
It does, however, prevent Ma & Pa Kettle DVD owner, who've never heard of chipping a player, from seeing anything besides studio-approved crap in their particular part of the world. No European art flicks, no US indy films, no Hong Kong chopsocky, no Iranian documentaries, nothing. Your average consumer may not be the type to pick up that slightly off-mainstream title in any case, but with region coding, he doesn't even get the possibility of making that choice.
Region coding _is_ useless for the likes of ourselves (the same reason copy protection and software registration codes are useless for 31337 d00dz) but it has a fairly significant impact on what Joe Sixpack can buy/rent.
Interesting, but you neglect to mention that the itgo.com article states that prior to the Wrights, the Smithsonian referred to Samuel Langley as the "father of flight".
I'm no aviation historian, but I seem to recall that Langley (a) was sponsored heavily by the War Department, and (b) didn't manage much more than to crash his "aerodromes" into the Potomac several times.
While the point may hold for Alberto Santos-Dumont, or Whitehead, or Pearce, using Langley as a measuring stick is sort of a weird idea.
I broke my jaw two years ago while in a Tae Kwon Do tournament
Dude, it's a martial art. "Martial", as in fighting. I think it's sort of amusing (except for the guy getting hurt) when people who engage in this sort of sport are surprised about injuries.
I fenced in high school--there was a particularly gruesome accident in our city HS league, where some girl was hit in the mask by a guy using an old foil; the blade had metal fatigue, and snapped when he lunged at her, broke, and drove straight through her mask and out the back of her head. Now _that_ was awful.
Now I do kendo, and regularly get beaten black and blue, armor notwithstanding--I'd hate to break or otherwise fuck something up, but it's just sort of part of the game. My father played handball for a long time, and I think he's had his knees rebuilt several times over his 60 years.
Sports can hurt (although it'd be nice if they didn't.) I can understand being wary of a particular sport if it causes you pain once, but it's sort of a shame if you completely cut it out.
I'm not a big sports fan, but I somehow got the impression that a lot of pro athletes (especially in US league sports like football and basketball) were kids from the wrong side of the tracks--a lot of whom wouldn't be the sort of spoiled middle-class brats who'd have access to a Playstation, or the upbringing to sit inside all day long playing Madden XXXV.
On the other hand, what are big league sports really about? Not just entertainment, but seeing people who're "larger than life". Watching a big European soccer game, or going to a baseball game, or having a Superbowl grill party is a fairly particular experience. Little Charlie Jones' Juventus scoring 8 goals against Bobby Smith's Man U online isn't and won't ever be in the same league as watching Barry Bonds knock one out of the park.
I think this goes both ways--people play sports both for the fun and sport of it, and maybe a bit for the knowledge that they're doing the same stuff as their "heroes" on TV, and people watch sports on TV because here are a bunch of dudes doing really well what you just do for fun. And wa-hey, if it leads to the death of bloated overblown pro sports, well, I don't know if they'll be missed much--people will always play pickup hoops in the park.
A friend of mine found what I think is the perfect balance--on Formula 1 weekends, he'd invite a bunch of people over for a few rounds of racing on his console, then a BBQ, then the real race. So I think it's definitely a complementary experience.
Yeah, fair enough, although running on a Thinkpad X20, KDE was slow enough to be a pain in the ass. I'm running Enlightenment on an X40 now (just for fun, as I don't really need to do work on the thing for my current project.)
However, I thought the main proprietary bit about MacOS was Aqua? I mean, it's just BSD on a Mach kernel, right?
I have my account with the Swiss post office, which works pretty nicely (although you could insert any Swiss bank in its place--bank transfer numbers are standardized and inter-bank payments don't cost extra.)
There are some regularly occurring, fixed-amount bills (gym, rent, etc.) for which I have standing payment orders. Anything occasional or variable, I get a paper bill in the mail, with a payment slip.
This is about 1/3 of an A4 piece of paper, containing recipient, amount, and payer, as well as bank info. It has a long-ass numerical code (about 25 numbers) which, along with the recipient account, I have to type into my online banking page.
When I've paid a bill, I just write 'paid date xyz' on the slip and archive it for 2 years--works a charm. The post office also sends me a paper printout of my account activity every month.
It's a great system, it sounds like it's a lot of effort, but I can pay my bills once a month within about 20 minutes time, including archiving paperwork. And I have both electronic and tangible means of tracking my payments.
Seriously, I've been using FreeBSD as my desktop in various forms for about 4 years now. It's nice, although my experience became a lot more agreeable once I partitioned my work into two bits--the "hardcore" stuff, like scripting, testing, compiling, sniffing networks, etc. and the "soft" stuff like doing presentations, writing docs, etc.
I do not like Star/OpenOffice, and the lack of something like Crossover Office (from CodeWeavers) running nicely on FreeBSD, despite Linux binary compatibility, has made me keep an XP box around. For some things, FreeBSD is just faster and better, and for others, XP involves a lot less knob-dicking around to get application xyz working.
So in short, yeah it's doable, yeah, it'd be nice (I've had _no_ stability issues with FreeBSD at all, and the whole thing is organized nicely) but it would need a lot of work to get it all prettied up for the masses.
That's honestly why I'm considering buying a Powerbook...
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I'm no fan of megastores in any case, especially not the white trash variety like Wal-Mart and Tar-jay, but in Wal-Mart's defense, it _was_ the only place where a bunch of drunken idiots could buy ammo at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Chico, California.
I like Daryl better. It reminds me of "Hi I'm Larry, and this is my brother Daryl, and this is my other brother Daryl."
Look it up if you're too young to remember--it's strangely appropriate 8)
OK, so this explains the leaked company documents that use the project code name "It".
It's the Segway of computer games!
This is also pretty hilarious--sorry, couldn't resist.
This'll go nicely with my other morning staples, near-beer and nicotine-less cigarettes.
Might as well have stale-beer-and-cold-pizza-flavored marmalade for breakfast.
Isn't someone sort of missing the point?
So, if I get this right, global dimming and global warming are compatible, possibly complementary phenomena. This would mean that the world is getting warmer & darker.
Now, I'm not a scientist, but this sort of implies to me that things will get more humid as well. So, we're setting up for living in a big ole' sauna. So, let's look at the ups and downs:
Good: We'll all have great skin for starts.
Bad: Lots of very fat men walking around in flip-flops with small towels around their waists.
Good: Girls will wear less clothing to cope with the heat & humidity--we'll have a population of nice-skinned chicks dressed like the love-slaves from planet Triton. Misquoting Mary Carey: "Global warming? Never heard of it, but I guess we'll all have to wear less". Woo!
Bad: Killer hangovers, massive ring around the collar.
You forgot the four elephants in-between. Get your geology straight, you thick-head. Sheesh, kids these days, don't learn anything useful in schools.
Anyway, anyone _really_ educated would be able to tell you in a second that the earth is banana-shaped.
Bob: Do the theme, eh?
Doug [gives Great White North theme]
Bob: Good day, eh. Oh, hey, do our new movie theme, eh?
Doug [gives Great White North fanfare]
Bob: Beauty, eh? Good day, I'm Bob McKenzie, this is my brother Doug.
Doug: How's it going, eh?
Bob: Wait a second, you hoser, you can't spend all that cash on this big mosaic thing, eh? That's dad's beer money!
So, every time you talk about the "Asian" market, you obviously mean Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, ...and Bhutan, right?
Get over yourself. The OP was referring to western Europe. This sort of thing does not happen in Western Europe (except apparently in the UK.)
And the whole "snob" thing could pretty quickly be turned around to Americans being seen as fat annoying idiots. (By the way, I'm a citizen of both the US and a European country.)
This is actually pretty funny.
I've always wondered what stewardesses talk about when they withdraw to their little alcove...
Guantanamo Bay. There are actually only two physical Region 8 DVDs in existence; they're a copy of "Gigli" which is shown to "enemy combatants" to break down their willpower, and one of "Ishtar", which they get to watch as a reward for spilling the beans.
I've read a few articles expounding on this; the point wasn't _just_ that it violates a principle of privacy and sovereignty, but also puts forward the question, "do you realize exactly what kind of data airlines collect on you?"
Think about it. Dietary habits, travel patterns. Possibly medical history. What else? What do you think ticket agents are writing on those screens you can't see during checkin, when they're frantically typing away? I don't know, do you? The consensus appeared to be that airlines keep some pretty quirky stuff on file about you, including the occasional nasty comment.
What kind of information do you give away when signing up for frequent flyer programs, including that airline miles credit card? Bang, there go your spending habits.
Not sure I'm comfortable with Uncle Sam having that as a matter of routine.
I was also referring to region 1 DVDs, not just the content; get a grip, dude.
It's analogous to "UK-only release" CDs in the states. You do get them, they just cost more. And while yes, it may be illegal to sell them unrated in the UK, it certainly isn't throughout most of the continent.
I don't know where you get "FUD" from, but I was under the impression that if your DVD player uses region-coding, it will not play uncoded discs? Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
OK, so lets refer to commercial releases--the US isn't by far the only country creating big-budget cinema. I can't imagine that, say, an Italian commercial film that's released abroad, wouldn't be region coded. If your local distributor only decides to release a dubbed version, well, too bad.
Ahhh, that explains it. Mind, I was referring to civilized countries.
*ducks and runs*
Good point you make. Unfortunately, that's not entirely an option for a lot of us.
Bush aside (a lot of this horseshit's been going on for years before he entered the picture--think "war on drugs", "encryption export controls", etc.) there's a long-running problem a lot of Europeans have with the dichotomy of "US the beacon of liberty and progress" and US home of John Ashcroft & his ilk."
I'm a US-Swiss dual citizen living in Europe--I've seriously considered giving up my US passport due to ideological concerns. I haven't done so, as I have a lot of close family in the US, whom I like to see, and stand to inherit some property. Sort of a conundrum, no?
Likewise, it's not much of a choice if you live in a country which has something like biometric identification in its passports mandated by the US departmen of . What if I never wanted to enter the US, but maybe decided to head over to France for the weekend? Tough cookies, please place your retina here.
What country is this? Moldova and Byelorussia do not count as part of "Europe" as the rest of us understand it, really. I don't know what part of "Europe" you've been hanging out in, but this statement is just plain silly.
Since when does Ebay shut down auctions of DVDs? Doing a search for 'DVD' on ebay.com yields about 170,000 results.
Customs searches your bags for narcotics and guns and kiddy porn and such. Do you really believe they have that much free time?
Of course you can buy American DVDs in Europe. The same goes for American games nd American paperbacks--they just cost a bit more if bought retail, and your shipping charges are slightly higher if ordered.
Point taken, but this is relevant primarily to big-studio, big-name releases.
It does, however, prevent Ma & Pa Kettle DVD owner, who've never heard of chipping a player, from seeing anything besides studio-approved crap in their particular part of the world. No European art flicks, no US indy films, no Hong Kong chopsocky, no Iranian documentaries, nothing. Your average consumer may not be the type to pick up that slightly off-mainstream title in any case, but with region coding, he doesn't even get the possibility of making that choice.
Region coding _is_ useless for the likes of ourselves (the same reason copy protection and software registration codes are useless for 31337 d00dz) but it has a fairly significant impact on what Joe Sixpack can buy/rent.
Interesting, but you neglect to mention that the itgo.com article states that prior to the Wrights, the Smithsonian referred to Samuel Langley as the "father of flight".
I'm no aviation historian, but I seem to recall that Langley (a) was sponsored heavily by the War Department, and (b) didn't manage much more than to crash his "aerodromes" into the Potomac several times.
While the point may hold for Alberto Santos-Dumont, or Whitehead, or Pearce, using Langley as a measuring stick is sort of a weird idea.
I broke my jaw two years ago while in a Tae Kwon Do tournament
Dude, it's a martial art. "Martial", as in fighting. I think it's sort of amusing (except for the guy getting hurt) when people who engage in this sort of sport are surprised about injuries.
I fenced in high school--there was a particularly gruesome accident in our city HS league, where some girl was hit in the mask by a guy using an old foil; the blade had metal fatigue, and snapped when he lunged at her, broke, and drove straight through her mask and out the back of her head. Now _that_ was awful.
Now I do kendo, and regularly get beaten black and blue, armor notwithstanding--I'd hate to break or otherwise fuck something up, but it's just sort of part of the game. My father played handball for a long time, and I think he's had his knees rebuilt several times over his 60 years.
Sports can hurt (although it'd be nice if they didn't.) I can understand being wary of a particular sport if it causes you pain once, but it's sort of a shame if you completely cut it out.
I don't want to know what happens to all the people with body piercings.
I'm not a big sports fan, but I somehow got the impression that a lot of pro athletes (especially in US league sports like football and basketball) were kids from the wrong side of the tracks--a lot of whom wouldn't be the sort of spoiled middle-class brats who'd have access to a Playstation, or the upbringing to sit inside all day long playing Madden XXXV.
On the other hand, what are big league sports really about? Not just entertainment, but seeing people who're "larger than life". Watching a big European soccer game, or going to a baseball game, or having a Superbowl grill party is a fairly particular experience. Little Charlie Jones' Juventus scoring 8 goals against Bobby Smith's Man U online isn't and won't ever be in the same league as watching Barry Bonds knock one out of the park.
I think this goes both ways--people play sports both for the fun and sport of it, and maybe a bit for the knowledge that they're doing the same stuff as their "heroes" on TV, and people watch sports on TV because here are a bunch of dudes doing really well what you just do for fun. And wa-hey, if it leads to the death of bloated overblown pro sports, well, I don't know if they'll be missed much--people will always play pickup hoops in the park.
A friend of mine found what I think is the perfect balance--on Formula 1 weekends, he'd invite a bunch of people over for a few rounds of racing on his console, then a BBQ, then the real race. So I think it's definitely a complementary experience.
Yeah, fair enough, although running on a Thinkpad X20, KDE was slow enough to be a pain in the ass. I'm running Enlightenment on an X40 now (just for fun, as I don't really need to do work on the thing for my current project.)
However, I thought the main proprietary bit about MacOS was Aqua? I mean, it's just BSD on a Mach kernel, right?
I have my account with the Swiss post office, which works pretty nicely (although you could insert any Swiss bank in its place--bank transfer numbers are standardized and inter-bank payments don't cost extra.)
There are some regularly occurring, fixed-amount bills (gym, rent, etc.) for which I have standing payment orders. Anything occasional or variable, I get a paper bill in the mail, with a payment slip.
This is about 1/3 of an A4 piece of paper, containing recipient, amount, and payer, as well as bank info. It has a long-ass numerical code (about 25 numbers) which, along with the recipient account, I have to type into my online banking page.
When I've paid a bill, I just write 'paid date xyz' on the slip and archive it for 2 years--works a charm. The post office also sends me a paper printout of my account activity every month.
It's a great system, it sounds like it's a lot of effort, but I can pay my bills once a month within about 20 minutes time, including archiving paperwork. And I have both electronic and tangible means of tracking my payments.
MaxOS X, no?
Seriously, I've been using FreeBSD as my desktop in various forms for about 4 years now. It's nice, although my experience became a lot more agreeable once I partitioned my work into two bits--the "hardcore" stuff, like scripting, testing, compiling, sniffing networks, etc. and the "soft" stuff like doing presentations, writing docs, etc.
I do not like Star/OpenOffice, and the lack of something like Crossover Office (from CodeWeavers) running nicely on FreeBSD, despite Linux binary compatibility, has made me keep an XP box around. For some things, FreeBSD is just faster and better, and for others, XP involves a lot less knob-dicking around to get application xyz working.
So in short, yeah it's doable, yeah, it'd be nice (I've had _no_ stability issues with FreeBSD at all, and the whole thing is organized nicely) but it would need a lot of work to get it all prettied up for the masses.
That's honestly why I'm considering buying a Powerbook...