Heck, that scene is hilarious even if you haven't read the Oresteia. Euripides mercilessly parodies a variety of literary conceits which are still used today.
Are you telling me that Jesus wasn't an original character?
Actually, some of the stories do seem to be borrowed from older tales about other characters.
And the business with haloes seems to be lifted from depictions of the "rogue" pharaoh Akhenaten, who attempted to convert the Egyptians to the then-heretical idea of monotheism. The disk behind the head (sometimes with rays) is a symbol for the Sun, with its associated themes of death and rebirth. There seems to have been some cultural crossover between Akhenaten's religion and early Judaism, to the extent that with some aspects of the modern bible, its not totally clear whether Akhenaten's lot nicked them from Judeism, or whether Judaism nicked them from Akhenaten's priests. Ancient Judaism wasn't necessarily monotheistic. That aspect got emphasised at a later revision.
Since the Jesus story was told partly as the fulfilment of a prophesy, the story lived up to expectations better if certain older themes (particularly to do with his conception, birth and death) occurred within the narrative.
It's not dead... it's waiting for a hardware upgrade.
Q10: What does "Windows Vista Capable PC" mean?
A10: Microsoft defines a Windows Vista Capable PC as: "A new PC that carries the Windows Vista Capable PC logo can run Windows Vista. Some features available in the premium editions of Windows Vista - like the new Windows Aero user experience - may require advanced or additional hardware."
In other words, a new "Windows Vista capable" PC is officially certified by Microsoft as being capable of running Vista...
... apart from any parts of Vista that may turn out not be capable of running on that machine's hardware.
There's probably also a lot more deluded blokes who believe that their patent applications will make them rich, and who're prepared to set aside the rest of their lives while they wait for their patent toenail-clipper to make them instant zillionaires.
If you're a guy, high-risk strategies to get rich are more tempting. Being Rich seems to be the answer to many problems. It gets you nice things and a nice lifestyle and makes you more attractive to women. Guys usually don't have the option of finding themselves with a nice lifestyle by accidentally marrying well, so we tend to take more long-shots. The "mad inventor" (or committed researcher) type tends to get laid less often, and so finds themselves less likely to be diverted from their work into bringing up a family. Real life doesn't intrude so much.
The story that I read was that the IBM guys were due to visit DR to get an operating system (CPM), and were then due to drop in on Gates to talk about getting a version of BASIC. When they visit Digital Research for their pre-arranged meeting, they find that the boss is out of the office, flying his plane, and can't be reached.
So they leave, a little disgruntled, and make the next stop on their itinerary, Our Bill. They discuss a deal for Bill to supply a version of BASIC. This will let them tick the second item on their shopping list. Then, just before they leave they ask, "By the way, do you happen to know anyone other than DR that can do operating systems?"
Bill sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As it happens, Bill does know someone that already has an OS that could be ported, and who could do the port. IBM probably ought to be talking to that guy. Bill probably ought to give them the guy's name. The guy will probably be very pleased with Bill for pointing IBM his way. But Bill realises that for these few precious minutes, he's the only person on the planet who knows that these two parties ought to be talking. As long as he can keep them away from each other, he can make a lot of money by doing deals with each of them individually, and making sure that neither of them is aware of what he's really doing.
The first stage in getting this scam to work is to ensure that the IBM guys don't ask anyone else about operating systems, and don't go back to DR. Bill has to get them to agree that he'll be supplying the OS, right now, without admitting that he doesn't actually have an OS to supply. But they've come here to make a deal about BASIC, so they "have their pens out". They've been told that Bill is the "go-to" guy for BASIC, so he has their confidence. They're asking him for suggestions. He has one.
"No Problem! We can do that for you too!".
The IBM guys had hoped to be making a deal on the PC OS, they're planning to make a deal with Bill on that day anyway, they have no reason to believe that Bill is bullshitting them, and so it's an easy sell.
Having got the deal, and stopped IBM from asking anyone else about OSes, Bill now has to put the second stage of the plan into operation. He has to go to "OS Guy" and nonchalantly enquire as to whether OS guy might want a bit of work, to port his uninteresting OS to another platform, and give Bill the rights to it on that new platform. Bill is careful not to let "OS Guy" realise that thus is a potentially huge contract, that IBM are involved, that Bill has naughtily already made a contract that depends on OSG's cooperation, or that that Bill stands a chance of getting filthy rich from the rights to his (OS Guy's) OS. If OSG knew any of these things, he could walk away, or ask for a lot more money, or decide to make his own separate deal with IBM. He'd have Bill over a barrel, because if OSG didn't agree, Bill would have no obvious way to fulfill his deal with IBM.
So the success of Bill's plan depends on a certain lack of openness: He has to bluff IBM, or he doesn't get the contract, and he has to be less than honest with the guy whose OS it is, or else he might not be able to fulfil the contract. Bill's only hold over OS guy is that he's not telling OS guy what's really going on, or why he wants the OS. OS Guy doesn't demand a huge amount of money, because he doesn't know that Bill has IBM for a client, or that Bill's effectively presold something that OSG owns.
OS Guy doesn't demand partnership in the IBM deal, because it's kept secret that there is an IBM deal. Bill later justifies the deception by pointing out that he was legally prevented from telling OSG what he was doing by IBM's standard "non-disclosure" clause. From Bill's POV, he's successfully delivered an OS to IBM as promised, so he hasn't conned IBM, and while it's possible that IBM might have gone to OSG directly and made HIM filthy rich instead of Bill, it's also possible that if Bill hadn't made such a determined play for the con
Gates did have the vision of "a computer on every desk". He saw it as a potential mass-market device, not everyone did.
Then again, one of the recurring themes that crops up in Bill's earliest adventures with computers is the presence of his Mum. Which makes me wonder how much of the vision was actually Bill's and how much might have been his Mum's attempt to steer "little Bill" into some sort of useful niche business, if he didn't seem cut out for law.
Apparently, Mary Gates knew the head of IBM socially, because they served on one of the same committees. It's not outlandish to think that she may have decided that there was obviously a fair bit of money in this computing lark, and helped to encourage little Bill in that direction.
BG was unusual in that, unlike many "hippy" programmers at the time, he came from a "banking and law" family background. He's William Henry Gates the Third, family nickname, "Trey" for three. How many of us have family nicknames in Latin?:)
So unlike most of the other people writing code at the time, BG understood Big Business. Monopoly power. Cross-market leverage. Inertial market share. And after IBM stupidly gave Bill a profitable toehold in their loss-making PC business, BG successfully leveraged his company to the top, using every textbook business trick going (many of them borrowed from IBM).
One of BG's smartest moves was to stay the hell out of computer manufacturing, and to instead focus on making sure that all the myriad PC manufacturers, who were desperately cutting each others' throats on price, were paying to pre-install his software on their machines. Apple were control freaks and hated the idea of anyone else making money out of their product, Bill recognised that partitioning the market into hardware and software meant that he could take an absurd margin on the software and leave some other mug to worry about actually building, stocking, warehousing and sell the hardware.
Microsoft have done a few good things, but Bill's aim was always for MS to become the new IBM, a company powerful enough to make its success self-perpetuating through sheer market presence.
The tragedy is that he succeeded. Microsoft are now roughly where IBM were in the early eighties, a company with lacklustre products that runs on business inertia, with no real idea of what they ought to be doing next. They hire a lot of talent, but it's not obvious what they do with it all.
Come now... you aren't seriously suggesting that George W. Bush's ability to become CEO of the USA was due in any significant way to his family's political connections rather than on a combination of obvious talent, natural aptitude, intelligence, and sheer hard work? His dad being a former president and his brother being governor of Florida had nothing to do with it!
And we all know that the guys who make multi-million dollar bonuses on Wall Street earn every cent of that money by working far harder then the rest of us. They work much longer hours than those lazy people on the poverty line with two or three jobs. And its very responsible work. And they're very responsible people. And you have to pay a premium for that responsibility. otherwise, I dunno, you might end up with a bunch of hacks crashing the market. Which would never, ever happen with our guys.
Of course - in an underground installation like this, dry ice or fog machines are often considered to be an essential safety component that lets you monitor airflow and immediately check that the ventilation systems are working properly. Large palm trees (with their swaying fronds) can perform a similar purpose. Ditto large fake spider-webs (theatrical suppliers offer a suitable "fake-web -spinning" device - ask your usual fog-machine supplier).
This choice represents one of the most important initial design decisions for underground datacentres, because combining the different options isn't sensible. Spiderwebs AND palm trees AND dry ice would look silly.
No transformers in every device SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the heat load, also makes the racks creepy-quiet.
Mmm. So you might want a decent sound system down there to stop the total silence being too distracting.
And the contrast between the "daylight" light-sources and the more distant dark walls and ceiling is a bit harsh. If they're not whitewashing the walls, I think they need some sort of light-scattering system to reduce the contrast. It's difficult to judge how well the photographed image corresponds to the actual lighting, but it currently looks like they just put in a lot of suspended fluorescent tubes with standard down-deflecting housings, which is bad. Uncomfortable on the eyes.
How about adding a few mirror balls?:)
Now, humidifiers... you want to place them//after// the servers (wrt airflow), in the central section. You don't want to spend a lot of money on a custom industrial unit that costs a fortune to service: instead, they could just put in a jacuzzi.
Next, since they don't have windows, it'd be a good idea to put in some sort of distant moving images for people to focus on, to help alleviate eyestrain from the monitors and the lights. The spots of light playing over the rock-walls from the mirror-balls would help, but another useful thing might be really big TV screens (maybe put in a few home movie systems with digital projectors). That'd let them project soothing live webcam feeds of woodland and beach scenes onto the walls. And as a purely accidental bonus, could also play movies.
A team of highly-trained masseuses would be useful for stress-relief, too. Especially ones with large breasts.
If it's 100ft underground, that suggests the possibility of passive convection cooling. If you have separated air intake and outlet shafts (or divide a single shaft), then you could bring the fresh air in under the floor panels, and have warm air leaving the server regions, passing the fishtanks, and heading back up the shaft. Keeps the tunnels nice and cosy.
I don't know what sort of updraft you get with a 100-foot column of warm air, but the suction might be quite significant. The more heat you generate, the greater the temperature differential, and the greater the gravity-feed effect between the inlet and outlet air-columns.
As for cost, I suppose that they saved some money on not bothering to build false walls and ceilings inside the cave to turn the thing into a more conventional "boxed-in" office. With exposed rock, you'd perhaps be a little concerned about potential dampness (for the people who work there) but if the warmed dry air piped up under the servers is then passing back along the corridors, I guess that'll help to fix any potential "cold damp rockface" issues.
Try approaching them with a troubled look and asking if they can explain to you the business about Noah, and what the moral of the tale is.
I don't mean the bit about the boat. I mean afterwards. When Noah gets blind drunk, and wakes up the next morning in his tent, stark naked, with one of his sons. Um.
And his son tells his other sons, and Noah is furious, and punishes his son for "telling" by disinheriting him and declaring that he and all his children , ad his children's children, will now be slaves forever. Or something.
Anyway, ask the priest whether the moral of the story is that if a grown-up gets inappropriately drunk and naked with you in their tent, that if you tell anyone, it means that you're Bad and deserve to be punished?
Or is the moral of the story that Noah, God's Chosen, was a evil vindictive child-abusing drunk?
I read through the Old Testament when I was little and I was horrified. It seemed to me that most of the "heroes" were lying/cheating/thieving/murdering/relative-shagging/slavekeeping/mass-murdering/two-faced cunts.
The bad guys always seemed to come out on top, and the worse they were, the more successful they got, and the more they were hero-worshipped.
And THAT's supposed to be the basis of a moral code? Jeez.
And I personally don't understand why you think an oderless, colorless gas is somehow equivalent to "the Earth putting on a sweater", to borrow the popular analogy.
The greenhouse effect works. It's the basis of... er... greenhouses. Glass is an "odorless colorless" substance that's transparent to visible light but blocks infrared. Light enters the greenhouse, hits something inside, the innards warm up, the warm objects try to re-radiate the energy as infrared, and the glass stops that IR getting out again.
Similarly with CO2. Transparent to visible light, not so transparent to infrared.
Think of the difference between a dry winter night with and without cloud cover. The temperature tends to drop faster on the cloudless nights, yes? So greenhouse gases are like "one-way" cloud cover, they don't stop the sunlight coming in, but help keep the heat in once it's here.
So the greenhouse effect itself is real.
The questions are:
(a) Is our climate currently changing in a significant way?
(b) How much of this is due to greenhouse effects?
(c) How much of the greenhouse contribution is due to human activity? And
(d) What are the cost-benefit implications of doing nothing versus doing something?
Or start buying up and converting old cruise liners. Eventually find some shallows, park your ships permanently around the edge to make a a seabreak, and start reclaiming land within the break. While you're still reclaiming, you have the liners as static luxury hotels.
BTW, does anyone know how much it costs to buy and ship landfill by the megatonne? Perhaps we could convert old oil-tankers. Are there any convenient deserts with portside access, where the locals don't care about donating a mass of dry sand and dirt, in exchange for perhaps getting a nice inland lake?
I think that London's always been pretty multicultural, ever since it was founded by the Romans. Some other parts of England, not so much. If you'd slogged your way to the UK in the C16th-C19th for a better life, chances are that you'd either head for where the action was (London), or settle somewhere near the seaport where you landed (e.g. Liverpool).
Personally I was born and brought up in London, and I consider myself a Londoner, rather than as "English" (IMO "England" isn't even a proper country, there's no "English Government". Culturally, I tend to have more in common with other Londoners, regardless of colour or creed, than with people from some other parts of England.
So I'm a Londoner, I'm British (UK passport), and I'm European (in the sense of having EU rights), but "England" doesn't come into it, for me.
And if you regard London as being almost a separate country, a hell of a lot of the population are "immigrants" in the sense that they aren't "born" Londoners, they've come from some other part of the UK. It's a constant "churn".
Actually, the "mass murder" tag might have some justification in the alleged mass deaths of a few thousand POW's in Afghanistan shortly after the Afghan invasion. The US troops were instructed to put all their resources into finding Osama, Bush's public instruction to them was to use any and all methods at their disposal, using US transports to fly in food for all those surrendered POW's would have diverted resources from the search, the local Intel guys believed that they had presidential authority to do whatever they deemed necessary to help the mission succeed... and the number of POW's arriving at the prison turned out to by conveniently lower then the number that were sent there, by a few thousand. The remainder apparently ended up in a mass grave en route.
You couldn't have POW's starving to death under US overview, so apparently what happened was a system of "accelerated natural wastage", whereby POW's were herded into unventilated shipping containers, holes were then shot in the sides of the containers, and the containers were then driven part-way to the prison and left in the sun to cook for a bit. Then the containers were driven at night to the mass grave-site for their contents to be emptied.
The White House initially denied that any such thing had taken place, then they admitted that it had happened but insisted that no US troops had been present, then they admitted a limited US supervisory presence, but only at the beginning.
IF (if) the US has some culpability for what happened (at the time US troops were helping by keeping Red Cross observers out of the area), then the people involved will be able to say that they were acting according to the direct instructions of their commander-in-chief, because Bush authorised them to use "any and all" means.
As to the "pervert-fucker" aspect, I have no information on that. It was his dad that was in that society that supposedly had initiation rites involving sexual acts with human remains, not Bush Jr.
For instance, one of the problems with the UK press is that Murdoch's "News International" owns a big chunk of the media, and openly "sells" its audience to whichever politician has currently earned Murdoch's favour. By being able to promise to deliver a great big chunk of votes, M got to grease a number of business deals that shouldn't otherwise have gotten through. It's an open secret that Murdoch's papers will have an editorial opinion on any matter that relates to his business, that will sagely advise readers that the side of the argument that happens to make Murdoch the most money is the right one.
As part of Murdoch's strategy of being able to promise a "voter-block" to politicians, his "Sun" paper used to whip up virulently pro-nationalistic, anti-foreigner "hate" issues, as a way of encouraging the readership to be loyal to the paper and dismiss outside sources of information. He then used to openly claim that his papers could swing a national election one way or the other, depending on who he graced with his favours (hence the "Sun"'s headline after one election "It was the Sun what won it"). Ironically, Murdoch himself was an Australian.
So, Murdoch was exactly the sort of malicious foreign meddler that the people who wrote US law wanted to keep out. The free press was critically important to the functioning of US democracy, and you couldn't allow foreigners with lots of money to simply buy chunks of it and start telling Americans who they ought to vote for. That's why the US has laws saying that non-Americans aren't allowed to go around buying up control of US media outlets.
When Murdoch decided to extend further into the the US market, those laws stopped him, so he had to become a nationalised US citizen to bypass the safeguards.
Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one.
Iraq.
From the POV of the rest of the world, the US tv media reporting on the whole Iraq/WMD situation was almost totally cut off from reality. It seemed to be occupying its own little bubble of "Questioning-the-government-equals-support-for-America's-enemies, questioning-whether-the-White-House-is-telling-the-truth-equals-supporting-terrorists".
Bush's "You're with us or you're against us" ultimatum seemed to be taken to heart by the US corporate media, who seemed to be falling over themselves to compete for who could be seen to be the most patriotic. Any suggestion that perhaps things weren't going as well as the White House said, or that perhaps the ongoing Iraqi WMD programme didn't exist meant that you were liable to be "outed" as a patsy of Saddam or a terrorist sympathiser. Crazy times. Remember how outraged some people were that the Dixie Chicks should express an opinion against Bush and the war? How DARE they disagree with the President!
Back in the Sixties, the output of the State news agencies of the USSR and China were regarded by outsiders as a ludicrous bad joke that nobody took seriously except some of the more ignorant and/or brainwashed members of their population. It was preprocessed cattle food. Well, after 2001, US TV reporting became regarded by outsiders in the same way, as essentially regurgitated state propaganda. You had TV news trotting out the same old Bush stuff about links between Saddam and 9-11 months after even the White House had publicly agreed that it wasn't true.
It was Shit.
It may also have encouraged anti-US sentiments (and further anti-Western terrorism), because people in the Arab world could get Fox News, and were liable to think that the US population really were 100% behind the actions of their president, and therefore ought to be held accountable for what was being done in their name.
Remember that day when Obama was visiting Germany and addressing huge German crowds (reminiscent of JFK's Berlin visit), and McCain was visiting a smallish shop in the US? And McCain's people were upset that Obama's day was getting far more news coverage than theirs?
It wasn't an issue of "balance", the Obama visit was simply the bigger story.
And generally, Obama was a far bigger story than McCain. I mean, "My God, our next president may well be an elderly white man who married into money! Who'd have ever thought that such a thing could happen!" honestly doesn't make for such an interesting news discussion.
If journalists were discussing the potential significance of someone with Obama's background becoming president, it was difficult not to be positive. It was difficult to think of as much positive material relating to the idea of someone with McCain's background becoming president.
So Obama's campaign won a lot of positive news coverage by providing news stories that were difficult not to cover positively.
Where the situations were reversed was with the choice of VP. Biden was a hellishly boring VP candidate, and consequently didn't get much coverage. Old white guy with worthy credentials and a lot of tedious experience. Snore. Nothing to see, move along.
McCain OTOH deliberately chose an "exiting" VP candidate, and consequently got huge amounts of media coverage off the back of it.
Unfortunately for the McCain camp, there was a lot more to say about Palin that was potentially negative than potentially positive, and even a lot of republicans winced at the idea of "President Palin", because the person honestly didn't seem to know enough to be considered presidential material. And Palin seemed to love the attention - the McCain people couldn't complain that news people were putting undue emphasis on Palin, because that's why McCain chose Palin - to get headlines and try to stir up some excitement. But other than McCain himself, it was difficult to find anyone in the Republican Party with any experience who was prepared to stand in front of a camera and declare that they thought that Palin would actually be a competent President if anything should happen to McCain.
So that then generated a further tendency for negative stories about the McCain campaign compared to the Obama campaign, and that in turn generated discussions about the relative judgement of the two candidates, since Obama was generally considered to have run an excellent campaign despite his relative inexperience, and since McCain seemed to have made at least one critical error, in his VP choice.
If that was the situation, then reporters were obliged to report on it. They weren't obliged to try to impose a corrective bias onto the news in order to force an artificial 50:50 balance in airtime, if the available stories and information didn't justify that balance.
The way that Google's "Google Books" division acted when they started out (before they started getting hit by lawsuits) was a//little// bit evil.
The guys running GB said some very stupid things early on that suggested that they were going down a course that would lead to certain specialist publishing companies having their businesses destroyed, due to GB doing things with those companies' copyrighted materials that GB had no legal right to do.
The attitude emanating from Google Books back then seemed to be:
(a) There's no problem
(b) Even if there//is// a problem we don't care
(c) We're doing authors and publishers a favour so they should stop whining and thank us, and
(d) Even if what we're doing is illegal, we're part of Google, so we're huge and you can't stop us. So there. Swivel.
The early statements from Google Books showed a casual indifference to the concerns of some of the people they were potentially going to be screwing over, the obvious problem being the specialist reference book market.
Google initially seemed to be saying that they'd be putting everything online, copyright or not, on the basis that accessing something on GB was just like looking at a copy in the local library.
The first difference was that libraries actually//buy// books, and GB doesn't... there are even publishers whose//main market// is libraries.
If you compile and produce, say, a specialist ten-volume encyclopedia of modern music that sells for five hundred quid, you're going to be selling it to libraries rather than individuals, and you may well choose to print 10,000 copies purely based on expected sales to libraries.
If people read your encyclopedia for free in the library, that's okay, because that's how your product is designed to be used. The library system has financed your book by buying those ten thousand copies, and the library readers wouldn't seriously ever be buying copies for themselves anyway. So when GB said that there was no difference between what they'd be doing and what libraries were already doing, they were wrong.
The difference would be, for our hypothetical publisher, that Google books would have been illegally making the copyrighted resource available to at least as many people//without// buying those ten thousand copies... without buying a single copy in fact.
So the publisher would be facing a situation in which Google would effectively be "pirating" the book, and making money off it with online advertising (GB later dropped their plans for selling advertising space on book pages), while the publisher/rights owner wouldn't be seeing any money... and if libraries realised that their users could access the encyclopedia for free online from a library terminal, then they might decide to save the five hundred quid,//not// buy the encyclopedia, and simply make it available to visitors by bookmarking the GB page on the library terminals.
When publishers and authors complained that GB was going to be illegally making money out of other people's work, while damaging legitimate sales, GB initially replied that:
(a) Nobody would be hurt, GB was providing free publicity for books that potential reader might not otherwise have access to, and authors and0 publishers should be grateful, and
(b) That GB had systems in place that made it difficult for individual readers to access more than a certain number of chapters per month, so people would still have to buy the books (or visit a library) to read the whole thing.
The problem with those arguments was that while they might have worked reasonably well for fiction, they didn't work for all types of book. For reference books (like our hypothetical music encyclopedia), the reader would almost certainly NOT be buying the book to take home. Those users wouldn't be interested in buying the entire encyclopedia, only in looking up an occa
No, "out of print" does NOT mean that no print copies exist!
It means that the publisher has run out of new copies to sell you. It might be that the publisher has no intention of ever printing any more, or it might be that they're pondering whether or not it might be worthwhile running off another batch, depending on how many people ask.
One obscure academic book that I wanted to buy had a very small print run, and seemed to go out of print in about eight months! So I had to go to a library and (ahem) photocopy a couple of key pages. A few years later, they reprinted it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, not stuffy at all, then.
Actually, some of the stories do seem to be borrowed from older tales about other characters.
And the business with haloes seems to be lifted from depictions of the "rogue" pharaoh Akhenaten, who attempted to convert the Egyptians to the then-heretical idea of monotheism. The disk behind the head (sometimes with rays) is a symbol for the Sun, with its associated themes of death and rebirth. There seems to have been some cultural crossover between Akhenaten's religion and early Judaism, to the extent that with some aspects of the modern bible, its not totally clear whether Akhenaten's lot nicked them from Judeism, or whether Judaism nicked them from Akhenaten's priests. Ancient Judaism wasn't necessarily monotheistic. That aspect got emphasised at a later revision. Since the Jesus story was told partly as the fulfilment of a prophesy, the story lived up to expectations better if certain older themes (particularly to do with his conception, birth and death) occurred within the narrative.
They were probably more familiar with the "Tommy Lee" version of the joke.
In other words, a new "Windows Vista capable" PC is officially certified by Microsoft as being capable of running Vista ...
... apart from any parts of Vista that may turn out not be capable of running on that machine's hardware.
Those parts won't work, obviously.
A mobile phone user-interface that can be operated remotely by cats.
If you're a guy, high-risk strategies to get rich are more tempting. Being Rich seems to be the answer to many problems. It gets you nice things and a nice lifestyle and makes you more attractive to women. Guys usually don't have the option of finding themselves with a nice lifestyle by accidentally marrying well, so we tend to take more long-shots. The "mad inventor" (or committed researcher) type tends to get laid less often, and so finds themselves less likely to be diverted from their work into bringing up a family. Real life doesn't intrude so much.
Hence more patent applications.
Also probably more guys in business and law.
So they leave, a little disgruntled, and make the next stop on their itinerary, Our Bill. They discuss a deal for Bill to supply a version of BASIC. This will let them tick the second item on their shopping list. Then, just before they leave they ask, "By the way, do you happen to know anyone other than DR that can do operating systems?"
Bill sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As it happens, Bill does know someone that already has an OS that could be ported, and who could do the port. IBM probably ought to be talking to that guy. Bill probably ought to give them the guy's name. The guy will probably be very pleased with Bill for pointing IBM his way. But Bill realises that for these few precious minutes, he's the only person on the planet who knows that these two parties ought to be talking. As long as he can keep them away from each other, he can make a lot of money by doing deals with each of them individually, and making sure that neither of them is aware of what he's really doing.
The first stage in getting this scam to work is to ensure that the IBM guys don't ask anyone else about operating systems, and don't go back to DR. Bill has to get them to agree that he'll be supplying the OS, right now, without admitting that he doesn't actually have an OS to supply. But they've come here to make a deal about BASIC, so they "have their pens out". They've been told that Bill is the "go-to" guy for BASIC, so he has their confidence. They're asking him for suggestions. He has one.
"No Problem! We can do that for you too!".
The IBM guys had hoped to be making a deal on the PC OS, they're planning to make a deal with Bill on that day anyway, they have no reason to believe that Bill is bullshitting them, and so it's an easy sell.
Having got the deal, and stopped IBM from asking anyone else about OSes, Bill now has to put the second stage of the plan into operation. He has to go to "OS Guy" and nonchalantly enquire as to whether OS guy might want a bit of work, to port his uninteresting OS to another platform, and give Bill the rights to it on that new platform. Bill is careful not to let "OS Guy" realise that thus is a potentially huge contract, that IBM are involved, that Bill has naughtily already made a contract that depends on OSG's cooperation, or that that Bill stands a chance of getting filthy rich from the rights to his (OS Guy's) OS. If OSG knew any of these things, he could walk away, or ask for a lot more money, or decide to make his own separate deal with IBM. He'd have Bill over a barrel, because if OSG didn't agree, Bill would have no obvious way to fulfill his deal with IBM.
So the success of Bill's plan depends on a certain lack of openness: He has to bluff IBM, or he doesn't get the contract, and he has to be less than honest with the guy whose OS it is, or else he might not be able to fulfil the contract. Bill's only hold over OS guy is that he's not telling OS guy what's really going on, or why he wants the OS. OS Guy doesn't demand a huge amount of money, because he doesn't know that Bill has IBM for a client, or that Bill's effectively presold something that OSG owns.
OS Guy doesn't demand partnership in the IBM deal, because it's kept secret that there is an IBM deal. Bill later justifies the deception by pointing out that he was legally prevented from telling OSG what he was doing by IBM's standard "non-disclosure" clause. From Bill's POV, he's successfully delivered an OS to IBM as promised, so he hasn't conned IBM, and while it's possible that IBM might have gone to OSG directly and made HIM filthy rich instead of Bill, it's also possible that if Bill hadn't made such a determined play for the con
Then again, one of the recurring themes that crops up in Bill's earliest adventures with computers is the presence of his Mum. Which makes me wonder how much of the vision was actually Bill's and how much might have been his Mum's attempt to steer "little Bill" into some sort of useful niche business, if he didn't seem cut out for law.
Apparently, Mary Gates knew the head of IBM socially, because they served on one of the same committees. It's not outlandish to think that she may have decided that there was obviously a fair bit of money in this computing lark, and helped to encourage little Bill in that direction.
So unlike most of the other people writing code at the time, BG understood Big Business. Monopoly power. Cross-market leverage. Inertial market share. And after IBM stupidly gave Bill a profitable toehold in their loss-making PC business, BG successfully leveraged his company to the top, using every textbook business trick going (many of them borrowed from IBM).
One of BG's smartest moves was to stay the hell out of computer manufacturing, and to instead focus on making sure that all the myriad PC manufacturers, who were desperately cutting each others' throats on price, were paying to pre-install his software on their machines. Apple were control freaks and hated the idea of anyone else making money out of their product, Bill recognised that partitioning the market into hardware and software meant that he could take an absurd margin on the software and leave some other mug to worry about actually building, stocking, warehousing and sell the hardware.
Microsoft have done a few good things, but Bill's aim was always for MS to become the new IBM, a company powerful enough to make its success self-perpetuating through sheer market presence.
The tragedy is that he succeeded. Microsoft are now roughly where IBM were in the early eighties, a company with lacklustre products that runs on business inertia, with no real idea of what they ought to be doing next. They hire a lot of talent, but it's not obvious what they do with it all.
And we all know that the guys who make multi-million dollar bonuses on Wall Street earn every cent of that money by working far harder then the rest of us. They work much longer hours than those lazy people on the poverty line with two or three jobs. And its very responsible work. And they're very responsible people. And you have to pay a premium for that responsibility. otherwise, I dunno, you might end up with a bunch of hacks crashing the market. Which would never, ever happen with our guys.
Wow, that's cool. Never seen that before. Thanks!
This choice represents one of the most important initial design decisions for underground datacentres, because combining the different options isn't sensible. Spiderwebs AND palm trees AND dry ice would look silly.
Mmm. So you might want a decent sound system down there to stop the total silence being too distracting.
And the contrast between the "daylight" light-sources and the more distant dark walls and ceiling is a bit harsh. If they're not whitewashing the walls, I think they need some sort of light-scattering system to reduce the contrast. It's difficult to judge how well the photographed image corresponds to the actual lighting, but it currently looks like they just put in a lot of suspended fluorescent tubes with standard down-deflecting housings, which is bad. Uncomfortable on the eyes.
How about adding a few mirror balls? :)
Now, humidifiers ... you want to place them //after// the servers (wrt airflow), in the central section. You don't want to spend a lot of money on a custom industrial unit that costs a fortune to service: instead, they could just put in a jacuzzi.
Next, since they don't have windows, it'd be a good idea to put in some sort of distant moving images for people to focus on, to help alleviate eyestrain from the monitors and the lights. The spots of light playing over the rock-walls from the mirror-balls would help, but another useful thing might be really big TV screens (maybe put in a few home movie systems with digital projectors). That'd let them project soothing live webcam feeds of woodland and beach scenes onto the walls. And as a purely accidental bonus, could also play movies.
A team of highly-trained masseuses would be useful for stress-relief, too. Especially ones with large breasts.
I don't know what sort of updraft you get with a 100-foot column of warm air, but the suction might be quite significant. The more heat you generate, the greater the temperature differential, and the greater the gravity-feed effect between the inlet and outlet air-columns.
As for cost, I suppose that they saved some money on not bothering to build false walls and ceilings inside the cave to turn the thing into a more conventional "boxed-in" office. With exposed rock, you'd perhaps be a little concerned about potential dampness (for the people who work there) but if the warmed dry air piped up under the servers is then passing back along the corridors, I guess that'll help to fix any potential "cold damp rockface" issues.
I don't mean the bit about the boat. I mean afterwards. When Noah gets blind drunk, and wakes up the next morning in his tent, stark naked, with one of his sons. Um.
And his son tells his other sons, and Noah is furious, and punishes his son for "telling" by disinheriting him and declaring that he and all his children , ad his children's children, will now be slaves forever. Or something.
Anyway, ask the priest whether the moral of the story is that if a grown-up gets inappropriately drunk and naked with you in their tent, that if you tell anyone, it means that you're Bad and deserve to be punished?
Or is the moral of the story that Noah, God's Chosen, was a evil vindictive child-abusing drunk?
I read through the Old Testament when I was little and I was horrified. It seemed to me that most of the "heroes" were lying/cheating/thieving/murdering/relative-shagging/slavekeeping/mass-murdering/two-faced cunts.
The bad guys always seemed to come out on top, and the worse they were, the more successful they got, and the more they were hero-worshipped.
And THAT's supposed to be the basis of a moral code? Jeez.
The greenhouse effect works. It's the basis of ... er ... greenhouses. Glass is an "odorless colorless" substance that's transparent to visible light but blocks infrared. Light enters the greenhouse, hits something inside, the innards warm up, the warm objects try to re-radiate the energy as infrared, and the glass stops that IR getting out again.
Similarly with CO2. Transparent to visible light, not so transparent to infrared.
Think of the difference between a dry winter night with and without cloud cover. The temperature tends to drop faster on the cloudless nights, yes? So greenhouse gases are like "one-way" cloud cover, they don't stop the sunlight coming in, but help keep the heat in once it's here.
So the greenhouse effect itself is real. The questions are:
(a) Is our climate currently changing in a significant way?
(b) How much of this is due to greenhouse effects?
(c) How much of the greenhouse contribution is due to human activity? And
(d) What are the cost-benefit implications of doing nothing versus doing something?
BTW, does anyone know how much it costs to buy and ship landfill by the megatonne? Perhaps we could convert old oil-tankers. Are there any convenient deserts with portside access, where the locals don't care about donating a mass of dry sand and dirt, in exchange for perhaps getting a nice inland lake?
Personally I was born and brought up in London, and I consider myself a Londoner, rather than as "English" (IMO "England" isn't even a proper country, there's no "English Government". Culturally, I tend to have more in common with other Londoners, regardless of colour or creed, than with people from some other parts of England.
So I'm a Londoner, I'm British (UK passport), and I'm European (in the sense of having EU rights), but "England" doesn't come into it, for me.
And if you regard London as being almost a separate country, a hell of a lot of the population are "immigrants" in the sense that they aren't "born" Londoners, they've come from some other part of the UK. It's a constant "churn".
You couldn't have POW's starving to death under US overview, so apparently what happened was a system of "accelerated natural wastage", whereby POW's were herded into unventilated shipping containers, holes were then shot in the sides of the containers, and the containers were then driven part-way to the prison and left in the sun to cook for a bit. Then the containers were driven at night to the mass grave-site for their contents to be emptied.
The White House initially denied that any such thing had taken place, then they admitted that it had happened but insisted that no US troops had been present, then they admitted a limited US supervisory presence, but only at the beginning.
IF (if) the US has some culpability for what happened (at the time US troops were helping by keeping Red Cross observers out of the area), then the people involved will be able to say that they were acting according to the direct instructions of their commander-in-chief, because Bush authorised them to use "any and all" means.
As to the "pervert-fucker" aspect, I have no information on that. It was his dad that was in that society that supposedly had initiation rites involving sexual acts with human remains, not Bush Jr.
For instance, one of the problems with the UK press is that Murdoch's "News International" owns a big chunk of the media, and openly "sells" its audience to whichever politician has currently earned Murdoch's favour. By being able to promise to deliver a great big chunk of votes, M got to grease a number of business deals that shouldn't otherwise have gotten through. It's an open secret that Murdoch's papers will have an editorial opinion on any matter that relates to his business, that will sagely advise readers that the side of the argument that happens to make Murdoch the most money is the right one.
As part of Murdoch's strategy of being able to promise a "voter-block" to politicians, his "Sun" paper used to whip up virulently pro-nationalistic, anti-foreigner "hate" issues, as a way of encouraging the readership to be loyal to the paper and dismiss outside sources of information. He then used to openly claim that his papers could swing a national election one way or the other, depending on who he graced with his favours (hence the "Sun"'s headline after one election "It was the Sun what won it"). Ironically, Murdoch himself was an Australian.
So, Murdoch was exactly the sort of malicious foreign meddler that the people who wrote US law wanted to keep out. The free press was critically important to the functioning of US democracy, and you couldn't allow foreigners with lots of money to simply buy chunks of it and start telling Americans who they ought to vote for. That's why the US has laws saying that non-Americans aren't allowed to go around buying up control of US media outlets.
When Murdoch decided to extend further into the the US market, those laws stopped him, so he had to become a nationalised US citizen to bypass the safeguards.
Murdoch is the guy behind Fox News.
Iraq.
From the POV of the rest of the world, the US tv media reporting on the whole Iraq/WMD situation was almost totally cut off from reality. It seemed to be occupying its own little bubble of "Questioning-the-government-equals-support-for-America's-enemies, questioning-whether-the-White-House-is-telling-the-truth-equals-supporting-terrorists". Bush's "You're with us or you're against us" ultimatum seemed to be taken to heart by the US corporate media, who seemed to be falling over themselves to compete for who could be seen to be the most patriotic. Any suggestion that perhaps things weren't going as well as the White House said, or that perhaps the ongoing Iraqi WMD programme didn't exist meant that you were liable to be "outed" as a patsy of Saddam or a terrorist sympathiser. Crazy times. Remember how outraged some people were that the Dixie Chicks should express an opinion against Bush and the war? How DARE they disagree with the President!
Back in the Sixties, the output of the State news agencies of the USSR and China were regarded by outsiders as a ludicrous bad joke that nobody took seriously except some of the more ignorant and/or brainwashed members of their population. It was preprocessed cattle food. Well, after 2001, US TV reporting became regarded by outsiders in the same way, as essentially regurgitated state propaganda. You had TV news trotting out the same old Bush stuff about links between Saddam and 9-11 months after even the White House had publicly agreed that it wasn't true.
It was Shit.
It may also have encouraged anti-US sentiments (and further anti-Western terrorism), because people in the Arab world could get Fox News, and were liable to think that the US population really were 100% behind the actions of their president, and therefore ought to be held accountable for what was being done in their name.
It wasn't an issue of "balance", the Obama visit was simply the bigger story.
And generally, Obama was a far bigger story than McCain. I mean, "My God, our next president may well be an elderly white man who married into money! Who'd have ever thought that such a thing could happen!" honestly doesn't make for such an interesting news discussion.
If journalists were discussing the potential significance of someone with Obama's background becoming president, it was difficult not to be positive. It was difficult to think of as much positive material relating to the idea of someone with McCain's background becoming president.
So Obama's campaign won a lot of positive news coverage by providing news stories that were difficult not to cover positively.
Where the situations were reversed was with the choice of VP. Biden was a hellishly boring VP candidate, and consequently didn't get much coverage. Old white guy with worthy credentials and a lot of tedious experience. Snore. Nothing to see, move along.
McCain OTOH deliberately chose an "exiting" VP candidate, and consequently got huge amounts of media coverage off the back of it.
Unfortunately for the McCain camp, there was a lot more to say about Palin that was potentially negative than potentially positive, and even a lot of republicans winced at the idea of "President Palin", because the person honestly didn't seem to know enough to be considered presidential material. And Palin seemed to love the attention - the McCain people couldn't complain that news people were putting undue emphasis on Palin, because that's why McCain chose Palin - to get headlines and try to stir up some excitement. But other than McCain himself, it was difficult to find anyone in the Republican Party with any experience who was prepared to stand in front of a camera and declare that they thought that Palin would actually be a competent President if anything should happen to McCain. So that then generated a further tendency for negative stories about the McCain campaign compared to the Obama campaign, and that in turn generated discussions about the relative judgement of the two candidates, since Obama was generally considered to have run an excellent campaign despite his relative inexperience, and since McCain seemed to have made at least one critical error, in his VP choice.
If that was the situation, then reporters were obliged to report on it. They weren't obliged to try to impose a corrective bias onto the news in order to force an artificial 50:50 balance in airtime, if the available stories and information didn't justify that balance.
The guys running GB said some very stupid things early on that suggested that they were going down a course that would lead to certain specialist publishing companies having their businesses destroyed, due to GB doing things with those companies' copyrighted materials that GB had no legal right to do.
The attitude emanating from Google Books back then seemed to be: //is// a problem we don't care
(c) We're doing authors and publishers a favour so they should stop whining and thank us, and
(d) Even if what we're doing is illegal, we're part of Google, so we're huge and you can't stop us. So there. Swivel.
(a) There's no problem (b) Even if there
The early statements from Google Books showed a casual indifference to the concerns of some of the people they were potentially going to be screwing over, the obvious problem being the specialist reference book market.
Google initially seemed to be saying that they'd be putting everything online, copyright or not, on the basis that accessing something on GB was just like looking at a copy in the local library.
The first difference was that libraries actually //buy// books, and GB doesn't ... there are even publishers whose //main market// is libraries.
If you compile and produce, say, a specialist ten-volume encyclopedia of modern music that sells for five hundred quid, you're going to be selling it to libraries rather than individuals, and you may well choose to print 10,000 copies purely based on expected sales to libraries.
If people read your encyclopedia for free in the library, that's okay, because that's how your product is designed to be used. The library system has financed your book by buying those ten thousand copies, and the library readers wouldn't seriously ever be buying copies for themselves anyway. So when GB said that there was no difference between what they'd be doing and what libraries were already doing, they were wrong.
//without// buying those ten thousand copies ... without buying a single copy in fact.
The difference would be, for our hypothetical publisher, that Google books would have been illegally making the copyrighted resource available to at least as many people
So the publisher would be facing a situation in which Google would effectively be "pirating" the book, and making money off it with online advertising (GB later dropped their plans for selling advertising space on book pages), while the publisher/rights owner wouldn't be seeing any money ... and if libraries realised that their users could access the encyclopedia for free online from a library terminal, then they might decide to save the five hundred quid, //not// buy the encyclopedia, and simply make it available to visitors by bookmarking the GB page on the library terminals.
When publishers and authors complained that GB was going to be illegally making money out of other people's work, while damaging legitimate sales, GB initially replied that:
(a) Nobody would be hurt, GB was providing free publicity for books that potential reader might not otherwise have access to, and authors and0 publishers should be grateful, and
(b) That GB had systems in place that made it difficult for individual readers to access more than a certain number of chapters per month, so people would still have to buy the books (or visit a library) to read the whole thing.
The problem with those arguments was that while they might have worked reasonably well for fiction, they didn't work for all types of book. For reference books (like our hypothetical music encyclopedia), the reader would almost certainly NOT be buying the book to take home. Those users wouldn't be interested in buying the entire encyclopedia, only in looking up an occa
And then there are all the modern editions.
So they're not //in// copyright and //out// of print, they're //out// of copyright and //in// print.
It means that the publisher has run out of new copies to sell you. It might be that the publisher has no intention of ever printing any more, or it might be that they're pondering whether or not it might be worthwhile running off another batch, depending on how many people ask.
One obscure academic book that I wanted to buy had a very small print run, and seemed to go out of print in about eight months! So I had to go to a library and (ahem) photocopy a couple of key pages. A few years later, they reprinted it.