If you wake up to three feet of water in your bedroom due to global warming, then it is only because you decided you would ignore it when there was one foot, and then when it rose to two feet, and then two and a half...
That rather depends where you live. If you live below sea level the change is likely to be a step rather than a slow rise.
Some information acts on the human mind in the same way as a virus on Windows.
If you want something which really sticks, I recomend the picture of two male walrusses (ahem) doing the wild thing from the book Biological Exuberance. I think I need to wipe my brain and re-install the OS to get that one out. Indeed, without even seeing it, the concept is probably now lodged firmly in the depths of your mind, and some day you will mention it to someone else and...
O2 levels vary dramatically whether we're here or not,
This is, of course, irrelevant. That the CO2 level, and hence climate, has varied in the past is not going to be much comfort if you wake up to find your bedroom 3 feet deep in seawater.
No one (sane) is arguing that the change in CO2 and hence climate we seem to be seeing is moving the earth somewhere it hasn't been before, or that it will somehow destroy the biosphere. Indeed if it seriously impacts on human life it will likely improve things by reducing the number of people and their ability to screw things up.
The isssues are
Is it happening.
If it is and keeps happening, will we be seriously screwed.
Is human activity part of the cause.
If 1, 2, and 3, then how can we change our activity to minimise the `we are screwed' level.
The people who think it is a bad thing when evidence is found that human activity is causing CO2 levels to rise haven't thought it through[*]. If you are in a car accelerating towards a wall, would you prefer it to be because you are going down hill, or because you absent mindedly put your foot on the accelerator?
Personally I like Terry Pratchett's suggestion that we should all buy more books.
[*] Well, haven't thought it through or are part of the fossil fuel industry and hope to earn enough to build a bunker.
How many "leaders" will see it eaiser to reduce the number of humans?
The people it is easiest to eliminate are the ones whose elimination will have least impact on carbon use.
Mind you, some kind of flying robot which picks up any four wheel drive vehicle in use in an urban area and drops it and it's driver into a deep ocean trench is a possibility for significant change few people will object to...
And all of them are on the front-page as of my posting this.
Shock! The/. software fucked up. Imagine how amazed we all are that there are bugs in software. Oh me, oh my. What has the world come to! Next thing you know there will be bugs in Windows's image handling, and then where will we be!
Notice that the linked to factoid has no information about which 10 people they asked, and which 7 answered, and is supported only by a link to a databse they know most people won't have access too.
They're not even trying to look like they aren't shoveling bullshit.
If they had released it as a game in it's own right, it would just have been just another mediocre game with little plot, no atmosphere, crap gameplay and teeny-tiny levels. It was pretending it was in some way related to Deus Ex which caused people to judge it more harshly.
OTOH, that's the only reason they sold any number of copies, so from a comemrcial POV they did the right thing. They sold a lot just based on the name before word got around it was a turkey.
Of course, one reason it pissed me off was that it wouldn't run on my games machine. I upgraded the machine just to be able to find out it was crap.
Believe it or not, the Doom movie is Callahams first produced movie script...
Hard to believe, lets listen in to that meeting:
Hm, in return for some publicity, we appear to be committed to making a complete turkey of a movie which will blight the career of all those associated with it. Even our scriptwriters have too much spine to agree to work on this.
Hey! Why don't we give the job to that new kid -- he's too wet behind the ears to know to refuse!
ss1's usefulness vs. 1 shuttle launch: shuttle wins!
True as that is, it is probably the most horrible thing anyone has ever said about any technological project.
Imagine, something less useful than the space scuttle!:-)
s1 'just' goes up 100km and then comes down - that's cool and all, but quite useless unless you're travelling or something like that.
Actually sub-orbital rockets have lots of uses for atmospheric research etc. Waste of time sending a human being up though. I wonder if SS1 is automated enough for them to be able to convert it to a reusable unmanned sub-orbital vehicle. It would carry quite a lot of instruments.
However, a degree does indicate that someone had the discipline and attention span to follow through with something that takes four or more years to attain.
Of course, the same can be said of a really good beer gut.
The inclusion of R2D2 & C3PO and other 'famous' characters from the later stories leads to one stupid contrivance after another.
The robots being there all the way through isn't a guest appearence thing, it is the structural thing he nicked from The Hidden Fortress, it's been the assumption from the start of the first/fourth film that they would tie the series together.
If the robots ends up in the household chattels of Leia's mother, it's unsuprising they are given to Leia when she needs servents while playing rebel.
Having 3PO built by the irritating kid is just a stupidity caused by Lucas needing to do everything according to some cookie-cutter format. The irritating kid just has to do this kind of thing in order to make all self respecting human beings hate the movie.
I would love to be able to track a kid, especially a rather young one, say 4-14.
People have managed to track their kids for a million years (depending what you count as people:-)). Should be a solved problem by now, no need for high tech.
As for curfew, if you don't know if the kid is in the house you have a remarkably quiet and undemanding child.
It doesn't help, though, that we keep going back to f&^$$ing Tatooine again and again.
Loath as I am to defend Lucas' lack of imagination, it does make sense in the context of the story. If the kids comes from there, then his family will be there, so that is where Luke gets dumped with his uncle.
I suppose you could also support the return in Jedi in the same kind of way -- Solo was there because he delt with someone there, and so that was where he got dragged back to. However, it would have been so easy to give Jabba a home on another planet.
However, one thing I think it's important to remember is that Lucas' stated aim was not to produce good SF. He was aiming to create the feel of a pulp series, and those were always claustrophobic. How many planets Ming the Merciless rule?
Of course you pay taxes when you buy inside EU. Actually, Denmark has one of the highest VATs in the world, at 25%.
I believe (and this is deep evil legal magic, so don't anyone base anything on it) that whether you pay their rate or your rate depends on how much business they do with people in your country. I.e. if they start to sell lots of nerdy stuff to people in, say, the UK, then they will be able to operate as if a UK company and charge UK customers the UK VAT rate.
You can safely assume [the amount committed is] millions though
Why? All they have signed is a licence agreement. I would expect the big expense at this point is the models and artists impressions and so on used in the publicity.
and even billionaires don't like throwing money away...
I never said anything had been thrown away. He has bought a hell of alot of publicity. He certainly got the BBC news Web front page yesterday, and I expect the BBC TV news (I didn't see it), he certainly got the TV news I did see yesterday.
All this, by total conincidence, on the day of the first run of his new trains, when there were the expected breakdowns.
I didn't say X doesn't come with FreeBSD. I said: It's not part of the base system.
This is rather theological from the POV of a normal user. X is shipped with the system, is installed as part of the normal instalation (if you like), is declared in/etc/mtree/, it's in/usr, not/usr/local and so on.
That it isn't part of the base system is interesting for developers, but from the POV of a user you'd be hard pushed to notice any difference in status between X and, say, OpenSSH.
The best solution would be not to mandate any standard.
As your standard issue free market liberal, my instincts lie that way too, however:
This is what caused the take-off of mobile phones in the US to be so much slower than in Europe. Similarly why TV in the US was so much later than in Britain and Germany. There are times when having somoene just say `that one' really helps get things going, even if `that one' is not in fact the best available.
Standards are really good for infrastructure, if those choosing get it right. OTOH, a wrong choice can be disasterous (UK satelite TV and European 3G phones are an example of when things go wrong, I'm sure there are US examples). This latter result is made much more likely when politicians get involved.
If you have a system where the market is not going to be allowed to work no matter what (which is the case in most things in the USA and EU) the actual choice is usually between getting a standard selected before the interested parties buy enough politicians to make the issue completely political, or letting the market in politicians decide.
GSM managed to sneak through before European politicians noticed how strategic the mobile phone industry was going to get, for instance the quality and price improvements it created completely sank the remains of the structures Thatcher set up to keep telecoms in the UK an effective monopoly. The next generation equivalent was a complete political pig's breakfast, and as a result has not taken off.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather less than for one which looked exactly like like Halle Berry.
Windows is a shell.
Dangerous, with a brittle, thin outside, and a tendency to explode.
[modded down like a thin giraffe in quicksand]
I'll take that as a no then:-).
``I don't know, kids today, ...''
Does no one remember QDOS?
That rather depends where you live. If you live below sea level the change is likely to be a step rather than a slow rise.
But, of course, I was just being silly.
Don't worry, you aren't the only one.
Some information acts on the human mind in the same way as a virus on Windows.
If you want something which really sticks, I recomend the picture of two male walrusses (ahem) doing the wild thing from the book Biological Exuberance. I think I need to wipe my brain and re-install the OS to get that one out. Indeed, without even seeing it, the concept is probably now lodged firmly in the depths of your mind, and some day you will mention it to someone else and...
This is, of course, irrelevant. That the CO2 level, and hence climate, has varied in the past is not going to be much comfort if you wake up to find your bedroom 3 feet deep in seawater.
No one (sane) is arguing that the change in CO2 and hence climate we seem to be seeing is moving the earth somewhere it hasn't been before, or that it will somehow destroy the biosphere. Indeed if it seriously impacts on human life it will likely improve things by reducing the number of people and their ability to screw things up.
The isssues are
The people who think it is a bad thing when evidence is found that human activity is causing CO2 levels to rise haven't thought it through[*]. If you are in a car accelerating towards a wall, would you prefer it to be because you are going down hill, or because you absent mindedly put your foot on the accelerator?
Personally I like Terry Pratchett's suggestion that we should all buy more books.
[*] Well, haven't thought it through or are part of the fossil fuel industry and hope to earn enough to build a bunker.
Either look the word up in a dictionary, or ask neighbouring planets what role it plays in their community.
[this message brought to you by the society for laughing at idiots who don't understand the difference between sex and gender]
The people it is easiest to eliminate are the ones whose elimination will have least impact on carbon use.
Mind you, some kind of flying robot which picks up any four wheel drive vehicle in use in an urban area and drops it and it's driver into a deep ocean trench is a possibility for significant change few people will object to...
Well, it would have made the day of the gorilla (gorilless?). Chimps are better hung than Gorillas.
I find it rather worrying that I know this.
Over 9 days. Hardly a flood.
And all of them are on the front-page as of my posting this.
Shock! The /. software fucked up. Imagine how amazed we all are that there are bugs in software. Oh me, oh my. What has the world come to! Next thing you know there will be bugs in Windows's image handling, and then where will we be!
They're not even trying to look like they aren't shoveling bullshit.
If they had released it as a game in it's own right, it would just have been just another mediocre game with little plot, no atmosphere, crap gameplay and teeny-tiny levels. It was pretending it was in some way related to Deus Ex which caused people to judge it more harshly.
OTOH, that's the only reason they sold any number of copies, so from a comemrcial POV they did the right thing. They sold a lot just based on the name before word got around it was a turkey.
Of course, one reason it pissed me off was that it wouldn't run on my games machine. I upgraded the machine just to be able to find out it was crap.
WHat, `all' two of them?
Hard to believe, lets listen in to that meeting:
``Luke, I fragged your father!''
True as that is, it is probably the most horrible thing anyone has ever said about any technological project.
Imagine, something less useful than the space scuttle!:-)
s1 'just' goes up 100km and then comes down - that's cool and all, but quite useless unless you're travelling or something like that.
Actually sub-orbital rockets have lots of uses for atmospheric research etc. Waste of time sending a human being up though. I wonder if SS1 is automated enough for them to be able to convert it to a reusable unmanned sub-orbital vehicle. It would carry quite a lot of instruments.
Of course, the same can be said of a really good beer gut.
The robots being there all the way through isn't a guest appearence thing, it is the structural thing he nicked from The Hidden Fortress, it's been the assumption from the start of the first/fourth film that they would tie the series together.
If the robots ends up in the household chattels of Leia's mother, it's unsuprising they are given to Leia when she needs servents while playing rebel.
Having 3PO built by the irritating kid is just a stupidity caused by Lucas needing to do everything according to some cookie-cutter format. The irritating kid just has to do this kind of thing in order to make all self respecting human beings hate the movie.
People have managed to track their kids for a million years (depending what you count as people:-)). Should be a solved problem by now, no need for high tech.
As for curfew, if you don't know if the kid is in the house you have a remarkably quiet and undemanding child.
Loath as I am to defend Lucas' lack of imagination, it does make sense in the context of the story. If the kids comes from there, then his family will be there, so that is where Luke gets dumped with his uncle.
I suppose you could also support the return in Jedi in the same kind of way -- Solo was there because he delt with someone there, and so that was where he got dragged back to. However, it would have been so easy to give Jabba a home on another planet.
However, one thing I think it's important to remember is that Lucas' stated aim was not to produce good SF. He was aiming to create the feel of a pulp series, and those were always claustrophobic. How many planets Ming the Merciless rule?
I believe (and this is deep evil legal magic, so don't anyone base anything on it) that whether you pay their rate or your rate depends on how much business they do with people in your country. I.e. if they start to sell lots of nerdy stuff to people in, say, the UK, then they will be able to operate as if a UK company and charge UK customers the UK VAT rate.
Why? All they have signed is a licence agreement. I would expect the big expense at this point is the models and artists impressions and so on used in the publicity.
and even billionaires don't like throwing money away...
I never said anything had been thrown away. He has bought a hell of alot of publicity. He certainly got the BBC news Web front page yesterday, and I expect the BBC TV news (I didn't see it), he certainly got the TV news I did see yesterday.
All this, by total conincidence, on the day of the first run of his new trains, when there were the expected breakdowns.
This is rather theological from the POV of a normal user. X is shipped with the system, is installed as part of the normal instalation (if you like), is declared in /etc/mtree/, it's in /usr, not /usr/local and so on.
That it isn't part of the base system is interesting for developers, but from the POV of a user you'd be hard pushed to notice any difference in status between X and, say, OpenSSH.
As your standard issue free market liberal, my instincts lie that way too, however:
This is what caused the take-off of mobile phones in the US to be so much slower than in Europe. Similarly why TV in the US was so much later than in Britain and Germany. There are times when having somoene just say `that one' really helps get things going, even if `that one' is not in fact the best available.
Standards are really good for infrastructure, if those choosing get it right. OTOH, a wrong choice can be disasterous (UK satelite TV and European 3G phones are an example of when things go wrong, I'm sure there are US examples). This latter result is made much more likely when politicians get involved.
If you have a system where the market is not going to be allowed to work no matter what (which is the case in most things in the USA and EU) the actual choice is usually between getting a standard selected before the interested parties buy enough politicians to make the issue completely political, or letting the market in politicians decide.
GSM managed to sneak through before European politicians noticed how strategic the mobile phone industry was going to get, for instance the quality and price improvements it created completely sank the remains of the structures Thatcher set up to keep telecoms in the UK an effective monopoly. The next generation equivalent was a complete political pig's breakfast, and as a result has not taken off.