One was inside the storage area that caught on fire. Not particularly big fire, and the case itself was only "licked" by flames before the fire was put out - but the plastic on/off and reset buttons on the front of it melted and the case was to be written off and thrown out. Since it was an old Pentium - no great loss. Floppy drive worked though. Kept it and years later when a friend needed a floppy drive, I dug it out of a box - and it worked.
Similar story with the other box - only different storage room and this time it was bad drainage and couple of days of rain. Water was simply coming out of a wall the whole night. Quite a sight to see in the morning. This floppy also worked - but it smelled bad. Ended up throwing it away in the end as I already had couple of spares.
I never imagined that MS developers were smart enough to actually to think of something like this. We in Macintosh land where auto-detection of floppies was standard from the beginning had simply chalked it up to a simple case of microsoft being microsoft
Such small things as having your hardware custom built, instead of dealing with gazillion different models and manufacturers, have probably made implementation of such a feature far simpler.
Oh... and that electronic floppy ejection system, which was controlled by the OS, might have had a part in that too.
IMHE - floppy drives are on of those things you could salvage even from a case that was partially burned or submerged in water. Only things in the case that are more robust and/or reusable are cables, case itself and the screws.
If you cut 10 people's carbon footprint by 30% over 20 years and during that 20 years, 3 more people are added to the group, their 70% contribution negates all savings from the 30%reduction.
I guess you were to busy driving your gas guzzling SUV, getting 2 miles per gallon, while eating big greasy cheeseburgers in those old-fashioned styrofoam containers and chucking those containers through the window of your car - to actually do some number crunching there. 30% out of 10 is 3 - yes... BUT...
Those 3 people are also gonna have their carbon emissions scaled down - so take 30% off of them too. That would be 0.9 - almost an entire person. So, starting with 10, you end up with 13 people - who are creating as much of CO2 as 9 people did before. More people, less pollution.
Or don't have those 3 new ones cut their emissions. You still get 13 people tomorrow producing as much as 10 do today. So, with those 10 reducing their emissions by 30%, and those extra 3 not reducing at all - you get a 7.7% reduction per capita. Again - more people, less pollution.
Or let me illustrate it like this.
The ship is sinking in the middle of the ocean and there are not enough lifeboats. Help is on the way, but it won't get there before crew and passengers get a chance to see just how good swimmers they are.
Each lifeboat seats 10 "regular" humans - weighing about 80 kg. As a bunch of fat bastards from first class show up on the deck, captain decides to put a temporary moratorium on the people's rights and the democracy - takes out a gun and proclaims himself the sole authority on the seating arrangements in the life boats.
So, he has someone bring a scale to the deck and starts weighing passengers. If you are 30% lighter than the "regular" 80-kilo human - you get an instant ticket on the life boat.
So, he fills the boat with 10 people weighing 56 kilos or less (80 kg - 30%) - and he still has weight capacity left for 4 more skinny people. Someone will have to sit in someone else's lap - but hey... They only weigh about 56 kilos or less. Plus... they have about 16 kilos left - captain adds 4 more babies to the people in the life boat and sends them on their way.
So... While he could have let 5 rich fat fucks take the boat, or have 10 average (spending) people rowing off to safety - with a little creative rationing the brave but politically incorrect captain got 14 people and 4 babies in that same boat. He could have also said "Fuck the babies" and loaded the boat with 10 "light" and 3 regular people. But saving babies from drowning illustrates the point kinda better.
you can see that it would be almost impossible to go back 10 years in carbon production while the needs of the people are constantly increasing.
You can see that it WOULD NOT be impossible. Plus - needs of the people are not increasing EQUALLY. A village somewhere in Africa that needs a wind or solar powered water pump DOES NOT equal one lard-ass in the developed world who spends dozen such pumps on lattes each year.
By cutting down on your own emissions and implementing clean energy sources on the large scale - YOU get to keep nearly all of your current comforts, plus you let some developing countries reach a higher level of civilization in the process. And not only do you get to live a cleaner and healthier life with less chance for getting cancer and with a "better" body due to actually walking a bit here and there - by raising standards of those poor people in the "Third World" you reduce the chances that in the future they will feel the urge to chuck a plane or two into some buildings near your home. Or a carcass crawling with Ebola into your local water supply.
Or... somewhere... out.. ummm... there. Bellow the trees, in the orchards... waiting. Heroically preserving plants (and by their eating habits - the rocks too) by eating only "dead" fruit, like some kind of vegetation-vultures.
Definition of fruitarian Some fruitarians will eat only what falls (or would fall) naturally from a plant, that is: foods that can be harvested without killing the plant. These foods consist primarily of culinary fruits, nuts, and seeds. Some do not eat grains, believing it is unnatural to do so, and some fruitarians feel that it is improper for humans to eat seeds. Others believe they should eat only plants that spread seeds when the plant is eaten. Others eat seeds and some cooked foods. Some fruitarians use the botanical definitions of fruits and consume pulses, such as many beans and peas, while others include green leafy vegetables and/or root vegetables in their diet.
Motivation Some fruitarians believe fruitarianism was the original diet of mankind in the form of Adam and Eve based on Genesis 1:29. They believe that a return to an Eden-like paradise will require simple living and a holistic approach to health and diet. Some fruitarians wish to avoid killing in all its forms, including plants. Some fruitarians say that eating some types of fruit does the parent plant a favor and that fleshy fruit has evolved to be eaten by animals, to achieve seed dispersal.
Keep an eye out for any local fruitarians. When the civilization collapses, we will breed them for their meat and hide.
I couldn't read the whole thing. Closed the tab in disgust when TFA started talking about 24 hours of drinking water and gasoline not being pump-able from the underground tanks because there would be no electricity.
Besides the obvious solutions of getting a portable generator to both water and gasoline pumps and implementing rationing - is there some law of nature that would prevent lowering a bucket into the gas-tank or loading up with water canisters and hauling it up to the 10th+ floor of your Manhattan apartment? Or is that too much work and people would rather starve and dehydrate than godforbid do some physical labor.
I've also noticed before I closed the tab that the author of that piece of shit article started masturbating about "30 days of coal left". I'd like to show him how you get the coal - by driving a pickaxe between his cranial lobes.
People writing such crap should be made an example of public ridicule. Crowds of small children should chase them through the streets flinging rotten vegetables at them. If they want to write Fallout fan-fiction let them.
A transformer isn't like a PC where you can just swap out "broken components"... When they say the transformers will be destroyed, they mean the massive coils of wire will MELT AND FUSE TOGETHER. You can't just replace something like that, you have to wind a new coil. That's what takes so long, and what they have so few backups for.
Can you fix a "burned out" motherboard by testing each component on it and replacing broken ones with ones that work?
Same with the transformer. Only there are far fewer components and they are mostly coils of wire. Usually sets of 3 - one for each phase. If 1 of those 3 is not fused - you may have a working transformer on your hands. Only 1 phase, but hey - we mostly use only 1.
And that is just with some relatively simple rewiring - not taking coils out for rewinding, which can also be done.
I'm talking about getting SOME power, of ANY consistency for short periods of time if need be. NOT business as usual by any means. Getting transformers that would work for couple of hours a day if needed - not just flipping a giant red switch inside and making it magically OK.
All 3 phases at exactly the same time in exactly the same way on a dozen or more transformers across the town?
When you have the choice of shoddy power supply for couple of hours a day until things get fixed properly or no power at all for weeks or months - you find out that there is a shitload one can salvage from a burning transformer.
For those of us not in the know, can you explain which parts of what is in essence little more than two large coils of wire can be salvaged when the wire has caught light?
The one with the less burn marks on it Mr. Smartypants.:P
Exactly because transformers are little more than coils of wire submerged (or not - some, smaller ones, rely on air-cooling) in oil-coolant - there is not that much to go wrong when it does go wrong. Unless they fuse into a ball of copper you can even rewind the coils and build transformers from two completely useless ones - just as you can build a small transformer by hand. Sure, you can't do that at home with a Leatherman and a stick of gum - but you CAN do it in a specialized machine shop. The kind that can be found at the premises of power companies.
Also, here is a textbook example of a transformer. Note multiple coils and separate coolant tank.
Are you telling me that out of perhaps.. 20... of such devices ALL of them will be so ruined that no single coil or a liter of coolant will be salvageable? In a case of such an event I am guessing that we have nothing to worry about - electromagnetic radiation will fry us anyway.
How? We're not just talking about supply problems, we're talking distribution as well. With powerlines and substations down, there's no way to switch who gets the power.
Ah! I'm glad you asked that. There is this set of secret skills they teach all power-technicians.
Like WALKING and FLIPPING SWITCHES BY HAND! Or even DRIVING to the grid-junction. In a case of an emergency they can even coordinate their work down to a minute - by LOOKING AT A WATCH!
Again, the scenario in TFA is about complete blackout, not intermittent supply -- this is on a completely different scale.
The 4-hours-a-day scenario I was talking about is not the start of the situation. That is the second or third day scenario, when SOME power becomes available and distributable. THAT can last for days, weeks, months - getting better incrementally. Fixing things city block by city block. 4 hours turn to 6, 8, 12... Then you get 24-hour power with short breaks here and there. Then... things get back to normal.
You're assuming that they're going to fail in random ways. What's being described is that every one of them fails in exactly the same way -- which means you can't cobble together a single working one from multiple failed ones.
And how exactly are they going to fail?
There is some secret procedure manual that THE SUN follows when creating transformer-killing solar storms? It is a random electromagnetic event, created by a god damn STAR millions of kilometers away, that is supposed to influence widely distributed coils of wire on a rotating ball-shaped rock we call Earth.
FUCK YEAH IT IS GOING TO BE RANDOM!
Look at it this way... Have all your lightbulbs over the years burned out in EXACTLY the same way? Lot less random factors there...
Also... have you ever walked or drove around town while listening to the radio? Did you notice the changes in the audio quality? Kinda random seeming right? Guess what the radio waves and solar storms have in common?
Both are electromagnetic radiation, and as such there ARE differences in their distribution across this planet of ours. Differences, which due to the lack of our ability to measure and/or predict them with enough accuracy all of the time, can and are considered random.
What is going to happen is that people are going to have a horrible jolt to their comfort levels. We'll move from TV to battery powered radios, and have to give up our dependance on pre-made frozen meals.
Exactly! Just as people who go out for camping don't kill and eat their fellow campers the first night away from TV, so would humans in the cities adapt for a couple of days or weeks. Eat canned food paid for in cash instead of with credit cards and play monopoly or poker instead of Halo3 or whatever.
We'll probably lose more to riots and looting than directly caused reasons.
Thank god police and army run on beans and water and not electricity.
No power utility has enough spare distribution transformers on hand to replace all of them after they go. They are usually built to order and take 12 months or more to produce. So why don't you imagine a power outage that lasts for months or years across the entire Northeast United States and tell me how undramatic it is? No refrigeration, no gasoline for your car (no electric to pump it through pipelines or service stations), limited and rationed modern medicine, no pumped potable water, no water treatment plants, no HVAC systems, limited communications, etc, etc, etc.
In a case of a large scale power-system breakdown you don't go and try to bring it all back up all at once. And you sure as hell don't sit on your ass crying, mourning the end of civilization and your X-box points.
Instead, teams of experienced technicians (you know... all those people with the various degrees in electrical engineering) start fixing the grid so that they can have parts of it running as soon as possible. 1 transformer, 2 transformers, 3 transformers, 4... You lack the parts? Pillage the dead transformers. There is a PRETTY good chance you can take 2 or 3 dead ones and have 1 working in under 24 hours. Fix the ones that CAN be fixed, leave the completely messed up ones for later replacement. Don't have enough power to power the entire town cause the nation-wide system is down? DON'T. Give one half of town 12 hours of power and then turn them off for the next 12 hours while the other half gets their 12 hours. Or 8. Or 6.
Hell... During the war (I'm from Bosnia) people used to steal cooling oil from the transformers (you can run chainsaws for cutting wood, and even cars on that stuff), artillery shells would explode next to them drilling them up with shrapnel, even the local power-plant got hit couple of times so bad that technicians had to take it off line to patch the pipes in the cooling towers. Let me tell you... you get used to 4 hours of electricity per day (or less) VERY fast. You leave the lights on to wake you up when it comes on. Charge the batteries, cook, wash clothes, heat up the boiler and then go about your business waiting for better times.
And when you are trying to grade something "objectively" (or at least you are trying to keep the pretense of objectivity - like MPAA) - you must be able to quantify.
So, you get people counting F-words, stab wounds, examining bullet holes, measuring puddles of blood and etc. - pretending that they are actually doing something more than just saying "I like this movie, it is OK" or "I don't like this movie, give it an R or NC-17".
On another note - graphic violence is dulling. You see it clearly in front of you and it becomes clinical. Like those re-enactment scenes on the CSI shows. Bullet goes from A to B, puncturing some meat, bones, exiting the body and jamming itself in the wall. Yawn.
In case of the implied violence (if done right) - you, the audience, take part in deciding the extent of the violence. You add the blood, the gushing wounds, the pain...
Explicit violence just for the violence's sake just gets you a Grindhouse movie.
Try this... Write down how you remember that scene, and go and watch it again and write down what you actually see. Compare notes.
Does he slit his throat or just his mouth? If he is holding a knife in his mouth, how many cuts does he make? Does he stab him or just cut him? Also... what happens to the Chechen? Does he get fed to his dogs? How about Lau? Does he burn along with the money? Do we get to see it?
Most of the violence in The Dark Knight is left to the viewers' imagination. It is played up before that, by actors, by direction, editing, music... So, when the actual scene does come - just a hint of what is supposed to happen in the scene is enough. You add the last piece of the puzzle yourself.
The box office on that one was great. I hear another is in the works, and I doubt it will be PG-13.
Batman Begins (2005) - Rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements. The Dark Knight (2008) - Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.
Remember that scene where they bring Joker's "corpse" to Gambol, only Joker jumps up from the table alive and psychotic...? What exactly does he do to Gambol? How about those two guys that were standing right next to his "corpse"? Did you ever actually see what happens there?
A good director can do wonders with PG-13. Always remember that we never really see the actual stabbing in Psycho.
Why the R-Rating then? Phantom boobs, men dressed in women clothing and even toilets being flushed.
When was the last time that happened? The Boxer Rebellion? When "civilized" colonial nations jumped in to state the claim on their part of China? Well... if USA is to do something like that again, I suggest it once more sends a priest to lead the pillaging. They have a proven record of being VERY good at it.
And people wonder why a 20+ year of war followed by 30 years of Mao's terror seemed like a good idea to the Chinese. Guess they decided that if they are going to be fucked in the ass - at least they can try to keep it local.
I would love to change my post to accommodate your "EVERYONE IS SPECIAL!!!" ways.
This is slashdot. People don't get to change their posts. But they do get to regret them.
Remember that for when some day in the future your Chinese boss lets you go for the "lack of productivity", "restructuring" or some other excuse. I'm guessing from your way of talking that you are young enough to live to experience that.
I was feigning arrogance and ignorance - unlike the GP who proposes that one of the world's oldest civilizations, and home of a quarter of the world's human population "be brought out of the stone age". And suggesting, by mentioning Commodore Perry, that it should be done by force. By a country of mere 306 million, who owe a shitload of money to the above mentioned "stone age" country.
But I guess that subtle humor is an elegant weapon, for a more civilized times. At least on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Two different cases of casings.
One was inside the storage area that caught on fire.
Not particularly big fire, and the case itself was only "licked" by flames before the fire was put out - but the plastic on/off and reset buttons on the front of it melted and the case was to be written off and thrown out.
Since it was an old Pentium - no great loss. Floppy drive worked though. Kept it and years later when a friend needed a floppy drive, I dug it out of a box - and it worked.
Similar story with the other box - only different storage room and this time it was bad drainage and couple of days of rain.
Water was simply coming out of a wall the whole night. Quite a sight to see in the morning.
This floppy also worked - but it smelled bad. Ended up throwing it away in the end as I already had couple of spares.
I never imagined that MS developers were smart enough to actually to think of something like this. We in Macintosh land where auto-detection of floppies was standard from the beginning had simply chalked it up to a simple case of microsoft being microsoft
Such small things as having your hardware custom built, instead of dealing with gazillion different models and manufacturers, have probably made implementation of such a feature far simpler.
Oh... and that electronic floppy ejection system, which was controlled by the OS, might have had a part in that too.
Really..?
IMHE - floppy drives are on of those things you could salvage even from a case that was partially burned or submerged in water.
Only things in the case that are more robust and/or reusable are cables, case itself and the screws.
How much would they be willing to pay for some other celestial body. Say for example... Uranus?
Some Tchaikovsky I hope?
If you cut 10 people's carbon footprint by 30% over 20 years and during that 20 years, 3 more people are added to the group, their 70% contribution negates all savings from the 30%reduction.
I guess you were to busy driving your gas guzzling SUV, getting 2 miles per gallon, while eating big greasy cheeseburgers in those old-fashioned styrofoam containers and chucking those containers through the window of your car - to actually do some number crunching there.
30% out of 10 is 3 - yes... BUT...
Those 3 people are also gonna have their carbon emissions scaled down - so take 30% off of them too. That would be 0.9 - almost an entire person.
So, starting with 10, you end up with 13 people - who are creating as much of CO2 as 9 people did before. More people, less pollution.
Or don't have those 3 new ones cut their emissions. You still get 13 people tomorrow producing as much as 10 do today.
So, with those 10 reducing their emissions by 30%, and those extra 3 not reducing at all - you get a 7.7% reduction per capita.
Again - more people, less pollution.
Or let me illustrate it like this.
The ship is sinking in the middle of the ocean and there are not enough lifeboats.
Help is on the way, but it won't get there before crew and passengers get a chance to see just how good swimmers they are.
Each lifeboat seats 10 "regular" humans - weighing about 80 kg.
As a bunch of fat bastards from first class show up on the deck, captain decides to put a temporary moratorium on the people's rights and the democracy - takes out a gun and proclaims himself the sole authority on the seating arrangements in the life boats.
So, he has someone bring a scale to the deck and starts weighing passengers.
If you are 30% lighter than the "regular" 80-kilo human - you get an instant ticket on the life boat.
So, he fills the boat with 10 people weighing 56 kilos or less (80 kg - 30%) - and he still has weight capacity left for 4 more skinny people.
Someone will have to sit in someone else's lap - but hey... They only weigh about 56 kilos or less.
Plus... they have about 16 kilos left - captain adds 4 more babies to the people in the life boat and sends them on their way.
So... While he could have let 5 rich fat fucks take the boat, or have 10 average (spending) people rowing off to safety - with a little creative rationing the brave but politically incorrect captain got 14 people and 4 babies in that same boat.
He could have also said "Fuck the babies" and loaded the boat with 10 "light" and 3 regular people.
But saving babies from drowning illustrates the point kinda better.
you can see that it would be almost impossible to go back 10 years in carbon production while the needs of the people are constantly increasing.
You can see that it WOULD NOT be impossible.
Plus - needs of the people are not increasing EQUALLY.
A village somewhere in Africa that needs a wind or solar powered water pump DOES NOT equal one lard-ass in the developed world who spends dozen such pumps on lattes each year.
By cutting down on your own emissions and implementing clean energy sources on the large scale - YOU get to keep nearly all of your current comforts, plus you let some developing countries reach a higher level of civilization in the process.
And not only do you get to live a cleaner and healthier life with less chance for getting cancer and with a "better" body due to actually walking a bit here and there - by raising standards of those poor people in the "Third World" you reduce the chances that in the future they will feel the urge to chuck a plane or two into some buildings near your home.
Or a carcass crawling with Ebola into your local water supply.
Fruitarians are here!
Or... somewhere... out.. ummm... there. Bellow the trees, in the orchards... waiting.
Heroically preserving plants (and by their eating habits - the rocks too) by eating only "dead" fruit, like some kind of vegetation-vultures.
Keep an eye out for any local fruitarians. When the civilization collapses, we will breed them for their meat and hide.
I couldn't read the whole thing.
Closed the tab in disgust when TFA started talking about 24 hours of drinking water and gasoline not being pump-able from the underground tanks because there would be no electricity.
Besides the obvious solutions of getting a portable generator to both water and gasoline pumps and implementing rationing - is there some law of nature that would prevent lowering a bucket into the gas-tank or loading up with water canisters and hauling it up to the 10th+ floor of your Manhattan apartment?
Or is that too much work and people would rather starve and dehydrate than godforbid do some physical labor.
I've also noticed before I closed the tab that the author of that piece of shit article started masturbating about "30 days of coal left".
I'd like to show him how you get the coal - by driving a pickaxe between his cranial lobes.
People writing such crap should be made an example of public ridicule.
Crowds of small children should chase them through the streets flinging rotten vegetables at them.
If they want to write Fallout fan-fiction let them.
But DON'T let them call that "science".
Can you fix a "burned out" motherboard by testing each component on it and replacing broken ones with ones that work?
Same with the transformer. Only there are far fewer components and they are mostly coils of wire. Usually sets of 3 - one for each phase.
If 1 of those 3 is not fused - you may have a working transformer on your hands.
Only 1 phase, but hey - we mostly use only 1.
And that is just with some relatively simple rewiring - not taking coils out for rewinding, which can also be done.
I'm talking about getting SOME power, of ANY consistency for short periods of time if need be. NOT business as usual by any means.
Getting transformers that would work for couple of hours a day if needed - not just flipping a giant red switch inside and making it magically OK.
All 3 phases at exactly the same time in exactly the same way on a dozen or more transformers across the town?
When you have the choice of shoddy power supply for couple of hours a day until things get fixed properly or no power at all for weeks or months - you find out that there is a shitload one can salvage from a burning transformer.
For those of us not in the know, can you explain which parts of what is in essence little more than two large coils of wire can be salvaged when the wire has caught light?
The one with the less burn marks on it Mr. Smartypants. :P
Exactly because transformers are little more than coils of wire submerged (or not - some, smaller ones, rely on air-cooling) in oil-coolant - there is not that much to go wrong when it does go wrong.
Unless they fuse into a ball of copper you can even rewind the coils and build transformers from two completely useless ones - just as you can build a small transformer by hand.
Sure, you can't do that at home with a Leatherman and a stick of gum - but you CAN do it in a specialized machine shop.
The kind that can be found at the premises of power companies.
Also, here is a textbook example of a transformer.
Note multiple coils and separate coolant tank.
Are you telling me that out of perhaps.. 20... of such devices ALL of them will be so ruined that no single coil or a liter of coolant will be salvageable?
In a case of such an event I am guessing that we have nothing to worry about - electromagnetic radiation will fry us anyway.
How? We're not just talking about supply problems, we're talking distribution as well. With powerlines and substations down, there's no way to switch who gets the power.
Ah! I'm glad you asked that.
There is this set of secret skills they teach all power-technicians.
Like WALKING and FLIPPING SWITCHES BY HAND! Or even DRIVING to the grid-junction.
In a case of an emergency they can even coordinate their work down to a minute - by LOOKING AT A WATCH!
Again, the scenario in TFA is about complete blackout, not intermittent supply -- this is on a completely different scale.
The 4-hours-a-day scenario I was talking about is not the start of the situation.
That is the second or third day scenario, when SOME power becomes available and distributable.
THAT can last for days, weeks, months - getting better incrementally. Fixing things city block by city block.
4 hours turn to 6, 8, 12... Then you get 24-hour power with short breaks here and there. Then... things get back to normal.
And how exactly are they going to fail?
There is some secret procedure manual that THE SUN follows when creating transformer-killing solar storms?
It is a random electromagnetic event, created by a god damn STAR millions of kilometers away, that is supposed to influence widely distributed coils of wire on a rotating ball-shaped rock we call Earth.
FUCK YEAH IT IS GOING TO BE RANDOM!
Look at it this way... Have all your lightbulbs over the years burned out in EXACTLY the same way? Lot less random factors there...
Also... have you ever walked or drove around town while listening to the radio? Did you notice the changes in the audio quality? Kinda random seeming right?
Guess what the radio waves and solar storms have in common?
Both are electromagnetic radiation, and as such there ARE differences in their distribution across this planet of ours.
Differences, which due to the lack of our ability to measure and/or predict them with enough accuracy all of the time, can and are considered random.
What is going to happen is that people are going to have a horrible jolt to their comfort levels. We'll move from TV to battery powered radios, and have to give up our dependance on pre-made frozen meals.
Exactly!
Just as people who go out for camping don't kill and eat their fellow campers the first night away from TV, so would humans in the cities adapt for a couple of days or weeks.
Eat canned food paid for in cash instead of with credit cards and play monopoly or poker instead of Halo3 or whatever.
We'll probably lose more to riots and looting than directly caused reasons.
Thank god police and army run on beans and water and not electricity.
Bullshit, FUD and fearmongering...
In a case of a large scale power-system breakdown you don't go and try to bring it all back up all at once.
And you sure as hell don't sit on your ass crying, mourning the end of civilization and your X-box points.
Instead, teams of experienced technicians (you know... all those people with the various degrees in electrical engineering) start fixing the grid so that they can have parts of it running as soon as possible.
1 transformer, 2 transformers, 3 transformers, 4...
You lack the parts? Pillage the dead transformers. There is a PRETTY good chance you can take 2 or 3 dead ones and have 1 working in under 24 hours.
Fix the ones that CAN be fixed, leave the completely messed up ones for later replacement.
Don't have enough power to power the entire town cause the nation-wide system is down? DON'T.
Give one half of town 12 hours of power and then turn them off for the next 12 hours while the other half gets their 12 hours. Or 8. Or 6.
Hell... During the war (I'm from Bosnia) people used to steal cooling oil from the transformers (you can run chainsaws for cutting wood, and even cars on that stuff), artillery shells would explode next to them drilling them up with shrapnel, even the local power-plant got hit couple of times so bad that technicians had to take it off line to patch the pipes in the cooling towers.
Let me tell you... you get used to 4 hours of electricity per day (or less) VERY fast.
You leave the lights on to wake you up when it comes on.
Charge the batteries, cook, wash clothes, heat up the boiler and then go about your business waiting for better times.
And when you are trying to grade something "objectively" (or at least you are trying to keep the pretense of objectivity - like MPAA) - you must be able to quantify.
So, you get people counting F-words, stab wounds, examining bullet holes, measuring puddles of blood and etc. - pretending that they are actually doing something more than just saying "I like this movie, it is OK" or "I don't like this movie, give it an R or NC-17".
On another note - graphic violence is dulling.
You see it clearly in front of you and it becomes clinical. Like those re-enactment scenes on the CSI shows.
Bullet goes from A to B, puncturing some meat, bones, exiting the body and jamming itself in the wall. Yawn.
In case of the implied violence (if done right) - you, the audience, take part in deciding the extent of the violence.
You add the blood, the gushing wounds, the pain...
Explicit violence just for the violence's sake just gets you a Grindhouse movie.
I make great pancakes (that's crepe for the American slashdotters).
... this way finally all the future cars will be metallic-silver, metallic-gray and pristine white.
Future might actually look something like the future we were promised so many times.
Try this... Write down how you remember that scene, and go and watch it again and write down what you actually see.
Compare notes.
Does he slit his throat or just his mouth? If he is holding a knife in his mouth, how many cuts does he make? Does he stab him or just cut him?
Also... what happens to the Chechen? Does he get fed to his dogs? How about Lau? Does he burn along with the money? Do we get to see it?
Most of the violence in The Dark Knight is left to the viewers' imagination.
It is played up before that, by actors, by direction, editing, music...
So, when the actual scene does come - just a hint of what is supposed to happen in the scene is enough.
You add the last piece of the puzzle yourself.
Kirby Dick?
Batman Begins (2005) - Rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements.
The Dark Knight (2008) - Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.
Remember that scene where they bring Joker's "corpse" to Gambol, only Joker jumps up from the table alive and psychotic...?
What exactly does he do to Gambol?
How about those two guys that were standing right next to his "corpse"?
Did you ever actually see what happens there?
A good director can do wonders with PG-13.
Always remember that we never really see the actual stabbing in Psycho.
Why the R-Rating then? Phantom boobs, men dressed in women clothing and even toilets being flushed.
You would be stealing A backup copy of THE Internet. An incomplete one at that, but still quite extensive.
Now... If you were somehow able to steal that copy AND break the internet... your stolen internet may be considered THE internet.
Several.
With varying levels of subtlety, from kindergarten to intellectual.
Keep forgetting this is slashdot. Stick to the fart jokes, movie quotes and internet memes.
Must write that down somewhere...
When was the last time that happened?
The Boxer Rebellion? When "civilized" colonial nations jumped in to state the claim on their part of China?
Well... if USA is to do something like that again, I suggest it once more sends a priest to lead the pillaging. They have a proven record of being VERY good at it.
And people wonder why a 20+ year of war followed by 30 years of Mao's terror seemed like a good idea to the Chinese.
Guess they decided that if they are going to be fucked in the ass - at least they can try to keep it local.
I would love to change my post to accommodate your "EVERYONE IS SPECIAL!!!" ways.
This is slashdot. People don't get to change their posts. But they do get to regret them.
Remember that for when some day in the future your Chinese boss lets you go for the "lack of productivity", "restructuring" or some other excuse.
I'm guessing from your way of talking that you are young enough to live to experience that.
Yeah, I was quite aware of that.
I was feigning arrogance and ignorance - unlike the GP who proposes that one of the world's oldest civilizations, and home of a quarter of the world's human population "be brought out of the stone age".
And suggesting, by mentioning Commodore Perry, that it should be done by force.
By a country of mere 306 million, who owe a shitload of money to the above mentioned "stone age" country.
But I guess that subtle humor is an elegant weapon, for a more civilized times.
At least on slashdot.
WHOOSH!
Shut up with your Asian fetish already!
We get it! You like Asians, OK, fine.