Yes! This is indeed quite preferable to downloading these films for free with quality subtitles. How will the Triad be able to provide slaves for shipping and drug-running without our $60?
Hell, what's a geek if not a 9 year-old girl in the body of a fat-assed white guy. Obsessive desire to collect expensive products no one else wants, drawing of innane distinctions between productivity tools based on qualities irelevent to their function, rampantly over-idealized view of how the real world works, lack of a sex life...
So shut up and watch your damn cartoons. Some Japanese marketing guys went through a lot of effort to figure out what your demographic likes, now enjoy, damnit.
They've got different goals, but they were developed kinda parellel to eachother. Naussica is war-centric, Mononoke is evironment-centric, but he did come up with them (at least the main characters) at about the same time, so there's a bit of overlap. And really, in the Nausicaa manga, he spends a lot more time covering most of Mononoke's points. I think there's also something about how the Mononoke ending was mostly making up for the way they changed the Nausicaa anime to have that tacked happy ending.
Well considering all people that get released after 10 or so years on death row without even the apolog... sorry... "admission of error" this guy got, I think he's already been compensated.
If this is a failed attempt at a dog-eating joke, I'm exterminating humanity from the face of the earth in hopes that our next gene pool might not be defective.
Great. I guess we can expect 500 comments full of a combination of racism and idiocy.
A brief summary: Takeout joke blah blah blah stupid MSG joke blah blah blah somebody confusing Korea and China and making a dog-eating joke blah blah blah something so goddamn offensive I can't even think of it, but it'll happen blah blah blah communism is bad blah blah blah communists don't care if they die blah blah blah militarizing space blah blah blah this something about libertarians or Ayn Rand blah blah blah does it run Linux blah blah blah Bush is gonna declare war on China blah blah blah one or two people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about but are so hopelessly drowned out by racist non-humor that I'll never read them.
I said something about Jefferson's Bible in my other post, but I found it for you here. Notice the lack of rising from the dead or miracle births. Wikipedia has some more about Jefferson's religion. He wasn't quite pat with the masonic god, but then again, "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." He was largely deist, though. Sort of a reverse-agnostic. God has to be physical quanity if he exists, and you should be able to prove him one way or another. The masons took that for a little loop, put they're from the same place, fundamentally.
Indeed. Jefferson (as well as Madison and probably Washington too, but I'm not absolutely sure) believed miracles were impossbile, and as such Jesus couldn't have been the son of God. There's a Jefferson version of the New Testement out there somewhere, where he cut out all the bits he thought were bullshit. Did a pretty good job, I think. The UVA library scaned it and put it on the web, shouldn't be hard to find.
Most of the delegates at the Continental Congress would identify themselves as either unitarian or deist. Franklin, if you believe the rumors (which were not all that odd, considering all the time he spent with French hookers) spent quite a bit of his times in England at "The Hell Fire Club" where they made up pagan rituals involving a suspiciously disproportionate number of orgies. Franklin was a fan of thinly-veiled excuses for hot monkey-sex. Thomas Paine, the guy who really got the revolution going, was rather emphatically opposed to the entire concept of organized religion. He considered it to be slightly worse than slavery, since slavery was at least honest.
The vast majority of Americans at the time of the Revolution did not go to church regularly. The most popular versions of Christianity were Quaker and Menonite-type things, where you just got together with your family and read the Bible once and awhile. It was not generally frowned upon to have a few kids before you managed to find the time to get married, so long as you were planning on getting around to it eventually.
Whenever you see "God" written by Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Paine, Washington, or most of the "Sons of Liberty", they almost always mean "natural order". "God" is the collective laws of nature, like Einstein's usage, only the founders usually applied it to the direction society and politics naturally move, rather than physics.
The US is not even at all based on the Judeo-Christan God. It's not even that much based on the Masonic god, although it's closer. It's based on John Locke. That's it. If you want to institute manditory worship of Locke based on the argument that he started the country, you'd have a stupid, but at least correct, point. The Judeo-Christian God only founded America in the sense that Judeo-Christians were the crazy bastards America was trying to get away from.
Well, considering that in 2nd grade I tried to sit out (well, I stood and didn't say the "under God" bit) the pledge and got yelled at for disrespecting the teacher's war-veteran father, sent to the principal's office, sent to the library, then sent back to the class after lunch, at which point she called me a "turd", I think I learned extremely little about respecting the beliefs of others.
I sing everybody's national anthems. They're fun. Badly-phrased oaths of loyalty to random shit aren't nearly so fun. How is the US not divisible? We had a fucking secession, for god's sake. And we've got states! We're hardly even uniform, how are we indivisible? Don't get me started in the whole paradox that is a republic "under" anything. What the hell happened to the people being the final authority?
Incidentally, does it make me a bad American that I know all the words to "Oh Canada" and maybe half of "Star Spangled Banner"? It is very hard.
Putting your country under a "higher power" is enough of a problem in and of itself. "Oooh, let's lauch some nukes, if it doesn't work out, Our God will save us, he aaaalllways saves us!" Sure, nobody's gonna say that, but I'd rather not go around artificially promoting the idea.
Larry Flynt says perople think changing it is OK, and I think we can all agree he's the final authority on this sort of thing.
There's a lot wrong with the pledge. First, pledging allegience to the country, flag, president, whatever is slightly off from what our goal ought to be here. You hit it exactly. Pride in America is fine, allegience isn't. Allegience is dangerous. It encourages trust and complicity and all that other shit we're not supposed to have on this side of the Atlantic.
You can proclaim that America is the domain of God all you want, but when the government writes that proclaimation for you, even if you claim to agree with them, I get the heebie-motherfucking-jeebies something awful. And it sure as hell doesn't help when "you" are a minor that's not even old enough to really fully understand the concept of either a god or a country.
And where the hell is this anti-Americanism anyway? I suppose it's just my anti-fucking-American attitude that makes me annoyed that some pathetic, attention-starved whores decided to anally rape both my country and my religion to promote themselves to the death-fearing majority that wouldn't know faith if God shoved it up their asses. I must apoligize that my anti-American attitude forces me to grasp at this little light in the dank cave that my religion's become in the past 20 years.
Honestly, I think the US can survive a badly written meme, but I doubt my religion will, at least not for much longer. Have you been to church recently? I've been. Religion's good for more than deluding yourself into thinking you're not going to die. Or used to be. There's good shit in the Bible, stuff that's worthwhile. Mostly the stuff that's vaguely close to something Jesus actually said. You know, the communist parts. That's what I remember getting when I went to church as a kid. Now, though, I go in and all I get is 2000 year-old food-poisoning hallucinations. Giant fucking sheep in the sky? You can't run a religion on giant fucking sheep. Nobody wants giant fucking sheep. Nobody except people who can't find it in themselves to pay attention without giant fucking sheep. If that's your attitude, why bother? Way too many people have a terminal inability to accept that they just don't fucking believe. Deal with it and move on. Don't try and trick yourself into believing in shit just because you're afraid to think.
Sorry. Luckily I probably won't be going to church again for another decade, so you don't need to worry about another of these rants coming up.
Linux geeks howled a bit, but then wrote off SCO as a bunch of sleazebags and went back to playing live-action roleplaying (LARP) games in their mothers' basements, or whatever it is they do when they're not writing device drivers and complaining about clueless end users.
But then SCO started making noise about suing Linux customers too, unless they paid licensing fees to SCO. Suddenly the joke wasn't so funny anymore.
DUM DUM DUUUUM! Holy shit, the drama. First paragraph's about right, though.
The $1 billion in damages and future royalties SCO is seeking won't put a mere dent in the Linux movement: "That's a cost that gets lost in the rounding," says Boies, adding, "The cost efficiency of Linux won't rise or fall."
So either we enforce fair and social behavior, or allow full freedom and accept that people will abuse it. Hark, we've discovered the difference between anarchy and communism. Congratulations.
Have you ever seen Forbes' argument, or are you just a Junk Science fan? I don't know what it was the parent saw, but I know the Forbes company over all is a little obsessive about GM food. They're usually not arguing over how many people are allergic to the spliced-in material, they're arguing that "Roundup Ready" benefits consumers... somehow. In computer terms, they'd be supportive of a patent ruling prohibiting Open Office from being able to open Word files, since it would let MS cut costs... somehow. And, apparently, that's not just an idle analogy.
Well, I guess I might benefit immensely from moving to a planet owned by a greedy bastard in muttonchops...
Anyway, I still don't know where the hell all this money is supposed to come from. Here, somebody fight me on any of my assumtions:
1) Transportation doesn't get you a fuck of a lot without a destination.
Look, I would not pay for an X-Prize flight. Maybe that's just me, but I'm not going to pay, even if it's only $10,000 or so, to go straight up and then back down. Used Civic, or 10 minutes of weightlessness. Well, my Carolla kinda shimmies up above 70, sorry, Carmack. Even if there's a big market despite my crotchety penny-pinching, I cannot see this making anybody more than a new Doom engine would.
Space tourism in general is going to be tricky, I think. If you try and look past the standard geek space-fetish, where's the appeal? When was the last time you fantasized about a vacation in Antarctica? The weight thing is about it. If I'm right, then tourism won't fund anything bigger than one or two nice hotels on the moon and in orbit. One barren wastland looks a lot like another.
2) I don't know any business out there that would feel the need to create a destination for us.
Mining needs cheap transportation. Until it's cheaper to move a ton of steel from the moon than it is to dig deeper into Canada, no moon mines, not to mention asteroid mines. A cubic mile of pure gold beyond Mars isn't worth getting to anybody except Goldfinger, and even then, what bank is going to fund him collapsing the gold market?
DisneyMoon. Maybe. But the tourism limits are still there. Disney won't put shit on Mars, and if they do, it'll be French Disney all over again.
Even science, think about it. Other than putting things on the far side of other things to avoid contamination, there's no point. Well, there's some use in having guys on the ground to check things out, but science isn't going to be setting up the kind of extensive infastructure anywhere that would extend the tourism limits I pointed out earlier.
The only commercial venture I can concieve would be something like helium isotopes or whatever, something specific and bizzare that fills an important niche. This won't get us much. We have too much automation now, we don't need to build Boulder City on the moon. Plus, it's not the kind of thing that makes people incredibly wealthy. There's no open-ended demand. You can only run so many fusion reactors, or whatever. Unless somebody finds a safe, tolerance-free opiate deposit on Europa, this won't make anybody as rich as a railroad tycoon. Still, this is still the best stimulus I can think of for a space industry.
3) Crazy fucking colonists.
You can find some crazy fuckers who will move to mars given the opportunity. They will get the opportunity some day. But, they will have to make their own, funding it from scratch, with no chance at showing a profit, ever. Either that, or the government will hand it to them.
This is the only way anyone will get stinking rich, and it won't be the colonists. It will be the aging, government-subsidized airlines still hanging around that far down the road. They will ferry psychos between mars and earth. They will make some good money, but they still won't fund expansion. They'll probably lower the entry barrier for new bands of crazy colonists through charters and whatnot, but those colonists still won't be profitable.
4) Conclusion.
Based on the information we have and my wild guesswork and poor reasoning skills, John Carmack-types are essential here. However, they won't ever get rich. They might get a house on mars eventually, but they won't make any more money there than an equivalent-sized bunch of John Carmacks in a cave in Antarctica.
I'm not saying we're doomed to earth, but, first of all, killing NASA won't help John Carmack get to mars faster. He needs to rip off NASA's work to get there as fast as
...every government on this earth knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Horseless carriages and the Aeroplane were nothing more than rich man's toys.
Well, not really, at least for airplanes. The press was mocking them all like hell, but the Smithsonian and the War Department had put up about $100,000 between them, and were either ahead or just behind the Wrights depending on how you look at it. The Wrights' design actually worked, but if you compare it to the things the Smithsonian had been sinking in the Patomac for the last few months before the Wrights launched, the Smithsonian was quite a bit closer to what you see today.
The Smithsonian was more helpful to aeronautics than the Wrights, anyway. The Wrights weren't scientists, and you could make a good argument that they didn't really have a good idea of how lift worked. They mostly just tweaked and experimented their way to a working prototype, the Smithsonian was working on the bulding blocks for an engineering discipline. If you want to argue that somebody was working from the "expensive toy" perspective, it would be the Wrights.
Plus, if you're willing to excuse that the last Smithsonian flight worked fine, except for some damage during launch that made it list to the left so much that it was only "controlled" in the sense that they could control how big a counterclockwise circle to make, the Smithsonian actually beat the Wrights by a week or so.
What kind of sucky meme is this? We're coming off Soviet Russia and this is the best we can come up with? Is just the fact that it's from a Matt Groening cartoon enough now? Soviet Russia was at least funny the first couple times, this is just stupid.
SD Gundam has got to be the best pothead show ever. I don't know what the fuck it's about, but anything with baby robots that talk by stretching their orificeless faces around has to be hilarious when you're stoned.
They want the Wi-Fi shut down by injunction, and then they want the school to agree to not start it up again. Maybe they'll decide to go looking for money later, but quit making shit up until then.
We have insipid little sayings for a reason, you know. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity." It's because not everybody who fucks shit up royally is a greedy bastard. Sometimes they're just as moral and even just as smart as you, just ill-informed on the subject at hand.
Whoa, hold on, I just came up with a sig. "There's no such thing as evil, just stupidity and insanity." Damn I'm good. Like some kinda philosiphizing tornado, motherfuckers. Out of my way!
Slashdot Mirror
I think that Spike Spencer absolutely nailed Shinji in the dub.
I though he sounded drunk, but then again I only heard the 5 minutes before the 6 year old girl they had doing Misato came on and I quit listening.
Yes! This is indeed quite preferable to downloading these films for free with quality subtitles. How will the Triad be able to provide slaves for shipping and drug-running without our $60?
Hell, what's a geek if not a 9 year-old girl in the body of a fat-assed white guy. Obsessive desire to collect expensive products no one else wants, drawing of innane distinctions between productivity tools based on qualities irelevent to their function, rampantly over-idealized view of how the real world works, lack of a sex life...
So shut up and watch your damn cartoons. Some Japanese marketing guys went through a lot of effort to figure out what your demographic likes, now enjoy, damnit.
They've got different goals, but they were developed kinda parellel to eachother. Naussica is war-centric, Mononoke is evironment-centric, but he did come up with them (at least the main characters) at about the same time, so there's a bit of overlap. And really, in the Nausicaa manga, he spends a lot more time covering most of Mononoke's points. I think there's also something about how the Mononoke ending was mostly making up for the way they changed the Nausicaa anime to have that tacked happy ending.
G-Mo rep'esent.
Well considering all people that get released after 10 or so years on death row without even the apolog... sorry... "admission of error" this guy got, I think he's already been compensated.
Damn. Missed "made in China" too? Ok, I'm an idiot. This should be everything though, /.ers aren't that creative.
Oh, right, I forgot about badly done Japanese accent "jokes". Sorry. Should've seen it coming.
That's because they're making fun of you.
If this is a failed attempt at a dog-eating joke, I'm exterminating humanity from the face of the earth in hopes that our next gene pool might not be defective.
Great. I guess we can expect 500 comments full of a combination of racism and idiocy.
A brief summary: Takeout joke blah blah blah stupid MSG joke blah blah blah somebody confusing Korea and China and making a dog-eating joke blah blah blah something so goddamn offensive I can't even think of it, but it'll happen blah blah blah communism is bad blah blah blah communists don't care if they die blah blah blah militarizing space blah blah blah this something about libertarians or Ayn Rand blah blah blah does it run Linux blah blah blah Bush is gonna declare war on China blah blah blah one or two people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about but are so hopelessly drowned out by racist non-humor that I'll never read them.
Nice work, Slashdot!
I said something about Jefferson's Bible in my other post, but I found it for you here. Notice the lack of rising from the dead or miracle births. Wikipedia has some more about Jefferson's religion. He wasn't quite pat with the masonic god, but then again, "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." He was largely deist, though. Sort of a reverse-agnostic. God has to be physical quanity if he exists, and you should be able to prove him one way or another. The masons took that for a little loop, put they're from the same place, fundamentally.
Indeed. Jefferson (as well as Madison and probably Washington too, but I'm not absolutely sure) believed miracles were impossbile, and as such Jesus couldn't have been the son of God. There's a Jefferson version of the New Testement out there somewhere, where he cut out all the bits he thought were bullshit. Did a pretty good job, I think. The UVA library scaned it and put it on the web, shouldn't be hard to find.
Most of the delegates at the Continental Congress would identify themselves as either unitarian or deist. Franklin, if you believe the rumors (which were not all that odd, considering all the time he spent with French hookers) spent quite a bit of his times in England at "The Hell Fire Club" where they made up pagan rituals involving a suspiciously disproportionate number of orgies. Franklin was a fan of thinly-veiled excuses for hot monkey-sex. Thomas Paine, the guy who really got the revolution going, was rather emphatically opposed to the entire concept of organized religion. He considered it to be slightly worse than slavery, since slavery was at least honest.
The vast majority of Americans at the time of the Revolution did not go to church regularly. The most popular versions of Christianity were Quaker and Menonite-type things, where you just got together with your family and read the Bible once and awhile. It was not generally frowned upon to have a few kids before you managed to find the time to get married, so long as you were planning on getting around to it eventually.
Whenever you see "God" written by Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Paine, Washington, or most of the "Sons of Liberty", they almost always mean "natural order". "God" is the collective laws of nature, like Einstein's usage, only the founders usually applied it to the direction society and politics naturally move, rather than physics.
The US is not even at all based on the Judeo-Christan God. It's not even that much based on the Masonic god, although it's closer. It's based on John Locke. That's it. If you want to institute manditory worship of Locke based on the argument that he started the country, you'd have a stupid, but at least correct, point. The Judeo-Christian God only founded America in the sense that Judeo-Christians were the crazy bastards America was trying to get away from.
Well, considering that in 2nd grade I tried to sit out (well, I stood and didn't say the "under God" bit) the pledge and got yelled at for disrespecting the teacher's war-veteran father, sent to the principal's office, sent to the library, then sent back to the class after lunch, at which point she called me a "turd", I think I learned extremely little about respecting the beliefs of others.
I sing everybody's national anthems. They're fun. Badly-phrased oaths of loyalty to random shit aren't nearly so fun. How is the US not divisible? We had a fucking secession, for god's sake. And we've got states! We're hardly even uniform, how are we indivisible? Don't get me started in the whole paradox that is a republic "under" anything. What the hell happened to the people being the final authority?
Incidentally, does it make me a bad American that I know all the words to "Oh Canada" and maybe half of "Star Spangled Banner"? It is very hard.
Putting your country under a "higher power" is enough of a problem in and of itself. "Oooh, let's lauch some nukes, if it doesn't work out, Our God will save us, he aaaalllways saves us!" Sure, nobody's gonna say that, but I'd rather not go around artificially promoting the idea.
Larry Flynt says perople think changing it is OK, and I think we can all agree he's the final authority on this sort of thing.
There's a lot wrong with the pledge. First, pledging allegience to the country, flag, president, whatever is slightly off from what our goal ought to be here. You hit it exactly. Pride in America is fine, allegience isn't. Allegience is dangerous. It encourages trust and complicity and all that other shit we're not supposed to have on this side of the Atlantic.
You can proclaim that America is the domain of God all you want, but when the government writes that proclaimation for you, even if you claim to agree with them, I get the heebie-motherfucking-jeebies something awful. And it sure as hell doesn't help when "you" are a minor that's not even old enough to really fully understand the concept of either a god or a country.
And where the hell is this anti-Americanism anyway? I suppose it's just my anti-fucking-American attitude that makes me annoyed that some pathetic, attention-starved whores decided to anally rape both my country and my religion to promote themselves to the death-fearing majority that wouldn't know faith if God shoved it up their asses. I must apoligize that my anti-American attitude forces me to grasp at this little light in the dank cave that my religion's become in the past 20 years.
Honestly, I think the US can survive a badly written meme, but I doubt my religion will, at least not for much longer. Have you been to church recently? I've been. Religion's good for more than deluding yourself into thinking you're not going to die. Or used to be. There's good shit in the Bible, stuff that's worthwhile. Mostly the stuff that's vaguely close to something Jesus actually said. You know, the communist parts. That's what I remember getting when I went to church as a kid. Now, though, I go in and all I get is 2000 year-old food-poisoning hallucinations. Giant fucking sheep in the sky? You can't run a religion on giant fucking sheep. Nobody wants giant fucking sheep. Nobody except people who can't find it in themselves to pay attention without giant fucking sheep. If that's your attitude, why bother? Way too many people have a terminal inability to accept that they just don't fucking believe. Deal with it and move on. Don't try and trick yourself into believing in shit just because you're afraid to think.
Sorry. Luckily I probably won't be going to church again for another decade, so you don't need to worry about another of these rants coming up.
This one too, from a different author. I don't even know what the hell that's saying.
So either we enforce fair and social behavior, or allow full freedom and accept that people will abuse it. Hark, we've discovered the difference between anarchy and communism. Congratulations.
In Forbes America, the FSF paints you!
Have you ever seen Forbes' argument, or are you just a Junk Science fan? I don't know what it was the parent saw, but I know the Forbes company over all is a little obsessive about GM food. They're usually not arguing over how many people are allergic to the spliced-in material, they're arguing that "Roundup Ready" benefits consumers... somehow. In computer terms, they'd be supportive of a patent ruling prohibiting Open Office from being able to open Word files, since it would let MS cut costs... somehow. And, apparently, that's not just an idle analogy.
Well, I guess I might benefit immensely from moving to a planet owned by a greedy bastard in muttonchops...
Anyway, I still don't know where the hell all this money is supposed to come from. Here, somebody fight me on any of my assumtions:
1) Transportation doesn't get you a fuck of a lot without a destination.
Look, I would not pay for an X-Prize flight. Maybe that's just me, but I'm not going to pay, even if it's only $10,000 or so, to go straight up and then back down. Used Civic, or 10 minutes of weightlessness. Well, my Carolla kinda shimmies up above 70, sorry, Carmack. Even if there's a big market despite my crotchety penny-pinching, I cannot see this making anybody more than a new Doom engine would.
Space tourism in general is going to be tricky, I think. If you try and look past the standard geek space-fetish, where's the appeal? When was the last time you fantasized about a vacation in Antarctica? The weight thing is about it. If I'm right, then tourism won't fund anything bigger than one or two nice hotels on the moon and in orbit. One barren wastland looks a lot like another.
2) I don't know any business out there that would feel the need to create a destination for us.
Mining needs cheap transportation. Until it's cheaper to move a ton of steel from the moon than it is to dig deeper into Canada, no moon mines, not to mention asteroid mines. A cubic mile of pure gold beyond Mars isn't worth getting to anybody except Goldfinger, and even then, what bank is going to fund him collapsing the gold market?
DisneyMoon. Maybe. But the tourism limits are still there. Disney won't put shit on Mars, and if they do, it'll be French Disney all over again.
Even science, think about it. Other than putting things on the far side of other things to avoid contamination, there's no point. Well, there's some use in having guys on the ground to check things out, but science isn't going to be setting up the kind of extensive infastructure anywhere that would extend the tourism limits I pointed out earlier.
The only commercial venture I can concieve would be something like helium isotopes or whatever, something specific and bizzare that fills an important niche. This won't get us much. We have too much automation now, we don't need to build Boulder City on the moon. Plus, it's not the kind of thing that makes people incredibly wealthy. There's no open-ended demand. You can only run so many fusion reactors, or whatever. Unless somebody finds a safe, tolerance-free opiate deposit on Europa, this won't make anybody as rich as a railroad tycoon. Still, this is still the best stimulus I can think of for a space industry.
3) Crazy fucking colonists.
You can find some crazy fuckers who will move to mars given the opportunity. They will get the opportunity some day. But, they will have to make their own, funding it from scratch, with no chance at showing a profit, ever. Either that, or the government will hand it to them.
This is the only way anyone will get stinking rich, and it won't be the colonists. It will be the aging, government-subsidized airlines still hanging around that far down the road. They will ferry psychos between mars and earth. They will make some good money, but they still won't fund expansion. They'll probably lower the entry barrier for new bands of crazy colonists through charters and whatnot, but those colonists still won't be profitable.
4) Conclusion.
Based on the information we have and my wild guesswork and poor reasoning skills, John Carmack-types are essential here. However, they won't ever get rich. They might get a house on mars eventually, but they won't make any more money there than an equivalent-sized bunch of John Carmacks in a cave in Antarctica.
I'm not saying we're doomed to earth, but, first of all, killing NASA won't help John Carmack get to mars faster. He needs to rip off NASA's work to get there as fast as
...every government on this earth knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Horseless carriages and the Aeroplane were nothing more than rich man's toys.
Well, not really, at least for airplanes. The press was mocking them all like hell, but the Smithsonian and the War Department had put up about $100,000 between them, and were either ahead or just behind the Wrights depending on how you look at it. The Wrights' design actually worked, but if you compare it to the things the Smithsonian had been sinking in the Patomac for the last few months before the Wrights launched, the Smithsonian was quite a bit closer to what you see today.
The Smithsonian was more helpful to aeronautics than the Wrights, anyway. The Wrights weren't scientists, and you could make a good argument that they didn't really have a good idea of how lift worked. They mostly just tweaked and experimented their way to a working prototype, the Smithsonian was working on the bulding blocks for an engineering discipline. If you want to argue that somebody was working from the "expensive toy" perspective, it would be the Wrights.
Plus, if you're willing to excuse that the last Smithsonian flight worked fine, except for some damage during launch that made it list to the left so much that it was only "controlled" in the sense that they could control how big a counterclockwise circle to make, the Smithsonian actually beat the Wrights by a week or so.
What kind of sucky meme is this? We're coming off Soviet Russia and this is the best we can come up with? Is just the fact that it's from a Matt Groening cartoon enough now? Soviet Russia was at least funny the first couple times, this is just stupid.
SD Gundam has got to be the best pothead show ever. I don't know what the fuck it's about, but anything with baby robots that talk by stretching their orificeless faces around has to be hilarious when you're stoned.
Relief != Money
They want the Wi-Fi shut down by injunction, and then they want the school to agree to not start it up again. Maybe they'll decide to go looking for money later, but quit making shit up until then.
We have insipid little sayings for a reason, you know. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity." It's because not everybody who fucks shit up royally is a greedy bastard. Sometimes they're just as moral and even just as smart as you, just ill-informed on the subject at hand.
Whoa, hold on, I just came up with a sig. "There's no such thing as evil, just stupidity and insanity." Damn I'm good. Like some kinda philosiphizing tornado, motherfuckers. Out of my way!