I think he's talking about the square stickers with the pink and silver wiring on the back. Usually they've got a bar code on the other side of the wiring. They put them on the packaging, underneath the DVD. Those are just scanner-trippers, at least the one I just pulled off to take a look at.
I used to think that would work like that, but now I doubt it. They don't just want to sell you things you care about, they want to try and force you to care about things you don't. You might get more ads for things you want, which is nice, but I bet you'd still get the rest of the crap.
People always point to guys having to watch tampon ads, here. I bet you wouldn't even get rid of those! Brand recognition. How many guys get sent into drug stores with faulty instructions on an average day, you think? Perfect brand recognition opportunity. At that point, the stereotypical male is working on purely subconsious pattern recognition as the consious mind recoils in panic. Somebody wants you to regress to a Tampax commercial in that kind of clinch.
There's people that do that stuff for a living. If they have the money to spew this stuff to everyone now, they'll be able to come up with a scenario that demands the spew it to you later, no matter how much information they get.
I like the philosophy my parents used. Operate under the assumption that your child will someday be a fugative from a dystopian police state, dodging FBI profilers predicting his moves based on his past purchasing history and avoiding the ubiquitous biometric scanning systems criss-crossing every public area. Leave the trade-offs to when your kid's old enough to determine his own status in relation to The Man.
Well, most of the area's transmitters kinda caught fire and plummeted 1500 feet to the ground as lumps of melted steel. You really need something to cut in on if you're going to cut in. Plus, if Guliani had a EBS-starting box, it would've been in the emergency office, which was at the bottom of building 7, if I'm not mistaken.
I'd be more interested to know if D.C. had any alerts. The EBS is a federal system, mostly oriented towards "the Ruskies are coming!" as far as I know. I'm sure it's much easier for the feds to set it off than anyone else, at least.
Ewww. Geeks using the very air I breathe to penetrate my tender flesh with their insidious waves? No thank you! Come back when you name you waves after something other than a juicy, pink slab of meat.
CPB gets federal money, I think that's all they get, since they don't seem to be asking for donations. $362 mil this year, CPB divies it up between PBS and NPR and all kinds of other shit, like paying for all those "don't do drugs" school assemblies and whatever else. They seem to think the $90 grand they give PBS is 12%, though, and not 11%. Whatever.
Actually, most mafia-type organizations are instated with some kind of popular support, at least at first. The "protection" thing actually has some kind of basis in reality, it's not just mobsters being ironic. If you're a merchant in 16th-century Italy that isn't getting enough protection from your prince, you get private security. Of course, without police, it takes about 20 minutes for the security guards to hook up with the gangs and play both sides of the street.
GW!=Tony, anyway. Tony Soprano can get away with seeing a therapist. Polititans just let their psychoses quietly fester.
Shhh! You can't say that here! Deregulation always, always, always works! It works because the world economy is a perfectly logical, completely researched and analyzed system that can be represented with a simple equation! All this talk about economics being barely mature enough to even be called a science is just nonsense! The numbers say deregulation works in an ideal system, and since deregulation always works, we must have an ideal system, and so deregulation must work! If you disagree, your brain must be broken.
The ruling against the EPA you linked to has nothing about them lying. He disputes none of their findings, and peer reviews of that study have backed it up. What he was pissed about was that they didn't let the fox guard the henhouse. He basically just scolded them for doubting the numbers the tobacco industry consultants sent them. Go back and look at the judge for that case's record. Whenever anybody so much as mentions cigarettes, he just votes whichever way best conveys "I love Philip Moris!" The guy's a hack. The only reason that story gets spread around is Junk Science linked to it, and so everybody assumes it's cool and rebelious to talk about it.
Incidentally, I think you went a little too far forward on the Libertarian train. On the anarchy-totalitarianism political scale, you're trying to balance the increased productivity strong attrition brings against the detriments of the mounting death toll. More or less, if you're trying to be Libertarian, you have to make sure the new system makes enough extra money to still hold a profit after you clean up the corpses of the poor people that are going to starve to death.
If, for example, you vote to eliminate building permits, you have to be willing to pay to deal with the increased number of abandoned Barbie Dream-Deathtraps that will produce. There's plenty of wiggle room in the death/money scale, but between the costs of the hyperspecialization you're looking for in telecommunications, and the luxury-centered healthcare system, I think you're going to have to either get used to the stench of rotting corpses, or cut off your $2000 a month DSL line.
That's gotta be the best part of having a communist revolution. Now, I live in New Jersey, but after the revolution... The New Glorious People's Homeland of Democratic Socialist Jersey Republic!
Seriously, a moonbase is really tough to justify right now. Seriously, a western route to the orient is really tough to justify right now...
Damn, you mean we're all going to spend the next hundred years trying to find a moonbase, only to realize there isn't one, and then wait another hundred years for the French to start a Nigerian Moonbase scam and then sell the infastructure to our irritating president who will build us a moonbase to piss off the Columbians?
And who, pray tell, will get us our moon-cocaine if not the Columbians? Answer me that!
Oh my god! It's a mutated form of pneumonia! It has a moderate fatality rate when incredibly old people get it! We're all going to die!
Christ, I can live with SARS, thanks anyway. How about we rename AIDS to ACUTE And SEVERE Death From Sex SYNDROME. Maybe then somebody'd try and cure that.
Funny stuff. I wonder if psycho-politics has some kind of Uno! rule, where you have to tell everyone if you're a nutcase before you start playing.
PNAC, 1997: "Let's invade Iraq! It'll be so fucking cool!" World, 1997: "What the... Well, thank God it's just Jeb Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer and Dan Quale and Dick Cheney and a bunch of other losers, it's not like they'll ever let those dorks near a tank." PNAC, 2000: "Wonderdork powers, ACTIVATE!" World, 2000: "Shit, now they're going to invade Iraq, and it'll be so fucking cool." PNAC, 2000: "Never! I'm shocked you would say such a thing!" PNAC, 2002: "Let's invade Iraq! Uhh... Look! WMDs!" World, 2002: "Goddamnit." PNAC, 2003: "That was so fucking cool!" World, 2003: "So, you find any of those WMDs?" PNAC, 2003: "What? Come on, that's not why we invaded." World, 2003: "No shit! Really?"
Ok, well, you can hardly use the Japan/China/Korea clusterfuck over there as an indicator of any of their leanings towards world domination. If you use it against present-day China, then you have to apply the same thing to Japan and the Koreas.
The kamikaze thing makes no sense, unless you're implying that Kublai Kahn was Chinese, and if you're going to do that, then you should be talking about Genghis or somebody instead of Kublai.
The support of the North Koreans is, again, clusterfuck shit, and trying to keep your big regional rival from becoming a stable, unified nation under US protection.
I admit I don't know what the 35 parallel thing is. All I can get on that is the Georgia-Tenessee/N. Carolina border was drawn there in the 1800s. I'm assuming China wasn't involved. I'm interested in that, though.
And Taiwan's been invaded by everybody that's shown up with a boat and a gun since the 1500s. Dutch, British, Frenchies, Pirates, Japanese, Chinese, Chinese again, some different Chinese... probably a few dozen various Polynesians before that.
China isn't particularly nice, but they're undeniably isolationist, at least through 90% of their history. I'd be afraid of them building some sort of space-wall around the moon and relocating their population before I'd worry about them raining death down on the people they spent most of their history trying to pretend didn't exist.
It always sounded to me like he said "a". Maybe it's just the radio voice. That's a better thing to make fun of anyway. He's doing his big quote for history and shit, and he says it with the exact same modulation as if he were noting the time they flushed the toilet. "That'sahhhh one small stepforman... onegiantleap... formankind." I mean, sure he's a test pilot, but Shatner could do better than that.
Not many? You're the majority by about 10%, for fuck's sake. You just don't vote. Well, maybe not you personally, but the generic rebeloutside thesystem that's so independent he's surrendered the electoral system to his enemies. If you don't feel represented just show up and start changing shit. It's not like it's hard or anything. Just find out where the smallest localization of whichever party you prefer is, and rewrite their platform to whatever you want. It's not like they're going to stop you. you think anybody below national level in any of the major parties actually gives a shit? You'll probably be the only one there that isn't legally brain-dead. It won't affect anything beyond your town for awhile, but if enough people actually care, democracy almost works, you know.
To bad no one does. I'll keep working though, at least until my Castro-beard grows in. Can't lay siege to D.C. with a baby-face...
You could consider it 15. We don't have any real evidence that life has appeared from scratch more than once, or that life capable of saving itself from disasters on the scale of the death of the sun is innevitable, or even likely. Based on experimental evidence alone, we're all there is. If you work from there, we're 15 billion years of work.
Plus, if you want to consider evolution of, I don't know, evolutions, or something, then you have a better reason to say 15. As in, natural selection of entire biospheres through supernova and asteroids, cutting out everybody that can't build a starship fast enough to get away. That would still be evolution.
...distracting everybody form the fact that the only effort we put into finding the actual leader of Al-Quaeda was testing some of our potential Daisy-Cutter replacements near a few places he might have been...
Sure, the only problem is he had to pretend to be a slack-jawed yokel to get elected. Just like... about every president since Nixon. I guess we learned not to let the crafty ones near the executive-order pen.
"Linux?... Oh, I'm good at free speech, do I get more beer then?... Ohh, you mean I can write letters, and I don't have to pay a skinny glasses-wearing man?... Oh, no, he's pastier I am. Well, that's nice, but... missiles!? Who the fuck put this man in charge of my country? Someone needs a very stern talking-to!"
Politics? I kinda figured it was just the euro rising and being stable enough for rich people to be willing to keep their money in it. I mean, we're going into economic stimulus season, which means a few hundred billion getting pumped into the market this time, and if you're a rich enough bastard to make it worthwhile, you might as well move your money out now and make a load or two converting back once the dollar hits bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. I can think of plenty of places that would kill for a homosexual-dispensing mechanism of some sort. I know I would.
I think he's talking about the square stickers with the pink and silver wiring on the back. Usually they've got a bar code on the other side of the wiring. They put them on the packaging, underneath the DVD. Those are just scanner-trippers, at least the one I just pulled off to take a look at.
I used to think that would work like that, but now I doubt it. They don't just want to sell you things you care about, they want to try and force you to care about things you don't. You might get more ads for things you want, which is nice, but I bet you'd still get the rest of the crap.
People always point to guys having to watch tampon ads, here. I bet you wouldn't even get rid of those! Brand recognition. How many guys get sent into drug stores with faulty instructions on an average day, you think? Perfect brand recognition opportunity. At that point, the stereotypical male is working on purely subconsious pattern recognition as the consious mind recoils in panic. Somebody wants you to regress to a Tampax commercial in that kind of clinch.
There's people that do that stuff for a living. If they have the money to spew this stuff to everyone now, they'll be able to come up with a scenario that demands the spew it to you later, no matter how much information they get.
I like the philosophy my parents used. Operate under the assumption that your child will someday be a fugative from a dystopian police state, dodging FBI profilers predicting his moves based on his past purchasing history and avoiding the ubiquitous biometric scanning systems criss-crossing every public area. Leave the trade-offs to when your kid's old enough to determine his own status in relation to The Man.
Well, most of the area's transmitters kinda caught fire and plummeted 1500 feet to the ground as lumps of melted steel. You really need something to cut in on if you're going to cut in. Plus, if Guliani had a EBS-starting box, it would've been in the emergency office, which was at the bottom of building 7, if I'm not mistaken.
I'd be more interested to know if D.C. had any alerts. The EBS is a federal system, mostly oriented towards "the Ruskies are coming!" as far as I know. I'm sure it's much easier for the feds to set it off than anyone else, at least.
Ewww. Geeks using the very air I breathe to penetrate my tender flesh with their insidious waves? No thank you! Come back when you name you waves after something other than a juicy, pink slab of meat.
I'm proud of this comment, I really am.
You can't even measure that figure.
How about we guestimate for when I can read the HDTV prices in the J&R circular without coughing up blood in horror?
CPB gets federal money, I think that's all they get, since they don't seem to be asking for donations. $362 mil this year, CPB divies it up between PBS and NPR and all kinds of other shit, like paying for all those "don't do drugs" school assemblies and whatever else. They seem to think the $90 grand they give PBS is 12%, though, and not 11%. Whatever.
Vegetarians eat Vegetables, BEWARE the man who claims to be a Humanitarian.
Ah, but Vegans eat NOTHING but Vegetables. With Humanitarians, your fate is uncertain, but with Humans...
Actually, most mafia-type organizations are instated with some kind of popular support, at least at first. The "protection" thing actually has some kind of basis in reality, it's not just mobsters being ironic. If you're a merchant in 16th-century Italy that isn't getting enough protection from your prince, you get private security. Of course, without police, it takes about 20 minutes for the security guards to hook up with the gangs and play both sides of the street.
GW!=Tony, anyway. Tony Soprano can get away with seeing a therapist. Polititans just let their psychoses quietly fester.
Shhh! You can't say that here! Deregulation always, always, always works! It works because the world economy is a perfectly logical, completely researched and analyzed system that can be represented with a simple equation! All this talk about economics being barely mature enough to even be called a science is just nonsense! The numbers say deregulation works in an ideal system, and since deregulation always works, we must have an ideal system, and so deregulation must work! If you disagree, your brain must be broken.
The ruling against the EPA you linked to has nothing about them lying. He disputes none of their findings, and peer reviews of that study have backed it up. What he was pissed about was that they didn't let the fox guard the henhouse. He basically just scolded them for doubting the numbers the tobacco industry consultants sent them. Go back and look at the judge for that case's record. Whenever anybody so much as mentions cigarettes, he just votes whichever way best conveys "I love Philip Moris!" The guy's a hack. The only reason that story gets spread around is Junk Science linked to it, and so everybody assumes it's cool and rebelious to talk about it.
Incidentally, I think you went a little too far forward on the Libertarian train. On the anarchy-totalitarianism political scale, you're trying to balance the increased productivity strong attrition brings against the detriments of the mounting death toll. More or less, if you're trying to be Libertarian, you have to make sure the new system makes enough extra money to still hold a profit after you clean up the corpses of the poor people that are going to starve to death.
If, for example, you vote to eliminate building permits, you have to be willing to pay to deal with the increased number of abandoned Barbie Dream-Deathtraps that will produce. There's plenty of wiggle room in the death/money scale, but between the costs of the hyperspecialization you're looking for in telecommunications, and the luxury-centered healthcare system, I think you're going to have to either get used to the stench of rotting corpses, or cut off your $2000 a month DSL line.
You have to admit, that is a pretty cool name.
That's gotta be the best part of having a communist revolution. Now, I live in New Jersey, but after the revolution... The New Glorious People's Homeland of Democratic Socialist Jersey Republic!
Seriously, a moonbase is really tough to justify right now.
Seriously, a western route to the orient is really tough to justify right now...
Damn, you mean we're all going to spend the next hundred years trying to find a moonbase, only to realize there isn't one, and then wait another hundred years for the French to start a Nigerian Moonbase scam and then sell the infastructure to our irritating president who will build us a moonbase to piss off the Columbians?
And who, pray tell, will get us our moon-cocaine if not the Columbians? Answer me that!
Oh my god! It's a mutated form of pneumonia! It has a moderate fatality rate when incredibly old people get it! We're all going to die!
Christ, I can live with SARS, thanks anyway. How about we rename AIDS to ACUTE And SEVERE Death From Sex SYNDROME. Maybe then somebody'd try and cure that.
Funny stuff. I wonder if psycho-politics has some kind of Uno! rule, where you have to tell everyone if you're a nutcase before you start playing.
PNAC, 1997: "Let's invade Iraq! It'll be so fucking cool!"
World, 1997: "What the... Well, thank God it's just Jeb Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer and Dan Quale and Dick Cheney and a bunch of other losers, it's not like they'll ever let those dorks near a tank."
PNAC, 2000: "Wonderdork powers, ACTIVATE!"
World, 2000: "Shit, now they're going to invade Iraq, and it'll be so fucking cool."
PNAC, 2000: "Never! I'm shocked you would say such a thing!"
PNAC, 2002: "Let's invade Iraq! Uhh... Look! WMDs!"
World, 2002: "Goddamnit."
PNAC, 2003: "That was so fucking cool!"
World, 2003: "So, you find any of those WMDs?"
PNAC, 2003: "What? Come on, that's not why we invaded."
World, 2003: "No shit! Really?"
Ok, well, you can hardly use the Japan/China/Korea clusterfuck over there as an indicator of any of their leanings towards world domination. If you use it against present-day China, then you have to apply the same thing to Japan and the Koreas.
The kamikaze thing makes no sense, unless you're implying that Kublai Kahn was Chinese, and if you're going to do that, then you should be talking about Genghis or somebody instead of Kublai.
The support of the North Koreans is, again, clusterfuck shit, and trying to keep your big regional rival from becoming a stable, unified nation under US protection.
I admit I don't know what the 35 parallel thing is. All I can get on that is the Georgia-Tenessee/N. Carolina border was drawn there in the 1800s. I'm assuming China wasn't involved. I'm interested in that, though.
And Taiwan's been invaded by everybody that's shown up with a boat and a gun since the 1500s. Dutch, British, Frenchies, Pirates, Japanese, Chinese, Chinese again, some different Chinese... probably a few dozen various Polynesians before that.
China isn't particularly nice, but they're undeniably isolationist, at least through 90% of their history. I'd be afraid of them building some sort of space-wall around the moon and relocating their population before I'd worry about them raining death down on the people they spent most of their history trying to pretend didn't exist.
It always sounded to me like he said "a". Maybe it's just the radio voice. That's a better thing to make fun of anyway. He's doing his big quote for history and shit, and he says it with the exact same modulation as if he were noting the time they flushed the toilet. "That'sahhhh one small stepforman... onegiantleap... formankind." I mean, sure he's a test pilot, but Shatner could do better than that.
Not many? You're the majority by about 10%, for fuck's sake. You just don't vote. Well, maybe not you personally, but the generic rebel outside the system that's so independent he's surrendered the electoral system to his enemies. If you don't feel represented just show up and start changing shit. It's not like it's hard or anything. Just find out where the smallest localization of whichever party you prefer is, and rewrite their platform to whatever you want. It's not like they're going to stop you. you think anybody below national level in any of the major parties actually gives a shit? You'll probably be the only one there that isn't legally brain-dead. It won't affect anything beyond your town for awhile, but if enough people actually care, democracy almost works, you know.
To bad no one does. I'll keep working though, at least until my Castro-beard grows in. Can't lay siege to D.C. with a baby-face...
You could consider it 15. We don't have any real evidence that life has appeared from scratch more than once, or that life capable of saving itself from disasters on the scale of the death of the sun is innevitable, or even likely. Based on experimental evidence alone, we're all there is. If you work from there, we're 15 billion years of work.
Plus, if you want to consider evolution of, I don't know, evolutions, or something, then you have a better reason to say 15. As in, natural selection of entire biospheres through supernova and asteroids, cutting out everybody that can't build a starship fast enough to get away. That would still be evolution.
Ah, but the parts of America that never have to deal with cops love those kinds of shows! Bush is just playing to his target audience.
...distracting everybody form the fact that the only effort we put into finding the actual leader of Al-Quaeda was testing some of our potential Daisy-Cutter replacements near a few places he might have been...
Sure, the only problem is he had to pretend to be a slack-jawed yokel to get elected. Just like... about every president since Nixon. I guess we learned not to let the crafty ones near the executive-order pen.
"Linux? ... Oh, I'm good at free speech, do I get more beer then? ... Ohh, you mean I can write letters, and I don't have to pay a skinny glasses-wearing man? ... Oh, no, he's pastier I am. Well, that's nice, but... missiles!? Who the fuck put this man in charge of my country? Someone needs a very stern talking-to!"
Politics? I kinda figured it was just the euro rising and being stable enough for rich people to be willing to keep their money in it. I mean, we're going into economic stimulus season, which means a few hundred billion getting pumped into the market this time, and if you're a rich enough bastard to make it worthwhile, you might as well move your money out now and make a load or two converting back once the dollar hits bottom.
Or have you been watching Fox again?