I love Firefly, too, and the first thing I noticed about BSG was they used the same way of showing the ships in space, with a wildly swinging camera, jumping around, then zooming in or out a little. I wish they wouldn't do that on the people shots though, it gives me a headache.
BTW, "you are" is abbreviated "you're" and if you refer to people complaining, you either mean "whining" or "whingeing". I myself am not familiar with the second term, to whinge, and am not sure if the present tense is whinging or whingeing. Your arguments don't hold water as well when you sound ignorant.
I've taken to writing on my wall calendar when I receive and send a DVD, and they HAVE gone down in frequency in the last couple months. The parent poster is quite right about things being received and a delay in getting things replaced. Every great thing gets taken over by greedy corporate dickwads who ruin it...
Why would anyone who's not a fanboy be in here posting, anyway? Only to be an asshole who likes to stand around criticizing others to no purpose. Those of us who DO like Firefly don't like losing our friend, and yeah, maybe someone somewhere is looking for a "Save Firefly" movement like Farscape had, but to just go post because you have an unsolicited opinion is simply a foolish waste. An enlightened person does not engage in idle talk or pointless criticism.
I call bullshit. Based on the context, the parent is right; to make some into thing else is to "em"-whatever it is, and the word 'cromulent' in same paragraph is taken from an episode of Black Adder in which Samuel Johnson is touting his new invention, the Dictionary, housing all the words in the English language. Black Adder says something about how that's very cromulent and several other made-up adjectives,just to fuck with Johnson.
Carbon116 is right; the guy across the street from me when I was a kid had a master's degree in biology and worked for a large company, but was completely clueless in every other respect, a complete and utter idiot.
The article says people won't look like the donor nor themselves, but a hybrid. Which only makes sense, the bone underlying the fascia, muscles, skin etc will make a big difference. Their ethical concern comes in when the donor can't be dead. They (for reasons unspecified in the article) have to take the face donation from a "beating heart" donor, who may continue to live once their own respirator is turned off. Besides, the world isn't television. Criminals don't use plastic surgery to escape detection/conviction etc; they wouldn't need someone else's face to do that either. This is all so horror-show!
I have been coming to the same conclusions lately ever since I heard that what a room really sounds like when you're in it is just like what others listening on a speakerphone would hear, but our brains have software to make it sound nice. I think there are visual things that do the same thing. A friend took a picture of me and I thought "hell, am I that fat? I don't look that fat in the mirror." And I took a picture of this girl I'm sweet on, and the picture didn't look as good as she does in real life. Maybe real life is an illusion, as the buddhists say. So now the trick is finding girls who have the same software in their heads that I do in my head to filter out the pudgy cheeks and improve my hairline! And meanwhile my brain is filtering out their saddlebags and everybody's happy.
I work for the repair department of a telephone company, and we get to talk to all the loonies who aren't busy posting BS on the internet. It was just in the last two years or less that they're all talking about terrorists being out to get them, watching them, tapping their phone lines, listening to their incredibly inane boring conversations, etc. Before that it was always drug dealers. Interesting how it took a good while after 9/11 for it to happen though. This is caused by the constant repetition of the word 'terrorist' on TV. Terrorists became the villains in tv shows and movies, and the fear spreads. Maybe soon we'll give up the 20-year old (and lost) drug war.
Very good point. Everybody here ought to rent "Grave of the Fireflies" and watch it. It tells the story of some japanese kids during the war. That's all. On a related note to the above discussion, suicide bombers may or may not (from their point of view) deliberately kill civilians; everyone they blow up is the Enemy, whether by being an actual soldier, or by being some kind of supporter for those soldiers. These people are quite simple-minded; that is to say they don't spend much time thinking about every little detail, they just lump everything into one category and turn off their brains. Just like our Fundamentalists. And our bombs kill a hell of a lot more people than suicide bombers'. The only real difference is that it's okay if our side does it. That's all. We do the same things they do. Kidnap and torture people, commit atrocities, make up lies and spread them about the other side and people who live near them or look like them or have similar ethnic extraction. We're scum too.
Good deal! Nice to have THOUGHTFUL and INFORMATIVE posts on here instead of idiots quoting the stupidest tv character so far. I was unaware of a lot of that. Thanks.
I'm so fucking sick of the idiot AC cocksuckers acting like France is some sort of bunch of losers because they "surrendered" to Germany in WWII. They didn't just roll over and surrender, asshole, pull your head out of your ass. The Germans swallowed up Austria (to the cheers of welcoming crowds), then spent a few weeks polishing up their war machine on Poland. They were nice and warmed up, with the best weapons in the world when they turned on France. And sure, the French aren't the military freaks SOME countries are, but they still fought against a vicious adversary until FORCED to surrender. All wars end when the victor accepts the surrender of the loser. Why don't you jizzbags ever call Japan sushi-eating surrender monkeys, or the Germans spaetzle-eating suicide monkeys? Should the Vietnamese call us burger-chomping shrapnel-monkeys? It's fucking easy as hell to sit with thousands of miles of ocean between you and the enemy, not to mention decades of smug idiocy building up between then and now. Nobody in the forties and fifties criticized the french for this bullshit; it's only now that WE'RE the assholes and they sometimes tell us so, as any good friend ought to do. Fucking asslicking troll.
Us? Intelligent? Well, some of us...
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King Kong Lived?
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· Score: 1
There's some question regarding the intelligence of neanderthals insofar as the brain-to-body ratio. Neanderthals were much bigger-boned and the shape of the bones indicates they were a lot more muscular, so their larger brains were counterbalanced by everything else being bigger on them.
>You were taught from birth that evolution is the truth, right?
No, I was taught that in science class. Back when science wasn't being ripped apart by fools, desperate to protect their sad little egos. "We're special! God created US." Incidentally, I was taught it as a SCIENTIFIC truth, which is to say "The best we have until a better one comes along," as opposed to religious truth, "Infallible and incontrovertible for all time until a better religion comes along to replace ours." Try Zen buddhism or wicca, or both together.
Everybody who's not a freak DOES get screwed over.
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Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 0, Troll
Retard. The people of America are the most productive workers in the world, but are the corporate bigwigs EVER satisfied? Of COURSE not! And so there's this ever-escalating world of more and more work, people spending less and less time raising their kids, improving their communities, taking part in politics or other activities. So finally only those people who are employable are those willing to screw over everything else in their lives for the Company. Fuck that. Hard.
Re:Why wouldn't they be happy?
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Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 1
>The only people that are safe are the truly brilliant
No, they're in trouble too. Truly brilliant people often lack particular skills that make them great in certain settings. Pixar is great because it's a great team, with brilliant people. If you fire all the people that are facilitating these brilliant creative people's genius, and fill the joint with number-crunching fuckheads, they'll all wind up out of a job and wasting time trying to rebuild a life when they could be making a CG version of Nausicaa or something.
I'm the same way, and very healthy. I consider all these hand-washers to be wussies of the first stripe, and they deserve to have their own immune systems kill them. I only wash my hands if I get something ON them. Imaginary cooties are for pussies. I may be wrong about how it all works. It could be related to personal courage. I see these office-bred cowards who are afraid to step out of line, to use a public bathroom at all, and they're sick all the time. The greatest cowards are the hand-washers, and they're the same ones paying brave men to kill every perceived danger they can make up. Drugs a "threat"? Drug war! Terrorists? Attack every muslim country one or two at a time! People who are afraid are a lot easier to control. Crime reporting went up 600% in the 90s. Hmmm....
This can be taken in at least two ways: MOD parent up! Get it? Huh? Huh? And of course just from the content of the post, we could assume you weren't an american. Not most of 'em anyways. Well done.
Elohim _is_ a plural. This is offtopic, but important, as this one sentence has had so much impact on our society. "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets." is the first line of Genesis. 'In the beginning Gods created Heaven and Earth.' Elohim connotes unmitigated justice; after this verse they stop using elohim and switch to 'adonai elohim' which promptly genders it male and connotes 'mercy".
So remember you bible-whumpers out there, your god is only one of many, according to your own Book.
You guys. First of all, just shut up, and think for a few minutes before you post. Questioning Darwin because some idiots get to breed is like questioning gravity because a scaffold is preventing a hammer from hitting the ground. Darwinism doesn't fail because idiots get to reproduce; there are many many strategies in nature (which we're part of) for reproduction within a species. One is to breed lots of offspring on the off chance one of them will make it to adulthood. Anyone familiar with human history (viz infant mortality) knows this is the norm for humanity. Other means we've developed through the use of technology are fewer offspring, but higher quality care for those offspring. This second strategy is very effective, obviously, but requires a vast amount of wherewithal to support it. Wherewithal meaning not only time and money (the usual meaning) but also social structures that support the reproduction strategy, i.e. schools, elimination of most predators from the environment, ready supplies of clean food & water, controlled environments, laws that control various aspects of the entire thing etc etc. If you don't like the original strategy, make the replacement strategy more viable! Make it so the 'fewer/better' social structures only apply to those who utilize that structure instead of everyone. (This is the republican/conservative worldview. Make it exclusive and everyone will want in, and screw anyone on the outside.)...OR... You could do something wise and insightful and realize it also works the other way. Make it easier for EVERYONE to utilize the fewer/better model and they'll have fewer offspring. Instead of cutting the throats of public schools, make the schools better. Educate people and increase their knowledge of how it all works. Enforce the protective laws equally, not just to the beige kids in the beige-burbs. Make the clean food/water/air available to everyone equally. Now, this is difficult as human nature is selfish and no one will want to pay to better the lives of someone else's offspring, as this would be counter to the survival of me-fittest mentality. (This is kind of the liberal viewpoint, but still involves coercion, as it requires people to pay taxes to help others, even members of other tribes/groups/nations etc.) I recommend a middle way. Certainly make basic food, air, water, education and health care available, but also get anyone really dumb and remove them from the gene pool. Oh, wait, that's kind of what's happening now. Obviously we need some people to clean offices and pick lettuce, and plenty of people do that now who are perfectly fine members of society. Hell, I'd do it if it paid $20 an hour. So we need fewer dumb people gumming up the works; what's the cause? Poor education is a big part of it, but the education system can only work with what it's given. Obviously NOT everyone is created equal; they have different DNA, some of which is for strength, some of which is for intelligence, some of which is for the ability to weasel a cushy job directing FEMA even though completely unqualified. So new laws allowing the sterilization of anyone who screws up so bad that others' lives are majorly affected need to be enacted. Enforcement will have to be across our entire species, not just certain socio-economic groups.
Your comments above about the arrogance of the Anonymous Cowards of the world are well taken; however your opinion is only true of SOME of the people of the world; the AC is right about SOME of the people too. While some work to put food on the table (ever see the movie A Day Without a Mexican?) and contribute to the running of society, others are the grit in the grease or are simply parasites. They sit on their asses, wasting the day away flapping their gums and stuffing their cake-hole while some sucker works like a dog to allow them to do it. Politicians for example. Or most of the idle rich.
Some of these people do both. While their crappy jobs put food on the table, they take their meager earnings and spend them at Walmart, thereby contributing to horrible wage conditions in other countries, and filling the pockets of wealthy corporations and individuals, who turn around and use their wealth and power to deny democracy and freedom to the very people we're talking about. And Walmart and their evil ilk are cruel union-busters of the worst stripe, so these people have very little they can do to improve their lot. So the cycle continues.
Some folks have a weird (spelled right) idea of..
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Python vs. Alligator
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..of everything. Why is this idiot modified insightful? It's the OPPOSITE of insightful. It's ignoring fundamental differences between invasive species in nature and invasive species killing off things due to human idiocy. >"What's so special about eg: "endangered woodstorks" that makes their species worthy to get a free pass on evolution?" I'll tell you: they were fine before WE came along, and as the top species on the planet, it is OUR job to steward all our fellows and not kill them through idiocy and greed. "It's evolution in action," is the same Might-Makes-Right bullshit that wise people have been fighting since the development of language. It'd be evolution in action if I cut your fucking gonads off and fed them to you, right? Let's do that too! And the same arrogance that you display above is what's the greatest single threat to OUR species right now. Your same idiotic bullshit is currently melting the ice caps, flooding New Orleans, and building suburbs in clearcut forests that are full of deer ticks.
You'd be right except for the price is still way off. A quarter a song and millions of people would be forking over, but $.99 is still way too high. Especially for something that's SO low-cost. No CD to make, package, distribute etc. Hell a quarter is probably too much really.
The monolithic domes are in general a great idea. They do the advantages listed above, but there is a VAST amount of energy wasted in creating concrete. Gypsum (and maybe other minerals, I don't remember all the details right now) is heated to very high temperatures to make concrete. Natural building materials are every bit as good, slower, but WAY cheaper, usually free. And if one is rebuilding a lot of homes in devastated areas, the perfect (IMHO) plan is to take broken concrete chunks, readily availabe for free lots of places, build foundations out of them and take locally available clay soil and sand, mix in straw, and build your walls.
I'd really like to see Habitat for Humanity start building cob houses and combo cob/straw bale. You could build the ENTIRE house for $5000, and the house would (properly built and plastered) last for hundreds of years. And the cob walls (monolithic single-piece walls made of earth, sand and straw, like adobe only not bricks) are VERY heavy and won't blow away in extremely high winds, and they don't absorb water fast enough to slump in a storm. The only problem is this idea in america that everything has to be done NOW. Things slapped together in short amount of time fall apart proportionately quickly. Cob houses take longer to build, but last for centuries. They're also way more beautiful. Go see <URL:http://www.cobcottage.com/> for pictures and information.
My Neighbor Totoro. It's a great film for both kids and adults, and is really really good to adults instead of being boring and stupid like most kid-films are. Great lead-in to his other stuff too.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Firefly, too, and the first thing I noticed about BSG was they used the same way of showing the ships in space, with a wildly swinging camera, jumping around, then zooming in or out a little. I wish they wouldn't do that on the people shots though, it gives me a headache.
BTW, "you are" is abbreviated "you're" and if you refer to people complaining, you either mean "whining" or "whingeing". I myself am not familiar with the second term, to whinge, and am not sure if the present tense is whinging or whingeing. Your arguments don't hold water as well when you sound ignorant.
I've taken to writing on my wall calendar when I receive and send a DVD, and they HAVE gone down in frequency in the last couple months. The parent poster is quite right about things being received and a delay in getting things replaced. Every great thing gets taken over by greedy corporate dickwads who ruin it...
Why would anyone who's not a fanboy be in here posting, anyway? Only to be an asshole who likes to stand around criticizing others to no purpose. Those of us who DO like Firefly don't like losing our friend, and yeah, maybe someone somewhere is looking for a "Save Firefly" movement like Farscape had, but to just go post because you have an unsolicited opinion is simply a foolish waste. An enlightened person does not engage in idle talk or pointless criticism.
I call bullshit. Based on the context, the parent is right; to make some into thing else is to "em"-whatever it is, and the word 'cromulent' in same paragraph is taken from an episode of Black Adder in which Samuel Johnson is touting his new invention, the Dictionary, housing all the words in the English language. Black Adder says something about how that's very cromulent and several other made-up adjectives,just to fuck with Johnson.
Carbon116 is right; the guy across the street from me when I was a kid had a master's degree in biology and worked for a large company, but was completely clueless in every other respect, a complete and utter idiot.
The article says people won't look like the donor nor themselves, but a hybrid. Which only makes sense, the bone underlying the fascia, muscles, skin etc will make a big difference. Their ethical concern comes in when the donor can't be dead. They (for reasons unspecified in the article) have to take the face donation from a "beating heart" donor, who may continue to live once their own respirator is turned off.
Besides, the world isn't television. Criminals don't use plastic surgery to escape detection/conviction etc; they wouldn't need someone else's face to do that either.
This is all so horror-show!
I have been coming to the same conclusions lately ever since I heard that what a room really sounds like when you're in it is just like what others listening on a speakerphone would hear, but our brains have software to make it sound nice. I think there are visual things that do the same thing. A friend took a picture of me and I thought "hell, am I that fat? I don't look that fat in the mirror." And I took a picture of this girl I'm sweet on, and the picture didn't look as good as she does in real life. Maybe real life is an illusion, as the buddhists say. So now the trick is finding girls who have the same software in their heads that I do in my head to filter out the pudgy cheeks and improve my hairline! And meanwhile my brain is filtering out their saddlebags and everybody's happy.
I work for the repair department of a telephone company, and we get to talk to all the loonies who aren't busy posting BS on the internet. It was just in the last two years or less that they're all talking about terrorists being out to get them, watching them, tapping their phone lines, listening to their incredibly inane boring conversations, etc.
Before that it was always drug dealers. Interesting how it took a good while after 9/11 for it to happen though. This is caused by the constant repetition of the word 'terrorist' on TV. Terrorists became the villains in tv shows and movies, and the fear spreads. Maybe soon we'll give up the 20-year old (and lost) drug war.
Very good point. Everybody here ought to rent "Grave of the Fireflies" and watch it. It tells the story of some japanese kids during the war. That's all.
On a related note to the above discussion, suicide bombers may or may not (from their point of view) deliberately kill civilians; everyone they blow up is the Enemy, whether by being an actual soldier, or by being some kind of supporter for those soldiers. These people are quite simple-minded; that is to say they don't spend much time thinking about every little detail, they just lump everything into one category and turn off their brains. Just like our Fundamentalists. And our bombs kill a hell of a lot more people than suicide bombers'. The only real difference is that it's okay if our side does it. That's all. We do the same things they do. Kidnap and torture people, commit atrocities, make up lies and spread them about the other side and people who live near them or look like them or have similar ethnic extraction. We're scum too.
Good deal! Nice to have THOUGHTFUL and INFORMATIVE posts on here instead of idiots quoting the stupidest tv character so far. I was unaware of a lot of that. Thanks.
I'm so fucking sick of the idiot AC cocksuckers acting like France is some sort of bunch of losers because they "surrendered" to Germany in WWII. They didn't just roll over and surrender, asshole, pull your head out of your ass. The Germans swallowed up Austria (to the cheers of welcoming crowds), then spent a few weeks polishing up their war machine on Poland. They were nice and warmed up, with the best weapons in the world when they turned on France.
And sure, the French aren't the military freaks SOME countries are, but they still fought against a vicious adversary until FORCED to surrender. All wars end when the victor accepts the surrender of the loser. Why don't you jizzbags ever call Japan sushi-eating surrender monkeys, or the Germans spaetzle-eating suicide monkeys? Should the Vietnamese call us burger-chomping shrapnel-monkeys? It's fucking easy as hell to sit with thousands of miles of ocean between you and the enemy, not to mention decades of smug idiocy building up between then and now. Nobody in the forties and fifties criticized the french for this bullshit; it's only now that WE'RE the assholes and they sometimes tell us so, as any good friend ought to do.
Fucking asslicking troll.
There's some question regarding the intelligence of neanderthals insofar as the brain-to-body ratio. Neanderthals were much bigger-boned and the shape of the bones indicates they were a lot more muscular, so their larger brains were counterbalanced by everything else being bigger on them.
>You were taught from birth that evolution is the truth, right?
No, I was taught that in science class. Back when science wasn't being ripped apart by fools, desperate to protect their sad little egos. "We're special! God created US."
Incidentally, I was taught it as a SCIENTIFIC truth, which is to say "The best we have until a better one comes along," as opposed to religious truth, "Infallible and incontrovertible for all time until a better religion comes along to replace ours." Try Zen buddhism or wicca, or both together.
Retard. The people of America are the most productive workers in the world, but are the corporate bigwigs EVER satisfied? Of COURSE not! And so there's this ever-escalating world of more and more work, people spending less and less time raising their kids, improving their communities, taking part in politics or other activities. So finally only those people who are employable are those willing to screw over everything else in their lives for the Company. Fuck that. Hard.
>The only people that are safe are the truly brilliant
No, they're in trouble too. Truly brilliant people often lack particular skills that make them great in certain settings. Pixar is great because it's a great team, with brilliant people. If you fire all the people that are facilitating these brilliant creative people's genius, and fill the joint with number-crunching fuckheads, they'll all wind up out of a job and wasting time trying to rebuild a life when they could be making a CG version of Nausicaa or something.
I'm the same way, and very healthy. I consider all these hand-washers to be wussies of the first stripe, and they deserve to have their own immune systems kill them. I only wash my hands if I get something ON them. Imaginary cooties are for pussies.
I may be wrong about how it all works. It could be related to personal courage. I see these office-bred cowards who are afraid to step out of line, to use a public bathroom at all, and they're sick all the time. The greatest cowards are the hand-washers, and they're the same ones paying brave men to kill every perceived danger they can make up. Drugs a "threat"? Drug war! Terrorists? Attack every muslim country one or two at a time! People who are afraid are a lot easier to control. Crime reporting went up 600% in the 90s. Hmmm....
This can be taken in at least two ways: MOD parent up! Get it? Huh? Huh? And of course just from the content of the post, we could assume you weren't an american. Not most of 'em anyways.
Well done.
Elohim _is_ a plural. This is offtopic, but important, as this one sentence has had so much impact on our society. "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets." is the first line of Genesis. 'In the beginning Gods created Heaven and Earth.' Elohim connotes unmitigated justice; after this verse they stop using elohim and switch to 'adonai elohim' which promptly genders it male and connotes 'mercy".
So remember you bible-whumpers out there, your god is only one of many, according to your own Book.
You guys. First of all, just shut up, and think for a few minutes before you post. Questioning Darwin because some idiots get to breed is like questioning gravity because a scaffold is preventing a hammer from hitting the ground. ...OR... You could do something wise and insightful and realize it also works the other way. Make it easier for EVERYONE to utilize the fewer/better model and they'll have fewer offspring. Instead of cutting the throats of public schools, make the schools better. Educate people and increase their knowledge of how it all works. Enforce the protective laws equally, not just to the beige kids in the beige-burbs. Make the clean food/water/air available to everyone equally. Now, this is difficult as human nature is selfish and no one will want to pay to better the lives of someone else's offspring, as this would be counter to the survival of me-fittest mentality. (This is kind of the liberal viewpoint, but still involves coercion, as it requires people to pay taxes to help others, even members of other tribes/groups/nations etc.)
Darwinism doesn't fail because idiots get to reproduce; there are many many strategies in nature (which we're part of) for reproduction within a species. One is to breed lots of offspring on the off chance one of them will make it to adulthood. Anyone familiar with human history (viz infant mortality) knows this is the norm for humanity. Other means we've developed through the use of technology are fewer offspring, but higher quality care for those offspring. This second strategy is very effective, obviously, but requires a vast amount of wherewithal to support it. Wherewithal meaning not only time and money (the usual meaning) but also social structures that support the reproduction strategy, i.e. schools, elimination of most predators from the environment, ready supplies of clean food & water, controlled environments, laws that control various aspects of the entire thing etc etc.
If you don't like the original strategy, make the replacement strategy more viable! Make it so the 'fewer/better' social structures only apply to those who utilize that structure instead of everyone. (This is the republican/conservative worldview. Make it exclusive and everyone will want in, and screw anyone on the outside.)
I recommend a middle way. Certainly make basic food, air, water, education and health care available, but also get anyone really dumb and remove them from the gene pool. Oh, wait, that's kind of what's happening now. Obviously we need some people to clean offices and pick lettuce, and plenty of people do that now who are perfectly fine members of society. Hell, I'd do it if it paid $20 an hour. So we need fewer dumb people gumming up the works; what's the cause? Poor education is a big part of it, but the education system can only work with what it's given. Obviously NOT everyone is created equal; they have different DNA, some of which is for strength, some of which is for intelligence, some of which is for the ability to weasel a cushy job directing FEMA even though completely unqualified.
So new laws allowing the sterilization of anyone who screws up so bad that others' lives are majorly affected need to be enacted. Enforcement will have to be across our entire species, not just certain socio-economic groups.
Your comments above about the arrogance of the Anonymous Cowards of the world are well taken; however your opinion is only true of SOME of the people of the world; the AC is right about SOME of the people too. While some work to put food on the table (ever see the movie A Day Without a Mexican?) and contribute to the running of society, others are the grit in the grease or are simply parasites. They sit on their asses, wasting the day away flapping their gums and stuffing their cake-hole while some sucker works like a dog to allow them to do it. Politicians for example. Or most of the idle rich.
Some of these people do both. While their crappy jobs put food on the table, they take their meager earnings and spend them at Walmart, thereby contributing to horrible wage conditions in other countries, and filling the pockets of wealthy corporations and individuals, who turn around and use their wealth and power to deny democracy and freedom to the very people we're talking about. And Walmart and their evil ilk are cruel union-busters of the worst stripe, so these people have very little they can do to improve their lot. So the cycle continues.
..of everything. Why is this idiot modified insightful? It's the OPPOSITE of insightful. It's ignoring fundamental differences between invasive species in nature and invasive species killing off things due to human idiocy.
>"What's so special about eg: "endangered woodstorks" that makes their species worthy to get a free pass on evolution?" I'll tell you: they were fine before WE came along, and as the top species on the planet, it is OUR job to steward all our fellows and not kill them through idiocy and greed. "It's evolution in action," is the same Might-Makes-Right bullshit that wise people have been fighting since the development of language. It'd be evolution in action if I cut your fucking gonads off and fed them to you, right? Let's do that too!
And the same arrogance that you display above is what's the greatest single threat to OUR species right now. Your same idiotic bullshit is currently melting the ice caps, flooding New Orleans, and building suburbs in clearcut forests that are full of deer ticks.
You'd be right except for the price is still way off. A quarter a song and millions of people would be forking over, but $.99 is still way too high. Especially for something that's SO low-cost. No CD to make, package, distribute etc. Hell a quarter is probably too much really.
The monolithic domes are in general a great idea. They do the advantages listed above, but there is a VAST amount of energy wasted in creating concrete. Gypsum (and maybe other minerals, I don't remember all the details right now) is heated to very high temperatures to make concrete. Natural building materials are every bit as good, slower, but WAY cheaper, usually free. And if one is rebuilding a lot of homes in devastated areas, the perfect (IMHO) plan is to take broken concrete chunks, readily availabe for free lots of places, build foundations out of them and take locally available clay soil and sand, mix in straw, and build your walls.
I'd really like to see Habitat for Humanity start building cob houses and combo cob/straw bale. You could build the ENTIRE house for $5000, and the house would (properly built and plastered) last for hundreds of years. And the cob walls (monolithic single-piece walls made of earth, sand and straw, like adobe only not bricks) are VERY heavy and won't blow away in extremely high winds, and they don't absorb water fast enough to slump in a storm.
The only problem is this idea in america that everything has to be done NOW. Things slapped together in short amount of time fall apart proportionately quickly. Cob houses take longer to build, but last for centuries. They're also way more beautiful. Go see <URL:http://www.cobcottage.com/> for pictures and information.
My Neighbor Totoro. It's a great film for both kids and adults, and is really really good to adults instead of being boring and stupid like most kid-films are. Great lead-in to his other stuff too.