btw, everybody check out Neil Stephenson's book Interface he wrote under the name Stephen Bury. According to Wikipedia, that's a collaboration with J Frederick George.
is the beer purity act of 1516. Yummy beer for four hundred year. And your list is also correct, water, malt, hops, and yeast. Nothing else. I always LOL when I hear/see the Bud ads currently out. "we've been making beer for over a hundred years" and these tv ads of skinny mallrat dorks sitting in front of a Bud in various countries like anyone else is swilling that shit down, especially in Europe.
Our local taiko drumming group in Minneapolis (theatermu.org) has a number of practice drums made from PVC. They're leftover contstruction end pieces about two feet across, with regular rawhide heads tightened w/traditional/modern methods: pegs and ropes followed by hydraulic car jacks. Heavy though! I myself (with mentoring from a local taiko maker) made a chu-daiko out of a wine barrel, as most american taiko drums are. Anyone can make a great-sounding drum using large wooden salad bowls, rawhide heads and furniture tacks. Get the head really wet, stretch it as tight as possible and tack the head down. When it dries it'll shrink and you'll have a nice tight drumhead.
>How about we just work on cars that can drive themselves independently in the midst of humans driving their cars?
They're a great idea! You walk to a nearby street corner and get on this "bus". You don't even have to summon it, they just come by at various appointed times. Not only do they drive themselves, they actually employ human beings to drive them. And not only that! These busses are large enough to serve more than one person, thereby saving costly fuel and providing chances for (much needed in this country) social interaction between different people. Everybody wins!
>I could live in the middle of nowhere and get around just as efficiently as if I lived in the heart of the city...
Unless you were going FROM the middle of nowhere TO the heart of the city; most places I'm aware of have an hour of more of travel time between those two locations. At least the hearts of major cities. Perhaps you're talking about Larry Niven's teleport booths?
Really work for who? Not people really. the construction industry maybe. "Real living"? We Americans are the most stressed-out people on earth, surrounded at all times with straight lines and right angles, neither of which occur in nature. Flat planes of single colors, fluorescent lighting, on and on. We feel subconsciously that something's wrong all the time due to these environmental factors being subtly off. So we distract ourselves with Stuff. Things we can bolt to walls, fill in the useless corners with. And we work at jobs we hate at hours that would have shocked our village-dwelling ancestors, just to pay the interest on all that Stuff. I agree the concert hall is a great idea, shared community space and all, but we need something beside suburban conformity-boxes with 30 year mortgages on them. These wooden houses need way more upkeep and cost ten times as much, and are quite a bit bigger than people really need. Check out The Hand Sculpted House by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley and Michael Smith.
http://www.deatech.com/cobcottage has all kinds of information and pictures of gorgeous hand-sculpted houses. Why spend millions of dollars developing something that separates us even further from our lives, homes and the environment? And the poster at the top of the page is way right; this would only make the burbs more lockstep conformist.
Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, as they say. I'm sorry I can't provide a link, but William Gibson wrote a GREAT script for Alien 3, which didn't get made as we know. It certainly used to be available online, surely is somewhere.
I used to work in the Minneapolis conference center; they now have a large biz conf thang that hosts huge teleconferences of 5000 participants. And the stuff listed above, of course. They other thing they do is whine about the old days and their shrinking market share while still blowing thousands of dollars a day on executive compensation (like the CEO they hired before Mike Armstong and then decided he wasn't good enough and sent home with a 25 million dollar severance).
People in the US have spent the last generation or two sitting in front of the TV, where every problem is solved by the end of the the episode, one hour max, or by the end of the commercial. The public, by and large, has no clue how things work in real life. They think they're the only ones who have a problem and it should be fixed NOW. Technology IS responsible for stress, simply like any other tool allows things to happen. Call routers are invented, so phone calls can be rammed faster and faster down your throat in the crappy call center job. (for example.) Etc etc.
The book came out in the early 80's (if I recall right, too busy at work to look it up, plus I'm not supposed to use any internet, let along something obvious like google). anyway, the Peter Principle dictates that a person gets promoted up to his own level of incompetence. If you're good in IT, you get promoted to management, and no longer do what you're good at.
Hey, Floyd fan, kids in africa are starving because corporations patent the genes of grains they develop, give away hybrid grains that don't produce seeds that'll grow, then let their victims starve because they can no longer grow food to feed themselves or afford to pay for seed. (BTW, charitable organizations seldom send food to africa from the US in cars. Your original post was about cars.)
All of the things you list above (infant mortality, illiteracy, dying 'early') are all being exacerbated by policies of corporate-controlled america, which have been gaining more and more control of our country starting under Reagan, getting worse under the Bushes AND Clinton. Remember NAFTA? It's still affecting our lives, weakening our unions and putting the middle class right on the edge in this country. Thanks to democrats selling out just like the GOP. to Money.
PS: if you hate those damned environmentalists so much, why don't you show us all up and move to Love Canal, or Three Mile Island? Or Chernobyl? Or go drink some that water with Chomium 6 in it like they had in "Erin Brokovitch". Yum!
Funny, I thought humans got along for millenia without either. Most people get along fine without a car now. I bet you drive a 4-ton clone box (suv) to get to the video game store a mile or two away.
and sent it to a publisher he was having a dispute with. Neil Gaiman has a highly amusing anecdote about how the mailroom boy who delivered the box to the publisher got fired (that's not the funny part). The mailroom boy met Neil Gaiman years after this and told him what happened, and Neil had heard Harlan Ellison tell about how he took a handgun out to his garden in his bathrobe to shoot the gopher, but nobody would believe him until Neil told the rest.
Yes, anyone who's a genuine pastry chef, even one from Poland or Japan, _will_ know how to make a crepe, whether they work for Greenpeace or the Walforf Astoria. This is what really pisses me off about you idiots. Greenpeace is ON YOUR SIDE, moron! You're just trying to rip off the rest of us for money, and you're trying to do nothing about a very serious problem that affects the entire fucking human race.
Why work at a job you hate, pay a bunch of taxes, then spend the rest on a 30 year mortgage so a for-profit bank can get rich off a house only designed to last 50 years? You can build your own cob cottage for cheap, and it's much more fire and earthquake resistant, and WAY more beautiful than these suburban clone-boxes.
Everything is going down the shitter. If the quality of music is constant, why are there so many younger bands covering old songs? Corporate music contract policies create the crap. 70s crap came from heartfelt (but crappy) artists; nowadays crap comes from artists being contractually obligated to create something, anything that can be sold. It's about the money, not the music. That's autocrap.
And saying there's a large elephant in the room doesn't answer the question "Why is the elephant there?" Yes, partly it _is_ cheaper to download than buy. But also there's the factor of people not wanting to patronize a business they regard as Evil. Once the word got out on how CCR got screwed, more people began examining the egregious abuses of this industry, and people began to wake up. No one wants to feed these bastards when buying an album is hardly a necessity. I've been avoiding buying CDs for years because I don't want the industry to get my money. When I finally broke down and bought a Metallica cd/dvd combination (the packaging said the DVD was a _Concert_ of the entire album; it turned out to be a rehearsal, full of off-key singing and no audience or energy, talk about false advertising) it turns out the whole album was, in fact, crap. Surprise surprise. If there were a return policy on the crap, more people would be willing to pay for music in the first place. Fuck 'em.
The other factor I consider important in this debate is the whole consumer lifestyle. Housing prices have skyrocketed since the 70s; small towns have died a slow death and more people have migrated to larger and larger suburban houses or increasingly expensive cities. People work longer and longer hours at worse jobs they hate, just to pay the huge mortgage/rent. Entertainment becomes more important in people's lives but more expensive (comparatively). And corporations have increased their political power more and more since the 70s until now a congressman has way less power in Washington than a lobbyist does. The corporations have us by the balls and they're squeezing every last cent out of us and giving us less and less back. No raise this year, sorry dude, and your co-pays are going up 50%. And the rent goes up, oh and the bank now charges $27 for an overdraft even though their cost is still less than $5. No wonder people are downloading for all they're worth; it's the only way we can get back at them!
Since they're allowed to "recoup costs" they can make up any number that sounds good (whatever the market will bear) and slap that on every bill for every customer, including millions of people who will never, ever port their numbers. Profit!
Every film commentator who has seen the LOTR props has raved about their detail and craftsmanship. People would go to New Zealand specifically to see these props and the 'bigatures' etc. It would have been a good idea to leave to Hobbiton sets up too, but too late now.
"It's well capable and has the necessary landing ability." Uh, stop and think for 10 seconds. The shuttle lands on Earth using wings. Wings require air. Also the shuttle needs a decent landing strip, and to take off it needs a bunch of fuel, even in the moon's low gravity. Unfortunately TV and movies are viewed as reality by most americans, nearly every show in space treats ships like planes in space; they're streamlined, winged, and they maneuver like dogfighting planes. Watch some Babylon 5 reruns.
If the sentence says Ghost in the Shell (the movie) and GitS (The TV Series), the first one in the sentence is the former, and the latter one in the sentence is the latter.
... immediately the production, performance or marketing of your recent play, "Romeo and Juliet" which is obviously an infringement of our copyrighted work "Romeus and Juliet". Sincerely yours, Shylock Law Firm
Seriously folks, the world got along JUST FINE without copyright, and some of the most important works of all literature were based on someone else's 'intellectual property'. There's no such fucking thing. Ideas, plays, music, whatever; it all belongs to Everyone, not some corporation that's not even a person. All this control freak bullshit is just a selfish jerk's way to get more for himself at the expense of everyone else. Would ANYONE buy a Windows from Microsoft if there were other companies selling their own version of windows? Actually, yes! But not as many as do now, I think.
And as far as this music thing goes, this whole concept of Wealthy Music Star and fans who pay is an artificial concept created to move wealth from the many into the hands of the few, thereby concentrating power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. There was a time not long ago when people made their own music, all the time. People shared music with each other in community gatherings, not giant arenas where noone knows each other, and audience and the performer both oddly anonymous. Kill the profit in the music industry and build better communities.
They're extra-bitchy about losing theatrical release ticket sales? A new box-office record was set last month! $680,000,000! WHAT THE FUCK IS THEIR PROBLEM?! WHEN WILL IT EVER BE ENOUGH?! Is there no end to the avarice of people? How many fucking cars and mansions do they need?
I've been WONDERING what these are; the last/. post about it I've seen didn't provide ANY information about what the hell it was talking about, like everybody automatically knows what a machinima is. Isn't in the dictionary either. So thanks very much indeed.
Don't you people ever read ANYTHING? All the modded up posts are about how this is supposed to be a GOOD thing! Don't you ever pay any attention to the posts about how things start out small?
It starts with "sobriety check points" and 'harmless' little black boxes, your own property helping convict you of a crime. Then it's little gray boxes in your toilet making sure you're not doing any drugs. Then maybe RFID tags in library books and chips in your computer making sure you're not doing anything terroristic or pedophilistic. Before long the Control Freaks have you right where they want you.
Slashdot Mirror
btw, everybody check out Neil Stephenson's book Interface he wrote under the name Stephen Bury. According to Wikipedia, that's a collaboration with J Frederick George.
is the beer purity act of 1516. Yummy beer for four hundred year. And your list is also correct, water, malt, hops, and yeast. Nothing else. I always LOL when I hear/see the Bud ads currently out. "we've been making beer for over a hundred years" and these tv ads of skinny mallrat dorks sitting in front of a Bud in various countries like anyone else is swilling that shit down, especially in Europe.
Our local taiko drumming group in Minneapolis (theatermu.org) has a number of practice drums made from PVC. They're leftover contstruction end pieces about two feet across, with regular rawhide heads tightened w/traditional/modern methods: pegs and ropes followed by hydraulic car jacks. Heavy though!
I myself (with mentoring from a local taiko maker) made a chu-daiko out of a wine barrel, as most american taiko drums are.
Anyone can make a great-sounding drum using large wooden salad bowls, rawhide heads and furniture tacks. Get the head really wet, stretch it as tight as possible and tack the head down. When it dries it'll shrink and you'll have a nice tight drumhead.
>How about we just work on cars that can drive themselves independently in the midst of humans
driving their cars?
They're a great idea! You walk to a nearby street corner and get on this "bus". You don't even have to summon it, they just come by at various appointed times. Not only do they drive themselves, they actually employ human beings to drive them. And not only that! These busses are large enough to serve more than one person, thereby saving costly fuel and providing chances for (much needed in this country) social interaction between different people. Everybody wins!
>I could live in the middle of nowhere and get around just as efficiently as if I lived in the heart of the city...
Unless you were going FROM the middle of nowhere TO the heart of the city; most places I'm aware of have an hour of more of travel time between those two locations. At least the hearts of major cities. Perhaps you're talking about Larry Niven's teleport booths?
Really work for who? Not people really. the construction industry maybe. "Real living"? We Americans are the most stressed-out people on earth, surrounded at all times with straight lines and right angles, neither of which occur in nature. Flat planes of single colors, fluorescent lighting, on and on. We feel subconsciously that something's wrong all the time due to these environmental factors being subtly off. So we distract ourselves with Stuff. Things we can bolt to walls, fill in the useless corners with. And we work at jobs we hate at hours that would have shocked our village-dwelling ancestors, just to pay the interest on all that Stuff. I agree the concert hall is a great idea, shared community space and all, but we need something beside suburban conformity-boxes with 30 year mortgages on them. These wooden houses need way more upkeep and cost ten times as much, and are quite a bit bigger than people really need. Check out The Hand Sculpted House by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley and Michael Smith.
http://www.deatech.com/cobcottage has all kinds of information and pictures of gorgeous hand-sculpted houses. Why spend millions of dollars developing something that separates us even further from our lives, homes and the environment? And the poster at the top of the page is way right; this would only make the burbs more lockstep conformist.
Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, as they say. I'm sorry I can't provide a link, but William Gibson wrote a GREAT script for Alien 3, which didn't get made as we know. It certainly used to be available online, surely is somewhere.
I used to work in the Minneapolis conference center; they now have a large biz conf thang that hosts huge teleconferences of 5000 participants. And the stuff listed above, of course. They other thing they do is whine about the old days and their shrinking market share while still blowing thousands of dollars a day on executive compensation (like the CEO they hired before Mike Armstong and then decided he wasn't good enough and sent home with a 25 million dollar severance).
People in the US have spent the last generation or two sitting in front of the TV, where every problem is solved by the end of the the episode, one hour max, or by the end of the commercial. The public, by and large, has no clue how things work in real life. They think they're the only ones who have a problem and it should be fixed NOW.
Technology IS responsible for stress, simply like any other tool allows things to happen. Call routers are invented, so phone calls can be rammed faster and faster down your throat in the crappy call center job. (for example.) Etc etc.
The book came out in the early 80's (if I recall right, too busy at work to look it up, plus I'm not supposed to use any internet, let along something obvious like google).
anyway, the Peter Principle dictates that a person gets promoted up to his own level of incompetence. If you're good in IT, you get promoted to management, and no longer do what you're good at.
Hey, Floyd fan, kids in africa are starving because corporations patent the genes of grains they develop, give away hybrid grains that don't produce seeds that'll grow, then let their victims starve because they can no longer grow food to feed themselves or afford to pay for seed. (BTW, charitable organizations seldom send food to africa from the US in cars. Your original post was about cars.)
All of the things you list above (infant mortality, illiteracy, dying 'early') are all being exacerbated by policies of corporate-controlled america, which have been gaining more and more control of our country starting under Reagan, getting worse under the Bushes AND Clinton. Remember NAFTA? It's still affecting our lives, weakening our unions and putting the middle class right on the edge in this country. Thanks to democrats selling out just like the GOP. to Money.
PS: if you hate those damned environmentalists so much, why don't you show us all up and move to Love Canal, or Three Mile Island? Or Chernobyl? Or go drink some that water with Chomium 6 in it like they had in "Erin Brokovitch". Yum!
Funny, I thought humans got along for millenia without either. Most people get along fine without a car now. I bet you drive a 4-ton clone box (suv) to get to the video game store a mile or two away.
and sent it to a publisher he was having a dispute with. Neil Gaiman has a highly amusing anecdote about how the mailroom boy who delivered the box to the publisher got fired (that's not the funny part). The mailroom boy met Neil Gaiman years after this and told him what happened, and Neil had heard Harlan Ellison tell about how he took a handgun out to his garden in his bathrobe to shoot the gopher, but nobody would believe him until Neil told the rest.
Yes, anyone who's a genuine pastry chef, even one from Poland or Japan, _will_ know how to make a crepe, whether they work for Greenpeace or the Walforf Astoria. This is what really pisses me off about you idiots. Greenpeace is ON YOUR SIDE, moron! You're just trying to rip off the rest of us for money, and you're trying to do nothing about a very serious problem that affects the entire fucking human race.
Why work at a job you hate, pay a bunch of taxes, then spend the rest on a 30 year mortgage so a for-profit bank can get rich off a house only designed to last 50 years? You can build your own cob cottage for cheap, and it's much more fire and earthquake resistant, and WAY more beautiful than these suburban clone-boxes.
Everything is going down the shitter. If the quality of music is constant, why are there so many younger bands covering old songs? Corporate music contract policies create the crap. 70s crap came from heartfelt (but crappy) artists; nowadays crap comes from artists being contractually obligated to create something, anything that can be sold. It's about the money, not the music. That's autocrap.
And saying there's a large elephant in the room doesn't answer the question "Why is the elephant there?" Yes, partly it _is_ cheaper to download than buy. But also there's the factor of people not wanting to patronize a business they regard as Evil. Once the word got out on how CCR got screwed, more people began examining the egregious abuses of this industry, and people began to wake up. No one wants to feed these bastards when buying an album is hardly a necessity. I've been avoiding buying CDs for years because I don't want the industry to get my money. When I finally broke down and bought a Metallica cd/dvd combination (the packaging said the DVD was a _Concert_ of the entire album; it turned out to be a rehearsal, full of off-key singing and no audience or energy, talk about false advertising) it turns out the whole album was, in fact, crap. Surprise surprise. If there were a return policy on the crap, more people would be willing to pay for music in the first place. Fuck 'em.
The other factor I consider important in this debate is the whole consumer lifestyle. Housing prices have skyrocketed since the 70s; small towns have died a slow death and more people have migrated to larger and larger suburban houses or increasingly expensive cities. People work longer and longer hours at worse jobs they hate, just to pay the huge mortgage/rent. Entertainment becomes more important in people's lives but more expensive (comparatively). And corporations have increased their political power more and more since the 70s until now a congressman has way less power in Washington than a lobbyist does. The corporations have us by the balls and they're squeezing every last cent out of us and giving us less and less back. No raise this year, sorry dude, and your co-pays are going up 50%. And the rent goes up, oh and the bank now charges $27 for an overdraft even though their cost is still less than $5. No wonder people are downloading for all they're worth; it's the only way we can get back at them!
Since they're allowed to "recoup costs" they can make up any number that sounds good (whatever the market will bear) and slap that on every bill for every customer, including millions of people who will never, ever port their numbers. Profit!
Every film commentator who has seen the LOTR props has raved about their detail and craftsmanship. People would go to New Zealand specifically to see these props and the 'bigatures' etc. It would have been a good idea to leave to Hobbiton sets up too, but too late now.
"It's well capable and has the necessary landing ability."
Uh, stop and think for 10 seconds. The shuttle lands on Earth using wings. Wings require air. Also the shuttle needs a decent landing strip, and to take off it needs a bunch of fuel, even in the moon's low gravity.
Unfortunately TV and movies are viewed as reality by most americans, nearly every show in space treats ships like planes in space; they're streamlined, winged, and they maneuver like dogfighting planes. Watch some Babylon 5 reruns.
If the sentence says Ghost in the Shell (the movie) and GitS (The TV Series), the first one in the sentence is the former, and the latter one in the sentence is the latter.
... immediately the production, performance or marketing of your recent play, "Romeo and Juliet" which is obviously an infringement of our copyrighted work "Romeus and Juliet".
Sincerely yours,
Shylock Law Firm
Seriously folks, the world got along JUST FINE without copyright, and some of the most important works of all literature were based on someone else's 'intellectual property'. There's no such fucking thing. Ideas, plays, music, whatever; it all belongs to Everyone, not some corporation that's not even a person. All this control freak bullshit is just a selfish jerk's way to get more for himself at the expense of everyone else. Would ANYONE buy a Windows from Microsoft if there were other companies selling their own version of windows? Actually, yes! But not as many as do now, I think.
And as far as this music thing goes, this whole concept of Wealthy Music Star and fans who pay is an artificial concept created to move wealth from the many into the hands of the few, thereby concentrating power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. There was a time not long ago when people made their own music, all the time. People shared music with each other in community gatherings, not giant arenas where noone knows each other, and audience and the performer both oddly anonymous. Kill the profit in the music industry and build better communities.
They're extra-bitchy about losing theatrical release ticket sales? A new box-office record was set last month! $680,000,000! WHAT THE FUCK IS THEIR PROBLEM?! WHEN WILL IT EVER BE ENOUGH?! Is there no end to the avarice of people? How many fucking cars and mansions do they need?
I've been WONDERING what these are; the last /. post about it I've seen didn't provide ANY information about what the hell it was talking about, like everybody automatically knows what a machinima is. Isn't in the dictionary either.
So thanks very much indeed.
Don't you people ever read ANYTHING? All the modded up posts are about how this is supposed to be a GOOD thing! Don't you ever pay any attention to the posts about how things start out small?
It starts with "sobriety check points" and 'harmless' little black boxes, your own property helping convict you of a crime. Then it's little gray boxes in your toilet making sure you're not doing any drugs. Then maybe RFID tags in library books and chips in your computer making sure you're not doing anything terroristic or pedophilistic. Before long the Control Freaks have you right where they want you.
WAKE THE FUCK UP!
Do you mean dermitologists, ie skin-doctors?