How exactly would bigger muscles aid you in setting up a web server, doing your accounts, designing an ad campaign, selling real estate, operating industrial robots or any job at all that pays more than minimum wage? We didn't need Superman to build the Empire State Building. That's what we have machines for. These days, muscles are mainly used for beating up wives and drinking buddies. Read a few books and exercise your brain tissue, if you want to get anywhere in life.
Must run on an ethanol converter cell - so I can drink the battery when things get desperate. A side pocket for a lemon slice and an olive would be good, too.
These days, all of Dubya's oil buddies in the US and in Saudi Arabia are swimming in money due to high oil prices. In Clinton's days, the totalitarian, islamic fundamentalist Saudi regime was in big trouble, since oil prices were so low that they couldn't simply bribe any opposition into silence any more. Basically, that's where al Qaeda came from: As the oil pie got smaller, the rulers kept the biggest piece, causing envy.
So we could imagine that plunging the region into crisis and shutting down Iraqi production for good and thus raising oil prices sky high was a conscious ploy to make every oil magnate on the planet rich beyond belief.
Somehow I tend to believe more in Dubya's incompetence, though, since there's enough evidence for it: "We will be greeted as liberators, organize elections and the markets will fix things by themselves." That's what they said. All of America was mumbling that mantra in the build-up to the war. Since 99% of Americans knew shit about Eyeraq before the war and the CIA provably knew fuck all about it, why would we expect the White House to understand the many tensions complicating Iraqi politics?
Keep in mind: Failing utterly at your goals is not proof that you never had them. Go on, get drunk, break into a jewelry store, pass out on its floor and try to convince the judge: "I can't have possibly intended to burgle this store, since I botched it so badly."
"The ideal is pacifism, I admit, but obviously some things justify violence. Many Christians would argue that it is one's duty to protect the Lord's gift of life from the wicked who would take it."
...by taking said gift from those you regard as wicked. Right.
See? That's why I don't call myself Christian anymore. Sufficient interpretative hoop jumping renders it utterly meaningless.
Jesus may have lost His temper in the temple, but He did not ever kill anybody.
Christ protect us from Christians!
"I actually AM what many would call a bible-toting religious nut, but I'm tired of seeing mindless pacifism advocated. Pacifism is utterly naive and foolish in every sense."
You might want to read that Bible some day, instead of just toting it. You may be a religious nut, but you are definitely not a Christian, since Jesus Christ was exactly the kind of wuss who advocated absolute pacifism. You know, "love your enemy", "turn the other cheek", "do not meet evil with evil" and "thou shalt NOT kill". No if, when or but to any of these statements.
Jesus figured that if everybody was the same kind of wuss as he was, there would be peace on earth. And yes, he got crucified for it, so maybe he was naive and foolish. It takes balls of steel to lay down your arms and take whatever the world dishes out, which is why there are fairly few Christians in the world and most of them are women.
Me? I'm a Sumutian. Naive and foolish would be putting it mildly. Nobody's gotten around to crucifying me yet, though.
And didn't whales communicate over hundreds of miles with each other? So we might assume that a strenuous testing schedule of this system might render plenty of whales deaf or suicidal. Like sharing your home with a guy who runs a leaf blower indoors at any hours of the day. Bit rude, no?
I remember vaguely liking this as a kid. Watching recent reruns, I started to suspect that my parents kept me heavily sedated throughout my childhood...snooze city! Severely bored actors standing around waiting for their next gruesome line of dialogue to come along ever so slowly.
Red Dwarf was lovely. But then it never aired in the US, so it didn't really exist, right?
The Hitchhiker's Guide appears to be missing as well.
And if they count Buffy, Batman and Xena as science fiction, they might as well count Grim & Evil, too. Completely useless flab, the whole list. They obviously just put their thumbs in their mouths and drooled until they could think of 50 shows to put in. Not worth the hits they collect.
I suspect that most Korean traffic comes from Korean language sites, which are mostly conveniently located in the same small country.
US traffic probably comes mostly from American sites, but also from English speaking countries around the world as well as European sites published in English, which is our defacto lingua franca.
South Africans probably browse sites from all over the world, like I do here in Finland: 99% of sites I visit come from overseas, which makes me a much more expensive customer than that Korean dude surfing mostly sites less than a thousand miles away on the same trunk line. Underwater, cross-Atlantic cable takes a while to pay for...
As a rollerblader I must register my disapproval of any stories displaying cobblestones in a positive light.
Pave the earth! Turn paradise into a parking lot! And put those elderly patients on blades. I guarantee they'll gain "improvements in balance and physical performance" - or die trying.
Oh, and Mozilla (Debian package 1.7.8-1) crashed with a segmentation fault the first time I hit reply on this story. The international cobblestone conspiracy has agents working on free software!!! Foam! Splutter! Moan!
It's often written up so difficult like that us normal folks can't read it nicely, and it's got no good pictures and jokes to liven up the reading.
"Conceptual art lacks craft" is exactly equivalent to "Perl programmers are incompetent because perl code looks like line noise." Hell, yeah, some conceptual art is crap and some Perl code is line noise, but it takes an expert to recognize it.
Next time you're at a conceptual art exhibition, think of your pointy haired boss peeping over your shoulder and saying: "That looks like pretty bad code to me. If you used less white space, you could fit a lot more code on one page."
Around 1890, people used to say that Van Gogh and the impressionists lacked craft because you could see all those fat brush strokes.
Now, if this snotty reply didn't inspire you to throw mud in the face of the next highfalutin' artist you meet, I don't know what will.
Blown away by a freak solar storm, it's now racing away from Earth at 0.1 light speed, its sails in tatters, due to pass Alpha Centauri in a century or so.
What can I say, I'm an amateur science fiction writer. Those little pesky things called 'facts' don't really bother me...
Here's a quote from another Russian, frequently renamed download site, which has a link to said organization. Rumor has it that it's just about impossible for foreigners to get money out of them.
"The Audio1 Services are licensed in accordance with the Licensing Agreement and the License # LS-3M-04-164, issued by the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. All respective copyrights owners, including songwriters, authors, composers, artists, music publishers and recording companies are fully compensated through the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society www.roms.ru, which in accordance with the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights" is entitled to issue licenses on behalf of different copyright owners and pay them license fees."
Apparently, you just pay them a fee and you're 'licensed' to distribute anything you want.
Der Spiegel recently reported that computer users with internet connections would have to pay the yearly TV license, too, since the German state owned TV companies stream their shit onto the net and thus every computer is a potential television programming receiver.
Entrapment. Of course, since you have already paid for it when you bought your computer and your media, you now have a license to pirate, right?
Sorry, I can't resist replying to his points. Please moderate this and the parent as off-topic.
Answers to your points:
1. Bush did retreat from Afghanistan after handing it over to heroin running warlords and arranging a farce of an election for a president of Kabul, in which none of the candidates could campaign outside their own strongholds for fear of being killed, and with the only serious opposition to the US favorite CIA asset being a mass murdering warlord. Nobody cared. Bush will also hand Iraq to any friendly dictator who can keep it quiet - or would, if there was anyone who could. He'd have to be another Saddam at this point. Allawi/Bush has already started on the "bombing his own people" part in Falluja. Next up: A secret police torturing dissident 'terrorists'. There's not much Kerry could have done, but he couldn't done worse than Bush will. Promise.
2. Bush's roadmap is dead and went nowhere. He gave Sharon free hands to turn Israel into an apartheit state complete with a Berlin wall style structure that cements the conflict. Unemployment among young Palestinians is something like 80% with no prospects of improvement: Unlimited pool of potential terrorists with nothing to lose.
3. South-American economies are permanently down because most people can't afford to consume. How do you expect the US car industry to survive, if most employees can barely afford a used heap while working two jobs below minimum wage? Most new jobs created under Bush have been low wage jobs that will barely pay rent and food. No wonder consumer spending is down -> production is down -> revenues are down. The USA is turning into another banana republic.
Under Bush, oil prices have tripled, well paying jobs have disappeared or gone overseas, the dollar has lost a third of its value.
Ending social security would put millions of beggars onto your streets and lower consumption even further while raising crime rates. Of course, you can't even imagine going bankrupt and too chronically ill to work to ever need it yourself. Do you propose to kill yourself when your own earning capacity and savings end?
4. The Bush administration learned nothing from Afghanistan. Half of all military spending in the world is spent by the USA. There is no other power in the world that can threaten the US without facing annihilation. North-Korea has had the capacity to destroy Seoul and kill a hundred thousand people in one day using conventional missiles for decades. Nukes are irrelevant there. All we can do is wait for NK to crumble or sacrifice millions of Korean lives in pointless war. US military spending is based on groundless paranoia and the need to spread it into every congressperson's district.
In its new cabinet appointments, the Bush administration has shown no capacity of learning from mistakes. Kerry would not have been much of an improvement, but at least he would not have committed rash idiocies, of which the current regime is inordinately fond.
Kerry did not propose to withdraw from Iraq and did have a detailed plan for social security and healthcare reform.
I did not vote for either of them, as I belong to that majority of humankind that gets to sit still and wait to be bombed for any made-up reason that will please the American public. I love most of what constitutes the USA, but your government is among the most dangerous rogue states in the world.
Found this old book at the library: Electronic Projects for Musicians by Craig Anderton, which has some very basic looking projects like simple amplifiers, guitar fuzz boxes, ring modulator and such. Looked suitable for beginners (which is why I'm reading it, of course). It's 24 years old, though, but maybe you'll find something similar from this decade.
One niggle: In Finland, a town or city is an administrative term that collects a population spread out over massive distances. A typical countryside town here has a dozen houses and a church in the center and hundreds of houses that can be dozens of kilometers away.
Add to that our obsession with summer cottages in remote regions that *must* be served, so that our yuppies and Nokia executives can stay in touch with the office during vacations, and you will find that 90% coverage is required from a competitive cell phone service provider. We've had big cities only providers, but they were unsuccessful.
> Ask Jeeves: Groklaw.net as #1 > Google: NewsForge analysing article as #1 and other SCO related news articles.
Groklaw blocks the Google spider, last I heard. I think the reason stated was that they did not want to swamp search results for the SCO lawsuits, or something like that. I don't see the point. Groklaw is a perfectly fine starting point for researching them, IMHO, but then my name is not Darl McBride...
It makes for a more viable ecosystem, though. The more competitors there are, the more ideas are likely to be tried. And free software is not really on a do or die schedule. It doesn't go bankrupt, if success doesn't show up within two years.
Mozilla could spend a leisurely four years rebuilding from scratch. As long as there are a few developers to keep the code compiling on the latest platforms, a project can even vegetate in near coma for years without terminal consequences. Look at the history of PostgreSQL, for instance.
The reason reptiles, small dinosaur relatives and small mammals survived such an upheaval where the giants died lies in their energy requirements.
I've seen a fairly good case made for the dinosaurs being warm-blooded. This means that they required a huge, steady supply of food, which was disrupted by the catastrophe.
A cold-blooded crocodile gets by on a lot less food, since it doesn't heat itself constantly. It just grows more slowly with less food.
Now, mice. Take a brontosaur's mass of mice, say 20,000. Food supply dwindles to scraps, 19,800 mice starve to death. No problem. As soon as there's enough food again, the remaining 200 mice can breed back to 20,000 within less than a year to efficiently fill their ecological niche. A brontosaur cannot simply lose 99% of its weight to make it through a lean spell.
Birds have the same advantages as mice and migrate nearly instantly to new regions on top of that.
As I told you, this was not a matter of wartime exigencies (as those weapons were a mere plane ride away in case of imminent war, anyway), but of peacetime posturing, of drawing the blocks closer to war by threatening to use nukes on invading armies.
I'm sure you felt really nice and comfy sitting somewhere on the American continent, unlikely to be hit by anything but the draft, while we were between the grindstones of two superpowers, waiting to be crushed.
I give up. There's no way I can convey that atmosphere of fear.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly would bigger muscles aid you in setting up a web server, doing your accounts, designing an ad campaign, selling real estate, operating industrial robots or any job at all that pays more than minimum wage?
We didn't need Superman to build the Empire State Building. That's what we have machines for. These days, muscles are mainly used for beating up wives and drinking buddies. Read a few books and exercise your brain tissue, if you want to get anywhere in life.
"Let's do it like they do it on Discovery Channel..."
Well, you're one fewer to bid against me when the Martian porn recovered from the Earth Polar Lander goes on Ebay, then.
Let me be the first to say:
Good job with the brooms, Martian dudes!
Hope you enjoy the hardware.
Sorry we forgot to pack any porn on the hard disk.
Must run on an ethanol converter cell - so I can drink the battery when things get desperate. A side pocket for a lemon slice and an olive would be good, too.
These days, all of Dubya's oil buddies in the US and in Saudi Arabia are swimming in money due to high oil prices. In Clinton's days, the totalitarian, islamic fundamentalist Saudi regime was in big trouble, since oil prices were so low that they couldn't simply bribe any opposition into silence any more. Basically, that's where al Qaeda came from: As the oil pie got smaller, the rulers kept the biggest piece, causing envy.
So we could imagine that plunging the region into crisis and shutting down Iraqi production for good and thus raising oil prices sky high was a conscious ploy to make every oil magnate on the planet rich beyond belief.
Somehow I tend to believe more in Dubya's incompetence, though, since there's enough evidence for it: "We will be greeted as liberators, organize elections and the markets will fix things by themselves." That's what they said. All of America was mumbling that mantra in the build-up to the war. Since 99% of Americans knew shit about Eyeraq before the war and the CIA provably knew fuck all about it, why would we expect the White House to understand the many tensions complicating Iraqi politics?
Keep in mind: Failing utterly at your goals is not proof that you never had them.
Go on, get drunk, break into a jewelry store, pass out on its floor and try to convince the judge: "I can't have possibly intended to burgle this store, since I botched it so badly."
See? That's why I don't call myself Christian anymore. Sufficient interpretative hoop jumping renders it utterly meaningless.
Jesus may have lost His temper in the temple, but He did not ever kill anybody. Christ protect us from Christians!
"I actually AM what many would call a bible-toting religious nut, but I'm tired of seeing mindless pacifism advocated. Pacifism is utterly naive and foolish in every sense."
You might want to read that Bible some day, instead of just toting it. You may be a religious nut, but you are definitely not a Christian, since Jesus Christ was exactly the kind of wuss who advocated absolute pacifism. You know, "love your enemy", "turn the other cheek", "do not meet evil with evil" and "thou shalt NOT kill". No if, when or but to any of these statements.
Jesus figured that if everybody was the same kind of wuss as he was, there would be peace on earth. And yes, he got crucified for it, so maybe he was naive and foolish. It takes balls of steel to lay down your arms and take whatever the world dishes out, which is why there are fairly few Christians in the world and most of them are women.
Me? I'm a Sumutian. Naive and foolish would be putting it mildly.
Nobody's gotten around to crucifying me yet, though.
And didn't whales communicate over hundreds of miles with each other? So we might assume that a strenuous testing schedule of this system might render plenty of whales deaf or suicidal. Like sharing your home with a guy who runs a leaf blower indoors at any hours of the day. Bit rude, no?
37. 'Space 1999'
I remember vaguely liking this as a kid.
Watching recent reruns, I started to suspect that my parents kept me heavily sedated throughout my childhood...snooze city! Severely bored actors standing around waiting for their next gruesome line of dialogue to come along ever so slowly.
Red Dwarf was lovely. But then it never aired in the US, so it didn't really exist, right?
The Hitchhiker's Guide appears to be missing as well.
And if they count Buffy, Batman and Xena as science fiction, they might as well count Grim & Evil, too. Completely useless flab, the whole list. They obviously just put their thumbs in their mouths and drooled until they could think of 50 shows to put in. Not worth the hits they collect.
That's a very nice firewall you've got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it...
I suspect that most Korean traffic comes from Korean language sites, which are mostly conveniently located in the same small country.
US traffic probably comes mostly from American sites, but also from English speaking countries around the world as well as European sites published in English, which is our defacto lingua franca.
South Africans probably browse sites from all over the world, like I do here in Finland: 99% of sites I visit come from overseas, which makes me a much more expensive customer than that Korean dude surfing mostly sites less than a thousand miles away on the same trunk line. Underwater, cross-Atlantic cable takes a while to pay for...
As a rollerblader I must register my disapproval of any stories displaying cobblestones in a positive light.
Pave the earth!
Turn paradise into a parking lot!
And put those elderly patients on blades. I guarantee they'll gain "improvements in balance and physical performance" - or die trying.
Oh, and Mozilla (Debian package 1.7.8-1) crashed with a segmentation fault the first time I hit reply on this story. The international cobblestone conspiracy has agents working on free software!!! Foam! Splutter! Moan!
It's often written up so difficult like that us normal folks can't read it nicely, and it's got no good pictures and jokes to liven up the reading.
"Conceptual art lacks craft" is exactly equivalent to "Perl programmers are incompetent because perl code looks like line noise." Hell, yeah, some conceptual art is crap and some Perl code is line noise, but it takes an expert to recognize it.
Next time you're at a conceptual art exhibition, think of your pointy haired boss peeping over your shoulder and saying: "That looks like pretty bad code to me. If you used less white space, you could fit a lot more code on one page."
Around 1890, people used to say that Van Gogh and the impressionists lacked craft because you could see all those fat brush strokes.
Now, if this snotty reply didn't inspire you to throw mud in the face of the next highfalutin' artist you meet, I don't know what will.
Blown away by a freak solar storm, it's now racing away from Earth at 0.1 light speed, its sails in tatters, due to pass Alpha Centauri in a century or so.
What can I say, I'm an amateur science fiction writer. Those little pesky things called 'facts' don't really bother me...
Here's a quote from another Russian, frequently renamed download site, which has a link to said organization. Rumor has it that it's just about impossible for foreigners to get money out of them.
"The Audio1 Services are licensed in accordance with the Licensing Agreement and the License # LS-3M-04-164, issued by the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. All respective copyrights owners, including songwriters, authors, composers, artists, music publishers and recording companies are fully compensated through the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society www.roms.ru, which in accordance with the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights" is entitled to issue licenses on behalf of different copyright owners and pay them license fees."
Apparently, you just pay them a fee and you're 'licensed' to distribute anything you want.
I assume you don't want to hear about my broadband provider in Finland, since you kindly failed to mention even the country you're posting from.
I somehow doubt that Welho.fi would want to string cable all the way to Centeroftheuniverse, California...
Der Spiegel recently reported that computer users with internet connections would have to pay the yearly TV license, too, since the German state owned TV companies stream their shit onto the net and thus every computer is a potential television programming receiver.
Entrapment. Of course, since you have already paid for it when you bought your computer and your media, you now have a license to pirate, right?
...an MBA shouldn't be too hard for the average cat, either.
And I wish this to be moderated as '-1: D'uh!'
Thank you.
Sorry, I can't resist replying to his points. Please moderate this and the parent as off-topic.
Answers to your points:
1. Bush did retreat from Afghanistan after handing it over to heroin running warlords and arranging a farce of an election for a president of Kabul, in which none of the candidates could campaign outside their own strongholds for fear of being killed, and with the only serious opposition to the US favorite CIA asset being a mass murdering warlord. Nobody cared. Bush will also hand Iraq to any friendly dictator who can keep it quiet - or would, if there was anyone who could. He'd have to be another Saddam at this point. Allawi/Bush has already started on the "bombing his own people" part in Falluja. Next up: A secret police torturing dissident 'terrorists'. There's not much Kerry could have done, but he couldn't done worse than Bush will. Promise.
2. Bush's roadmap is dead and went nowhere. He gave Sharon free hands to turn Israel into an apartheit state complete with a Berlin wall style structure that cements the conflict. Unemployment among young Palestinians is something like 80% with no prospects of improvement: Unlimited pool of potential terrorists with nothing to lose.
3. South-American economies are permanently down because most people can't afford to consume. How do you expect the US car industry to survive, if most employees can barely afford a used heap while working two jobs below minimum wage? Most new jobs created under Bush have been low wage jobs that will barely pay rent and food. No wonder consumer spending is down -> production is down -> revenues are down. The USA is turning into another banana republic.
Under Bush, oil prices have tripled, well paying jobs have disappeared or gone overseas, the dollar has lost a third of its value.
Ending social security would put millions of beggars onto your streets and lower consumption even further while raising crime rates. Of course, you can't even imagine going bankrupt and too chronically ill to work to ever need it yourself. Do you propose to kill yourself when your own earning capacity and savings end?
4. The Bush administration learned nothing from Afghanistan. Half of all military spending in the world is spent by the USA. There is no other power in the world that can threaten the US without facing annihilation. North-Korea has had the capacity to destroy Seoul and kill a hundred thousand people in one day using conventional missiles for decades. Nukes are irrelevant there. All we can do is wait for NK to crumble or sacrifice millions of Korean lives in pointless war.
US military spending is based on groundless paranoia and the need to spread it into every congressperson's district.
In its new cabinet appointments, the Bush administration has shown no capacity of learning from mistakes. Kerry would not have been much of an improvement, but at least he would not have committed rash idiocies, of which the current regime is inordinately fond.
Kerry did not propose to withdraw from Iraq and did have a detailed plan for social security and healthcare reform.
I did not vote for either of them, as I belong to that majority of humankind that gets to sit still and wait to be bombed for any made-up reason that will please the American public. I love most of what constitutes the USA, but your government is among the most dangerous rogue states in the world.
Found this old book at the library:
Electronic Projects for Musicians by Craig Anderton,
which has some very basic looking projects like simple amplifiers, guitar fuzz boxes, ring modulator and such. Looked suitable for beginners (which is why I'm reading it, of course). It's 24 years old, though, but maybe you'll find something similar from this decade.
Kids love making noise, right?
One niggle: In Finland, a town or city is an administrative term that collects a population spread out over massive distances. A typical countryside town here has a dozen houses and a church in the center and hundreds of houses that can be dozens of kilometers away.
Add to that our obsession with summer cottages in remote regions that *must* be served, so that our yuppies and Nokia executives can stay in touch with the office during vacations, and you will find that 90% coverage is required from a competitive cell phone service provider. We've had big cities only providers, but they were unsuccessful.
> Ask Jeeves: Groklaw.net as #1
> Google: NewsForge analysing article as #1 and other SCO related news articles.
Groklaw blocks the Google spider, last I heard.
I think the reason stated was that they did not want to swamp search results for the SCO lawsuits, or something like that. I don't see the point. Groklaw is a perfectly fine starting point for researching them, IMHO, but then my name is not Darl McBride...
It makes for a more viable ecosystem, though. The more competitors there are, the more ideas are likely to be tried. And free software is not really on a do or die schedule. It doesn't go bankrupt, if success doesn't show up within two years.
Mozilla could spend a leisurely four years rebuilding from scratch. As long as there are a few developers to keep the code compiling on the latest platforms, a project can even vegetate in near coma for years without terminal consequences. Look at the history of PostgreSQL, for instance.
The reason reptiles, small dinosaur relatives and small mammals survived such an upheaval where the giants died lies in their energy requirements.
I've seen a fairly good case made for the dinosaurs being warm-blooded. This means that they required a huge, steady supply of food, which was disrupted by the catastrophe.
A cold-blooded crocodile gets by on a lot less food, since it doesn't heat itself constantly. It just grows more slowly with less food.
Now, mice. Take a brontosaur's mass of mice, say 20,000. Food supply dwindles to scraps, 19,800 mice starve to death. No problem. As soon as there's enough food again, the remaining 200 mice can breed back to 20,000 within less than a year to efficiently fill their ecological niche. A brontosaur cannot simply lose 99% of its weight to make it through a lean spell.
Birds have the same advantages as mice and migrate nearly instantly to new regions on top of that.
As I told you, this was not a matter of wartime exigencies (as those weapons were a mere plane ride away in case of imminent war, anyway), but of peacetime posturing, of drawing the blocks closer to war by threatening to use nukes on invading armies.
I'm sure you felt really nice and comfy sitting somewhere on the American continent, unlikely to be hit by anything but the draft, while we were between the grindstones of two superpowers, waiting to be crushed.
I give up. There's no way I can convey that atmosphere of fear.