before anyone starts getting all 'see, all you global-warming believers, this is a perfectly rational natural explanation for the current warming trend,' the periods of these natural cycles are on the order of 1.2 and 2.4 million years. not exactly fast-acting.
Though is is worth noting that something happened either to the earth's orbit or its speed of rotation in the 8th century BCE. History shows civilizations around the world dumping their 360-day calender at right about the same time after having used it for over 1000 years, followed by a struggle to come up with a 365-day one. Attempts to hand-wave this away as "silly ancients couldn't make an accurate calendar" or "it was just a ceremonial calendar" are clearly wrong. With a 5 day variance like that the calender would become 180 degrees out of phase in only 36 years-- within one person's lifetime-- so obviously someone would've noticed and adjusted it and not just left it alone for 1000+ years. As for the second, that ignores the entire purpose of the calender: agricultural planning. A calender so inaccurate you can't plant crops by it is worthless. No, clearly the mechanics of earth's orbit were altered. Probably not enough to make any significant climatic difference, but an orbital alteration nonetheless, and within recorded history. Worth keeping in mind lest people get the idea that we live within a static system
Basically after that I realized that "civilization" should really be called "kick the auslanders asses"....
Compare that to the numerous times that I've played CS:S and rescued all the hostages without firing a shot... I was still rewarded for my efforts a hell of a lot better than what Civ rewarded me for being generous, peaceful and noble.
Yeah, I'd have to agree. No game brings out my "inner shithead" more than Civilization. Granted, you can't really play GTA[3|VC|SA] without feeling some sensation of being a lawless asshole, but only the Civ games make me cackle with sadistic glee as I pile up Modern Armor in anticipation of being a total dick and invading my peaceful neighbor in revenge for one minor war they started with me fifteen hundred years ago.
Many people already call PDF "Adobe format" because they don't know you can read it without Adobe.
No they call it that because they have a remarkable inability to distinguish the the company name (Adobe) from the product (Reader, formerly Acrobat), and Adobe's decision to call it "Adobe Reader" only made that worse. I can't tell you how many calls I've gotten from office drones complaining about "Adobe not working". Adobe what? Photoshop? Indesign? Illustrator? Reader? "No, just Adobe. You know, for reading PDF files". People are idiots and Adobe's stupid naming choices haven't helped them any.
And yet they own your "intelligent" mind at chess and almost any game.
Chess isn't a game of "intelligence" so much as "mathematics". Despite what chess loons would like you to think of it, winning at chess does not involve complex creativity, but rather successful calculation and identification of the most numerically advantageous path on a finite decision tree. This is why Kasparov was so pissed off when he lost to Deep Blue. No master chess player wants to have it pushed in their face that they're not so much a creative genius as a borderline "idiot-savant" with a knack for chess math.
Of course he said it. Just because he later denies it, doesn't mean he isn't lying.
Right, and just because nobody can come up with a time place, witness, or any other evidence at all of Bill Gates' supposed quote actually coming from Bill Gates' mouth, that doesn't mean he didn't say it. Perhaps a goddamn psychic heard him think it in the shower one morning! Fucking moron.
Considering America's unquenchable appetite for mystery/murder novels, murder TV shows and big budget slaughter-the-bad-guys movies, you're a fine one to lecture anyone on what is tasteless. Look around you doofus, this _is_ America.
America? this is humanity. People have always gotten off on this shit. Take a look at shakespeare. Chock-full of murder. Greek mythology, ditto. Norse mythology, likewise. We are fascinated by murder.
but FTA there's nothing implicating him other than his divorce and the fact he is refusing to talk to police (thus they're treating him like shit).
I've watched enough "real life murder" type shows on A&e to have learned one thing: guilty or not, keep your mouth shut, no matter what the cops say. Seriously, homicide investigators are suspicious, pigheaded, and often arbitrary. You'll watch one show and the cop will say "his alibi just didn't sound right", and you'll watch another where they'll say "his alibi was just a little too good". In the end, they usually catch the person because a witness comes forward saying "yeah, I seen him do it" or "I heard him brag about it". The few times they pick the right guy and then find the evidence on their own, it seems to be by dumb luck. Of course all the ones you see made into A7e shows, they picked the right guy. Makes you wonder how many stories there are about innocent folks being put through the same wringer just because some cop with a BS in criminology "just has a feeling about this guy".
>>> That's incorrect -- eyewitness testimony isn't circumstantial.
Circumstantial:
1. Of, relating to, or dependent on circumstances.
----> Includes every situation. It's all dependant on the crime, for instance.
"Circumstantial evidence" has a specific meaning in law, so you might as well stick your vanilla dictionary definitions up your ass, for all their applicability. In law, eyewitness testimony is not circumstantial evidence.
I wonder if you'd change your tune if it was your wife or mother or daughter that was killed.
I personally would hope to be as enlightened as those Amish folks when that nutcase killed all those young girls. They actually invited the family of the nut to come pray with them, realizing that the guy was sick and that being angry about it won't bring back the dead. Seriously, thirsting for revenge doesn't make any aspect of such a bad situation any better. Finding compassion in the face of personal loss might be extraordinarily difficult, but letting anger rule your life essentially flushes a second life down the drain after the first.
Given that a death sentence is not only planned but scheduled, I think that just made it murder by your own definition.
In your zeal to hastily support your erroneous claim, you missed one key thing. Capital punishment isn't unlawful. Homicide must first and foremost be unlawful to be murder.
By what metric is a woman who doesn't like porn perfect?
By some weird-ass fucked up metric, if you ask me. My girlfriend badgered me into putting all my porn in a shared volume on the server so she could access it, and then complained that it "wasn't enough, and not dirty enough" and demanded I find more (and better) porn.
Oh yeah! MoM is part of my perpetual triumvirate of Old Standbys:
1. Master of Magic (Mystic X is for hire? WOO!)
2. Master of Orion II (whaddya know, another Simtex game like MoM)
3. X-Com: UFO (the original, not any of the weird sequels that were either underwater or didn't have the turn-based combat)
I can't believe people still believe the "stuff made today is shit, while everything made in the past lasted forever" meme.
Indeed, this is among my favorite myths. Another factor affecting that perception is the process of commoditization. Microwave ovens are a great example. Today you find all kinds of people bellyaching about how microwaves now are crap compared to "the one my [mother|grandmother|aunt] had back in '79", but this is not entirely true. You can get a good, solid, bulletproof microwave oven like they had in the 70's-- it's just going to be very expensive because it's a commercial grade unit. See, back in the 70's all you could get was a commercial grade oven. They didn't have cheap throwaway microwaves back then. I guarantee that if you pay what your Aunt Matilda paid for a microwave back in 1975 (inflation adjusted), you'll get one that lasts just as long.
I'm arguing that copyright is a right in exactly the same way that freedom of speech is a right: by legal protection. The GP seems to be claiming that all 'rights' are actually privileges that are legally protected (and I tend to agree). You're claiming that there's a substantive difference between different legally protected rights -- that some are 'true' rights and others are 'merely' privileges. I think you've failed to demonstrate this.
Look, the distinction is fairly obvious if you'll quit focusing on the fact that the word "right" shows up in reference to both in the Constitution. A right is something enjoyed by all by nature of simply existing. The exercise of a right does not by its nature infringe upon the rights of others. Copyright, on the other hand, is not in the same class as a "natural right" such as the freedom of speech. The exercise of copyright is by definition a government enforced abridgment of the rights of everyone else. The act of enforcing copyright, by its very nature involves prohibiting the free exercise of certain rights in others. I am not free to exercise my right to free expression by singing "happy Birthday" to a customer in my restaurant because the government has granted a monopoly on public performance rights for that song to one entity: the copyright holder. The granting of the privilege of lmiting the rights of others (in order to be able to charge for license) is for the purpose of enriching the public domain. The purpose was much more obvious in the early days, when the term was 14 + 14 years. The current term of life + 75 years has clearly confused many people into thinking that the right to prevent others from repeating a story you made up is some sort of "natural" right.
Try makeing any untoward comments about your almighty presedent, and how to depose him (violently or otherwise) and then see where your constitution gets you....
It gets you all the way up to the fence around the White House, where you can stand around all day shouting "IMPEACH BUSH" and waving your sign that reads "BUSH = HITLER, KILL BUSH NOW!"
Inciting crimes is illegal here (in the UK), as it is in the US.
True, but your above example doesn't even approach that.
And sedition is a thorny one both side of the pond.
Beyond a single absurd incident where the Veteran's Administration investigated one of its employees for writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, and a VA spokesperson foolishly claimed they had a "duty to investigate potential acts of sedition", there hasn't been any attempt to apply "sedition" here. this is precisely because sedition is a thorny 1st Amendment issue here. When the government goons come after you in the US, they make good and sure they can nail you for conspiracy. "sedition" is just too defensible.
It's a good show, but the "amateur camera operator" technique drives me away.
You mean they do that irritating "pseudo first person" handheld camera bullshit? I want to know what fucktard came up with that and thought it was a good idea. Man, I hope they don't do a lot of it, because I have the BSG first season on the way from netflix for this week's TV viewing...
I have to think at some point, dehydrating the air in an already arid region is going to have negative effects on the local climate.
Typical overestimation of man's power. You need to spend some time thinking (with apologies to Douglas Adams) about how phenomenally big the earth's atmosphere is. You might think that 300 gallons a day is a lot of water, but keep in mind that the atmosphere contains 1.12E17 gallons of it, and that only represents 0.0031% of the water on earth. Humanity does not have the wherewithal to affect the humidity such that it makes a fart in a thunderstorm's difference to the climate, even locally.
A youth stood in her way in a public park and demanded that she hit him. She did. So he hit her back. It is against the law in this country to assault people even if they ask you to, so she was arrested.
You could look at it that way and determine the CPS acted appropriately, but you'd be wrong. The law is not a computer program with a series of boolean conditions that call "CPS->Arrest(citizen)" when an IF...THEN evaluates true. Laws are expected to be enforced based upon the "reasonable man" theory. Would a reasonable man consider it assault in the case of a punch from an elderly woman against a belligerant young man who impeded her passage along a public walk and goaded her into it and then proceeded to use it as justification for breaking her arm? Unlikely. CPS should not have either.
Most all of the compositing, editing, and formatting software is for windows. For some very limited sorts of things, you could probably roll your own, but it would take a lot of development time, and probably be hard to use.
However, you should check out Apple's final cut pro. I've seen it used for small-medium sized TV stations, and it's not too hard to use. I like it.
RTFQ:
"I've been tasked to move them to computerized playback"
Not compositing, editing, and formatting; failsafe, scheduled playback. Final Cut Pro has no facility for that.
Jail should be a last resort. It makes no use of the person or their time, and does nothing to "rehabilitate" anyone.
Jail is punishment. Hardly anyone comes out of jail "rehabilitated". The notion that incarceration can be used to "fix" people is a quaint 19th century fantasy. The idea originally was that through hard work and rigorous application of religion they could "reinstall" morality in people. I think the best people like this can do is serve as an example to others who might try the same. Their's was not a crime of desperation, like some illiterate young man turning to robbing liquor stores because he can't hold down a job. It is precisely because these are skilled, intelligent, and successful people that their crimes should result in jail time. It almost sounds like you're saying that the rich and powerful shouldn't have to go to jail because they're more important than some fucked up crackhead.
You pay X dollers for X amount of on die cache You pay X dollers for each additional core over 2 you pay X dollers for a custom cpu (ie $100-$300)
I know this is expensive now, but intel could probably find a way it can make the initial process for cpu production streamlined for this market.
Errrr..... no, not likely. Creating the mask for the photolithography is not a simple task. Such a custom chip would require scores of photomasks, one for each possible combination. Then the finished chip would require testing, to see if it it actually works. If it doesn't (due to any of a number of possible issues, from mask errors to unexpected leakage or capacitance) then the mask has to be redesigned. Then, even if it works, you'd need to make several extra of each ordered core design in order to be sure to get a deliverable yield. The "initial process for cpu production", as you call it, is basically 99% of the hard work in CPU manufacturing. There's no magic automation wand available to make it any easier-- not beyond the incremental improvement we've been seeing for the last 30 years, anyway.
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Oh yeah! MoM is part of my perpetual triumvirate of Old Standbys:
1. Master of Magic (Mystic X is for hire? WOO!)
2. Master of Orion II (whaddya know, another Simtex game like MoM)
3. X-Com: UFO (the original, not any of the weird sequels that were either underwater or didn't have the turn-based combat)
Ice cores show atmospheric gas content, not temperature.
True, but your above example doesn't even approach that.
Beyond a single absurd incident where the Veteran's Administration investigated one of its employees for writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, and a VA spokesperson foolishly claimed they had a "duty to investigate potential acts of sedition", there hasn't been any attempt to apply "sedition" here. this is precisely because sedition is a thorny 1st Amendment issue here. When the government goons come after you in the US, they make good and sure they can nail you for conspiracy. "sedition" is just too defensible.
"I've been tasked to move them to computerized playback"
Not compositing, editing, and formatting; failsafe, scheduled playback. Final Cut Pro has no facility for that.