The reason RIAA will never recognize this is because to do so would be to condemn their own mediocrity. John Carmack succeeds because he is brilliant, he ALSO works damn hard, and doesn't give a crap about other people's opinions. I have no doubt that if his games weren't a succes, he'd still be working as a programmer for some crap company, and spending his evenings coding up his latest sphere collision-detection code. You think the RIAA wants to acknowledge that someone got rich because of effort, skill, and self-restraint? Let's think of something that would be more anathema to a group whose revenues are based on promotion, hype, and cramming 9 crap songs on every cd for each song worth paying for, and charging the public $15 for a cd that costs $1 to make.
No, I'm not thinking they are going to absorb much from him.
http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/
Strategy First is coming out with Nexagon:the Pit which is kind of Warcraft-meets-Rollerball where it's a 3d RTS game in an arena, but you get extra points for doing stuff that appeals to the crowd. You get extra $$ when you can manage to get your creature pounding another to a pulp in front of the camera, and even more if you can do it and get one of the surrounding billboards in the same camera shot. AFAIK at this point they're not sure if they can/will get any real advertisers in the mix, or if all the ads will be fake.
IMO that will be a blast.
Clearly they have once again violated the law, and will again be promptly slapped sternly across the knuckles. This time TWICE.
That should teach 'em to fear the law!
Re:has the targeted demographic really changed?
on
Attack of the Clones
·
· Score: 1
It's not that George Lucas is sunk in mediocrity. It's that he's so rich he doesn't have to listen/nobody will tell him any of his ideas are stupid.
When he was a punk-ass director making American Graffiti, I'm *sure* that he had to sit down, think out his ideas, and that he bounced them off his friends (don't we all?).
I'm equally sure some of them said "George, that's a stupid idea" to some of them. So he revised them.
Now, when he owns IL&M, Skywalker Ranch, etc, he's so damn rich & powerful, either nobody has the nuts to say "George, making an alien sound like a 1920's Al-Jolson mockery of a negro is a STUPID IDEA" *or* someone said it, and he's got too much ego to listen. I don't know the guy, so I don't know which is true. But I do know if you ran the "jar-jar" idea past 3 sane adults, at least 2 would say its ridiculous.
the ONLY people that care about this are the ones that were so damn annoying around Y2K. You know, those anal-retentives that got wood out of always insisting that the new millenium began in January 2001?
This smells entirely like when the telco's floated the idea of 'flat fee for voice, per-minute charges for internet/data calls'.
What a crock. Sure, as businesses they are entitled to price their services however they like. However, in the case of cable co's, they are NOT simply freestanding business, but have been granted a monopoly service that, in many areas, has NO competition.
They can never enforce this because it would break a fundamental right to privacy. There are a number of reasons someone might run a VPN or a VPN-like system for personal, hobby, or entertainment reasons having nothing to do with business. For them to intercept or discern what precisely is going on over that network sounds an awful lot like corporate wiretapping.
I'd be curious about your opinions regarding the breakup of AT&T, and the subsequent behavior/performance of the Baby Bells. Would you be willing to advocate the breakup of Microsoft if it lied to the commission or broke its promises? If not, what would be a suitable punishment? Basically, what are your views of the enforcement of the settlement and the consequences of punishment for failure to abide thereby?
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/13046.html : August 23,2001: "Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff says that at least two of the more than 400 letters his office has received in support of Bill Gates' Microsoft were from people who had died.
Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT), in its quest to sway states' attorneys general into settling antitrust charges still filed against it, has apparently orchestrated what was originally thought to be a grassroots letter-writing campaign in support of the company, the Los Angeles Times has reported."
Methinks they doth communicate too much.
[I'd rather have linked to the/. report of this story, but searching/. on "Microsoft" and "phony" brought up too damn many references.]
Having worked previously in a police department, and after reading the comments on this list, I can say it probably IS the life-threatening danger, or the charactistically different nature of physical labor-intensive jobs. In terms of the life-threatening occupations, it's clear that the bonds of dependence are much, much tighter by necessity. Sure, there are coworkers you hate in every job, cops are no different. But the fact that in the end maybe your life will depend on this guy/gal means that otherwise common decency is boosted with a little self-interest. In that same vein, I've never seen more character assassination, sniping, and backstabbing as in my more recent IT job. Maybe if geeks carried guns they'd be nicer to each other? In terms of the physical jobs, the simple fact there is that you don't necessarily use your brain for much while doing the work. Your mind, and thoughts, are your own. After a hard day of back breaking labor laying sod, I'm happy to suck down a beer or eight with buddies sitting watching football. After a hard day of debugging thousands of lines of badly-commented code, I just want to stick my head in a bucket of ice and be left alone. Probably the nature of the beast.
Slachdotters are so nicely predictable.
3/4 of the posts are either "why would anyone use this?" or "how dare they try to edit content."
Yeah, content is SOOOO precious.
This won't replace parenting; nothing I've seen about this product claims that it will. If you object to the modification of the "director's vision" (as if it was impossible that it was flawed in the first place?) DON'T USE IT.
But, let's say for example you wanted to watch Dr. Doolittle 2 with your 5-8 year old kids. Or Liar Liar. For some reason, Hollywood feels compelled (or perhaps, just has entirely different cultural mores than my midwestern upbringing grants me) to put words like "bitch", "ass", "dick" and such semi-swear words in (ostensibly) kids films. I don't necessarily find that appropriate content for preteen kids. Yes, they hear it on the bus, yes, they hear it in the schoolyard, but I don't feel it ok for our home. Same with James Bond movies.
Personally I think it's a great tool.
My $0.02:
Globalization is the homogenization of culture. It is an invitable counterpart to a world where communication is becoming more global, quicker, easier, and cheaper.
As far as I understand it, the main protests against Globalization are twofold. First and most offensive to the old hard-core leftists is that Globalization is being driven largely by commercial entities - multinational corporations, media companies, etc. These folks (either for locally protectionist sentiments, or an anti-corporate, anti-profit Weltanschauung) mainly see multinationals as exploitative, anti-environmentalist, and rapacious.
Secondly, local cultures are overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of wealthier (usually Western) cultural mores. This side of Globalization is obvious when you see a Watusi tribesman in traditional garb but with Nike tennis shoes, or a documentary on isolated New Guinea villages shows a faded Coca-Cola sign in the background. The implication is that the pervasiveness of western culture will lead to the weakening and eventual erasure of indigenous cultural variety, which is seen as intrinsically valuable.
Personally (flame all you want) Globalization is nothing more than advertising-aware aggressive provincialism on the part of white-guilted middle/upper class westerners, college-enlightened young adults of indigenous origin, or it's simply a disingenuous flag waved by people with an axe to grind or political points to score at home.
If one values local cultures for their music, their culture, their language - that may be a valid point. But to suggest that some sort of "cultural insulation" is possible (or desireable) is just naive. If an artist in Irin Jaya hears a Britney Spears song, and then in his next work uses some faint phrase or leitmotif therefrom - is that Globalization? I'd say technically yes. What, are you going to tell everyone in the 3rd world that they are not allowed to listen to Western Music?
Alternately, if you are a Nigerian living in the hinterlands, and your choice is a crappy pair of hand-woven scratchy sandals woven in your village, or a pair of Nikes that are comfortable and keep your feet far more dry - are we supposed to tell her that she cannot buy the Nikes because they are culturally inappropriate? Or maybe she should be kept in ignorance so she doesn't know they are even available?
Frankly, the "we're doing this for your own good" mentality that seems to drive anti-globalism smacks strongly of the missionary ethos of the 19th century. At least missionaries were geniuinely trying to improve the lives of the peoples they were prosetelyzing - antiglobalism purports to 'protect' indigenes by denying them what they clearly want?
The main point is, people will vote with their dollars. If Wal-mart can plop a big box store in the middle of Uruguay and make enough money to make it worth while, aren't those local people smart enough to choose for themselves? Or are the anti-globalists simply shouldering a new "white man's burden" and thinking on the poor-ignorant brown folk's behalf, since they don't know any better?
Fer chrissakes. "Hi there, we're the/. crowd, and we have the patience of a mayfly..."
"There wasn't any character development" : hey guys, this was a PILOT. Few pilots develop much characterwise, they have too much expositional ground to cover. Two hours is what, 80 pages of script? How much "development" can you cram into that without forcing it, AND still have time to show all the neato-whiz-bang special effects for which the series is famed? (And remember, they ARE trying to build a ~new~ audience, not just attract the old. The old will keep coming to con's and buying rubber vulcan ears forever.)
"How does armor plate go offline?" SOMEbody wasn't listening when they said that the armor POLARIZATION had gone off line. 1) At least in the NCC1701 a great deal of the hull stability was imparted by gravitic and other (insert pseudo-physics handwaving) fields. Assuming something has to assist normal matter holding together at 4.5 times the speed of light, yeah, I guess that would make sense. 2) Alternately, (insert more pseudo-physics handwaving) one could postulate that the "armor" was an ultradense iron/coherent molecules/whatever the heck - something that required a charge and computer support to dynamically resist damage. Whatever, it's nit picking.
I thought the pilot was decent. Bakula was (if I may mix genres) a physical Sean Connery-esque to Picard's Roger Moore-ish distance. I thought, yes, some of the supporting roles were pretty forced. But then again, I *remember* Encounter at Farpoint - a truly crappy pilot. Ship's Counsellor? What, a ship's prostitute in the future? And remember, Riker and Troi could communicate telpathically? That was dumped pretty quickly. And who can forget the Naked Now (episode 2) where writers (apparently already grasping at plot straws) reverted to the old saw of "everyone acting opposite" which would have been a lot better if we had more than caricature opinions of what their personalities WERE in the first place!
ST:NG took FIVE SEASONS to come up with ep's like "The Inner Light" - DS:9 royally sucked the first 2 years (fortunate, since I preferred watching B5 anyway...which ALSO took at least a few episodes to find it's feet).
The only two gripes I've seen that are valid IMO are the gratuitous slathering scene (not unappreciated, but pretty obvious. My god, no wonder we like the Vulcans!) and the points about putting spoiler comments on the front page before it aired. Rather provincial mistake, really.
The rest of you, cripes, give it a season or two. Let some of the characters' personalities gell a little, and let some chemistry develop. They may even change the theme music. I think it was a fine pilot, given the circumstances, no matter how "disappointed" some/.'s are from over-pumped expectations.
"The warming trend in global-mean surface temperature observations during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real and is substantially greater than the average rate of warming during the twentieth century. The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusions that surface temperature has been rising."
All this states is that the temperature is increasing FASTER than previously measured. I'm neither a scientist, nor a degraded scientist, but doesn't the glaciation cycle happen on approximately 100,000 year cycles?
If I understand the data I've seen (again, I'm no scientist), the climatological data appears to suggest that average global temps vary by as much as 12-15 deg F from min to max over these spans.
I think the current period is called the Holocene, and it started at the end of the last ice age - about 8700 BC. Since then it appears to have varied far more widely up & down than the current 'catastrophists' say would be terrible for the human race. Didn't we invent AGRICULTURE in that time period? I don't think that was so bad for us.
Are we polluting our atmosphere? Yes, of course. Is it changing short-term climate data? Probably, the same way if you exercise you raise the temperature of the room you're in. But it doesn't mean the house is going to fall down, either.
I just get the sense that the people screaming "GLOBAL WARMING" were the same ones who told us Petroleum would be exhausted by 1988, and we'd have 20 billion people living in starvation by 2000. As much as I care about the environment, it's hard not to get a severe case of the "cry wolf"ies when I hear these doomsayers.
Most of the things I mention are summarized at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA194.html
4. Clearly, anything 'everyone else' likes must ergo be stupid and common.
It's the same impetus that allowed our local movie critic to dismiss ET as crap, and then 're-review' it several weeks later as "inspired moviemaking", or 'serious' musicians to dismiss Pachelbel as 'that crap you hear in elevators at Christmastime'.
Sorry, popular doesn't equal bad, as much as that opinion may be self-validating for critics.
"Maybe I just have Hoof-in-mouth disease, but the thought of censoring ANYTHING, for noble reasons or not, makes me sick."
Madcow, I don't mean this to sound like flammage, but that's just naive.
I'm sitting with some kids at the library, and we're surfing the net. They're looking up stuff for a report that's due tomorrow. Am I supposed to tell them "DON'T CLICK ON ANYTHING UNLESS I APPROVE IT!" - that's a little extreme, isn't it? They can't do anything if I go to the bathroom or blow my nose?
The reality of parenting - a painful realization to anyone with kids - is that you cannot watch them all the time. You can't. And then to say that it's 'sickening' to suggest that software filters be used to backstop parenting? That simply denies reality, IMO.
Do I agree that most censorware has its own agenda? Yes. Is it flawed? Yes. Is it a substitution for being responsible adult/parent? No. I think in those things we can probably agree, I just see that it DOES have a valuable supplemental role.
In re: EFF trying to bring people out for protests against government-mandated censorware in schools and libraries.
I will happily participate in any effort that PROMOTES such censorware. Granted, the right to free speech is of outstanding importance. But there should be no question that minors are NOT entitled to the same full "set" of rights as adults, and that this is for their own good. Should a three-year-old have the "opportunity" to accidentally click on www.goatse.cx? As an adult, I can view that and deal with it in my own moral framework. Were we talking about web browsing in adult-only scenarios, or even primarily-adult scenarios (such as internet cafes), that would be one thing.
But schools and libraries are SPECIFICALLY places where children are involved. To suggest that the browsers they will be using (or are likely to have access to) should not be heavily filtered against violence, adult content, etc - that is (in the best possible light) criminally irresponsible naivete. At worst, it's tantamount to the deliberate corruption of minors - and that is, in my mind, unforgiveable.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason RIAA will never recognize this is because to do so would be to condemn their own mediocrity. John Carmack succeeds because he is brilliant, he ALSO works damn hard, and doesn't give a crap about other people's opinions. I have no doubt that if his games weren't a succes, he'd still be working as a programmer for some crap company, and spending his evenings coding up his latest sphere collision-detection code. You think the RIAA wants to acknowledge that someone got rich because of effort, skill, and self-restraint? Let's think of something that would be more anathema to a group whose revenues are based on promotion, hype, and cramming 9 crap songs on every cd for each song worth paying for, and charging the public $15 for a cd that costs $1 to make.
No, I'm not thinking they are going to absorb much from him.
http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/
Strategy First is coming out with Nexagon:the Pit which is kind of Warcraft-meets-Rollerball where it's a 3d RTS game in an arena, but you get extra points for doing stuff that appeals to the crowd. You get extra $$ when you can manage to get your creature pounding another to a pulp in front of the camera, and even more if you can do it and get one of the surrounding billboards in the same camera shot. AFAIK at this point they're not sure if they can/will get any real advertisers in the mix, or if all the ads will be fake.
IMO that will be a blast.
"rasactive" must be russian for "how dare anyone exist in a different context than me!".
It's apparently a russian homonym for "I am also humorless!"
Clearly they have once again violated the law, and will again be promptly slapped sternly across the knuckles. This time TWICE.
That should teach 'em to fear the law!
It's not that George Lucas is sunk in mediocrity. It's that he's so rich he doesn't have to listen/nobody will tell him any of his ideas are stupid.
When he was a punk-ass director making American Graffiti, I'm *sure* that he had to sit down, think out his ideas, and that he bounced them off his friends (don't we all?).
I'm equally sure some of them said "George, that's a stupid idea" to some of them. So he revised them.
Now, when he owns IL&M, Skywalker Ranch, etc, he's so damn rich & powerful, either nobody has the nuts to say "George, making an alien sound like a 1920's Al-Jolson mockery of a negro is a STUPID IDEA" *or* someone said it, and he's got too much ego to listen. I don't know the guy, so I don't know which is true. But I do know if you ran the "jar-jar" idea past 3 sane adults, at least 2 would say its ridiculous.
"...and you know, I heard this ship is unsinkable!" overheard at dinner, 50 deg 12 min W, 41 deg 46 min N, 2230 hours, 4/15/12
the ONLY people that care about this are the ones that were so damn annoying around Y2K. You know, those anal-retentives that got wood out of always insisting that the new millenium began in January 2001?
What a crock. Sure, as businesses they are entitled to price their services however they like. However, in the case of cable co's, they are NOT simply freestanding business, but have been granted a monopoly service that, in many areas, has NO competition.
They can never enforce this because it would break a fundamental right to privacy. There are a number of reasons someone might run a VPN or a VPN-like system for personal, hobby, or entertainment reasons having nothing to do with business. For them to intercept or discern what precisely is going on over that network sounds an awful lot like corporate wiretapping.
I'd be curious about your opinions regarding the breakup of AT&T, and the subsequent behavior/performance of the Baby Bells. Would you be willing to advocate the breakup of Microsoft if it lied to the commission or broke its promises? If not, what would be a suitable punishment? Basically, what are your views of the enforcement of the settlement and the consequences of punishment for failure to abide thereby?
Seven would be an insult; BGates is worth TENS OF BILLIONS...say a reasonable offer would be ELEVEN FIGURE, not a pitiful seven figures.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/13046.html : August 23,2001: "Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff says that at least two of the more than 400 letters his office has received in support of Bill Gates' Microsoft were from people who had died.
/. report of this story, but searching /. on "Microsoft" and "phony" brought up too damn many references.]
Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT), in its quest to sway states' attorneys general into settling antitrust charges still filed against it, has apparently orchestrated what was originally thought to be a grassroots letter-writing campaign in support of the company, the Los Angeles Times has reported."
Methinks they doth communicate too much.
[I'd rather have linked to the
Having worked previously in a police department, and after reading the comments on this list, I can say it probably IS the life-threatening danger, or the charactistically different nature of physical labor-intensive jobs. In terms of the life-threatening occupations, it's clear that the bonds of dependence are much, much tighter by necessity. Sure, there are coworkers you hate in every job, cops are no different. But the fact that in the end maybe your life will depend on this guy/gal means that otherwise common decency is boosted with a little self-interest. In that same vein, I've never seen more character assassination, sniping, and backstabbing as in my more recent IT job. Maybe if geeks carried guns they'd be nicer to each other? In terms of the physical jobs, the simple fact there is that you don't necessarily use your brain for much while doing the work. Your mind, and thoughts, are your own. After a hard day of back breaking labor laying sod, I'm happy to suck down a beer or eight with buddies sitting watching football. After a hard day of debugging thousands of lines of badly-commented code, I just want to stick my head in a bucket of ice and be left alone. Probably the nature of the beast.
Slachdotters are so nicely predictable.
3/4 of the posts are either "why would anyone use this?" or "how dare they try to edit content."
Yeah, content is SOOOO precious.
This won't replace parenting; nothing I've seen about this product claims that it will. If you object to the modification of the "director's vision" (as if it was impossible that it was flawed in the first place?) DON'T USE IT.
But, let's say for example you wanted to watch Dr. Doolittle 2 with your 5-8 year old kids. Or Liar Liar. For some reason, Hollywood feels compelled (or perhaps, just has entirely different cultural mores than my midwestern upbringing grants me) to put words like "bitch", "ass", "dick" and such semi-swear words in (ostensibly) kids films. I don't necessarily find that appropriate content for preteen kids. Yes, they hear it on the bus, yes, they hear it in the schoolyard, but I don't feel it ok for our home. Same with James Bond movies.
Personally I think it's a great tool.
My $0.02:
Globalization is the homogenization of culture. It is an invitable counterpart to a world where communication is becoming more global, quicker, easier, and cheaper.
As far as I understand it, the main protests against Globalization are twofold. First and most offensive to the old hard-core leftists is that Globalization is being driven largely by commercial entities - multinational corporations, media companies, etc. These folks (either for locally protectionist sentiments, or an anti-corporate, anti-profit Weltanschauung) mainly see multinationals as exploitative, anti-environmentalist, and rapacious.
Secondly, local cultures are overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of wealthier (usually Western) cultural mores. This side of Globalization is obvious when you see a Watusi tribesman in traditional garb but with Nike tennis shoes, or a documentary on isolated New Guinea villages shows a faded Coca-Cola sign in the background. The implication is that the pervasiveness of western culture will lead to the weakening and eventual erasure of indigenous cultural variety, which is seen as intrinsically valuable.
Personally (flame all you want) Globalization is nothing more than advertising-aware aggressive provincialism on the part of white-guilted middle/upper class westerners, college-enlightened young adults of indigenous origin, or it's simply a disingenuous flag waved by people with an axe to grind or political points to score at home.
If one values local cultures for their music, their culture, their language - that may be a valid point. But to suggest that some sort of "cultural insulation" is possible (or desireable) is just naive. If an artist in Irin Jaya hears a Britney Spears song, and then in his next work uses some faint phrase or leitmotif therefrom - is that Globalization? I'd say technically yes. What, are you going to tell everyone in the 3rd world that they are not allowed to listen to Western Music?
Alternately, if you are a Nigerian living in the hinterlands, and your choice is a crappy pair of hand-woven scratchy sandals woven in your village, or a pair of Nikes that are comfortable and keep your feet far more dry - are we supposed to tell her that she cannot buy the Nikes because they are culturally inappropriate? Or maybe she should be kept in ignorance so she doesn't know they are even available?
Frankly, the "we're doing this for your own good" mentality that seems to drive anti-globalism smacks strongly of the missionary ethos of the 19th century. At least missionaries were geniuinely trying to improve the lives of the peoples they were prosetelyzing - antiglobalism purports to 'protect' indigenes by denying them what they clearly want?
The main point is, people will vote with their dollars. If Wal-mart can plop a big box store in the middle of Uruguay and make enough money to make it worth while, aren't those local people smart enough to choose for themselves? Or are the anti-globalists simply shouldering a new "white man's burden" and thinking on the poor-ignorant brown folk's behalf, since they don't know any better?
would almost certainly include spelling and grammar.
For example the spelling of "forest" and the plural of "curriculum" is "curricula", just to name a couple of random examples.
Fer chrissakes. "Hi there, we're the /. crowd, and we have the patience of a mayfly..."
/.'s are from over-pumped expectations.
"There wasn't any character development" : hey guys, this was a PILOT. Few pilots develop much characterwise, they have too much expositional ground to cover. Two hours is what, 80 pages of script? How much "development" can you cram into that without forcing it, AND still have time to show all the neato-whiz-bang special effects for which the series is famed? (And remember, they ARE trying to build a ~new~ audience, not just attract the old. The old will keep coming to con's and buying rubber vulcan ears forever.)
"How does armor plate go offline?" SOMEbody wasn't listening when they said that the armor POLARIZATION had gone off line. 1) At least in the NCC1701 a great deal of the hull stability was imparted by gravitic and other (insert pseudo-physics handwaving) fields. Assuming something has to assist normal matter holding together at 4.5 times the speed of light, yeah, I guess that would make sense. 2) Alternately, (insert more pseudo-physics handwaving) one could postulate that the "armor" was an ultradense iron/coherent molecules/whatever the heck - something that required a charge and computer support to dynamically resist damage. Whatever, it's nit picking.
I thought the pilot was decent. Bakula was (if I may mix genres) a physical Sean Connery-esque to Picard's Roger Moore-ish distance. I thought, yes, some of the supporting roles were pretty forced. But then again, I *remember* Encounter at Farpoint - a truly crappy pilot. Ship's Counsellor? What, a ship's prostitute in the future? And remember, Riker and Troi could communicate telpathically? That was dumped pretty quickly. And who can forget the Naked Now (episode 2) where writers (apparently already grasping at plot straws) reverted to the old saw of "everyone acting opposite" which would have been a lot better if we had more than caricature opinions of what their personalities WERE in the first place!
ST:NG took FIVE SEASONS to come up with ep's like "The Inner Light" - DS:9 royally sucked the first 2 years (fortunate, since I preferred watching B5 anyway...which ALSO took at least a few episodes to find it's feet).
The only two gripes I've seen that are valid IMO are the gratuitous slathering scene (not unappreciated, but pretty obvious. My god, no wonder we like the Vulcans!) and the points about putting spoiler comments on the front page before it aired. Rather provincial mistake, really.
The rest of you, cripes, give it a season or two. Let some of the characters' personalities gell a little, and let some chemistry develop. They may even change the theme music. I think it was a fine pilot, given the circumstances, no matter how "disappointed" some
This was not faked in the same studio as the "lunar landings."
Why would someone fake IISS servers in the same studios as the lunar landings?
OK, we're not perfect. But Minneapolis isn't THAT bad.
All this states is that the temperature is increasing FASTER than previously measured. I'm neither a scientist, nor a degraded scientist, but doesn't the glaciation cycle happen on approximately 100,000 year cycles?
If I understand the data I've seen (again, I'm no scientist), the climatological data appears to suggest that average global temps vary by as much as 12-15 deg F from min to max over these spans.
I think the current period is called the Holocene, and it started at the end of the last ice age - about 8700 BC. Since then it appears to have varied far more widely up & down than the current 'catastrophists' say would be terrible for the human race. Didn't we invent AGRICULTURE in that time period? I don't think that was so bad for us.
Are we polluting our atmosphere? Yes, of course. Is it changing short-term climate data? Probably, the same way if you exercise you raise the temperature of the room you're in. But it doesn't mean the house is going to fall down, either.
I just get the sense that the people screaming "GLOBAL WARMING" were the same ones who told us Petroleum would be exhausted by 1988, and we'd have 20 billion people living in starvation by 2000. As much as I care about the environment, it's hard not to get a severe case of the "cry wolf"ies when I hear these doomsayers.
Most of the things I mention are summarized at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA194.html
Ah well, another thing to have a complex about.
Yeah, so it's OT, what're ya gonna do? Rate it down? Can I get negative ratings?
1. Nobody likes me. I feel different.
2. I'm brilliant and underappreciated.
3. Everyone else *must* be stupid and common.
4. Clearly, anything 'everyone else' likes must ergo be stupid and common.
It's the same impetus that allowed our local movie critic to dismiss ET as crap, and then 're-review' it several weeks later as "inspired moviemaking", or 'serious' musicians to dismiss Pachelbel as 'that crap you hear in elevators at Christmastime'.
Sorry, popular doesn't equal bad, as much as that opinion may be self-validating for critics.
I misunderstood. I thought it was the "Read once. Right? Never!" web. Maybe that's just my experience.
Madcow, I don't mean this to sound like flammage, but that's just naive.
I'm sitting with some kids at the library, and we're surfing the net. They're looking up stuff for a report that's due tomorrow. Am I supposed to tell them "DON'T CLICK ON ANYTHING UNLESS I APPROVE IT!" - that's a little extreme, isn't it? They can't do anything if I go to the bathroom or blow my nose?
The reality of parenting - a painful realization to anyone with kids - is that you cannot watch them all the time. You can't. And then to say that it's 'sickening' to suggest that software filters be used to backstop parenting? That simply denies reality, IMO.
Do I agree that most censorware has its own agenda? Yes. Is it flawed? Yes. Is it a substitution for being responsible adult/parent? No. I think in those things we can probably agree, I just see that it DOES have a valuable supplemental role.
I will happily participate in any effort that PROMOTES such censorware. Granted, the right to free speech is of outstanding importance. But there should be no question that minors are NOT entitled to the same full "set" of rights as adults, and that this is for their own good. Should a three-year-old have the "opportunity" to accidentally click on www.goatse.cx? As an adult, I can view that and deal with it in my own moral framework. Were we talking about web browsing in adult-only scenarios, or even primarily-adult scenarios (such as internet cafes), that would be one thing.
But schools and libraries are SPECIFICALLY places where children are involved. To suggest that the browsers they will be using (or are likely to have access to) should not be heavily filtered against violence, adult content, etc - that is (in the best possible light) criminally irresponsible naivete. At worst, it's tantamount to the deliberate corruption of minors - and that is, in my mind, unforgiveable.
dammit, don't know how the space got in the url (I *did* preview it too!). No space before supertoys.html. :(