I'm more shocked to find out we have a Psy-Ops unit at all. Reminds me of Walter Koenig's role on Babylon-5. And I bet they are probably just as underhanded in real life as his character was. After all, rule of law in America doesn't seem to apply to them, or they already feel they are above the law.
In fact, with all I've been reading about how f*cked up this country is, just this week, I'm starting to think I have a better chance of freedom and privacy if I move to Libya.
Too much to hope for: That more than a billion people could be wiped out from cell-phone use. And who would be the first to go? Chatty, useless people who spend all their time talking on the phone and doing nothing useful.
"Oh hi, I'm on a bus"... As if that bit of information is so important, that it must be shared with the caller... and everyone else on the bus listening to this useless person blathering away on a cell phone.
Oh if only! To quiet the world. To end resource waste. To bring the population of the planet down to a reasonable, sustainable number. I remember when there were only 3 billion. There was room to breathe.
Now we are heading towards 9 billion before 2050. There will be wars, famine, water rationing, and massive disasters based on us ravaging the planet in search of resources to sustain such a number.
If only cell-phones could kill a few billion. That would be an amazing way to get out of the disaster we are headed towards. But alas, it's too much to hope for.
We're going to need a good, sustained, nuclear exchange before we really have some progress in that area. And unfortunately, that's just going to leave even less resources for the survivors. Cell phones would have made a great way to kill off a lot of people without damaging the rest of the planet. Ah well.
When I was a kid (about 30-35 years ago), an electronics surplus outfit in Mass., named John Meshna used to sell this thing (along with a lot of other military hardware)... It basically looked like a turd, about 3 inches long. If you scraped off enough of the plastic outer coating, you'd find a few transitors, a coil, some kind of microswitch, and a button battery.
It was basically a crude radio transmitter that would sound off if it got stepped on, or if there was enough vibration to activate it (such as tank activity).
It's been around since the Korean war, and frankly, devices such as this are hardly top-secret spy gadgets, more like well-known army crap.
You know, given the complete lack of technology *at all* back in 1692, I can't imagine that any rational person would step into a leaky wooden boat and travel vast unknown distances when they might fall off the edge of the planet.
Therefore I say that Columbus faked the whole thing. There is no new world, we Americans have been duped. We're really still living in Spain.
Seriously... someone out there thought that Heavy Metal was *worthy* of a remake, or is Hollywood *that* desperate? What next, a remake of "Cool World"?
If you want a Heavy Metal remake CHEAPLY, just buy up a ton of Hentai Anime, dub it and release to theaters. Problem solved.
Maybe the reason they can't get funding for that stupid idea has nothing to do with Watchmen, and everything to do with it being a stupid idea.
Why are you defending Bush? We are all still paying for his errors, and we will probably *still* be paying for his errors for another 20 years.
He did more damage to this nation than any other president in history. His name should be spoken in the same way we speak of other leaders who committed atrocities.
I will continue to bash Bush, thank you. I mean, unless you're trying to make the argument that Bush was a patsy and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney did all the damage. But it doesn't matter. Bush called himself the Decider, and now he has to live with the consequences of destroying the USA "because God told him to do it".
Lemme get this straight.... The DHS accused 84,000 people of being child molestors. Do we have that many ankle bracelets?
In the meantime, we have Congressmen sending racy photos to women on Craigslist, we have TSA agents stealing cash from people's luggage (yes, this is real, two guys were just busted for this), and our entire lawmaking body is composed of whiny, childish, incompetent fools who are only there to take money under the table, enriching themselves at the cost of the public.
But in Egypt, they are rioting. We are too busy watching American I-Dull. I'm moving to another country where freedoms are respected. 'Cause it sure ain't here. The USA is over. Romania is looking good right now.
Fool! Don't you know that you're supposed to THROW AWAY any card that is no longer officially supported by a copyright holder? You're then supposed to go out and buy whole new hardware every time they drop driver support.
And don't even try to reverse-engineer the card and WRITE your own driver, that's a violation of the DMCA!
In fact, I think it will soon be mandatory to throw away your computer whenever the sound card stops working and buy a whole new computer! With all your apps "on the cloud" anyhow, it's not like you'll need to re-install anything anyhow.
And yes, it was easier back in the BBS days. Even more annoying is that when you search Google for your drivers, you're led to one crappy site after the other that doesn't have anything, it's just an ad farm that echos back whatever you're looking for. Go ahead type in "purple cow driver" and freedrivers.com will claim to have it, but they of course, do not. Or you have to "join" their site (i.e. pay for the driver), with no guarantee that you'll get the driver even after you join!
The "web" is now one big lie for the purposes of making money. Didn't it *used* to be for sharing documents? At least on a BBS there was a good chance that what you were looking for what you were getting.
Every illustration, poster, image, of a "space station" produced from 1975 to 2007 showed a docked shuttle. Usually it was some "expanded" version of the ISS, and there was always a shuttle in those images, docked.
I propose we keep one in space. Send it up unmanned, remotely piloted (or send up a single pilot, who's return flight will be provided by the Russians), and keep it docked to the ISS.
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong. Furthermore, as Apollo 13 showed us, it's good to have an extra "lifeboat" that the crew could evacuate to if there's a problem aboard the ISS that can't easily be fixed.
It could be both an escape pod and an extra shelter. We know that seven people can fit on the shuttle's living quarters and you can bet the folks up there would appreciate the extra space.
Plus is has it's own O2 scrubbers, fuel cells, and could even be used as a tug to boost the ISS into a better orbit someday. Why throw it away? That makes no sense if we've already got people up there.
I hope you are right. Because right now I cannot afford Apple stock. But if the price dips by $100 a share, I will buy it. As much as I can afford. Because sooner or later, Apple will reorganize, the best and brightest will rise to the top and Apple will continue to put out magnificent products by leveraging their existing intellectual property.
And then I'll be rich.Or at least, richer than I was.
Seriously, who's up for a job at Apple that pays only one dollar per year? That is Steve's official salary boys and girls, and it's going to be very difficult to find someone talented and innovative who will accept such an offer at such low pay.
All that said, I vote for Woz -- get the other founder to take over and that's a story Wall Street would love... for about 5 seconds.
I only hope the board has some brains and finds someone willing to run the company as Steve would, and NOT some MBA idiot who's only goal is to maintain profitability by cutting, while building his golden parachute. In other words, NOT Carly.
This little saying from my GPS has almost gotten me into accidents along the Garden State more times than I can remember...
What it's really saying is that I should stay center because the road is about to split into "Express" and "Local" and I need to be on the local, but, after I follow it's directions to stay left, I'm headed for the express, with NO WAY to get off the Garden State from that point on for many, many miles.
It makes me want to throw the damn thing out the window and just look at a paper map. All hail analog!
For all the logic in your last paragraph, it ignores the obvious: That America isn't about making game-changing leaps in technology anymore. It *is* about a few people, trying to amass as much money as they can, as quickly as they can.
Thus, it is about giving a trillion dollars to bankers, because they are the ones controlling the government, and they don't care about "building" anything, other than the number of digits in their personal accounts.
Personally, I think you're more likely to get funding to build sexbots. There's *how many* Japanese companies that build multi-thousand-dollar sex-dolls already? And there's at least two in the USA that make high-end sex-dolls (and too many making cheap inflatables)...
Although there may be eyebrow-raising, most (male) people are secretly rubbing their hands together (and other things) at the prospect of an autonomous sex-bot. And while telepresence may be nice, whoever corners the market for sex-bots is going to make Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg look like paupers.
Although you may not believe it, Futurama has it right. Sex-bots might be declared illegal in some future, because it will seriously impact reproduction, it may lead to low number of human to human pairings as well as having half the population (women) wondering how they are going to compete. See: Chobits/Persecoms
You mean, you're not willing to pay $100 for a rusty, bent fender? It's RARE. And I'll bet you're looking for recent VW parts.
Try aircooled, "vintage" beetle pieces. You'd think they were made of gold. And yet, beetles can still be found in just about every junkyard from coast to coast.
By the same token, Fox News tried to show a packed rally for Glenn Beck, and it became obvious that the footage was from different events with different weather conditions.
So China is as guilty as any other news organization. I don't believe much coming out of Fox, MsNbc, Cnn, or any other news agency that believes that ratings are more important than truth.
My understanding is that the cars were SHREDDED so no one could try and resell them "under the table", and then the shredded metal was melted down and reforged back into steel that we are selling to China. Steel and Coal are just about all we sell to China.
Umm plowing is more an issue of Torque, and electrics have 100% torque starting from zero miles per hour. In other words, they would be better at plowing.
Ever see a locomotive? Those diesel engines are just powering the electric motors that drive the train. That's how you get those trains that are a mile long, end-to-end, and yet they can move a million tons of freight.
One million electrics on the road is do-able, *if* the government does a "Cash for Clunkers" again. You all forget that this was a wildly successful program two years back. In fact, if the government was willing to partially subsidize my purchase of an Electric Car, I'd probably buy one... My only problem is that I don't currently have a clunker to trade in.
The government is going to have to Jump-start an electric car program, no doubt. Manufacturers are hesitant to make them because they percieve no market, but if there's a "forced" market, then they will build 'em. And if people start buying them they will make better and better models.
I think they are going to have to make electrics a new class of vehicle. For example, they should be exempt from having airbags and other heavy safety features that weigh the car down. They should also be allowed in HOV lanes regardless of number of passengers. Motorcycles, for example, *are* like that. Also, in States like NJ, which only perform emissions tests, Electrics obviously should be exempt from inspection.
In other words, pile on so many plusses to having such a car that people might forget about the range limits and other problems.
It's a good thing to start forcing over this change, otherwise, we will all be hurting when gas is $12 a gallon. But to do it, and do it properly, electricity needs to come down in price. That means more nuclear, more renewable sources. America needs to seriously invest in electric infrastructure if Obama is truly serious about having a one million electric cars on the road by 2015.
It's like that other film "Ocean's Eleven".... Where the hell was parts one to ten? And if you think this is a joke, they *did* make a sequel and named it "Ocean's Twelve". So where are the other films?
Wow, I like how you were specifically putting in the clause for "last ten years" so you could intentionally ignore the case of Matthew Shepard. As if anything older than 10 years is too old to be remembered.
9/11 2001 is going to be 10 years this September, so I guess you should forgive all Muslims, right? Beck, Limbaugh and Palin can't mention 9/11 during their 2012 Presidential runs, right, because it's too old?
I still can't figure out why Christians get so upset about letting gays get married. What's the big freaking deal? But mention it, and the right-wingers cry like you just stole their candy. But seriously, there isn't room to list all the offenses of American Christians throughout the rest of the world.
Let's just say that American foreign policy is geared to make everyone in the world hate America. Because America *needs* enemies, because a constant diet of fear is what you feed on, and it keeps you distracted from the real matters of the USA, like how the entire country is going down the toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more shocked to find out we have a Psy-Ops unit at all. Reminds me of Walter Koenig's role on Babylon-5. And I bet they are probably just as underhanded in real life as his character was. After all, rule of law in America doesn't seem to apply to them, or they already feel they are above the law.
In fact, with all I've been reading about how f*cked up this country is, just this week, I'm starting to think I have a better chance of freedom and privacy if I move to Libya.
Too much to hope for: That more than a billion people could be wiped out from cell-phone use. And who would be the first to go? Chatty, useless people who spend all their time talking on the phone and doing nothing useful.
"Oh hi, I'm on a bus"... As if that bit of information is so important, that it must be shared with the caller... and everyone else on the bus listening to this useless person blathering away on a cell phone.
Oh if only! To quiet the world. To end resource waste. To bring the population of the planet down to a reasonable, sustainable number. I remember when there were only 3 billion. There was room to breathe.
Now we are heading towards 9 billion before 2050. There will be wars, famine, water rationing, and massive disasters based on us ravaging the planet in search of resources to sustain such a number.
If only cell-phones could kill a few billion. That would be an amazing way to get out of the disaster we are headed towards. But alas, it's too much to hope for.
We're going to need a good, sustained, nuclear exchange before we really have some progress in that area. And unfortunately, that's just going to leave even less resources for the survivors. Cell phones would have made a great way to kill off a lot of people without damaging the rest of the planet. Ah well.
When I was a kid (about 30-35 years ago), an electronics surplus outfit in Mass., named John Meshna used to sell this thing (along with a lot of other military hardware)... It basically looked like a turd, about 3 inches long. If you scraped off enough of the plastic outer coating, you'd find a few transitors, a coil, some kind of microswitch, and a button battery.
It was basically a crude radio transmitter that would sound off if it got stepped on, or if there was enough vibration to activate it (such as tank activity).
It's been around since the Korean war, and frankly, devices such as this are hardly top-secret spy gadgets, more like well-known army crap.
You know, given the complete lack of technology *at all* back in 1692, I can't imagine that any rational person would step into a leaky wooden boat and travel vast unknown distances when they might fall off the edge of the planet.
Therefore I say that Columbus faked the whole thing. There is no new world, we Americans have been duped. We're really still living in Spain.
Seriously... someone out there thought that Heavy Metal was *worthy* of a remake, or is Hollywood *that* desperate? What next, a remake of "Cool World"?
If you want a Heavy Metal remake CHEAPLY, just buy up a ton of Hentai Anime, dub it and release to theaters. Problem solved.
Maybe the reason they can't get funding for that stupid idea has nothing to do with Watchmen, and everything to do with it being a stupid idea.
Why are you defending Bush? We are all still paying for his errors, and we will probably *still* be paying for his errors for another 20 years.
He did more damage to this nation than any other president in history. His name should be spoken in the same way we speak of other leaders who committed atrocities.
I will continue to bash Bush, thank you. I mean, unless you're trying to make the argument that Bush was a patsy and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney did all the damage. But it doesn't matter. Bush called himself the Decider, and now he has to live with the consequences of destroying the USA "because God told him to do it".
I say take that 'intimidating image' and post it EVERYWHERE. It loses it's meaning if it's on every website from Fark to Google.
We have the power to take power from those that have power.
You can also alter the image to make it funny as well.
Lemme get this straight.... The DHS accused 84,000 people of being child molestors. Do we have that many ankle bracelets?
In the meantime, we have Congressmen sending racy photos to women on Craigslist, we have TSA agents stealing cash from people's luggage (yes, this is real, two guys were just busted for this), and our entire lawmaking body is composed of whiny, childish, incompetent fools who are only there to take money under the table, enriching themselves at the cost of the public.
But in Egypt, they are rioting. We are too busy watching American I-Dull. I'm moving to another country where freedoms are respected. 'Cause it sure ain't here. The USA is over. Romania is looking good right now.
Fool! Don't you know that you're supposed to THROW AWAY any card that is no longer officially supported by a copyright holder? You're then supposed to go out and buy whole new hardware every time they drop driver support.
And don't even try to reverse-engineer the card and WRITE your own driver, that's a violation of the DMCA!
In fact, I think it will soon be mandatory to throw away your computer whenever the sound card stops working and buy a whole new computer! With all your apps "on the cloud" anyhow, it's not like you'll need to re-install anything anyhow.
And yes, it was easier back in the BBS days. Even more annoying is that when you search Google for your drivers, you're led to one crappy site after the other that doesn't have anything, it's just an ad farm that echos back whatever you're looking for. Go ahead type in "purple cow driver" and freedrivers.com will claim to have it, but they of course, do not. Or you have to "join" their site (i.e. pay for the driver), with no guarantee that you'll get the driver even after you join!
The "web" is now one big lie for the purposes of making money. Didn't it *used* to be for sharing documents? At least on a BBS there was a good chance that what you were looking for what you were getting.
Every illustration, poster, image, of a "space station" produced from 1975 to 2007 showed a docked shuttle. Usually it was some "expanded" version of the ISS, and there was always a shuttle in those images, docked.
I propose we keep one in space. Send it up unmanned, remotely piloted (or send up a single pilot, who's return flight will be provided by the Russians), and keep it docked to the ISS.
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong. Furthermore, as Apollo 13 showed us, it's good to have an extra "lifeboat" that the crew could evacuate to if there's a problem aboard the ISS that can't easily be fixed.
It could be both an escape pod and an extra shelter. We know that seven people can fit on the shuttle's living quarters and you can bet the folks up there would appreciate the extra space.
Plus is has it's own O2 scrubbers, fuel cells, and could even be used as a tug to boost the ISS into a better orbit someday. Why throw it away? That makes no sense if we've already got people up there.
I hope you are right. Because right now I cannot afford Apple stock. But if the price dips by $100 a share, I will buy it. As much as I can afford. Because sooner or later, Apple will reorganize, the best and brightest will rise to the top and Apple will continue to put out magnificent products by leveraging their existing intellectual property.
And then I'll be rich.Or at least, richer than I was.
Seriously, who's up for a job at Apple that pays only one dollar per year? That is Steve's official salary boys and girls, and it's going to be very difficult to find someone talented and innovative who will accept such an offer at such low pay.
All that said, I vote for Woz -- get the other founder to take over and that's a story Wall Street would love... for about 5 seconds.
I only hope the board has some brains and finds someone willing to run the company as Steve would, and NOT some MBA idiot who's only goal is to maintain profitability by cutting, while building his golden parachute. In other words, NOT Carly.
This little saying from my GPS has almost gotten me into accidents along the Garden State more times than I can remember...
What it's really saying is that I should stay center because the road is about to split into "Express" and "Local" and I need to be on the local, but, after I follow it's directions to stay left, I'm headed for the express, with NO WAY to get off the Garden State from that point on for many, many miles.
It makes me want to throw the damn thing out the window and just look at a paper map. All hail analog!
For all the logic in your last paragraph, it ignores the obvious: That America isn't about making game-changing leaps in technology anymore. It *is* about a few people, trying to amass as much money as they can, as quickly as they can.
Thus, it is about giving a trillion dollars to bankers, because they are the ones controlling the government, and they don't care about "building" anything, other than the number of digits in their personal accounts.
Personally, I think you're more likely to get funding to build sexbots. There's *how many* Japanese companies that build multi-thousand-dollar sex-dolls already? And there's at least two in the USA that make high-end sex-dolls (and too many making cheap inflatables)...
Although there may be eyebrow-raising, most (male) people are secretly rubbing their hands together (and other things) at the prospect of an autonomous sex-bot. And while telepresence may be nice, whoever corners the market for sex-bots is going to make Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg look like paupers.
Although you may not believe it, Futurama has it right. Sex-bots might be declared illegal in some future, because it will seriously impact reproduction, it may lead to low number of human to human pairings as well as having half the population (women) wondering how they are going to compete. See: Chobits/Persecoms
You mean, you're not willing to pay $100 for a rusty, bent fender? It's RARE. And I'll bet you're looking for recent VW parts.
Try aircooled, "vintage" beetle pieces. You'd think they were made of gold. And yet, beetles can still be found in just about every junkyard from coast to coast.
Beverly:
If there's nothing wrong with me...maybe there's something wrong with the universe!
Here's one you shouldn't be able to answer...
Computer, what is the nature of the universe?
Computer:
The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.
By the same token, Fox News tried to show a packed rally for Glenn Beck, and it became obvious that the footage was from different events with different weather conditions.
So China is as guilty as any other news organization. I don't believe much coming out of Fox, MsNbc, Cnn, or any other news agency that believes that ratings are more important than truth.
My understanding is that the cars were SHREDDED so no one could try and resell them "under the table", and then the shredded metal was melted down and reforged back into steel that we are selling to China. Steel and Coal are just about all we sell to China.
Umm plowing is more an issue of Torque, and electrics have 100% torque starting from zero miles per hour. In other words, they would be better at plowing.
Ever see a locomotive? Those diesel engines are just powering the electric motors that drive the train. That's how you get those trains that are a mile long, end-to-end, and yet they can move a million tons of freight.
One million electrics on the road is do-able, *if* the government does a "Cash for Clunkers" again. You all forget that this was a wildly successful program two years back. In fact, if the government was willing to partially subsidize my purchase of an Electric Car, I'd probably buy one... My only problem is that I don't currently have a clunker to trade in.
The government is going to have to Jump-start an electric car program, no doubt. Manufacturers are hesitant to make them because they percieve no market, but if there's a "forced" market, then they will build 'em. And if people start buying them they will make better and better models.
I think they are going to have to make electrics a new class of vehicle. For example, they should be exempt from having airbags and other heavy safety features that weigh the car down. They should also be allowed in HOV lanes regardless of number of passengers. Motorcycles, for example, *are* like that. Also, in States like NJ, which only perform emissions tests, Electrics obviously should be exempt from inspection.
In other words, pile on so many plusses to having such a car that people might forget about the range limits and other problems.
It's a good thing to start forcing over this change, otherwise, we will all be hurting when gas is $12 a gallon. But to do it, and do it properly, electricity needs to come down in price. That means more nuclear, more renewable sources. America needs to seriously invest in electric infrastructure if Obama is truly serious about having a one million electric cars on the road by 2015.
Better than the last one that came out of a drug rehab ward.
It's like that other film "Ocean's Eleven" .... Where the hell was parts one to ten? And if you think this is a joke, they *did* make a sequel and named it "Ocean's Twelve". So where are the other films?
That's what I always say, if you want to save the planet, get rid of the people!
I mean, Seven Billion? What happens when we outnumber insects?
Wow, I like how you were specifically putting in the clause for "last ten years" so you could intentionally ignore the case of Matthew Shepard. As if anything older than 10 years is too old to be remembered.
9/11 2001 is going to be 10 years this September, so I guess you should forgive all Muslims, right? Beck, Limbaugh and Palin can't mention 9/11 during their 2012 Presidential runs, right, because it's too old?
I still can't figure out why Christians get so upset about letting gays get married. What's the big freaking deal? But mention it, and the right-wingers cry like you just stole their candy. But seriously, there isn't room to list all the offenses of American Christians throughout the rest of the world.
Let's just say that American foreign policy is geared to make everyone in the world hate America. Because America *needs* enemies, because a constant diet of fear is what you feed on, and it keeps you distracted from the real matters of the USA, like how the entire country is going down the toilet.