They might as well claim the Germans are passing us in natural gas production due to their consumption of sausages. I remember when people questioned why Germany was focusing on solar due to how few sunny days they had. Compare that to Arizona or New Mexico or even Florida and it's just plain silly. So long as you are below the Mason Dixon Line there should be no debate about solar. The northern states are more hit and miss.
As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)
This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.
The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.
An overstated headline is hardly the same as claiming Germany is sunnier than the US. Beside no one including liberals considers The Huffington Post news. It's one step above the Onion and not much different than the entertainment rags.
I've heard it said both that no dinosaurs survived the K/T event and that a handful survived for a few million years after the event. Which is it? Was it a sudden end or did they slowly die due to climate change?
I keep wondering if the bird/dinosaur connection is far more about parallel development than a direct tie? They've found feathered reptiles and Archaeopteryx was not a proto-bird but a failed evolutionary line. Tree up seems the likely path for bird evolution as opposed to ground up yet where are all the tree climbing dinosaurs? Feathered reptiles seemed to climb trees so they appear to be the more likely ancestors of birds than dinosaurs?
Will Pterosaurs ever be reclassified as Dinosaurs? They seem to far better fit as dinosaurs than reptiles yet a 100+ year classification seems to still lock them into being reptiles. The main argument I've heard was concerning hip rotation but that seems to be disputed. Is it really dogma keeping Pterosaurs classified as reptiles?
This is the value the market has decided in this case. To quote the whiner: "'No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few," (emphasis mine).
That's right. Unless you're actually willing to put time and effort into the industry, you're not going to make very much money. There's nothing wrong with that, welcome to the real world. No more free rent. The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills. Why shouldn't musicians have to "sing for their supper" like everyone else does?
"The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills." Really? A cellist leading a rock star lifestyle? Are you that desperate to make a point that you don't bother to think about what you are saying? Her point is there's very little demand for live performance so it's not that's she's being lazy as you claim. Her living in the past would have come from modest sales which have been replaced by streaming her music which has resulted in a drastic reduction in income. This constant claim that only live performances are worthy of your hard earned dollars is irrational and a claim that only showed up when the internet provided an option to paying for music. I haven't been to a live performance in 20 years but I still buy music regularly, all be it most of it is from the 60s,70s and 80s. The only ones that will survive are big corporate backed groups and indies that strictly do it as a hobby, translated not very good. It takes time to become good especially when it comes to learning an instrument. They say Jimmy Hendricks would walk down the stairs then to a local movie theater and watch a movie the whole time playing his electric guitar without an amp. Hard to have that kind of dedication when you have to work 8 hours a day at a Starbucks. The whole take away should not be that artists are greedy rock stars it's that the streaming model only makes money for the companies streaming. Where's the righteous indignation at artists being taken advantage of? So it's okay for corporations to make money, it's only greed when artists make money?
We handle energy like the national debt. It's always how can we get more without ever considering living within our means. The largest untapped resource for new energy is conservation. It's not as sexy as nuclear power or even tar sands because both give the illusion of endless energy growth. Easily two thirds of all power used is wasted. With existing technology we can make 50mpg cars. In truth the real number is more like 100mpg. Lighter cars running off gasoline vapor can hit that mark without major changes. Given the average mileage for cars right there 75% is being wasted. Back in the 70s we started that process before Regan scrapped it and encouraged waste. If we had started then and continued that progress we could have bought another 50 years on oil and reduced climate change. Large numbers of houses are poorly insulated and most people still use low efficiency light bulbs. Older refrigerators and washers and driers waste a lot of power as well as older AC units. Most areas have regulations against building high efficiency homes like earth shelter and hay bale. There's actually a fairly narrow definition of what a house is and it's not very efficient. Newer TVs and computers are getting more efficient, I'm going to evoked the hated name of Apple but their next generation iMac use very little power and have excellent sleep capabilities. To say we can't get most of our power from renewable sources is irrational. If you use high efficiency appliances and cover even half your roof with solar cells most places in the country you can easily get the bulk of your power. I'm not saying to go exclusively solar the study they were trying to debunk called for multiple sources which is the most sensible. FYI solar isn't the only source of energy. Wave power is actually mostly gravitational power. Geothermal has the potential for nearly unlimited power. I read that if we got a 100% of our power from geothermal we would not reduce the core temperature by one degree. Saying we have no option but fossil fuels and nuclear is ridiculous. We already get a lot of our power from other sources including hydroelectric. How about allowing people to put paddle wheels along major rivers? It's banned most places which is silly since a thousand water wheel wouldn't noticeably affect major rivers. In fact all forms of personal hydroelectric is banned most places. Power companies can pollute but sticking a wheel or turbine in a stream is illegal? Stop wasting energy and take the shackles off so more people who are willing and able to produce their own power are encouraged to do so. Every house that does this is one less you have to power with fossil fuels. What's the downside, fossil fuels hold out longer buying us more time. If we had encouraged people to do things like wind energy 30 years ago we might have pushed back the end of fossil fuels a couple of hundred years. I can put up a 200 watt home built wind generator for a few hundred bucks. That's 200 watt average power not peak. Ten would half power most homes and twenty would power most homes and they are dirt cheap to make. Just imagine if a few percent of houses had one roof top wind generator? We could close down a bunch of coal fired plants. It's like debt, start chipping away at the power problem and it'll go away on it's own.
The simple fact that anyone who produces evidence to the contrary is automatically suspect is perhaps THE biggest problem with the entire climate change debate.
That's not the problem it's the anti global warming people latching onto any study that supports their claims and focuses on it and assumes all other studies are biased. Other studies are showing last year was a full degree warmer than previous records so who is right? I see evidence on the news practically every night. Not because I'm cherry picking but because I've been around more than a half a century and I've never seen weather like this. Also remember the real issue isn't warming it's more radical weather. Warming deniers always pick unseasonably cold days to claim as proof warming is a hoax ignoring that the science talks averages and radical shifts so cold weather is part of the pattern. We had pipes freezing for the better part of a week here in Phoenix but before that it was unseasonably warm. Weather tends to be like a rubber ban and warm weather can result in a sudden cooling in the winter. The real point is I've read multiple articles on warming trends worldwide literally from Antarctica to the North Pole and everywhere in between and they all show a warming trend. Droughts to dying corals to vanishing glaciers. Collapsing ice flows that scientists literally thought were impossible should give everyone pause. I recently saw a Nova episode on Greenland glaciers that was jaw dropping. The amount and form of the melts was shocking. The experts all appear to be stunned by what they are seeing so my question is if the experts are shocked and concerned then why aren't the deniers? FYI There are slowly "scientists" coming out against global warming. Most are backed by conservatives and many by the Koch brothers themselves. If the Koch brothers pay for the education of a person in climate science and that person went in believing it's all a hoax then came out of college claiming it's all a hoax then I think it's reasonable to call that person biased. The goal of people like the Koch brothers is keep doubt alive to avoid regulations that will decrease their profits.
It's all but been forgotten but Playmation, it later became Animation Master, got me started in CG animation. It wasn't the first animation software but it was the first to run high end code on consumer level machines. I started using it in the early 90s on an old 386sx notebook with 4 meg of ram. At a time when other lower end softwares had barely gotten above chrome balls it was starting to do character animation. After the Animation Master upgrade things got real interesting. A friend had gotten into Lightwave back when it was still bundled with an Amiga board. He claimed Lightwave could do anything Animation Master could do and proposed a weekly competition. I was busy that week and didn't have time to build and rig a model so in an hour I too a stock character and quickly did a shot of a character doing a back flip and a bow. I felt guilty since I didn't do the model myself due to time. Well he proudly showed me a crude landscape rotation. The model was extremely low res and half the polygons were flipped. Well then I ran my shot. His jaw dropped. I apologized for not having time to model anything. It really didn't make any difference because the point was proved since Lightwave couldn't begin to do what I had quickly thrown together. Needless to say it was the end of our weekly exchange of animations. Much has changed but 20+ years ago but Playmation/Animation Master showed what was going to be possible. Years before Toy Story I had the thought of doing an animated feature with Animation Master. What made it impossible wasn't the software it was the state of current technology at the time. That was the age of 40 meg hard drives and there was no easy way to output the film. I even considered saving it shot by shot on floppy disk and shooting it off a monitor onto film. Not too unlike how the first animations were transferred to film but it was still going to cost hundreds of thousands and take many years to finish. The whole point is it would have been possible software wise with Animation Master and it did give me a start. Many softwares have been forgotten over the years like D-Paint and Aldus Photostyler. They all had their issues but they got us started back at a time when hardware was more of the restricting factor than software was.
"Ah, guys, it's been ten years. Seriously when am I coming home? I figured a year, eighteen months tops. You did make plans to bring me back, right? I mean it's not like you planned to abandon me here. Okay I'll check out this next geological feature but after that we're having a heart to heart about cashing in this return ticket. The winters here are murder and I keep dreaming of that tropical retirement you promised. I found some possible signs of life but I'll discuss it once I'm back in Florida. Just get me back to palm trees and bikinis and I'll tell you whatever you want to know!"
This is not going to help explaining the differences to the Girlfriend when she says "Star Wars, Star Trek same thing..."
"The Star Wars franchise had a series of movies starting a bit over 30 years ago. They are about to make some new ones. The guy who did Lost is going to direct them. . Where as Star Trek had a series of movies starting circa 30 years ago. They are now making new ones. The guy who did Lost directs them...""
The simplest way to deal with a girlfriend, assuming you have one, is to simply say have you seen the new episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians". That should keep her busy talking for a half hour while you play Halo in your head. When there's a lull in her talking just say, "I know can you believe what happened". That should keep her going for another half hour while you finish another imaginary Halo level. If she doesn't watch that show there's always the Twilight punt. Just tell her you started reading the Twilight novels. That will buy you an hour of in head gaming before she asks your thoughts on something from the novel. I recommend your response to whatever she asked to be "Isn't it an amazing romance?" That'll buy you two hours if not the rest of the night and you might even get laid.
Star Trek was an abomination. Being able to beam into warp destroys the Star-Trek universe worse than midichlorians ever did.
Episodes 1, 2, and 3 support my stance that George Lucas died in a tragic accident right after Empire Strikes Back came out came out and he was replaced by a clone. That would also explain Ewoks and Howard the Duck.
They should be selling for $20 not $100. I might understand if it actually controlled the watering and fertilizing. You're paying a $100 for something that will tell you while you are on vacation, "oh by the way your plant is dying". Most of the others cost $10 to $20 they just lack the iOS app. I made an automatic watering pot out of a used soda bottle and it would keep the plants watered for a week and didn't cost a dime. The joke is it actually watered the plants. If you are going to sell automated systems make it do some form of automation!
Time passes faster when you're having fun. If we have a limited number of heartbeats, the trick is to stay as miserable as possible, so that the time will pass more slowly.
I think the old joke was if the doctor tells you that you have a year to live move to Montana and marry a Jewish girl. It'll seem like forever and you'll be glad be glad when you finally die.
I try to stay out of these discussions and I'll keep the question neutral but I'm curious what people see as the goal of things like the Pirate Party? Defunding movies, music and software seems counterproductive so what is the solution? If it's a party then it has to have goals? I know the dream is the end of copyrights and the free exchange of all information but it's an unrealistic goal so what is the compromise since in sense the goal of politics is compromise? I figure if we're going to cover the subject yet again there should be more interesting discussion than devolving into the standard "Piracy, good", "Copyright, bad" posts. The goal should be discussing solutions or the whole thread becomes redundant. FYI I'm not trying to troll here it's a legitimate question and an opening to offer sensible options.
"What on earth did you think they put in them? Prime cuts of delicious free-range, organic, rare breed, heritage beef, grass-fed, Eton-educated, humanely slaughtered, dry-aged [beef], hand-ground by fairies...?"
The point isn't what do you expect but what it "should" contain. The article at makes makes it seem foolish to expect hamburger to be made of beef and you should feel luck it has any meat at all. The fillers and horsemeat aren't about making a cheaper more afordable product as many suggest it's about maximizing profits. I looked it up and if you ground the whole dressed carcass including the expensive cuts it'd only be around $2 a pound not counting grinding costs. The point being they use the absolute worst cuts and even that is too good so they cut it with pink slime and other fillers and even that isn't enough so they add in horse meat. The label needs to reflect the actual ingredients and proportions. If corporations could get away with it they'd sell us beef flavored sawdust and sell it for the same price meat should sell for.
Does anybody even care what Microsoft does these days? They even seem to fail at being evil, though they still try.
Microsoft is akin to Dr Evil kidnapping Mitt Romney only to find out not only will the Republicans not pay the million dollars for his return but his own family won't. Trying to force a standard now is the same as trying to capture the water supply in a bucket full of holes. Apples pulls it off only because the axis of evil, iDevices/iTunes, that the world spins on. Every time Microsoft has tried to do similar things it's failed. Microsoft said software rules the world and Apple said it was hardware. In the end Apple won.
They should ask one of those Kardashian women. They'll do anything for money as long as they can put their name on it.
It's a catch-22. They'd insist on mating with an actual Neanderthal, preferably on video so the tape could be sold. You end up with a chicken and the egg scenario. You'd need a Neanderthal to impregnate a Kardashian woman with a Neanderthal. Then again proposing a reality series called, "Knocked Up By a Caveman" could work.
Just wondering how corrosive it is to the seals in an engine? That's the downside of regular alcohol it rots the seals on most cars. The description makes it sound even more corrosive than straight alcohol or ethanol. Sounds great but if it kills the engines after a few thousand miles it's hardly a replacement. I love bio fuels but most engines aren't designed to run them. They need to work more with car makers to bring this stuff to market. My guess is that's part of the ten year plan.
Actually the fiber extraction process leaves a sugary caustic residue. You can take most any plant material especially grasses then just heat them with regular fireplace leavings. After a while it starts to smell sugary as the caustic ash breaks the long chain sugars holding the plant fibers together. That waste product can be used to make ethanol. Every part of the hemp plant is useful including the waste residues. Another plant called kenaf has the same benefits and is totally legal while industrial hemp remains iffy to grow. One type of Kenaf looks like hemp but the other strains look nothing like it. It's easier to grow Kenaf than jump through the hoops and end up getting Christmas cards from the DEA to grow industrial hemp. Kenaf is unregulated.
It's unfair mentioning the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition since they were so long ago. Okay there's some fire bombing of abortion cllinics, Jews and Palestinians taking shots at each other, the Muslim extremists attacking the twin towers. Okay so MOST violence is religious in nature but the Constitution gives religious people the right to stick their heads up their own asses if they want to!!!
Slashdot Mirror
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." - Mel Brooks
So Fox News doing a head stand in a sewer must be hysterical by definition.
They might as well claim the Germans are passing us in natural gas production due to their consumption of sausages. I remember when people questioned why Germany was focusing on solar due to how few sunny days they had. Compare that to Arizona or New Mexico or even Florida and it's just plain silly. So long as you are below the Mason Dixon Line there should be no debate about solar. The northern states are more hit and miss.
As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)
This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.
The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.
An overstated headline is hardly the same as claiming Germany is sunnier than the US. Beside no one including liberals considers The Huffington Post news. It's one step above the Onion and not much different than the entertainment rags.
I've heard it said both that no dinosaurs survived the K/T event and that a handful survived for a few million years after the event. Which is it? Was it a sudden end or did they slowly die due to climate change?
I keep wondering if the bird/dinosaur connection is far more about parallel development than a direct tie? They've found feathered reptiles and Archaeopteryx was not a proto-bird but a failed evolutionary line. Tree up seems the likely path for bird evolution as opposed to ground up yet where are all the tree climbing dinosaurs? Feathered reptiles seemed to climb trees so they appear to be the more likely ancestors of birds than dinosaurs?
Will Pterosaurs ever be reclassified as Dinosaurs? They seem to far better fit as dinosaurs than reptiles yet a 100+ year classification seems to still lock them into being reptiles. The main argument I've heard was concerning hip rotation but that seems to be disputed. Is it really dogma keeping Pterosaurs classified as reptiles?
This is the value the market has decided in this case. To quote the whiner: "'No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few," (emphasis mine).
That's right. Unless you're actually willing to put time and effort into the industry, you're not going to make very much money. There's nothing wrong with that, welcome to the real world. No more free rent. The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills. Why shouldn't musicians have to "sing for their supper" like everyone else does?
"The rock star lifestyle just slammed into the real world where people work hard every day to pay their bills." Really? A cellist leading a rock star lifestyle? Are you that desperate to make a point that you don't bother to think about what you are saying? Her point is there's very little demand for live performance so it's not that's she's being lazy as you claim. Her living in the past would have come from modest sales which have been replaced by streaming her music which has resulted in a drastic reduction in income. This constant claim that only live performances are worthy of your hard earned dollars is irrational and a claim that only showed up when the internet provided an option to paying for music. I haven't been to a live performance in 20 years but I still buy music regularly, all be it most of it is from the 60s,70s and 80s. The only ones that will survive are big corporate backed groups and indies that strictly do it as a hobby, translated not very good. It takes time to become good especially when it comes to learning an instrument. They say Jimmy Hendricks would walk down the stairs then to a local movie theater and watch a movie the whole time playing his electric guitar without an amp. Hard to have that kind of dedication when you have to work 8 hours a day at a Starbucks. The whole take away should not be that artists are greedy rock stars it's that the streaming model only makes money for the companies streaming. Where's the righteous indignation at artists being taken advantage of? So it's okay for corporations to make money, it's only greed when artists make money?
We handle energy like the national debt. It's always how can we get more without ever considering living within our means. The largest untapped resource for new energy is conservation. It's not as sexy as nuclear power or even tar sands because both give the illusion of endless energy growth. Easily two thirds of all power used is wasted. With existing technology we can make 50mpg cars. In truth the real number is more like 100mpg. Lighter cars running off gasoline vapor can hit that mark without major changes. Given the average mileage for cars right there 75% is being wasted. Back in the 70s we started that process before Regan scrapped it and encouraged waste. If we had started then and continued that progress we could have bought another 50 years on oil and reduced climate change. Large numbers of houses are poorly insulated and most people still use low efficiency light bulbs. Older refrigerators and washers and driers waste a lot of power as well as older AC units. Most areas have regulations against building high efficiency homes like earth shelter and hay bale. There's actually a fairly narrow definition of what a house is and it's not very efficient. Newer TVs and computers are getting more efficient, I'm going to evoked the hated name of Apple but their next generation iMac use very little power and have excellent sleep capabilities. To say we can't get most of our power from renewable sources is irrational. If you use high efficiency appliances and cover even half your roof with solar cells most places in the country you can easily get the bulk of your power. I'm not saying to go exclusively solar the study they were trying to debunk called for multiple sources which is the most sensible. FYI solar isn't the only source of energy. Wave power is actually mostly gravitational power. Geothermal has the potential for nearly unlimited power. I read that if we got a 100% of our power from geothermal we would not reduce the core temperature by one degree. Saying we have no option but fossil fuels and nuclear is ridiculous. We already get a lot of our power from other sources including hydroelectric. How about allowing people to put paddle wheels along major rivers? It's banned most places which is silly since a thousand water wheel wouldn't noticeably affect major rivers. In fact all forms of personal hydroelectric is banned most places. Power companies can pollute but sticking a wheel or turbine in a stream is illegal? Stop wasting energy and take the shackles off so more people who are willing and able to produce their own power are encouraged to do so. Every house that does this is one less you have to power with fossil fuels. What's the downside, fossil fuels hold out longer buying us more time. If we had encouraged people to do things like wind energy 30 years ago we might have pushed back the end of fossil fuels a couple of hundred years. I can put up a 200 watt home built wind generator for a few hundred bucks. That's 200 watt average power not peak. Ten would half power most homes and twenty would power most homes and they are dirt cheap to make. Just imagine if a few percent of houses had one roof top wind generator? We could close down a bunch of coal fired plants. It's like debt, start chipping away at the power problem and it'll go away on it's own.
The simple fact that anyone who produces evidence to the contrary is automatically suspect is perhaps THE biggest problem with the entire climate change debate.
That's not the problem it's the anti global warming people latching onto any study that supports their claims and focuses on it and assumes all other studies are biased. Other studies are showing last year was a full degree warmer than previous records so who is right? I see evidence on the news practically every night. Not because I'm cherry picking but because I've been around more than a half a century and I've never seen weather like this. Also remember the real issue isn't warming it's more radical weather. Warming deniers always pick unseasonably cold days to claim as proof warming is a hoax ignoring that the science talks averages and radical shifts so cold weather is part of the pattern. We had pipes freezing for the better part of a week here in Phoenix but before that it was unseasonably warm. Weather tends to be like a rubber ban and warm weather can result in a sudden cooling in the winter. The real point is I've read multiple articles on warming trends worldwide literally from Antarctica to the North Pole and everywhere in between and they all show a warming trend. Droughts to dying corals to vanishing glaciers. Collapsing ice flows that scientists literally thought were impossible should give everyone pause. I recently saw a Nova episode on Greenland glaciers that was jaw dropping. The amount and form of the melts was shocking. The experts all appear to be stunned by what they are seeing so my question is if the experts are shocked and concerned then why aren't the deniers? FYI There are slowly "scientists" coming out against global warming. Most are backed by conservatives and many by the Koch brothers themselves. If the Koch brothers pay for the education of a person in climate science and that person went in believing it's all a hoax then came out of college claiming it's all a hoax then I think it's reasonable to call that person biased. The goal of people like the Koch brothers is keep doubt alive to avoid regulations that will decrease their profits.
It's all but been forgotten but Playmation, it later became Animation Master, got me started in CG animation. It wasn't the first animation software but it was the first to run high end code on consumer level machines. I started using it in the early 90s on an old 386sx notebook with 4 meg of ram. At a time when other lower end softwares had barely gotten above chrome balls it was starting to do character animation. After the Animation Master upgrade things got real interesting. A friend had gotten into Lightwave back when it was still bundled with an Amiga board. He claimed Lightwave could do anything Animation Master could do and proposed a weekly competition. I was busy that week and didn't have time to build and rig a model so in an hour I too a stock character and quickly did a shot of a character doing a back flip and a bow. I felt guilty since I didn't do the model myself due to time. Well he proudly showed me a crude landscape rotation. The model was extremely low res and half the polygons were flipped. Well then I ran my shot. His jaw dropped. I apologized for not having time to model anything. It really didn't make any difference because the point was proved since Lightwave couldn't begin to do what I had quickly thrown together. Needless to say it was the end of our weekly exchange of animations. Much has changed but 20+ years ago but Playmation/Animation Master showed what was going to be possible. Years before Toy Story I had the thought of doing an animated feature with Animation Master. What made it impossible wasn't the software it was the state of current technology at the time. That was the age of 40 meg hard drives and there was no easy way to output the film. I even considered saving it shot by shot on floppy disk and shooting it off a monitor onto film. Not too unlike how the first animations were transferred to film but it was still going to cost hundreds of thousands and take many years to finish. The whole point is it would have been possible software wise with Animation Master and it did give me a start. Many softwares have been forgotten over the years like D-Paint and Aldus Photostyler. They all had their issues but they got us started back at a time when hardware was more of the restricting factor than software was.
Sorry, never read it. I have a life.
"Ah, guys, it's been ten years. Seriously when am I coming home? I figured a year, eighteen months tops. You did make plans to bring me back, right? I mean it's not like you planned to abandon me here. Okay I'll check out this next geological feature but after that we're having a heart to heart about cashing in this return ticket. The winters here are murder and I keep dreaming of that tropical retirement you promised. I found some possible signs of life but I'll discuss it once I'm back in Florida. Just get me back to palm trees and bikinis and I'll tell you whatever you want to know!"
This is not going to help explaining the differences to the Girlfriend when she says "Star Wars, Star Trek same thing..."
"The Star Wars franchise had a series of movies starting a bit over 30 years ago. They are about to make some new ones. The guy who did Lost is going to direct them. . Where as Star Trek had a series of movies starting circa 30 years ago. They are now making new ones. The guy who did Lost directs them...""
The simplest way to deal with a girlfriend, assuming you have one, is to simply say have you seen the new episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians". That should keep her busy talking for a half hour while you play Halo in your head. When there's a lull in her talking just say, "I know can you believe what happened". That should keep her going for another half hour while you finish another imaginary Halo level. If she doesn't watch that show there's always the Twilight punt. Just tell her you started reading the Twilight novels. That will buy you an hour of in head gaming before she asks your thoughts on something from the novel. I recommend your response to whatever she asked to be "Isn't it an amazing romance?" That'll buy you two hours if not the rest of the night and you might even get laid.
Star Trek was an abomination. Being able to beam into warp destroys the Star-Trek universe worse than midichlorians ever did.
Episodes 1, 2, and 3 support my stance that George Lucas died in a tragic accident right after Empire Strikes Back came out came out and he was replaced by a clone. That would also explain Ewoks and Howard the Duck.
"KAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHNNNN!"
(and this text goes in here because slashdot hates 1 word answers, even when they're totally awesome.)
You're forgetting it's Star Wars, "DAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRTTTTTTHHHHHH!"
They should be selling for $20 not $100. I might understand if it actually controlled the watering and fertilizing. You're paying a $100 for something that will tell you while you are on vacation, "oh by the way your plant is dying". Most of the others cost $10 to $20 they just lack the iOS app. I made an automatic watering pot out of a used soda bottle and it would keep the plants watered for a week and didn't cost a dime. The joke is it actually watered the plants. If you are going to sell automated systems make it do some form of automation!
Time passes faster when you're having fun. If we have a limited number of heartbeats, the trick is to stay as miserable as possible, so that the time will pass more slowly.
I think the old joke was if the doctor tells you that you have a year to live move to Montana and marry a Jewish girl. It'll seem like forever and you'll be glad be glad when you finally die.
I try to stay out of these discussions and I'll keep the question neutral but I'm curious what people see as the goal of things like the Pirate Party? Defunding movies, music and software seems counterproductive so what is the solution? If it's a party then it has to have goals? I know the dream is the end of copyrights and the free exchange of all information but it's an unrealistic goal so what is the compromise since in sense the goal of politics is compromise? I figure if we're going to cover the subject yet again there should be more interesting discussion than devolving into the standard "Piracy, good", "Copyright, bad" posts. The goal should be discussing solutions or the whole thread becomes redundant. FYI I'm not trying to troll here it's a legitimate question and an opening to offer sensible options.
The point isn't what do you expect but what it "should" contain. The article at makes makes it seem foolish to expect hamburger to be made of beef and you should feel luck it has any meat at all. The fillers and horsemeat aren't about making a cheaper more afordable product as many suggest it's about maximizing profits. I looked it up and if you ground the whole dressed carcass including the expensive cuts it'd only be around $2 a pound not counting grinding costs. The point being they use the absolute worst cuts and even that is too good so they cut it with pink slime and other fillers and even that isn't enough so they add in horse meat. The label needs to reflect the actual ingredients and proportions. If corporations could get away with it they'd sell us beef flavored sawdust and sell it for the same price meat should sell for.
Does anybody even care what Microsoft does these days? They even seem to fail at being evil, though they still try.
Microsoft is akin to Dr Evil kidnapping Mitt Romney only to find out not only will the Republicans not pay the million dollars for his return but his own family won't. Trying to force a standard now is the same as trying to capture the water supply in a bucket full of holes. Apples pulls it off only because the axis of evil, iDevices/iTunes, that the world spins on. Every time Microsoft has tried to do similar things it's failed. Microsoft said software rules the world and Apple said it was hardware. In the end Apple won.
They should ask one of those Kardashian women. They'll do anything for money as long as they can put their name on it.
It's a catch-22. They'd insist on mating with an actual Neanderthal, preferably on video so the tape could be sold. You end up with a chicken and the egg scenario. You'd need a Neanderthal to impregnate a Kardashian woman with a Neanderthal. Then again proposing a reality series called, "Knocked Up By a Caveman" could work.
"Well I don't know about the former, but given they are all dead I'm pretty sure about the latter."
Not at all. They were superstrong and supersmart. Unfortunately for them, they were also supergullible.
Sad how buying bridges and swampland off crafty Homo Sapiens lead to their extinction.
Just wondering how corrosive it is to the seals in an engine? That's the downside of regular alcohol it rots the seals on most cars. The description makes it sound even more corrosive than straight alcohol or ethanol. Sounds great but if it kills the engines after a few thousand miles it's hardly a replacement. I love bio fuels but most engines aren't designed to run them. They need to work more with car makers to bring this stuff to market. My guess is that's part of the ten year plan.
Actually the fiber extraction process leaves a sugary caustic residue. You can take most any plant material especially grasses then just heat them with regular fireplace leavings. After a while it starts to smell sugary as the caustic ash breaks the long chain sugars holding the plant fibers together. That waste product can be used to make ethanol. Every part of the hemp plant is useful including the waste residues. Another plant called kenaf has the same benefits and is totally legal while industrial hemp remains iffy to grow. One type of Kenaf looks like hemp but the other strains look nothing like it. It's easier to grow Kenaf than jump through the hoops and end up getting Christmas cards from the DEA to grow industrial hemp. Kenaf is unregulated.
Religion causes more violence than video games.
Tax churches.
It's unfair mentioning the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition since they were so long ago. Okay there's some fire bombing of abortion cllinics, Jews and Palestinians taking shots at each other, the Muslim extremists attacking the twin towers. Okay so MOST violence is religious in nature but the Constitution gives religious people the right to stick their heads up their own asses if they want to!!!