Hey lighten up Dude, you have to be capable of simultaneously holding two entirely contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time before you have the right to be a grown-up. In case you hadn't noticed its children like the Taliban with their rigid and unquestionable ideologies who are butchering children in the streets, not tax paying democrats occasionally overspending on ridiculous parties. Money isn't important unless you don't have enough of it and if you have sufficient then wasting some of it still recycles it back to other people. Also on artistic grounds I dont like your ideas, I would rather we had some rich people who could build magnificent buildings for the heck of it rather than a state who taxes us to build concrete monstrosities for example. Helping the poor to not be poor does not have one easy simple solution like you suggest, and it certainly does not come from outlawing people enjoying themselves.
It does - thats why they wrote it in intentionally general terms. Its designed to prevent dancing which happens to be associated with drug taking, often illegal drugs. Makes you think of the Medieval Church though when phrased in that way.
£800 for a tent, mobile sound system, barbecue food and booze for 20 friends sounds cheap. I've spent more money on a Christmas dinner for a few friends. I think you just dont like people who break laws against people having fun. He publicized the event to his friends, not to the whole of facebook. What exactly is this Rave thing the law was designed to ban anyway? From what I remember it was introduced because entrepreneurs were organizing parties where they sold drugs and booze on land with out the owners permission with the pull of all night music. Well no one is going to make much of a fuss about putting a stop to littering peoples fields, potentially with dead teenagers. But this was a thirty-th birthday barbecue with music and a tent to hide under when the rain got too bad, set in a field so that alcohol could be consumed and slept off in your own tent. There used to be a pub in Exeter which allowed much the same deal in its field. The pub has been bought by a national chain now and camping in its field is no longer allowed. This country is becoming a vile place to live, no strike that, this country is a vile place to live.
Its the creation of a monopoly marketplace that excludes private citizens. American capitalism revolts me in its obsession with money above culture, its no better than all the other criminal states like Iran, China and Burma.
Being a game designer is a vocation. Anyone asking the question "what is the best way to become a game designer" will never make it. There is no best way, you have to fight your way in by being both excellent and probably cheap and overworked in most cases.
Why not aspire to work on head up displays used by the military, you should get paid pretty well, not lose your job in a recession, occasionally get to blow things up for real, work on a really important game. There are tons of exciting things you can do that don't involve dedicating your life to satisfying the desires of pre-pubescent boys. Graphics software for medicine, for chemistry, for car designers. Realtime software for transport systems, for robotic factories, for space shuttles.
Good grief, who the hell wants to be a game designer? what a dull occupation that must be.
The huge joke about energy efficiency is that it makes money for the end user. The problem is that falling energy demand reduces the profits of very large companies. So we get a lot of disinformation and lobbying trying to scare the end user about changing to cleaner and more efficient technologies. Carbon cap and trade is a regulatory lever to shift large companies into investing in cleaner and more efficient technologies.
Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse
on
Introducing the Warpship
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Einsteins space-time says that all that will ever be is mapped out and exists, just like XY and Z. Just because you and I see chemical entropy as elapsing time doesn't mean that the dimension of time is any different from XY and Z. If you have any special insight into what time is I am sure the world would be deeply interested to hear about it. Physics doesnt have a clue what time is, all of the math in physics says that there is absolutely no difference between what happens and what happens when you look at things with time reversed. We await your deep insight. (to be frank the world needs an insight because we don't have a clue about time, theres definitely no chance of any wonder warp drive thats for sure, the human race is going to die inside the solar system and the chances of seeing people on even a single other planet in the solar system are as likely as unbridled Capitalism being the future).
Funnily enough the first thing that came into my head was not that Microsoft is the evil empire but that any country that could seriously have an intellectual property patent for "hot or not" has actually regressed to the intellectual capacity of a slime mold. You have to be kidding surely, you cannot patent "hot or not" and sell licenses to business corporations, not unless the corporations are run by thirteen year olds.
Maybe thats the answer, American corporations are run by thirteen year olds. That could possibly explain why four thousand trillion dollars has been lent to shysters and shoveled into holes in the ground known as housing for some inexplicable reason. It explains why the global financial system just went tits up and yours and my pension has been destroyed. The only consolation is that Iran is still an infinitely worse place to live than Disney land.
I think that Scientologists should wear yellow, six-pointed stars on their clothing. During World War II, Hitler forced Jewish men, women and children to wear a a yellow cloth star bearing the word Jude to brand them in the streets of Europe, and in the Nazi death camps. So anything that could raise some sympathy for the money making cult is clearly worth a try now that they have become so discredited in the mainstream.
Hey, I've got an even better idea, why doesnt Miscaviage go on hunger strike to the death protesting against Google for banning his minions from using Wikipedia as a free advertising service? That way maybe somebody else could get to be in charge and clean up the cult.
Any Scientologist dissatisfied with the money grabbing evil empire that is the church of Scientology should head over to the Freezone where religious freedom (and physical and mental freedom come to think about it) is available at almost no financial cost. It seems that Anonymous's information campaign is now truly mainstream and this evil cult cannot get away with its gross behavior any longer. Hurrah!
More to the point they peddle this heroin to vulnerable people by falsely marketing it. Its the marketing that outraged citizens and now it seems Wikipedia are objecting to. Now if Scientology was to advertise their services as 'brainwashing guaranteed to make you want to pay stupid amounts of money for never ending training inside a cult" then no one would have any objection. As for declaring themselves a Church for tax purposes and so that they can play the "racist" card. Well the final solution seems appropriate in their case. Nasty horrible money making organization that well deserves the opprobrium of our youth. Good luck to anonymous.
And don't forget that only TV and down market newspapers ever "think of the children" in our world so bereft of scaremongering. Though I am surprised that disreputable semi underground political parties prefer the idea of murdering or mutilating people of different skin colour in preference to "thinking of the children". Maybe it just reflects the backward cultural leanings of their memberships that they haven't cottoned onto this hot topic and used this particular fear as a recruiting banner.
The whole thing is being looked at back to front in any case. In future governments will enforce arbitrary interpretations of the law based on what you look at on the internet. As various websites arouse displeasure in our political masters they can just get the police to look up anyone who ever looked at the site in the anti-terrorist database - and have the appropriate number of limbs surgically removed from the offenders so identified.
Lets hope Slashdot doesnt end up on the list for some time.
The rate we are going there will be so many corrections to the CMB that there wont be any signal left at all. Mind you could be the ultimate irony when it turns out that the universe actually built out of correction errors from actual real empty nothing.
Yes, but we are going to have to wait one heck of a long time for the images to come back down from the probe we put outside the galaxy when we find out that the galactic shock wave is screwing up our measurements.
Yeah, death to the ribbon folk. Actually I have a good reason for severing their carotid arteries. Blind people cannot use ribbons - not unless you offer them menus of tool tips. But its not just because the ribbon folk are trendy, blind people hating marketing droid types. Its because I don't want all this spangly shit on my screen. I want my work on the screen and will fight to the death over my right not to have product placement icons in my face ten hours a day.
Looks like the Austrian school of economics is living up to its reputation of I'm all right jack so screw you and your joint project for the sake of humanity. How can you take an economic system seriously when it comes from this bunch of loons? Its not so much the lack of enthusiasm for fundamental science that gets up my nose as they signed up in the first place, its the going back on your word and shafting your friends because you can save a few bucks mentality. Seriously though isnt Austria one of the most venal international partners in the first world?
Totally agree. I think it is inevitable that both TOR and Torrents will be made illegal in the UK by the current labour government if they are re-elected next year. The excuse that will be made to justify it, will be that these are being used to break copyright law. Connecting to a TOR router will effectively be treated like viewing kiddy porn, so you wont be doing that for sure. I believe that the days of the internet being the new wild west are coming to an end, it wouldn't surprise me if the technology behind the great firewall of China weren't used on us the way things are going.
Absolutely, it seems to me in any case that Ballards science fiction does not interest itself principally in the science or in predicting a realistic technological future anyway. It takes people who (had) existed at the time the works were written and finds out what happens to them when their world does something wierd.
A case in point is the wonderful Crystal World. Assorted characters loosely associated with a medical facility behave strangely as the jungle around them crystallizes. The writing is so good that you believe it could be happening somewhere real soon. Not because of the science, but because the characters are so obviously in that weird world, and they are real. Great book.
Whats wrong with naked people all of a sudden? I don't mind them and the people who do are only upset because someone taught them to be upset. A bit like teaching children that people with different colored skins are to be hated really. Thats what pisses me off about religion and censorship, they only want the censorship because its in a list of mindless rules that make sure that they have to kill other people in other religions because they are different in each religion. Religion is a sickness, a self propagating information set which is designed to kill everybody with a different self propagating meme. And if you insist that athesisim is also a religion then fair enough, it means that I have to kill all these people with a religion - not because I have a meme that tells me that I have to kill them but because they want to kill me. If Amazon is censoring books because of some religious lobby group then I don't buy from Amazon any more.
World population is the underlying problem which makes solving all the others so much more difficult. However if we take it as read that the human race is not about to start culling the excess in places like Bangladesh any time soon then we need to do something about global warming. It is also very obvious that no elected government is going to stop us burning fossil fuel any time soon and that CO2 emission is going to be only slightly impacted by the introduction of wind power. This leaves us facing the prospect of places like Bangladesh becoming uninhabitable over the next 50 years, the 160 Million people who will be looking for somewhere else to live either need to be shot or stored in refugee camps somewhere. Would you want your childrens nightly tv viewing to consist of watching these defenseless people being mown down with machine guns or stacked up in the equivalent of 100 (thats one Hundred for the hard of hearing) Gaza strips - and associated conflicts. Lets face it, firing hundreds of tons of dust into the stratosphere and screwing with the climate has got to be cheaper than planning for that kind of tv schedule.
So let me bet you that all the science is going to be done and that the technology is going to be ready to do climate modification within the next ten years because as a realist Obama is going to give the western world the option. We wont be waiting for Bushes "la la la" christian god to come up with something just because we are the righteous inheritors of the earth. Thats not the way we do stuff now, we look at the data and pick our options. Climate change technology is probably the only option going that lets you keep your lifestyle and not kill off half of the rest of the planet.
Enjoying the video stream, never realised there were so many observatories doing cool stuff. Also try the excellent podcast stream, one per day for the rest of the year. http://365daysofastronomy.org/ (Yes I bought the tee shirt)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey lighten up Dude, you have to be capable of simultaneously holding two entirely contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time before you have the right to be a grown-up. In case you hadn't noticed its children like the Taliban with their rigid and unquestionable ideologies who are butchering children in the streets, not tax paying democrats occasionally overspending on ridiculous parties. Money isn't important unless you don't have enough of it and if you have sufficient then wasting some of it still recycles it back to other people. Also on artistic grounds I dont like your ideas, I would rather we had some rich people who could build magnificent buildings for the heck of it rather than a state who taxes us to build concrete monstrosities for example. Helping the poor to not be poor does not have one easy simple solution like you suggest, and it certainly does not come from outlawing people enjoying themselves.
It does - thats why they wrote it in intentionally general terms. Its designed to prevent dancing which happens to be associated with drug taking, often illegal drugs. Makes you think of the Medieval Church though when phrased in that way.
The root of this all is the War on untaxed Drugs.
Fixed that for you.
£800 for a tent, mobile sound system, barbecue food and booze for 20 friends sounds cheap. I've spent more money on a Christmas dinner for a few friends. I think you just dont like people who break laws against people having fun. He publicized the event to his friends, not to the whole of facebook. What exactly is this Rave thing the law was designed to ban anyway? From what I remember it was introduced because entrepreneurs were organizing parties where they sold drugs and booze on land with out the owners permission with the pull of all night music. Well no one is going to make much of a fuss about putting a stop to littering peoples fields, potentially with dead teenagers. But this was a thirty-th birthday barbecue with music and a tent to hide under when the rain got too bad, set in a field so that alcohol could be consumed and slept off in your own tent. There used to be a pub in Exeter which allowed much the same deal in its field. The pub has been bought by a national chain now and camping in its field is no longer allowed. This country is becoming a vile place to live, no strike that, this country is a vile place to live.
Its the creation of a monopoly marketplace that excludes private citizens. American capitalism revolts me in its obsession with money above culture, its no better than all the other criminal states like Iran, China and Burma.
Being a game designer is a vocation. Anyone asking the question "what is the best way to become a game designer" will never make it. There is no best way, you have to fight your way in by being both excellent and probably cheap and overworked in most cases.
Why not aspire to work on head up displays used by the military, you should get paid pretty well, not lose your job in a recession, occasionally get to blow things up for real, work on a really important game. There are tons of exciting things you can do that don't involve dedicating your life to satisfying the desires of pre-pubescent boys. Graphics software for medicine, for chemistry, for car designers. Realtime software for transport systems, for robotic factories, for space shuttles.
Good grief, who the hell wants to be a game designer? what a dull occupation that must be.
The huge joke about energy efficiency is that it makes money for the end user. The problem is that falling energy demand reduces the profits of very large companies. So we get a lot of disinformation and lobbying trying to scare the end user about changing to cleaner and more efficient technologies. Carbon cap and trade is a regulatory lever to shift large companies into investing in cleaner and more efficient technologies.
Einsteins space-time says that all that will ever be is mapped out and exists, just like XY and Z. Just because you and I see chemical entropy as elapsing time doesn't mean that the dimension of time is any different from XY and Z. If you have any special insight into what time is I am sure the world would be deeply interested to hear about it. Physics doesnt have a clue what time is, all of the math in physics says that there is absolutely no difference between what happens and what happens when you look at things with time reversed. We await your deep insight. (to be frank the world needs an insight because we don't have a clue about time, theres definitely no chance of any wonder warp drive thats for sure, the human race is going to die inside the solar system and the chances of seeing people on even a single other planet in the solar system are as likely as unbridled Capitalism being the future).
Funnily enough the first thing that came into my head was not that Microsoft is the evil empire but that any country that could seriously have an intellectual property patent for "hot or not" has actually regressed to the intellectual capacity of a slime mold. You have to be kidding surely, you cannot patent "hot or not" and sell licenses to business corporations, not unless the corporations are run by thirteen year olds.
Maybe thats the answer, American corporations are run by thirteen year olds. That could possibly explain why four thousand trillion dollars has been lent to shysters and shoveled into holes in the ground known as housing for some inexplicable reason. It explains why the global financial system just went tits up and yours and my pension has been destroyed. The only consolation is that Iran is still an infinitely worse place to live than Disney land.
I think that Scientologists should wear yellow, six-pointed stars on their clothing. During World War II, Hitler forced Jewish men, women and children to wear a a yellow cloth star bearing the word Jude to brand them in the streets of Europe, and in the Nazi death camps. So anything that could raise some sympathy for the money making cult is clearly worth a try now that they have become so discredited in the mainstream.
Hey, I've got an even better idea, why doesnt Miscaviage go on hunger strike to the death protesting against Google for banning his minions from using Wikipedia as a free advertising service? That way maybe somebody else could get to be in charge and clean up the cult.
Any Scientologist dissatisfied with the money grabbing evil empire that is the church of Scientology should head over to the Freezone where religious freedom (and physical and mental freedom come to think about it) is available at almost no financial cost. It seems that Anonymous's information campaign is now truly mainstream and this evil cult cannot get away with its gross behavior any longer. Hurrah!
More to the point they peddle this heroin to vulnerable people by falsely marketing it. Its the marketing that outraged citizens and now it seems Wikipedia are objecting to. Now if Scientology was to advertise their services as 'brainwashing guaranteed to make you want to pay stupid amounts of money for never ending training inside a cult" then no one would have any objection. As for declaring themselves a Church for tax purposes and so that they can play the "racist" card. Well the final solution seems appropriate in their case. Nasty horrible money making organization that well deserves the opprobrium of our youth. Good luck to anonymous.
And don't forget that only TV and down market newspapers ever "think of the children" in our world so bereft of scaremongering. Though I am surprised that disreputable semi underground political parties prefer the idea of murdering or mutilating people of different skin colour in preference to "thinking of the children". Maybe it just reflects the backward cultural leanings of their memberships that they haven't cottoned onto this hot topic and used this particular fear as a recruiting banner.
The whole thing is being looked at back to front in any case. In future governments will enforce arbitrary interpretations of the law based on what you look at on the internet. As various websites arouse displeasure in our political masters they can just get the police to look up anyone who ever looked at the site in the anti-terrorist database - and have the appropriate number of limbs surgically removed from the offenders so identified.
Lets hope Slashdot doesnt end up on the list for some time.
The rate we are going there will be so many corrections to the CMB that there wont be any signal left at all. Mind you could be the ultimate irony when it turns out that the universe actually built out of correction errors from actual real empty nothing.
Yes, but we are going to have to wait one heck of a long time for the images to come back down from the probe we put outside the galaxy when we find out that the galactic shock wave is screwing up our measurements.
I'm on the last chapter as you speak, very entertaining book.
Who said the big bang started at an infinitesimally small point. It could have been a loop the size of the Planck distance.
Yeah, death to the ribbon folk. Actually I have a good reason for severing their carotid arteries. Blind people cannot use ribbons - not unless you offer them menus of tool tips. But its not just because the ribbon folk are trendy, blind people hating marketing droid types. Its because I don't want all this spangly shit on my screen. I want my work on the screen and will fight to the death over my right not to have product placement icons in my face ten hours a day.
Looks like the Austrian school of economics is living up to its reputation of I'm all right jack so screw you and your joint project for the sake of humanity. How can you take an economic system seriously when it comes from this bunch of loons? Its not so much the lack of enthusiasm for fundamental science that gets up my nose as they signed up in the first place, its the going back on your word and shafting your friends because you can save a few bucks mentality. Seriously though isnt Austria one of the most venal international partners in the first world?
ok happy tax payer, I suppose that you want to pay tax for services that you dont use? Why not put the tax on electricity? or water for that matter?
Totally agree. I think it is inevitable that both TOR and Torrents will be made illegal in the UK by the current labour government if they are re-elected next year. The excuse that will be made to justify it, will be that these are being used to break copyright law. Connecting to a TOR router will effectively be treated like viewing kiddy porn, so you wont be doing that for sure. I believe that the days of the internet being the new wild west are coming to an end, it wouldn't surprise me if the technology behind the great firewall of China weren't used on us the way things are going.
Absolutely, it seems to me in any case that Ballards science fiction does not interest itself principally in the science or in predicting a realistic technological future anyway. It takes people who (had) existed at the time the works were written and finds out what happens to them when their world does something wierd.
A case in point is the wonderful Crystal World. Assorted characters loosely associated with a medical facility behave strangely as the jungle around them crystallizes. The writing is so good that you believe it could be happening somewhere real soon. Not because of the science, but because the characters are so obviously in that weird world, and they are real. Great book.
Whats wrong with naked people all of a sudden? I don't mind them and the people who do are only upset because someone taught them to be upset. A bit like teaching children that people with different colored skins are to be hated really. Thats what pisses me off about religion and censorship, they only want the censorship because its in a list of mindless rules that make sure that they have to kill other people in other religions because they are different in each religion. Religion is a sickness, a self propagating information set which is designed to kill everybody with a different self propagating meme. And if you insist that athesisim is also a religion then fair enough, it means that I have to kill all these people with a religion - not because I have a meme that tells me that I have to kill them but because they want to kill me. If Amazon is censoring books because of some religious lobby group then I don't buy from Amazon any more.
World population is the underlying problem which makes solving all the others so much more difficult. However if we take it as read that the human race is not about to start culling the excess in places like Bangladesh any time soon then we need to do something about global warming. It is also very obvious that no elected government is going to stop us burning fossil fuel any time soon and that CO2 emission is going to be only slightly impacted by the introduction of wind power. This leaves us facing the prospect of places like Bangladesh becoming uninhabitable over the next 50 years, the 160 Million people who will be looking for somewhere else to live either need to be shot or stored in refugee camps somewhere. Would you want your childrens nightly tv viewing to consist of watching these defenseless people being mown down with machine guns or stacked up in the equivalent of 100 (thats one Hundred for the hard of hearing) Gaza strips - and associated conflicts. Lets face it, firing hundreds of tons of dust into the stratosphere and screwing with the climate has got to be cheaper than planning for that kind of tv schedule.
So let me bet you that all the science is going to be done and that the technology is going to be ready to do climate modification within the next ten years because as a realist Obama is going to give the western world the option. We wont be waiting for Bushes "la la la" christian god to come up with something just because we are the righteous inheritors of the earth. Thats not the way we do stuff now, we look at the data and pick our options. Climate change technology is probably the only option going that lets you keep your lifestyle and not kill off half of the rest of the planet.
Enjoying the video stream, never realised there were so many observatories doing cool stuff. Also try the excellent podcast stream, one per day for the rest of the year.
http://365daysofastronomy.org/
(Yes I bought the tee shirt)
I agree, unhelpful jest, hope you find some better class of april 1st humor elsewhere.