"To protect social peace, and protect the lives our citizens, the library of Alexandria will mostly contain shelves upon shelves of various editions of the Koran. Of course, there will be a 'western literature' section, featuring mostly Noam Chomsky. And on our collection of world maps, where the USA and Israel should be, there'll just be big empty black spaces that say 'There be monsters here.' Oh, and women won't be allowed inside. Thus by placating religious zealots, we will protect the social peace. We're fucking geniuses."
Well, let those people give their work away for free. If you want to spend the money and the 10+ years in school to become molecular biologist and subsequently work for free, more power to you. For my part, I'm glad to pay for the pills that keep me from having epileptic seizures every other day. I'm happy someone took the time and energy to create the damn things, and I'm happy to pay for them.
You've gotta have a lot of balls to demand that a doctor or a scientist work for you for nothing.
"What is our business in the internal affairs of another nation ?"
The business is that Saddam Hussein hasn't disarmed over the last dozen years. It's interesting to note that even France admits he hasn't cooperated. No one wants to wait for a bunch of terrorists carrying aerosol cans full of made-in-iraq anthrax to coat NYC before acting against Mr. Hussein.
Oh an i hear the objections already..."But there is no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda! You're just a paranoid war-monger!"
Saddam Hussein gladly throws money at Palestinian terrorists. How far a jump do you think it is from Islamic Jihad to Osama bin Laden, even if there really is no direct connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda?
The world will be a better place when he's gone. We'll all be safer, and the Iraqi people, whether they like us or not, will be better off.
"Meanwhile, my goodness--the man enacts economic decrees! Oh dear! Can't have governments passing legislation relating to economic issues! There's a parliament dude. You know, elected representatives? They vote on all that stuff. It isn't by fiat of the big man."
The legislature doesn't vote on decrees--thats what makes them decrees. The point is that Chavez now has the power to enact laws *without* parliamentary debate. So, he can indeed rule by fiat. Anyone who wants to pretend that such a move is a step toward democracy has a warped understanding of the term.
Can you imagine the response here in canada (hi, i'm in nova scotia) they extended Jean Chretien's term, gave him the power of decree, and he started expropriating private land, driving up taxes beyond belief, demanding full governmental control of all joint public/private ventures, and trying to install his own pals as the heads of labor unions? It would make for some good episodes of Undercurrents, thats for damn sure.
Btw, my reference to an extra-legal army *was* a bit of an overstatement. What he has is a bunch of extra-legal militias (well, armed gangs) called Bolivarian Circles, which is pretty close. Give him a few years and it will be the same thing.
Well why don't you fund a charity to do drug research then, then sell it at whatever price you want, or give it away. Oh wait, i know why: IT TAKES WORK AND BRAINS TO DEVELOP DRUGS THAT KEEP PEOPLE ALIVE, AND PEOPLE WITH THE EXPERTISE SHOULDN'T BE MADE TO DO IT FOR FREE. They do not owe you a goddamn thing; if anything we owe *them* for helping us to live that much longer, which is the whole damn point of capitalism--PEOPLE GET WHAT THEY ARE OWED.
So it was the business people who started rewriting the constitution, enacted 40 economic 'decrees' to basically put economic control entirely into Chavez's hot little hands, subsequently sending inflation up to ~30% and unemployment up passed 20%, and it's them who are building their own extra-legal army just in case the real one turns on him (you say they bribed the military--it looks like they did a bad job)?
And I suppose they have a Hugo Chavez body double who they can put on camera saying "Saddam Hussein is a brother". Yep.
"If it works so well, why have you had at least 4 NESes?:)"
I get overly frustrated with TopGun 2, and keep smashing my NESs against the wall. For some reason, no amount of cleaning the connectors helps after that.;)
"OH SHIT! Another five missiles heading my way...evasive action, barrel rolls, fire the vulcan cannon, more speeed!
*boom*, 'Game Over'
"ARRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH"
--RMT
Re:You could always buy replacement parts...
on
Finally, A Working NES!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Despite popular belief, it _is_ possible to clean the connector you already have. Just remove it and give it a good cleaning--use whatever electronics cleaning solvent you like (alcohol works)--I've even used plain soap and water and one of those little fingernail brush things. Then (and here is the tricky part) you have to bend the pins back into place. The problem with the nes is that after continuous use the pins on the connector get pushed down and the connection it makes with the cartridges becomes hella loose. You can use a very tiny flathead screw driver to stick in between the pins and then verrrry gently pry them back up. Then put everything back together and it should work like a charm.
I've done this to three NESs now so far, and all of them work fabulously. One was in pieces in a plastic bag in my dank nova scotia basement for 3 years. Previous to that I did buy a new connector for yet a 4th nes, and while it works fine as well, it just isn't worth the extra money when with about 15 minutes of extra work you can breathe life into an old one. Hell, I'm playing Blades of Steel as we speak.
Yeah but their complaining might have worked had they remembered to release usable products. I guess they felt bitching about MS would be enough to endear customers, just like bitching about MS makes slashdot kids feel important. heh
Yeah probably just like that. It also didn't help that ie4 was ten thousand times better than its netscape counterpart. My heart absolutely bleeds for netscape.
It's a piece from the Requiem for a Dream soundrack. Actually, almost every song on that soundtrack is a variation of just that piece of music. But since it's awesome, it doesn't really matter. heh
Yeah, i think i agree with your list, thus eliminating the necessity of me posting my own. I'm not sure TOS really should be anywhere on it though; it's kindof in a class of its own and 30 years out of context. As it stands I think Enterprise might shoot up the list in the future, and I also think that in some cases Voyager was superior to TNG, particularly when you compare the last couple seasons of both.
Okay, here's the thing. I sincerely believe that DS9 is the best one. Everything from the first contact with the Dominion to the end of season 6 was awesome. The best shit ever. But for season 7 they killed off Jadzia Dax and replaced her with a nerd, and the writing got boring and trite, though it was still far better than say, season 7 of TNG. The only thing that *really* made me mad was that in the finale they killed off Weyoun (or his 'last clone'). Man, that guy was the best character ever. But at least, like you say, the space battles were unmatched.
BUT, for all the protestations that Voyager sucked ass, I disagree--well, partly. The first few years of Voyager were absolutely terrible, surely the nadir of startrek so far. None of the characters were the *least bit* interesting, except maybe the doctor, and enemies like the Kazon were a big yawn of a nothing. Plus they made Janeway some kind of female Captain Picard, but forgot to give her a personality or a brain. But then they got rid of Kes, brought in 7/9, and eventually turned Janeway into a useable character. I swear that one of the best startrek scenes ever is the one where the Doctor is trying to teach 7/9 to sing "You are my Sunshine". I mean *come on*, how can you not love that? "you are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy..." by a borg and a hologram. Supurb. (maybe that's some of the punchline you were looking for)
And I watch Enterprise, and *I* like it. Frankly i consider season 1 of enterprise to be farrrr better than that of tng, ds9 or voyager. People complain about the softcore porn in the pilot ("it's a distraction, it takes away from teh philosophy blah blah blah")...well look how many alien chicks captain kirk got with. Enterprise is another step in a long tradition of sexed up sci fi. Plus most of the characters are awesome, particularly that chief engineer guy, Tucker. Every alien he meets you can practically sense him trying to restrain himself from uttering, "WTF are you?"
As for buying those ds9 DVDs, count me in. But I just can't sit by while people entirely denigrate Voyager and say they despise Enterprise on principle. I hope it goes 10 seasons and they start 5 different wars with the klingons. I'll be in rapt suspense.
I don't think Iraq is likely to nuke Israel. Iraq, strange as it may sound, is probably one of the more rational countries in the mideast for the simple reason that it is a military dictatorship instead of a theocracy or a kingdom. Saddam Hussein surely realizes that an attack on the USA or Israel will *immediately* result in his own destruction. I think any overt action by iraq is highly unlikely. However, the bigger problem I see is that the weapons developed in Iraq will not stay there forever. Hussein may not take any direct action, but it is not unthinkable that he will sell weapons to the other enemies of Israel and the US and before long we end up with crazy weapons in the hands of the princes and theocrats.
So, should the USA takedown Hussein? I think that action sooner rather than later is the best course of action, so I'd say yes. Until there is some indication that mideast crazies no longer pose a threat to the USA, then america has a right and a responsibility to look out for its own interests and those of its citizens. So bombs away.
Man, you are so...right. Sales tax where i am (Nova Scotia) is 15%,:) . And we just had protests about a privately owned and run MRI clinic opening round the corner here in Halifax, despite the fact that otherwise it takes 6 months (yes, 6 months, i did it last year) to get an MRI scan when limited to what the province provides. So basically we sell our souls and get absolutely positively nothing. I just had a friend whose urgently needed open heart surgery was postponed 6 times. 6. Wooohooo, public healthcare. I feel so safe.
"Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what this whole "free" capitalism is about, that the government should be friendly with businesses and that big corporations (such as the record industry) be allowed to exploit innocent consumers?"
No, "free" capitalism means non-interference by government, where the government is not permitted to make laws that favor or injur businesses. If this were real capitalism, the government would have no say in terms of what the record companies did, so long as they weren't putting a gun to consumer's heads, ordering them to buy Britney CDs. In that case there'd also be no reason for record company lobby groups to buy government officials, because by definition the officials wouldn't be able to act in their favor anyway. If the public thinks the record companies are assfucking them, then the public is *perfectly free* to hurt them by choosing not to buy the expensive trash they produce. For my part, I think making price-fixing and collusion a crime is fucking stupid; if record companies did compete dog-eat dog style, and one of them buried all the others because it became more attractive to consumers for whatever reason and made the most money and put the others out of business, then they'd be charged with antitrust violations and monopolistic practices. The fact is, people don't want real competition because that means it's possible that someone might eventually win, and they don't want multiple companies to co-exist more or less equally because that means they'd be colluding. So it's impossible to make people happy.
We're not quite communism, but not quite capitalism either.
Man, you said it. I had an american one day rifling through a handful of change asking me what it all was.
"What's this?" "That's a bridge token" "What's this?" "A canadian nickle." "What's this?" "A canadian quarter." "What's this?" "uhhh, that's am american quarter."
Slashdot Mirror
"To protect social peace, and protect the lives our citizens, the library of Alexandria will mostly contain shelves upon shelves of various editions of the Koran. Of course, there will be a 'western literature' section, featuring mostly Noam Chomsky. And on our collection of world maps, where the USA and Israel should be, there'll just be big empty black spaces that say 'There be monsters here.' Oh, and women won't be allowed inside. Thus by placating religious zealots, we will protect the social peace. We're fucking geniuses."
Yeah but resistance is futile. All will be assimated; it is inevitable.
n/t
HAHAHAHAAHA
My hat goes off to you sir.
--RMT
Well, let those people give their work away for free. If you want to spend the money and the 10+ years in school to become molecular biologist and subsequently work for free, more power to you. For my part, I'm glad to pay for the pills that keep me from having epileptic seizures every other day. I'm happy someone took the time and energy to create the damn things, and I'm happy to pay for them.
You've gotta have a lot of balls to demand that a doctor or a scientist work for you for nothing.
--RMT
i pressed enter at the wrong time
"What is our business in the internal affairs of another nation ?"
The business is that Saddam Hussein hasn't disarmed over the last dozen years. It's interesting to note that even France admits he hasn't cooperated. No one wants to wait for a bunch of terrorists carrying aerosol cans full of made-in-iraq anthrax to coat NYC before acting against Mr. Hussein.
Oh an i hear the objections already..."But there is no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda! You're just a paranoid war-monger!"
Saddam Hussein gladly throws money at Palestinian terrorists. How far a jump do you think it is from Islamic Jihad to Osama bin Laden, even if there really is no direct connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda?
The world will be a better place when he's gone. We'll all be safer, and the Iraqi people, whether they like us or not, will be better off.
--RMT
"What is our business in the internal affairs of another nation ?"
"Meanwhile, my goodness--the man enacts economic
decrees! Oh dear! Can't have governments passing legislation relating to economic issues! There's a parliament dude. You know, elected representatives? They vote on all that stuff. It isn't by fiat of the big man."
The legislature doesn't vote on decrees--thats what makes them decrees. The point is that Chavez now has the power to enact laws *without* parliamentary debate. So, he can indeed rule by fiat. Anyone who wants to pretend that such a move is a step toward democracy has a warped understanding of the term.
Can you imagine the response here in canada (hi, i'm in nova scotia) they extended Jean Chretien's term, gave him the power of decree, and he started expropriating private land, driving up taxes beyond belief, demanding full governmental control of all joint public/private ventures, and trying to install his own pals as the heads of labor unions? It would make for some good episodes of Undercurrents, thats for damn sure.
Btw, my reference to an extra-legal army *was* a bit of an overstatement. What he has is a bunch of extra-legal militias (well, armed gangs) called Bolivarian Circles, which is pretty close. Give him a few years and it will be the same thing.
--RMT
Well why don't you fund a charity to do drug research then, then sell it at whatever price you want, or give it away. Oh wait, i know why: IT TAKES WORK AND BRAINS TO DEVELOP DRUGS THAT KEEP PEOPLE ALIVE, AND PEOPLE WITH THE EXPERTISE SHOULDN'T BE MADE TO DO IT FOR FREE. They do not owe you a goddamn thing; if anything we owe *them* for helping us to live that much longer, which is the whole damn point of capitalism--PEOPLE GET WHAT THEY ARE OWED.
Sorry for the yelling.
--RMT
So it was the business people who started rewriting the constitution, enacted 40 economic 'decrees' to basically put economic control entirely into Chavez's hot little hands, subsequently sending inflation up to ~30% and unemployment up passed 20%, and it's them who are building their own extra-legal army just in case the real one turns on him (you say they bribed the military--it looks like they did a bad job)?
And I suppose they have a Hugo Chavez body double who they can put on camera saying "Saddam Hussein is a brother". Yep.
Hurray for populist socialism!
--RMT
"If it works so well, why have you had at least 4 NESes? :)"
;)
I get overly frustrated with TopGun 2, and keep smashing my NESs against the wall. For some reason, no amount of cleaning the connectors helps after that.
"OH SHIT! Another five missiles heading my way...evasive action, barrel rolls, fire the vulcan cannon, more speeed!
*boom*, 'Game Over'
"ARRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH"
--RMT
Despite popular belief, it _is_ possible to clean the connector you already have. Just remove it and give it a good cleaning--use whatever electronics cleaning solvent you like (alcohol works)--I've even used plain soap and water and one of those little fingernail brush things. Then (and here is the tricky part) you have to bend the pins back into place. The problem with the nes is that after continuous use the pins on the connector get pushed down and the connection it makes with the cartridges becomes hella loose. You can use a very tiny flathead screw driver to stick in between the pins and then verrrry gently pry them back up. Then put everything back together and it should work like a charm.
I've done this to three NESs now so far, and all of them work fabulously. One was in pieces in a plastic bag in my dank nova scotia basement for 3 years. Previous to that I did buy a new connector for yet a 4th nes, and while it works fine as well, it just isn't worth the extra money when with about 15 minutes of extra work you can breathe life into an old one. Hell, I'm playing Blades of Steel as we speak.
--RMT
Yeah but their complaining might have worked had they remembered to release usable products. I guess they felt bitching about MS would be enough to endear customers, just like bitching about MS makes slashdot kids feel important. heh
--RMT
Yeah probably just like that. It also didn't help that ie4 was ten thousand times better than its netscape counterpart. My heart absolutely bleeds for netscape.
--RMT
I personally thought they both sucked. ;)
Just another step on kevin Costner's slow, torturous, march downhill.
--RMT
It's a piece from the Requiem for a Dream soundrack. Actually, almost every song on that soundtrack is a variation of just that piece of music. But since it's awesome, it doesn't really matter. heh
--RMT
Yeah, i think i agree with your list, thus eliminating the necessity of me posting my own. I'm not sure TOS really should be anywhere on it though; it's kindof in a class of its own and 30 years out of context. As it stands I think Enterprise might shoot up the list in the future, and I also think that in some cases Voyager was superior to TNG, particularly when you compare the last couple seasons of both.
--RMT
Okay, here's the thing. I sincerely believe that DS9 is the best one. Everything from the first contact with the Dominion to the end of season 6 was awesome. The best shit ever. But for season 7 they killed off Jadzia Dax and replaced her with a nerd, and the writing got boring and trite, though it was still far better than say, season 7 of TNG. The only thing that *really* made me mad was that in the finale they killed off Weyoun (or his 'last clone'). Man, that guy was the best character ever. But at least, like you say, the space battles were unmatched.
BUT, for all the protestations that Voyager sucked ass, I disagree--well, partly. The first few years of Voyager were absolutely terrible, surely the nadir of startrek so far. None of the characters were the *least bit* interesting, except maybe the doctor, and enemies like the Kazon were a big yawn of a nothing. Plus they made Janeway some kind of female Captain Picard, but forgot to give her a personality or a brain. But then they got rid of Kes, brought in 7/9, and eventually turned Janeway into a useable character. I swear that one of the best startrek scenes ever is the one where the Doctor is trying to teach 7/9 to sing "You are my Sunshine". I mean *come on*, how can you not love that? "you are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy..." by a borg and a hologram. Supurb. (maybe that's some of the punchline you were looking for)
And I watch Enterprise, and *I* like it. Frankly i consider season 1 of enterprise to be farrrr better than that of tng, ds9 or voyager. People complain about the softcore porn in the pilot ("it's a distraction, it takes away from teh philosophy blah blah blah")...well look how many alien chicks captain kirk got with. Enterprise is another step in a long tradition of sexed up sci fi. Plus most of the characters are awesome, particularly that chief engineer guy, Tucker. Every alien he meets you can practically sense him trying to restrain himself from uttering, "WTF are you?"
As for buying those ds9 DVDs, count me in. But I just can't sit by while people entirely denigrate Voyager and say they despise Enterprise on principle. I hope it goes 10 seasons and they start 5 different wars with the klingons. I'll be in rapt suspense.
--RMT
Look to see Microsoft take on all its U.S. competitors.
Yeah, imagine that. A company taking on its competitors in a capitalist country! Darn them all to heck. There oughtta be a law!
--RMT
Man, I remember a good one.
Geordi et al. looking for a way to detect those terrorists using dimensional shifting (wesley helped alot of course)
Picard: Is there a way to detect them?
Geordi: With an adaptive subspace echogram...maybe.
I don't think Iraq is likely to nuke Israel. Iraq, strange as it may sound, is probably one of the more rational countries in the mideast for the simple reason that it is a military dictatorship instead of a theocracy or a kingdom. Saddam Hussein surely realizes that an attack on the USA or Israel will *immediately* result in his own destruction. I think any overt action by iraq is highly unlikely. However, the bigger problem I see is that the weapons developed in Iraq will not stay there forever. Hussein may not take any direct action, but it is not unthinkable that he will sell weapons to the other enemies of Israel and the US and before long we end up with crazy weapons in the hands of the princes and theocrats.
So, should the USA takedown Hussein? I think that action sooner rather than later is the best course of action, so I'd say yes. Until there is some indication that mideast crazies no longer pose a threat to the USA, then america has a right and a responsibility to look out for its own interests and those of its citizens. So bombs away.
--RMT
Maybe we should ask the highest source...BEHOLD, the Great Queen Spider!
--RMT
Man, you are so...right. Sales tax where i am (Nova Scotia) is 15%, :) . And we just had protests about a privately owned and run MRI clinic opening round the corner here in Halifax, despite the fact that otherwise it takes 6 months (yes, 6 months, i did it last year) to get an MRI scan when limited to what the province provides. So basically we sell our souls and get absolutely positively nothing. I just had a friend whose urgently needed open heart surgery was postponed 6 times. 6. Wooohooo, public healthcare. I feel so safe.
--RMT
"Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what this whole "free" capitalism is about, that the government should be friendly with businesses and that big corporations (such as the record industry) be allowed to exploit innocent consumers?"
No, "free" capitalism means non-interference by government, where the government is not permitted to make laws that favor or injur businesses. If this were real capitalism, the government would have no say in terms of what the record companies did, so long as they weren't putting a gun to consumer's heads, ordering them to buy Britney CDs. In that case there'd also be no reason for record company lobby groups to buy government officials, because by definition the officials wouldn't be able to act in their favor anyway. If the public thinks the record companies are assfucking them, then the public is *perfectly free* to hurt them by choosing not to buy the expensive trash they produce. For my part, I think making price-fixing and collusion a crime is fucking stupid; if record companies did compete dog-eat dog style, and one of them buried all the others because it became more attractive to consumers for whatever reason and made the most money and put the others out of business, then they'd be charged with antitrust violations and monopolistic practices. The fact is, people don't want real competition because that means it's possible that someone might eventually win, and they don't want multiple companies to co-exist more or less equally because that means they'd be colluding. So it's impossible to make people happy.
We're not quite communism, but not quite capitalism either.
--RMT
Man, you said it. I had an american one day rifling through a handful of change asking me what it all was.
"What's this?"
"That's a bridge token"
"What's this?"
"A canadian nickle."
"What's this?"
"A canadian quarter."
"What's this?"
"uhhh, that's am american quarter."
:)