Not to mention Indiana Jones is a much more physically demanding role, assuming the movie isn't just about Dr. Jones becoming a crotchety, washed up academic.
"Dad! I'm 65 years old! Will you STOP CALLING ME JUNIOR already??!?!"
And then there's that douchebag who plays anakin in episodes I & II. He's just a shitty actor. I mean, c'mon, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Ewan McGregor were all in the cast, and they hire a lamo for the leading role.
Nah, Hayden Christensen isn't a douchebag. He was good in "Shattered Glass", for instance. He was just totally wrong for the role. They should've cast Ewan McGregor as Anakin, Liam Neeson as Obi-Wan, and gotten someone else to play Qui-Gon. (Sean Connery, maybe? Just kidding, sorta...)
Anyway, I think we can all agree that Jar-Jar Binks was the Lamest. Character. Ever.
As for global warming specifically, the rhetoric I see is generally very nasty and one-sided. The US is evil, its citizens need to endure a recession/depression to save the world, etc. When the rhetoric becomes serious, rational, and includes everyone, give me a call. When you do, please stop sounding like con-artists and try to sound like rational human beings.
Indeed. Any proposed "solution" that involves lowering of expectations, or trying to prevent economic growth and progress, or which ignores the billions of people in Asia, Africa, and South America who'd like to have all the same conveniences and toys enjoyed by folks in North America and Europe, is unrealistic and a waste of time and effort. We're not going to solve the problem by trying to slow down and constrict humanity - we have to figure out how to move forward from here. I won't claim to have the ultimate solution, but I suspect it involves nuclear energy (and lots of it), carbon sequestration, and (ultimately) interplanetary travel. We have to view this, not as something scary, but as the Grandest of Grand Challenges.
The choice of Marvell Wifi chip contradicts the very philosophical goal of OLPC itself. Disgusting.
And here I thought the philosophical goal of OLPC was... One Laptop Per Child. What does Marvell vs. Realtek have to do with that? That only raises the hackles of folks who think this is about some open-vs-closed "war", rather than the larger (and IMO more important) goal of helping disadvantaged children.
And that, in a nutshell, is why the next generation of US and European kids are going to be serving coffee and noodles to the highly motivated, well educated immigrants who will be doing all the real work by then.
Oh, nonsense. When I was a kid (born in 1969, in the US), I spent hours and hours in front of video games - Odyssey2, then VIC-20, then C-64. But I also spent hours and hours with my nose in various fiction and non-fiction books, and not just textbooks either. (Actually, I seldom bothered with textbooks.) And I may not have grown up to be Steve Wozniak or John Carmack or (shudder) George W. Bush, but I still manage to earn a pretty decent living - I'm certainly not serving anyone's damn coffee or noodles. Why should we worry about today's kids being any different? In any country, in any generation, there are the smart people, and then there's everyone else.
So then how is the keyboard on the lower portion of the device communicating with the mother board? Is is using a low power radio transmitter or something? What about the touchpad? And power from the battery?
Uh... the same way a regular notebook manages to display data even though the display is in one half and the motherboard is in the other. There are these things we call wires, running between the two halves...
Windows NT was designed to run on i386, MIPS, PPC and Alpha. Over the years, Microsoft discontinued support for the various platforms - IIRC MIPS and Alpha ended with NT3.51 - PPC ended with NT4. NT5 (aka - Windows 2000) was the first i386 only version of NT.
But don't forget - the XBox 360 runs an OS derived from Win2K, and Windows CE runs on ARM, MIPS, and SH. As Microsoft gets into the devices market, they're going to have to support more and more types of hardware.
Although, China has been making moves to distance themselves from N.K. recently. but until they do, they'll be off limits. Both of my grandfathers fought in the last Korean war, and as one of them put it "Frequently, we'd run out of machine gun bullets before they ran out of troops to throw at us"
China's not the same country it was 50 years ago. The people there have been getting a taste of the good life, and it seems like they want more and more. They might not be willing to spill out onto the battlefield by the millions, the way they used to back when they had nothing better to do. If the US were to get crazy enough to mess with North Korea, the Chinese just might decide to sit back and watch the fireworks...
Actually it's not the plastic toys that kill, it's the fat in the meat that leads to a slow death of the US.
Oh, yeah? Well, at least it ain't no damn North Korean meat. (Actually, I'd imagine that there are quite a few million North Koreans who wouldn't mind getting a taste of some mean, evil, nasty meat right about now...)
If you don't want people to be aware of the spirit or of energy or of UFO's or of our ancient history, (do you feel that jolt of internal revulsion which accompanies the reading of each of those terms? That's your programming talking.), then you implement a social engineering system to lock down the very people who could take that knowledge and study it properly according to the tenets of science. Because if you do not, the knowledge uncovered gives the power to become aware of our hidden oppressors and to resist them; not with cool laser guns, but with the simple awareness of higher realms of existence and the ability to choose our daily actions with knowledge and thus make decisions which benefit humanity and not those who farm humanity, sowing suffering. Because in the end, it's all about the soul, and they do not want you to even believe you have one, let alone realize that to work on strengthening it is the way to oppose them.
Wow, I'm not even sure where to begin. Just what do "the tenets of science" have to say about "the spirit", or "UFOs", or "the soul", or "higher realms of existence", anyway? And what does "the ability to choose our daily actions with knowledge and thus make decisions which benefit humanity" have to do with any of those things? Why does a person have to believe in religious mysticism in order to not want to hurt people? And who are these "hidden oppressors" of whom you speak? Seems to be that Bush & Co. are being pretty public about it, these days...
They are seeking weapons as deterrence. As for the 'Orwellian police state', have a look at the US. Sure, North Korea is not innocent in this respect, but the scale of development of the US police state dwarfs North Korea incredibly. You need to get some context into your analysis.
And you need to get some into yours. The scale of development of the "US police state" is large, sure - because the US has a large population and a huge economy and ready access to high technology. The scope of the "US police state", however, in terms of the degree to which it actually affects the life of the average American citizen, simply pales in comparison to that of North Korea. This comparison is so ridiculous as to almost not bear scrutiny. For all the discussion and concern raised in the Slashosphere and elsewhere, the "US police state" is at most a minor issue or annoyance to the vast majority of the American people, whereas the North Korean government not only is far more intrusive and oppressive, but it's willing to fund that totalitarian regime even at the expense letting its own people freeze and starve to death, all for the glory of the Exalted Leader. Look, I'm about a libertarian a guy as you're likely to find on Slashdot, and as such I have plenty of criticisms of the US government, but to seriously compare it to North Korea is simply preposterous. [Waits patiently for the minus points...]
The newly refurbished middle school in our neighborhood boasts a sophisticated lighting system that dims the lights when the natural light from outside gets brighter. No doubt this was sold to the school district on the premise of lowering the electric bill. I wonder if they realize that simply switching bulbs would save many times more electricity cost, without paying for a spiffy control system.
I would imagine that your daughter's school already uses fluorescent lights in addition to this control system, doesn't it?
To those unable to innately grasp why feeding meat to a herbivore is 'bad and wrong', it is impossible to explain and I suspect that to them, the understanding of it will forever remain an undiscovered country.
"Herbivore" is a human classification. If cows are such herbivores, then why do they favor meat over grass when offered meat? In any case, even if this turns out to be a mistake, a bad idea for practical reasons - I don't see how your hotheaded moralization of the issue does anything other than shed more heat than light on the problem.
Maybe you have a different definition of recent, but in 95/96 there was a blizzard from the Atlantic to the Ohio valley.
OK, but that was ten years ago. There was another fairly bad one in '88 IIRC, and another before that in '78. So maybe we're due for one soon? But still, in general, at least in the part of the Northeast where I live (Long Island), snowless Decembers are hardly rare.
Ah, but was it the case a hundred years ago? Wasn't there a time when the America's Northeast had snow on Christmas? The literature of New England implies that it did snow there a lot once. (And I don't just mean Buffalo.)
Sure. And I'm sure there were times before that when, again, there wasn't snow in the Northeast in late December. It comes and goes.
Don't read too much into what I said - I'm neither supporting nor denying global warming, nor am I saying anything about anthropogenic causes; I'm just saying that not having snow in December is nothing new. (And frankly I don't miss it one bit - I have a 150-foot driveway.)
First we had the geniuses who went ahead with the money saving plan "Let's feed sheep's brains to cows!" which resulted in mad cow disease [wikipedia.org] (which, when infected meat is eaten, can cause incurable and fatal neurological disease CJD [wikipedia.org] in humans). Feeding meat to cows was clearly bad and wrong in ways that don't (shouldn't) need explaining to anyone and *blammo*, well what do you know, karma bites.
"Bad and wrong"? I guess that needs explaining to me, as I can't see where it is necessary or even appropriate to use moral adjectives here. Certainly it appears that feeding brains to cows is unwise, and not a very good idea, but wrong? Like morally wrong? I don't understand why. For one thing, morality is a personal phenomenon, so we have no way of knowing the morality of a sheep or a cow. Second, the law does not define this activity as unethical in the sense of violating the "rights" of cows or sheep. So I don't see where the basis lies for ascribing moral characteristics. Again, it's a dumb thing to do, and because we now know of the risks to human health it should be prohibited, but you seem to be taking this farther than that...
What about all the invertebrates killed in the production of the tonnes of grain to feed to the cow?
But meat-eaters aren't the ones whining about the death of poor helpless creatures; vegans are. If a few earthworms have to die so I can get my porterhouse, so be it. But vegans claim to care about such things, don't they?
Even if it does not snow on Christmas day, there is usually still snow on the ground from previous snow showers which is not the case this year in most of the north east.
Nor has it been the case in any recent year I can remember. This really isn't anything new.
Your answer, without any apparent personal experience, is somewhat laughable
No, but your spouting off in a public forum about your illegal drug activities is somewhat laughable. As if dealing drugs, even if (as far as I'm concerned) it ought to be legal, is something to get arrogant and uptight about.
Isn't it kind of hard to do that when Mecca isn't a magnetic pole?
[sigh] The building rotates; it doesn't move. Therefore, if you know which way North is, finding the direction to Mecca is a trivial exercise. (It's slightly south of due West.) Or you could get one of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention Indiana Jones is a much more physically demanding role, assuming the movie isn't just about Dr. Jones becoming a crotchety, washed up academic.
"Dad! I'm 65 years old! Will you STOP CALLING ME JUNIOR already??!?!"
I don't get it. Why can't George Lucas just digitally remaster things so Harrison Ford agrees to play Han Solo?
Lucas: <waves hand> Of course you want to play Solo again.
Ford: <slightly hazy look> Of course I want to play Solo again.
And then there's that douchebag who plays anakin in episodes I & II. He's just a shitty actor. I mean, c'mon, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Ewan McGregor were all in the cast, and they hire a lamo for the leading role.
Nah, Hayden Christensen isn't a douchebag. He was good in "Shattered Glass", for instance. He was just totally wrong for the role. They should've cast Ewan McGregor as Anakin, Liam Neeson as Obi-Wan, and gotten someone else to play Qui-Gon. (Sean Connery, maybe? Just kidding, sorta...)
Anyway, I think we can all agree that Jar-Jar Binks was the Lamest. Character. Ever.
As for global warming specifically, the rhetoric I see is generally very nasty and one-sided. The US is evil, its citizens need to endure a recession/depression to save the world, etc. When the rhetoric becomes serious, rational, and includes everyone, give me a call. When you do, please stop sounding like con-artists and try to sound like rational human beings.
Indeed. Any proposed "solution" that involves lowering of expectations, or trying to prevent economic growth and progress, or which ignores the billions of people in Asia, Africa, and South America who'd like to have all the same conveniences and toys enjoyed by folks in North America and Europe, is unrealistic and a waste of time and effort. We're not going to solve the problem by trying to slow down and constrict humanity - we have to figure out how to move forward from here. I won't claim to have the ultimate solution, but I suspect it involves nuclear energy (and lots of it), carbon sequestration, and (ultimately) interplanetary travel. We have to view this, not as something scary, but as the Grandest of Grand Challenges.
The choice of Marvell Wifi chip contradicts the very philosophical goal of OLPC itself. Disgusting.
And here I thought the philosophical goal of OLPC was... One Laptop Per Child. What does Marvell vs. Realtek have to do with that? That only raises the hackles of folks who think this is about some open-vs-closed "war", rather than the larger (and IMO more important) goal of helping disadvantaged children.
Divide 10 by 3 and then by 2, all in your head, and get back to me.
1.6666666666... Something harder next time, please.
who cares what other space agencies think? Are they as successful as NASA?
You sure you want to use NASA as an example?
And that, in a nutshell, is why the next generation of US and European kids are going to be serving coffee and noodles to the highly motivated, well educated immigrants who will be doing all the real work by then.
Oh, nonsense. When I was a kid (born in 1969, in the US), I spent hours and hours in front of video games - Odyssey2, then VIC-20, then C-64. But I also spent hours and hours with my nose in various fiction and non-fiction books, and not just textbooks either. (Actually, I seldom bothered with textbooks.) And I may not have grown up to be Steve Wozniak or John Carmack or (shudder) George W. Bush, but I still manage to earn a pretty decent living - I'm certainly not serving anyone's damn coffee or noodles. Why should we worry about today's kids being any different? In any country, in any generation, there are the smart people, and then there's everyone else.
So then how is the keyboard on the lower portion of the device communicating with the mother board? Is is using a low power radio transmitter or something? What about the touchpad? And power from the battery?
Uh... the same way a regular notebook manages to display data even though the display is in one half and the motherboard is in the other. There are these things we call wires, running between the two halves...
I love the look of fear and horror on peoples faces when I pose that question.
Hmm. What sort of person does that make you?
Windows NT was designed to run on i386, MIPS, PPC and Alpha. Over the years, Microsoft discontinued support for the various platforms - IIRC MIPS and Alpha ended with NT3.51 - PPC ended with NT4. NT5 (aka - Windows 2000) was the first i386 only version of NT.
But don't forget - the XBox 360 runs an OS derived from Win2K, and Windows CE runs on ARM, MIPS, and SH. As Microsoft gets into the devices market, they're going to have to support more and more types of hardware.
Although, China has been making moves to distance themselves from N.K. recently. but until they do, they'll be off limits. Both of my grandfathers fought in the last Korean war, and as one of them put it "Frequently, we'd run out of machine gun bullets before they ran out of troops to throw at us"
China's not the same country it was 50 years ago. The people there have been getting a taste of the good life, and it seems like they want more and more. They might not be willing to spill out onto the battlefield by the millions, the way they used to back when they had nothing better to do. If the US were to get crazy enough to mess with North Korea, the Chinese just might decide to sit back and watch the fireworks...
Actually it's not the plastic toys that kill, it's the fat in the meat that leads to a slow death of the US.
Oh, yeah? Well, at least it ain't no damn North Korean meat. (Actually, I'd imagine that there are quite a few million North Koreans who wouldn't mind getting a taste of some mean, evil, nasty meat right about now...)
If you don't want people to be aware of the spirit or of energy or of UFO's or of our ancient history, (do you feel that jolt of internal revulsion which accompanies the reading of each of those terms? That's your programming talking.), then you implement a social engineering system to lock down the very people who could take that knowledge and study it properly according to the tenets of science. Because if you do not, the knowledge uncovered gives the power to become aware of our hidden oppressors and to resist them; not with cool laser guns, but with the simple awareness of higher realms of existence and the ability to choose our daily actions with knowledge and thus make decisions which benefit humanity and not those who farm humanity, sowing suffering. Because in the end, it's all about the soul, and they do not want you to even believe you have one, let alone realize that to work on strengthening it is the way to oppose them.
Wow, I'm not even sure where to begin. Just what do "the tenets of science" have to say about "the spirit", or "UFOs", or "the soul", or "higher realms of existence", anyway? And what does "the ability to choose our daily actions with knowledge and thus make decisions which benefit humanity" have to do with any of those things? Why does a person have to believe in religious mysticism in order to not want to hurt people? And who are these "hidden oppressors" of whom you speak? Seems to be that Bush & Co. are being pretty public about it, these days...
They are seeking weapons as deterrence. As for the 'Orwellian police state', have a look at the US. Sure, North Korea is not innocent in this respect, but the scale of development of the US police state dwarfs North Korea incredibly. You need to get some context into your analysis.
And you need to get some into yours. The scale of development of the "US police state" is large, sure - because the US has a large population and a huge economy and ready access to high technology. The scope of the "US police state", however, in terms of the degree to which it actually affects the life of the average American citizen, simply pales in comparison to that of North Korea. This comparison is so ridiculous as to almost not bear scrutiny. For all the discussion and concern raised in the Slashosphere and elsewhere, the "US police state" is at most a minor issue or annoyance to the vast majority of the American people, whereas the North Korean government not only is far more intrusive and oppressive, but it's willing to fund that totalitarian regime even at the expense letting its own people freeze and starve to death, all for the glory of the Exalted Leader. Look, I'm about a libertarian a guy as you're likely to find on Slashdot, and as such I have plenty of criticisms of the US government, but to seriously compare it to North Korea is simply preposterous. [Waits patiently for the minus points...]
The newly refurbished middle school in our neighborhood boasts a sophisticated lighting system that dims the lights when the natural light from outside gets brighter. No doubt this was sold to the school district on the premise of lowering the electric bill. I wonder if they realize that simply switching bulbs would save many times more electricity cost, without paying for a spiffy control system.
I would imagine that your daughter's school already uses fluorescent lights in addition to this control system, doesn't it?
To those unable to innately grasp why feeding meat to a herbivore is 'bad and wrong', it is impossible to explain and I suspect that to them, the understanding of it will forever remain an undiscovered country.
"Herbivore" is a human classification. If cows are such herbivores, then why do they favor meat over grass when offered meat? In any case, even if this turns out to be a mistake, a bad idea for practical reasons - I don't see how your hotheaded moralization of the issue does anything other than shed more heat than light on the problem.
Maybe you have a different definition of recent, but in 95/96 there was a blizzard from the Atlantic to the Ohio valley.
OK, but that was ten years ago. There was another fairly bad one in '88 IIRC, and another before that in '78. So maybe we're due for one soon? But still, in general, at least in the part of the Northeast where I live (Long Island), snowless Decembers are hardly rare.
Ah, but was it the case a hundred years ago? Wasn't there a time when the America's Northeast had snow on Christmas? The literature of New England implies that it did snow there a lot once. (And I don't just mean Buffalo.)
Sure. And I'm sure there were times before that when, again, there wasn't snow in the Northeast in late December. It comes and goes.
Don't read too much into what I said - I'm neither supporting nor denying global warming, nor am I saying anything about anthropogenic causes; I'm just saying that not having snow in December is nothing new. (And frankly I don't miss it one bit - I have a 150-foot driveway.)
First we had the geniuses who went ahead with the money saving plan "Let's feed sheep's brains to cows!" which resulted in mad cow disease [wikipedia.org] (which, when infected meat is eaten, can cause incurable and fatal neurological disease CJD [wikipedia.org] in humans). Feeding meat to cows was clearly bad and wrong in ways that don't (shouldn't) need explaining to anyone and *blammo*, well what do you know, karma bites.
"Bad and wrong"? I guess that needs explaining to me, as I can't see where it is necessary or even appropriate to use moral adjectives here. Certainly it appears that feeding brains to cows is unwise, and not a very good idea, but wrong? Like morally wrong? I don't understand why. For one thing, morality is a personal phenomenon, so we have no way of knowing the morality of a sheep or a cow. Second, the law does not define this activity as unethical in the sense of violating the "rights" of cows or sheep. So I don't see where the basis lies for ascribing moral characteristics. Again, it's a dumb thing to do, and because we now know of the risks to human health it should be prohibited, but you seem to be taking this farther than that...
What about all the invertebrates killed in the production of the tonnes of grain to feed to the cow?
But meat-eaters aren't the ones whining about the death of poor helpless creatures; vegans are. If a few earthworms have to die so I can get my porterhouse, so be it. But vegans claim to care about such things, don't they?
Even if it does not snow on Christmas day, there is usually still snow on the ground from previous snow showers which is not the case this year in most of the north east.
Nor has it been the case in any recent year I can remember. This really isn't anything new.
Before oil was discovered in Dubai about what, 35 years ago?, they were herding camels and trading rugs.
Dubai is not an oil-rich place; only 6% of its GDP comes from oil. Dubai is rich because of the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone.
Your answer, without any apparent personal experience, is somewhat laughable
No, but your spouting off in a public forum about your illegal drug activities is somewhat laughable. As if dealing drugs, even if (as far as I'm concerned) it ought to be legal, is something to get arrogant and uptight about.
Isn't it kind of hard to do that when Mecca isn't a magnetic pole?
[sigh] The building rotates; it doesn't move. Therefore, if you know which way North is, finding the direction to Mecca is a trivial exercise. (It's slightly south of due West.) Or you could get one of these.