Overall, a minute percentage of American taxes goes to new weapons.
And quite a bit of that is extremely political and porky.. Rumsfeld killing the Comanche and Crusader was like pulling teeth since the districts that had those factories had their congresslaves push for the programs not for the defense of their country but for the defense of their states' jobs. The USA builds warships largely to keep the ability to build warships intact.
A lot of defense spending is porkbarrel welfare for the home districts, and I'm sure most Generals would tell you that they'd rather take the money out of those programs and put it into recruitment/retention/quality-of-life for their troops, excepting of course for "their" projects;)
Then again, the nuclear weapon industry to my mind is a bit of "welfare for smart people", and I'm all for enriching the smart and industrious at the expense of the dumb and lazy.
Actually, you're probably thinking of the F-15.. F-14s were carrier-based aircraft for fleet defense and air superiority.. Protecting the cap ships from Exocets or bombers, yes, but unless you deployed your aircraft carriers along known bomber routes, not so much of the strategic bomber defense..
Also, I'm thinking more along the lines of the F-104 Starfighter and F-106 Delta Dart for the role you're talking about, and that role was ceded to antiaircraft missiles in 1960s and 1970s..
Who cares bout pretty, I just want a single client that does AIM, Yahoo and Jabber without paying extra, and something that I can use to make stupid animated YTMNDs.
The brain-damage is that GAIM isn't keeping up with GTK+. Meh, I can survive with Trillian + Google Talk.
GNOME apps (er, rather, GTK+ apps) work pretty well on Windows. Assuming, of course, you don't have a GTK+ version mismatch that requires you to run multiple versions of GTK+.
(I'm lookin' at _you_, GAIM! Play nice with the latest GIMP please!!!!!)
... To be honest, the main reasons I like Gentoo are because it's relatively free from political hassles (you want easy NVidia XOrg drivers? MP3 playback? Win32 Codecs? Go nuts!) and Portage is pretty good enough. Also, KDE is pretty well supported and USE variable settings can catch./configure flags that I might forget if I were to not use ebuilds.
However, installation really is a bear, and AFAIK the ill-publicized alpha GUI installer is still not stable or reliable (don't want a crash while repartitioning a drive that has a WinXP part to wipe my table). Also, Ubuntu beats it on stuff that Works Right Out Of The Box(tm).
Can I have a distro that's as easy to install as Ubuntu, but uses Portage and standard Linux config files and doesn't give me political hassles? That would be nice.
... As the term is generally understood, 'collateral damage' is unintended harm. There is no such thing as unintended harm in a terrorist attack, though the harm inflicted may have a lower strategic value than the terror created by that infliction.
BTW, it's all just Slashdot flamewars and MSM bloviating until the nuke comes. _THEN_ you'll pay the government to know what you _really_ think. Me? I prescribe fire. And lots of it!!
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him.
I wish Lucas would put the camera in a box, and bury the box.
Let someone who knows how to write dialogue and get actors that aren't witches (you know, made out of wood) continue the Universe. Maybe hire those smart folks who wrote and directed Knights of the Old Republic?
Why would I want to watch this when I have all the eps on DVD, so I can have them: * in the creator-intended viewing order * commercial-free * with digital sound (though DD5.1 mix like HBO series' would be nice) * with extra features * with episode commentaries ?
Unless, of course, SciFi is gauging whether or not to bring the series back into production.
There were a lot of people saying it, and they were all very vocal. "We're not buying until we can get a headless iMac with a G4" they said
So Apple made one, and it was called the Cube.
And they overpriced it out the wazoo, compared to, say, a PowerMac. Also, its expandability was pretty weak given its use of nonstandard-sized AGP cards. Would it have been _that_ much uglier to have designed in enough room for a standard short AGP card? It would've only required like 1-2cm internally on each axis, but noooo, Cube fans have to whip out the dremel and zip ties....
No, the Cube, like the Vasa, was a beautiful, expensive failure.
Now.. If Apple were to make a single-processor Merom system with a dual-width PCIe x16 slot and Apple-standard connectors (audio, gig-e, USB/FW, Bluetooth/Wifi) and 4 DIMM slots, and price it within the realm of rationality, that would be an entirely different story.
I wonder how cost-effective at this point it would be to simply store DVDs lock stock and barrel on drive arrays and view them on HTPCs. I want the best possible image and all menus and features of DVD, not just rips.
And I also wonder if the Sony XL1B2 Firewire changer is fully-supported in Linux? Cuz this would be a no-brainer sale for me if I could hook it up to a Myth box...
... How DARE those cowboy Americans thumb their noses at the international community in such a blatant way? They dare question the wisdom of their international comrades? First the Metric system and now THIS?
According to the CFL wikipedia entry, over 5 years the mercury released in burning the coal used to power incandescents is more than double the mercury used in both the manufacturing and powering of CFLs. The break-even point according to the chart is approx. 2 years.
The new Blood Elves are addicted to magic, and their culture revolves around the idea that totaliarianism is A Good ThingTM. For instance, see how did they manage to get Paladins: they captured and enslaved a holy entity that would have given holy powers to them had they simply asked! But no, Blood Elves don't ask, Blood Elves take!
I never understood why there weren't Lawful Evil paladins, given what the history of holy warriors has taught us... Blood Elves being Lawful Evil looks pretty cool to me, and totalitarianism is IMO the ultimate expression of Lawful Evil.
Our test network works, but it's a mess; if they can innovate before my eyes and tell me how to clean things up while being tactful then they're hired.
Fuck tact. If you need tact to deal with a broken design, that's an early warning sign in and of itself. OTOH, you can't complain about something unless you're willing to do the work to fix it.
Meh. If Man weren't meant to shop at supermarkets, he wouldn't have had a big brain. And if Man were not meant to eat meat, it wouldn't be so darned tasty. Who's to say that the world we live in isn't merely a natural result of evolution?
Slashdot Mirror
Overall, a minute percentage of American taxes goes to new weapons.
;)
And quite a bit of that is extremely political and porky.. Rumsfeld killing the Comanche and Crusader was like pulling teeth since the districts that had those factories had their congresslaves push for the programs not for the defense of their country but for the defense of their states' jobs. The USA builds warships largely to keep the ability to build warships intact.
A lot of defense spending is porkbarrel welfare for the home districts, and I'm sure most Generals would tell you that they'd rather take the money out of those programs and put it into recruitment/retention/quality-of-life for their troops, excepting of course for "their" projects
Then again, the nuclear weapon industry to my mind is a bit of "welfare for smart people", and I'm all for enriching the smart and industrious at the expense of the dumb and lazy.
Actually, you're probably thinking of the F-15.. F-14s were carrier-based aircraft for fleet defense and air superiority.. Protecting the cap ships from Exocets or bombers, yes, but unless you deployed your aircraft carriers along known bomber routes, not so much of the strategic bomber defense..
Also, I'm thinking more along the lines of the F-104 Starfighter and F-106 Delta Dart for the role you're talking about, and that role was ceded to antiaircraft missiles in 1960s and 1970s..
Who cares bout pretty, I just want a single client that does AIM, Yahoo and Jabber without paying extra, and something that I can use to make stupid animated YTMNDs.
The brain-damage is that GAIM isn't keeping up with GTK+. Meh, I can survive with Trillian + Google Talk.
GNOME apps (er, rather, GTK+ apps) work pretty well on Windows. Assuming, of course, you don't have a GTK+ version mismatch that requires you to run multiple versions of GTK+.
(I'm lookin' at _you_, GAIM! Play nice with the latest GIMP please!!!!!)
... To be honest, the main reasons I like Gentoo are because it's relatively free from political hassles (you want easy NVidia XOrg drivers? MP3 playback? Win32 Codecs? Go nuts!) and Portage is pretty good enough. Also, KDE is pretty well supported and USE variable settings can catch ./configure flags that I might forget if I were to not use ebuilds.
However, installation really is a bear, and AFAIK the ill-publicized alpha GUI installer is still not stable or reliable (don't want a crash while repartitioning a drive that has a WinXP part to wipe my table). Also, Ubuntu beats it on stuff that Works Right Out Of The Box(tm).
Can I have a distro that's as easy to install as Ubuntu, but uses Portage and standard Linux config files and doesn't give me political hassles? That would be nice.
Wires??
You were LUCKY!
We only had a series of TUBES! And not big nice ones either, just small leaky ones fit for infrequently-utilized urinal duty!
And it was in a LAKE!
No..
It's the xMAC!!!!
... As the term is generally understood, 'collateral damage' is unintended harm. There is no such thing as unintended harm in a terrorist attack, though the harm inflicted may have a lower strategic value than the terror created by that infliction.
BTW, it's all just Slashdot flamewars and MSM bloviating until the nuke comes. _THEN_ you'll pay the government to know what you _really_ think. Me? I prescribe fire. And lots of it!!
.... It's more like Kodak film.
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him.
I wish Lucas would put the camera in a box, and bury the box.
Let someone who knows how to write dialogue and get actors that aren't witches (you know, made out of wood) continue the Universe. Maybe hire those smart folks who wrote and directed Knights of the Old Republic?
... to support the final standard? Don't buy a product that isn't guaranteed to be upgradable to the final standard spec for free.
Sci-Fi Television network, decides to show a science fiction program.
Really? I thought they were the shitty B-movie, ECW wrestling and Law & Order network....
(at least until BSG comes back maybe?)
Why would I want to watch this when I have all the eps on DVD, so I can have them:
* in the creator-intended viewing order
* commercial-free
* with digital sound (though DD5.1 mix like HBO series' would be nice)
* with extra features
* with episode commentaries
?
Unless, of course, SciFi is gauging whether or not to bring the series back into production.
Hmm.
There were a lot of people saying it, and they were all very vocal. "We're not buying until we can get a headless iMac with a G4" they said
So Apple made one, and it was called the Cube.
And they overpriced it out the wazoo, compared to, say, a PowerMac. Also, its expandability was pretty weak given its use of nonstandard-sized AGP cards. Would it have been _that_ much uglier to have designed in enough room for a standard short AGP card? It would've only required like 1-2cm internally on each axis, but noooo, Cube fans have to whip out the dremel and zip ties....
No, the Cube, like the Vasa, was a beautiful, expensive failure.
Now.. If Apple were to make a single-processor Merom system with a dual-width PCIe x16 slot and Apple-standard connectors (audio, gig-e, USB/FW, Bluetooth/Wifi) and 4 DIMM slots, and price it within the realm of rationality, that would be an entirely different story.
I wonder how cost-effective at this point it would be to simply store DVDs lock stock and barrel on drive arrays and view them on HTPCs. I want the best possible image and all menus and features of DVD, not just rips.
And I also wonder if the Sony XL1B2 Firewire changer is fully-supported in Linux? Cuz this would be a no-brainer sale for me if I could hook it up to a Myth box...
... How DARE those cowboy Americans thumb their noses at the international community in such a blatant way? They dare question the wisdom of their international comrades? First the Metric system and now THIS?
Oh wait, I agree with them, I guess it's OK then.
Go Pluto!
According to the CFL wikipedia entry, over 5 years the mercury released in burning the coal used to power incandescents is more than double the mercury used in both the manufacturing and powering of CFLs. The break-even point according to the chart is approx. 2 years.
Of course it's wikipedia so YMMV.
The new Blood Elves are addicted to magic, and their culture revolves around the idea that totaliarianism is A Good ThingTM. For instance, see how did they manage to get Paladins: they captured and enslaved a holy entity that would have given holy powers to them had they simply asked! But no, Blood Elves don't ask, Blood Elves take!
I never understood why there weren't Lawful Evil paladins, given what the history of holy warriors has taught us... Blood Elves being Lawful Evil looks pretty cool to me, and totalitarianism is IMO the ultimate expression of Lawful Evil.
You mean like this?
Go to a computer store and put that into every browser, then lock the workstations... Oh to be 12 years old again!
First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're FIRED.
Our test network works, but it's a mess; if they can innovate before my eyes and tell me how to clean things up while being tactful then they're hired.
Fuck tact. If you need tact to deal with a broken design, that's an early warning sign in and of itself. OTOH, you can't complain about something unless you're willing to do the work to fix it.
Meh. If Man weren't meant to shop at supermarkets, he wouldn't have had a big brain. And if Man were not meant to eat meat, it wouldn't be so darned tasty. Who's to say that the world we live in isn't merely a natural result of evolution?
.. You can afford strange hobbies.
... "You fucked up! You trusted us!"
(and to mix up 2 classic lines....
"Fat, drunk and stupid is no basis for a system of government!"
)
Snakes is best viewed in a theater. Preferably a theater full of drunk and rowdy wise-asses who are gleefully MST3King every line they can.
WHAMMY!