Working in the web division of a semi-fine jewelry retailer.
graphic artist: Do you know computers?
me: I should hope so. Do you have a question?
graphic artist: Yes. It's with Photoshop.
me: Ok, I might be able to help. What's the problem?
graphic artist: Ok, let me zoom in here. You see what I have here? (zoomed in so that the pixels were big blocks on the screen.) Everything is really blocky.
me: Understandable at this view level.
graphic artist: Well, it's not working for me. I need to be able to get a smaller shape in here but it's all too blocky.
me: Let me get this straight. You want to get a shape in the image smaller than a pixel?
graphic artist: *beaming* Exactly! How do I do that?
me: I'll look into it. *slowly edged away*
And she was getting paid three times what I was. Things like this make me want to lock myself in the server room, trip the halon and wait for the blackness to take me.
they were NOT "floating around in his head", the first three SW movies were ripped nearly line for line out of Norse myth (minus the space travel). Luke, Leia, Aniken, the emperor, Tatooine.... he didn't even bother to change their names.
In his original scripts he just bashed a whole bunch of ideas together and kept chugging until he stumbled across a configuration that didn't entirely suck. It was still about as bad as Battlefield Earth -- the other versions were worse! The part with people being able to say "No, George, no" is why the first three movies were good. He got the ball rolling but the input of all the other people involved made sure the ball went where it was supposed to. Lucas without moderation or the influence of others is what we have in the nutrilogy.
The scary thing is that you don't even need overt corruption for this to go horribly wrong. All you need is a little persuasion and access to the right kinds of media. Anything can be spun, in any direction, and if it's up to every voter to be legitimately educated on every issue that comes up in government, GOD HELP US ALL! It's bad enough that the current popular representative form of government (around the world) basically gives a group of guys the keys to the country for 2-4 years at a stretch, now policy will shift daily based on who ran the most emotional commercials or trotted out the most appealing pundits on television.
This is the part that really astounds me. It doesn't matter what the facts are because people don't pay attention. I never understood how the Big Lie worked until I finally saw it in action. Once the disinformation is out there, it expands to fill up all available mindshare. The truth can't get a word in edgewise. Al Gore invented the Internet. Obama is a socialist who wasn't even born in America anyway. Free markets work. There isn't yet a conclusive link between cancer and tobacco.
The other thing that really blows my mind is how pernicious faith is. People will use the words of science to justify their beliefs but many are still fundamentally faith-based -- it's an unreasoning belief in something that cannot be shaken by any volume of competing information. In fact, the maintenance of belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is often seen as virtuous!
Hell, we can take a look at the old divisions in the geek community. Some people swear Microsoft is incapable of doing anything good. I maintain it's certainly possible, it just turns out that they never do. It's not automatically bad because Microsoft did it, it just means that you know there will be real flaws and drawbacks to point out. If it's from Microsoft and it doesn't have flaws, then it's still a good product. It could happen, honest. And the converse of this is assuming open source is automagically better because its open source. Usually open source means there aren't enough resources necessary for thorough documentation and UI polishing. Granted, for-profit software usually has that same drawback! But at least reasonable people can have a reasonable discussion about these things. Once you go faith-based, there's naught to do but plant stakes and grab pitchforks.
What did Enron say about their finances? Perfectly fine, perfectly fine, nothing to see here. What did BP say about their drilling practices? Perfectly fine, perfectly fine, nothing to see here. And what will we say in ten years when GM foods are proven to wreck your DNA and give your kids monkey lung and restless genitalia syndrome? "Who could have possibly foreseen this after we suppressed all the data? It's an act of a cruel and uncaring God, not us."
Rule #1: Never trust the prospectus. And taking a company's word on risk assessment -- a company with a significant interest in the risks being low to non-existent -- because they're going to be lying their fucking asses off.
Rule #2: Did you forget about rule 1? because I see you taking the salesman's word for it! Go back and read rule #1!
Rule #3: Oh, there's an auditing firm involved, a disinterested third party that gave a review. It's a bond rating agency telling you the bonds are good or an engineering company telling you the well design is solid or hey, it's Arthur Anderson! Your new rule is to make sure the third party isn't operating under the same moral hazards as the first, otherwise you're just getting yourself bullshat from both directions.
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
First you copy this quote. Then you paste it into the comment box. Then you post the quote in any vaguely appropriate thread. Then you get an instant +5 karma.
A scientist is willing to believe the evidence even if he finds it distasteful. If the science pointed to black people being genetically different from white people, the scientist would accept the evidence even if he found it unpleasant. He could still choose to advocate humane treatment and civility even with those facts in the record. As it stands, there's no scientific basis for racism since science has clearly shown there's minimal genetic difference between the races and any two members of the same race can often show more dissimilarities than two people from different races. This overturns the erroneous, faith-based approach to scientific racism that was just a fancy way of trying to justify preexisting biases. A racist advocating the line of scientific racism is not doing so because the science convinced him, it's just a high-falutin' excuse.
The majority of global warming deniers already have their minds made up and there is simply no evidence in the world that will ever convince them otherwise. It's like trying to use logic and reason to turn someone against their religion. Oh, sure, you'll get some converts but most people will sooner burn you at the stake than accept your reasoning, especially if you start making too much sense.
This is why you can't really hold a debate on teaching evolution in schools. They are immune to your logic. It is wasted breath. You will never convert them. At beast you can simply try to contain the damage they cause.
I hate physical media. It's a pain in the ass. I'll tolerate getting DVD's from netflix but I'd prefer if everything streamed. I'm damn well never buying another DVD again. Of course, life is made easier by being able to torrent what I can't get through netflix. I'm also very happy reading my books electronically. Sometimes reference hardcopy is nice but for novels and the like, electronic is the way to go. But they dick you too hard through the online stores. And that's the weakness with the games.
As far as games go, they're screwing you six ways from Sunday. You have to buy from the official store. I know on itunes for iphone apps you have to back it up yourself since they won't let you download it again if you lose it. I don't know how Xbox handles that sort of thing. I know people are complaining about trying to migrate downloads from console to console so I guess they're handling it poorly. And then there's the issue on getting discounted used games, trade-ins, borrowing a game from a friend, etc. Can't do any of that with downloads. And the hard drives on the consoles are so limited. 20gb for an Xbox? please. Oh, they came out with a 250gb. Whooptie fucking doo. You run out of space real quick and they sure as hell won't let you hook up an external drive via usb.
So given the current state of the industry, I'm stuck preferring physical game media to downloads, but that's only due to the legal constraints. If not for that, downloads would be the way to go, same as it is with PC.
There is no real good and evil dollar. There is just dollars. In the end the team which has the most of them decides what is good and what is evil for the people who have the least of them.
If I'm a manufacturer of hand tools and someone buys one of my axes and uses it to chop up his family, that's awful but I'm really not at fault here. I can put a sticker on future axes that says "Please don't chop up your family with this tool" but it's not my problem. If I'm a manufacturer of industrial shredders and there's a rich gentleman in Columbia who has one installed on his estate and my technicians keep having to get sent out to service it because there's a lot of meat and gore stuck in the thing, this is the point where I get to question just what the hell I'm supporting here. Whatever that guy's doing on his estate, I'm enabling it. Plausible deniability? Bullshit.
Western companies making a buck off evil? Nothing new.
Infamous Auschwitz Tattoo Began as an IBM Number
Auschwitz Phone Book Shows IBM Hollerith Buro Phone # 4496 In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record. Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special punishment. Finally, he was registered in the Labor Assignment Office and assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673. The five-digit Hollerith number was part of a custom punch card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. The Polish timber merchant's punch card number would follow him from labor assignment to labor assignment as Hollerith systems tracked him and his availability for work, and reported the data to the central inmate file eventually kept at Department DII. Department DII of the SS Economics Administration in Oranienburg oversaw all camp slave labor assignments, utilizing elaborate IBM systems. Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.
BP is now hiring drilling engineers. There's never enough money to do it right the first time but there's always money to try to fix it the second time.
People who cheat have one thing to blame, and to find it they need only look in the mirror.
FaceBook does not cause divorces. Divorce lawyers don't cause divorces.
Cheaters who get caught and don't change their behavior cause divorces.
No, but it makes documentation and substantiation of claims easier. The polaroid camera didn't cause people to have more sex and cheat on their wives but it did provide the temptation to take snapshots. A wife can suspect she smells perfume on your shirt but a polaroid of the other woman in the buff is a smoking gun. You can only imagine the increase in smoking guns once VHS camcorders became affordable. Sexting and digital cams only increases the amount of data to turn up. Before now a suspicious wife might have to hire a PI to get incriminating pics of cheating husbands.
Fuckface Leiberman and his internet kill switch. Government control of citizen access to information. You can bet your bottom yuan that when China starts producing serious IP they'll crack down on p2p. Their weak enforcement of copyright is simply Chinese mercantilism. Why send money overseas to pay for stuff that can be copied for free? Preserve capital at home. Joe Biden would love to have a Great Firewall of America.
Very disgusted with both sides of the issue. If we're not getting screwed by military-industrial complex republicans on one side it's entertainment-industrial complex democrats on the other. I find it encouraging that the one singular point far-left progressives and frothing tea-baggers can agree on is that the politicians and lobbyists trying to kill net neutrality are fucking over the American people. There is agreement on that point at least. Representation at the federal level is limited to the special interests with bucks for lobbying and campaign contributions. Left-wing or right-wing, it doesn't matter which one you are. You don't have money, you can go get fucked. Too big to fail, too little to concerned with.
Negotiating, in secret, a treaty that is likely to result in 'A responsibility' to pass a change in the laws of a country is intrinsically undemocratic and, as such, evil from a point of view of democratic principles. Freedom of speech is meaningless if the issues about which one has cause to speak are shrouded in maximal secrecy.
The democratic process is dead. What options are left to us?
Of course hydroelectric is great for peaking, too - especially if practiced like France and Switzerland. The Swiss buy power from the French (nuclear) during off-peak and use it to pump water into dammed lakes, then generate power through those dams during peak periods and sell it back to the French. The challenege is that there are only so many areas which can be powered this way do to the need for proper topography.
I've got a feeling that we're going to see a lot of energy barter in the future. Equatorial sites have plenty of sunshine. Not saying this is 100% certain but I think it's very conceivable that we see solar harvesting at the equator with power shipped pole-wards by super-conducting transmission lines. Nitrogen is supposed to be rather affordable by cryogenic standards though we might need to see more materials breakthroughs to get the temperature a little higher before this idea becomes fully economical. And methods of storing off-peak power like you mentioned, that's going to be the real key for evening out production spikes. It will take some serious computer control to balance base-load with variable sources like that. Wind and solar guys say that the spikes average out to a steady load over an entire region but there's still the matter of wind and solar having their peak times.
Sitting on a lab bench Came of mad science with good intent. Environmental toxins Clear tissues seared by nasty goo! Twitching under cold lights shivering as endless tests are run. Looking quite obscene If it had a mouth it would probably scream.
High pixel resolutions are not groundbreaking. Apple did not invent any of the technology in the iPhone and does not have a team of PhDs working on designs Apple is great at designing and marketing products that feature the inventions of other people IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. all design new technologies Have a nice day
Apple's an integrator. They assemble cool parts made by others, add some magic sauce, and generally come up with something interesting. Another company working with the same parts might come up with something less compelling. You know, you could compare Apple to a chef. It's not like he's got a proprietary lock on ingredients like meat and vegetables but a good chef can do things with those ingredients that lesser chefs can't touch and people are left guessing as to what he does with the spices to give the food his characteristic zing. You know, the chef comparison really works. Apple is the Soup Nazi. Everyone wants his soup because it's the best on the block but you are in no position to argue with him about anything. You accept what he gives you how he gives it to you with no debate. You complain, "no soup for you!"
The position Apple's in is that it has to maintain standards and be the best out there or else people will stop putting up with Soup Nazi tactics.
Frankly I'm beginning not to care. There's enough Chinese that if they got the guts tomorrow they could wipe out the regime, including the PLA, in about fifteen minutes (there would probably be a few tens of million dead, but Mao killed more than that with his incredibly retarded economic policies during the 1950s). People too cowardly to tear every Communist Party member's head off deserve the kind of rule the Party gives them.
There's three explanations.
1. They're too scared to fight the system. That's your explanation. 2. They're too lazy to fight the system. 3. They're happy with the system. This is what I've been led to believe.
There's a lot of "Yay, China!" sentiment amongst the common people over there. Sure, you'll have the occasional dissident but for the most part they're drinking the kool-aid and enjoying the powdered lead, just like we do here in the States.
This is very unfortunate because the game is beautiful, but it's being ruined by a federation, the FIFA, stuck in a 1920 mentality and of course by the hordes of players who abuse the system to cheat.
A beautiful, compelling rant. Thank you. This makes me feel all the more happy for not getting into footie. I feel the same way when people post their complaints about the shortcomings of MMO's. "Thank Cthulhu I'm not involved in that sort of thing."
I feel the same way when people talk about how screwed up sports are here in the states. My dad has a whole rant about what NASCAR has done to make racing as boring as baseball. I have cycling friends who can go on about how screwed up that sport is, too. I've got enough to worry about between software and scifi. I don't think I could handle getting geek-raged over these other things!
You're not going to add a damn thing to the original. Why not tell a whole new story and add something to the culture?
And what's with all the love for Sunshine? The premise sounded like another typical, tedious, scientifically illiterate Hollywood movie all the way down to the secret killer, crew getting picked off one by one, and impossibly large plot holes. How was it not awful?
We're dealing with big oil. Conflicts of interest over oil companies are something we'd be idiots not to take seriously. Remember Joe Barton, on the House Energy and Commerce Committee? Actually apologized to BP a few days ago for them having to pay for the damage they caused? Should we assume that guy had public interest at heart?
More to the point, he was not going rogue here, he was repeating the point of view shared by all the other Republicans in his think tank. His gaffe was simply saying this out loud. He repeated a talking point in front of the wrong crowd, like a comedian accidentally bringing out his blue material on Carson.
Slashdot Mirror
Working in the web division of a semi-fine jewelry retailer.
graphic artist: Do you know computers?
me: I should hope so. Do you have a question?
graphic artist: Yes. It's with Photoshop.
me: Ok, I might be able to help. What's the problem?
graphic artist: Ok, let me zoom in here. You see what I have here? (zoomed in so that the pixels were big blocks on the screen.) Everything is really blocky.
me: Understandable at this view level.
graphic artist: Well, it's not working for me. I need to be able to get a smaller shape in here but it's all too blocky.
me: Let me get this straight. You want to get a shape in the image smaller than a pixel?
graphic artist: *beaming* Exactly! How do I do that?
me: I'll look into it. *slowly edged away*
And she was getting paid three times what I was. Things like this make me want to lock myself in the server room, trip the halon and wait for the blackness to take me.
they were NOT "floating around in his head", the first three SW movies were ripped nearly line for line out of Norse myth (minus the space travel). Luke, Leia, Aniken, the emperor, Tatooine.... he didn't even bother to change their names.
In his original scripts he just bashed a whole bunch of ideas together and kept chugging until he stumbled across a configuration that didn't entirely suck. It was still about as bad as Battlefield Earth -- the other versions were worse! The part with people being able to say "No, George, no" is why the first three movies were good. He got the ball rolling but the input of all the other people involved made sure the ball went where it was supposed to. Lucas without moderation or the influence of others is what we have in the nutrilogy.
This is funny and to the point - why is this a troll?
We train young men to drop fire on people from the sky but forbid them to write the word "fuck" on their airplanes because it is obscene...
The scary thing is that you don't even need overt corruption for this to go horribly wrong. All you need is a little persuasion and access to the right kinds of media. Anything can be spun, in any direction, and if it's up to every voter to be legitimately educated on every issue that comes up in government, GOD HELP US ALL! It's bad enough that the current popular representative form of government (around the world) basically gives a group of guys the keys to the country for 2-4 years at a stretch, now policy will shift daily based on who ran the most emotional commercials or trotted out the most appealing pundits on television.
This is the part that really astounds me. It doesn't matter what the facts are because people don't pay attention. I never understood how the Big Lie worked until I finally saw it in action. Once the disinformation is out there, it expands to fill up all available mindshare. The truth can't get a word in edgewise. Al Gore invented the Internet. Obama is a socialist who wasn't even born in America anyway. Free markets work. There isn't yet a conclusive link between cancer and tobacco.
The other thing that really blows my mind is how pernicious faith is. People will use the words of science to justify their beliefs but many are still fundamentally faith-based -- it's an unreasoning belief in something that cannot be shaken by any volume of competing information. In fact, the maintenance of belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is often seen as virtuous!
Hell, we can take a look at the old divisions in the geek community. Some people swear Microsoft is incapable of doing anything good. I maintain it's certainly possible, it just turns out that they never do. It's not automatically bad because Microsoft did it, it just means that you know there will be real flaws and drawbacks to point out. If it's from Microsoft and it doesn't have flaws, then it's still a good product. It could happen, honest. And the converse of this is assuming open source is automagically better because its open source. Usually open source means there aren't enough resources necessary for thorough documentation and UI polishing. Granted, for-profit software usually has that same drawback! But at least reasonable people can have a reasonable discussion about these things. Once you go faith-based, there's naught to do but plant stakes and grab pitchforks.
What did Enron say about their finances? Perfectly fine, perfectly fine, nothing to see here. What did BP say about their drilling practices? Perfectly fine, perfectly fine, nothing to see here. And what will we say in ten years when GM foods are proven to wreck your DNA and give your kids monkey lung and restless genitalia syndrome? "Who could have possibly foreseen this after we suppressed all the data? It's an act of a cruel and uncaring God, not us."
Rule #1: Never trust the prospectus. And taking a company's word on risk assessment -- a company with a significant interest in the risks being low to non-existent -- because they're going to be lying their fucking asses off.
Rule #2: Did you forget about rule 1? because I see you taking the salesman's word for it! Go back and read rule #1!
Rule #3: Oh, there's an auditing firm involved, a disinterested third party that gave a review. It's a bond rating agency telling you the bonds are good or an engineering company telling you the well design is solid or hey, it's Arthur Anderson! Your new rule is to make sure the third party isn't operating under the same moral hazards as the first, otherwise you're just getting yourself bullshat from both directions.
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
First you copy this quote.
Then you paste it into the comment box.
Then you post the quote in any vaguely appropriate thread.
Then you get an instant +5 karma.
A scientist is willing to believe the evidence even if he finds it distasteful. If the science pointed to black people being genetically different from white people, the scientist would accept the evidence even if he found it unpleasant. He could still choose to advocate humane treatment and civility even with those facts in the record. As it stands, there's no scientific basis for racism since science has clearly shown there's minimal genetic difference between the races and any two members of the same race can often show more dissimilarities than two people from different races. This overturns the erroneous, faith-based approach to scientific racism that was just a fancy way of trying to justify preexisting biases. A racist advocating the line of scientific racism is not doing so because the science convinced him, it's just a high-falutin' excuse.
The majority of global warming deniers already have their minds made up and there is simply no evidence in the world that will ever convince them otherwise. It's like trying to use logic and reason to turn someone against their religion. Oh, sure, you'll get some converts but most people will sooner burn you at the stake than accept your reasoning, especially if you start making too much sense.
This is why you can't really hold a debate on teaching evolution in schools. They are immune to your logic. It is wasted breath. You will never convert them. At beast you can simply try to contain the damage they cause.
I hate physical media. It's a pain in the ass. I'll tolerate getting DVD's from netflix but I'd prefer if everything streamed. I'm damn well never buying another DVD again. Of course, life is made easier by being able to torrent what I can't get through netflix. I'm also very happy reading my books electronically. Sometimes reference hardcopy is nice but for novels and the like, electronic is the way to go. But they dick you too hard through the online stores. And that's the weakness with the games.
As far as games go, they're screwing you six ways from Sunday. You have to buy from the official store. I know on itunes for iphone apps you have to back it up yourself since they won't let you download it again if you lose it. I don't know how Xbox handles that sort of thing. I know people are complaining about trying to migrate downloads from console to console so I guess they're handling it poorly. And then there's the issue on getting discounted used games, trade-ins, borrowing a game from a friend, etc. Can't do any of that with downloads. And the hard drives on the consoles are so limited. 20gb for an Xbox? please. Oh, they came out with a 250gb. Whooptie fucking doo. You run out of space real quick and they sure as hell won't let you hook up an external drive via usb.
So given the current state of the industry, I'm stuck preferring physical game media to downloads, but that's only due to the legal constraints. If not for that, downloads would be the way to go, same as it is with PC.
There is no real good and evil dollar. There is just dollars. In the end the team which has the most of them decides what is good and what is evil for the people who have the least of them.
If I'm a manufacturer of hand tools and someone buys one of my axes and uses it to chop up his family, that's awful but I'm really not at fault here. I can put a sticker on future axes that says "Please don't chop up your family with this tool" but it's not my problem. If I'm a manufacturer of industrial shredders and there's a rich gentleman in Columbia who has one installed on his estate and my technicians keep having to get sent out to service it because there's a lot of meat and gore stuck in the thing, this is the point where I get to question just what the hell I'm supporting here. Whatever that guy's doing on his estate, I'm enabling it. Plausible deniability? Bullshit.
Western companies making a buck off evil? Nothing new.
Infamous Auschwitz Tattoo Began as an IBM Number
Auschwitz Phone Book Shows IBM Hollerith Buro Phone # 4496
In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record. Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special punishment. Finally, he was registered in the Labor Assignment Office and assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673.
The five-digit Hollerith number was part of a custom punch card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz.
The Polish timber merchant's punch card number would follow him from labor assignment to labor assignment as Hollerith systems tracked him and his availability for work, and reported the data to the central inmate file eventually kept at Department DII. Department DII of the SS Economics Administration in Oranienburg oversaw all camp slave labor assignments, utilizing elaborate IBM systems.
Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=663
BP is now hiring drilling engineers. There's never enough money to do it right the first time but there's always money to try to fix it the second time.
People who cheat have one thing to blame, and to find it they need only look in the mirror.
FaceBook does not cause divorces. Divorce lawyers don't cause divorces.
Cheaters who get caught and don't change their behavior cause divorces.
No, but it makes documentation and substantiation of claims easier. The polaroid camera didn't cause people to have more sex and cheat on their wives but it did provide the temptation to take snapshots. A wife can suspect she smells perfume on your shirt but a polaroid of the other woman in the buff is a smoking gun. You can only imagine the increase in smoking guns once VHS camcorders became affordable. Sexting and digital cams only increases the amount of data to turn up. Before now a suspicious wife might have to hire a PI to get incriminating pics of cheating husbands.
Fuckface Leiberman and his internet kill switch. Government control of citizen access to information. You can bet your bottom yuan that when China starts producing serious IP they'll crack down on p2p. Their weak enforcement of copyright is simply Chinese mercantilism. Why send money overseas to pay for stuff that can be copied for free? Preserve capital at home. Joe Biden would love to have a Great Firewall of America.
Very disgusted with both sides of the issue. If we're not getting screwed by military-industrial complex republicans on one side it's entertainment-industrial complex democrats on the other. I find it encouraging that the one singular point far-left progressives and frothing tea-baggers can agree on is that the politicians and lobbyists trying to kill net neutrality are fucking over the American people. There is agreement on that point at least. Representation at the federal level is limited to the special interests with bucks for lobbying and campaign contributions. Left-wing or right-wing, it doesn't matter which one you are. You don't have money, you can go get fucked. Too big to fail, too little to concerned with.
Negotiating, in secret, a treaty that is likely to result in 'A responsibility' to pass a change in the laws of a country is intrinsically undemocratic and, as such, evil from a point of view of democratic principles.
Freedom of speech is meaningless if the issues about which one has cause to speak are shrouded in maximal secrecy.
The democratic process is dead. What options are left to us?
Default assumption is suicide. Secondary assumption is that this is an elaborate prank. Time will tell.
Of course hydroelectric is great for peaking, too - especially if practiced like France and Switzerland. The Swiss buy power from the French (nuclear) during off-peak and use it to pump water into dammed lakes, then generate power through those dams during peak periods and sell it back to the French. The challenege is that there are only so many areas which can be powered this way do to the need for proper topography.
I've got a feeling that we're going to see a lot of energy barter in the future. Equatorial sites have plenty of sunshine. Not saying this is 100% certain but I think it's very conceivable that we see solar harvesting at the equator with power shipped pole-wards by super-conducting transmission lines. Nitrogen is supposed to be rather affordable by cryogenic standards though we might need to see more materials breakthroughs to get the temperature a little higher before this idea becomes fully economical. And methods of storing off-peak power like you mentioned, that's going to be the real key for evening out production spikes. It will take some serious computer control to balance base-load with variable sources like that. Wind and solar guys say that the spikes average out to a steady load over an entire region but there's still the matter of wind and solar having their peak times.
Sitting on a lab bench
Came of mad science with good intent.
Environmental toxins
Clear tissues seared by nasty goo!
Twitching under cold lights
shivering as endless tests are run.
Looking quite obscene
If it had a mouth it would probably scream.
Microlung!
The mice arranged to a bell included in the specification. Cunning little buggers.
High pixel resolutions are not groundbreaking.
Apple did not invent any of the technology in the iPhone and does not have a team of PhDs working on designs
Apple is great at designing and marketing products that feature the inventions of other people
IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. all design new technologies
Have a nice day
Apple's an integrator. They assemble cool parts made by others, add some magic sauce, and generally come up with something interesting. Another company working with the same parts might come up with something less compelling. You know, you could compare Apple to a chef. It's not like he's got a proprietary lock on ingredients like meat and vegetables but a good chef can do things with those ingredients that lesser chefs can't touch and people are left guessing as to what he does with the spices to give the food his characteristic zing. You know, the chef comparison really works. Apple is the Soup Nazi. Everyone wants his soup because it's the best on the block but you are in no position to argue with him about anything. You accept what he gives you how he gives it to you with no debate. You complain, "no soup for you!"
The position Apple's in is that it has to maintain standards and be the best out there or else people will stop putting up with Soup Nazi tactics.
Do you think Dell for example has a team of physics PHDs figuring out these technologies and pushing their vendors to tool up for them?
No, but their handheld computers still have network connectivity when you're holding them in your hand.
(I'm so getting downmodded for this)
Frankly I'm beginning not to care. There's enough Chinese that if they got the guts tomorrow they could wipe out the regime, including the PLA, in about fifteen minutes (there would probably be a few tens of million dead, but Mao killed more than that with his incredibly retarded economic policies during the 1950s). People too cowardly to tear every Communist Party member's head off deserve the kind of rule the Party gives them.
There's three explanations.
1. They're too scared to fight the system. That's your explanation.
2. They're too lazy to fight the system.
3. They're happy with the system. This is what I've been led to believe.
There's a lot of "Yay, China!" sentiment amongst the common people over there. Sure, you'll have the occasional dissident but for the most part they're drinking the kool-aid and enjoying the powdered lead, just like we do here in the States.
This is very unfortunate because the game is beautiful, but it's being ruined by a federation, the FIFA, stuck in a 1920 mentality and of course by the hordes of players who abuse the system to cheat.
A beautiful, compelling rant. Thank you. This makes me feel all the more happy for not getting into footie. I feel the same way when people post their complaints about the shortcomings of MMO's. "Thank Cthulhu I'm not involved in that sort of thing."
I feel the same way when people talk about how screwed up sports are here in the states. My dad has a whole rant about what NASCAR has done to make racing as boring as baseball. I have cycling friends who can go on about how screwed up that sport is, too. I've got enough to worry about between software and scifi. I don't think I could handle getting geek-raged over these other things!
You're not going to add a damn thing to the original. Why not tell a whole new story and add something to the culture?
And what's with all the love for Sunshine? The premise sounded like another typical, tedious, scientifically illiterate Hollywood movie all the way down to the secret killer, crew getting picked off one by one, and impossibly large plot holes. How was it not awful?
No Milton tag?
Incidentally, CSS on Idle broken for 522 days and counting.
We're dealing with big oil. Conflicts of interest over oil companies are something we'd be idiots not to take seriously. Remember Joe Barton, on the House Energy and Commerce Committee? Actually apologized to BP a few days ago for them having to pay for the damage they caused? Should we assume that guy had public interest at heart?
More to the point, he was not going rogue here, he was repeating the point of view shared by all the other Republicans in his think tank. His gaffe was simply saying this out loud. He repeated a talking point in front of the wrong crowd, like a comedian accidentally bringing out his blue material on Carson.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/061910dntexbartonescrow.1fc6cdc.html