1. Use DNA-based fiber-optics in the major backbones of the internet 2. Spread rumor that the DNA comes from fetal stem cells from forcibly aborted babies, white christian babies! 3. Watch right-wingers shut down their sites and flee the internet so they won't be taking part in the satanic evil of telecommunications. 4. Remind them that their phone calls go over that same satanic fiber so they can't use phones, either. 5. Gin up a new rumor that the power lines are being replaced by baby DNA fiber-optics, too, mail that to them in a chain letter. 6. Watch them become the new Amish, shunning baby DNA-based demon technology, spinning their hate into hand-crafted quilts sold by the roadside. 7. ??? Maybe if we're still feeling malicious, convince them buttons use baby DNA, too. 8. Profit!
"Which one of your former classmates is doing hardcore pr0n now? Find out!"
Reminds me of that 4chan motivational poster, I think they called it "expectations," showing the yearbook photo of a girl and her "what I want to be when I grow up" quote with a close-up of her a few years later taking a facial on some gonzo pr0n shoot. Funny in a "yikes, not really" sort of way.
What I wonder is just how much of the "junk DNA" (stuff we simply don't understand) is nature's toolkit of pre-evolved solutions that can be brought back out for new critters? We've seen examples of convergent evolution, say the Triceratops and rhino. Both last had a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago, mammals split off from lizardy creatures a long, long time ago. But we can see that for the need of large plains-dwelling herbivores who need to protect themselves from predators, the body structure is remarkably similar. But this is all supposed to be convergent, nothing really shared except for the common genetic material millions of years back.
But when we take a look at recent mammalian mega-fauna, we see woolly rhinos as well as woolly mammoths. Were those woolly coats independently evolved or were they part of the same genetic grab-bag? Mammals with coats that change during the seasons, independent or grab-bag? What evolutionary pressures could cause our modern elephants to sprout mammoth-style coats?
I'm no expert but I'm guessing we'll eventually find more proof to support punctuated equilibrium and all that's remaining is details on how the genetics of it work out.
It's almost to be expected. After the success of "Tubthumping", they were desperate for another avenue. Sadly, they had nowhere to go but down.
I get slapped with fines, but I get up again, they're never gonna bust my trust I get slapped with fines, but I get up again, they're never gonna bust my trust
colluding your rights away colluding your rights away
Isn't any drug dangerous in doses past the prescribed rate? Typically they say that overdosing on something will kill you, but the truth is that it will lead to something that will eventually kill you.
Even water is dangerous in large enough quantities. I'm not just talking about drowning, you can drink yourself to death bolting too much water in too short of time, messes with your electrolytes (what plants crave) and you die.
You do know the average age of people in the US military, right?
Our aircraft carriers and subs are all run by kids.
The ratings and junior officers may all look like kids but the senior officers, certainly the captain and CAG, they're going to be older.
And as far as setting goes, it all depends on the type of setting they're trying to convey. If the Enterprise is a brand new ship going out into the unknown and is a seriously important mission, they're going to ask for a captain whose been around the block. If they're in the middle of a war and are running short on experienced officers and the enterprise is portrayed as the equivalent of a destroyer, it's believable to have a very junior-grade officer as skipper. And if the Enterprise is a cushy flagship in peacetime, it would be just as believable to have a politically-connected captain in charge, a good old boy who might know very little about spacefaring and is relying heavily on his XO to keep the ship from running into the first asteroid they come across.
I liked how the original trailer looked like a Rammstein video, iron workers constructing the ship by hand on a planetbound spacedock.
Strangely enough, our modern warships are essentially built by hand because the volumes aren't large enough to warrant assembly lines with robots. The ships are built in large assemblies that are joined together, huge machines moving the parts but humans inspecting every piece as they go together. But trying to model the construction of a futuristic starship after a modern-day navy vessel is about as silly as modeling space combat tactics after WWII....ok, yeah, they do it but it's still silly! Though I did dearly love the depth-charging scene from the Wing Commander movie, especially the part about the crew having to remain silent so the Kilrathi couldn't hear them, presumably on space sonar.:)
But aside from the issue of how the pieces would be put together on a starship, there's the question of where it would be built. Trek has always had a thing for spacedocks in space. I remember asking my dad questions when we were watching Trek and was amazed when he told me the ship could never land. It blew my mind to think of a ship built in space, always in space, never landing.
Anyway, I wonder just how awful this movie will end up being. Is it considered an even or odd-numbered film?
Are they saying that aspirin is so simple and helpful that Big Pharma never would have allowed it on the market or would have it tied up in all sorts of patents? But the comparison makes it sound like aspirin is harmful, seeing as Google is portrayed as more powerful than we would have let happen if we knew the future in advance.
And who would have stopped Google from doing what they did? That's like saying "If people knew what Microsoft would become, they would have stopped it." Huh? If people knew who John Wayne Gacy would become they would have stopped him except they couldn't because they didn't know.
There was a group of dreamers a while back with an idea they called the Millennium Project. One of their ideas for solving the population crunch was creating artificial islands to populate the empty reaches of the equatorial waters. I don't remember all of the details of their plan, it's been years, but the islands themselves would be created by pulling calcium out of sea water, I think using some form of electrolysis. You lay metal grids in the water, run a current, and the calcium grows on the grid like sugar on a string with rock candy.
The islands themselves would be like giant dinner plates floating on the water, but I assume with enclosed flotation chambers so a good sloshing wouldn't sink them as it does with the dinner plate. The goal here would be extremely green and low-impact living so the islands would generate their own power via green and renewable methods, crops would be grown on the upper surface, and waste would be recycled. The experience here would be less like a cruise ship and more like low-impact commune living.
The habitat itself would have a submerged lip around the edge that would be perfect for the formation of corals and home for shallow water fish. Even if the island were moored in deep water, it would be a a fine habitat, much like a volcanic island can rise from the abyssal plane and suddenly there's a nice shallow water habitat for fish.
The really cool part is that these islands could theoretically be free-floating, drifting with the currents and floating around the world, using powered propulsion only when pushed too close to obstructions.
These islands represent a fairly interesting idea in population management. Right now, we have too damn many people on the planet. Now I know we're not going to get people to reduce population the way we're living now, there'd be blood in the streets if anyone forced them to. And not doing anything will just lead to ecological collapse, mass starvation, wars, and the population will be whittled down through attrition. But if we could get people a safe, clean, sustainable standard of living away from the cycle of poverty, the west has already shown that birthrates will naturally stabilize and begin to decline. The problem manages itself without coercion.
I don't know how likely it would be but I think it would be extremely cool if the islanders could just build their own replacements and say "fuck global warming, we're ready for it." Maybe the Dutch can join them, not sure how much longer their dikes can hold out.
Not all movies lent themselves well to being made fun of. There's a special kind of awful that lets you make fun of it thoroughly from beginning to end.
Some of my favorites through and through: 1. Attack of the the Eye Creatures 2. Pod People 3. Manos, Hands of Fate (some say it was too bad to be funny, I say it was just bad enough) 4. Warrior of the Lost World (Megaweapon!) 5. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (probably my all-time favorite) 6. Creepy Mexican Santa Movie 7. Beginning of the End (the one with the giant grasshoppers) 8. Alien from LA (Kathy Ireland's ditziest role ever)
What are your personal favs?
Personal strangest MST3K moment: seeing the A-ha "Take On Me" video and realizing that the racers attacking the singers were side-hacking. I had no idea that was a real sport, I thought people just made it up.
Check with your local Hospital geek. Doctors, nurses, social workers, pretty much everyone in a hospital still has one. They are starting to introduce a "cellular phone" into hospitals known by the local docs as a "banana phone"
GAH! Now I've got it stuck in my head again. Thanks a fucking lot, you!
The US (USAF?) does need a major overhaul of its nuclear handling policies; this crap would've never flown under SAC. You can pin that one on Clinton,
Blow me. Bush has had eight fucking years to fix any "problems" left over from the Clinton years. I know you're chronologically challenged casting the blame here but seriously, eight fucking years. What about the nukes the Air Force "lost" last year? The ones where they didn't even know the weapons were uploaded onto a B-52 and flown across the country? That Clinton's fault, too? And Bush being such an incompetent fuckwit, can we blame Clinton's penis on that?
You can't be rich and be a Christian. You can't be a solder or use violence and be a Christian. You actually need to spend time in prayer and engage in charity.
I'm not a Christian but I wouldn't want to be solder, either.:)
There's truth to both sides of the argument and there are several arguments.
1. Not everyone should go to college. Not every job really needs a four year degree. There are plenty of jobs that could be sufficiently handled by people with high school diplomas and OJT. But no, everyone has to have a degree, so people go to school and get one and they end up working places where they had to leave the degree off their application so they wouldn't price themselves out of a job. We have more degree-holders than jobs to employ them right now. So many of the honest blue collar jobs have gone overseas that it seems the only options are trying for an office job or becoming a fry cook, there's no middle-ground.
2. Related to this, we have degree/certification erosion. We see this with technical certs where everyone laughs at paper MCSE's who have the framed cert on the wall but don't know shit. And truthfully, do you really need an MCSE to work your helpdesk? But everyone assumes they have to go to college and all the employers keep asking for the degrees when not all of the jobs really require that kind of background.
3. The whole college game is fucked from the start. Yes, some people make excellent contacts for networking, grow as people, have excellent instructors and really get a lot out of their college buck. Some do the Bush route and burn a lot of brain cells with hangovers, and have nothing more than a degree in a topic they don't truly understand to show for the experience. I didn't have money for a fancy four-year school so I went to the local uni. Total crock of shit that was, waste of time. I don't think I had a bad attitude going in, it's just that the program was so divorced from anything practical that there wasn't anything to learn. I have a bachelor's in business admin. Some people will say "oh, it's not until grad school that the learning really starts." You know what? Grad students I talk to hear the same thing about the PhD program, that's where it really kicks in. Bull. I don't knock the idea of education, I don't knock the idea of universities, I'm actually quite in love with the theory of it all. It's just that the practice of it really sucks.
I think if you really look at the heart of the matter, it's difficult for people to find employment prospects that really turn them on in this society. People will go to college hoping to find something interesting, meander about, come out with a degree but still not have any focus. Then they settle for a job to get some cash coming in, are unhappy with it, and drift and float through their careers never really experiencing anything that makes them feel truly alive. And that goes right back to the point of "if you don't know what you want to do, how are you ever going to make a go of doing it?" Too many people go to college because its expected of them, not because they're excited by it.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Use DNA-based fiber-optics in the major backbones of the internet
2. Spread rumor that the DNA comes from fetal stem cells from forcibly aborted babies, white christian babies!
3. Watch right-wingers shut down their sites and flee the internet so they won't be taking part in the satanic evil of telecommunications.
4. Remind them that their phone calls go over that same satanic fiber so they can't use phones, either.
5. Gin up a new rumor that the power lines are being replaced by baby DNA fiber-optics, too, mail that to them in a chain letter.
6. Watch them become the new Amish, shunning baby DNA-based demon technology, spinning their hate into hand-crafted quilts sold by the roadside.
7. ??? Maybe if we're still feeling malicious, convince them buttons use baby DNA, too.
8. Profit!
Downmod me all you want fuckers, you know she's gonna do it!
"Which one of your former classmates is doing hardcore pr0n now? Find out!"
Reminds me of that 4chan motivational poster, I think they called it "expectations," showing the yearbook photo of a girl and her "what I want to be when I grow up" quote with a close-up of her a few years later taking a facial on some gonzo pr0n shoot. Funny in a "yikes, not really" sort of way.
What I wonder is just how much of the "junk DNA" (stuff we simply don't understand) is nature's toolkit of pre-evolved solutions that can be brought back out for new critters? We've seen examples of convergent evolution, say the Triceratops and rhino. Both last had a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago, mammals split off from lizardy creatures a long, long time ago. But we can see that for the need of large plains-dwelling herbivores who need to protect themselves from predators, the body structure is remarkably similar. But this is all supposed to be convergent, nothing really shared except for the common genetic material millions of years back.
But when we take a look at recent mammalian mega-fauna, we see woolly rhinos as well as woolly mammoths. Were those woolly coats independently evolved or were they part of the same genetic grab-bag? Mammals with coats that change during the seasons, independent or grab-bag? What evolutionary pressures could cause our modern elephants to sprout mammoth-style coats?
I'm no expert but I'm guessing we'll eventually find more proof to support punctuated equilibrium and all that's remaining is details on how the genetics of it work out.
It's almost to be expected. After the success of "Tubthumping", they were desperate for another avenue. Sadly, they had nowhere to go but down.
I get slapped with fines, but I get up again, they're never gonna bust my trust
I get slapped with fines, but I get up again, they're never gonna bust my trust
colluding your rights away
colluding your rights away
I cannot wait to listen to the first "Bangalore, we have a problem" support call...
Have you tried rebooting your spacecraft, sir?
Isn't any drug dangerous in doses past the prescribed rate? Typically they say that overdosing on something will kill you, but the truth is that it will lead to something that will eventually kill you.
Even water is dangerous in large enough quantities. I'm not just talking about drowning, you can drink yourself to death bolting too much water in too short of time, messes with your electrolytes (what plants crave) and you die.
You do know the average age of people in the US military, right?
Our aircraft carriers and subs are all run by kids.
The ratings and junior officers may all look like kids but the senior officers, certainly the captain and CAG, they're going to be older.
And as far as setting goes, it all depends on the type of setting they're trying to convey. If the Enterprise is a brand new ship going out into the unknown and is a seriously important mission, they're going to ask for a captain whose been around the block. If they're in the middle of a war and are running short on experienced officers and the enterprise is portrayed as the equivalent of a destroyer, it's believable to have a very junior-grade officer as skipper. And if the Enterprise is a cushy flagship in peacetime, it would be just as believable to have a politically-connected captain in charge, a good old boy who might know very little about spacefaring and is relying heavily on his XO to keep the ship from running into the first asteroid they come across.
I liked how the original trailer looked like a Rammstein video, iron workers constructing the ship by hand on a planetbound spacedock.
Strangely enough, our modern warships are essentially built by hand because the volumes aren't large enough to warrant assembly lines with robots. The ships are built in large assemblies that are joined together, huge machines moving the parts but humans inspecting every piece as they go together. But trying to model the construction of a futuristic starship after a modern-day navy vessel is about as silly as modeling space combat tactics after WWII....ok, yeah, they do it but it's still silly! Though I did dearly love the depth-charging scene from the Wing Commander movie, especially the part about the crew having to remain silent so the Kilrathi couldn't hear them, presumably on space sonar. :)
But aside from the issue of how the pieces would be put together on a starship, there's the question of where it would be built. Trek has always had a thing for spacedocks in space. I remember asking my dad questions when we were watching Trek and was amazed when he told me the ship could never land. It blew my mind to think of a ship built in space, always in space, never landing.
Anyway, I wonder just how awful this movie will end up being. Is it considered an even or odd-numbered film?
Are they saying that aspirin is so simple and helpful that Big Pharma never would have allowed it on the market or would have it tied up in all sorts of patents? But the comparison makes it sound like aspirin is harmful, seeing as Google is portrayed as more powerful than we would have let happen if we knew the future in advance.
And who would have stopped Google from doing what they did? That's like saying "If people knew what Microsoft would become, they would have stopped it." Huh? If people knew who John Wayne Gacy would become they would have stopped him except they couldn't because they didn't know.
There was a group of dreamers a while back with an idea they called the Millennium Project. One of their ideas for solving the population crunch was creating artificial islands to populate the empty reaches of the equatorial waters. I don't remember all of the details of their plan, it's been years, but the islands themselves would be created by pulling calcium out of sea water, I think using some form of electrolysis. You lay metal grids in the water, run a current, and the calcium grows on the grid like sugar on a string with rock candy.
The islands themselves would be like giant dinner plates floating on the water, but I assume with enclosed flotation chambers so a good sloshing wouldn't sink them as it does with the dinner plate. The goal here would be extremely green and low-impact living so the islands would generate their own power via green and renewable methods, crops would be grown on the upper surface, and waste would be recycled. The experience here would be less like a cruise ship and more like low-impact commune living.
The habitat itself would have a submerged lip around the edge that would be perfect for the formation of corals and home for shallow water fish. Even if the island were moored in deep water, it would be a a fine habitat, much like a volcanic island can rise from the abyssal plane and suddenly there's a nice shallow water habitat for fish.
The really cool part is that these islands could theoretically be free-floating, drifting with the currents and floating around the world, using powered propulsion only when pushed too close to obstructions.
These islands represent a fairly interesting idea in population management. Right now, we have too damn many people on the planet. Now I know we're not going to get people to reduce population the way we're living now, there'd be blood in the streets if anyone forced them to. And not doing anything will just lead to ecological collapse, mass starvation, wars, and the population will be whittled down through attrition. But if we could get people a safe, clean, sustainable standard of living away from the cycle of poverty, the west has already shown that birthrates will naturally stabilize and begin to decline. The problem manages itself without coercion.
I don't know how likely it would be but I think it would be extremely cool if the islanders could just build their own replacements and say "fuck global warming, we're ready for it." Maybe the Dutch can join them, not sure how much longer their dikes can hold out.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to see...
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
Hello Partner,
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
Snake! Snake!
What, why's everybody staring? Did I just fuck up another meme?
Chief?
MACLEOD!!
Not all movies lent themselves well to being made fun of. There's a special kind of awful that lets you make fun of it thoroughly from beginning to end.
Some of my favorites through and through:
1. Attack of the the Eye Creatures
2. Pod People
3. Manos, Hands of Fate (some say it was too bad to be funny, I say it was just bad enough)
4. Warrior of the Lost World (Megaweapon!)
5. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (probably my all-time favorite)
6. Creepy Mexican Santa Movie
7. Beginning of the End (the one with the giant grasshoppers)
8. Alien from LA (Kathy Ireland's ditziest role ever)
What are your personal favs?
Personal strangest MST3K moment: seeing the A-ha "Take On Me" video and realizing that the racers attacking the singers were side-hacking. I had no idea that was a real sport, I thought people just made it up.
"Attack of The Eye Creatures" and the TV premiere of the ninja show "The Master".
You mean Attack of the the Eye Creatures. They had a typo in the title of the film. "They just didn't care."
Check with your local Hospital geek. Doctors, nurses, social workers, pretty much everyone in a hospital still has one. They are starting to introduce a "cellular phone" into hospitals known by the local docs as a "banana phone"
GAH! Now I've got it stuck in my head again. Thanks a fucking lot, you!
He wants his manifesto back.
I don't think he'd use a pager, tended to prefer the mail. My advise, stamp it "return to sender."
The US (USAF?) does need a major overhaul of its nuclear handling policies; this crap would've never flown under SAC. You can pin that one on Clinton,
Blow me. Bush has had eight fucking years to fix any "problems" left over from the Clinton years. I know you're chronologically challenged casting the blame here but seriously, eight fucking years. What about the nukes the Air Force "lost" last year? The ones where they didn't even know the weapons were uploaded onto a B-52 and flown across the country? That Clinton's fault, too? And Bush being such an incompetent fuckwit, can we blame Clinton's penis on that?
Nothing complicated here. They move fast because they're hungry.
And people taste like snausages.
Better that than a German tosser named Wankshaft.
I've seen sexy vamps in the movies but never sexy zombies. Who'd want to have sex with zombies? Well, maybe some might like these.
If Dems are vamps and Republicans are zombies, I'll stick with the vamps.
You can't be rich and be a Christian. You can't be a solder or use violence and be a Christian. You actually need to spend time in prayer and engage in charity.
I'm not a Christian but I wouldn't want to be solder, either. :)
There's truth to both sides of the argument and there are several arguments.
1. Not everyone should go to college. Not every job really needs a four year degree. There are plenty of jobs that could be sufficiently handled by people with high school diplomas and OJT. But no, everyone has to have a degree, so people go to school and get one and they end up working places where they had to leave the degree off their application so they wouldn't price themselves out of a job. We have more degree-holders than jobs to employ them right now. So many of the honest blue collar jobs have gone overseas that it seems the only options are trying for an office job or becoming a fry cook, there's no middle-ground.
2. Related to this, we have degree/certification erosion. We see this with technical certs where everyone laughs at paper MCSE's who have the framed cert on the wall but don't know shit. And truthfully, do you really need an MCSE to work your helpdesk? But everyone assumes they have to go to college and all the employers keep asking for the degrees when not all of the jobs really require that kind of background.
3. The whole college game is fucked from the start. Yes, some people make excellent contacts for networking, grow as people, have excellent instructors and really get a lot out of their college buck. Some do the Bush route and burn a lot of brain cells with hangovers, and have nothing more than a degree in a topic they don't truly understand to show for the experience. I didn't have money for a fancy four-year school so I went to the local uni. Total crock of shit that was, waste of time. I don't think I had a bad attitude going in, it's just that the program was so divorced from anything practical that there wasn't anything to learn. I have a bachelor's in business admin. Some people will say "oh, it's not until grad school that the learning really starts." You know what? Grad students I talk to hear the same thing about the PhD program, that's where it really kicks in. Bull. I don't knock the idea of education, I don't knock the idea of universities, I'm actually quite in love with the theory of it all. It's just that the practice of it really sucks.
I think if you really look at the heart of the matter, it's difficult for people to find employment prospects that really turn them on in this society. People will go to college hoping to find something interesting, meander about, come out with a degree but still not have any focus. Then they settle for a job to get some cash coming in, are unhappy with it, and drift and float through their careers never really experiencing anything that makes them feel truly alive. And that goes right back to the point of "if you don't know what you want to do, how are you ever going to make a go of doing it?" Too many people go to college because its expected of them, not because they're excited by it.
We've discovered what "step 2: ???" is.
I don't like either of those options, how about "just more of the same Microsoft software?"
George W. Bush, great president or greatest president? I'll put you down for great.