> They pump that stuff into chickens and cattle even if they are *not sick*.
If animals grow faster when given routine antibiotics (and they do - antibiotics cost money, and wouldn't be used for no reason), then presumably the infections were weakening them even if they weren't noticably ill. Not that that makes it a good idea.
Being unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics intended for human use (and especially not finishing the course) is probably worse than small residues of animal-use antibiotics in meat, but the effects all add up. (And even if you yourself are vegetarian and only take antibiotics when you have a serious bacterial illness, whether the bacteria around develop resistance depends on the population as a whole).
> Was it another 'real-life' chain, or a made up one?
It was a chain owned by the same company that owns Taco Bell, I remember that much from the stories at the time (about the logos being digitally replaced). I only saw the movie on TV, and that still had "Taco Bell".
One quick Google later: http://www.yum.com/ says Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (and KFC) are owned by the same group ("Yum! Brands", formerly Tricon Global Restaurants). Pizza Hut being in Demolition Man rings a bell. And looking a bit deeper, both Taco Bell and Pizza Hut were owned by PepsiCo, which also sounds familiar.
http://uk.imdb.com/Trivia?0106697 confirms it. I should have looked there in the first place. In fact _you_ should have looked there in the first place:-)
> I never needed them because I don't have any characters wielding plasma rifles...
I never needed one, but I bought one anyway because it looked cool. (I have had non-D&D characters with plasma weapons, but those systems didn't use d30's either.)
I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that just about every writer then immediately did a "Wesley" script, but then was some dispute invoving the writers, so instead of spreading the Wesley scripts over a while they used them all close together because that was all that was available, and that overuse is where the alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die type backlash started.
Personally I found Wesley a somewhat irritating character, but didn't think that was the actor's fault. It's good to find out Wil is actually a pretty cool guy, (or has one amazing PR setup faking his website etc.:-) ).
Changing universes, I briefly worked with someone who had an original Millennium Falcon model because he'd worked on special effects for the film. That was cool.
> Well, yeah, and then you piss off _that_ guy by pointing out how the TARDIS can beat everything else.
The Doctor's TARDIS had constant problems. Now if you're talking about a fully working Gallifreian TARDIS, yep - because anyone building anything that can compete is likely to find their planet timelooped before they start:-).
> That's the weirdest spelling of "Software" i've ever seen.
Bother. At least it's an old and common one. My reference books are at home, so I just did a Google on "Berkeley Standard Distribution" to check my memory. However http://coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/history_unix.html does indeed say "Software" and they ought to know.
> > Lawyers that represent clients in the wrong, are in the wrong themselves.
> Who decides that the client is in the wrong? I would prefer to have a lawyer defend me in court to the best of his or her ability and have the judge decide
(Or the jury). And even people who are guilty _and pleading guilty_ deserve a lawyer to argue their side where the severity of the sentence could be affected.
Even where people are getting off "on a technicality", there are good reasons for technicalities like the rules of evidence, and if you want them to protect the innocent, you have to put up with the guilty getting away with stuff because of them sometime too.
> There's a reason it took as long as it did for a Concorde to crash.
Partly just that there aren't many of them and they don't fly very often compared to some planes - that one accident was enough to take Concorde's fatalities per air-miles flown from perfect to not very good.
> Suppose 1 out of 10000 people in the US are terrorists. This strikes me as an absurdly high ratio
The US has a population of around 278 million people, and the system can only look for already known (or at least suspected) terrorists with a good photo already on file. (And it won't work if they disguise themselves, but we can assume any disguise raises the chance of a human observer feeling there is something wrong about a person enough to balance the probabilities to simplify things).
Even 1 terrorist per 100000 people looks too high (a couple of thousand terrorists).
Now if you can extend this to major non-terrorist criminals, and you are stopping and searching random people for Customs searches anyway (at an international airport), the slight improvement in probabilities might be worthwhile.
Sucks for the poor guys who look similar to a wanted felon and now get searched every time instead of at random though.
> Metal Hydride storage functions at room temperature.
Yes, but when the original clueless poster said "in metallic form" he probably meant metallic hydrogen.
Which apparently can exist as a liquid at relatively high temperatures and huge pressures: http://www-phys.llnl.gov/H_Div/GG/meta lhydrofact.h tml "they found that metallization occurs at pressure equivalent to 1.4 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure, nine times the initial density of hydrogen, and at a temperature of 3000 K (5000 F). Because of the high temperature, the hydrogen was a liquid." (They did cool it to 20K before hitting it with a shock wave though).
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2000/split/pnu 48 8-1.htm says "Livermore physicists have the best evidence yet that deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, is metallic at pressures as low as 50 GPa with temperatures near 8000 K. These conditions are near those expected in Jupiter's interior."
Not that we're likely to be mining Jupiter's core for fuel anytime soon.
> In many ways, the the Tom Jericho character *is* based on Turing (in terms of character rather than actions)
In some ways, yes. But making him be the hero of a straight romance instead of being persecuted for his homosexuality is a _major_ difference.
Incidentally, Bletchley Park is now a museum. (The movie wasn't filmed there and doesn't recreate it (as you say, it's capturing the feel rather than trying to be a history)). http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
The secret they uncover in the film is real. I don't know how much was known at the time or whether it was mentioned in Enigma traffic. http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99- 00/art6.ht ml
> There's a Greek myth about the goddess Eos, who falls in love with a mortal and asks Zeus to make him immortal. [...] He continued to age but death could not reach him.
And ended up being turned into a grasshopper. http://www.loggia.com/myth/tithonus. html
> (or the arc[1])? > [1] I couldn't find the name of the object that you pass on the string in order to produce sounds
Bow. (Same word as the thing used for shooting arrows (tir à l'arc in French, if that's where you got arc) (I mean it's the same word in English, I don't actually know if the French for the instrument bow is the same as for an archery bow)).
And yes, I imagine a bowed instrument with virtual strings would be _really_ hard to play even if you could see the strings.
> I can get 3-5 years out of a car, a (potentially) lifetime of use out of a good watch
My oldest car is an '89. (Well, I have a '78 Alfa too, but that's more of a pile of parts than a car as such at the moment and for the foreseeable future). I've only recently bought it, but I expect to get at least three years out of it, and the previous owner got more than five.
And I'm wearing a 1940's watch right now. It was my father-in-law's, and we think he bought it second hand when he was doing National Service in submarines. At the time, there was no such thing as a cheap reliable accurate waterproof watch. These days I could buy six or so equally functional watches for what I paid just to have this one serviced, so it only made sense for the sentimental value.
> Can I lovingly craft a standard school issue room number placard and label an unlabled room in the name of art?
Yes, if you feel you're making an artistic statement by doing so. There really doesn't seem to be any better explanation of what makes something art that the person doing it wants it to be art. That's why a soup can isn't art, but Warhol's copy of a soup can is. That's why Duchamp's "Fountain" (a urinal) is art.
> I used to be able to tell people that buying a book was more bang for your buck then going to the movies
But at least you can buy books second hand. I've recently bought several sci-fi books from a local Amnesty International shop, and a few from Oxfam. Mostly £1.50 (a bit over $2) or less. (I do buy new books too, and sometimes buy old ones at second hand shops/stalls, and also use the library a lot.) (Ok, you can buy second hand videos and DVDs too, but that's not the same as going to the movies).
> Actually, I don't know; if I was working in a place I really liked with a community of folks I was close to, I might almost prefer the lower pay to keep the whole affair in gear.
I've been there and did take the pay cut. But that was a very small company where everyone left owned a significant share. If I was just an employee, my resume would have been with agencies the day after the cuts were decided. With hindsight, it was a mistake, and we should have given up sooner. But at the time, we still thought there was a real chance to turn the company round and end up with more money in the end, and no-one wanted to be the one who made it impossible for the others to continue.
> Carlton and Granada are limited liability companies; this is what limited liability means - they are not liable for ITV Digital's debt just because they own a majority of the shares
Carlton and Granada's limited exposure is because _ITV Digital_ is a limited company.
However the football clubs have been threatening to sue Carlton and Granada anyway. http://www.football-league.co.uk/today/vi ew/breaki ng_news_detail/0,,10794~194119,00.html "The Board is clear that in such an eventuality Carlton Communications plc and Granada plc would be liable to fulfil the obligations under the contract between The Football League and ITV Digital, a company jointly and equally owned by Carlton Communications plc and Granada plc."
http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,74 93 , 72358,00.html says "But the Football League is arguing that Granada and Carlton have a moral obligation to pay the contract, and independent media lawyers have told MediaGuardian that the moral argument may stand up in a court case." (and they've got some MP's to agree with them, or at least join in pleading: http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/story/ 0,7497,6859 04,00.html)
http://spurs.blogfootball.com/stories/storyReade r$ 241 says "Shareholders in limited liability companies are normally limited (hence the name) to the amount of money they used to buy the shares, so it looks OK for Granada and Carlton. However there are rumours of shareholder guarantees in the football contract, i.e. for Granada & Carlton to pay the contract if ITV Digital can not, although this is where it gets really messy (if you haven't given up or fallen asleep by now), the actual signed contract does NOT appear to contain any shareholder guarantees BUT the original tender documents do."
Slashdot Mirror
> They pump that stuff into chickens and cattle even if they are *not sick*.
If animals grow faster when given routine antibiotics (and they do - antibiotics cost money, and wouldn't be used for no reason), then presumably the infections were weakening them even if they weren't noticably ill. Not that that makes it a good idea.
Being unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics intended for human use (and especially not finishing the course) is probably worse than small residues of animal-use antibiotics in meat, but the effects all add up. (And even if you yourself are vegetarian and only take antibiotics when you have a serious bacterial illness, whether the bacteria around develop resistance depends on the population as a whole).
6. Find increasing numbers of patients have antibiotic resistent infection as a result of widespread routine over-prescription of antibiotics.
> Was it another 'real-life' chain, or a made up one?
:-)
It was a chain owned by the same company that owns Taco Bell, I remember that much from the stories at the time (about the logos being digitally replaced). I only saw the movie on TV, and that still had "Taco Bell".
One quick Google later: http://www.yum.com/ says Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (and KFC) are owned by the same group ("Yum! Brands", formerly Tricon Global Restaurants). Pizza Hut being in Demolition Man rings a bell. And looking a bit deeper, both Taco Bell and Pizza Hut were owned by PepsiCo, which also sounds familiar.
http://uk.imdb.com/Trivia?0106697 confirms it. I should have looked there in the first place. In fact _you_ should have looked there in the first place
> I never needed them because I don't have any characters wielding plasma rifles...
I never needed one, but I bought one anyway because it looked cool. (I have had non-D&D characters with plasma weapons, but those systems didn't use d30's either.)
> Put him in a scene. I know you can do it.
:-) ).
I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that just about every writer then immediately did a "Wesley" script, but then was some dispute invoving the writers, so instead of spreading the Wesley scripts over a while they used them all close together because that was all that was available, and that overuse is where the alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die type backlash started.
Personally I found Wesley a somewhat irritating character, but didn't think that was the actor's fault. It's good to find out Wil is actually a pretty cool guy, (or has one amazing PR setup faking his website etc.
Changing universes, I briefly worked with someone who had an original Millennium Falcon model because he'd worked on special effects for the film. That was cool.
> either a) go outside, b) get laid, or c) both.
But be careful if you're doing both at once.
> there was a law limiting how often you could make your indentured servant eat lobster.
I've heard the same story about salmon and oysters, and workhouses. (Oysters certainly were a cheap plentiful food in some places in the past).
> Well, yeah, and then you piss off _that_ guy by pointing out how the TARDIS can beat everything else.
:-).
The Doctor's TARDIS had constant problems. Now if you're talking about a fully working Gallifreian TARDIS, yep - because anyone building anything that can compete is likely to find their planet timelooped before they start
Ok, how can I moderate my own post down? It got an informative _after_ someone said that's wrong too and I agreed.
> That's the weirdest spelling of "Software" i've ever seen.
l does indeed say "Software" and they ought to know.
Bother. At least it's an old and common one.
My reference books are at home, so I just did a Google on "Berkeley Standard Distribution" to check my memory.
However http://coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/history_unix.htm
> The S in BSD stands for SYSTEM.
That's the weirdest spelling of "Standard" I've ever seen. (Berkeley Standard Distribution.)
> > Lawyers that represent clients in the wrong, are in the wrong themselves.
> Who decides that the client is in the wrong? I would prefer to have a lawyer defend me in court to the best of his or her ability and have the judge decide
(Or the jury). And even people who are guilty _and pleading guilty_ deserve a lawyer to argue their side where the severity of the sentence could be affected.
Even where people are getting off "on a technicality", there are good reasons for technicalities like the rules of evidence, and if you want them to protect the innocent, you have to put up with the guilty getting away with stuff because of them sometime too.
> There's a reason it took as long as it did for a Concorde to crash.
Partly just that there aren't many of them and they don't fly very often compared to some planes - that one accident was enough to take Concorde's fatalities per air-miles flown from perfect to not very good.
> Suppose 1 out of 10000 people in the US are terrorists. This strikes me as an absurdly high ratio
The US has a population of around 278 million people, and the system can only look for already known (or at least suspected) terrorists with a good photo already on file. (And it won't work if they disguise themselves, but we can assume any disguise raises the chance of a human observer feeling there is something wrong about a person enough to balance the probabilities to simplify things).
Even 1 terrorist per 100000 people looks too high (a couple of thousand terrorists).
Now if you can extend this to major non-terrorist criminals, and you are stopping and searching random people for Customs searches anyway (at an international airport), the slight improvement in probabilities might be worthwhile.
Sucks for the poor guys who look similar to a wanted felon and now get searched every time instead of at random though.
> Metal Hydride storage functions at room temperature.
a lhydrofact.h tml
u 48 8-1.htm says "Livermore physicists have the best evidence yet that deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, is metallic at pressures as low as 50 GPa with temperatures near 8000 K. These conditions are near those expected in Jupiter's interior."
Yes, but when the original clueless poster said "in metallic form" he probably meant metallic hydrogen.
Which apparently can exist as a liquid at relatively high temperatures and huge pressures:
http://www-phys.llnl.gov/H_Div/GG/met
"they found that metallization occurs at pressure equivalent to 1.4 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure, nine times the initial density of hydrogen, and at a temperature of 3000 K (5000 F). Because of the high temperature, the
hydrogen was a liquid."
(They did cool it to 20K before hitting it with a shock wave though).
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2000/split/pn
Not that we're likely to be mining Jupiter's core for fuel anytime soon.
> In many ways, the the Tom Jericho character *is* based on Turing (in terms of character rather than actions)
- 00/art6.ht ml
In some ways, yes. But making him be the hero of a straight romance instead of being persecuted for his homosexuality is a _major_ difference.
Incidentally, Bletchley Park is now a museum. (The movie wasn't filmed there and doesn't recreate it (as you say, it's capturing the feel rather than trying to be a history)).
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
The secret they uncover in the film is real. I don't know how much was known at the time or whether it was mentioned in Enigma traffic.
http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99
> There's a Greek myth about the goddess Eos, who falls in love with a mortal and asks Zeus to make him immortal. [...] He continued to age but death could not reach him.
. html
And ended up being turned into a grasshopper.
http://www.loggia.com/myth/tithonus
> TransGaming still has plenty of options: [...] negotiate a new licence with the programmers who have made the changes
Which is what they are trying to do. I notice the linked post doesn't say anything about "stealing" code, that's just the story submitter.
> (or the arc[1])?
> [1] I couldn't find the name of the object that you pass on the string in order to produce sounds
Bow. (Same word as the thing used for shooting arrows (tir à l'arc in French, if that's where you got arc) (I mean it's the same word in English, I don't actually know if the French for the instrument bow is the same as for an archery bow)).
And yes, I imagine a bowed instrument with virtual strings would be _really_ hard to play even if you could see the strings.
> I can get 3-5 years out of a car, a (potentially) lifetime of use out of a good watch
My oldest car is an '89. (Well, I have a '78 Alfa too, but that's more of a pile of parts than a car as such at the moment and for the foreseeable future). I've only recently bought it, but I expect to get at least three years out of it, and the previous owner got more than five.
And I'm wearing a 1940's watch right now. It was my father-in-law's, and we think he bought it second hand when he was doing National Service in submarines. At the time, there was no such thing as a cheap reliable accurate waterproof watch. These days I could buy six or so equally functional watches for what I paid just to have this one serviced, so it only made sense for the sentimental value.
> Can I lovingly craft a standard school issue room number placard and label an unlabled room in the name of art?
Yes, if you feel you're making an artistic statement by doing so. There really doesn't seem to be any better explanation of what makes something art that the person doing it wants it to be art.
That's why a soup can isn't art, but Warhol's copy of a soup can is. That's why Duchamp's "Fountain" (a urinal) is art.
> I used to be able to tell people that buying a book was more bang for your buck then going to the movies
But at least you can buy books second hand. I've recently bought several sci-fi books from a local Amnesty International shop, and a few from Oxfam.
Mostly £1.50 (a bit over $2) or less. (I do buy new books too, and sometimes buy old ones at second hand shops/stalls, and also use the library a lot.)
(Ok, you can buy second hand videos and DVDs too, but that's not the same as going to the movies).
> I am always curious where they actually come up with these numbers.
Made them up, probably. 78.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot to sound good.
> Actually, I don't know; if I was working in a place I really liked with a community of folks I was close to, I might almost prefer the lower pay to keep the whole affair in gear.
I've been there and did take the pay cut. But that was a very small company where everyone left owned a significant share. If I was just an employee, my resume would have been with agencies the day after the cuts were decided.
With hindsight, it was a mistake, and we should have given up sooner. But at the time, we still thought there was a real chance to turn the company round and end up with more money in the end, and no-one wanted to be the one who made it impossible for the others to continue.
> Carlton and Granada are limited liability companies; this is what limited liability means - they are not liable for ITV Digital's debt just because they own a majority of the shares
i ew/breaki ng_news_detail/0,,10794~194119,00.html
4 93 , 72358,00.html says "But the Football League is arguing that Granada and Carlton have a moral obligation to pay the contract, and independent media lawyers have told MediaGuardian that the moral argument may stand up in a court case." (and they've got some MP's to agree with them, or at least join in pleading:/ 0,7497,6859 04,00.html)
e r$ 241 says "Shareholders in limited liability companies are normally limited (hence the name) to the amount of money they used to buy the shares, so it looks OK for Granada and Carlton.
Carlton and Granada's limited exposure is because _ITV Digital_ is a limited company.
However the football clubs have been threatening to sue Carlton and Granada anyway.
http://www.football-league.co.uk/today/v
"The Board is clear that in such an eventuality Carlton Communications plc and Granada plc would be liable to fulfil the obligations under the contract between The Football League and ITV Digital, a company jointly and equally owned by Carlton Communications plc and Granada plc."
http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7
http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/story
http://spurs.blogfootball.com/stories/storyRead
However there are rumours of shareholder guarantees in the football contract, i.e. for Granada & Carlton to pay the contract if ITV Digital can not, although this is where it gets really messy (if you haven't given up or fallen asleep by now), the actual signed contract does NOT appear to contain any shareholder guarantees BUT the original tender documents do."