> That's a good sign. If we used to eat it, perhaps we will still find it tasty. And if mammoth becomes a farm animal then its survival is assured.
There's a reason why elephants were never domesticated...
> I'd like to see what the fences around a mammoth pasture will look like, as well as what the farmers will
drive which will be impressive enough to mammoth to be able to herd them.
...and that's part of it.
The other parts:
1) Elephants take a long time to gestate and mature. You can either feed a breeding pair for a year and get a month's worth of elephant-veal (poor return on investment), or you can feed two baby elephants for 5-10 years and get a year's worth of elephant-mutton (poor return on investment, and a loooong wait time before your first steak) plus a new breeding pair.
2) Also because of that long life cycle, you don't get many generations of elephant per century, which makes selective breeding for desired traits difficult.
Cats, dogs, pigs, cows, sheep, and horses are about it for domesticable edible quadrupeds, and most of these took thousands of years to domesticate. (And even so, cats only work if they're small, and dogs only worked in the first place because their "pack instinct" allowed them to accept humans as leaders. It's a bug in dog programming.)
I suppose nonhuman primates could have been domesticated (as human primates have been), but there's a long-lifecycle problem there, and unlike human primates, nonhuman primates are too smart to put up with it:)
Re:It's A Whole New Paradigm
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
> Trust no CEO >
Venture capital sees spam >
A proven model
One - spam customers.
Two - question? question? question?
Three - profit? No, SPEWS!
Re:Ignorance is beaming
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
>missed the intent > chinese send you more spam > while japanese write haiku
All of a sudden,
what Japan did at Nanking
sounds like a good thing.
Yes, we must have seasonal references!
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 4, Funny
550 spammer
trying to mail my user
fuck you, it's summer
> Imagine 4 spammers in a car looking for chicks "Hey guys, there's 4 girls in that car and there is 4 of us. We are gonna get LAID". Somehow, they never ask themselves why they never get laid. If they did, we wouldn't have mailboxes full of garbage.
You're overestimating the spammer's sense of ethics.
In the situation you describe, the spammers will get laid. Spammers would just ram the chicks' car off the road and rape them.
I mean, they asked for it, right? If they didn't wanna get banged, they shouldn't be on the informayshun s00perhighway with all the responsible murketers, right?
Spammer #1: "I looked out the window and held down my horn for 10 seconds, and she glanced at me for a second before flipping me the bird and driving off! But I got a good look at her! That's opt-in!"
Spammer #2: "My chick could have unsubscribed by just giving me a blowjob. But she didn't want to! It's her fault for not unsubscribing!"
Spammer #3: "I was just expressing my views on sexuality to her! Frea Speach is Garonteed by thuh First Amundmint!"
Spammer #4: "Just because she said '550 - fuck off, spammer' with every shafting didn't mean she might not change her mind a few seconds later!"
> The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!
1) You haven't been to an airport lately, have you? They're already doing the circus macaque thing!
I mean, just who do you think's confiscating G.I. Joe dolls and Medals of Honor while making lactating mothers guzzle a gallon of h00terj00ce as the price of admission for the "privilege" of flying the friendly skies?
Then again, anything that means less babies on airplanes gives at least some relief for the poor fuckers who still have to fly rather than drive. I wouldn't know. I love a good road trip, and my "I'll drive, rather than fly" limit for a one-day drive is about 16-20 hours - about 1000-1200 miles, which is way more than enough for anything my job will ever require.
<RANT> I mean, think about it. Fuck the airlines, gimme an air-conditioned automobile with a big cushy seat all to myself, an open road, a fresh box of Krispy Kremes, a six-pack of Jolt Cola, a line-out-to-tape adapter, six speakers, and a laptop crammed with MP3s of my favorite road music! Fuck the airlines! All the baggage I can cram into the trunk! Your choice of good eats at any restaurant in any city en route! Door-to-door service from home to hotel! No lineups, no waiting! I say again, Fuck the airlines!
You hear me, Chapter-11-bound United! FUCK YOU! You heard my, South-drunken-pilots-West! FUCK YOU! You heard me, Chapter-11-fried US Air! FUCK YOU! You can all rot in bankruptcy for all I care!
You hear that, airlines? We don't need you anymore! We don't need you, we don't need your shitty service, your lying gate agents, your lost baggage, your delayed flights! We don't need to watch TSA goonz feeling up our wives/girlfriends/daughters! And most of all, when we drive, we don't need to worry about still being blown to smithereens because you imbeciles JUST. DIDN'T. GET. IT. when it came to security.. We don't need you anymore. So please, airlines, just dry up and fly away. Fuck you and the Pegasi you flew in on. </RANT>
(Whew, OK, rant over.)
2) Based on my comment in #1, it appears as though I've just been sued on behalf of all nonhuman primate species by the Circus Macaque Anti-Defamation League, for my derogatory comments against macaques.
Re:The bleedin' obvious
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
> > "While they're spending money suing the monopolist, they're also feeding the monopolist with the other hand,"
Tiemann told the crowd. > >
#include <MHO.o> > >
I just can't understand why even the thickest politician cannot comprehend this. Purchasing from a company
that's under Federal investigation makes about as much sense as hiring R. Kelly [yahoo.com] as a Girl Scout
troop leader.
When the government sues Microsoft, it gets to spend lots of taxpayer dollars.
When the government buys from Microsoft, it also gets to spend lots of taxpayer dollars.
If the government's objective were to (a) have the best tool for the job, or (b) take a uniform principled stance for/against the company's business practices, this would be an inconsistency.
From this, it's reasonable to conclude that neither (a) nor (b) can be the government's objective.
I would note that if the government's ojective is (c) to spend as many taxpayer dollars as possible in every department in order to inflate headcounts and assure budgetary allocations of more taxpayer dollars next year, all inconsistencies vanishes, both from the government's point of view and from the taxpayer's point of view.
The world makes a lot more sense when you stop using words like "taxpaying citizen" and "civil servant", and you start using words like "cow" and "farm hand".
> > visit New York and hack it to put up a picture of the WTC towers overtop of whatever sawed-off 20-storey mundane blocks they try to "replace" them with.) > > god bless you, you wacky, wacky little man.:)
And God Bless Donald Trump for having the balls to say it in public:
TRUMP: Well, I hate them. I think they're terrible. I think they're not imaginative. I would have liked to have seen the top 10 to 15 to 20 architectural firms in the country each come up with a proposal. I think that what's being proposed is just not good enough for what we all suffered through. It really deserves much better than what they've come up with.
- Donald Trump, on the WTC design proposals, transcript from Wall $treet Week Without Louis Rukeyser, July 26, 2002.
> when I can sit down at a desk with maybe just a keyboard, and plug in the sound screen and
everything directly into my head.
As cool as it sounds to have an implant in your skull, there's a long-term risk of infection.
The other group they were talking about - that was implanting smaller, lower-voltage electrodes directly into the cortex - sounds like a better way to jack in.
Think of the implant in the brain, and a wireless interface between the computer and the implant.
Rather than a mechanical plug, the gadget you glom "onto" your brain could be as simple as a baseball cap with a small transmitter on the back of the head. (And you could have all the wiring you wanted going from the belt-pack to the hat. The transmission of data from hat to brain would be wireless.)
(This would also be a cool open door for TEMPEST h4x041ng - imagine walking through a crowd with a sensitive receiver and picking up stray emissions from people. You could do a "Being John Malkovich" routine, effectively tuning into a third party's wireless brain-vision transmitter and seeing the world - literally - through his eyes.)
Well, you can - but unless a nearby star goes supernova, you're not gonna see much. It's pretty dark in the X-ray spectrum around here.
And if a nearby star does go supernova, you're still not gonna see much. It'll be bright in the X-ray (and the visible, and the gamma, and the infrared), but being burnt to a crisp is rather an impediment to seeing anything. (In other words, it'll still be pretty dark:)
> The first version of this device installed in Jerry 20 years ago could acheive at least 4 FPS, so this version should be faster.
If I put a big-azz heatsink in my brain with the fins sticking out the back of my head, can I overclock it to get better framerates?
(Hmm, or watercooling. Overclock it and wander around with a big ice bath.:)
Just one question left - for those of us who checked "C++++" (I'll be first in line to get the new cybernetic interface installed into my skull. " in our Geek Code.sigs, where do we sign up?
Impractical but fun choice: Ability to see ultraviolet. Walk through a botanical garden and get a bee's-eye view.
Practical but more useful choice: Ability to see near infrared.
Impractical but even cooler choice: Ability to see far infrared. Know which dark alley the d00d you're trying to frag walked down... even if you're 5 minutes behind him. The coolant for the sensor might help with overclocking, too - anything to keep the frame-rate up!:)
And finally, some good uses for serious overclocking - real-time image reprocessing! Imagine driving with night-vision active at night (and software to filter out glare of incoming high-beams), and use the same software to highlight road signs and banner-block ugly billboards with pictures of trees or background patterns by day. Interface with GPS, visit New York and hack it to put up a picture of the WTC towers overtop of whatever sawed-off 20-storey mundane blocks they try to "replace" them with.)
> I agree. This guys seems to have a pretty defeatist attitude. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I think we can make a difference. Margaret Mead put it best:
> > Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it?s the only thing that ever has.
There was a "Successories" poster that showed four arms clasping each other in a symbolism of strength.
My favorite parody was one that showed the four arms, bent 90 degrees at the elbows, and all four arms wearing little red armbands with white circles, and black squiggles with 90-degree-angles.
The Margaret Mead quote, of course, was left intact. Because it applied just as much to those guys as it did to your utopian fantasies.
> Yet, it has been shown over and over that even though we are capable of our worst in the name of competition, it is also when we are at our best.
Without the space race, we would never had gotten to the moon in the first place, or built the Space Shuttle either, expensive dinosaur that it is.
> IANAI (I am not an Indian), but I'm going to have to agree that I just don't seem the point. The article claims it may foster more national pride and whatnot, but surely that $82.5 million could foster national pride by going more directly to the citizens. Granted it would amount to, what, 80 cents per person, but can't there be something done with that? Can't they show scientific and intellectual prowess by doing something that hasn't already been done and/or would directly benefit people?
First off - $82M for a moon shot is dirt cheap. We spend that going to Mars.
Second - you answered the question yourself. $0.80 per head. (Actually, at 1B people, it's $0.08 per head.)
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Last time I checked, even in India, that didn't buy much more than a day's worth of fish.
Force a bunch of men to learn how to go to the moon and odds are one of them will come up with something pretty neat, even if you don't give a whit for space exploration. Velcro, anyone?
To put it in historical perspective - one of the reasons you have a computer on your desk is because miniaturized electronics were required for the guidance systems of the first generation of ICBMs.
EMPs from incoming Russian nukes would fsck up any ground-based guidance communications systems, so the guidance had to be onboard the missile. Vacuum tubes were far too bulky, and weren't sturdy enough to survive launch. Even transistors were still too bulky. Solution obvious - integrated circuits, multi-layer circuit boards, and mass production.
The Minuteman II guidance system marked the first major production use of integrated circuits.
The computer, also built
by Autonetics, was one of the first ever to use the integrated circuit, or "chip,"
that has since become commonplace in consumer products found throughout
society. Air Force contracts for Minuteman guidance computers helped chip
makers learn manufacturing techniques, which later helped dramatically lower
prices. Each computer contained about 2,000 integrated circuits and about 4,000
conventional devices. Texas Instruments, one of the companies where the chip
was invented in 1959, supplied most of the circuits.
If the Indians can produce anything as cool by today's standards (maybe even a low-cost heavy-lift vehicle), they can make a fortune for their government by launching the rest of the world's satellites.
But no, you're right. That tech stuff never fed nobody. Let's give a billion people 8 cents' worth of fish.
> I agree, to some extent. The problem is this: go to any college student majoring in a technical field. Ask him or her how enthusiastic they are about being forced to take an additional history of science course. I think you will find a large percentage of students would react... poorly... to that idea.
Agreed.
But then fer chrissakes do it in public school and high school.
There's no physiological reason why a Junior High student (gr. 7 or 8) shouldn't be able to understand the basic techniques of rational argument, and spot logical fallacies.
Likewise, there's no reason any elementary school teacher shouldn't be able to teach this. Unlike calculus, or physics, this isn't rocket science.
There may be political reasons why you can go through high school and learn nothing about rhetoric, reasoning, the difference between science and not-science, and the basic history of science, but there's no real reason.
There's even a damn good political reason to teach kids this stuff -- an electorate of morons may be good for getting re-elected, but they're useless for building a functioning economy. And a functioning economy is what's needed for the tax dollars that support the rest of the State.
If politicians had any loyalty to the two-party system, they'd support a basic education for everyone, because once the economy implodes (say, after another 20 years of a society that graduates only accountants and airport security guards, but no engineers), the two-party system goes with it. That's fine if you're a Senator in your 60s, but it's not gonna help if you're new to politics and just starting to work your way up the party ladder, because you're gonna have to clean up the mess.
Winning elections is great - but what's the point of winning an election 5-6 terms from now when there's gonna be nothing left to rule?
If we're not going back the moon, at least somebody is.
Granted, the real motivation is to demonstrate to Pakistan and China that they have missi^H^H^H^H^H launch vehicles capable of reaching escape velocity, and thus, any targe^H^H^H^H^Hlocation on the planet.
But that said - it was precisely the same showboating against the Soviets that got us to the moon.
And if the same showboating can get either India or China (or both!) to the moon, maybe they'll be able to send a few scientists along for the ride. It's Space Race, Mk. II!
I'm not naive enough to believe that this will result in a permanent manned lunar base, or any long-term exploration of the lunar surface and subsurface, but I'm at least optimistic that we [humanity] will be able to piggyback a few scientists along for the ride, and learn a few things that we couldn't easily learn with robotic missions.
It's depressing that we're still at the stage where a guy with a pick and shovel can accomplish more in five minutes on the moon's surface than any probe NASA is likely to launch in the next 50 years.
> Take 1 part dry Lentils, Black Beans, Red Beans, etcetera (you have to soak some beans overnight, this is easy if you eat this everyday like I did, or you can do what I eventually did, soak the beans and rice in the slow cooker and plugged it into a timer to turn it on in the morning if I wasn't home)
Long as we're onto slow-cooking and fun with starch, try "Soubise". (Frogspeak for "onions and rice".)
1) 2 big-azz yellow onions, about a pound's worth. Slice 'em.
2) 1/2 cup rice. Boil for 5 minutes. You don't want the rice cooked.
3) 1/2 to 3/4 sticks of butter. (4-6 tbls.)
4) 1/2 tsp salt.
5) 1/2 cup whipping cream. (Or you can get away with milk, but I like it with cream. )
5) a few slices (1/4 cup) of swiss cheese.
Melt butter in crock pot or casserole. Toss in onions and salt until coated with melted butter and starting to soften. Toss in rice.
Bake mucho-slowly for an hour or so (easy enough - you can't overcook this:) at 300F. The onions disintegrate, leach out their water, turn insanely sweet, and flavor the rice. (Should be nice and yellow, not brown, when done baking.)
Take out of oven, nuke milk to warm, and toss in the milk. Stir in the cheese. Nice and creamy.
(If you wanna make a sauce, you can puree this and call it a sauce soubise.)
I find it also makes a great side dish all on its own, just heaped out of the dish. You can also sprinkle the top with cheese and bake a layer of cheese onto it. Or stir in some fresh parsley along with the cheese. It's versatile stuff.
If you're a carnivore (I am), it's also great with a splash of gravy or anything really thick and rich, like what you'd get if you pan-fried a steak and made a sauce out of the juices, or sauteed a pile of mushrooms. And it's just plain awesome with a big hunk of roasted or braised game or a leg o' lamb.
> Some chemical reactions are not reversible. In particular, IIRC, denatured protiens are irrevocably altered, and can't be re-assembled into their original state.
To be more precise - some chemical reactions just happen to require a lot of energy and atom-by-atom processing in order to be reversed.
You can, for instance, quite easily "uncook" a scrambled egg - by using a chicken as a bioreactor.
Simply cram lots of milk and scrambled eggs into the beak end of a chicken, wait a few weeks, and voila! Reconstructed egg proteins are extruded from the, uh... other end of the chicken.
(And what's even cooler, the reconstituted egg proteins are produced in ovoid-shaped calcium-based single-serving units. Much easier to handle than everything else that comes out of the business end of a chicken, lemme tell ya.)
> Not only that be he would annoy everyone else by mangling the recipe and mis-pronouncing each of the dishes' names and ingredients. He may also drive the Iron Chef nuts by using up all couple hundred cloves of garlic.
He might drive the Iron Chef nuts by using 200 cloves of garlic.
But he'd win.
Garlic fucking rules.
ObGarlic:
1) One head of garlic. Maybe two. Peel.
2) Slowly boil cloves in 4-5 cups of water. Add a bay leaf and some salt.
3) Strain. Stash garlic in cheesecloth, and wring out.
4) Return soup to a boil. Thicken and enrich with egg yolks.
> Corp officer: We are commited to stringent compliance with accounting rules and will not tolerate anything less than the pure truth. > >Translation: We're covering our rears as fast as we can.
Close, but wrong. That one means "Sell your stock now, because while we're committed to compliance, we haven't achieved it.
It's what's not said that counts.
> Or to steal one from Dilbert... > >
Management: Employees are our most valuable resource. > >
Translation: (nothing)
Again, close but not quite "nothing".
Translation: "We're laying some of you off. Go to fuckedcompany.com to see if you need to start looting now, or if you can wait a week to start looting."
>..except that the exact same sentence can be translated differently, depending on the context. > >
Speaker 1: Where are we going? >
Speaker 2: To the bank.
And in the vein of the submitter who wrote " perhaps one day they will be able to develop one that will allow politicians to talk to normal folks and be understood."...
...regardless of context, if a politician is Speaker #2, you're in deep, deep trouble.:)
Besides, all political speech boils down to (a) brute force, and (b) the non-politician going to the bank to pay for it.
> But what about the over/under dichotomy? Most people put the toilet paper in the holder so it unrolls over the top,
(ahem. the way God intended.)
>
but a sizable minority (myself included) put it in there so unrolls from the bottom. Each group drives the other
nuts.
Unrolling from the top makes sense - it's the middle of the night, you take a dump (or leak, if female), and you just wanna paw at the roll (why turn the light on?), and wow, there's a sheet or two or three in your hand.
Or "huh, wheredafuxdapapuh? fuggin underrollin' roommate", and you have to shove the roll away from you until the pieces of TP finally emerge from behind the roll in the wall.
OK, heretic. What's your excuse?
(Actually, the excuse of the other guy who said "under is best because it's easier to re-roll if the cat unrolls it" made sense. But as long as I'm in the company of an under-roller, what if there's no cat in the house? Seriously, what's the rationale for under-rolling?)
> And the personalities of the real people are more interesting than writers could ever come up with for fake ones. Think of Cameron Diaz's personality [...]
Think about it? I have it on my Linux box. (What do you think/dev/null is made of?)
I've never understood celebrity. "Look, it's a guy pretending to be a big-azz robot, and he blows shit up!" is all I need to know about Arnold. Once the credits roll, I don't need to know what Arnold's up to until the sequel.
But you're correct *sigh* in that there's a whole industry built around people who do care what the "stars" are doing off-screen. That industry is effectively a marketing arm of the movie industry -- if the proles don't see Arnold's name in the headlines every day and aren't motivated to see every film in which he stars, they won't see the three other movies that he's contracted for between now and the next blockbuster.
> You could make it up I guess, but it wouldn't be as intersting as a real person.
Don't be so sure. Have you read William Gibson's Idoru?:-) [Plot summary: A real-life rock star falls in love with a celebrity who exists solely as a piece of software.]
> What would you say if someone would be putting electrodes in YOUR brains (provided you have one, obviously) ?
If the electrodes stimulated my pleasure center 24/7, by definition, the answer would be yes.
(And if not before the surgery, then certainly after surgery. "Nope, no regrets at all, man, it's like they make me run these big mazes, but the walls themselves are made of cheese!")
> Anybody who doesn't read their bill before paying it is a jackass anyway. I look over my credit card bill every time...same for phone bill just to make sure. I've had to call the phone company a couple of times because of calls that I know were not made, and they dropped them from the bill.
Good advice, but useless in this case.
Gramps calls the phone company and says "What's this lease charge?" and the droid on the other end reads back the answer from the script: "Well, sir, you lease the phone from us, and if it breaks, we send you a new phone. You have to keep paying or you can't use that phone. You could buy a new phone - we have the FooBlitzkyCompuDyne 12000E for $129.99. Oh, you'd prefer to continue leasing? No problem, sir, thank you for bending over for Ma Bell and her strap-on!"
A more modern example:
- Charges for Network Access for Interstate Calling, Imposed by FCC -- which isn't quite true. They're imposed by the FCC, but the phone company can charge whatever the fuck it wants and keep the profit.
- Federal Universal Service fee
- State high cost fund surcharge
- State teleconnect fund surcharge
- Universal Lifeline Telephone Service Surcharge
- Rate Surcharge
- State Regulatory Fee
- State TDD Relay Service Fee
- Tax (!) federal and state
So - my local phone bill is about 50% higher with all these fees than it would be without 'em.
Then there's the...
- Carrier Universal Service Charge (which all the LD carriers just jacked up within a month of each other. Price-fixing, anyone? This is another "FCC" charge - that phone companies can charge any amount they want and skim the profit from before remitting the FCC's cut)
- Single Bill Fee (Fair enough, that's my fault, but why should I pay $1.50 for less paperwork on my part and theirs?)
- Carrier property tax
- LD Calling Plan Monthly Charge (Is it a charge? Or is it a use-it-or-lose-it? It started out as use-it-or-lose-it, then they changed it to a charge for the hell of it. My fault for sticking with 'em. But any other telco would do the same thing.)
- City utility tax
- Federal tax
- State and local (as opposed to city?!) tax
Now - you tell me - which of these fees are real and which are fodder for future class-action lawsuits? You think I can trust the accounting from which those numbers are derived? (You think anyon is ever gonna be able to figure out a telco's billing structure to determine the legit charges from the frauds?)
Fuck the telcos. Every last one of 'em. I hope they all crash and burn in an avalanche of debt. Every last one of 'em. It'll suck for a month, but maybe someone who isn't a con artist at heart will relight the fiber.
The guy who paid $4/month to keep his rotary service even though he was the last guy in the exchange to use it? Thank you, you're an inspiration to us all. Nice to see one of us being able to gouge the motherf00ckers back for once. (I'm calling my assnozzle telco and asking 'em if I can get rotary tomorrow. The look on the face of the front-line drone when it hears the question might make me want to buy a video phone:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a reason why elephants were never domesticated...
> I'd like to see what the fences around a mammoth pasture will look like, as well as what the farmers will drive which will be impressive enough to mammoth to be able to herd them.
The other parts:
1) Elephants take a long time to gestate and mature. You can either feed a breeding pair for a year and get a month's worth of elephant-veal (poor return on investment), or you can feed two baby elephants for 5-10 years and get a year's worth of elephant-mutton (poor return on investment, and a loooong wait time before your first steak) plus a new breeding pair.
2) Also because of that long life cycle, you don't get many generations of elephant per century, which makes selective breeding for desired traits difficult.
Cats, dogs, pigs, cows, sheep, and horses are about it for domesticable edible quadrupeds, and most of these took thousands of years to domesticate. (And even so, cats only work if they're small, and dogs only worked in the first place because their "pack instinct" allowed them to accept humans as leaders. It's a bug in dog programming.)
I suppose nonhuman primates could have been domesticated (as human primates have been), but there's a long-lifecycle problem there, and unlike human primates, nonhuman primates are too smart to put up with it :)
> Venture capital sees spam
> A proven model
One - spam customers.
Two - question? question? question? Three - profit? No, SPEWS!
> chinese send you more spam
> while japanese write haiku
All of a sudden,
what Japan did at Nanking
sounds like a good thing.
550 spammer
trying to mail my user
fuck you, it's summer
You're overestimating the spammer's sense of ethics. In the situation you describe, the spammers will get laid. Spammers would just ram the chicks' car off the road and rape them.
I mean, they asked for it, right? If they didn't wanna get banged, they shouldn't be on the informayshun s00perhighway with all the responsible murketers, right?
Spammer #1: "I looked out the window and held down my horn for 10 seconds, and she glanced at me for a second before flipping me the bird and driving off! But I got a good look at her! That's opt-in!"
Spammer #2: "My chick could have unsubscribed by just giving me a blowjob. But she didn't want to! It's her fault for not unsubscribing!"
Spammer #3: "I was just expressing my views on sexuality to her! Frea Speach is Garonteed by thuh First Amundmint!"
Spammer #4: "Just because she said '550 - fuck off, spammer' with every shafting didn't mean she might not change her mind a few seconds later!"
1) You haven't been to an airport lately, have you? They're already doing the circus macaque thing!
I mean, just who do you think's confiscating G.I. Joe dolls and Medals of Honor while making lactating mothers guzzle a gallon of h00terj00ce as the price of admission for the "privilege" of flying the friendly skies?
Then again, anything that means less babies on airplanes gives at least some relief for the poor fuckers who still have to fly rather than drive. I wouldn't know. I love a good road trip, and my "I'll drive, rather than fly" limit for a one-day drive is about 16-20 hours - about 1000-1200 miles, which is way more than enough for anything my job will ever require.
<RANT> I mean, think about it. Fuck the airlines, gimme an air-conditioned automobile with a big cushy seat all to myself, an open road, a fresh box of Krispy Kremes, a six-pack of Jolt Cola, a line-out-to-tape adapter, six speakers, and a laptop crammed with MP3s of my favorite road music! Fuck the airlines! All the baggage I can cram into the trunk! Your choice of good eats at any restaurant in any city en route! Door-to-door service from home to hotel! No lineups, no waiting! I say again, Fuck the airlines!
You hear me, Chapter-11-bound United! FUCK YOU! You heard my, South-drunken-pilots-West! FUCK YOU! You heard me, Chapter-11-fried US Air! FUCK YOU! You can all rot in bankruptcy for all I care!
You hear that, airlines? We don't need you anymore! We don't need you, we don't need your shitty service, your lying gate agents, your lost baggage, your delayed flights! We don't need to watch TSA goonz feeling up our wives/girlfriends/daughters! And most of all, when we drive, we don't need to worry about still being blown to smithereens because you imbeciles JUST. DIDN'T. GET. IT. when it came to security.. We don't need you anymore. So please, airlines, just dry up and fly away. Fuck you and the Pegasi you flew in on. </RANT>
(Whew, OK, rant over.)
2) Based on my comment in #1, it appears as though I've just been sued on behalf of all nonhuman primate species by the Circus Macaque Anti-Defamation League, for my derogatory comments against macaques.
>
> #include <MHO.o>
>
> I just can't understand why even the thickest politician cannot comprehend this. Purchasing from a company that's under Federal investigation makes about as much sense as hiring R. Kelly [yahoo.com] as a Girl Scout troop leader.
When the government sues Microsoft, it gets to spend lots of taxpayer dollars.
When the government buys from Microsoft, it also gets to spend lots of taxpayer dollars.
If the government's objective were to (a) have the best tool for the job, or (b) take a uniform principled stance for/against the company's business practices, this would be an inconsistency.
From this, it's reasonable to conclude that neither (a) nor (b) can be the government's objective.
I would note that if the government's ojective is (c) to spend as many taxpayer dollars as possible in every department in order to inflate headcounts and assure budgetary allocations of more taxpayer dollars next year, all inconsistencies vanishes, both from the government's point of view and from the taxpayer's point of view.
The world makes a lot more sense when you stop using words like "taxpaying citizen" and "civil servant", and you start using words like "cow" and "farm hand".
>
> god bless you, you wacky, wacky little man.
And God Bless Donald Trump for having the balls to say it in public:
- Donald Trump, on the WTC design proposals, transcript from Wall $treet Week Without Louis Rukeyser, July 26, 2002.
As cool as it sounds to have an implant in your skull, there's a long-term risk of infection.
The other group they were talking about - that was implanting smaller, lower-voltage electrodes directly into the cortex - sounds like a better way to jack in.
Think of the implant in the brain, and a wireless interface between the computer and the implant. Rather than a mechanical plug, the gadget you glom "onto" your brain could be as simple as a baseball cap with a small transmitter on the back of the head. (And you could have all the wiring you wanted going from the belt-pack to the hat. The transmission of data from hat to brain would be wireless.)
(This would also be a cool open door for TEMPEST h4x041ng - imagine walking through a crowd with a sensitive receiver and picking up stray emissions from people. You could do a "Being John Malkovich" routine, effectively tuning into a third party's wireless brain-vision transmitter and seeing the world - literally - through his eyes.)
Well, you can - but unless a nearby star goes supernova, you're not gonna see much. It's pretty dark in the X-ray spectrum around here.
And if a nearby star does go supernova, you're still not gonna see much. It'll be bright in the X-ray (and the visible, and the gamma, and the infrared), but being burnt to a crisp is rather an impediment to seeing anything. (In other words, it'll still be pretty dark :)
If I put a big-azz heatsink in my brain with the fins sticking out the back of my head, can I overclock it to get better framerates?
(Hmm, or watercooling. Overclock it and wander around with a big ice bath. :)
Just one question left - for those of us who checked "C++++" (I'll be first in line to get the new cybernetic interface installed into my skull. " in our Geek Code .sigs, where do we sign up?
Impractical but fun choice: Ability to see ultraviolet. Walk through a botanical garden and get a bee's-eye view.
Practical but more useful choice: Ability to see near infrared.
Impractical but even cooler choice: Ability to see far infrared. Know which dark alley the d00d you're trying to frag walked down... even if you're 5 minutes behind him. The coolant for the sensor might help with overclocking, too - anything to keep the frame-rate up! :)
And finally, some good uses for serious overclocking - real-time image reprocessing! Imagine driving with night-vision active at night (and software to filter out glare of incoming high-beams), and use the same software to highlight road signs and banner-block ugly billboards with pictures of trees or background patterns by day. Interface with GPS, visit New York and hack it to put up a picture of the WTC towers overtop of whatever sawed-off 20-storey mundane blocks they try to "replace" them with.)
>
> Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it?s the only thing that ever has.
There was a "Successories" poster that showed four arms clasping each other in a symbolism of strength.
My favorite parody was one that showed the four arms, bent 90 degrees at the elbows, and all four arms wearing little red armbands with white circles, and black squiggles with 90-degree-angles.
The Margaret Mead quote, of course, was left intact. Because it applied just as much to those guys as it did to your utopian fantasies.
(Godwin invoked, thread out :)
As you said. You win some, you lose some.
First off - $82M for a moon shot is dirt cheap. We spend that going to Mars.
Second - you answered the question yourself. $0.80 per head. (Actually, at 1B people, it's $0.08 per head.)
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Last time I checked, even in India, that didn't buy much more than a day's worth of fish.
Force a bunch of men to learn how to go to the moon and odds are one of them will come up with something pretty neat, even if you don't give a whit for space exploration. Velcro, anyone?
To put it in historical perspective - one of the reasons you have a computer on your desk is because miniaturized electronics were required for the guidance systems of the first generation of ICBMs.
EMPs from incoming Russian nukes would fsck up any ground-based guidance communications systems, so the guidance had to be onboard the missile. Vacuum tubes were far too bulky, and weren't sturdy enough to survive launch. Even transistors were still too bulky. Solution obvious - integrated circuits, multi-layer circuit boards, and mass production.
The Minuteman II guidance system marked the first major production use of integrated circuits.
If the Indians can produce anything as cool by today's standards (maybe even a low-cost heavy-lift vehicle), they can make a fortune for their government by launching the rest of the world's satellites.
But no, you're right. That tech stuff never fed nobody. Let's give a billion people 8 cents' worth of fish.
Agreed.
But then fer chrissakes do it in public school and high school.
There's no physiological reason why a Junior High student (gr. 7 or 8) shouldn't be able to understand the basic techniques of rational argument, and spot logical fallacies.
Likewise, there's no reason any elementary school teacher shouldn't be able to teach this. Unlike calculus, or physics, this isn't rocket science.
There may be political reasons why you can go through high school and learn nothing about rhetoric, reasoning, the difference between science and not-science, and the basic history of science, but there's no real reason.
There's even a damn good political reason to teach kids this stuff -- an electorate of morons may be good for getting re-elected, but they're useless for building a functioning economy. And a functioning economy is what's needed for the tax dollars that support the rest of the State.
If politicians had any loyalty to the two-party system, they'd support a basic education for everyone, because once the economy implodes (say, after another 20 years of a society that graduates only accountants and airport security guards, but no engineers), the two-party system goes with it. That's fine if you're a Senator in your 60s, but it's not gonna help if you're new to politics and just starting to work your way up the party ladder, because you're gonna have to clean up the mess.
Winning elections is great - but what's the point of winning an election 5-6 terms from now when there's gonna be nothing left to rule?
Granted, the real motivation is to demonstrate to Pakistan and China that they have missi^H^H^H^H^H launch vehicles capable of reaching escape velocity, and thus, any targe^H^H^H^H^Hlocation on the planet.
But that said - it was precisely the same showboating against the Soviets that got us to the moon.
And if the same showboating can get either India or China (or both!) to the moon, maybe they'll be able to send a few scientists along for the ride. It's Space Race, Mk. II!
I'm not naive enough to believe that this will result in a permanent manned lunar base, or any long-term exploration of the lunar surface and subsurface, but I'm at least optimistic that we [humanity] will be able to piggyback a few scientists along for the ride, and learn a few things that we couldn't easily learn with robotic missions.
It's depressing that we're still at the stage where a guy with a pick and shovel can accomplish more in five minutes on the moon's surface than any probe NASA is likely to launch in the next 50 years.
Long as we're onto slow-cooking and fun with starch, try "Soubise". (Frogspeak for "onions and rice".)
1) 2 big-azz yellow onions, about a pound's worth. Slice 'em.
2) 1/2 cup rice. Boil for 5 minutes. You don't want the rice cooked.
3) 1/2 to 3/4 sticks of butter. (4-6 tbls.)
4) 1/2 tsp salt.
5) 1/2 cup whipping cream. (Or you can get away with milk, but I like it with cream. )
5) a few slices (1/4 cup) of swiss cheese.
Melt butter in crock pot or casserole. Toss in onions and salt until coated with melted butter and starting to soften. Toss in rice.
Bake mucho-slowly for an hour or so (easy enough - you can't overcook this :) at 300F. The onions disintegrate, leach out their water, turn insanely sweet, and flavor the rice. (Should be nice and yellow, not brown, when done baking.)
Take out of oven, nuke milk to warm, and toss in the milk. Stir in the cheese. Nice and creamy.
(If you wanna make a sauce, you can puree this and call it a sauce soubise.)
I find it also makes a great side dish all on its own, just heaped out of the dish. You can also sprinkle the top with cheese and bake a layer of cheese onto it. Or stir in some fresh parsley along with the cheese. It's versatile stuff.
If you're a carnivore (I am), it's also great with a splash of gravy or anything really thick and rich, like what you'd get if you pan-fried a steak and made a sauce out of the juices, or sauteed a pile of mushrooms. And it's just plain awesome with a big hunk of roasted or braised game or a leg o' lamb.
To be more precise - some chemical reactions just happen to require a lot of energy and atom-by-atom processing in order to be reversed.
You can, for instance, quite easily "uncook" a scrambled egg - by using a chicken as a bioreactor.
Simply cram lots of milk and scrambled eggs into the beak end of a chicken, wait a few weeks, and voila! Reconstructed egg proteins are extruded from the, uh... other end of the chicken.
(And what's even cooler, the reconstituted egg proteins are produced in ovoid-shaped calcium-based single-serving units. Much easier to handle than everything else that comes out of the business end of a chicken, lemme tell ya.)
He might drive the Iron Chef nuts by using 200 cloves of garlic.
But he'd win.
Garlic fucking rules.
ObGarlic:
1) One head of garlic. Maybe two. Peel.
2) Slowly boil cloves in 4-5 cups of water. Add a bay leaf and some salt.
3) Strain. Stash garlic in cheesecloth, and wring out.
4) Return soup to a boil. Thicken and enrich with egg yolks.
Eat. Eat well.
>
>Translation: We're covering our rears as fast as we can.
Close, but wrong. That one means "Sell your stock now, because while we're committed to compliance, we haven't achieved it.
It's what's not said that counts.
> Or to steal one from Dilbert...
>
> Management: Employees are our most valuable resource.
>
> Translation: (nothing)
Again, close but not quite "nothing".
Translation: "We're laying some of you off. Go to fuckedcompany.com to see if you need to start looting now, or if you can wait a week to start looting."
>..except that the exact same sentence can be translated differently, depending on the context.
>
> Speaker 1: Where are we going?
> Speaker 2: To the bank.
And in the vein of the submitter who wrote " perhaps one day they will be able to develop one that will allow politicians to talk to normal folks and be understood."...
Besides, all political speech boils down to (a) brute force, and (b) the non-politician going to the bank to pay for it.
(ahem. the way God intended.)
> but a sizable minority (myself included) put it in there so unrolls from the bottom. Each group drives the other nuts.
Unrolling from the top makes sense - it's the middle of the night, you take a dump (or leak, if female), and you just wanna paw at the roll (why turn the light on?), and wow, there's a sheet or two or three in your hand.
Or "huh, wheredafuxdapapuh? fuggin underrollin' roommate", and you have to shove the roll away from you until the pieces of TP finally emerge from behind the roll in the wall.
OK, heretic. What's your excuse?
(Actually, the excuse of the other guy who said "under is best because it's easier to re-roll if the cat unrolls it" made sense. But as long as I'm in the company of an under-roller, what if there's no cat in the house? Seriously, what's the rationale for under-rolling?)
Think about it? I have it on my Linux box. (What do you think /dev/null is made of?)
I've never understood celebrity. "Look, it's a guy pretending to be a big-azz robot, and he blows shit up!" is all I need to know about Arnold. Once the credits roll, I don't need to know what Arnold's up to until the sequel.
But you're correct *sigh* in that there's a whole industry built around people who do care what the "stars" are doing off-screen. That industry is effectively a marketing arm of the movie industry -- if the proles don't see Arnold's name in the headlines every day and aren't motivated to see every film in which he stars, they won't see the three other movies that he's contracted for between now and the next blockbuster.
> You could make it up I guess, but it wouldn't be as intersting as a real person.
Don't be so sure. Have you read William Gibson's Idoru? :-) [Plot summary: A real-life rock star falls in love with a celebrity who exists solely as a piece of software.]
If the electrodes stimulated my pleasure center 24/7, by definition, the answer would be yes.
(And if not before the surgery, then certainly after surgery. "Nope, no regrets at all, man, it's like they make me run these big mazes, but the walls themselves are made of cheese!")
> Anybody who doesn't read their bill before paying it is a jackass anyway. I look over my credit card bill every time...same for phone bill just to make sure. I've had to call the phone company a couple of times because of calls that I know were not made, and they dropped them from the bill.
Good advice, but useless in this case.
Gramps calls the phone company and says "What's this lease charge?" and the droid on the other end reads back the answer from the script: "Well, sir, you lease the phone from us, and if it breaks, we send you a new phone. You have to keep paying or you can't use that phone. You could buy a new phone - we have the FooBlitzkyCompuDyne 12000E for $129.99. Oh, you'd prefer to continue leasing? No problem, sir, thank you for bending over for Ma Bell and her strap-on!"
A more modern example:
- Charges for Network Access for Interstate Calling, Imposed by FCC -- which isn't quite true. They're imposed by the FCC, but the phone company can charge whatever the fuck it wants and keep the profit.
- Federal Universal Service fee
- State high cost fund surcharge
- State teleconnect fund surcharge
- Universal Lifeline Telephone Service Surcharge
- Rate Surcharge
- State Regulatory Fee
- State TDD Relay Service Fee
- Tax (!) federal and state
So - my local phone bill is about 50% higher with all these fees than it would be without 'em.
Then there's the...
- Carrier Universal Service Charge (which all the LD carriers just jacked up within a month of each other. Price-fixing, anyone? This is another "FCC" charge - that phone companies can charge any amount they want and skim the profit from before remitting the FCC's cut)
- Single Bill Fee (Fair enough, that's my fault, but why should I pay $1.50 for less paperwork on my part and theirs?)
- Carrier property tax
- LD Calling Plan Monthly Charge (Is it a charge? Or is it a use-it-or-lose-it? It started out as use-it-or-lose-it, then they changed it to a charge for the hell of it. My fault for sticking with 'em. But any other telco would do the same thing.)
- City utility tax
- Federal tax
- State and local (as opposed to city?!) tax
Now - you tell me - which of these fees are real and which are fodder for future class-action lawsuits? You think I can trust the accounting from which those numbers are derived? (You think anyon is ever gonna be able to figure out a telco's billing structure to determine the legit charges from the frauds?)
Fuck the telcos. Every last one of 'em. I hope they all crash and burn in an avalanche of debt. Every last one of 'em. It'll suck for a month, but maybe someone who isn't a con artist at heart will relight the fiber.
The guy who paid $4/month to keep his rotary service even though he was the last guy in the exchange to use it? Thank you, you're an inspiration to us all. Nice to see one of us being able to gouge the motherf00ckers back for once. (I'm calling my assnozzle telco and asking 'em if I can get rotary tomorrow. The look on the face of the front-line drone when it hears the question might make me want to buy a video phone :-)