Re:Caffeine, like all alkaloids, is bug poison.
on
Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 1
Then I guess the premise of Naked Lunch is plausable... Bug poison may actually be drugs....
Re:Warning: Coffee contains DHMO
on
Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Because it's funnier to mod it informative than to mod it funny. The thought that someone might see it labeled as informative and then make an ass out of themselves repeating it in all seriousness around the DHMO-cooler is hilarious.
No, I noticed that the first cup Fry bought with his $300 bill cost him 3 bucks. It had to cost 3 bucks since everybody got 1 $300 bill and his coffee samhidi kicked in at 100 cups. The $300 bill was probably a satire on GW Bush's $300 tax rebate.
You may not be too suprised that in the future a cup of coffee costs $3.00. Heck now at overpriced Starbucks type places you can probably find coffee for $3.00/cup. But recently I've been noticing that the prices in Futurama actually appear somewhat lower than current prices, but that those prices were approximately the same as the prevalent prices during the timeframe when Futurama was being made..
Wrong. Coffee makes you pee because it contains caffiene. If you drink it too fast, then your kidneys can't keep up and your electrolytes become diluted. The stuff they feed to ppl with diarhea is very thick and contains tons more electrolytes than coffee. When I saw the stuff I thought it would actually dehydrate someone. I would feel thirsty after drinking that wallpaper paste gunk, that's for sure.
1 can = 12 Oz. 1 2-liter = approx 64 Oz ( 1 qt = 2 pts. 1 pt = 1 lb. 1 lb = 16 Oz. 1 liter = about 1 qt )
64 / 12 = 5 1/3 cans per 2 liter. I used to drink between two and three 2 liter diet cokes per day... It is not out of the realm of possibility that I once drank 4 two-liters which would = 5 1/3 * 4 = 21.3 cans. Thats still not close to 48 cans, though I had no ill effects from that much soda....
It'll be the wave of the future. No gas needed, no plowing, no paving needed either. Little maintenance of highways. CO2 emmisions are reduced by the plants that get fertilized by the resultant Dung.
None of this is needed since flying is actually much easier than driving. There are no obsticles other than other cars in the sky, and navigation & control can be done entirely by computer w/gps.
Maybe we have the available land/labor/technology to *feed* everyone, but what about the resources we spend on Yachts, BMWs, SUVs, Game Consoles, TVs etc? Without spending on these things there would be none of the rewards that give people the incentive to work. Everyone would just sit there and recieve their food dole until it was gone. You very well may be able to take the Gross World Product and divide it by the number of People and come out with acceptable 'rations'. But ask yourself if this kind of efficiency is even possible. And if it were, that would seem to reduce humans to a penicillin-like growth sucking nutrients from the surface of a blue orange orbiting a yellow star in a quiet section of the milky way.
Even if the channels are forcing bundling, requiring everyone ( cable, sattelite, and whatever may come along ) to offer a la carte channels means that no company will be legally able to cave into the channels. This will leave the channels with no customers that can be bullied and so they will have to offer THEIR channels a la carte to the cable companies.
I agree. One man's niche channel is another man's favorite channel. Those who actually watch certain types of programming will pay for their niche programming and those who don't won't. If enough people want something then it will be offered. Maybe the discovery channel would have less UFO-stories if the people who actually watch that channel alot had more say in what was offered.
I consider real-world/Joe-don't-know/mad-mad-house/survivor type shows to be a waste of bandwidth. If there were a niche-channel that offered nothing but that, then I could easily unsubscribe from it, while the primary audience for that crap could subscribe to it forcing any other channel that wanted to offer such fare to compete with the buffys-and-brandons-with-shallow-lives-and-empty-h eads-plotting-against-each-other channel. Maybe they'd choose to specialise in something else themselves instead.
I just delete HSN style channels from my listing, but no doubt these channels pay the satellite company X dollars to carry them. If any of this is passed on to the consumers then I will lose the bite that I take from people that actually buy stuff from those channels in the form of jacked up prices. Will this mean more or less Ron Popiel in the morning? I could cancel a channel that feeds me too much Prolong-lets-you-drive-without-oil, but then price may come into play.
You don't have the choice to buy channels a la carte because nobody, not even satellite offers it. This is a symptom of a breakdown of the market called an oligopoly, a cousin of the better known monopoly. Both the monopoly and the oligopoly are vulnerable to having the benefits of their position taken forcably by a govenment because they are not benefiting consumers as best as they could. Since only people (consumers) vote, they have all the power, so they can ( justly IMHO ) steal from mono/oligopolies of the world that would parasitise us all if left unchecked.
Cables. Naw. & most people don't know how to turn down their screen resolution let alone know how to purchase a new video card. Also many PC games would reset it to high res for you because they expect to be running under high resolution and were not designed to run at low res.
All these buzzwords merely refer to ways of factoring code to make it easy to read/understand so that it can be maintained. It seems that someone creates a programming language to support one of these paradigms(vomits) and then, when they finally get irritated with how the helpful language features seem to restrict them from implementing their idea, they come up with another idea and a language with helpful support for it.
And every time they come up with a new way to factor code it is pointed out that Scheme already supports that methodology without any language changes.
Sure it may be possible to create a language that supports *A* paradigm in an easier-to-learn/easier-to-read way than Scheme, but so far there is none that supports every paradigm and every paradigm that is yet to be thought of like Scheme. People need to give up their lame static typing and just use Scheme. Imagine the time saved not having to learn 900 different languages for 900 different styles of programming when you could just learn Scheme.
The games come on DVDs. PC games still come on CDs because they are still afraid of alienating the vanishingly small segment of the population that still has no DVD player on their computer. ( So far only games really utilize the huge amount of space available on a DVD so for non gamers, DVD is not really a neccessity, but neither is it a neccessity for PC gamers since no games for PC that I know of require it )
The PS2 costs about as much as the graphics card I would have to buy to get comperable performance out of my PC
My TV screen is bigger than my computer screen. For theatrical games, 27 inches is nice, even if the resolution sucks. Resolution isn't as important as size unless there is alot of text and menus. Inability to display text forces game designers to largely eschew them which lets you get more 'into' the game.
I can play a game while someone else uses the computer or vice versa. Why get that video card for the same price as a game system when you'd just have to share?
Console games are Bugfree (TM). They are. I have maybe found 1 or 2 MINOR bugs in console games over the years. Every third PC game I buy must be returned to WAL*MART because it won't install correctly on my computer.
The controllers are the best designed ever.
The only advantage to the PC as a gaming platform is for games like Sim City where lotsa menus are unavoidable and there is so much detail that the resolution of a computer monitor is NECCESARY. Also the raw crunching power of a relatively up to date computer is needed for simulation style games.
Fsck microsoft. They are fixing to 'merge' the PC with the console. This will make the console prone to bugs and make the PC into a black box that I can't do what I want on. "Sorry I can't play Mario Bros because I caught a virus from an email and now I have to reformat my game system. My WinBox OS CD is scratched so I have to buy another one because their damn DRM didn't let me make a backup copy." Yeah right.
Possibly they had the worm already written except for the exploit. Maybe they'd tested spreading and destruction parts using another very old and likely to be already patched exploit and have been waiting, template ready, for an appropriate exploit to be found which they could plug into their worm template.
Landing in Sasquatchewan was unfortunate because that Canadian province is home to the last remaining breeding pair of Bigfootses. Science will never know how that species of primate lived now that the meteor has sqatched them.
The Muslims would want the Mosque rebuilt, and the Jews would want to rebuild *their* Temple of the Mount instead. I dunno what the Christians would want since I have never been religious. Maybe the History Channel will do a 'Mysteries of the Bible' episode on the subject someday - that being the source of most of my knowledge of Judeo-Christian religions, but Christians probably have armegeddon prophesies regarding that spot too.
If someone wanted to stir some shit up so they could 'watch the black ants fight the red ants' then blowing that mosque up might start some entertaining fights to watch on CNN...
DISCLAIMER: This post was a *JOKE*. Don't blow anything up. If you were actually considering it seriously - get a life.
Tommy Chong is in jail for selling water-pipes over the Internet. I can go a couple miles from here to the local head shop ( which happens to be across the street from the police station ) and pick up a bong legally.
Before his arrest, I would have just ASSUMED selling bongs over the Internet was legal. What is the best way for an entrepreneur ( like an individual selling something on eBay ) to avoid tripping over any stupid and obscure laws?
I keep hearing scientist A complain about how they want to do X with the Hubble but now they can't because it's being cancelled. And what a pity since that was the most compelling reason for having the Hubble in the first place. And then the other side says that hubble is of limited usefulness, that it's done all it can do and that it wouldn't be worth the dough to keep it working.
I have to admit that I don't know enough to make an informed decision as to whether the Hubble is worth ( or ever was worth ) it's upkeep in terms of useful science data. Sitting with a knowledgeable person with an opinion either way for a half hour and I could be convinced to hold either opinion if I didn't know enough to take an opinionated diatribe by someone with more information than me with more than a few grains of salt.
But neither does Bush know whether the Hubble is worth it's upkeep, and neither does some NASA Bureaucrat.
So 99.9 % of the population ( me included ) are faced with the following: Do I want to pay ( insert federal budget divided by cost of space shuttle mission to service Hubble * federal tax bill here ) for more pretty space pictures. Of course, there are more pretty space pictures available at NASA's download site than anyone would ever actually look at, and the new ones aren't neccessarily prettier than the old ones. Color prints from Palomar are as esthetically pleasing in a coffee table book as ones from the Hubble. A galaxy is a galaxy whether it is right next door or 13 billion light years away.
Do I want to fund science that I don't understand is is probably a bureaucratic boondoggle science-wise? Any large accumulation of money attracts bureaucrats like a piece of meat attracts maggots and they don't give a damn about anything but their own jobs. Do I want to fund an army of highly paid office parasites who feed me pretty pictures every now and then via the science magazine websites where they are sometimes accompanied by a blurb that tells me something I didn't know but which will be just as convincingly contradicted in next week's issue making me feel dumb?
I like the pretty pictures and the what-if articles, but if I never read those sites, then I wouldn't want to pay to make the news that feeds them.
Just think, rest of the world, if it weren't for you guys having nukes, the US would have troops in your country to enforce tribute payments to the USA.
If there is a tidal wave that washes up 12 miles inland, then I want to be standing 12 miles and 1 foot inland to watch it just so I can say 'Nyah Nyah Nee Goo Goo'.
Only self defense of yourself or the defense of someone else against an attacker gives you the right to kill. Also, in the US, you have the obligation to retreat if possible so that duels are not legal.
However, you can for practically all intents and purposes, shoot a stranger in your house as long as they die so there are no witnesses, and especially if they have no reason to be there and have been convicted of burglery before. As long as you stuck to your story that you thought they were reaching for a weapon, no court would convict you of anything. ( I don't know if their family could still sue you for depriving the burgler of their civil right to life. They would only have to get a jury to believe that it was 51% likely that you killed the burgler knowing they were not intent on hurting you )
I can think of many interesting legal/ethical conundrums regarding the right to kill though:
Imagine if there are 100 people about to be killed and the only way to save the other 99 is to shoot one of the 100. Is that legal? Maybe it would be since the 1 was dead meat anyway, but then again we are all dead meat in the long run.
What about if there are 100 people about to die and the only way to save them is to kill an innocent bystander 300 meters away by shooting them? ( maybe they were deaf an facing away, but their body will fall in such a way as to unplug the heavy piece of machinery that is about to crush the 100 people. ) This is probably the most ethical thing to do, but I don't know if it is legal. I wouldn't do it for 100 strangers because I wouldn't want to face the legal issues involved. But were I altruistic enough to sacrifice my own life for 100 strangers ( and some people are ) then I would probably be altruistic enough to kill the innocent bystander and face murder charges myself. If there was someone I cared alot about among the 100 I might do it too.
I suspect killing an innocent bystander to save 100 people is illegal, but what if there were 1000 people in certain to die without a blood sacrifice? 10000? 10,000,000 about to be blown up by a thermonuclear bomb? Would the murder of one innocent be immoral? Illegal?
If you buy that killing one innocent bystander is justified to save New York City from being obliterated by Tsar Bomba, then what about organ transplants? If you know someone's hematocrit etc, you can assemble a list of five or six people who will die soon unless you shoot that innocent person in the head and steal their organs... At how many people is the cut off? Exactly how many bricks does it take to make a Heap of Bricks?
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Then I guess the premise of Naked Lunch is plausable... Bug poison may actually be drugs....
Because it's funnier to mod it informative than to mod it funny. The thought that someone might see it labeled as informative and then make an ass out of themselves repeating it in all seriousness around the DHMO-cooler is hilarious.
You may not be too suprised that in the future a cup of coffee costs $3.00. Heck now at overpriced Starbucks type places you can probably find coffee for $3.00/cup. But recently I've been noticing that the prices in Futurama actually appear somewhat lower than current prices, but that those prices were approximately the same as the prevalent prices during the timeframe when Futurama was being made..
Wrong. Coffee makes you pee because it contains caffiene. If you drink it too fast, then your kidneys can't keep up and your electrolytes become diluted. The stuff they feed to ppl with diarhea is very thick and contains tons more electrolytes than coffee. When I saw the stuff I thought it would actually dehydrate someone. I would feel thirsty after drinking that wallpaper paste gunk, that's for sure.
64 / 12 = 5 1/3 cans per 2 liter. I used to drink between two and three 2 liter diet cokes per day... It is not out of the realm of possibility that I once drank 4 two-liters which would = 5 1/3 * 4 = 21.3 cans. Thats still not close to 48 cans, though I had no ill effects from that much soda....
It'll be the wave of the future. No gas needed, no plowing, no paving needed either. Little maintenance of highways. CO2 emmisions are reduced by the plants that get fertilized by the resultant Dung.
None of this is needed since flying is actually much easier than driving. There are no obsticles other than other cars in the sky, and navigation & control can be done entirely by computer w/gps.
Maybe we have the available land/labor/technology to *feed* everyone, but what about the resources we spend on Yachts, BMWs, SUVs, Game Consoles, TVs etc? Without spending on these things there would be none of the rewards that give people the incentive to work. Everyone would just sit there and recieve their food dole until it was gone. You very well may be able to take the Gross World Product and divide it by the number of People and come out with acceptable 'rations'. But ask yourself if this kind of efficiency is even possible. And if it were, that would seem to reduce humans to a penicillin-like growth sucking nutrients from the surface of a blue orange orbiting a yellow star in a quiet section of the milky way.
Even if the channels are forcing bundling, requiring everyone ( cable, sattelite, and whatever may come along ) to offer a la carte channels means that no company will be legally able to cave into the channels. This will leave the channels with no customers that can be bullied and so they will have to offer THEIR channels a la carte to the cable companies.
I consider real-world/Joe-don't-know/mad-mad-house/survivor type shows to be a waste of bandwidth. If there were a niche-channel that offered nothing but that, then I could easily unsubscribe from it, while the primary audience for that crap could subscribe to it forcing any other channel that wanted to offer such fare to compete with the buffys-and-brandons-with-shallow-lives-and-empty-h eads-plotting-against-each-other channel. Maybe they'd choose to specialise in something else themselves instead.
I would miss cops tho...
I just delete HSN style channels from my listing, but no doubt these channels pay the satellite company X dollars to carry them. If any of this is passed on to the consumers then I will lose the bite that I take from people that actually buy stuff from those channels in the form of jacked up prices. Will this mean more or less Ron Popiel in the morning? I could cancel a channel that feeds me too much Prolong-lets-you-drive-without-oil, but then price may come into play.
You don't have the choice to buy channels a la carte because nobody, not even satellite offers it. This is a symptom of a breakdown of the market called an oligopoly, a cousin of the better known monopoly. Both the monopoly and the oligopoly are vulnerable to having the benefits of their position taken forcably by a govenment because they are not benefiting consumers as best as they could. Since only people (consumers) vote, they have all the power, so they can ( justly IMHO ) steal from mono/oligopolies of the world that would parasitise us all if left unchecked.
Cables. Naw. & most people don't know how to turn down their screen resolution let alone know how to purchase a new video card. Also many PC games would reset it to high res for you because they expect to be running under high resolution and were not designed to run at low res.
And every time they come up with a new way to factor code it is pointed out that Scheme already supports that methodology without any language changes.
Sure it may be possible to create a language that supports *A* paradigm in an easier-to-learn/easier-to-read way than Scheme, but so far there is none that supports every paradigm and every paradigm that is yet to be thought of like Scheme. People need to give up their lame static typing and just use Scheme. Imagine the time saved not having to learn 900 different languages for 900 different styles of programming when you could just learn Scheme.
The only advantage to the PC as a gaming platform is for games like Sim City where lotsa menus are unavoidable and there is so much detail that the resolution of a computer monitor is NECCESARY. Also the raw crunching power of a relatively up to date computer is needed for simulation style games.
Fsck microsoft. They are fixing to 'merge' the PC with the console. This will make the console prone to bugs and make the PC into a black box that I can't do what I want on. "Sorry I can't play Mario Bros because I caught a virus from an email and now I have to reformat my game system. My WinBox OS CD is scratched so I have to buy another one because their damn DRM didn't let me make a backup copy." Yeah right.
Possibly they had the worm already written except for the exploit. Maybe they'd tested spreading and destruction parts using another very old and likely to be already patched exploit and have been waiting, template ready, for an appropriate exploit to be found which they could plug into their worm template.
Landing in Sasquatchewan was unfortunate because that Canadian province is home to the last remaining breeding pair of Bigfootses. Science will never know how that species of primate lived now that the meteor has sqatched them.
The Muslims would want the Mosque rebuilt, and the Jews would want to rebuild *their* Temple of the Mount instead. I dunno what the Christians would want since I have never been religious. Maybe the History Channel will do a 'Mysteries of the Bible' episode on the subject someday - that being the source of most of my knowledge of Judeo-Christian religions, but Christians probably have armegeddon prophesies regarding that spot too.
If someone wanted to stir some shit up so they could 'watch the black ants fight the red ants' then blowing that mosque up might start some entertaining fights to watch on CNN...
DISCLAIMER: This post was a *JOKE*. Don't blow anything up. If you were actually considering it seriously - get a life.
Great...
I'm sure you agree that that's silly.
Before his arrest, I would have just ASSUMED selling bongs over the Internet was legal. What is the best way for an entrepreneur ( like an individual selling something on eBay ) to avoid tripping over any stupid and obscure laws?
I have to admit that I don't know enough to make an informed decision as to whether the Hubble is worth ( or ever was worth ) it's upkeep in terms of useful science data. Sitting with a knowledgeable person with an opinion either way for a half hour and I could be convinced to hold either opinion if I didn't know enough to take an opinionated diatribe by someone with more information than me with more than a few grains of salt.
But neither does Bush know whether the Hubble is worth it's upkeep, and neither does some NASA Bureaucrat.
So 99.9 % of the population ( me included ) are faced with the following: Do I want to pay ( insert federal budget divided by cost of space shuttle mission to service Hubble * federal tax bill here ) for more pretty space pictures. Of course, there are more pretty space pictures available at NASA's download site than anyone would ever actually look at, and the new ones aren't neccessarily prettier than the old ones. Color prints from Palomar are as esthetically pleasing in a coffee table book as ones from the Hubble. A galaxy is a galaxy whether it is right next door or 13 billion light years away.
Do I want to fund science that I don't understand is is probably a bureaucratic boondoggle science-wise? Any large accumulation of money attracts bureaucrats like a piece of meat attracts maggots and they don't give a damn about anything but their own jobs. Do I want to fund an army of highly paid office parasites who feed me pretty pictures every now and then via the science magazine websites where they are sometimes accompanied by a blurb that tells me something I didn't know but which will be just as convincingly contradicted in next week's issue making me feel dumb?
I like the pretty pictures and the what-if articles, but if I never read those sites, then I wouldn't want to pay to make the news that feeds them.
Just think, rest of the world, if it weren't for you guys having nukes, the US would have troops in your country to enforce tribute payments to the USA.
If there is a tidal wave that washes up 12 miles inland, then I want to be standing 12 miles and 1 foot inland to watch it just so I can say 'Nyah Nyah Nee Goo Goo'.
However, you can for practically all intents and purposes, shoot a stranger in your house as long as they die so there are no witnesses, and especially if they have no reason to be there and have been convicted of burglery before. As long as you stuck to your story that you thought they were reaching for a weapon, no court would convict you of anything. ( I don't know if their family could still sue you for depriving the burgler of their civil right to life. They would only have to get a jury to believe that it was 51% likely that you killed the burgler knowing they were not intent on hurting you )
I can think of many interesting legal/ethical conundrums regarding the right to kill though:
Imagine if there are 100 people about to be killed and the only way to save the other 99 is to shoot one of the 100. Is that legal? Maybe it would be since the 1 was dead meat anyway, but then again we are all dead meat in the long run.
What about if there are 100 people about to die and the only way to save them is to kill an innocent bystander 300 meters away by shooting them? ( maybe they were deaf an facing away, but their body will fall in such a way as to unplug the heavy piece of machinery that is about to crush the 100 people. ) This is probably the most ethical thing to do, but I don't know if it is legal. I wouldn't do it for 100 strangers because I wouldn't want to face the legal issues involved. But were I altruistic enough to sacrifice my own life for 100 strangers ( and some people are ) then I would probably be altruistic enough to kill the innocent bystander and face murder charges myself. If there was someone I cared alot about among the 100 I might do it too.
I suspect killing an innocent bystander to save 100 people is illegal, but what if there were 1000 people in certain to die without a blood sacrifice? 10000? 10,000,000 about to be blown up by a thermonuclear bomb? Would the murder of one innocent be immoral? Illegal?
If you buy that killing one innocent bystander is justified to save New York City from being obliterated by Tsar Bomba, then what about organ transplants? If you know someone's hematocrit etc, you can assemble a list of five or six people who will die soon unless you shoot that innocent person in the head and steal their organs... At how many people is the cut off? Exactly how many bricks does it take to make a Heap of Bricks?