Reguardless of how many feel that Bush didn't work out, there is still the majority of people that voted him into office (twice if I might add).
A truly excellent flamebait, sir! Why, you'll be receiving torrents of incendiary verbiage from those deluded fools who think the majority voted for Al Gore first time around! Stick it to those liberals, though, sir, they deserve it!
The irony is, we found out about a log file that logs every visited web page, +username. One of the unpopular teachers even revisited pages students had visited minutes ago just to look at what they were looking at, effectively spying on "our" privacy.
You don't like them spying on you? Fine: throw some sand in their eyes.
Doctor that file! Replace every occurrence of BoringEducationalSite.com with KinkyBondageSlutz.net and watch the fun begin!
I haven't tried Doom 3, but I tell you what, I gave Quake 3 a go when that came out. You wouldn't believe the hassle that was. I'd go into detail, but it was far too long and convoluted to post unless I was in fullscale flame mode...
Anyone else ever have a bugger of a time installing Q3 on Linux, or was I the only one?
I also think that this would be good for having a strong divx like layer. I love linux, but there seems to be too many fads, and flavors-of-the-months for things like that. Games and all that would love something that is common to all sytems.
If by 'divx' you meant 'directx', then there's SDL. That, with the addition of OpenGL, could well become a Linux equivalent.
It's the non-standard nature of the directory tree that gets on my nerves./bin,/usr/bin,/usr/share/bin,/usr/local/bin,/usr/local/share/bin... Aargh!
... there's a perfectly innocent explanation. It eloped with Beagle and got married in secret in the Russian Orthodox monastery where all the Soviet probes defected to over the years.
They're now setting up home in a pleasant spot on the slope of Mount Olympus overlooking the Mariner Valley and hoping to raise a family of small Lego buggies.
I've been thinking about this, and I think we might actually profit by it.
There are only a few countries in Europe that are industrially capable of building the kind of hardware that Aurora would require. The UK is one of them. We would be contributing to the project, and getting back contracts. The same firms that are building parts for the A380 and the Eurofighter can, if paid to do so, build spacecraft components.
Meanwhile, a lot of countries would be contributing to the project purely for prestige and the hope of having a ticket on the Mars ship in 2030 or whenever. Money for no immediate reward, coming our way. If we're not fully involved in Aurora, we won't be top of the list for all that pork-barrel money. All that kit will end up stamped FABRIQUE EN FRANCE.
It comes down to empire. The French still exhert ownership over a couple of countries that have good launch sites. The UK does not.
We've still got some lovely tropical islands in the Caribbean. One of those would do nicely. It would help recruit the best ground crew - too: think about it, would you rather work in a swamp in Florida? Or in some South American rainforest? Perhaps the Kazakh steppe is to your tastes, or maybe even a desolate part of Mongolia?
No, no, no. Coconut Island, that's the place for me! Native chicks who don't wear much, British Overseas Territory tax rates, cheap marijuana, and rockets. I'm up for it, how about you?
More importantly, it comes out not long after ESA reached an agreement with the Russians concerning the development of the Kliper spacecraft. Looks like the successor to Soyuz will be largely paid for by ESA and flown from French Guyana.
But for ESA to do this will take money, and money is short as long as the second-richest country in Europe refuses to spend a single penny on manned spacecraft. British money might make the difference between this thing flying someday and this thing becoming another might-have-been. Not to mention that we'll probably get a good few lucrative contracts related to the development, and the incalculable value to British technology of actually inspiring the next generation. We have way too few new physical science or engineering students in this country right now, and we have sod all to be proud of since we retired the Concorde. America might have betrayed their dream when they cancelled Apollo to pay for Vietnam, but at least they had one. What are we trying for?
After all, perhaps one reason they haven't before now is because the UK or another member country has had these kind of objections.
Quite a lot of the reason, actually. ESA had a project in the 1980s to build a small spaceplane called Hermes. It was going quite nicely, then the Americans accidentally blew up one of their shuttles and that caused a bit of a flap over here too. Subsequent redesigns sent the thing way over budget. The Germans got cross at being asked to pay far too much for the thing, especially with the British refusing to pay anything at all for a manned spacecraft. End result: what was very nearly an independent European spacecraft ended up as a pile of extremely expensive paperwork.
Since then European cosmonauts have mostly flown as passengers on Soyuz and sometimes on the Shuttle. This is a bit annoying, but then... Soyuz just works. What's to stop ESA contracting the Russians to provide capsules and rockets and conducting a space programme that way?
I live there, but what a typical European move, they have one so we've got one.
That is a typical European response. Remember how we all panicked over here when the Russians orbited Sputnik and then Gagarin in quick succession, and we just HAD to do that ourselves and then try to one-up them with a monstrously expensive moon mission? Meanwhile of course the sensible Americans ignored the whole show...
Adult. That's almost funny, because all it really means is possibly more graphic violence and a big step-up on sexual innuendo, both probably offered, in most situations, as a substitute for more creative, thoughtful writing.
I actually doubt that. From a more adult Doctor Who series, I'd expect more frightening little kids in gasmasks and alien refugees reanimating Victorian corpses, and fewer farting Slitheen.
Apparently they had to tone down the horror in The Empty Child in order to avoid... well, basically traumatising an entire generation. What the original was like I don't know, but it must have been something like the evil offspring of Ringu and The Exorcist, if it was worse than what actually went on air...
What truly bothers me is that The Doctor is a 900 year old 'superior being' who has been reduced to lusting after an emotionally immature 19 year old human.
Superior being? Try desperate, lonely refugee.
For eight lifetimes, the Doctor was the superior being. Sure, he slummed it in the rickety old TARDIS, and occasionally picked up human companions whose sole purpose was to provide someone to whom the Doctor could demonstrate his superior knowledge, experience and general leetness, and occasionally to get captured by monsters and need to be rescued. However, he never had to do that. Though he loved playing the rogue Time Lord, he could always go home, face whatever music there might be, and rejoin his own people on Gallifrey. He never needed those companions and always, as you say, played the Superior Being.
However, at some point in the recent past (at least, in the recent past from the Doctor's perspective) there was a Time War. You might have heard of it. In that Time War, Gallifrey was destroyed and the Time Lords were exterminated. The Doctor now has nowhere to go. There's no homeworld. He has no people of his own, he has no roots and no background. Suddenly he's lost. He and the TARDIS are all that's left of the most powerful civilisation that ever was. Not so superior now, are we, Doctor? Not surprising, then, that he's suddenly more personally interested in his human companions. Even a Time Lord needs somebody.
What was it from? SF, or is someone serious about that idea? Because if they are serious, I can't imagine what kind of evidence they might present for it. At least with the Big Splash notion of lunar formation they can compare Moon rocks to those from Earth...
"Earthlings have never come close to inventing a Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator, nor can the 19.7 km height of Mt. Everest even touch Olympus Mons with an altitude of 27 km!", says Mars local, Marvin.
Tch, tch, tch, tch... Nyeeeeeeeh. You got rabbits on Mars, Doc?
Giant purple spiders aside, does the image show actual spots where the remnant magnetic flux is particularly strong? It seems like those spots might be an interesting place to site the first few Mars colonies. Since shielding from the solar wind is a big issue, a location with just a little help from the residual field (even if weak) might have some advantages over a spot with no help at all from the dead crust.
It probably wouldn't help much. The local magnetic remnants would be tiny, not enough to significantly shield an area.
You'd plant your colonies where there are sites of scientific interest, or resources of value to the colonists, and put up with the radiation. One thing you won't be short of on Mars is rock. Lots and lots of rock. Dig a great big tunnel into the side of Mariner Valley, end of radiation problem...
Seeing as how we do not behave exactly like every other animal, would there be a way that we could have come from Mars? Perhaps Adam and Eve were real and the first couple to come.
Rubbish. We came from the Pak homeworld.
In other words, no. We, as in humans, didn't come from Mars. We're definitely mammals, closely related to the other great apes. It's about as plain as you could ask for at every level from DNA right through to gross anatomy.
It is conceivable that life originated on Mars and spread to Earth in the days of nothing but single-celled organisms, but that's quite another matter.
Also interesting is Andrew Bunnie's flat bed page scanner mod to use blue light instead of white. This made the yellow tracking dots easier to see, and the whole page could be seen at once to determine the pattern they made.
Right. So now, in order to ensure that we remain safe from terrorists, paedophiles, and liberals, we need to compel scanner manufacturers to make sure their products will refuse to show the secret codes we already compelled the printer manufacturers to install.
Don't worry, citizen. We have it all under control.
The world is slowly getting so fat it's going to spin out of orbit..
No, not the world; just one particular landmass in the Northern Hemisphere.
That won't spin us out of orbit, but the imbalance of mass with so much blubber concentrated on one continent might well lead the axis to wobble all over the place. Keep an eye on Sirius, it's your new North Star...
In any event, it's silly to deny that Windows hasn't had a positive effect on the number of machines in people's homes these days. I realize it's not fun to think about and all, but honestly, that's just not something to be in denial about.
Still not convinced. It's the open IBM platform more than the Windows OS that made the PC take off in popularity and leave the Mac behind, but that was never really a mass home market.
Ten years ago the most basic home PC cost about a grand, and might have as its big selling point a copy of Encarta. That's the home PC á la Microsoft. Nowadays a basic PC costs a few hundred, and has as its big selling point a connection to the Internet. That's what's changed. We have to thank the massive drop in hardware costs and the increased importance of the Internet for the huge number of home PCs today. The OS is quite irrelevant. Any cheap graphical interface would have done just as well; all that DOS / Windows had as an advantage was that they were far less expensive than the commercial Unices at the time.
The Bill Gates foundation is pretty nice. Even though I support Linux, they have kept our school computers very nice.
The crack dealer at the front gate has the same policy. If Bill can make sure that all schools use his software, then a generation grows up that knows nothing but Office on Windows. A great way to cement a monopoly, ne? Better yet, it costs Bill nothing to stamp out some more Windows CDs for schools, but he can claim his generosity against tax at full market value!
Isn't it great to be a selfless, altruistic philanthropist?
But seriously speaking DOS did revolutionalize the personal PC segment so it has its place in history.
No, the IBM PC did that, because it was an open platform, of which any manufacturer could create compatible clones. DOS was just along for the ride. The PC platform succeeded despite DOS, not because of it.
most/.ers wouldn't be here if they hadn't been introduced to computers at some point; most people are introduced to computing through Windows.
BBC Micro model B, followed by RiscOS on Acorn Archimedes. I might add that when I moved to high school I switched from RiscOS to Windows 3.1. A painful experience.
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A truly excellent flamebait, sir! Why, you'll be receiving torrents of incendiary verbiage from those deluded fools who think the majority voted for Al Gore first time around! Stick it to those liberals, though, sir, they deserve it!
Hurricanes Angel, Borg, Chewbacca and Dalek on their way right now...
You don't like them spying on you? Fine: throw some sand in their eyes.
Doctor that file! Replace every occurrence of BoringEducationalSite.com with KinkyBondageSlutz.net and watch the fun begin!
I haven't tried Doom 3, but I tell you what, I gave Quake 3 a go when that came out. You wouldn't believe the hassle that was. I'd go into detail, but it was far too long and convoluted to post unless I was in fullscale flame mode...
Anyone else ever have a bugger of a time installing Q3 on Linux, or was I the only one?
If by 'divx' you meant 'directx', then there's SDL. That, with the addition of OpenGL, could well become a Linux equivalent.
It's the non-standard nature of the directory tree that gets on my nerves. /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/share/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/share/bin... Aargh!
They're now setting up home in a pleasant spot on the slope of Mount Olympus overlooking the Mariner Valley and hoping to raise a family of small Lego buggies.
I didn't know the Department of Redundancy Department had an office in Japan...
There are only a few countries in Europe that are industrially capable of building the kind of hardware that Aurora would require. The UK is one of them. We would be contributing to the project, and getting back contracts. The same firms that are building parts for the A380 and the Eurofighter can, if paid to do so, build spacecraft components.
Meanwhile, a lot of countries would be contributing to the project purely for prestige and the hope of having a ticket on the Mars ship in 2030 or whenever. Money for no immediate reward, coming our way. If we're not fully involved in Aurora, we won't be top of the list for all that pork-barrel money. All that kit will end up stamped FABRIQUE EN FRANCE.
That enough for you, Gordon?
We've still got some lovely tropical islands in the Caribbean. One of those would do nicely. It would help recruit the best ground crew - too: think about it, would you rather work in a swamp in Florida? Or in some South American rainforest? Perhaps the Kazakh steppe is to your tastes, or maybe even a desolate part of Mongolia?
No, no, no. Coconut Island, that's the place for me! Native chicks who don't wear much, British Overseas Territory tax rates, cheap marijuana, and rockets. I'm up for it, how about you?
But for ESA to do this will take money, and money is short as long as the second-richest country in Europe refuses to spend a single penny on manned spacecraft. British money might make the difference between this thing flying someday and this thing becoming another might-have-been. Not to mention that we'll probably get a good few lucrative contracts related to the development, and the incalculable value to British technology of actually inspiring the next generation. We have way too few new physical science or engineering students in this country right now, and we have sod all to be proud of since we retired the Concorde. America might have betrayed their dream when they cancelled Apollo to pay for Vietnam, but at least they had one. What are we trying for?
Quite a lot of the reason, actually. ESA had a project in the 1980s to build a small spaceplane called Hermes. It was going quite nicely, then the Americans accidentally blew up one of their shuttles and that caused a bit of a flap over here too. Subsequent redesigns sent the thing way over budget. The Germans got cross at being asked to pay far too much for the thing, especially with the British refusing to pay anything at all for a manned spacecraft. End result: what was very nearly an independent European spacecraft ended up as a pile of extremely expensive paperwork.
Since then European cosmonauts have mostly flown as passengers on Soyuz and sometimes on the Shuttle. This is a bit annoying, but then... Soyuz just works. What's to stop ESA contracting the Russians to provide capsules and rockets and conducting a space programme that way?
That is a typical European response. Remember how we all panicked over here when the Russians orbited Sputnik and then Gagarin in quick succession, and we just HAD to do that ourselves and then try to one-up them with a monstrously expensive moon mission? Meanwhile of course the sensible Americans ignored the whole show...
I actually doubt that. From a more adult Doctor Who series, I'd expect more frightening little kids in gasmasks and alien refugees reanimating Victorian corpses, and fewer farting Slitheen.
Apparently they had to tone down the horror in The Empty Child in order to avoid... well, basically traumatising an entire generation. What the original was like I don't know, but it must have been something like the evil offspring of Ringu and The Exorcist, if it was worse than what actually went on air...
Superior being? Try desperate, lonely refugee.
For eight lifetimes, the Doctor was the superior being. Sure, he slummed it in the rickety old TARDIS, and occasionally picked up human companions whose sole purpose was to provide someone to whom the Doctor could demonstrate his superior knowledge, experience and general leetness, and occasionally to get captured by monsters and need to be rescued. However, he never had to do that. Though he loved playing the rogue Time Lord, he could always go home, face whatever music there might be, and rejoin his own people on Gallifrey. He never needed those companions and always, as you say, played the Superior Being.
However, at some point in the recent past (at least, in the recent past from the Doctor's perspective) there was a Time War. You might have heard of it. In that Time War, Gallifrey was destroyed and the Time Lords were exterminated. The Doctor now has nowhere to go. There's no homeworld. He has no people of his own, he has no roots and no background. Suddenly he's lost. He and the TARDIS are all that's left of the most powerful civilisation that ever was. Not so superior now, are we, Doctor? Not surprising, then, that he's suddenly more personally interested in his human companions. Even a Time Lord needs somebody.
What was it from? SF, or is someone serious about that idea? Because if they are serious, I can't imagine what kind of evidence they might present for it. At least with the Big Splash notion of lunar formation they can compare Moon rocks to those from Earth...
Tch, tch, tch, tch... Nyeeeeeeeh. You got rabbits on Mars, Doc?
It probably wouldn't help much. The local magnetic remnants would be tiny, not enough to significantly shield an area.
You'd plant your colonies where there are sites of scientific interest, or resources of value to the colonists, and put up with the radiation. One thing you won't be short of on Mars is rock. Lots and lots of rock. Dig a great big tunnel into the side of Mariner Valley, end of radiation problem...
Rubbish. We came from the Pak homeworld.
In other words, no. We, as in humans, didn't come from Mars. We're definitely mammals, closely related to the other great apes. It's about as plain as you could ask for at every level from DNA right through to gross anatomy.
It is conceivable that life originated on Mars and spread to Earth in the days of nothing but single-celled organisms, but that's quite another matter.
Nice idea. I'd have them record everything as having been printed 09/11/01 on printer 05417748117740317, just to spite 'em ;-)
Right. So now, in order to ensure that we remain safe from terrorists, paedophiles, and liberals, we need to compel scanner manufacturers to make sure their products will refuse to show the secret codes we already compelled the printer manufacturers to install.
Don't worry, citizen. We have it all under control.
No, not the world; just one particular landmass in the Northern Hemisphere.
That won't spin us out of orbit, but the imbalance of mass with so much blubber concentrated on one continent might well lead the axis to wobble all over the place. Keep an eye on Sirius, it's your new North Star...
Still not convinced. It's the open IBM platform more than the Windows OS that made the PC take off in popularity and leave the Mac behind, but that was never really a mass home market.
Ten years ago the most basic home PC cost about a grand, and might have as its big selling point a copy of Encarta. That's the home PC á la Microsoft. Nowadays a basic PC costs a few hundred, and has as its big selling point a connection to the Internet. That's what's changed. We have to thank the massive drop in hardware costs and the increased importance of the Internet for the huge number of home PCs today. The OS is quite irrelevant. Any cheap graphical interface would have done just as well; all that DOS / Windows had as an advantage was that they were far less expensive than the commercial Unices at the time.
The crack dealer at the front gate has the same policy. If Bill can make sure that all schools use his software, then a generation grows up that knows nothing but Office on Windows. A great way to cement a monopoly, ne? Better yet, it costs Bill nothing to stamp out some more Windows CDs for schools, but he can claim his generosity against tax at full market value!
Isn't it great to be a selfless, altruistic philanthropist?
No, the IBM PC did that, because it was an open platform, of which any manufacturer could create compatible clones. DOS was just along for the ride. The PC platform succeeded despite DOS, not because of it.
BBC Micro model B, followed by RiscOS on Acorn Archimedes. I might add that when I moved to high school I switched from RiscOS to Windows 3.1. A painful experience.