An man from China once said, China has every thing, what could the rest of the world offer in trade? The answer was thest addicting millions to opium and fighting the boxers and chasing the empress from her throne for the right.
The man in question was the Emperor Qinglong, in reply to an embassy from King George III, who was trying to open up trade with China. His reply is... amazing. The sheer arrogance and, so it seems, total ignorance on the part of the Celestial Emperor of what he was dealing with, is quite astounding. To say to the ruler of the rising British Empire, "Tremblingly obey and show no negligence!"... wow. Not really surprising things ended badly there. The whole letter is just one long spectacular insult.
What just about everybody forgets about the spece elevator is that every orbit lower than geosynchronous will eventually intersect the elevator (assuming the elevator is anchored on the equator). A particle too small to track from earth can still have quite an impact.
Simple solution: redundant threads.
Assume we can create nanotube fibres capable of space-elevator work. We're looking here at a fine thread of supremely strong material, holding up a cab full of cargo and passengers at one end, and a counterweight full of ballast at the other. Our problem is that an unnoticed small piece of space junk might impact the thread and cause a disaster.
If something large intersects the elevator, we're stuffed, but large objects can be spotted in advance and shot down. It's the little shards that we have to worry about, and have to find an engineering solution for.
Very well: instead have a dozen separate threads. The cab's big, because humans are big and so are the modules we want to put in space. The ropes are relatively thin. We can engineer things so that we can cope with the loss of one strand, and let the others take the strain while we get it repaired.
The first civilization to build one gets a free orbiting city and pollution free launches to orbit.
Me arse it does. All bases are considered to have an Aerospace Complex for purposes of building orbital installations, and produce from orbital installations (e.g Nessus mining platforms, orbital farms or solar arrays) is doubled. Oh, and it allows units equipped with Drop Pods to make Orbital Insertions to any location on Planet.
Great. Turn the allure of orbital travel into a 200km ride in a claustrophobic box with 17 people, sandwiched against some dude with balls-to-the-walls BO with a tinny rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" playing in the background. Where do I sign up?
Miyazaki's use of CGI is usually excellent and scarcely noticeable; the only place it didn't work was in the scene in Spirited Away where Haku and Sen are going along a path between two hedges with lots of flowers on either side - on their way to visit her parents. They seem to be in front of the scene there, and not in it, and that just broke the illusion for me.
What is the paticular wackiness of Japanese animators in respect to Tokyo?
Huge city, something like thirty million people, and pretty much guaranteed to get a complete pasting from an earthquake sooner or later. When the big one hits Tokyo, well... New Orleans will look like Boscastle.
Not to mention the complete wreck the USAF left of the place, and the repeated levellings of the city by Gojira and his comrades.
Did you ever see the original cut of Dragonball Z? I'll give you the stupid part, but I would hardly call it "kiddy", you know, with all the decapitation going on.
No kidding. It got pretty nasty at times - particularly all those Namekkuseijin that Vegeta killed while he was looking for the dragonballs... For that matter, you probably wouldn't get away with Muten Roshi's behaviour in a Western show. Dirty sod.
Toriyama had a really nice thing going on, but he succumbed to the pressure of the fans and extended the anime forever, recycling the same storyline over and over again.
Now come on! There's a great deal of plot variety in Dragonball Z!
For instance, Raditz arrives and beats the hell out of Gokuu. Then Gokuu goes away and trains, comes back, and defeats Raditz.
Then it turns out that Vegeta and Nappa are due to arrive shortly, so everybody trains for ages, then they fight Nappa and get thumped, then Gokuu arrives, beats the hell out of Nappa, goes to some Kaiou-ken multiple, and beats the hell out of Vegeta.
Then Frieza turns up and beats the hell out of everybody. Gokuu trains for a while, fights Frieza, becomes a Super Saiyajin, and defeats Frieza. Here I gloss over the interesting subplot whereby the Ginyuu Toku-Sentai turn up and beat the hell out of everybody until Gokuu arrives and beats them all.
Later, the Androids turn up and beat the hell out of everyone. After recovering from a near-fatal heart condition, Gokuu would have defeated the Androids, if...
... Cell hadn't got there first. But in a surprise plot twist, everyone goes off and trains for a while, then Gokuu fights Cell, then Gohan fights Cell, then Gohan goes SSJ2 and defeats Cell, then Gokuu teleports Cell away to undergo a controlled detonation, then Cell comes back from the dead and Gohan fights him again and wins again.
Then Buu turns up and... well, you get the picture. The plot is completely and entirely different every time. There's nothing in the least predictable or blatantly repetitive about any of this:-)
Rockstar derailed the PR build-up for the next generation consoles. It left the ESRB hanging by a thread and drew unwanted attention to Walmart. Rockstar has few friends left in the board room and none in government.
And every gamer in America heard all about it. Cue a run on original-release copies of San Andreas, I've no doubt.
Rockstar have never given a fuck for conservative morality, except insofar as offending said morality gets them free publicity. They certainly went out of their way to piss off the British tabloids, back when the original GTA came out.
The whole thing has been great publicity for Rockstar and the GTA franchise. So, if a few years down the line they release GTA4, but run into this stupid problem again, then they can release a US-rated version that just has the brutal violence, and a UK version that has the sex in it too, and amazon.co.uk can make a fucking killing, no pun intended, on mail orders from the US.
For a certain kind of game, controversy is good publicity. Rockstar, it must be said, are masters of this dark art; they'll do very, very well out of it when the next GTA game comes out.
If the "mark of the Beast" implanted chip is RFID, then it could be put pretty much anywhere on the body, so a potential mugger would have no idea where to find the chip to 'hack it out'.
Nope. Revelations says it has to be in the forehead or the right hand. Technical considerations are all very well, but if you were to put the chip in the buttocks then not only would you make the whole enterprise a bad joke but you'd make the Bible into a colossal LIE! HERETIC! UNBELIEVER! You will burn in the pits of HELL for your abominable blasphemies! The unforgivable sin against the very Holy Spirit! Loathsome bastard child of Beelzebub, infernal worker of the Adversary's indescribable horrors!
... um... sorry. The doctor says my computer time is up now, and it's time for my pills.
And have you seen what the going rates for broadband are up there ?
Meh. Bring a big, big antenna and bear in mind that you have line-of-sight to 50% of the wireless hotspots on the planet. LOTS of bandwidth.
The problem is latency. You'll be playing no twitch games, but look on the bright side: there is no way anyone can get a summons anywhere near you. Leech away!
That said, usenet is a wierd beast, clearly not anonymous but probably not high on the radar either.
It's safe enough to download from USENET. ISTR that the main commercial providers like Giganews make a point of keeping no logs, so that even if subpoenaed they can't betray their customers. For that matter, even if you use your ISP's USENET server, how are the **AA ever going to know what you downloaded? The ISP are hardly likely to tip them off - the pirate material was hosted on their machine to begin with...
As for uploading, I suspect strongly anonymous sharing could be done easily enough. Maybe we could finally get some actual use out of that bastard Hipcrime...
Personally I think it's a perfectly valid agreement and if I could save $30 on a $100 toner cartridge, I'd do it.
Hey, sure you would. It's a good deal.
Now, how long do you think the higher-priced cartidges without the silly legalese will be on the market? Who's going to buy them? Nobody as far as I can see. They'll be there for show, and after a while they'll be withdrawn.
After which you will no longer own any ink cartridge you buy; you will merely buy a licence to use one for a while, after which it must be returned.
And then the price goes back up to the highest value Lexmark thinks it can get away with.
It occurs to me that you could put small print on anything you like: 'This product is only licenced, not sold. It remains the property of Megacorp USA. This licence may be revoked at any time, for breach of terms, illegal use, or at any time by representatives of Megacorp USA.' Chances are we won't actually own a single thing by the time the century's out.
It's your lump of plastic and assorted trace metals. However, it's their patented technology which you need a licence to use legally.
You know, there was once a time when most people owned very little. The average European owned no land; instead he rented patches of land from the local lord, and paid most of his produce to that lord in rent.
We're heading back that way now. It's not land any more, no, it's intellectual property. The way things are going we geeks won't be free to invent as we always have done any more; we'll have to pay massive dues to our feudal overlords who own patents on everything.
The best thing is, the libertarians won't care. It's not the government that's pissing all over us, it's private enterprise. And that makes all the difference, doesn't it?
If you've ever lived or worked on farm with chickens you've seen how relentless and brutal they are chasing insects. Even stinging insects like bees and wasps are no match for that lightning fast beak. Free range chickens are quick and intelligent hunters.
They're quite tribal, too. I mean, you're a mighty warrior hero with more Pieces of Heart than you can count, you wander into town and start slashing at a chicken just for fun, next thing you know there's an entire flock of them, they're all over the place and all attacking you and all you can do is run...
Uh-oh. New Orleans is, from what I hear, full of psycho survivalists living out a Mad Max fantasy. If that lot see foreign troops on the streets of a US city - worse yet, the British, the old enemy - well, they'll go bananas. More so.
Canadians would be OK, though. Hard to tell the difference, eh?
Mmm. DHS was set up to, what, deal with the 'terrorist threat'?
OK. Let's suppose the worst nightmare comes true, the one the neocons keep telling us is such a realistic threat, the terrorists detonate a real live nuke in a city.
Well, then, we're stuffed, aren't we? Clearly they can't handle a flooded city even when given several days' warning. So if some sod manages to cause comparable damage with a bomb, with no warning...
BTW, I'm happy to remind you that if you are american, you are most certainly of european stock; be it Frog, Brit or Kraut, you all evolved (mutated in some cases) to become the americans...
Um. No, not necessarily. Quite apart from the surviving native populations, and the San Francisco Chinese, you are aware that enormous numbers of Africans also migrated to the New World? They did so on European ships, and it can't really be said that they were especially keen to go, but go they did, and their descendants make up a large fraction of the population of the modern United States.
This is known as Neo-Darwinism as the primary idea of primitive organisms evolving into complex ones remains but the process driving it is not natural selection but mutations.
So, what makes mutation A survive and spread throughout the population while mutation B dies horribly of cancer?
Whatever it is that chooses between mutations is driving evolution. Got any candidates besides natural selection?
I would be pissed as hell if I had paid for Opera yesterday or even within the last few months.
A wise man once say: Matt 20:1-16
If I'd paid for Opera yesterday, I would have paid a price I was comfortable with, for a product I liked, and would have been happy. The terms of somebody else's deal with Opera are no concern of mine; if they have managed to get a better deal, good luck to them, but I paid Opera a price I was happy to pay and have no cause to complain.
Illbleed for the Dreamcast had something sort of like a sanity system, in that your mental state was affected by the horrors you witnessed, and could lead to a heart attack.
As did Bureaucracy: every time something horribly bureaucratic happened to you your Blood Pressure would increase. Eventually it would kill you.
Slashdot Mirror
The man in question was the Emperor Qinglong, in reply to an embassy from King George III, who was trying to open up trade with China. His reply is... amazing. The sheer arrogance and, so it seems, total ignorance on the part of the Celestial Emperor of what he was dealing with, is quite astounding. To say to the ruler of the rising British Empire, "Tremblingly obey and show no negligence!"... wow. Not really surprising things ended badly there. The whole letter is just one long spectacular insult.
Simple solution: redundant threads.
Assume we can create nanotube fibres capable of space-elevator work. We're looking here at a fine thread of supremely strong material, holding up a cab full of cargo and passengers at one end, and a counterweight full of ballast at the other. Our problem is that an unnoticed small piece of space junk might impact the thread and cause a disaster.
If something large intersects the elevator, we're stuffed, but large objects can be spotted in advance and shot down. It's the little shards that we have to worry about, and have to find an engineering solution for.
Very well: instead have a dozen separate threads. The cab's big, because humans are big and so are the modules we want to put in space. The ropes are relatively thin. We can engineer things so that we can cope with the loss of one strand, and let the others take the strain while we get it repaired.
Me arse it does. All bases are considered to have an Aerospace Complex for purposes of building orbital installations, and produce from orbital installations (e.g Nessus mining platforms, orbital farms or solar arrays) is doubled. Oh, and it allows units equipped with Drop Pods to make Orbital Insertions to any location on Planet.
See, this is why I bought a 40-gig mp3 player...
Miyazaki's use of CGI is usually excellent and scarcely noticeable; the only place it didn't work was in the scene in Spirited Away where Haku and Sen are going along a path between two hedges with lots of flowers on either side - on their way to visit her parents. They seem to be in front of the scene there, and not in it, and that just broke the illusion for me.
Huge city, something like thirty million people, and pretty much guaranteed to get a complete pasting from an earthquake sooner or later. When the big one hits Tokyo, well... New Orleans will look like Boscastle.
Not to mention the complete wreck the USAF left of the place, and the repeated levellings of the city by Gojira and his comrades.
No kidding. It got pretty nasty at times - particularly all those Namekkuseijin that Vegeta killed while he was looking for the dragonballs... For that matter, you probably wouldn't get away with Muten Roshi's behaviour in a Western show. Dirty sod.
Toriyama had a really nice thing going on, but he succumbed to the pressure of the fans and extended the anime forever, recycling the same storyline over and over again.
Now come on! There's a great deal of plot variety in Dragonball Z!
For instance, Raditz arrives and beats the hell out of Gokuu. Then Gokuu goes away and trains, comes back, and defeats Raditz.
Then it turns out that Vegeta and Nappa are due to arrive shortly, so everybody trains for ages, then they fight Nappa and get thumped, then Gokuu arrives, beats the hell out of Nappa, goes to some Kaiou-ken multiple, and beats the hell out of Vegeta.
Then Frieza turns up and beats the hell out of everybody. Gokuu trains for a while, fights Frieza, becomes a Super Saiyajin, and defeats Frieza. Here I gloss over the interesting subplot whereby the Ginyuu Toku-Sentai turn up and beat the hell out of everybody until Gokuu arrives and beats them all.
Later, the Androids turn up and beat the hell out of everyone. After recovering from a near-fatal heart condition, Gokuu would have defeated the Androids, if...
... Cell hadn't got there first. But in a surprise plot twist, everyone goes off and trains for a while, then Gokuu fights Cell, then Gohan fights Cell, then Gohan goes SSJ2 and defeats Cell, then Gokuu teleports Cell away to undergo a controlled detonation, then Cell comes back from the dead and Gohan fights him again and wins again.
Then Buu turns up and... well, you get the picture. The plot is completely and entirely different every time. There's nothing in the least predictable or blatantly repetitive about any of this :-)
I mean, you don't need labelled keys to go
CTRL-C
PGUP
PGUP
PGUP
CTRL-V
ENTER
and then call it a new story, do you?
And every gamer in America heard all about it. Cue a run on original-release copies of San Andreas, I've no doubt.
Rockstar have never given a fuck for conservative morality, except insofar as offending said morality gets them free publicity. They certainly went out of their way to piss off the British tabloids, back when the original GTA came out.
The whole thing has been great publicity for Rockstar and the GTA franchise. So, if a few years down the line they release GTA4, but run into this stupid problem again, then they can release a US-rated version that just has the brutal violence, and a UK version that has the sex in it too, and amazon.co.uk can make a fucking killing, no pun intended, on mail orders from the US.
For a certain kind of game, controversy is good publicity. Rockstar, it must be said, are masters of this dark art; they'll do very, very well out of it when the next GTA game comes out.
Nope. Revelations says it has to be in the forehead or the right hand. Technical considerations are all very well, but if you were to put the chip in the buttocks then not only would you make the whole enterprise a bad joke but you'd make the Bible into a colossal LIE! HERETIC! UNBELIEVER! You will burn in the pits of HELL for your abominable blasphemies! The unforgivable sin against the very Holy Spirit! Loathsome bastard child of Beelzebub, infernal worker of the Adversary's indescribable horrors!
... um... sorry. The doctor says my computer time is up now, and it's time for my pills.
Meh. Bring a big, big antenna and bear in mind that you have line-of-sight to 50% of the wireless hotspots on the planet. LOTS of bandwidth.
The problem is latency. You'll be playing no twitch games, but look on the bright side: there is no way anyone can get a summons anywhere near you. Leech away!
It's safe enough to download from USENET. ISTR that the main commercial providers like Giganews make a point of keeping no logs, so that even if subpoenaed they can't betray their customers. For that matter, even if you use your ISP's USENET server, how are the **AA ever going to know what you downloaded? The ISP are hardly likely to tip them off - the pirate material was hosted on their machine to begin with...
As for uploading, I suspect strongly anonymous sharing could be done easily enough. Maybe we could finally get some actual use out of that bastard Hipcrime...
Hey, sure you would. It's a good deal.
Now, how long do you think the higher-priced cartidges without the silly legalese will be on the market? Who's going to buy them? Nobody as far as I can see. They'll be there for show, and after a while they'll be withdrawn.
After which you will no longer own any ink cartridge you buy; you will merely buy a licence to use one for a while, after which it must be returned.
And then the price goes back up to the highest value Lexmark thinks it can get away with.
It occurs to me that you could put small print on anything you like: 'This product is only licenced, not sold. It remains the property of Megacorp USA. This licence may be revoked at any time, for breach of terms, illegal use, or at any time by representatives of Megacorp USA.' Chances are we won't actually own a single thing by the time the century's out.
It's your lump of plastic and assorted trace metals. However, it's their patented technology which you need a licence to use legally.
You know, there was once a time when most people owned very little. The average European owned no land; instead he rented patches of land from the local lord, and paid most of his produce to that lord in rent.
We're heading back that way now. It's not land any more, no, it's intellectual property. The way things are going we geeks won't be free to invent as we always have done any more; we'll have to pay massive dues to our feudal overlords who own patents on everything.
The best thing is, the libertarians won't care. It's not the government that's pissing all over us, it's private enterprise. And that makes all the difference, doesn't it?
They're quite tribal, too. I mean, you're a mighty warrior hero with more Pieces of Heart than you can count, you wander into town and start slashing at a chicken just for fun, next thing you know there's an entire flock of them, they're all over the place and all attacking you and all you can do is run...
Wow. I knew we had a central black hole, but I didn't realise it distorted space that much. What value is the pi where you live?
Uh-oh. New Orleans is, from what I hear, full of psycho survivalists living out a Mad Max fantasy. If that lot see foreign troops on the streets of a US city - worse yet, the British, the old enemy - well, they'll go bananas. More so.
Canadians would be OK, though. Hard to tell the difference, eh?
OK. Let's suppose the worst nightmare comes true, the one the neocons keep telling us is such a realistic threat, the terrorists detonate a real live nuke in a city.
Well, then, we're stuffed, aren't we? Clearly they can't handle a flooded city even when given several days' warning. So if some sod manages to cause comparable damage with a bomb, with no warning...
I'm feeling really safe, aren't you?
G 0
B 255
A 0
That's the invisible purple unicorn. Not heretical, but certainly heterodox, and possibly with megalomaniacal tendencies.
Um. No, not necessarily. Quite apart from the surviving native populations, and the San Francisco Chinese, you are aware that enormous numbers of Africans also migrated to the New World? They did so on European ships, and it can't really be said that they were especially keen to go, but go they did, and their descendants make up a large fraction of the population of the modern United States.
Read that fourth paragraph carefully, mods!
Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to stock up on fire and acid.
So, what makes mutation A survive and spread throughout the population while mutation B dies horribly of cancer?
Whatever it is that chooses between mutations is driving evolution. Got any candidates besides natural selection?
A wise man once say: Matt 20:1-16
If I'd paid for Opera yesterday, I would have paid a price I was comfortable with, for a product I liked, and would have been happy. The terms of somebody else's deal with Opera are no concern of mine; if they have managed to get a better deal, good luck to them, but I paid Opera a price I was happy to pay and have no cause to complain.
As did Bureaucracy: every time something horribly bureaucratic happened to you your Blood Pressure would increase. Eventually it would kill you.