What, that you got the best results at about 3 or 4 percent? I never viewed that as being grotesquely right-wing... I always thought that the taxes you, as Mayor, imposed were additional to the taxes imposed by the government of SimNation. Tax rates of a few percent are quite reasonable in that context.
the transformation of one kind of animal into another.
Question: did anyone ever manage to get a clear definition of 'kind' out of a creationist? The best I could ever get out of them was 'if two animals don't have a common ancestor, then they're a different kind', which seems rather circular to me...
I don't think that's a good idea. Photos might get home like last time. Spammers and virus writers and their ilk should be 'rendered', I believe is the term, to an ally with less qualms about these silly 'human rights' that liberals like to bleat about. I'm sure we've still got some nice nasty dictatorial regimes on the list of client states...
Sure, the situation of use beating a technologically superior race of mind reading aliens is not very likely, but it sure makes you feel good when they blow that big saucer up!
For me, Independence Day was another of those films that was subject to what you might call the Pearl Harbour effect. Stay for a while, cheer on the Japanese (or the aliens) and then bugger off after half an hour to get the best effect.
In such a film, the first half hour has a whole lot of truly awesome blowing-up of stuff, which they put into all the advertising and the trailers, and after that it declines quite a lot into a fairly crappy film. Saving Private Ryan was a bit like that too, though its decline wasn't quite so sharp.
The Iron Giant is by far the best Western animation I've seen in a long time. Not particularly close to the book, but I can forgive that in this case:-)
Suuuperrrrmaaaannnn.....
I was a little disappointed with the ending, though. The robot shouldn't have survived. The way it just reassembles itself trivialises its sacrifice, as I see it. I think it would have been a better film if the we'd closed on the statue they put up. That's a minor quibble, though: The Iron Giant is great.
Incidentally, I wonder if the appearance of the robot was influenced by Laputa? Obviously the whole aesthetic is very much that of a fifties B-movie, but the robot does often remind me of those in Miyazaki's film. Probably something about the face...
Unlike most industries, Broadcasters don't even try to appear to care about the people that use their service.
Clue. YOU ARE NOT THEIR CUSTOMER.
You are their product. Commercial TV companies are in the business of supplying eyeballs to advertisers, nothing else. The shows they produce are just part of the process by which they obtain those eyeballs.
Broadcasters care a great deal about the people who use their service - the advertisers.
That's what it's really about. The US has a nice little global hegemony going on, and it would prefer not to have any rivals.
Suppose that once the oil starts to run a little short, a dictator who has contracts to supply oil to America invades the country of a dictator who has contracts to supply oil to Europe. The Americans would greatly prefer that dictator A could liberate country B from the tyranny of dictator C, without the brave freedom-loving people of country B having access to British tanks and German guns with which to defend themselves from the expansionist aggressive armies of dictator A. The Americans would very much prefer that the Europeans not have the military capability to directly assist country B.
It's all about influence on third-parties, really, rather than about fighting each other. War for profit.
1: An EU-US war is madness plain and simple. It's not going to happen. Both sides are very happy to play the game of trade tariff arm-wrestling, but actually fight? Leave it out... Short of a fascist dictator coming to power in the US (no, Bush does not constitute one of these) this is absurd. It's just not a profitable business model.
2: The Russians storming west is more likely than (1), which isn't saying much. The Russian conventional army is really not what it used to be, after years of underfunding. A hypothetical Russian dictator would need to rearm a whole lot to make an invasion of Europe a practical proposition, and that would take a long time. Time enough for the Europeans to get their act together - note that most of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies are now in NATO and the EU. In any case Russia is turning into a capitalist state like no other; they're more likely to see the EU as a huge, rich market on their doorstep, rather than as an opportunity for a scrap.
3) is just nuts. China decides to invade the EU for extra space? Picking out just about the only place on the planet more crowded than China itself? Entirely barmy. The only place China could realistically look for lebensraum is Siberia, and, er... well, I said the Russian conventional forces were not what they were, but that was an outlandish proposition when Tom Clancy tried it out, and it's no saner now.
If I was a European military planner I'd be worried about the dodgy nations on the doorstep, rather than the three other big players. Belarus, for instance, is ruled by a complete and utter fruitcake dictator. And as we expand we'll have more neighbours like that - if Turkey joins up we'll have Iraq right on the EU frontier. That's the sort of thing we'll need to be thinking about.
And as the expanding EU bumps up against such difficulties, we may need to conduct our own military operations, probably without American support - and sometimes, I would imagine, with outright opposition from Washington. That's why we need our own GPS-equivalent. It would be, at the very least, a diplomatic embarrassment to launch a war of which America disapproved, while relying on America's satellites to guide our missiles;-)
It has been promoting as more secure the homegrown Red Flag Linux, based on an open-code operating system.First Linux was invented by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and now Linus is Chinese. Methinks the article author doesn't get it with respect to linux.
What doesn't the author get? They use 'open-code' where the usual term is 'open-source', but that's a minor semantic quibble. Red Flag is Chinese, just like Mandrake is French, SuSE is German, Red Hat is American and Gentoo is Righthereinmyrooman.
If they use less energy, does that also mean that these processors will give off less heat?
No, they'll use less power, but give out the same amount of heat as before. I've already filed a patent for a device that will sit on top of one of these new CPUs and use that heat to run a generator, and feed part of the power produced back into the CPU. The result is a self-powering processor, with enough left over to run the video card.
In future, before you say anything, run it through in your head and think 'Does this allow a perpetual motion machine?' If the answer is yes, keep quiet:-)
But whats the possible damage if one of these plants pulls a Chernobyl on us?
Not much. The waste produced by a fusion reactor is helium - probably the most harmless stuff you can get. The process of fusion produces neutrons, so the fusion container itself will become mildly radioactive, but nowhere near the kind of nastiness you get with fission.
In addition, fusion is inherently fail-safe. If something goes horribly wrong with a fission reactor, you can get a runaway reaction. Meltdown. Not good. But in a fusion reactor, you have to carefully maintain the right conditions for the reaction to happen at all. Screw up and the light goes out, that's about it.
How much energy do they estimate it will take to create (and control?) that one kilogram of "fusion fuel"?
Deuterium... cheap. The oceans are full of the stuff. Tritium and helium-3 are harder to come by; we'd probably need a lunar harvesting operation if we were going to go for fusion on a commercial scale.
They have either blue or green hair, disturbingly large eyes, dynamically variable mouth size, and they spend most of their time piloting giant robots.
Ever heard of a man named Andrew Gilligan? The Hutton Report? The whole thing was a cut-and-dried case of the BBC asserting its right to distort stories and transmit outright lies.
Wow! I'm glad this post went to +5, because what we have here is perhaps unique - certainly not anything I've ever met IRL.
Someone who believed Lord Hutton. A rarity indeed!
We could compare ourselves to the UK. How many cameras in the UK watch people on a daily basis?
You know, I don't so much mind the cameras per se. What pisses me off no end is what the police do with the film.
No, it's not Big Brother. Or rather, it is - not in the Orwell sense, but the fucking Channel 4 sense. The police sell the film to TV companies to put together trash TV about drunks making fools of themselves.
If I come out of a pub pissed and throw up into the gutter, I don't mind some copper watching on the security camera. He's a copper - he sees loads of people throw up in gutters. But if the cops decide to sell the footage of me throwing up into a gutter, and it gets on TV, and people who know me, for instance maybe my boss or my dear old grandmother...
Embarrassing at the very least. The fuck are they playing at, selling the footage for entertainment?
Children so stupid they think America invented the Internet, computer, motor car, light bulb, telephone
I'm not sure how to take this... are you trolling here? Most people would say Americans invented most of these - even foreigners.
However:
the Internet: American in origin, though the Web is Anglo-Swiss and the software running it is increasingly Finnish
computer: British in origin, but developed to its current form mostly by Americans
motor car: German, I think. Benz, IIRC. Mass-production of cars, however, we owe to Ford.
light bulb: British. Joseph Swan, to be precise; I heard he even won a lawsuit against Edison proving that to be the case.
telephone: Bell was American, wasn't he? I think that on this one they have a quite undisputed claim.
That's very nice, but the fact remains that 90% of all spam originates from countries that are out of the FBI's jurisdiction. What are they going to do about it?
90% of spam is sent from servers outside the FBI's jurisdiction. That doesn't mean it originated there: it's sent by Americans who are offering products in America to an American market and expecting to be paid in American dollars to an American bank.
Unless the spammer is prepared personally to move overseas, sooner or later the matter comes into the FBI's jurisdiction.
And since when does being in a foreign country mean you can flout US law? Dmitri and Jon found that out to their cost. Criminals beware: you can no longer hide behind the figleaf of foreign national sovereignty!
'When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor. I think about Linux as a technology that is used by our competitors to build competitive offerings.'
He's quite right here. Linux isn't a competitor - it's just a kernel. GNU/Linux is a competitor. GNU/Linux with X and KDE is a dangerous competitor. But Linux on its own is not a big problem.
Slashdot Mirror
What, that you got the best results at about 3 or 4 percent? I never viewed that as being grotesquely right-wing... I always thought that the taxes you, as Mayor, imposed were additional to the taxes imposed by the government of SimNation. Tax rates of a few percent are quite reasonable in that context.
Question: did anyone ever manage to get a clear definition of 'kind' out of a creationist? The best I could ever get out of them was 'if two animals don't have a common ancestor, then they're a different kind', which seems rather circular to me...
I don't think that's a good idea. Photos might get home like last time. Spammers and virus writers and their ilk should be 'rendered', I believe is the term, to an ally with less qualms about these silly 'human rights' that liberals like to bleat about. I'm sure we've still got some nice nasty dictatorial regimes on the list of client states...
For me, Independence Day was another of those films that was subject to what you might call the Pearl Harbour effect. Stay for a while, cheer on the Japanese (or the aliens) and then bugger off after half an hour to get the best effect.
In such a film, the first half hour has a whole lot of truly awesome blowing-up of stuff, which they put into all the advertising and the trailers, and after that it declines quite a lot into a fairly crappy film. Saving Private Ryan was a bit like that too, though its decline wasn't quite so sharp.
It's just so touching. Bets on how long it lasts?
Suuuperrrrmaaaannnn.....
I was a little disappointed with the ending, though. The robot shouldn't have survived. The way it just reassembles itself trivialises its sacrifice, as I see it. I think it would have been a better film if the we'd closed on the statue they put up. That's a minor quibble, though: The Iron Giant is great.
Incidentally, I wonder if the appearance of the robot was influenced by Laputa? Obviously the whole aesthetic is very much that of a fifties B-movie, but the robot does often remind me of those in Miyazaki's film. Probably something about the face...
Clue. YOU ARE NOT THEIR CUSTOMER.
You are their product. Commercial TV companies are in the business of supplying eyeballs to advertisers, nothing else. The shows they produce are just part of the process by which they obtain those eyeballs.
Broadcasters care a great deal about the people who use their service - the advertisers.
Suppose that once the oil starts to run a little short, a dictator who has contracts to supply oil to America invades the country of a dictator who has contracts to supply oil to Europe. The Americans would greatly prefer that dictator A could liberate country B from the tyranny of dictator C, without the brave freedom-loving people of country B having access to British tanks and German guns with which to defend themselves from the expansionist aggressive armies of dictator A. The Americans would very much prefer that the Europeans not have the military capability to directly assist country B.
It's all about influence on third-parties, really, rather than about fighting each other. War for profit.
2: The Russians storming west is more likely than (1), which isn't saying much. The Russian conventional army is really not what it used to be, after years of underfunding. A hypothetical Russian dictator would need to rearm a whole lot to make an invasion of Europe a practical proposition, and that would take a long time. Time enough for the Europeans to get their act together - note that most of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies are now in NATO and the EU. In any case Russia is turning into a capitalist state like no other; they're more likely to see the EU as a huge, rich market on their doorstep, rather than as an opportunity for a scrap.
3) is just nuts. China decides to invade the EU for extra space? Picking out just about the only place on the planet more crowded than China itself? Entirely barmy. The only place China could realistically look for lebensraum is Siberia, and, er... well, I said the Russian conventional forces were not what they were, but that was an outlandish proposition when Tom Clancy tried it out, and it's no saner now.
If I was a European military planner I'd be worried about the dodgy nations on the doorstep, rather than the three other big players. Belarus, for instance, is ruled by a complete and utter fruitcake dictator. And as we expand we'll have more neighbours like that - if Turkey joins up we'll have Iraq right on the EU frontier. That's the sort of thing we'll need to be thinking about.
And as the expanding EU bumps up against such difficulties, we may need to conduct our own military operations, probably without American support - and sometimes, I would imagine, with outright opposition from Washington. That's why we need our own GPS-equivalent. It would be, at the very least, a diplomatic embarrassment to launch a war of which America disapproved, while relying on America's satellites to guide our missiles ;-)
What doesn't the author get? They use 'open-code' where the usual term is 'open-source', but that's a minor semantic quibble. Red Flag is Chinese, just like Mandrake is French, SuSE is German, Red Hat is American and Gentoo is Righthereinmyrooman.
Ah, yes. FWIW, the League of Nations was a great idea of yours - shame it didn't work, after all the effort and support you guys put into it.
No, they'll use less power, but give out the same amount of heat as before. I've already filed a patent for a device that will sit on top of one of these new CPUs and use that heat to run a generator, and feed part of the power produced back into the CPU. The result is a self-powering processor, with enough left over to run the video card.
In future, before you say anything, run it through in your head and think 'Does this allow a perpetual motion machine?' If the answer is yes, keep quiet :-)
No, but you can get helium-3 out of the regolith, where it's been collecting in small quantities for a few billion years out of the solar wind.
Not much. The waste produced by a fusion reactor is helium - probably the most harmless stuff you can get. The process of fusion produces neutrons, so the fusion container itself will become mildly radioactive, but nowhere near the kind of nastiness you get with fission.
In addition, fusion is inherently fail-safe. If something goes horribly wrong with a fission reactor, you can get a runaway reaction. Meltdown. Not good. But in a fusion reactor, you have to carefully maintain the right conditions for the reaction to happen at all. Screw up and the light goes out, that's about it.
Deuterium... cheap. The oceans are full of the stuff. Tritium and helium-3 are harder to come by; we'd probably need a lunar harvesting operation if we were going to go for fusion on a commercial scale.
That it's good and wholesome to spend quality time watching Shogun Assassin with the kids?
They have either blue or green hair, disturbingly large eyes, dynamically variable mouth size, and they spend most of their time piloting giant robots.
Wow! I'm glad this post went to +5, because what we have here is perhaps unique - certainly not anything I've ever met IRL.
Someone who believed Lord Hutton. A rarity indeed!
You know, I don't so much mind the cameras per se. What pisses me off no end is what the police do with the film.
No, it's not Big Brother. Or rather, it is - not in the Orwell sense, but the fucking Channel 4 sense. The police sell the film to TV companies to put together trash TV about drunks making fools of themselves.
If I come out of a pub pissed and throw up into the gutter, I don't mind some copper watching on the security camera. He's a copper - he sees loads of people throw up in gutters. But if the cops decide to sell the footage of me throwing up into a gutter, and it gets on TV, and people who know me, for instance maybe my boss or my dear old grandmother...
Embarrassing at the very least. The fuck are they playing at, selling the footage for entertainment?
Donations from sympathetic Americans who think they're Irish?
It gets worse. Apparently America's claim to the moral high ground in Iraq is now 'Yes, but Saddam did even worse things in that prison!'
I'm just hearing Squealer say 'Surely you do not want Jones to come back?'
I'm not sure how to take this... are you trolling here? Most people would say Americans invented most of these - even foreigners.
However:
the Internet: American in origin, though the Web is Anglo-Swiss and the software running it is increasingly Finnish
computer: British in origin, but developed to its current form mostly by Americans
motor car: German, I think. Benz, IIRC. Mass-production of cars, however, we owe to Ford.
light bulb: British. Joseph Swan, to be precise; I heard he even won a lawsuit against Edison proving that to be the case.
telephone: Bell was American, wasn't he? I think that on this one they have a quite undisputed claim.
90% of spam is sent from servers outside the FBI's jurisdiction. That doesn't mean it originated there: it's sent by Americans who are offering products in America to an American market and expecting to be paid in American dollars to an American bank.
Unless the spammer is prepared personally to move overseas, sooner or later the matter comes into the FBI's jurisdiction.
And since when does being in a foreign country mean you can flout US law? Dmitri and Jon found that out to their cost. Criminals beware: you can no longer hide behind the figleaf of foreign national sovereignty!
He's quite right here. Linux isn't a competitor - it's just a kernel. GNU/Linux is a competitor. GNU/Linux with X and KDE is a dangerous competitor. But Linux on its own is not a big problem.
Only after a long, debilitating, and extremely painful illness, though.