choice: would you rather be in the passenger seat of someone who had 2 joints or 2 beers? 1 joint or 1 beer?
Definitely the beers. The stoners I know make really fucking strong joints. Two of those and you do not want to drive. Or indeed do anything but sit very quietly in the corner and enjoy the ambience.
I'm not a farmer, but even I understand that not all land is good for farming, and it's no coincidence that the people who are lucky enough to be able to post complaints on Slashdot probably come from societies that sprang up on some of the best farmland in the world.
This being an English-speaking board, most of us are probably from societies derived from an archipelago off the northwest coast of Europe. It's not actually very good farmland at all, compared to what some of the neighbours enjoyed. England was basically a sheep economy for centuries. Scotland and Wales even more so. Ireland became dependent upon the potato for the very good reason that not a lot else would grow in sufficient quantities to feed everybody.
If it was all about quality of farmland we'd be speaking French. Seems there's something to be said for living behind a natural moat and not having to spend so much on an army.
I like the horse story but the Dodo bird meat industry didn't fare quite as well.
The dodo is extinct because there was no dodo meat industry. When the Dutch sailors first arrived on Mauritius they found these large, plump, flightless birds and promptly caught a few for dinner. Damn things tasted quite foul by all surviving accounts. But Mauritius was a convenient stop on the way to the East Indies, and they were keen to be able to resupply with food there. They released pigs onto the island and let them roam free, so that they would have good pork every time they came back. Of course these pigs preyed mercilessly on the dodo eggs they found simply lying on the ground everywhere. Goodbye, dodo.
Had the dodo been good to eat, there would today be dodo farms all over the world. They're extinct because they weren't tasty.
Lack of downloadable content on the Wii is stupid and pointless since there are 2 USB ports one could plug a flash memory extension into, as well as an SD memory slot.
In.uk, and I imagine in the dominions overseas, it is a mace. A very big one. In 1976 Michael Heseltine, a Tory, actually picked it up and used it to menace some Labour MPs.
And if I recall my Parliamentary urban legend correctly, the aisle down the centre was originally specified to be two sword-lengths wide, just to avoid anybody coming to fatal blows during heated debate.
They especially seem to allow anti-semetic hate tyraids as well.
You misspelled 'tyranids'. Though I'm not sure what 'anti-semitic' has to do with anything. Or indeed 'hate'. Tyranids are very even-handed: they destroy and devour pretty much everything in their path, quite indiscriminately.
I'm not clear on why you think they should not be allowed on Indymedia. It's a bit nerdy, obviously, but harmless. It's people who play Dark Eldar you want to watch out for. Fucking perverts.
I'm all for teaching evolution but would someone please explain to me what the issue was with teaching the strengths and weaknesses?
I would guess that they singled out evolution for this. They didn't demand that they teach the strengths and weaknesses of Newton's theory of gravity, or Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Dalton's atomic theory of matter. Yet for some reason Darwin's theory of evolution gets picked out so that teachers must highlight its weaknesses. Why might this be?
How would such a reactor work? You encapsulate a miniature black hole, throw random matter in it, and collect the hawking radiation to power your star destroyer?
Yes, except as others have pointed out it would be a D'deridex class Warbird, backbone of the Romulan fleet throughout the TNG and DS9 era.
The idea is sound, the engineering... troublesome. To get a useful power yield out of a black hole by Hawking radiation, it would have to be very, very small indeed. A hole with a 1GW luminosity would have a radius of about 9E-16 metres, rather smaller than an atomic nucleus, and a temperature of 2E11 Kelvin, as hot as a supernova. It would mass 6E11kg, or about twice as much as every human being on earth. A difficult thing to handle!
(Calculator at http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/ for black hole parameters. Order of magnitude comparisons of length, mass and temperature taken from Wikipedia.)
However, for such a black hole you wouldn't need to worry about feeding it: it would have a life expectancy of some 550 billion years. That's a good thing, because getting a matter beam carrying enough mass for high power applications, confined so narrowly and aimed so precisely, is going to be yet another monumentally tricky task. A black hole with a one-minute life expectancy would yield about 100,000 Mt / second. Yes, that's megatons. As in hydrogen bombs. Feeding such a beast its matter fuel, at a rate sufficient to supply such terrific luminosity, in the face of that furious blast, and never dropping the supply for as much as a minute... well, maybe the Time Lords or the Xeelee could manage it, but that's about all.
If the phone were open, I could download a track from Amazon and put it on my phone.
This is the heart of what I think is the problem with these music-on-mobiles services. There's no could about it. I can and do load my phone with music from the same sources I load my PC. I just hook up via USB and copy it over. Done. The USB cable came with the phone; so did handy software for... I don't know what for, I never installed it because the phone's just another USB disk.
So I do this. My teenage sister does it a hell of a lot more than I do (I'm happy enough to have the original NES Zelda theme as my ringtone forever; she needs a new tune on a seemingly weekly basis). So do her friends. They Bluetooth tracks to each other at school. They use Audacity or similar to edit them down to make text-message tones too. It's amazing the level of computer literacy people will achieve in the name of having the latest cool ringtone. Go on public transport anywhere and you're sure to find a teenager sharing his love of - I don't know what, but probably something to do with pimpin hos in da hood - with the entire carriage. You can bet he didn't get that from Jamster.
People are already filling up their phones with music in exactly the same way that they fill up their mp3 players. Now, I can still just about imagine there being a niche for music RIGHT THE HELL NOW delivered via 3G, but I can't imagine it being a mass market thing. Premier League goals as they happen via 3G? Yes please. New ringtones? That can wait till I get home.
Suicide bombing is not an effective tactic for anything except terrorism and terrorism doesn't effect enemy soldiers. The suicide bombings in Iraq don't target the U.S. military. It targets the Iraqi police, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi people.
The word you're looking for here is 'collaborators'. The French Resistance did just this to the instruments of the Vichy state. The IRA did it to the Royal Irish Constabulary. It's standard practice for a violent insurrection: you attack collaborators because they're a far easier target than the occupying military itself, it deters others from working for the occupation, and in time it becomes extremely difficult for the occupation to govern the country at all.
I think they both came in at about the same time. Roberts began 'I, Barack Hussein Obama', then paused. Obama got as far as 'I, Barack...' then stopped because Roberts had continued '... do solemnly swear...' I tend to blame Roberts, because, well, if it was me and the other guy paused that long, then I'd begin repeating the bit I'd heard thus far. As for the second screwup, being a foreign devil I don't know the correct wording, so I wasn't able to say who got it wrong.
Yes, but no year zero. In the Gregorian calendar, 31st December of 1 BC is followed by 1st January of 1 AD. Therefore the AD period reaches a hundred years old at the end of the year 100, not at the beginning of that year. Same for the millennia: the second millennium ended on the night of 31st December 2000.
My cable connection in.uk is advertised at 20Mb, and I've seen it do 18Mb on speed testers. There are many good reasons to criticise Virgin, but they don't fuck around on bandwidth. A 50Mb product is planned later this year. Even ADSL connections are available up to 16Mb now.
As an interesting side note, I know quite a few college level teachers that only take.doc files. Can OpenOffice make those files?
Yes, but they're considerably larger than the ones Word produces. I've lately been told that this is because OpenOffice.org embeds an image of the first page for use as a preview thumbnail, which substantially inflates the size of shorter documents. Kind of embarrassing when I send off a 200K document, someone on Word makes a trivial change and mails it back at more like 10K:-)
So, does the "republican" tag indicate that the bushitler regime's tentacles have insinuated their way into British ISPs? Or is this a nefarious plot to end the monarchy?
Neither. Presumably the IWF have a stated goal of getting the Brits out of Ireland and establishing a 32-county Republic by messing with people's internet connections.
Buy some decent binoculars or just use the ones you have around the house. You'll start enjoying them now as opposed to waiting until save up the $400.
But be sure to have a tripod for them, or at least something firm to use as a stand. You'll be able to see the four Galilean moons of Jupiter quite easily with a tripod, but you'll struggle to hold the binoculars steadily enough just by hand.
I have one of those and the 12" big brother to it. the 8" I loan out all the time to people interested in astronomy and they freak out when they look at saturn and see the rings seperated from the planet unlike a lesser scope can do.
I get a very good view of Saturn with my old 5" Newtonian. Can't make out the Cassini division, but the rings as separate from the planet are perfectly clear.
I trust my fellow man more then machines. Machines can be reprogrammed/hacked.
I trust machines more than my fellow man, especially the kind of man who will freely abdicate his duty to make his own moral and political decisions by promising to obey the orders of others. Men can also be reprogrammed/hacked - it's the entire point of the propagandist's art - but unlike machines, men will often go above and beyond the call of duty and invent new atrocities of their own. Consider Abu Ghraib. Consider My Lai. Then tell me your fellow man is trustworthy, and can be relied upon to do as instructed.
Re:Among insiders this is a well-known phenomenon.
on
The Unmanned Air Force
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I am even willing to pay $5,000 dollars as my share to attack Iran, Syria, AND !AND! PAKISTAN RIGHT NOW.
Pakistan is a nuclear power. You might want to re-think your target list.
As a matter of fact I think open source is a triumph of Socialism. Hitherto, compilers cost a fortune, UNIX distributions even more. You had to buy such software from a capitalist - or more likely, be employed by a capitalist who could afford it. The GNU project put the means of production in the hands of the workers, allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labour ourselves.
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Definitely the beers. The stoners I know make really fucking strong joints. Two of those and you do not want to drive. Or indeed do anything but sit very quietly in the corner and enjoy the ambience.
This being an English-speaking board, most of us are probably from societies derived from an archipelago off the northwest coast of Europe. It's not actually very good farmland at all, compared to what some of the neighbours enjoyed. England was basically a sheep economy for centuries. Scotland and Wales even more so. Ireland became dependent upon the potato for the very good reason that not a lot else would grow in sufficient quantities to feed everybody.
If it was all about quality of farmland we'd be speaking French. Seems there's something to be said for living behind a natural moat and not having to spend so much on an army.
The dodo is extinct because there was no dodo meat industry. When the Dutch sailors first arrived on Mauritius they found these large, plump, flightless birds and promptly caught a few for dinner. Damn things tasted quite foul by all surviving accounts. But Mauritius was a convenient stop on the way to the East Indies, and they were keen to be able to resupply with food there. They released pigs onto the island and let them roam free, so that they would have good pork every time they came back. Of course these pigs preyed mercilessly on the dodo eggs they found simply lying on the ground everywhere. Goodbye, dodo.
Had the dodo been good to eat, there would today be dodo farms all over the world. They're extinct because they weren't tasty.
Yes, what a pity nobody ever thought of that.
And if I recall my Parliamentary urban legend correctly, the aisle down the centre was originally specified to be two sword-lengths wide, just to avoid anybody coming to fatal blows during heated debate.
They'd have to go by sense of smell. Or maybe play it by intuition.
You misspelled 'tyranids'. Though I'm not sure what 'anti-semitic' has to do with anything. Or indeed 'hate'. Tyranids are very even-handed: they destroy and devour pretty much everything in their path, quite indiscriminately.
I'm not clear on why you think they should not be allowed on Indymedia. It's a bit nerdy, obviously, but harmless. It's people who play Dark Eldar you want to watch out for. Fucking perverts.
I would guess that they singled out evolution for this. They didn't demand that they teach the strengths and weaknesses of Newton's theory of gravity, or Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Dalton's atomic theory of matter. Yet for some reason Darwin's theory of evolution gets picked out so that teachers must highlight its weaknesses. Why might this be?
Yes, except as others have pointed out it would be a D'deridex class Warbird, backbone of the Romulan fleet throughout the TNG and DS9 era.
The idea is sound, the engineering... troublesome. To get a useful power yield out of a black hole by Hawking radiation, it would have to be very, very small indeed. A hole with a 1GW luminosity would have a radius of about 9E-16 metres, rather smaller than an atomic nucleus, and a temperature of 2E11 Kelvin, as hot as a supernova. It would mass 6E11kg, or about twice as much as every human being on earth. A difficult thing to handle! (Calculator at http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/ for black hole parameters. Order of magnitude comparisons of length, mass and temperature taken from Wikipedia.)
However, for such a black hole you wouldn't need to worry about feeding it: it would have a life expectancy of some 550 billion years. That's a good thing, because getting a matter beam carrying enough mass for high power applications, confined so narrowly and aimed so precisely, is going to be yet another monumentally tricky task. A black hole with a one-minute life expectancy would yield about 100,000 Mt / second. Yes, that's megatons. As in hydrogen bombs. Feeding such a beast its matter fuel, at a rate sufficient to supply such terrific luminosity, in the face of that furious blast, and never dropping the supply for as much as a minute... well, maybe the Time Lords or the Xeelee could manage it, but that's about all.
This is the heart of what I think is the problem with these music-on-mobiles services. There's no could about it. I can and do load my phone with music from the same sources I load my PC. I just hook up via USB and copy it over. Done. The USB cable came with the phone; so did handy software for... I don't know what for, I never installed it because the phone's just another USB disk.
So I do this. My teenage sister does it a hell of a lot more than I do (I'm happy enough to have the original NES Zelda theme as my ringtone forever; she needs a new tune on a seemingly weekly basis). So do her friends. They Bluetooth tracks to each other at school. They use Audacity or similar to edit them down to make text-message tones too. It's amazing the level of computer literacy people will achieve in the name of having the latest cool ringtone. Go on public transport anywhere and you're sure to find a teenager sharing his love of - I don't know what, but probably something to do with pimpin hos in da hood - with the entire carriage. You can bet he didn't get that from Jamster.
People are already filling up their phones with music in exactly the same way that they fill up their mp3 players. Now, I can still just about imagine there being a niche for music RIGHT THE HELL NOW delivered via 3G, but I can't imagine it being a mass market thing. Premier League goals as they happen via 3G? Yes please. New ringtones? That can wait till I get home.
The word you're looking for here is 'collaborators'. The French Resistance did just this to the instruments of the Vichy state. The IRA did it to the Royal Irish Constabulary. It's standard practice for a violent insurrection: you attack collaborators because they're a far easier target than the occupying military itself, it deters others from working for the occupation, and in time it becomes extremely difficult for the occupation to govern the country at all.
Really? Never at all?
I think they both came in at about the same time. Roberts began 'I, Barack Hussein Obama', then paused. Obama got as far as 'I, Barack...' then stopped because Roberts had continued '... do solemnly swear...' I tend to blame Roberts, because, well, if it was me and the other guy paused that long, then I'd begin repeating the bit I'd heard thus far. As for the second screwup, being a foreign devil I don't know the correct wording, so I wasn't able to say who got it wrong.
If life in the Navy consists of spending a lot of time on boats listening to the Pogues, why didn't they say so? I'm joining up!
Yes, but no year zero. In the Gregorian calendar, 31st December of 1 BC is followed by 1st January of 1 AD. Therefore the AD period reaches a hundred years old at the end of the year 100, not at the beginning of that year. Same for the millennia: the second millennium ended on the night of 31st December 2000.
Ah, but I have a brass lantern. And a nasty knife. And an elvish sword of great antiquity. I fear nothing...
... hey, is it me or is my light getting dim?
My cable connection in .uk is advertised at 20Mb, and I've seen it do 18Mb on speed testers. There are many good reasons to criticise Virgin, but they don't fuck around on bandwidth. A 50Mb product is planned later this year. Even ADSL connections are available up to 16Mb now.
Yes, but they're considerably larger than the ones Word produces. I've lately been told that this is because OpenOffice.org embeds an image of the first page for use as a preview thumbnail, which substantially inflates the size of shorter documents. Kind of embarrassing when I send off a 200K document, someone on Word makes a trivial change and mails it back at more like 10K :-)
Neither. Presumably the IWF have a stated goal of getting the Brits out of Ireland and establishing a 32-county Republic by messing with people's internet connections.
But be sure to have a tripod for them, or at least something firm to use as a stand. You'll be able to see the four Galilean moons of Jupiter quite easily with a tripod, but you'll struggle to hold the binoculars steadily enough just by hand.
I get a very good view of Saturn with my old 5" Newtonian. Can't make out the Cassini division, but the rings as separate from the planet are perfectly clear.
I trust machines more than my fellow man, especially the kind of man who will freely abdicate his duty to make his own moral and political decisions by promising to obey the orders of others. Men can also be reprogrammed/hacked - it's the entire point of the propagandist's art - but unlike machines, men will often go above and beyond the call of duty and invent new atrocities of their own. Consider Abu Ghraib. Consider My Lai. Then tell me your fellow man is trustworthy, and can be relied upon to do as instructed.
Pakistan is a nuclear power. You might want to re-think your target list.
As opposed to the first, where the threat IIRC was to the galaxy's supply of the shaving cream chemical?
As a matter of fact I think open source is a triumph of Socialism. Hitherto, compilers cost a fortune, UNIX distributions even more. You had to buy such software from a capitalist - or more likely, be employed by a capitalist who could afford it. The GNU project put the means of production in the hands of the workers, allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labour ourselves.