They are obviously more concerned about getting attention then in things like accuracy and responsibility.
Irresponsible? Possibly... it's conceivable that someone might have escaped being disappeared to Gula^H^Hantanamo as a result of the BBC breaking the story so early. But inaccurate? As far as I am aware everything in the BBC's report was true.
Personally, I'd trust a news agency that broke the news regardless of whether or not Bush liked it, rather than one which only published news that the Party considered helpful.
It was probably most explicit in Asimov. The Spacer culture had achieved great longevity, and had therefore become rather cowardly. They remained on their fifty worlds with their hordes of robot slaves and declined the challenge of galactic expansion. The Settler culture, a second wave of colonists spreading out from Earth, rejected both robots and long life, and swarmed clear across the Galaxy. Earth itself was destroyed by the Spacers, but all this did was drive the Settlers further onwards.
As for Puppeteers, which someone mentioned elsewhere on the thread: their cowardice probably came from their ancestry as grazing animals. The Pak are just as long-lived, and they are no cowards; neither are humans, who live indefinitely with the aid of boosterspice, and who have smashed the kzinti on four separate occasions and (on behalf of the puppeteers) explored an exploding galactic core and the Ringworld, guarded by the most powerful weapon in the known universe. Humans learn paranoia as they grow old, yes - we see the contrast between Louis and Teela, for instance - but it doesn't seem the same as Puppeteer immortality.
And the Elves? Nobody could ever accuse them of cowardice. Feanor himself declared their aim: "We are threatened with many evils, and treason not least; but one thing is not said: that we shall suffer from cowardice, from cravens or the fear of cravens. Therefore I say that we will go on, and this doom I add: the deeds that we shall do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda." He was right.
Given long life, we'll probably consciously rethink our attitudes to danger. If I make a habit of something for eighty years, it probably won't kill me, but if I keep at it for two hundred it might. But our instinctive attitude to risk will probably remain set at the 80-year level, because that's what's in the DNA.
Being charitable, I might suggest that the OP meant that adding CMYK to the Gimp would take ten minutes, tops. In which case the obvious response is 'go and add CMYK to the Gimp, then.'
An unmanned system to deliver a bomb to any point on the Earth's surface within two hours... Well, what's wrong with an old-fashioned ICBM? Seems a whole lot of money to spend, and the only benefit I can see is that this thing is reusable. Reusability isn't necessarily all that great - look at the Shuttle...
So, a national do-not-call list, and maybe a national do-not-email list... I think we'd all be happy not to be deluged with attempted connections from spammers and telemarketers, wouldn't we?
Now, how about a national do-not-link list? For people who value their bandwidth, and don't particularly want to be linked to from high-traffic news sites?
Well, I just played the game for a while, and I think I _am_ going to buy Warcraft. That media pack is just not very good. The background music is a godawful MIDI file, and the graphics look like they were made in MS Paint. It's the same problem FreeCiv had - programmers generally aren't great artists. I installed the graphics files from a real Civ2 CD on FreeCiv, and I think I'll have to do much the same in FreeCraft.
That emerge command grabbed the source from http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu/distfiles. You're after freecraft itself and fcmp, the additional media packs that let you play it without having to actually buy Warcraft.
To be honest, though, what are NASA going to do? NASA: 'No, sorry, we can't let you take paying passengers to the ISS.'
Russians: 'You mean like your astronauts?'
Hopefully, if this works, we could have the Severn Barrage back on the agenda. Build that thing and we could power Bristol and Cardiff and have enough left over to run half of Somerset, all without a single mole of CO2...
Well, it sounds nice, over the web... Of course, that's before the/. effect strikes:-)
Digital radio over SW sounds interesting. I wonder if old Auntie's going to pick this one up? I gather BBC services got cut over North America recently in favour of web broadcasts... maybe digital technology will allow that to be reinstated in the future?
Actually, the _real_ real decisions are made in London, Paris and Berlin. I wonder how good a model of European decisionmaking 'best two of the big three = policy' would be?
What film were you watching? I was watching one in which Moria was a desolate hellhole swarming with orcs and goblins and one bloody terrifying Balrog, pretty much as described in the books. You saw one where it was still a thriving dwarf city?
Downloading from kernel.org at 57.12 K/s... which is just about as fast as my ADSL link can gulp it down. People, you're not doing your duty! Melt that server!... as soon as my download finishes, that is.
"Did I just get transported back to my Catholic High School religion class?"
I don't know, but I'm having flashbacks to mine...
Tolkien himself was a pretty firm Catholic, and though he denied having written any message or allegory into his world, it's clear enough that his religion and worldview influenced his creation.
"The other big gripe I concerns the ending. Gandalf, Eomer, and a couple of hundred riders wipe out 10,000 orcs? In the book it took thousands of hurons to do that."
Gandalf, Erkenbrand, and a small force of Rohirrim turned up more or less as in the film. Erkenbrand was merged with Eomer in the movie, a change I found fairly reasonable. They did so at about the same time that Theoden and Aragorn led the charge out of Helm's Deep. This caused the Orcs to panic and flee into the forest of Huorns.
Now, watching the end of TTT, we don't actually see the Orcs flee Helm's Deep - we only see Gandalf and the Rohirrim engaging them. The Orcs certainly haven't panicked yet; they form an orderly line of pikes to hold off the horsemen. The last we see of the battle is Gandalf the White kicking a great deal of arse. Presumably the Orcs will realise they're up against something awful (you have a Maia who's just killed the Balrog of Moria, wielding the ancient sword of Turgon of Gondolin - not something you really want to try fighting) and break - at which point the Huorns come into play. They didn't actually engage the army, they just exterminated the ones that tried to run.
The battle of Helm's Deep was reasonably faithful to the book - apart from the party of Elves. That was completely uncalled-for.
Hmm...
From Appendix A, a part of The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen...
"I speak no confort to you, for there is no confort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men."
"Nay, dear lord," she said, "that choice is long over. There is now no ship that would bear me hence, and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill: the loss and the silence."
I think this can be read either way. It may be that her choice is not truly made until this moment; we are told that 'the light of her eyes was quenched; and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star' - or it may be that her choice was made when Elrond sailed away without her, or a variety of other possibilities.
Arwen would probably be able to sail to the West if she decided to do so - Gimli made it, as did Frodo and Bilbo. Whether Aragorn was right and she still had the chance of immortality, or whether even in the West she would die, is something we'll probably never know...
Aragorn is one of the last of the Dunedain, a long-lived race of Men, descended from Elros the half-elf, brother of Elrond. Over the millennia their life expectancies have declined; Elros lived for five hundred years, while Aragorn lived to 190.
Elrond and Elros are called the Half-elven, but strictly that isn't quite true. It's all rather messy and incestuous. Beren (a legendary human hero) married Luthien (daughter of an elven-king and a Maia - a minor deity like Sauron but not evil), had many adventures, died, came back to life as ordinary humans, and then died again of natural causes; their son, Dior, an elf, married Nimloth, another elf, and their daughter was Elwing.
Meanwhile, Belegund, Beren's cousin, had a daughter Rian, who married Huor, another hero; Tuor, Huor's son, went into the heroic family business; he ended up in the hidden elven-city of Gondolin and married the princess, Idril. Their son was Earendil.
Earendil married Elwing, and their sons were Elrond and Elros. Now, all this was terribly confusing, because nobody was entirely certain what species they were. So the Valar (the major gods) said that Earendil, Elwing, Elrond and Elros would each get to choose their species. Earendil and Elwing both chose to be elves, and went on to start new careers as the planets Venus and Mercury respectively. Elrond also chose to be an elf, and became the great elf-lord we know so well from Rivendell. Elros chose to be human, and was the first King of Numenor, and is an ancestor of Aragorn - which was the point of this long digression.
Aragorn's long life, then, comes from his being, in a small part, Elvish, and in an even smaller part, divine - and also from the general favour of the gods on his people. However, Elrond frowns on his plan to bring up again the whole problem of the Half-Elves. Elros' children were all human, and Elrond's children were all elves, but what happens if Elros' descendant Aragorn marries Elrond's descendant Arwen? I don't think the exact policy of the Valar was ever made explicitly, but the most likely outcome is that if Elrond sails West and Arwen stays behind and marries a human, she will become mortal as well, and will die with him in Middle-earth.
On his deathbed, Aragorn suggested that Arwen might still have the choice to follow her father Elrond to the West, and live forever there - she says that the only reason she cannot is that there are no ships to take her back, and she is stranded. But we know that Legolas sailed with Gimli into the West after the death of Aragorn, so there was at least one sailing available.
Slashdot Mirror
Irresponsible? Possibly... it's conceivable that someone might have escaped being disappeared to Gula^H^Hantanamo as a result of the BBC breaking the story so early. But inaccurate? As far as I am aware everything in the BBC's report was true.
Personally, I'd trust a news agency that broke the news regardless of whether or not Bush liked it, rather than one which only published news that the Party considered helpful.
As for Puppeteers, which someone mentioned elsewhere on the thread: their cowardice probably came from their ancestry as grazing animals. The Pak are just as long-lived, and they are no cowards; neither are humans, who live indefinitely with the aid of boosterspice, and who have smashed the kzinti on four separate occasions and (on behalf of the puppeteers) explored an exploding galactic core and the Ringworld, guarded by the most powerful weapon in the known universe. Humans learn paranoia as they grow old, yes - we see the contrast between Louis and Teela, for instance - but it doesn't seem the same as Puppeteer immortality.
And the Elves? Nobody could ever accuse them of cowardice. Feanor himself declared their aim: "We are threatened with many evils, and treason not least; but one thing is not said: that we shall suffer from cowardice, from cravens or the fear of cravens. Therefore I say that we will go on, and this doom I add: the deeds that we shall do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda." He was right.
Given long life, we'll probably consciously rethink our attitudes to danger. If I make a habit of something for eighty years, it probably won't kill me, but if I keep at it for two hundred it might. But our instinctive attitude to risk will probably remain set at the 80-year level, because that's what's in the DNA.
Try this:
4. Learn Japanese.
Being charitable, I might suggest that the OP meant that adding CMYK to the Gimp would take ten minutes, tops. In which case the obvious response is 'go and add CMYK to the Gimp, then.'
An unmanned system to deliver a bomb to any point on the Earth's surface within two hours... Well, what's wrong with an old-fashioned ICBM? Seems a whole lot of money to spend, and the only benefit I can see is that this thing is reusable. Reusability isn't necessarily all that great - look at the Shuttle...
Now, how about a national do-not-link list? For people who value their bandwidth, and don't particularly want to be linked to from high-traffic news sites?
Well, I just played the game for a while, and I think I _am_ going to buy Warcraft. That media pack is just not very good. The background music is a godawful MIDI file, and the graphics look like they were made in MS Paint. It's the same problem FreeCiv had - programmers generally aren't great artists. I installed the graphics files from a real Civ2 CD on FreeCiv, and I think I'll have to do much the same in FreeCraft.
That emerge command grabbed the source from http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu/distfiles. You're after freecraft itself and fcmp, the additional media packs that let you play it without having to actually buy Warcraft.
Yep, here it comes. I'll cease and desist downloading this right now, of course...
One Linux to rule them all, one libc to find them, one X to bring them all and on the Desktop bind them.
R2D2! You know better than to trust a strange computer!
The BSA wrote a European law? What was it - gays and atheists have to leave the continent?
To be honest, though, what are NASA going to do?
NASA: 'No, sorry, we can't let you take paying passengers to the ISS.'
Russians: 'You mean like your astronauts?'
"He's already unconscious - decaf could kill him! Still, it's worth a try..." - Bernard Bernoulli, attempting to revive Dr. Fred Edison
$ man true
AUTHOR
Written by no one.
Hopefully, if this works, we could have the Severn Barrage back on the agenda. Build that thing and we could power Bristol and Cardiff and have enough left over to run half of Somerset, all without a single mole of CO2...
Digital radio over SW sounds interesting. I wonder if old Auntie's going to pick this one up? I gather BBC services got cut over North America recently in favour of web broadcasts... maybe digital technology will allow that to be reinstated in the future?
Actually, the _real_ real decisions are made in London, Paris and Berlin. I wonder how good a model of European decisionmaking 'best two of the big three = policy' would be?
What film were you watching? I was watching one in which Moria was a desolate hellhole swarming with orcs and goblins and one bloody terrifying Balrog, pretty much as described in the books. You saw one where it was still a thriving dwarf city?
Downloading from kernel.org at 57.12 K/s... which is just about as fast as my ADSL link can gulp it down. People, you're not doing your duty! Melt that server!... as soon as my download finishes, that is.
You know, I've seen many a troll in the comments, but never before have I seen one actually posted as an article.
Tolkien himself was a pretty firm Catholic, and though he denied having written any message or allegory into his world, it's clear enough that his religion and worldview influenced his creation.
Gandalf, Erkenbrand, and a small force of Rohirrim turned up more or less as in the film. Erkenbrand was merged with Eomer in the movie, a change I found fairly reasonable. They did so at about the same time that Theoden and Aragorn led the charge out of Helm's Deep. This caused the Orcs to panic and flee into the forest of Huorns.
Now, watching the end of TTT, we don't actually see the Orcs flee Helm's Deep - we only see Gandalf and the Rohirrim engaging them. The Orcs certainly haven't panicked yet; they form an orderly line of pikes to hold off the horsemen. The last we see of the battle is Gandalf the White kicking a great deal of arse. Presumably the Orcs will realise they're up against something awful (you have a Maia who's just killed the Balrog of Moria, wielding the ancient sword of Turgon of Gondolin - not something you really want to try fighting) and break - at which point the Huorns come into play. They didn't actually engage the army, they just exterminated the ones that tried to run.
The battle of Helm's Deep was reasonably faithful to the book - apart from the party of Elves. That was completely uncalled-for.
"I speak no confort to you, for there is no confort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men."
"Nay, dear lord," she said, "that choice is long over. There is now no ship that would bear me hence, and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill: the loss and the silence."
I think this can be read either way. It may be that her choice is not truly made until this moment; we are told that 'the light of her eyes was quenched; and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star' - or it may be that her choice was made when Elrond sailed away without her, or a variety of other possibilities.
Arwen would probably be able to sail to the West if she decided to do so - Gimli made it, as did Frodo and Bilbo. Whether Aragorn was right and she still had the chance of immortality, or whether even in the West she would die, is something we'll probably never know...
Elrond and Elros are called the Half-elven, but strictly that isn't quite true. It's all rather messy and incestuous. Beren (a legendary human hero) married Luthien (daughter of an elven-king and a Maia - a minor deity like Sauron but not evil), had many adventures, died, came back to life as ordinary humans, and then died again of natural causes; their son, Dior, an elf, married Nimloth, another elf, and their daughter was Elwing.
Meanwhile, Belegund, Beren's cousin, had a daughter Rian, who married Huor, another hero; Tuor, Huor's son, went into the heroic family business; he ended up in the hidden elven-city of Gondolin and married the princess, Idril. Their son was Earendil.
Earendil married Elwing, and their sons were Elrond and Elros. Now, all this was terribly confusing, because nobody was entirely certain what species they were. So the Valar (the major gods) said that Earendil, Elwing, Elrond and Elros would each get to choose their species. Earendil and Elwing both chose to be elves, and went on to start new careers as the planets Venus and Mercury respectively. Elrond also chose to be an elf, and became the great elf-lord we know so well from Rivendell. Elros chose to be human, and was the first King of Numenor, and is an ancestor of Aragorn - which was the point of this long digression.
Aragorn's long life, then, comes from his being, in a small part, Elvish, and in an even smaller part, divine - and also from the general favour of the gods on his people. However, Elrond frowns on his plan to bring up again the whole problem of the Half-Elves. Elros' children were all human, and Elrond's children were all elves, but what happens if Elros' descendant Aragorn marries Elrond's descendant Arwen? I don't think the exact policy of the Valar was ever made explicitly, but the most likely outcome is that if Elrond sails West and Arwen stays behind and marries a human, she will become mortal as well, and will die with him in Middle-earth.
On his deathbed, Aragorn suggested that Arwen might still have the choice to follow her father Elrond to the West, and live forever there - she says that the only reason she cannot is that there are no ships to take her back, and she is stranded. But we know that Legolas sailed with Gimli into the West after the death of Aragorn, so there was at least one sailing available.