I guess I could use them for children's birthday parties huh?? Just hope some little girl doesn't think she's cute and rubs it in her hair to make it staticy and BOOM!!!
You've heard, I suppose, the story of George, who played with a Dangerous Toy, and suffered a Catastrophe of considerable Dimensions?
Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None, I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
I feel had the Lib Dems allied with nobody after the election, they'd have gained more long-term respect for sticking to their manifesto.
Oh, bollocks. If they'd done that, nobody would have bothered voting Lib Dem ever again. What would be the fucking point? You vote for a third party and then cross your fingers and hope for a hung Parliament, so that you can maybe get some of your policies enacted in a coalition. If the Lib Dems had been presented their golden opportunity, a hung Parliament, which happens a couple of times in a lifetime, and had just walked away... Never mind doing a deal with the Tories, that would have been the supreme betrayal of their voters.
A Freedom/Repeal bill is great in principle, but it'll never happen in practice. Quite apart from the problem that any repeals will pilloried as Soft On Something, the coalition have very different ideas on what the little people should be free to do: Cons tend to be pro freedom to smoke tobacco and anti freedom to smoke cannabis, and the Dems are t'other way around, for example.
Chances are they'll both be able to agree on repealing 'Stuff That Labour Did'.
Actually, since the Repeal Bill was a Lib Dem manifesto pledge that made it into the Coalition agreement, it might be worthwhile seeing what it was the Liberals had in mind. This might change because the Tories will have their own ideas and they might even bring in some public suggestions from that website (it is just about possible), but I'd expect the bill to end up looking a lot like that one.
No, it's just a God (well, government) given opportunity for libertarians to have a rant, which let's face it, they're very good at.
Bearing in mind that the government is an alliance of broadly left-wing sandal-wearing bearded social liberals and broadly right-wing money-grubbing City-whoring economic deregulators, this might genuinely be a great opportunity for British libertarianism. One way or another you've got a sympathetic ear!
when i saw that when cameron moved into number 10, he only had a simple bed, 1-2 ikea brand stools and whatnot. i said to myself, well, someone who is living that simple has to have some good qualities at least.
Careful with that. He's no common man; both Cameron and Clegg are fantastically posh, so much so that they don't need to flaunt wealth with conspicuous consumption. He's still got his town house in Notting Hill as well; no need to move the best furniture into the prime ministerial residence, is there?
In the US, Christians are about 80% of the population, but over 90% of convicted criminals.
If I were ever to be convicted of some dreadful crime and sentenced to a long time in prison, you'd better believe I'd find Jesus. It plays well with the parole boards. I doubt I'd be the only one; that must skew the statistics pretty severely.
Why don't we read up on what actual Islam is, versus the supremacist Arab culture that permeates and corrupts it. Karen Armstrong did a wonderful job of pointing out what Islam actually is, and how Arab culture with it's tradition of jahilliyeh has since permeated and corrupted it
Yes, that's a great idea. Let's all read about what some people claim actual Islam ought to be, as opposed to what a billion-plus people actually believe and practice in their daily lives. You know what? If 'actual Islam' has been 'permeated and corrupted' by something else, then 'actual Islam' is what we technically call 'extinct' and 'irrelevant'. What we're dealing with here is 'Islam' warts and all, not your idealised Islam you find in books by this Karen Armstrong of yours.
It should come with a couple of IR LEDs to be attached to the forehead
Er... can I have some of what you're smoking?
If this is actually necessary, try an infrared LED on the unit itself, and a detector that's watching for the reflection from the user's eyes. The whole point of the 3DS is that it's a 3D game that doesn't require the user to wear stupid glasses; you think that a Borg cosplay accessory is even remotely acceptable here?
That has been available on other devices such as the Nokia N900 for a while.
... Well, for a few weeks anyway, since the last software update that activated Skype video calling. Unless I've overlooked something?
I don't honestly have much use for video calling either. Once you get over the whole OMG I'M LIVING IN TEH FUTURE thing, video phone is just kind of awkward. Give me a Thunderbirds-style SOUND ONLY SELECTED card to put up and I'll be happy.
... that this American custom of the spelling bee is something that would matter more to an immigrant than to the established population. English spelling is fiendishly difficult, internally inconsistent and often downright bizarre, and in addition to the strange rules of English itself there are also words which operate according to Greek or Latin or Germanic principles instead.
So to an immigrant family, having a child who can truly master this horrible mess is a sign that they've arrived, established themselves and put down roots. A point of great pride, a tremendous achievement. To the established population, the ability to spell is taken for granted and the ability to spell well is just a nice-to-have.
Alas, we don't have this custom in England. A pity, really. I was good at spellings at primary school, so it would have been fun. I remember I once got into a huge argument with the teacher over the spelling of a certain word for more than one very small person, because it meant I only got nine out of ten that week. She cited the dictionary; I cited The Hobbit. The mark stood:-(
Certificates aren't strictly required. Pretty much everyone I phone, I meet physically from time to time. Next time we meet, we can exchange public keys in person and be quite sure of their authenticity.
It's only if I want to make an encrypted call to somebody I've never met that a certificate is needed; and if encryption is an application with any significant market demand, how about a protocol where your phone comes preinstalled with the phone company's public key, you generate a key pair, send the public key to the phone company (securely, using their public key) and they sign it as part of the service? Then the phone company get a certificate for their public key, and anybody who wants to check my public key's authenticity can find a clear endorsement of it.
I've often heard the lack of forced military or civil service (a draft or something similar) as having been a detriment on society and empathy. After going through a war trying to save other people, or having to defend the guy next to you even if you think he's a jerk. How many people do you think would go around pointing guns at people and playing thug if they had spent some time shooting and defending people, understanding just how powerful a tool the thing is.
Yes, but what if you don't have a war going on? That would put a stop to this social engineering scheme. You'd have to start a war. Kill them over there, so we don't end up killing each other over here...
Cool name for a ship with that kind of firepower. I have a mental image of the captain powering up for five episodes or so before he turns the 'nuke half the planet' key.
Hardware has outrun consumer applications at last, I think. Other than gaming and HD video there's nothing I've been unable to do with the Eee 901 I picked up at launch a couple of years ago. That's equivalent to, what... a Pentium III at about 1GHz? Did we hit 'good enough' in 2001?
Ah, but a single statk of cards 1km high would just tip over. You'd need many stacks clustered together to reach such a height.
Try filling the Burj Khalifa with punched cards. Total floor space of 464,511 square metres. Let each floor be three metres high, that's a volume of 1.4 million cubic metres. Taking the figures from your cited Wikipedia article, a card is 2.7 millionths of a cubic metre. I make it about 5E11 cards, which at 64 bytes per card gives us... getting on for 30 terabytes.
... Says who? The Universe can be infinite and still expanding. Or it can be finite, curved back on itself, and still expanding.
Let's try two one-dimensional analogues of our three-dimensional space. First, the finite case. Picture a clock face, and a one-dimensional circular Universe on it. The galaxies of this Universe sit at the hour marks. The Universe expands, the circle grows larger, the galaxies find themselves further apart - but there's no edge of the Universe, and no centre. If this Universe can be said to bee expanding 'into' anything, it's expanding into the future, and there's a Big Bang singularity in its past where every coordinate is the same point, there at the centre.
Now the infinite case. An infinitely long number line, with galaxies on every integer, from minus infinity through zero to plus infinity. The Universe expands, and we move every galaxy currently on number n to number 2n. This needn't involve actually picking up and moving galaxies; you can just stretch the line itself, and relabel the coordinates appropriately. The galaxies find themselves further apart - but again, there's no edge of the Universe, no centre of the Universe (oh, there's a zero, but that's an arbitrary point - you could declare anywhere to be your zero and it looks just the same), and it's still not expanding 'into' anything.
Of course our Universe has more dimensions than this, and we don't actually know what its overall geometry actually looks like - but whether finite or infinite, it's clearly expanding, and theory does not require that there be any 'edge' other than the horizon from which light has had the time to reach us, or any kind of greater hyperspace into which the Universe is expanding.
as opposed to real atheists who unobtrusively go about their business
Ah, you don't mind atheists, as long as we shut up and let you get on with implementing your superstitious agenda for society, eh? Personally, I rather like a culture where, for instance, I can draw whatever cartoons I like, regardless of what your sacred traditions might say to the contrary. I like living in a culture where I can readily obtain contraceptives, regardless of how terribly sinful the Pope might think they are - and then proceed to use them with the consenting adult partner of my choice, whether or not I have gone through any kind of ritual or ceremony beforehand. In general I'm perfectly happy as long as Catholics and Muslims and the rest of them unobtrusively go about their business, but I am terribly offended whenever they try to impose their own peculiar rules on the rest of us. Offended, yes, and insulted.
So I'll happily go about my own business and never mention anything about whether there's a god or not, as long as you all do the same. Keep your superstitions to yourselves and you'll hear no quarrel from me.
Slashdot Mirror
1 hellagram = 1.0 × 10**27 grams
1 hellabyte = 1.23794004 × 10**27 bytes
Shouldn't that last one be a hebibyte or something?
You've heard, I suppose, the story of George, who played with a Dangerous Toy, and suffered a Catastrophe of considerable Dimensions?
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Ethics of Greed
A frightening thought indeed!
Oh, bollocks. If they'd done that, nobody would have bothered voting Lib Dem ever again. What would be the fucking point? You vote for a third party and then cross your fingers and hope for a hung Parliament, so that you can maybe get some of your policies enacted in a coalition. If the Lib Dems had been presented their golden opportunity, a hung Parliament, which happens a couple of times in a lifetime, and had just walked away... Never mind doing a deal with the Tories, that would have been the supreme betrayal of their voters.
Chances are they'll both be able to agree on repealing 'Stuff That Labour Did'.
Actually, since the Repeal Bill was a Lib Dem manifesto pledge that made it into the Coalition agreement, it might be worthwhile seeing what it was the Liberals had in mind. This might change because the Tories will have their own ideas and they might even bring in some public suggestions from that website (it is just about possible), but I'd expect the bill to end up looking a lot like that one.
Bearing in mind that the government is an alliance of broadly left-wing sandal-wearing bearded social liberals and broadly right-wing money-grubbing City-whoring economic deregulators, this might genuinely be a great opportunity for British libertarianism. One way or another you've got a sympathetic ear!
Careful with that. He's no common man; both Cameron and Clegg are fantastically posh, so much so that they don't need to flaunt wealth with conspicuous consumption. He's still got his town house in Notting Hill as well; no need to move the best furniture into the prime ministerial residence, is there?
13.75 +- 0.11 billion, according to the latest WMAP figures.
If I were ever to be convicted of some dreadful crime and sentenced to a long time in prison, you'd better believe I'd find Jesus. It plays well with the parole boards. I doubt I'd be the only one; that must skew the statistics pretty severely.
Yes, that's a great idea. Let's all read about what some people claim actual Islam ought to be, as opposed to what a billion-plus people actually believe and practice in their daily lives. You know what? If 'actual Islam' has been 'permeated and corrupted' by something else, then 'actual Islam' is what we technically call 'extinct' and 'irrelevant'. What we're dealing with here is 'Islam' warts and all, not your idealised Islam you find in books by this Karen Armstrong of yours.
Sunshine wasn't great, and honestly I was a bit disappointed in Spirit Tracks. But what's this about Majora's Mask? That game was wonderful.
Er... can I have some of what you're smoking?
If this is actually necessary, try an infrared LED on the unit itself, and a detector that's watching for the reflection from the user's eyes. The whole point of the 3DS is that it's a 3D game that doesn't require the user to wear stupid glasses; you think that a Borg cosplay accessory is even remotely acceptable here?
... Well, for a few weeks anyway, since the last software update that activated Skype video calling. Unless I've overlooked something?
I don't honestly have much use for video calling either. Once you get over the whole OMG I'M LIVING IN TEH FUTURE thing, video phone is just kind of awkward. Give me a Thunderbirds-style SOUND ONLY SELECTED card to put up and I'll be happy.
So to an immigrant family, having a child who can truly master this horrible mess is a sign that they've arrived, established themselves and put down roots. A point of great pride, a tremendous achievement. To the established population, the ability to spell is taken for granted and the ability to spell well is just a nice-to-have.
Alas, we don't have this custom in England. A pity, really. I was good at spellings at primary school, so it would have been fun. I remember I once got into a huge argument with the teacher over the spelling of a certain word for more than one very small person, because it meant I only got nine out of ten that week. She cited the dictionary; I cited The Hobbit. The mark stood :-(
That's Wispa, and they brought it back last year. You even see Wispa Gold from time to time.
It's only if I want to make an encrypted call to somebody I've never met that a certificate is needed; and if encryption is an application with any significant market demand, how about a protocol where your phone comes preinstalled with the phone company's public key, you generate a key pair, send the public key to the phone company (securely, using their public key) and they sign it as part of the service? Then the phone company get a certificate for their public key, and anybody who wants to check my public key's authenticity can find a clear endorsement of it.
Yes, but what if you don't have a war going on? That would put a stop to this social engineering scheme. You'd have to start a war. Kill them over there, so we don't end up killing each other over here...
Cool name for a ship with that kind of firepower. I have a mental image of the captain powering up for five episodes or so before he turns the 'nuke half the planet' key.
They're tonties.
Hardware has outrun consumer applications at last, I think. Other than gaming and HD video there's nothing I've been unable to do with the Eee 901 I picked up at launch a couple of years ago. That's equivalent to, what... a Pentium III at about 1GHz? Did we hit 'good enough' in 2001?
That idea may include some unwarranted tactical assumptions.
Try filling the Burj Khalifa with punched cards. Total floor space of 464,511 square metres. Let each floor be three metres high, that's a volume of 1.4 million cubic metres. Taking the figures from your cited Wikipedia article, a card is 2.7 millionths of a cubic metre. I make it about 5E11 cards, which at 64 bytes per card gives us... getting on for 30 terabytes.
... Says who? The Universe can be infinite and still expanding. Or it can be finite, curved back on itself, and still expanding.
Let's try two one-dimensional analogues of our three-dimensional space. First, the finite case. Picture a clock face, and a one-dimensional circular Universe on it. The galaxies of this Universe sit at the hour marks. The Universe expands, the circle grows larger, the galaxies find themselves further apart - but there's no edge of the Universe, and no centre. If this Universe can be said to bee expanding 'into' anything, it's expanding into the future, and there's a Big Bang singularity in its past where every coordinate is the same point, there at the centre.
Now the infinite case. An infinitely long number line, with galaxies on every integer, from minus infinity through zero to plus infinity. The Universe expands, and we move every galaxy currently on number n to number 2n. This needn't involve actually picking up and moving galaxies; you can just stretch the line itself, and relabel the coordinates appropriately. The galaxies find themselves further apart - but again, there's no edge of the Universe, no centre of the Universe (oh, there's a zero, but that's an arbitrary point - you could declare anywhere to be your zero and it looks just the same), and it's still not expanding 'into' anything.
Of course our Universe has more dimensions than this, and we don't actually know what its overall geometry actually looks like - but whether finite or infinite, it's clearly expanding, and theory does not require that there be any 'edge' other than the horizon from which light has had the time to reach us, or any kind of greater hyperspace into which the Universe is expanding.
Ah, you don't mind atheists, as long as we shut up and let you get on with implementing your superstitious agenda for society, eh? Personally, I rather like a culture where, for instance, I can draw whatever cartoons I like, regardless of what your sacred traditions might say to the contrary. I like living in a culture where I can readily obtain contraceptives, regardless of how terribly sinful the Pope might think they are - and then proceed to use them with the consenting adult partner of my choice, whether or not I have gone through any kind of ritual or ceremony beforehand. In general I'm perfectly happy as long as Catholics and Muslims and the rest of them unobtrusively go about their business, but I am terribly offended whenever they try to impose their own peculiar rules on the rest of us. Offended, yes, and insulted.
So I'll happily go about my own business and never mention anything about whether there's a god or not, as long as you all do the same. Keep your superstitions to yourselves and you'll hear no quarrel from me.