That, or hard drive company apologists who are trying to make it okay that we buy 200 gigabytes and get sold 200000000 bytes.
I'm also angry at the people who made my network card. Gigabit ethernet? Nonsense, only 1,000,000,000 bps. Same goes for my CPU, which they said would run at 2.6GHz, but does it hell...
Everyone knows/. is completely useless on April 1. Wouldn't it be funny if the industry took use of that fact and posted an important story on April 1st specifically to take advantage of that?
Happened once before and a lot of people didn't believe it. Free email with a gigabyte of storage? You're having a laugh, right? Sure. Look at the date. No way could even Google do that!
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fail to be modern Christianity by almost any measure of the term modern.
I don't know about Eastern Orthodoxy, but I can say that Catholicism is well up to speed with contemporary cosmology, geology and biology. That's pretty modern, I reckon, certainly far more so than some belief systems I could name.
Why do you think there are so many scientists who are religious?
Are there? Most of the surveys I've seen have scientists as a terrifically godless lot, far less religious on average than pretty much any other segment of society.
No doubt about that. It's frighteningly far right. Quick example, every so often the subject of trade unionism comes up, and the sheer venom of the rhetoric against organised labour is unbelievable. Thatcher herself would be shocked. I think everyone must have read one too many Ayn Rand tracts, or maybe played Bioshock through a few times and thought it sounded like a good idea.
Could 'possessing weapons of mass destruction' mean having hundreds of thousands shells loaded and ready to go, or could it mean having no more than a couple of arterially shells with expired nerve-gas that even the Iraqis had forgoten about (I THINK we have found the latter)
It meant loaded, ready to go, and capable of being launched against British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes. That's what I was told, anyway.
Does that mean the size of an apple gets larger? or the distance between two apples gets larger? What is it the atom radius? or the distance between galaxies?
What is happening is that the underlying geometry of space is expanding. Best estimate of the rate of expansion is something like 72 kilometres per second per megaparsec. So if two objects are one million parsecs apart (that's 3.26 million lightyears), then one second later they'll be one million parsecs and 72 kilometres apart.
In addition, objects in that space are free to move within it, and so if they are subject to mechanical forces they'll follow those forces just as normal. So atoms and apples are held together by their internal electromagnetism, and the Solar System by the gravitational attraction between the Sun and the planets. Objects like these drift along with cosmic expansion, but do not themselves expand.
It's only on the cosmic scale that the universal expansion becomes significant. Remember, we're talking kilometres per second per megaparsec - on such a huge scale, forces pulling objects together drop to tiny levels, while the expansion of space becomes greater and greater. The Andromeda Galaxy is only two-thirds of a megaparsec away, and so the cosmic expansion is small compared to the local motion of the galaxies - indeed, we're on a collision course with Andromeda. The largest known object in the Universe, the Great Wall, is maybe a hundred times more distant; on this scale, the cosmic expansion becomes significant. It's really the distance between galactic clusters and superclusters which is being expanded.
Once Mickey becomes public domain, Disney is screwed, and they know it, since other characters will soon follow. Sure, Disney has other stuff, but will it be enough?
When did you last watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon? I haven't, not in many years. I don't remember even noticing that one was being shown on the TV, not in the last decade at any rate. They used to show them all the time when I was a kid, but now the old five-minute cartoon shows are dead. The Simpsons killed them.
I don't think Disney make all that much much off Mickey Mouse. Nor Donald Duck, nor Goofy, nor... you know what? I'm out of characters. Disney cartoons sucked anyway, Warner Bros. were far better. Disney make far more on their movies. Most of their characters are public domain to begin with - Disney don't own Snow White, nor Sleeping Beauty, nor the Mad Hatter, and Peter Pan belongs in perpetuity to Great Ormond Street Childrens' Hospital. And even though they own the films, well... lose copyright on those and you get third parties producing their own copies, but the Disney brand counts for a lot in the customer's mind. There might be cheap copies now legally sold at the market, but the birthday present for little Jessica is still going to be a real Disney disc bought in a Disney store.
And the big cash cow for Disney today won't go out of copyright for a long, long time. Don't think of dusty cartoons from the early twentieth century. Think Buzz Lightyear. Pixar is huge.
Of course Disney will protect Mickey Mouse, but not for the revenue his cartoons bring in: only because they've made Mickey Mouse the iconic mascot for the Disney brand, and if the early cartoons enter the public domain then derivative works of those become legitimate. Derivative works which might portray their subject in the most awful manner. You do not want to give/b/ free rein on the good reputation of Mickey Mouse!
Yes, I suppose TPB is a convenient place for children and the morally immature to violate copyright law. Some of us, however, are adults, and have grasped that if something costs money then either you pay for it or you do without.
I'm selling a roughly 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen gas mixture (with traces of other chemicals) for $1,000 per litre. If you don't want to pay for it, you'd better do without, otherwise you're morally immature. Don't even think about just taking it for free from the atmosphere!
It's a theory I know. I'd like to call it Cen's Big Fucking Thing theory, it's a big ball of stuff, chairs, signs, tanks, gravel and so on, literally sucking the universe dry of interesting stuff. A universal suck, maybe even a multiversal suck mechanism. Either way, I'm pretty sure we'll not see it coming.
But by far the most takedowns seem to have reasonable cause. WWE SomethingOrOther Night Parts 1 through 16? Yeah, I'm sure -that's- fair use.
See, there it is though. You consider it reasonable to censor a YouTube posting because you believe information can be owned. In Kuwait they consider it reasonable to censor a YouTube posting because they believe the Prophet should not be criticised. Both to me seem rather artificial. But I suppose Americans believe it worth restricting free speech in that way in order to encourage a profitable media industry, and Kuwaitis believe it worth restricting free speech in that way to avoid infuriating God.
Maybe now the ending scene in Total Recall makes some more sense?
The ending of Total Recall makes perfect sense. It only causes problems if you insist that the ludicrously over-the-top secret agent action hero scenario was actually real, as opposed to what your man had in fact paid for at the very beginning.
Neither of those options are practical. Gasoline is useless. Won't work outside the atmosphere, and if you're going to carry the fuel aboard the climber then you're missing the point of a space elevator and you might as well fly a rocket. Batteries and fuel cells are even worse - think of the weight.
Running a current through the ribbon is a better idea. But you've just added a new requirement to the list: the ribbon must be incredibly light, incredibly strong, and a superconductor. We've gone from 'something we might feasibly invent in the foreseeable future' to 'unobtainium'.
The best proposal I've heard is to run a nuclear reactor on the ground, and transmit the energy to the climber by laser or microwave. Or do the same with a solar array at the counterweight. Either is good, but then you run into a new problem; make the motors as efficient as you like, there'll still be losses. Entropy. Waste heat. How do you cool the climber?
They just saw that the EU completed the LHC world wonder so they are building a Space Elevator wonder to prevent a cultural victory.
Supercollider doubles the research output of the base in which it is built. The Space Elevator removes the requirement for a base to have an aerospace complex in order to benefit from the effects of orbital improvements. Neither have anything to do with culture.
Both are in fact irrelevant. I've just built the Cloning Vats. That pretty much means I win.
You have an anchor at the top of the ribbon. It needs to be very massive compared to the payload - so we need a large space station, or a small captured asteroid. You have it in an orbit that's slightly above geostationary, so that it tends to drift into a higher orbit and is kept in place by tension in the ribbon. That way, the top is pulling upwards naturally, and the payload doesn't drag the whole structure down.
The concept of a space elevator, of course, requires a very very tall structure, or a pully of sorts from space. That would need to be a really damn strong system, to pull somebody up that high...
That's probably not how it would be done. You'd have a ribbon hanging down from geostationary to the equator, and your vehicle would actively climb up it, rather than being hauled up. The ribbon still needs to be incredibly strong and light, but it's not the component that's actually doing the work.
Exercise for the reader: work out how you're going to power the climber.
So that's why since the gun ban violent crime has skyrocketed? Home invasions, specifically those that occur when the dwelling has people in it, were up over 50% almost overnight (figuratively speaking)
Figuratively speaking, eh? I like that. Is the '50%' figurative, or the 'almost overnight'? It's a handy phrase that acts as a get-out-of-jail-free card if anyone calls you on your made-up statistic. I mean, given that burglary rates have dropped by almost 60% since 1995.
As an imigrant to this country, the US, some 20+ years ago, one of the things that has always amused me was the unshakable faith the majority of Americans put into the Constitution. It seems to be held right below God, Jesus, and maybe the Virgin Mary. What they have failed to realize is that the constitution is nothing more than a principled piece of paper.
That might be the most dangerous thing of all. The belief that 'it can't happen here'. It's quite safe to pass all these laws allowing all manner of abuses, because no villain will ever arise who will use them to implement a true police state and become a dictator. That can't happen, because hey, the constitution!
The Weimar Republic had a constitution too. Constitutions aren't worth the paper they're printed on once powerful people stop caring about them. As I recall my history, when it happened in Germany, the problem was that their politics had become totally polarised, fairly equally between the Communists and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, with shifting alliances of smaller parties providing the balance of power. With no stable overall government, the executive under Hindenburg got into the habit of ruling by decree (that's 'executive order' to you, chum), pretty much bypassing the constitution. Once the aforesaid National Socialists finally got their man into a position of power, he was perfectly happy to continue ruling in just the same manner. Goodnight, democracy.
To be fair to the slave owners, it was perfectly reasonable of them to interpret the intent of the founders as meaning that the rights they went on about were only for whites. I mean, if Washington et. al. intended black people to be free citizens of the new Republic, then surely they'd have begun by freeing all their own slaves?
I agree that we shouldn't be able to go around and violate the laws of other countries.
I assume you'll be giving up alcohol, then, as is the law in certain Middle Eastern states? And also giving up the practice of your religion, as is the law in North Korea? You'll certainly be surrendering your gun, as is the law in the UK. And according to the rules of various legislatures, you'll not say anything disparaging about Ataturk, the king of Thailand, Mohammed the Prophet, or beef.
Seriously, did you even think this through at all? Of course you should be able to violate the laws of other countries, as long as you're not in that country. A nineteen-year-old in England can drink all the beer he likes, and the Yanks have no fucking say in the matter. Neither do the English have any say in the matter when a man in America carries a gun around the place. The Sharia laws against apostasy from Islam hold no force in Japan. And American laws forbidding linking to copyrighted material do not apply in Sweden.
When you're visiting another country, of course you obey that country's law. But in your own land, you shouldn't have to give a damn what the idiot politicians of some foreign place decide to ban or not to ban.
Wow, all the pot I can steal as a worker paid by my job almost as much as the minimum I need to survive? Sign me up!
Look, you wouldn't live there. Not unless you're a millionaire in tax exile. Nobody wants to be the workers in the libertarian paradise. You'd only go there to buy your weed, and you'd host your pirate FTP servers there.
But you won it, too. That's the thing about civil wars.
States were supposed to govern their own borders and the Constitution was there to limit a few things that states could not govern (like trade between states, or basic rights).
Like the inalienable right to keep and bear slaves.
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I'm also angry at the people who made my network card. Gigabit ethernet? Nonsense, only 1,000,000,000 bps. Same goes for my CPU, which they said would run at 2.6GHz, but does it hell...
Everyone knows /. is completely useless on April 1. Wouldn't it be funny if the industry took use of that fact and posted an important story on April 1st specifically to take advantage of that?
Happened once before and a lot of people didn't believe it. Free email with a gigabyte of storage? You're having a laugh, right? Sure. Look at the date. No way could even Google do that!
I don't know about Eastern Orthodoxy, but I can say that Catholicism is well up to speed with contemporary cosmology, geology and biology. That's pretty modern, I reckon, certainly far more so than some belief systems I could name.
Are there? Most of the surveys I've seen have scientists as a terrifically godless lot, far less religious on average than pretty much any other segment of society.
No doubt about that. It's frighteningly far right. Quick example, every so often the subject of trade unionism comes up, and the sheer venom of the rhetoric against organised labour is unbelievable. Thatcher herself would be shocked. I think everyone must have read one too many Ayn Rand tracts, or maybe played Bioshock through a few times and thought it sounded like a good idea.
It meant loaded, ready to go, and capable of being launched against British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes. That's what I was told, anyway.
What is happening is that the underlying geometry of space is expanding. Best estimate of the rate of expansion is something like 72 kilometres per second per megaparsec. So if two objects are one million parsecs apart (that's 3.26 million lightyears), then one second later they'll be one million parsecs and 72 kilometres apart.
In addition, objects in that space are free to move within it, and so if they are subject to mechanical forces they'll follow those forces just as normal. So atoms and apples are held together by their internal electromagnetism, and the Solar System by the gravitational attraction between the Sun and the planets. Objects like these drift along with cosmic expansion, but do not themselves expand.
It's only on the cosmic scale that the universal expansion becomes significant. Remember, we're talking kilometres per second per megaparsec - on such a huge scale, forces pulling objects together drop to tiny levels, while the expansion of space becomes greater and greater. The Andromeda Galaxy is only two-thirds of a megaparsec away, and so the cosmic expansion is small compared to the local motion of the galaxies - indeed, we're on a collision course with Andromeda. The largest known object in the Universe, the Great Wall, is maybe a hundred times more distant; on this scale, the cosmic expansion becomes significant. It's really the distance between galactic clusters and superclusters which is being expanded.
When did you last watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon? I haven't, not in many years. I don't remember even noticing that one was being shown on the TV, not in the last decade at any rate. They used to show them all the time when I was a kid, but now the old five-minute cartoon shows are dead. The Simpsons killed them.
I don't think Disney make all that much much off Mickey Mouse. Nor Donald Duck, nor Goofy, nor... you know what? I'm out of characters. Disney cartoons sucked anyway, Warner Bros. were far better. Disney make far more on their movies. Most of their characters are public domain to begin with - Disney don't own Snow White, nor Sleeping Beauty, nor the Mad Hatter, and Peter Pan belongs in perpetuity to Great Ormond Street Childrens' Hospital. And even though they own the films, well... lose copyright on those and you get third parties producing their own copies, but the Disney brand counts for a lot in the customer's mind. There might be cheap copies now legally sold at the market, but the birthday present for little Jessica is still going to be a real Disney disc bought in a Disney store.
And the big cash cow for Disney today won't go out of copyright for a long, long time. Don't think of dusty cartoons from the early twentieth century. Think Buzz Lightyear. Pixar is huge.
Of course Disney will protect Mickey Mouse, but not for the revenue his cartoons bring in: only because they've made Mickey Mouse the iconic mascot for the Disney brand, and if the early cartoons enter the public domain then derivative works of those become legitimate. Derivative works which might portray their subject in the most awful manner. You do not want to give /b/ free rein on the good reputation of Mickey Mouse!
I'm selling a roughly 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen gas mixture (with traces of other chemicals) for $1,000 per litre. If you don't want to pay for it, you'd better do without, otherwise you're morally immature. Don't even think about just taking it for free from the atmosphere!
Naaa na na nana nana na na, katamari damashii...
Isn't that a bit like 'grouping Germans and Europeans', or 'grouping nouns and words'?
See, there it is though. You consider it reasonable to censor a YouTube posting because you believe information can be owned. In Kuwait they consider it reasonable to censor a YouTube posting because they believe the Prophet should not be criticised. Both to me seem rather artificial. But I suppose Americans believe it worth restricting free speech in that way in order to encourage a profitable media industry, and Kuwaitis believe it worth restricting free speech in that way to avoid infuriating God.
The ending of Total Recall makes perfect sense. It only causes problems if you insist that the ludicrously over-the-top secret agent action hero scenario was actually real, as opposed to what your man had in fact paid for at the very beginning.
Running a current through the ribbon is a better idea. But you've just added a new requirement to the list: the ribbon must be incredibly light, incredibly strong, and a superconductor. We've gone from 'something we might feasibly invent in the foreseeable future' to 'unobtainium'.
The best proposal I've heard is to run a nuclear reactor on the ground, and transmit the energy to the climber by laser or microwave. Or do the same with a solar array at the counterweight. Either is good, but then you run into a new problem; make the motors as efficient as you like, there'll still be losses. Entropy. Waste heat. How do you cool the climber?
Supercollider doubles the research output of the base in which it is built. The Space Elevator removes the requirement for a base to have an aerospace complex in order to benefit from the effects of orbital improvements. Neither have anything to do with culture.
Both are in fact irrelevant. I've just built the Cloning Vats. That pretty much means I win.
You have an anchor at the top of the ribbon. It needs to be very massive compared to the payload - so we need a large space station, or a small captured asteroid. You have it in an orbit that's slightly above geostationary, so that it tends to drift into a higher orbit and is kept in place by tension in the ribbon. That way, the top is pulling upwards naturally, and the payload doesn't drag the whole structure down.
That's probably not how it would be done. You'd have a ribbon hanging down from geostationary to the equator, and your vehicle would actively climb up it, rather than being hauled up. The ribbon still needs to be incredibly strong and light, but it's not the component that's actually doing the work.
Exercise for the reader: work out how you're going to power the climber.
Yeah, you're right there. Anecdotal evidence is always more reliable than the results of organised surveys.
Figuratively speaking, eh? I like that. Is the '50%' figurative, or the 'almost overnight'? It's a handy phrase that acts as a get-out-of-jail-free card if anyone calls you on your made-up statistic. I mean, given that burglary rates have dropped by almost 60% since 1995.
That might be the most dangerous thing of all. The belief that 'it can't happen here'. It's quite safe to pass all these laws allowing all manner of abuses, because no villain will ever arise who will use them to implement a true police state and become a dictator. That can't happen, because hey, the constitution!
The Weimar Republic had a constitution too. Constitutions aren't worth the paper they're printed on once powerful people stop caring about them. As I recall my history, when it happened in Germany, the problem was that their politics had become totally polarised, fairly equally between the Communists and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, with shifting alliances of smaller parties providing the balance of power. With no stable overall government, the executive under Hindenburg got into the habit of ruling by decree (that's 'executive order' to you, chum), pretty much bypassing the constitution. Once the aforesaid National Socialists finally got their man into a position of power, he was perfectly happy to continue ruling in just the same manner. Goodnight, democracy.
To be fair to the slave owners, it was perfectly reasonable of them to interpret the intent of the founders as meaning that the rights they went on about were only for whites. I mean, if Washington et. al. intended black people to be free citizens of the new Republic, then surely they'd have begun by freeing all their own slaves?
I assume you'll be giving up alcohol, then, as is the law in certain Middle Eastern states? And also giving up the practice of your religion, as is the law in North Korea? You'll certainly be surrendering your gun, as is the law in the UK. And according to the rules of various legislatures, you'll not say anything disparaging about Ataturk, the king of Thailand, Mohammed the Prophet, or beef.
Seriously, did you even think this through at all? Of course you should be able to violate the laws of other countries, as long as you're not in that country. A nineteen-year-old in England can drink all the beer he likes, and the Yanks have no fucking say in the matter. Neither do the English have any say in the matter when a man in America carries a gun around the place. The Sharia laws against apostasy from Islam hold no force in Japan. And American laws forbidding linking to copyrighted material do not apply in Sweden.
When you're visiting another country, of course you obey that country's law. But in your own land, you shouldn't have to give a damn what the idiot politicians of some foreign place decide to ban or not to ban.
No, that's the spaceprobe that's being launched by the St. Ives Space Agency next month.
Look, you wouldn't live there. Not unless you're a millionaire in tax exile. Nobody wants to be the workers in the libertarian paradise. You'd only go there to buy your weed, and you'd host your pirate FTP servers there.
But you won it, too. That's the thing about civil wars.
States were supposed to govern their own borders and the Constitution was there to limit a few things that states could not govern (like trade between states, or basic rights).
Like the inalienable right to keep and bear slaves.