Americans were not running into Britain to blow things up, they were not using random people as human shields, they were not kidnapping British civilians
Tell it to John Paul Jones the pirate, arsonist of Whitehaven, who attempted to kidnap for ransom the Earl of Selkirk, and on failing this proceeded to rob his house. Of course Americans remember this nautical terrorist as a hero.
You probably wouldn't have a passenger dirigible over the atlantic as the time and associated costs (like food) wouldn't be worth it - so Jumbos would do that, but it doesn't make ANY sense to fly a jet from L.A. to New York - THAT trip would be much more sensibly done in a dirigible, even if it did take a few hours longer.
LA to New York is actually a longer flight than New York to London. America's a big place.
I actually think the Hindenburg accident would have been survivable for the airship industry. Trouble was, it was 1930s Germany. So the war began, and suddenly nobody's got the time to float merrily about the place in Zeppelins, and all the aviation workers are making bombers for London. The pressure of war drove the development of jet planes to the point where they were viable for civilian aviation, and far, far faster than an airship could ever be. Plus, a big bonus for planes in the immediately post-war world, they weren't iconically Nazi.
if the Zeppelin had been running on Helium like it should have it would almost certainly have survived
Actually, the Hindenburg fire could well have had more to do with the surface coating than the hydrogen gas, although that certainly didn't help. At any rate most of the passengers and crew of the Hindenburg survived, and those who died were the ones who jumped out of the airship; people who stayed aboard survived. Compare that with the survival rate of any famous disaster on a jet plane and tell me airships are dangerous. I mean, these things were SUPPOSED to fly straight at skyscrapers. There's a mast at the top of the Empire State Building which was for mooring airships; if one had missed and crashed into the side, it would have gone bump, quite gently.
As far as I know future Muslim youth is working their asses off studying Qur'an and Java, while the future non-Muslim youth is... ? That is a question you should ask yourself, what is the chance of your ideology to be passed to future generation, and what is the chance of Islam to be passed to future generations.
If Islam comes to predominate by peaceful means over many generations, then I honestly don't much care; we'll all be long dead by then anyway, and you are welcome to your fantasies about your great-great-grandchildren. But you threatened war, and you threatened that 'we' would do it, not 'our descendants', not some far-distant future generation. Given the long and sordid history of pogroms going back as far as European history is written, that scenario cannot end well for the Muslims. Parties of the far right arise from time to time in Europe, normally based around areas of ethnic tension, and their rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of the 1930s - it's just that the object of their hate has changed.
I don't fear Islam. I fear what the rest of us will become in reaction, should Islam proceed to act as you threatened. I don't fear living under Islamic law because I don't think it remotely likely ever to happen; I do fear living under a racist, Fascist state.
Are you atheist or not? It seems like you have certain beliefs about the future.
Beliefs? I'd describe these as opinions, based on my rather negative view of human nature and European history. Apart from the bit about being an atheist, which you have quite right. My view of the future is that no god will ever save us. Your view appears to be the opposite, which is leading you to espouse the most appalling foolishness I've ever heard. You don't care how many are killed in your war, if it means triumph for your bloodthirsty god? You speak for your whole people when you say you are not afraid to die? Wait, of course... those who are afraid to die are apostates, and deserve to die anyway, right? You are a monster.
It is true that we will come to your country with war, whether you want it or not.
If you do that, you will be exterminated. No joke. It's what people do when they feel threatened by a minority. Hitler is disappearing from living memory, and the Holocaust is becoming a matter of dusty history books and grim museums in the East; with every old man that dies, taking the memory of that horror with him, there is less and less to stop the West from committing the same crimes again. So - attempt this and you give the far right all the support they need. They'll say about you exactly what the Fascists once said about the Jews, the Communists, the gays. Do you want all your people rounded up, the way Jews once were? Do you want to see Mecca glow in the dark? Because that's how your plan ends, and your god will not protect you.
The only purpose it's pretty much used for is the exchange of the worst crimes of humanity.
Be more specific. Are they going out to West Africa and getting a bunch of people and shipping them en masse to America over Freenet? Or are they invading Manchuria and performing exotic biological and chemical experiments on the locals there over Freenet? Perhaps they are rounding up millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and opponents of the regime and gassing them over Freenet? Or as it might be are they riding out on ponies over the steppe with composite shortbows and razing to the ground any city that dares resist their rule over Freenet?
Or are they exchanging crimes which are pretty nasty but which are actually nowhere near the worst?
As a matter of fact it's not so new an idea. The same basic Mariner probe was used for missions to Mars, Venus and Mercury in the seventies. Similarly, ESA recently followed up Mars Express with Venus Express, a suspiciously similar spaceprobe.
Until they get schoolyard DHS style check-in to examine all portable media arriving at school, the sneaker net will continue.
Examine all portable media?
I have a 4GB Micro-SD memory card in my phone. That's the kind of capacity typical computers had when Napster first took off, so it can easily store a pretty decent music collection. Certainly plenty to be bringing into school for trade in a day, even if your collection proper is on your home PC.
And if I put it on top of a penny, it doesn't even go over the sides. In among the vast amount of assorted junk the average schoolboy carries about each day, what are your chances of finding it?
Now estimate the capacities of the equivalent devices in 2010. 2015. 2020...
I do believe this will be the ultimate form of music trading.
When I was at high school I went in carrying a bag of cassettes. We'd trade and duplicate those. Half an album on each side of a tape, laboriously copied on dual-deck recorders, crappy quality, but in the mid-nineties it was how it was done. I still have a stack of old Blur and Pulp tapes from way back, gathering dust somewhere in my parents' house.
Fifteen years or so later my sister is at the same high school. She goes in carrying a four gigabyte USB stick, a DVD containing every Number One hit there ever was, a mobile phone with more capacity than the PC I had back then and with the ability to transfer any of its contents wirelessly to any other phone at any time.
Fifteen years from now kids will be swapping the entire history of recorded music at one go, and keeping it on memory chips the size of postage stamps.
I don't like 99 per cent of the food at McDonalds. Does that mean that I get to waltz in and steal an Egg McMuffin because that's what I like and not everything on their menu is an Egg McMuffin
No, but you can make Egg McMuffins at home to the exact same recipe as McDonalds use, and you can even show your friends how to do the same if you like. You save an enormous amount of money on Egg McMuffins and so do all your friends.
Of course then the original creative artist who came up with the Egg McMuffin recipe does not get his royalties from McDonalds, and the likelihood of McDonalds coming up with brand new tasty snacks in future is substantially reduced. But of course we don't give a shit, we have our home-made pirate Egg McMuffins and that suits us just fine.
I rather enjoyed Conan Doyle's first person narrative in Sherlock Holmes.
You mean Dr Watson's first person narrative. The other fellow was just Watson's literary agent.
Re:Second person shooter
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You still move yourself but see all the action from the eyes of your enemy. Sorta hard to maneuver, though: Look left. Left!
This is nothing new. Battletoads did it years ago; the boss at the end of the first level was a huge mecha which was far too big to fit on the screen. So they cut to the monster's eye view.
Terrific game, but a bit hard to find nowadays; ring your local GameStop and see if they have any in stock, it's well worth tracking down.
And they say that it is OK to sell these games to children?
Who says that, exactly? In the UK all the GTA games have been rated 18. I gather that in the US, they've normally been rated 17 - which was why the Hot Coffee thing was so controversial over there, since a sex scene would have upgraded the game to an 18. Either way, it's not as if very many children are being sold these games. No sensible parent would buy little Timmy such a game, any more than they would sit them down in front of a DVD of 'Scarface'. Right?
Everyone defending that woman is a music thief with a guilty conscience
Actually, my conscience is perfectly clear; I feel no guilt whatever. When I argue in favour of a copyright infringer and against the MAFIAA, I'm doing it in the hope of persuading more people to pirate, and thereby increase the size of the average torrent swarm and hence the speed of my own downloads. If people get scared off pirate services, there'll be less material available and what there is will be less well seeded, and then where will we be?
How would you feel if you bought a 2 litre bottle of milk, only to find out that the farmer actually filled it with 1.9 litres of milk becuase "he counts litres differently to the normal method". Wouldn't stand up would it?
I'd be upset at the farmer, until I discovered that the manufacturer of my measuring cylinder had actually calibrated it in llitres instead of litres, but labelled it litres anyway.
Also, thank fuck for the House of Lords. There are few elected representatives who'll speak out on an issue that's got the word 'pornography' stuck to it.
These are the Lords. British aristocrats. You'll not find a more perverted bunch anywhere in the world. These are the people who invented spanking fetishism, and who refuse to give up their wigs and tights for anything. No wonder they're on the side of the angels... well, succubi perhaps... on this issue.
Governments do not exist to create criminals. Governments exist to create a smooth living environment that allows large groups of people to interact in an easy and predictable fashion.
Governments exist to perpetuate themselves. No more, no less. Running the country well just happens to be one very good way of doing that. A government that runs its country poorly undermines its own existence and is eventually replaced by a more competent government.
The late mathematician Paul Erds used to say, perhaps metaphorically, that the most elegant proof of every mathematical theorem was written in a great book in God's library. When he came up with a beautiful proof, he would say it was one from the book.
By the way, before anybody gets overexcited about this and adds this great mathematician to their list of 'Clever People Who Believed In God So You Should Too'... Erdos normally referred to God as 'the Supreme Fascist'. Even other mathematicians thought the guy was a bit eccentric.
I'd actually like to see a Wii version, I don't care if it has to be scaled back, we know it can be at least as good as San Andreas.
Go and buy 'The Godfather: Blackhand Edition' if you want a GTA-type game on Wii. The motion controls on that are wonderful. After overdosing on Nintendo's in-house games, which are great but, you know, saccharine, the first time I played this game was a revelation. Grab a guy by the collar with one hand, pummel his face with the other, fling him through a plate glass window, or just choke the life out of him... It was genuinely disturbing how good it felt to kill this way, so much more immersive than just pressing buttons to do it.
Don't hold your breath for GTA 4 though. Wii only has 64MiB of RAM, and GTA 4's selling point is the enormous scale and detail of its simulated city. Scale back enough to fit on a Wii and you've destroyed the whole point of it. Maybe there'll be ports of the PS2 games, a la Bully, but I wonder if there might be contractual issues there.
If you saying it was only a small local flood, explain the fact that sedimentary rock and fossils are found on every continent, including Antarctica. This is also the case for even the highest mountains on earth, such as Mt. Everest.
Plate tectonics. Look it up.
Slowly buried life forms decay. They never produce coal or oil. To do that takes quick burial and lots of heat and pressure.
Citation needed.
There is evidence for MUCH more water is bound in the mantle of the earth, still today, than in all the oceans.
Their argument is based off a strictly capitalist view. If you consider the notion that there is no way to claim your work as your own once it is under the GPL and generate a profit directly from it, in this world view, it's a waste. They see GPL as a trap where once entered, there is no escape.
More importantly, they see the GPL as a threat. Despite what he says, Gates knows that GNU/Linux has improved, and continues to improve, very quickly indeed. We're a long way from Linus's hobby project now.
Gates's problem is that the GNU project has placed the means of production firmly in the hands of the workers. A development toolset that would once have cost thousands or tens of thousands - remember the valuations AT&T put on Unix code in the days of the SJG raid? - is now completely free. You no longer need to be a capitalist corporation to do professional work. The bosses cannot possibly compete with the collective productivity of the workers united.
Better yet, because of the way the GPL is written, the capitalists by the rules they themselves paid to have made cannot simply take the product of the workers, rebrand it and call it their own. 'Embrace, extend, extinguish' was Gates's motto, and he is furious that he cannot do this any more. If they want to benefit from our work, they do it by our rules.
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Tell it to John Paul Jones the pirate, arsonist of Whitehaven, who attempted to kidnap for ransom the Earl of Selkirk, and on failing this proceeded to rob his house. Of course Americans remember this nautical terrorist as a hero.
LA to New York is actually a longer flight than New York to London. America's a big place.
I actually think the Hindenburg accident would have been survivable for the airship industry. Trouble was, it was 1930s Germany. So the war began, and suddenly nobody's got the time to float merrily about the place in Zeppelins, and all the aviation workers are making bombers for London. The pressure of war drove the development of jet planes to the point where they were viable for civilian aviation, and far, far faster than an airship could ever be. Plus, a big bonus for planes in the immediately post-war world, they weren't iconically Nazi.
Nobody forgets the Spanish Inquisition.
Actually, the Hindenburg fire could well have had more to do with the surface coating than the hydrogen gas, although that certainly didn't help. At any rate most of the passengers and crew of the Hindenburg survived, and those who died were the ones who jumped out of the airship; people who stayed aboard survived. Compare that with the survival rate of any famous disaster on a jet plane and tell me airships are dangerous. I mean, these things were SUPPOSED to fly straight at skyscrapers. There's a mast at the top of the Empire State Building which was for mooring airships; if one had missed and crashed into the side, it would have gone bump, quite gently.
If Islam comes to predominate by peaceful means over many generations, then I honestly don't much care; we'll all be long dead by then anyway, and you are welcome to your fantasies about your great-great-grandchildren. But you threatened war, and you threatened that 'we' would do it, not 'our descendants', not some far-distant future generation. Given the long and sordid history of pogroms going back as far as European history is written, that scenario cannot end well for the Muslims. Parties of the far right arise from time to time in Europe, normally based around areas of ethnic tension, and their rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of the 1930s - it's just that the object of their hate has changed.
I don't fear Islam. I fear what the rest of us will become in reaction, should Islam proceed to act as you threatened. I don't fear living under Islamic law because I don't think it remotely likely ever to happen; I do fear living under a racist, Fascist state.
Are you atheist or not? It seems like you have certain beliefs about the future.
Beliefs? I'd describe these as opinions, based on my rather negative view of human nature and European history. Apart from the bit about being an atheist, which you have quite right. My view of the future is that no god will ever save us. Your view appears to be the opposite, which is leading you to espouse the most appalling foolishness I've ever heard. You don't care how many are killed in your war, if it means triumph for your bloodthirsty god? You speak for your whole people when you say you are not afraid to die? Wait, of course... those who are afraid to die are apostates, and deserve to die anyway, right? You are a monster.
If you do that, you will be exterminated. No joke. It's what people do when they feel threatened by a minority. Hitler is disappearing from living memory, and the Holocaust is becoming a matter of dusty history books and grim museums in the East; with every old man that dies, taking the memory of that horror with him, there is less and less to stop the West from committing the same crimes again. So - attempt this and you give the far right all the support they need. They'll say about you exactly what the Fascists once said about the Jews, the Communists, the gays. Do you want all your people rounded up, the way Jews once were? Do you want to see Mecca glow in the dark? Because that's how your plan ends, and your god will not protect you.
Be more specific. Are they going out to West Africa and getting a bunch of people and shipping them en masse to America over Freenet? Or are they invading Manchuria and performing exotic biological and chemical experiments on the locals there over Freenet? Perhaps they are rounding up millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and opponents of the regime and gassing them over Freenet? Or as it might be are they riding out on ponies over the steppe with composite shortbows and razing to the ground any city that dares resist their rule over Freenet?
Or are they exchanging crimes which are pretty nasty but which are actually nowhere near the worst?
As a matter of fact it's not so new an idea. The same basic Mariner probe was used for missions to Mars, Venus and Mercury in the seventies. Similarly, ESA recently followed up Mars Express with Venus Express, a suspiciously similar spaceprobe.
Examine all portable media?
I have a 4GB Micro-SD memory card in my phone. That's the kind of capacity typical computers had when Napster first took off, so it can easily store a pretty decent music collection. Certainly plenty to be bringing into school for trade in a day, even if your collection proper is on your home PC.
And if I put it on top of a penny, it doesn't even go over the sides. In among the vast amount of assorted junk the average schoolboy carries about each day, what are your chances of finding it?
Now estimate the capacities of the equivalent devices in 2010. 2015. 2020...
When I was at high school I went in carrying a bag of cassettes. We'd trade and duplicate those. Half an album on each side of a tape, laboriously copied on dual-deck recorders, crappy quality, but in the mid-nineties it was how it was done. I still have a stack of old Blur and Pulp tapes from way back, gathering dust somewhere in my parents' house.
Fifteen years or so later my sister is at the same high school. She goes in carrying a four gigabyte USB stick, a DVD containing every Number One hit there ever was, a mobile phone with more capacity than the PC I had back then and with the ability to transfer any of its contents wirelessly to any other phone at any time.
Fifteen years from now kids will be swapping the entire history of recorded music at one go, and keeping it on memory chips the size of postage stamps.
No, but you can make Egg McMuffins at home to the exact same recipe as McDonalds use, and you can even show your friends how to do the same if you like. You save an enormous amount of money on Egg McMuffins and so do all your friends.
Of course then the original creative artist who came up with the Egg McMuffin recipe does not get his royalties from McDonalds, and the likelihood of McDonalds coming up with brand new tasty snacks in future is substantially reduced. But of course we don't give a shit, we have our home-made pirate Egg McMuffins and that suits us just fine.
Unauthorised downloading is still illegal. But you have to upload them to get caught.
You mean Dr Watson's first person narrative. The other fellow was just Watson's literary agent.
This is nothing new. Battletoads did it years ago; the boss at the end of the first level was a huge mecha which was far too big to fit on the screen. So they cut to the monster's eye view.
Terrific game, but a bit hard to find nowadays; ring your local GameStop and see if they have any in stock, it's well worth tracking down.
Who says that, exactly? In the UK all the GTA games have been rated 18. I gather that in the US, they've normally been rated 17 - which was why the Hot Coffee thing was so controversial over there, since a sex scene would have upgraded the game to an 18. Either way, it's not as if very many children are being sold these games. No sensible parent would buy little Timmy such a game, any more than they would sit them down in front of a DVD of 'Scarface'. Right?
Actually, my conscience is perfectly clear; I feel no guilt whatever. When I argue in favour of a copyright infringer and against the MAFIAA, I'm doing it in the hope of persuading more people to pirate, and thereby increase the size of the average torrent swarm and hence the speed of my own downloads. If people get scared off pirate services, there'll be less material available and what there is will be less well seeded, and then where will we be?
I'd be upset at the farmer, until I discovered that the manufacturer of my measuring cylinder had actually calibrated it in llitres instead of litres, but labelled it litres anyway.
These are the Lords. British aristocrats. You'll not find a more perverted bunch anywhere in the world. These are the people who invented spanking fetishism, and who refuse to give up their wigs and tights for anything. No wonder they're on the side of the angels... well, succubi perhaps... on this issue.
Governments exist to perpetuate themselves. No more, no less. Running the country well just happens to be one very good way of doing that. A government that runs its country poorly undermines its own existence and is eventually replaced by a more competent government.
Yes.
By the way, before anybody gets overexcited about this and adds this great mathematician to their list of 'Clever People Who Believed In God So You Should Too'... Erdos normally referred to God as 'the Supreme Fascist'. Even other mathematicians thought the guy was a bit eccentric.
Go and buy 'The Godfather: Blackhand Edition' if you want a GTA-type game on Wii. The motion controls on that are wonderful. After overdosing on Nintendo's in-house games, which are great but, you know, saccharine, the first time I played this game was a revelation. Grab a guy by the collar with one hand, pummel his face with the other, fling him through a plate glass window, or just choke the life out of him... It was genuinely disturbing how good it felt to kill this way, so much more immersive than just pressing buttons to do it.
Don't hold your breath for GTA 4 though. Wii only has 64MiB of RAM, and GTA 4's selling point is the enormous scale and detail of its simulated city. Scale back enough to fit on a Wii and you've destroyed the whole point of it. Maybe there'll be ports of the PS2 games, a la Bully, but I wonder if there might be contractual issues there.
We don't believe you. Back under the microwave induction pain ray for you for another half hour.
Plate tectonics. Look it up.
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
More importantly, they see the GPL as a threat. Despite what he says, Gates knows that GNU/Linux has improved, and continues to improve, very quickly indeed. We're a long way from Linus's hobby project now.
Gates's problem is that the GNU project has placed the means of production firmly in the hands of the workers. A development toolset that would once have cost thousands or tens of thousands - remember the valuations AT&T put on Unix code in the days of the SJG raid? - is now completely free. You no longer need to be a capitalist corporation to do professional work. The bosses cannot possibly compete with the collective productivity of the workers united.
Better yet, because of the way the GPL is written, the capitalists by the rules they themselves paid to have made cannot simply take the product of the workers, rebrand it and call it their own. 'Embrace, extend, extinguish' was Gates's motto, and he is furious that he cannot do this any more. If they want to benefit from our work, they do it by our rules.