So I find myself wondering if the beatles have grossed $400 million in total for their music since it was written. I'm sure it's possible but would like to know for sure. Anyone?
Oh God yes. $400 million is about £200 million, is £50 million per Beatle. McCartney's offered £25 million just to buy off Heather Mills in this divorce thing.
The Beatles were, are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, huge.
As the aardvark is invisible, it does not reflect light in the correct wavelength in order to appear pink. Thus there is not an invisible pink aardvark. QED.
But that is the miracle of the invisible pink aardvark. It is invisible AND it is pink. This is one of the central mysteries of the Church of the Aardvark, and this holy miracle is the central proof of the supernatural nature of the aardvark; a mere ordinary aardvark certainly could not be both invisible and pink at the same time.
(This is probably an after-effect of Catholic school. After the mental gymnastics of believing in transubstantiation, this stuff's peanuts. It just takes practice; soon you'll be believing half a dozen impossible things before breakfast!)
All the rhythms I just mentioned involve information about resources beyond our atmosphere, and are directly involving 'heavenly bodies'.
Day. Night. Full moon, new moon. Keep count and you've got a calendar. You don't need any voodoo astrology connection to the motion of the planet Saturn to do it. And that's before the additional comic value to be had when an astrologer makes predictions based on the positions of Uranus (discovered 1781) or Neptune (discovered 1846), and claims that this is based on Ancient Wisdom.
Quantum.
Appears to be a complete non-sequitur unrelated to anything else in the post. Before using the word 'quantum' again, please give a short explanation of the significance of the Schrodinger wave equation. Otherwise people will just assume you don't know what you're talking about.
I would never suggest that planetary motions or phases determine what we do or how we make decisions. Most of our recent history shows a very intentional separation from the natural world as part of our own proof of dominance superiority and control over nature. But whether we like it or not, the mechanisms of reception to this information are there and the separation is as much a fiction as our superiority.
What mechanisms do you propose? Electromagnetic, I seem to recall... but Mars and Venus have no significant magnetic field, and the gas giants are so far away that their field contributions are swamped by the variations in the Earth's own field due to local geology and weather. As for gravitation, as has already been pointed out, the gravitation of a distant planet is considerably less than the gravitation of the midwife. Oh, wait. Quantum, where 'quantum' means 'magic'.
You've given several examples of periodic events in living systems. But why tie these in to an astrological framework dragging in the whole solar system, when they are adequately explained in terms of only the sun and the moon and the progression of seasons on a perfectly mundane calendar? If astrology had named itself, oh... horolomancy, divination based purely on times and dates, it would be far less objectionable.
Astrology is not just another tool of divination, like tarot or I Ching or picking petals off a daisy. It is a system of looking at the flow of energy in the universe and how it affects you.
What nonsense. You seem to be suggesting that the positions of the eight planets reflects some underlying 'universal energy' which has effects on human events. How strange it is then that the movement of the planets is mechanical and predictable and fully in accordance with well established theories of motion and gravitation. One would think the planets would move about as changeably as the trends and fashions of human society - I mean, if the one were a reflection of the other. Or alternatively, that the fates of human beings were as closely constrained as the paths of the planets are well known to be. That's a depressing thought.
Even from a woo-woo perspective, your comment is utter rot. Divination is an attempt to predict events in a chaotic system - specifically, human civilisation. The I Ching and the Tarot are chaotically sensitive to differences in the initial conditions - the throw of stalks, the shuffle - and so you're using a chaotic process in your divination, which at least might make sense. If the fall of the I Ching is governed by Universal Energy, and society is also governed by Universal Energy, at least they're both similarly unpredictable.
The mention of quantum theory makes me think this is actually a subtle troll; use of the word 'quantum' without any indication of any understanding of what it means is well known kooksign, which if I remember correctly is worth ten points on the Crackpot Index...
I hypothesize that personality differences observed by astrology (such as certain signs have certain personality traits) might very well be attributed to the influence of magnetic fields on human embryos at an early stage of development.
Your hypothesis is interesting. Now it is time to work through some numbers to determine whether it is plausible. What is the magnitude of the magnetic field present within the womb due to Jupiter? What is the magnitude of the magnetic field present within the womb due to the CRT in the ultrasound scanner? How many orders of magnitude difference are there between the two?
They could, but in doing so they'd have to redesign it from its current philosophy of disposable carrying module to that of reusable spacecraft.
Actually, the ATV is designed to remain attached to ISS for months on end, with hatch open, basically acting as a big walk-in wardrobe. It's effectively another module while attached. Then you ditch it and it and all the accumulated rubbish in it burn up, and then you hook up a new one.
Remember when they crashed a cargo ship into the side of Mir?
That ship wasn't carrying the automatic docking system; they'd left it off to save money, and had asked one of the cosmonauts on board to steer it in manually.
So, for the record: Russian automatic docking systems were already better than human cosmonauts ten years ago.
This is really about stupid people who are sending their emails to the wrong address. How is the AF supposed to control that?
When those emails contain the flight plan for Air Force 1, the Air Force really ought to work out a way of controlling that. Preferably a way involving strong encryption, and thorough training of everyone involved about how to use it. There are innocent people aboard that plane who could be killed if anyone decided to take a shot at it to take out Dubya.
Eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world != unilateral disarmament. Unilateral disarmament is when you eliminate all your own nukes, without reference to anybody else's. Multilateral disarmament is when everybody eliminates their nukes, and has been the goal of pretty much every strategic arms treaty ever signed.
As well as a speech he made last week that I cannot find online at the moment. He said 'greatly reduce' at first, then alluded that the US should eliminate them to 'lead the way'.
You'd be a good person to ask this one of, then.... is there any truth to the theory that over time, humans will develop a natural immunity to HIV in the same way that cats have largely developped immunity to Feline Leukemia and FIV?
Try it the other way around. For a virus, as for any parasite, killing off the host is a bad move. Taking the point of view of the HIV virus, its best move is to delay the onset of AIDS as long as possible, to maximise its chances of infecting new hosts. We might not evolve to be immune to the virus, so much as the virus might evolve to be harmless to us.
Enter the eeePC, which comes fairly cheap (mine was 399.99) with Linux pre-installed. It's Xanadros, and I'll admit, I'm a moron, so I didn't want to deal with it. Installing XP was anything but easy... lacking a DVD-rom drive, I had to port it to a memory stick, run a bunch of suspicious looking programs to make the stick bootable, and then run it from there. XP died after installing 4-5 times, 6th time's the charm...
This kind of thing is why Windows will never be ready for the micro-laptop.
Want to plug in your iPod though? Not enough storage space for it to be worthwhile.
You must have a very small-capacity iPod. I'd have thought it would have been perfect as external mass storage to supplement the four gig capacity of the Eee.
you also buy computers more powerful than what you need because you MIGHT want to want decent quality video clips.
800x480 is fine by me for video on a small screen. PAL standard is 720x576, and that looks just fine on the huge TV in the living room.
You might want to do some video and audio editing,
I don't think I've ever needed to edit video. Audio editing, yes, which consisted of making MP3 ringtones for my phone. Can the Eee not run Audacity?
you MIGHT want to keep more than 8-16gb's worth of data on your computer
External USB storage is cheap and getting cheaper and denser every day. I've got a four-gig micro SD chip in my phone. It's not as if you need to carry wheelbarrows full of floppies around anymore.
and you MIGHT want to use the plethora of programs/ features that are found on XP that simply don't work that well or at all in Linux.
What, games? Yeah, fair enough: you won't be buying an Eee to play Crysis.
I don't know about you, but surfing the internet on a 8" screen with a 800 x 480 resolution screen sounds like a nightmare, especially if you are used to even an SXGA.
Install Adblock Plus and a lot of screen space gets freed up immediately. Most of my internet activity is on text-heavy sites like/., which scale down nicely. In fact, most websites these days seem to be quite good about scale: the days of 'Best Viewed in 800x600 in Internet Explorer 4' appear to be mostly behind us. I wonder if it's the increasing popularity of mobile browsing that's driving this?
And, ever since I bought my prs-500, it has been difficult to stay legit - I have a hard time buying a book online for the same (or very similar) price to a real, dead tree paper book.
You've finished all of Project Gutenberg? Impressive!
So a game that sells into Germany can't let me kill nazis.
You can kill Nazis. They can goosestep around the place and give stiff-armed salutes and sing the Horst Wessel Song and shout achtung achtung for you Tommy zer war is over. They just can't display the insignia: chiefly, no swastikas.
Which is why the Germans in WW2 games tend to have a red flag with a white circle on which is emblazoned the Iron Cross.
Even if it is somewhat hypocritical in some cases, it's a nice step forward--because, after all, this will mean that the member states will have to eventually reduce or eliminate censorship in order to comply with the EU regulations.
Correct. The real power in Europe is not found in Brussels, but in Paris and London and Berlin. The member states are very powerful and independent; the Brussels government is really just a jumped-up trading association, whose remit is to unify the European market for free trade, and to speak on behalf of the member states as a union in disputes with foreign powers such as the US and China.
So, the EU directives tend to have to do with trading standards - hence the standardisation of weights and measures, the ongoing harmonisation of labour laws, and the project to establish a common currency. The member states make their own decisions about media censorship, based on local standards: hence the famous ban on Nazi memorabilia in Germany.
However, EU directives are binding on the member states and do have to be implemented - at least in theory. So this might well be a good thing. Not sure it's the best precedent, though; it reminds me more than a little of the way the American federal government abuses the 'interstate commerce' rule to usurp the states' power. That's not something even I want to see in Europe, and I'm way over on the federalist side of the spectrum.
I think that with the moon's lower gravity you could get away with hauling much more weight in batteries.
Look up the cost of shipping a kilo of mass to the Moon before you say that. Every kilo used up by a battery adds to the launch cost, and is a kilo not used up by a scientific instrument. And there's a hard upper limit: there are no Saturn-class launchers in the world today, so the whole payload cannot exceed the capacity of the largest Delta Heavy in the inventory.
When you allow for more than 24 hours to happen in one of God's days, the only thing that comes up against the face of modern science is that the birds came before the dinosaurs.
That, and the plants on Earth before the creation of the Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh God yes. $400 million is about £200 million, is £50 million per Beatle. McCartney's offered £25 million just to buy off Heather Mills in this divorce thing.
The Beatles were, are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, huge.
But that is the miracle of the invisible pink aardvark. It is invisible AND it is pink. This is one of the central mysteries of the Church of the Aardvark, and this holy miracle is the central proof of the supernatural nature of the aardvark; a mere ordinary aardvark certainly could not be both invisible and pink at the same time.
(This is probably an after-effect of Catholic school. After the mental gymnastics of believing in transubstantiation, this stuff's peanuts. It just takes practice; soon you'll be believing half a dozen impossible things before breakfast!)
Day. Night. Full moon, new moon. Keep count and you've got a calendar. You don't need any voodoo astrology connection to the motion of the planet Saturn to do it. And that's before the additional comic value to be had when an astrologer makes predictions based on the positions of Uranus (discovered 1781) or Neptune (discovered 1846), and claims that this is based on Ancient Wisdom.
Quantum.
Appears to be a complete non-sequitur unrelated to anything else in the post. Before using the word 'quantum' again, please give a short explanation of the significance of the Schrodinger wave equation. Otherwise people will just assume you don't know what you're talking about.
I would never suggest that planetary motions or phases determine what we do or how we make decisions. Most of our recent history shows a very intentional separation from the natural world as part of our own proof of dominance superiority and control over nature. But whether we like it or not, the mechanisms of reception to this information are there and the separation is as much a fiction as our superiority.
What mechanisms do you propose? Electromagnetic, I seem to recall... but Mars and Venus have no significant magnetic field, and the gas giants are so far away that their field contributions are swamped by the variations in the Earth's own field due to local geology and weather. As for gravitation, as has already been pointed out, the gravitation of a distant planet is considerably less than the gravitation of the midwife. Oh, wait. Quantum, where 'quantum' means 'magic'.
You've given several examples of periodic events in living systems. But why tie these in to an astrological framework dragging in the whole solar system, when they are adequately explained in terms of only the sun and the moon and the progression of seasons on a perfectly mundane calendar? If astrology had named itself, oh... horolomancy, divination based purely on times and dates, it would be far less objectionable.
What nonsense. You seem to be suggesting that the positions of the eight planets reflects some underlying 'universal energy' which has effects on human events. How strange it is then that the movement of the planets is mechanical and predictable and fully in accordance with well established theories of motion and gravitation. One would think the planets would move about as changeably as the trends and fashions of human society - I mean, if the one were a reflection of the other. Or alternatively, that the fates of human beings were as closely constrained as the paths of the planets are well known to be. That's a depressing thought.
Even from a woo-woo perspective, your comment is utter rot. Divination is an attempt to predict events in a chaotic system - specifically, human civilisation. The I Ching and the Tarot are chaotically sensitive to differences in the initial conditions - the throw of stalks, the shuffle - and so you're using a chaotic process in your divination, which at least might make sense. If the fall of the I Ching is governed by Universal Energy, and society is also governed by Universal Energy, at least they're both similarly unpredictable.
The mention of quantum theory makes me think this is actually a subtle troll; use of the word 'quantum' without any indication of any understanding of what it means is well known kooksign, which if I remember correctly is worth ten points on the Crackpot Index...
Your hypothesis is interesting. Now it is time to work through some numbers to determine whether it is plausible. What is the magnitude of the magnetic field present within the womb due to Jupiter? What is the magnitude of the magnetic field present within the womb due to the CRT in the ultrasound scanner? How many orders of magnitude difference are there between the two?
Actually, the ATV is designed to remain attached to ISS for months on end, with hatch open, basically acting as a big walk-in wardrobe. It's effectively another module while attached. Then you ditch it and it and all the accumulated rubbish in it burn up, and then you hook up a new one.
That ship wasn't carrying the automatic docking system; they'd left it off to save money, and had asked one of the cosmonauts on board to steer it in manually.
So, for the record: Russian automatic docking systems were already better than human cosmonauts ten years ago.
Citizens of the Land of the Free are forbidden by their government to visit Cuba.
When those emails contain the flight plan for Air Force 1, the Air Force really ought to work out a way of controlling that. Preferably a way involving strong encryption, and thorough training of everyone involved about how to use it. There are innocent people aboard that plane who could be killed if anyone decided to take a shot at it to take out Dubya.
Eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world != unilateral disarmament. Unilateral disarmament is when you eliminate all your own nukes, without reference to anybody else's. Multilateral disarmament is when everybody eliminates their nukes, and has been the goal of pretty much every strategic arms treaty ever signed.
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
Her name's Yelena Rossini. Anglo-Russian-Italian. Old Heath Road. Her family are so old money they're prehistoric-riche.
I fucked my editor's niece and she says nothing happened. But I know it did. Because I'm clever.
And because I left my shades on. And my shades' defence system thought all the falling down and rolling around and stuff was an assault.
And what does it do when there's an assault? I'm glad you asked.
It takes PICTURES.
-- Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan, 'Year of the Bastard'
RM, who have had a pretty strong hold on the UK education market since the demise of Acorn, are pushing Eee.
Carbon is black when it's in the form of graphite, like in a pencil, or in a lump of coal. When it's in the form of diamond, it's transparent.
Try it the other way around. For a virus, as for any parasite, killing off the host is a bad move. Taking the point of view of the HIV virus, its best move is to delay the onset of AIDS as long as possible, to maximise its chances of infecting new hosts. We might not evolve to be immune to the virus, so much as the virus might evolve to be harmless to us.
Actually, what Americans call 'liberal' we call 'moderate Conservative'. What we call left-wing, Americans call pinko Commie traitors.
This kind of thing is why Windows will never be ready for the micro-laptop.
You must have a very small-capacity iPod. I'd have thought it would have been perfect as external mass storage to supplement the four gig capacity of the Eee.
800x480 is fine by me for video on a small screen. PAL standard is 720x576, and that looks just fine on the huge TV in the living room.
You might want to do some video and audio editing,
I don't think I've ever needed to edit video. Audio editing, yes, which consisted of making MP3 ringtones for my phone. Can the Eee not run Audacity?
you MIGHT want to keep more than 8-16gb's worth of data on your computer
External USB storage is cheap and getting cheaper and denser every day. I've got a four-gig micro SD chip in my phone. It's not as if you need to carry wheelbarrows full of floppies around anymore.
and you MIGHT want to use the plethora of programs/ features that are found on XP that simply don't work that well or at all in Linux.
What, games? Yeah, fair enough: you won't be buying an Eee to play Crysis.
I don't know about you, but surfing the internet on a 8" screen with a 800 x 480 resolution screen sounds like a nightmare, especially if you are used to even an SXGA.
Install Adblock Plus and a lot of screen space gets freed up immediately. Most of my internet activity is on text-heavy sites like /., which scale down nicely. In fact, most websites these days seem to be quite good about scale: the days of 'Best Viewed in 800x600 in Internet Explorer 4' appear to be mostly behind us. I wonder if it's the increasing popularity of mobile browsing that's driving this?
You've finished all of Project Gutenberg? Impressive!
You can kill Nazis. They can goosestep around the place and give stiff-armed salutes and sing the Horst Wessel Song and shout achtung achtung for you Tommy zer war is over. They just can't display the insignia: chiefly, no swastikas.
Which is why the Germans in WW2 games tend to have a red flag with a white circle on which is emblazoned the Iron Cross.
Correct. The real power in Europe is not found in Brussels, but in Paris and London and Berlin. The member states are very powerful and independent; the Brussels government is really just a jumped-up trading association, whose remit is to unify the European market for free trade, and to speak on behalf of the member states as a union in disputes with foreign powers such as the US and China.
So, the EU directives tend to have to do with trading standards - hence the standardisation of weights and measures, the ongoing harmonisation of labour laws, and the project to establish a common currency. The member states make their own decisions about media censorship, based on local standards: hence the famous ban on Nazi memorabilia in Germany.
However, EU directives are binding on the member states and do have to be implemented - at least in theory. So this might well be a good thing. Not sure it's the best precedent, though; it reminds me more than a little of the way the American federal government abuses the 'interstate commerce' rule to usurp the states' power. That's not something even I want to see in Europe, and I'm way over on the federalist side of the spectrum.
Look up the cost of shipping a kilo of mass to the Moon before you say that. Every kilo used up by a battery adds to the launch cost, and is a kilo not used up by a scientific instrument. And there's a hard upper limit: there are no Saturn-class launchers in the world today, so the whole payload cannot exceed the capacity of the largest Delta Heavy in the inventory.
But plants on Earth were not. At least, not according to Modern Science, with which you appear to wish to reconcile your Bronze Age creation myth.
That, and the plants on Earth before the creation of the Sun.