Areas like the Bermuda and Dragon's triangles sit on top of very deep sections of the ocean, and the same lines of longitude. What if all the strange incidents have to do with something extra-terrestrial sitting on the ocean floor? And the disappearances occur when you see something that you shouldn't.
The most merciful thing in the Universe, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents.
For the love of all that is good and decent, and for the sake of your own sanity, and for the good of the restful sleep of all the civilisations of mortal men upon the dry crust of this earth under the hideous stars, do not continue this line of thought... The abomination that lies below the wave is too horrible even to name. I cannot bear the thought of what lurks waiting and dreaming in the endless dark night of the Abyssal plain... it calls to me endlessly... darkening even the bright dawn of earthly summer with its sickening evil, crawling behind my eyes and corroding all joy with the knowledge of the distorted vastnesses of ancient uncaring... Ia! Ia! Ph'nglui mglw'nath Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
The UFO theorists (I try to keep an open mind, but I find the existence of UFOs less than probable due to lack of evidence) say that UFOs started visiting (or started visiting heavily) in the middle of the 20th century in response to the nuclear bombs going off.
Naturally. That was the big thing in Fifties SF: it was all about the Bomb, and The Power Of The Atom. Atomic energy awoke Gojira. It brought Michael Rennie to Earth with his robot. It gave many men in tights their strange powers. So it was the Bomb that attracted the UFOs, too.
The FEMA emergency worker handbook contains a section on what to do if a UFO crash lands.
I would be fascinated to read that. Have you a link?
Question, though: why do you still call them 'Unidentified Flying Objects' when you've clearly established beyond any reasonable doubt that they're Grey scout ships from Zeta Reticuli? I mean, they're identified flying objects then.
I think we can all agree... that if the american indians had sent out regular "message in a bottle" type items across the ocean, describing their society, level of technology, etc, the Europeans would have been much friendlier when they arrived.
'There's a huge continent a few thousand miles to the west of here, sparsely populated by naked savages with good bows but no horses. They've never heard of Christ. They have lots of gold.'
The Europeans would have arrived the moment they could get the ships together. Maybe not with guns, but with heavy cavalry, men at arms and English longbowmen. Outcome, er...
Since piracy statistics are being used to help with marketing and increase profits, is this a measureable reduction to the actual cost piracy has on the industry?
As far as I've heard, TV companies haven't been so vicious at hunting down pirates. Not as bad as the movie companies, and certainly not as bad as the RIAA.
It's probably that their product goes out free to all anyway - ad-supported, sure, but there's no revenue coming in directly from people watching the show. A heavily pirated show is clearly a popular show and a sign of success. Many of the pirates are people in whose country the show is not yet out - like, say, Brits watching season 2 of Heroes. Not that I'd be one of them or anything. These pirates build buzz about the show ahead of time - and they'll quite likely get their friends to watch when it finally does air, and watch it again with them.
Ever watched the flags go by in the 'Peers' window on KTorrent? That's a TV marketer's dream. Just sit there and see where you ought to target your show overseas.
they simply do not understand copyright, or intellectual property for that matter, enough to comment on it at all. if you did you 'd know that you cannot copyright a name, you can only trademark them.
And as I understand it, trademarks are restricted in scope. It's OK, for instance, for a computer company to trade under the same name as a record company, because there's no risk of confusion; the computer company after all is not in the music business! So it's similarly OK to call an audio codec Ogg Vorbis, because it is neither a witch nor a priest, and the name collision will not cause confusion in the marketplace.
I've seen quite a few posts/articles/etc. on various systems on assorted subjects where the originator of the thread submits some standard dogma about Jesus Christ/Muhammad/whomever and either never respond to subsequent queries or respond with some obscene vitriol about how questioning faith is the ultimate blasphemy.
Back in the days when there was anything in Yahoo chat rooms besides spam bots and Arabs - in other words before they closed down all the user rooms - there used to be a lot of preachers around. Usually invading science discussions to go on about the Book of Genesis.
I was pretty sure that a lot of these were bots. They'd have a standard set of phrases to repeat, fairly standard Christian crap, which were roughly relevant to what had been said to them, but didn't ever address any actual details. They seemed to just get onto a particular subject and regurgitate preset texts.
But then again, it's hard to be sure; the human godbotherers often acted much the same.
Re:My Wii is almost a year old...
on
Where are Wii?
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· Score: 1
They, as far as I know, are the only 3rd gen console manufacturer who are making a respectable profit on the console hardware...
3rd gen? Not sure what you mean by 'gen' - maybe it's some sort of rating of awesomeness like 'dan'? - but if it's short for 'generation' then that makes N64 / Saturn / PlayStation 1st gen.
If NES is 1st gen, then this round is 5th gen. Before the NES, the UK market was dominated by home computers - Spectrums, C64s, that kind of thing. There were previous consoles popular in the US - Atari 2600, ColecoVision - so over there this might be as much as 7th gen.
Of course, in war games both the Canadian and Australian military tend to trounce the Americans because they the American military expects overwhelming firepower to win any conflict. I remember a capture the flag excercise where the Americans quit the field of battle because they'd already lost 3 times in the first day of a 3 day exercise. Apparently the Canadian troops weren't "playing fair" against the American troops who had better equipment and more people. They kept using "stealth and subterfuge" against the American troops and stole the flag (3 times) before the Americans were "ready" for the war games to start despite the fact that he games had already started.
It's not even in wargames against other countries that Americans fail in this way. They've been known to make the same mistakes internally, too. Lt. General Paul van Riper is well-known for taking the part of the terrorist forces in such simulations and winning.
When he does so, the correct response is to pretend he didn't, declare the aircraft carriers re-floated, and continue as before to prove that the US military is every bit as supreme as advertised. See here.
I said "Now that it is SCIENTIFICALLY proven that Abortions INCREASE the risk of cancer". People having abortions are indeed at higher risk for cancer. It doesn't prove causality
Impressive. You contradict yourself within a single paragraph. First you say abortions increase the risk of cancer. Then you say it doesn't prove causality. That's fast.
Maybe cancer increases the risk of abortions. Or maybe a third factor increases the risk of both. Saying abortions increase the risk of cancer is a claim of causality and you know it.
if you are asking me if man came from a monkey, then I don't know, because we've never proven the links.
This is a common misconception. Nobody's claiming man came from a monkey. The contemporary model of human origins is that we and monkeys share a common ancestor. Quite a distant common ancestor, too; the divergence with monkeys is a good way back, long before the time when our common ancestor with the apes lived.
And what links are you looking for? Suppose we found one, bones of an animal between, say, Lucy and H. habilis: does that clinch the deal, or does it just mean there are now two gaps where previously there was just one?
we were born with most of what we need to survive, and augementations to that I want evaluated very heavily before just assuming we've figured out something better than a few million years of evolution.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea at all what the infant mortality rate was throughout most of those years?
It is, instead, something we have never seen before: a maturing fascist regime. This new phenomenon is hard to recognize, both because Chinese leaders continue to call themselves communists, and also because the fascist states of the first half of the 20th century were young, governed by charismatic and revolutionary leaders, and destroyed in World War II.
Try Spain. Franco stayed well out of World War II, behaved politely towards the Americans afterwards, and remained in power in Spain until his death in 1975.
Now Spain was sitting on a continent dominated by a growing confederacy of democratic nations and backed by a democratic superpower - so it made sense after Franco's death for Spain to become a democracy also. But had circumstances been different, a Fascist successor might well have emerged.
China does seem to have got around the main problem such states tend to encounter, though: they've managed to ensure smooth successions. And they've done away with any kind of cult of personality around a Leader figure; how many people can even name the current Chinese leadership? Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have been relatively obscure figures at the heart of a vast government apparatus. No great rallies in their name, no vast portraits or monolithic statuary.
I think it's not Fascism we want to compare to here, since Fascism tends to emphasise a single strong Leader behind whom the country is expected to rally. Instead I think we're looking at old-fashioned Chinese Bureaucracy. Sure there's an emperor in there somewhere, but he's surrounded by armies of officials and mandarins and secretaries. The man in charge may change but the system goes on. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss...
we do not have the capacity to destroy this planet save maybe detonating every single nuclear weapon that we have at the same time and that's not going to happen.
Nowhere near enough. If we worked at it we might be able to eliminate all land vertebrates - build a really big Strangelove-style Doomsday Device, something like that. Wiping out the ocean vertebrates would be harder (although in some areas our fishing fleets are doing quite a good job). Wiping out invertebrate life would be extremely difficult. Wiping out the single-cell organisms... give it up, it's not going to happen, those things have Earth completely infested at every level.
To destroy the Earth, Alderaan-style, would take some 2x10^32 joules, or 5x10^16 nukes, assuming a generous 1MT yield per nuke. That's ten million nukes per person. I don't think we have that many.
We can own atoms, eh? Then your data is traveling around the world using electrons from my atoms. Give my electrons back, or start paying me a fee!
Sure, here you go. I assume your computer is not accumulating a net positive charge? Good, then you have your electrons back.
What do you mean they're not the same electrons? I suggest you just try to prove that. Distinguish between the electrons you got back and the ones you sent out, if you think you can...
So what if all of the sudden a wireless medium became available that could reach anybody in any place? You no longer have to worry about laying your own fiber and other infrastructure. No longer do you have the expensive barriers to the ISP market. This is where I think Google wants to be. They already have ton's of content, now they'd have their own means to deliver it (and make you pay -- probably). They essentially want to be the one-stop shop for anything internet and probably TV (the line between the two is starting to blur).
So in a few years' time, they'd basically... own the internet?
Scary. So, a word of warning. If Google ever buy a large bunker in Utah, do not under any circumstances accept a job working security there. Really not worth it.
It's not unusual to go to a mall, and see 45% to 50% of the people who are clearly not born in Canada. This is evident from their clothing, their mannerisms, and especially their near-complete lack of knowledge of English or French.
I wouldn't say Americans are that bad at English...
Slashdot Mirror
The most merciful thing in the Universe, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents.
For the love of all that is good and decent, and for the sake of your own sanity, and for the good of the restful sleep of all the civilisations of mortal men upon the dry crust of this earth under the hideous stars, do not continue this line of thought... The abomination that lies below the wave is too horrible even to name. I cannot bear the thought of what lurks waiting and dreaming in the endless dark night of the Abyssal plain... it calls to me endlessly... darkening even the bright dawn of earthly summer with its sickening evil, crawling behind my eyes and corroding all joy with the knowledge of the distorted vastnesses of ancient uncaring... Ia! Ia! Ph'nglui mglw'nath Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
Naturally. That was the big thing in Fifties SF: it was all about the Bomb, and The Power Of The Atom. Atomic energy awoke Gojira. It brought Michael Rennie to Earth with his robot. It gave many men in tights their strange powers. So it was the Bomb that attracted the UFOs, too.
I would be fascinated to read that. Have you a link?
Question, though: why do you still call them 'Unidentified Flying Objects' when you've clearly established beyond any reasonable doubt that they're Grey scout ships from Zeta Reticuli? I mean, they're identified flying objects then.
'There's a huge continent a few thousand miles to the west of here, sparsely populated by naked savages with good bows but no horses. They've never heard of Christ. They have lots of gold.'
The Europeans would have arrived the moment they could get the ships together. Maybe not with guns, but with heavy cavalry, men at arms and English longbowmen. Outcome, er...
As far as I've heard, TV companies haven't been so vicious at hunting down pirates. Not as bad as the movie companies, and certainly not as bad as the RIAA.
It's probably that their product goes out free to all anyway - ad-supported, sure, but there's no revenue coming in directly from people watching the show. A heavily pirated show is clearly a popular show and a sign of success. Many of the pirates are people in whose country the show is not yet out - like, say, Brits watching season 2 of Heroes. Not that I'd be one of them or anything. These pirates build buzz about the show ahead of time - and they'll quite likely get their friends to watch when it finally does air, and watch it again with them.
Ever watched the flags go by in the 'Peers' window on KTorrent? That's a TV marketer's dream. Just sit there and see where you ought to target your show overseas.
KDE is not a monopoly.
No it doesn't. It stands for 'British Board of Film Classification'.
Well, nowadays I hear it does have wireless. And substantially more space than a Nomad. I'd say now it's definitely not a fad.
And as I understand it, trademarks are restricted in scope. It's OK, for instance, for a computer company to trade under the same name as a record company, because there's no risk of confusion; the computer company after all is not in the music business! So it's similarly OK to call an audio codec Ogg Vorbis, because it is neither a witch nor a priest, and the name collision will not cause confusion in the marketplace.
Back in the days when there was anything in Yahoo chat rooms besides spam bots and Arabs - in other words before they closed down all the user rooms - there used to be a lot of preachers around. Usually invading science discussions to go on about the Book of Genesis.
I was pretty sure that a lot of these were bots. They'd have a standard set of phrases to repeat, fairly standard Christian crap, which were roughly relevant to what had been said to them, but didn't ever address any actual details. They seemed to just get onto a particular subject and regurgitate preset texts.
But then again, it's hard to be sure; the human godbotherers often acted much the same.
3rd gen? Not sure what you mean by 'gen' - maybe it's some sort of rating of awesomeness like 'dan'? - but if it's short for 'generation' then that makes N64 / Saturn / PlayStation 1st gen.
If NES is 1st gen, then this round is 5th gen. Before the NES, the UK market was dominated by home computers - Spectrums, C64s, that kind of thing. There were previous consoles popular in the US - Atari 2600, ColecoVision - so over there this might be as much as 7th gen.
It's not even in wargames against other countries that Americans fail in this way. They've been known to make the same mistakes internally, too. Lt. General Paul van Riper is well-known for taking the part of the terrorist forces in such simulations and winning.
When he does so, the correct response is to pretend he didn't, declare the aircraft carriers re-floated, and continue as before to prove that the US military is every bit as supreme as advertised. See here.
Impressive. You contradict yourself within a single paragraph. First you say abortions increase the risk of cancer. Then you say it doesn't prove causality. That's fast.
Maybe cancer increases the risk of abortions. Or maybe a third factor increases the risk of both. Saying abortions increase the risk of cancer is a claim of causality and you know it.
This is a common misconception. Nobody's claiming man came from a monkey. The contemporary model of human origins is that we and monkeys share a common ancestor. Quite a distant common ancestor, too; the divergence with monkeys is a good way back, long before the time when our common ancestor with the apes lived.
And what links are you looking for? Suppose we found one, bones of an animal between, say, Lucy and H. habilis: does that clinch the deal, or does it just mean there are now two gaps where previously there was just one?
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea at all what the infant mortality rate was throughout most of those years?
Try Spain. Franco stayed well out of World War II, behaved politely towards the Americans afterwards, and remained in power in Spain until his death in 1975.
Now Spain was sitting on a continent dominated by a growing confederacy of democratic nations and backed by a democratic superpower - so it made sense after Franco's death for Spain to become a democracy also. But had circumstances been different, a Fascist successor might well have emerged.
China does seem to have got around the main problem such states tend to encounter, though: they've managed to ensure smooth successions. And they've done away with any kind of cult of personality around a Leader figure; how many people can even name the current Chinese leadership? Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have been relatively obscure figures at the heart of a vast government apparatus. No great rallies in their name, no vast portraits or monolithic statuary.
I think it's not Fascism we want to compare to here, since Fascism tends to emphasise a single strong Leader behind whom the country is expected to rally. Instead I think we're looking at old-fashioned Chinese Bureaucracy. Sure there's an emperor in there somewhere, but he's surrounded by armies of officials and mandarins and secretaries. The man in charge may change but the system goes on. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss...
And glorious works they were too; Zelda 1's overworld tune serves as my ringtone to this day.
But if I were to pick a classic soundtrack from the NES era, I'd be looking at the Mega Man series. Capcom got some great composers in for those.
Go to your brother, kill him with your gun, leave him lying in his uniform dying in the sun...
Nowhere near enough. If we worked at it we might be able to eliminate all land vertebrates - build a really big Strangelove-style Doomsday Device, something like that. Wiping out the ocean vertebrates would be harder (although in some areas our fishing fleets are doing quite a good job). Wiping out invertebrate life would be extremely difficult. Wiping out the single-cell organisms... give it up, it's not going to happen, those things have Earth completely infested at every level.
To destroy the Earth, Alderaan-style, would take some 2x10^32 joules, or 5x10^16 nukes, assuming a generous 1MT yield per nuke. That's ten million nukes per person. I don't think we have that many.
Sure, here you go. I assume your computer is not accumulating a net positive charge? Good, then you have your electrons back.
What do you mean they're not the same electrons? I suggest you just try to prove that. Distinguish between the electrons you got back and the ones you sent out, if you think you can...
So in a few years' time, they'd basically... own the internet?
Scary. So, a word of warning. If Google ever buy a large bunker in Utah, do not under any circumstances accept a job working security there. Really not worth it.
I wouldn't say Americans are that bad at English...
Bruce Schneier doesn't bother to secure his wireless network at all. Who would dare, anyway?
It's not often you get a legitimate excuse to use that phrase. So when it comes around, be sure to deliver it properly. Think Vegeta.
We are great apes, actually. We're not descended from them. We and the other apes share a common ancestor about 10 million years back.