If we changed to biodiesel or ethanol our costs would probably go up $100 to $200 billion. But this would probably be made up by growths in the economy due to hydrocarbon security.
But imagine... if the US switched to biodiesel or ethanol, what would become of all those jobs in aerospace and munitions industries? Without the necessity to go to war every couple of years to protect oil interests, the US would lose all interest in the Middle East, and all the war industries would collapse!
The violence has to be truly obscene for an M rating. Of course, show a couple boobs, and it gets slapped on right away.
A kid growing up playing games full of brutal violence in which the hero solves all problems by killing, and suffers little if any consequence for doing so... or a kid growing up playing games with big tits in them.
Who's likely to turn out to be a peaceful happy liberal loser of no use to anybody, and who's likely to listen to the wise words of the military recruiters and go off and do God's good work in the heathen hot countries?
Censoring violence is un-American, you Islamofascist sympathising pinko commie!
What happened was that the spammer complied with instructions from Blue Security to download a program that washed Blue Security protected email addresses from the spammers' sucker list. When theis program was run on the spammer's email list Blue Security email addresses were purged. The spammer simply compared the purged list against his unpurged list and listed all the email addresses that were removed.
This is what annoys me. What are they thinking? They're helping spammers listwash. The fact that a spammer can simply use a diff of his lists before vs. after to find out who's using the service is trivial; the larger point is that even after the list has been purged of BlueSecurity users, the spammer is still spamming. It's addressing only a symptom, not the cause.
They should say to the spammers 'if you continue to spam the addresses of our subscribers, we will continue to jam your unsubscribe addresses and drop boxes with garbage messages, one per spam email received. No, we're not telling you which addresses these are. Stop sending all mail to all addresses for which you do not have a confirmed opt-in, and you will have no further trouble from us.'
That way they're not helping the spammers continue to spam, and I'd feel a lot better about them.
This, for example, is what makes certain Linux distros have to use offshore (or volunteer run) servers for programs like dvdcsslib, which is used in lots of programs like Xine and Mplayer.
Not dvdcsslib, libdvdcss.
Perhaps rather pedantic of me, but it's quite possible that some 'how do I get DVDs to play in Linux' newbie will read this and go off to google with quite the wrong search term...
Imagine if the people of amsterdam decided that drugs should be more available in the USA. Should they help Americans break the law inside the borders of the USA?
The equivalent of what's being done here would be a Dutch group putting information on the internet about how to grow the very best skunk, and making the seeds available by mail-order to anyone who wants them.
Now, if I order a product from another country which is legal there but illegal here, that's my problem, not theirs. That applies if I'm an American importing hydroponics gear and seeds from Holland, a Briton importing extreme hentai DVDs from Japan, or a Chinese importing anonymising crypto software from the US. It's not the supplier's problem to worry about the laws where I happen to be, it's mine.
How about the bazillions of double opt-in mailing lists?
'Double opt-in' is spammer speak - it implies redundancy, in that you have to opt in twice. 'Confirmed opt-in' is better: the process of opting in has a confirmation step to avoid, say, abuse by subscribing someone else to ten thousand mailing lists, but it's still only one opt-in.
When you log in to a computer and have to type a username AND a password, you don't call it 'double log-in', do you?
Eva is done by an otaku, targeted to otaku, to shake them.
An interesting thought. I've mentioned already that I think of Shinji as an archetype of what geeks hate in themselves. But that's my own impression of Shinji, as a foreign geek watching Evangelion in isolation.
Looking at him in the Japanese cultural context from which he came, might Shinji be on the borderline of becoming a hikikomori? Look at his position: his father is distant and entirely consumed with his work, he himself has great difficulty coping with the unrealistic pressures placed upon him both by his family and by the system, and he's almost completely unable to deal with social situations...
He's run away more than once, and he frequently shuts himself up in his room, then further cuts out the outside world with headphones. He's getting worse with time. Now there are two ways it can go; either Shinji comes out and rejoins society, or he shuts himself in for good. Except, of course, that the critical point is Third Impact, and if Shinji turns hikikomori then he doesn't so much shut himself off from the world, as liquidate the entire species... Personally I'd prefer the happy smiling CONGRATULATIONS! ending.
As for the so-called references... I firmly believe there is no "second meaning" in Evangelion. There are a lot of things thrown at the viewer, but I don't find any real sense. I suspect they were put in just to "look cool" and have people think a lot about nothing.
This is perhaps a good thing, though. Mythology is less interesting when everything is understood and concrete.
Switching to a Western example, I remember when I first read Lord of the Rings. The world was huge and deep, with occasional icebergs showing above the surface - a reference to Númenor here, to Elbereth there, ancient kings name-dropped and heroes cited, echoes of stories that went untold, a huge substance left to the imagination.
Later I read the Silmarillion and associated materials. Now I know all the lore of the Elder Days. The mystery is all gone. Rereading LotR, it's not what it was. I read through it and all the evocative names, all the hints and traces of the deeper mythical past of the world, are suddenly made concrete. I know all about the history of the Dunedain and their wars with Sauron, of the Rings of Power, of Gil-galad and what became of him in Mordor and why he went there, about Beren and Lúthien... Once myth becomes history it loses much of its power.
Similarly with Evangelion: if they explained everything, we'd have forgotten Eva by now. But they've left it vague, and you may be right in thinking that there is no true answer, but so what? It's kept us guessing for ten years, and it's hardly as if we haven't enjoyed doing so...
Could never stand Shinji. But the point of Shinji, as I saw it, was that he's the part every geek hates about himself. I frequently wanted to punch Shinji because his continuous weakness hit way too close to home. Would I go pilot the giant robot? HELL YEAH! Would I dare even try to talk to Ayanami? Nope. I'd go to pieces. Melt into yellow goo twenty episodes early.
So I scream at Shinji for his pathetic weakness when he runs away from having to pilot Eva, because I can't scream at his weakness in dealing with Rei, Asuka and Misato...
Later in the series, five minutes. Which started out as what it could do in emergency power-save mode, but ended up what it could do while smashing the crap out of Mass Production Evangelions.
Still not long. I wonder if I could get an S2 unit for my Prius, though?
The first (End of Evangelion) was basically a re-hash of the series, very little new content. The second is "Death and Rebirth" which was Hideko Anno's response to people complaints about episodes 25 and 26.
Other way round. Death and Rebirth was a clip-show of the series, followed by the first half of End of Evangelion (Air). EoE was the full alternate ending, consisting of some awesome battles followed by a brainfuck.
I heard that the Evangelion movie (possibly more than 1?) that he made after the end of the series cleared up alot more, but I have yet to see it/them.
Ahahahaahahahahahahahahaha hah hahahaha!
No.
But go ahead. Pick up The End of Evangelion and watch it if you like. Feel free, go right ahead. It makes even less sense than the original ending, but before it goes entirely bananas there are some supremely cool mecha battles.
The UK has 60 million inhabitants, not 6 million... So it's 0.5%, not 5%.
See, here's why I probably shouldn't stick away a couple of pints at lunchtime and then try to do mental arithmetic. Misplaced decimal point, editing out 54 million people from the UK. Oops.
That said, some among the Scots, Welsh and Not Quite Irish would probably appreciate the removal of 54 million people from the UK:-)
New, Lighter, Less Expensive Secure Operating System
Already done by some bastard from Finland, I'm told.
New Cool & Useful Technology/Hardware to digitize your home, incorporate all your digital gadgets, gaming, GPS, Remote access, etc.
Microsoft keep trying for this, hence Media Center. But it seems most people don't really WANT all their gadgets incorporated. Jack of all trades and master of none, and all that. Better to have one device to record TV, another to browse the net, another to play music... it's simpler that way.
New (not monolithic blue) Websites to provide free services & reviews (you actually will use) with minimal ads (see Google Earth, wikipedia, download.com)
Precisely. Already done by other people for free. How would it benefit MS to try to compete here? There used to be a Microsoft-run satellite imaging site; Google Earth has crushed it to such an extent that I can't even remember what it was called! MS's goal might be to integrate such services into Vista, however, to such an extent that the user doesn't notice they're coming over the internet - and thereby crush Google et. al. in their traditional way. Extend the desktop monopoly into yet another field, and bullshit the antitrust courts like before.
And all of those examples, the largest death toll was still "only" 50 million or so world wide. That's a far cry from shutting down 3/4 of the US and such that the media predicts.
I hear that the British government are setting up contingency plans to dispose of around 300,000 bodies, as a worst-case scenario: that's about one twentieth of the population. Doesn't seem so much on the face of it, does it? Surely we can cope without 5%.
But for everyone killed, how many spend weeks off work on a sickbed? How many do not fall ill, but stay off work to minimise their potential exposure, at the office and on buses or the Tube? And what if the one killed happens to be the boss? Or the only guy who knows the root password? And remember also that with these diseases, the young and healthy - and hence economically active - are worst hit, because death is often caused by an over-reaction of the immune system.
I can quite imagine that a flu killing one in twenty in this way could completely paralyse the national economy for the duration.
If we believe the hype that the bird flu is a real threat to the health of the people of the world... which despite the hype from the media and the upcoming ABC made for tv movie... I have yet to see any credible evidence of despite much looking.
Every so often, a mutant flu strain arises that kills millions of people. Most famously in 1919, when more people died from flu than were killed in the entire four years of unprecedentedly bloody warfare just past. IIRC there were two more major flu pandemics in the twentieth century, although neither were as devastating.
Sooner or later there WILL be another flu with the ability to kill millions. The only way we have of preventing another 1919 is to spot the threat before it gets going and prepare a vaccine. Hence the worry over H5N1. It's entirely possible that it will all blow over. It's also possible that it will mutate to a form that can spread from one human to another, and become pandemic. If it doesn't, well, great. If it does, we'll be glad we prepared.
For myself, I'm far more afraid of a mutant strain of bird flu killing me than I am of terrorists killing me. That said, I'm more afraid of being hit by a car than I am of either of them, but that doesn't stop me crossing the road...
Well, perhaps not as absolute as all that. Last year the Doctor tried to drop Rose off at home, at an epoch twelve hours after the time they'd left. Turned out to be twelve months. A couple of weeks ago he attempted to go to an Ian Dury gig in 1979. Wound up in 1879.
Now, you can put all this down to the TARDIS being less than perfectly reliable, but both times the Doctor didn't notice the mistake until he found out the hard way...
Not to be too fanboyish, but GURPS beats any other tabletop RPG hands down for clarity, simplicity, realism, and playability. Plus it only uses 6 sided dice. It has the largest collection of licensed game worlds of any system, including Conan, Uplift and Riverworld, among others. Plus, it has a huge collection of historical supplements allowing people to role play in historically accurate game worlds from the Aztecs to the Vikings.
Y'know, if you've got a system that works equally well with weird space monstrosities and with stone-age tribes and with pirates and Vikings and so forth...
...
* heads over to Google and types in 'gurps "doctor who"' and wonders what stat bonuses might be conveyed by a recorder, a bag of jelly babies and / or the Key to Time, and how much one might expect to pay per month for one of those call-through-time SIM cards *
It's not a perfect system, but it's better than saying "fuck it, just invade anyone you wish".
But that is precisely the reason why the Americans hate it!
In the last century the Americans faced an opponent who was too strong to be invaded. Therefore they had to play a different game - one of diplomacy, and of trying to win over as much of the rest of the world as possible. Hence the UN as a broadly impartial referee: if either the US or USSR overstepped the mark in some imperialist adventure, UN condemnation would have a serious detrimental effect on their prestige among non-aligned countries. International law worked in the Americans' favour as often as it worked against them, so it was worth acting lawfully.
Now, however, there is no such opponent. Why, then, should the Americans care about UN condemnation of their imperialism? Why not simply invade any country of whose policies they disapprove, and damn international law?
Hence the American disapproval of the UN, and by extension France. They really hate being told they're wrong.
... personally, though, I'm just enjoying the geek nostalgia.
When I was a little man,
Playdoh came in a little can
I was Star Wars' biggest fan
Now I'm stuck without a plan
G. I. Joe was an Action Man
Shaggy drove the mystery van
Devo was my favourite band
Take me back to my happy land!
-- The Aquabats, Playdoh. Available NOW at your local P2P app!
Slashdot Mirror
But imagine... if the US switched to biodiesel or ethanol, what would become of all those jobs in aerospace and munitions industries? Without the necessity to go to war every couple of years to protect oil interests, the US would lose all interest in the Middle East, and all the war industries would collapse!
Surely you can see how this would be a Bad Thing.
A kid growing up playing games full of brutal violence in which the hero solves all problems by killing, and suffers little if any consequence for doing so... or a kid growing up playing games with big tits in them.
Who's likely to turn out to be a peaceful happy liberal loser of no use to anybody, and who's likely to listen to the wise words of the military recruiters and go off and do God's good work in the heathen hot countries?
Censoring violence is un-American, you Islamofascist sympathising pinko commie!
This is what annoys me. What are they thinking? They're helping spammers listwash. The fact that a spammer can simply use a diff of his lists before vs. after to find out who's using the service is trivial; the larger point is that even after the list has been purged of BlueSecurity users, the spammer is still spamming. It's addressing only a symptom, not the cause.
They should say to the spammers 'if you continue to spam the addresses of our subscribers, we will continue to jam your unsubscribe addresses and drop boxes with garbage messages, one per spam email received. No, we're not telling you which addresses these are. Stop sending all mail to all addresses for which you do not have a confirmed opt-in, and you will have no further trouble from us.'
That way they're not helping the spammers continue to spam, and I'd feel a lot better about them.
Not dvdcsslib, libdvdcss.
Perhaps rather pedantic of me, but it's quite possible that some 'how do I get DVDs to play in Linux' newbie will read this and go off to google with quite the wrong search term...
The equivalent of what's being done here would be a Dutch group putting information on the internet about how to grow the very best skunk, and making the seeds available by mail-order to anyone who wants them.
Now, if I order a product from another country which is legal there but illegal here, that's my problem, not theirs. That applies if I'm an American importing hydroponics gear and seeds from Holland, a Briton importing extreme hentai DVDs from Japan, or a Chinese importing anonymising crypto software from the US. It's not the supplier's problem to worry about the laws where I happen to be, it's mine.
'Double opt-in' is spammer speak - it implies redundancy, in that you have to opt in twice. 'Confirmed opt-in' is better: the process of opting in has a confirmation step to avoid, say, abuse by subscribing someone else to ten thousand mailing lists, but it's still only one opt-in.
When you log in to a computer and have to type a username AND a password, you don't call it 'double log-in', do you?
An interesting thought. I've mentioned already that I think of Shinji as an archetype of what geeks hate in themselves. But that's my own impression of Shinji, as a foreign geek watching Evangelion in isolation.
Looking at him in the Japanese cultural context from which he came, might Shinji be on the borderline of becoming a hikikomori ? Look at his position: his father is distant and entirely consumed with his work, he himself has great difficulty coping with the unrealistic pressures placed upon him both by his family and by the system, and he's almost completely unable to deal with social situations...
He's run away more than once, and he frequently shuts himself up in his room, then further cuts out the outside world with headphones. He's getting worse with time. Now there are two ways it can go; either Shinji comes out and rejoins society, or he shuts himself in for good. Except, of course, that the critical point is Third Impact, and if Shinji turns hikikomori then he doesn't so much shut himself off from the world, as liquidate the entire species... Personally I'd prefer the happy smiling CONGRATULATIONS! ending.
This is perhaps a good thing, though. Mythology is less interesting when everything is understood and concrete.
Switching to a Western example, I remember when I first read Lord of the Rings. The world was huge and deep, with occasional icebergs showing above the surface - a reference to Númenor here, to Elbereth there, ancient kings name-dropped and heroes cited, echoes of stories that went untold, a huge substance left to the imagination.
Later I read the Silmarillion and associated materials. Now I know all the lore of the Elder Days. The mystery is all gone. Rereading LotR, it's not what it was. I read through it and all the evocative names, all the hints and traces of the deeper mythical past of the world, are suddenly made concrete. I know all about the history of the Dunedain and their wars with Sauron, of the Rings of Power, of Gil-galad and what became of him in Mordor and why he went there, about Beren and Lúthien... Once myth becomes history it loses much of its power.
Similarly with Evangelion: if they explained everything, we'd have forgotten Eva by now. But they've left it vague, and you may be right in thinking that there is no true answer, but so what? It's kept us guessing for ten years, and it's hardly as if we haven't enjoyed doing so...
So I scream at Shinji for his pathetic weakness when he runs away from having to pilot Eva, because I can't scream at his weakness in dealing with Rei, Asuka and Misato...
... it all comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down...
Later in the series, five minutes. Which started out as what it could do in emergency power-save mode, but ended up what it could do while smashing the crap out of Mass Production Evangelions.
Still not long. I wonder if I could get an S2 unit for my Prius, though?
Teh wtf? Thumbnail Theatre is back up?
YAAAAY!
Shinji STILL sucks, though.
Yeah, right, troll. Your mum's a giant robot.
Other way round. Death and Rebirth was a clip-show of the series, followed by the first half of End of Evangelion (Air). EoE was the full alternate ending, consisting of some awesome battles followed by a brainfuck.
Ahahahaahahahahahahahahaha hah hahahaha!
No.
But go ahead. Pick up The End of Evangelion and watch it if you like. Feel free, go right ahead. It makes even less sense than the original ending, but before it goes entirely bananas there are some supremely cool mecha battles.
The only time we saw a recognisable interface, it looked like MS-DOS. And it had a two-letter dictionary password.
See, here's why I probably shouldn't stick away a couple of pints at lunchtime and then try to do mental arithmetic. Misplaced decimal point, editing out 54 million people from the UK. Oops.
That said, some among the Scots, Welsh and Not Quite Irish would probably appreciate the removal of 54 million people from the UK :-)
Already done by some bastard from Finland, I'm told.
New Cool & Useful Technology/Hardware to digitize your home, incorporate all your digital gadgets, gaming, GPS, Remote access, etc.
Microsoft keep trying for this, hence Media Center. But it seems most people don't really WANT all their gadgets incorporated. Jack of all trades and master of none, and all that. Better to have one device to record TV, another to browse the net, another to play music... it's simpler that way.
New (not monolithic blue) Websites to provide free services & reviews (you actually will use) with minimal ads (see Google Earth, wikipedia, download.com)
Precisely. Already done by other people for free. How would it benefit MS to try to compete here? There used to be a Microsoft-run satellite imaging site; Google Earth has crushed it to such an extent that I can't even remember what it was called! MS's goal might be to integrate such services into Vista, however, to such an extent that the user doesn't notice they're coming over the internet - and thereby crush Google et. al. in their traditional way. Extend the desktop monopoly into yet another field, and bullshit the antitrust courts like before.
I hear that the British government are setting up contingency plans to dispose of around 300,000 bodies, as a worst-case scenario: that's about one twentieth of the population. Doesn't seem so much on the face of it, does it? Surely we can cope without 5%.
But for everyone killed, how many spend weeks off work on a sickbed? How many do not fall ill, but stay off work to minimise their potential exposure, at the office and on buses or the Tube? And what if the one killed happens to be the boss? Or the only guy who knows the root password? And remember also that with these diseases, the young and healthy - and hence economically active - are worst hit, because death is often caused by an over-reaction of the immune system.
I can quite imagine that a flu killing one in twenty in this way could completely paralyse the national economy for the duration.
Every so often, a mutant flu strain arises that kills millions of people. Most famously in 1919, when more people died from flu than were killed in the entire four years of unprecedentedly bloody warfare just past. IIRC there were two more major flu pandemics in the twentieth century, although neither were as devastating.
Sooner or later there WILL be another flu with the ability to kill millions. The only way we have of preventing another 1919 is to spot the threat before it gets going and prepare a vaccine. Hence the worry over H5N1. It's entirely possible that it will all blow over. It's also possible that it will mutate to a form that can spread from one human to another, and become pandemic. If it doesn't, well, great. If it does, we'll be glad we prepared.
For myself, I'm far more afraid of a mutant strain of bird flu killing me than I am of terrorists killing me. That said, I'm more afraid of being hit by a car than I am of either of them, but that doesn't stop me crossing the road...
Well, perhaps not as absolute as all that. Last year the Doctor tried to drop Rose off at home, at an epoch twelve hours after the time they'd left. Turned out to be twelve months. A couple of weeks ago he attempted to go to an Ian Dury gig in 1979. Wound up in 1879.
Now, you can put all this down to the TARDIS being less than perfectly reliable, but both times the Doctor didn't notice the mistake until he found out the hard way...
Y'know, if you've got a system that works equally well with weird space monstrosities and with stone-age tribes and with pirates and Vikings and so forth...
...
* heads over to Google and types in 'gurps "doctor who"' and wonders what stat bonuses might be conveyed by a recorder, a bag of jelly babies and / or the Key to Time, and how much one might expect to pay per month for one of those call-through-time SIM cards *
But that is precisely the reason why the Americans hate it!
In the last century the Americans faced an opponent who was too strong to be invaded. Therefore they had to play a different game - one of diplomacy, and of trying to win over as much of the rest of the world as possible. Hence the UN as a broadly impartial referee: if either the US or USSR overstepped the mark in some imperialist adventure, UN condemnation would have a serious detrimental effect on their prestige among non-aligned countries. International law worked in the Americans' favour as often as it worked against them, so it was worth acting lawfully.
Now, however, there is no such opponent. Why, then, should the Americans care about UN condemnation of their imperialism? Why not simply invade any country of whose policies they disapprove, and damn international law?
Hence the American disapproval of the UN, and by extension France. They really hate being told they're wrong.
Wii will
Rock you.
Seriously, that's awesome. I had my doubts about the name, but that actually works damn well. Nintendo should so use that.
When I was a little man,
Playdoh came in a little can
I was Star Wars' biggest fan
Now I'm stuck without a plan
G. I. Joe was an Action Man
Shaggy drove the mystery van
Devo was my favourite band
Take me back to my happy land!
-- The Aquabats, Playdoh. Available NOW at your local P2P app!