Personally I found the books tedious as hell: I've started them several times and never got more than half-way through the first one because Tolkein was continually getting distracted from the plot to rabbit on about his world background and Elvish language or whatever. So from my point of view, the movies are much, much better than the books.
I hadn't seen any trailers before the movie, but I thought it was pretty obvious that he was going to win that fight. Which was the whole problem: given that I knew he was going to win, what was that point? It just dragged on and on and on and on and on and on and on for no good reason other than to allow the directors to show how 'cool' their effects were.
Matrix 2 would be a much, much better movie if they'd cut out the boring half-hour, including most of that fight and a significant chunk of the freeway battle. Matrix 1 never had much of a story, but at least the effects scenes never got boring: Matrix 2 was just a porn movie for effects fetishists.
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S1/whats_happe ni ng/research/pdf_res_notes/rn01-72.pdf
the government takes 12% directly in tax, and the lottery income was falling, at least up to 2001, presumably as people have realised what a rip-off it is, with only 50% of the money being given to the winners... also, isn't it true that the big prizes are not given as lump sums, but paid over several years?
Also, is online gambling legal in the UK? The big thing the lottery offers is easy access, since tickets are sold in various outlets that people regularly visit: offline gambling is usually much harder, requiring people to deliberately visit a gambling establishment to make their bets.
Vice-law enforcement is a multi-billion dollar a year industry (AFAIR anti-drug enforcement alone is a >$10,000,000,000 a year industry in America): if these things were legalised, that industry would vanish overnight, and put many government workers and their cronies out of jobs. That will not be allowed to happen until and unless a major crisis occurs, no matter how sensible it may be.
Then you'll be glad to know that it's well-established that the Antarctic is _cooling_. Greenland is also rather cooler today than it was during the 30s/40s (though warming again from the unusually cool period during the 60s/70s).
Yeah, it's awful. A while back I was reading about more than a dozen people dying of summer heat about twenty miles from where I live in the UK.
_In the 1840s_.
This is nothing new: the only reason people think it's new is because it's something _they_ haven't experienced before.
"Even tar on the road melted because of the heat"
You mean you've never noticed tar melting before because of the heat? I remember it happening regularly in the summer when I was a kid walking to school: maybe people should try walking sometime, they might actually notice these things.
"This is to avoid the overheated rail tracks to bend and causing the trains to crash."
Again, that's because British railways suck and are designed to only run at 3pm one Thursday in March each year while being out of spec the rest of the time, it's no evidence of Global Warming(tm).
"Here in the Uk (where ia m living at the mo) we just had the hottest day on record"
And the coldest day on record in the UK was in 1995. Therefore we must have had Global Cooling, like they were warning us about in the 70s. Right?
Hint: localised temperatures tell you nothing about global trends, and the global trend since 1979 as measured by the satellites is tiny. Not to mention that the theory predicts that most of the warming will occur at the poles, since the CO2 bands are already pretty much saturated in warmer areas. But I'm sure you know that, right?
"and 6 of the hottest years have been in then 90s."
A lot of which is due to bogus measurements and urban warming: Britain, particularly the south-east, is so densely populated that little of it escapes such warming effects, but they're nothing to do with CO2 or global changes.
I was reading, for example, a news article about a >38C temperature record at... Heathrow Airport (not the official record, which was in Kent, and is probably less bogus). Hmm, an airport, with 747s taking off every couple of minutes, with huge amounts of concrete to reflect heat around, with vast numbers of cars, taxis and buses driving in and out stuck in often stationary traffic. Yes, I'm sure that's really representative of Global Warming temperature changes!
I'd also add that, having had the misfortune to live through the 70s in the UK, that while the current year may have broken the odd record, some of the warm summers in the 70s were much worse than this. And that was when Global Cooling was going to kill us with a new Ice Age!
Why would you want to hang $2000 worth off hardware off a $10 power supply? Particularly as when you overload that cheap power supply by accident (putting in too many hard drives, upgrading to a far more power-hungry CPU or whatever) it may burn out and trash your CPU, motherboard and RAM in the process.
Personally if I'm spending that much money on components for my system I like to have a decent power supply to run them and the knowledge that if I do screw up and overload it it will just shut down nicely: but if you're happy with a cheapy, good for you.
"Because our technology sector has a fairly large interest in seeing Taiwan remain free from the mainland"
ROTFL. Taiwan is more likely to peacefully reunite with the mainland than it is to be invaded. The Chinese government know a good thing when they see one, and Taiwanese investment in China and the huge trade imbalance between China and America are good things for them that they're not going to screw up. They're probably real glad, in fact, to see the US government wasting vast sums of money on pointless weapons while they're busy working to beat America economically, not militarily.
What you probably really mean is that our technology sector has a large interest in sucking huge wads of dollar bills from the government pork-trough, and building hugely complex and expensive fighters is a good way to justify doing that. The F-22 is corporate welfare to the defence contractors, nothing more, nothing less.
True, but the computer was still required for its 'fly-by-wire' capabilities: the descent stage engine was slow to respond to throttle and gimbal commands, so a human had a hard time controlling it accurately enough to steer the LM.
The reason why it wasn't a problem was because it used a priorty-based scheduling scheme, so it would keep on running the 'fly-by-wire' part of the software and just drop lower-priority tasks like checking the radar. As it turned out, the reason why this showed up on the Apollo 11 landing and not in training was that the docking radar was not implemented in the landing simulators, so the software had never been tested with the settings that NASA had specified in the pre-landing checklist (which included setting the docking radar controls).
Incidentally, if you want to know exactly how the LEM 'Luminary' software worked, the source code is available now on the web at:
"It is only Microsofts poor showing in Japan which keeps xbox a qualified success instead of an outright one."
Well, that and the fact that they reportedly lost $1,000,000,000 on the XBox last year... if that's a "qualified success" I'd like to know what you count as a failure.
"The truth is, white northerners couldn't end slavery without the black slaves in the south revolting."
All they had to do was eliminate the Fugitive Slaves Acts which _forced_ northerners to send escaped slaves back to their owners... once slaves knew that if they got to a northern state they'd be free, slavery would have been impossible to sustain. The US government was the only thing keeping slavery viable, and could have ended it peacefully at any time.
Lincoln's war was an utter disaster which destroyed constitutional government and created the hideous racial relations which have existed ever since: had slavery simply become non-viable and faded away there would have been no reason for the south to have such a chip on its shoulder over being defeated in a war with the north.
"the slaves, you could say, were imbedded among the white slave owners, and in some areas probably outnumbered the whites."
Why do you think that all slave owners were white? Free black people in the south owned slaves, and also fought for the south against Lincoln's armies.
Hardware is basically irrelevant in the console market: what matters is who has the best games. You could beat the XBox2 with a Sinclair Spectrum-based console if you had the best games and Microsoft continued to have games of suck. I've yet to see a single Xbox game that would convince me to buy one over a PS2, even if I didn't already have a PC... I don't see any reason why that would change with XBox2.
And, to make it worse, they're trashing their money-making markets by pushing XBox developers to only release on the XBox and not the PC in the hope that the few decent games will convince PC users to buy an XBox too. Yet they make most of their money from Windows, and the main reason to ugprade a PC today (and thereby buy a new copy of Windows) is to run new games! Only a company the size of Microsoft could have two divisions so directly in conflict.
"Except that those that are successful are exceptionally successful. I believe that two products (Windows, Office) make up ~90% of Microsoft's revenue"
That is not a good thing: smart investors tend to steer well clear of companies where 90% of their revenue comes from two products... particularly when people can download almost equivalent products for free.
How many people, for example, really need to pay money for Office when they can download OpenOffice? Inertia and big IT budgets seem to be the main things keeping Office alive, and as companies cut costs OpenOffice is likely to start eating into one of those 'big two' even if Linux doesn't eliminate many Windows machines on the desktop.
That would be far more trouble than it was worth: I think the set was actually 5/6 of one cube (one wall missing) and 1/6 (one wall) of another so you could look through a door and see what was there.
It was the late 70s, wasn't it? So probably most of the money went on cups of tea, biscuits and union-inflated wages.
At least it was late enough in the 70s that they didn't have some of the problems that 'Space 1999' apparently did, with power strikes and three-day weeks while shooting the show.
Effects-wise, certainly, and many of the scripts were so-so while some were just as awful as a lot of Dr Who scripts. But what made the series really was the characters: the variety and 'in-fighting' amongst the heroes raised it to a level well beyond the average TV SF show.
Orbiter isn't open source either, which is a pain: there are a bunch of things I'd like to add to it which can't be done through the SDK, but there's no way to do so.
However, it is pretty accurate once you get outside the atmosphere (much less so for aerodynamics): flying Apollo missions, if I got stuck with something like trying to take off from the moon and rendevouz in orbit I could just track down the real procedures from the web and usually it worked.
Indeed: union leaders regularly sell out their members so they can cosy up to the bosses. After all, unions are for losers, so the leaders have no reason to care provided the subs keep coming in to buy their Mercs and pay for their 'fact-finding' trips to exotic locations.
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Personally I found the books tedious as hell: I've started them several times and never got more than half-way through the first one because Tolkein was continually getting distracted from the plot to rabbit on about his world background and Elvish language or whatever. So from my point of view, the movies are much, much better than the books.
I hadn't seen any trailers before the movie, but I thought it was pretty obvious that he was going to win that fight. Which was the whole problem: given that I knew he was going to win, what was that point? It just dragged on and on and on and on and on and on and on for no good reason other than to allow the directors to show how 'cool' their effects were.
Matrix 2 would be a much, much better movie if they'd cut out the boring half-hour, including most of that fight and a significant chunk of the freeway battle. Matrix 1 never had much of a story, but at least the effects scenes never got boring: Matrix 2 was just a porn movie for effects fetishists.
Actually, according to:
e ni ng/research/pdf_res_notes/rn01-72.pdf
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S1/whats_happ
the government takes 12% directly in tax, and the lottery income was falling, at least up to 2001, presumably as people have realised what a rip-off it is, with only 50% of the money being given to the winners... also, isn't it true that the big prizes are not given as lump sums, but paid over several years?
Also, is online gambling legal in the UK? The big thing the lottery offers is easy access, since tickets are sold in various outlets that people regularly visit: offline gambling is usually much harder, requiring people to deliberately visit a gambling establishment to make their bets.
Vice-law enforcement is a multi-billion dollar a year industry (AFAIR anti-drug enforcement alone is a >$10,000,000,000 a year industry in America): if these things were legalised, that industry would vanish overnight, and put many government workers and their cronies out of jobs. That will not be allowed to happen until and unless a major crisis occurs, no matter how sensible it may be.
"these sportsbooks pay better than state lotteries"
Precisely. Why would anyone play the state lottery if they could gamble online instead with much better odds?
Then you'll be glad to know that it's well-established that the Antarctic is _cooling_. Greenland is also rather cooler today than it was during the 30s/40s (though warming again from the unusually cool period during the 60s/70s).
"Many people died"
Yeah, it's awful. A while back I was reading about more than a dozen people dying of summer heat about twenty miles from where I live in the UK.
_In the 1840s_.
This is nothing new: the only reason people think it's new is because it's something _they_ haven't experienced before.
"Even tar on the road melted because of the heat"
You mean you've never noticed tar melting before because of the heat? I remember it happening regularly in the summer when I was a kid walking to school: maybe people should try walking sometime, they might actually notice these things.
"This is to avoid the overheated rail tracks to bend and causing the trains to crash."
Again, that's because British railways suck and are designed to only run at 3pm one Thursday in March each year while being out of spec the rest of the time, it's no evidence of Global Warming(tm).
"Here in the Uk (where ia m living at the mo) we just had the hottest day on record"
And the coldest day on record in the UK was in 1995. Therefore we must have had Global Cooling, like they were warning us about in the 70s. Right?
Hint: localised temperatures tell you nothing about global trends, and the global trend since 1979 as measured by the satellites is tiny. Not to mention that the theory predicts that most of the warming will occur at the poles, since the CO2 bands are already pretty much saturated in warmer areas. But I'm sure you know that, right?
"and 6 of the hottest years have been in then 90s."
A lot of which is due to bogus measurements and urban warming: Britain, particularly the south-east, is so densely populated that little of it escapes such warming effects, but they're nothing to do with CO2 or global changes.
I was reading, for example, a news article about a >38C temperature record at... Heathrow Airport (not the official record, which was in Kent, and is probably less bogus). Hmm, an airport, with 747s taking off every couple of minutes, with huge amounts of concrete to reflect heat around, with vast numbers of cars, taxis and buses driving in and out stuck in often stationary traffic. Yes, I'm sure that's really representative of Global Warming temperature changes!
I'd also add that, having had the misfortune to live through the 70s in the UK, that while the current year may have broken the odd record, some of the warm summers in the 70s were much worse than this. And that was when Global Cooling was going to kill us with a new Ice Age!
Why would you want to hang $2000 worth off hardware off a $10 power supply? Particularly as when you overload that cheap power supply by accident (putting in too many hard drives, upgrading to a far more power-hungry CPU or whatever) it may burn out and trash your CPU, motherboard and RAM in the process.
Personally if I'm spending that much money on components for my system I like to have a decent power supply to run them and the knowledge that if I do screw up and overload it it will just shut down nicely: but if you're happy with a cheapy, good for you.
"Because our technology sector has a fairly large interest in seeing Taiwan remain free from the mainland"
ROTFL. Taiwan is more likely to peacefully reunite with the mainland than it is to be invaded. The Chinese government know a good thing when they see one, and Taiwanese investment in China and the huge trade imbalance between China and America are good things for them that they're not going to screw up. They're probably real glad, in fact, to see the US government wasting vast sums of money on pointless weapons while they're busy working to beat America economically, not militarily.
What you probably really mean is that our technology sector has a large interest in sucking huge wads of dollar bills from the government pork-trough, and building hugely complex and expensive fighters is a good way to justify doing that. The F-22 is corporate welfare to the defence contractors, nothing more, nothing less.
True, but the computer was still required for its 'fly-by-wire' capabilities: the descent stage engine was slow to respond to throttle and gimbal commands, so a human had a hard time controlling it accurately enough to steer the LM.
7 29 .pdf
The reason why it wasn't a problem was because it used a priorty-based scheduling scheme, so it would keep on running the 'fly-by-wire' part of the software and just drop lower-priority tasks like checking the radar. As it turned out, the reason why this showed up on the Apollo 11 landing and not in training was that the docking radar was not implemented in the landing simulators, so the software had never been tested with the settings that NASA had specified in the pre-landing checklist (which included setting the docking radar controls).
Incidentally, if you want to know exactly how the LEM 'Luminary' software worked, the source code is available now on the web at:
http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1
"It is only Microsofts poor showing in Japan which keeps xbox a qualified success instead of an outright one."
Well, that and the fact that they reportedly lost $1,000,000,000 on the XBox last year... if that's a "qualified success" I'd like to know what you count as a failure.
"The truth is, white northerners couldn't end slavery without the black slaves in the south revolting."
All they had to do was eliminate the Fugitive Slaves Acts which _forced_ northerners to send escaped slaves back to their owners... once slaves knew that if they got to a northern state they'd be free, slavery would have been impossible to sustain. The US government was the only thing keeping slavery viable, and could have ended it peacefully at any time.
Lincoln's war was an utter disaster which destroyed constitutional government and created the hideous racial relations which have existed ever since: had slavery simply become non-viable and faded away there would have been no reason for the south to have such a chip on its shoulder over being defeated in a war with the north.
"the slaves, you could say, were imbedded among the white slave owners, and in some areas probably outnumbered the whites."
Why do you think that all slave owners were white? Free black people in the south owned slaves, and also fought for the south against Lincoln's armies.
Hardware is basically irrelevant in the console market: what matters is who has the best games. You could beat the XBox2 with a Sinclair Spectrum-based console if you had the best games and Microsoft continued to have games of suck. I've yet to see a single Xbox game that would convince me to buy one over a PS2, even if I didn't already have a PC... I don't see any reason why that would change with XBox2.
And, to make it worse, they're trashing their money-making markets by pushing XBox developers to only release on the XBox and not the PC in the hope that the few decent games will convince PC users to buy an XBox too. Yet they make most of their money from Windows, and the main reason to ugprade a PC today (and thereby buy a new copy of Windows) is to run new games! Only a company the size of Microsoft could have two divisions so directly in conflict.
"Except that those that are successful are exceptionally successful. I believe that two products (Windows, Office) make up ~90% of Microsoft's revenue"
That is not a good thing: smart investors tend to steer well clear of companies where 90% of their revenue comes from two products... particularly when people can download almost equivalent products for free.
How many people, for example, really need to pay money for Office when they can download OpenOffice? Inertia and big IT budgets seem to be the main things keeping Office alive, and as companies cut costs OpenOffice is likely to start eating into one of those 'big two' even if Linux doesn't eliminate many Windows machines on the desktop.
More likely Avon just grabbed Vila and used him as a human shield :).
AFAIR it worked out to be about 150,000 in UK pounds, so that would make it about CAN$350,000.
That would be far more trouble than it was worth: I think the set was actually 5/6 of one cube (one wall missing) and 1/6 (one wall) of another so you could look through a door and see what was there.
Yeah, but did they say _which_ autumn :) ?
If they could get Natalie Portman to play Soolin in the remake :).
Series one is supposed to be released on DVD in a couple of months in the UK: don't know if it's available anywhere else already.
It was the late 70s, wasn't it? So probably most of the money went on cups of tea, biscuits and union-inflated wages.
At least it was late enough in the 70s that they didn't have some of the problems that 'Space 1999' apparently did, with power strikes and three-day weeks while shooting the show.
Effects-wise, certainly, and many of the scripts were so-so while some were just as awful as a lot of Dr Who scripts. But what made the series really was the characters: the variety and 'in-fighting' amongst the heroes raised it to a level well beyond the average TV SF show.
Orbiter isn't open source either, which is a pain: there are a bunch of things I'd like to add to it which can't be done through the SDK, but there's no way to do so.
However, it is pretty accurate once you get outside the atmosphere (much less so for aerodynamics): flying Apollo missions, if I got stuck with something like trying to take off from the moon and rendevouz in orbit I could just track down the real procedures from the web and usually it worked.
Indeed: union leaders regularly sell out their members so they can cosy up to the bosses. After all, unions are for losers, so the leaders have no reason to care provided the subs keep coming in to buy their Mercs and pay for their 'fact-finding' trips to exotic locations.