Yeah, I can see what you're saying, but I guess what I was saying is that the phenomenon of a truly free market, as advocated by economic libertarians, etc, is a helluva lot rarer than some people make out.
Like Communists who, when you point out that Communism didn't work that well in the USSR, say "yeah, but that wasn't true Communism".
Maybe Communism does work in theory, just like the free market does work in theory. The trouble is that one tends to turn into a totalitarian dictatorship and the other one ends up being strangled by a bunch of cartels and monopolies.
An economic model is only useful if it works in practice.
Don't worry. Because, as we all know, the Free Market will always end up providing the best solution for everybody, where consumers can choose the best product at the best price and everything sorts itself out, magically, until we're all rich and free and happy. Or something.
Honestly, though; first DVD regionalisation, then this. Yeah, maybe the free market would be a good idea, if it actually existed.
What people refer to as the "free market" currently is better described as a global welfare state for fat guys in suits.
And then you have to factor in the fuel used by the air cover and so on, which also has to be transported to base - so, in order to move a gallon of fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad, you've got to move a hell of a lot of fuel about other places, too, to power the vehicles that:
1. Carry the fuel
2. Protect the vehicle carrying the fuel
3. Carry fuel to the vehicles protecting the vehicle carrying the fuel
4. Protect the vehicles in point 3
5. Ad infinitum.
So, once you've worked out a realistic base-rate per mile per gallon for fuel transportation costs, you should probably square it or something, due to the recursive nature of the overheads.
It could be a fun resources-management strategy game.
Small kid: "What's North of the North pole, daddy?"
Dad: "Nothing, son. you can't go North of the North Pole."
SK: "yeah, but, daddy, suppose you did? What would be there?"
Dad: "Nothing."
SK: "You mean, like, a big empty space?"
Dad: "No, I don't mean a big empty space, I mean, no space at all, nothing, there's nothing North of the North Pole becuase that's as North as you can get."
SK: "So, if you're at the North Pole, and you go North, which direction do you go in?"
Dad: "You CAN'T go North of the North pole, because there is no North from there!"
SK: "So, suppose you're half a mile south of the North Pole, and you walk north for a mile, where are you?"
Dad: "You're still half a mile South of the North pole, but on the other side."
You know, I was tempted to foe you for dissing Patrick Stewart higher up in the thread, but decided that that would have been childish. However, you have now left me with no choice.
Star Trek TNG and Buffy are two of the finest television programmes ever made and if you can't at least appreciate why someone might like them then I really don't know what you're doing posting in a thread about TV, as you obviously know nothing about the subject.
No, the Santa Cruise Operation was a real police operation here in London a few years back, when the Met. were attempting to trap the notorious "gay santa" who had been hanging round the gents' conveniences on Clapham Common, scaring small boys.
At the height of the tabloid hysteria, several BBC radio stations were forced to remove songs such as "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" from their playlists becuase of all the tasteless double-entendres that could be read into the lyrics if you were thinking about the "gay santa".
I don't think they ever caught him - I haven't got time to look it up, but searching news.bbc.co.uk would probably turn something up.
What I don't understad, is what did it score 1/10 for? I mean, what did it do in order to earn that one point? Not getting 0/10 suggests that it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but at no point in the review do they mention anything even remotely non-borken about the game.
I guess that it loaded, at least. And there were trucks on it.
It reminds me of the tests we had school where the first 10% of your score was for getting your name right.
Does NASA really direct the Rover using LOGO? (Was that what it was called? Oldskool vector-graphics / robot-turtle-control language?)<br> Man, I learned that when I was like ten, on a BBC Microcomputer. Can I have a job at NASA?
If my memories of early-eighties BBC drama areanything to go by (not Dr Who, but other contemporaneous stuff), then they filmed indoor stuff with video, and outdoor stuff on film, reason being that early video was cheap but looked rubbish used with natural light. or something.
For my wife's birthday recently, I spent a whole lot of money on a watch. Then she had me take it back to the shop becuase it was losing about forty minutes a day.
I could have just told her it was a Mars Watch, but instead I get it "fixed" to show plain old boring GMT. Darn.
Re:my opinion of 'Oryx and Crake'
on
Oryx and Crake
·
· Score: 1
No, he doesn't think it's science fiction because he found parts of it hard to understand. Science fiction, as we all know, is only read by subliterate teenagers. If the grandparent poster, obviously a man of superior intellect, couldn't understand parts of it, how on earth would one expect the average spotty Sci-fi fan to cope? Ergo, it is not Sci-fi.
Pepsi doesn't trash keyboards, People trash keyboards.
The idea that soft-drink manufacturers should somehow be responsible for what a few whackos choose to do with thier product is stupid, as well as in direct contravention of the Second Amendment.
If you define "liberal" as "lots of boobs and sex", then yes, hollywood is too liberal as well.
Er, have to disagree with you there, in the strongest possible terms, I'm afraid. If you're talking about mainstream Hollywood films, then I'm constantly shocked at the lack of "boobs and sex" in them, compared to, say, European, or even British, Cinema. I think it's getting worse, too. I'm sure that there used to be more nudity in hollywood films, say fifteen years ago. This is a worrying trend. Violence is getting more acceptable, and wholesome natural human "boobs and sex" less so.
Monsoon Wedding isn't a Bollywood movie. It's made by a British company, with British money. The director might have an Indian name, but I'm pretty sure she's British, too.
And it's rubbish, anyway.
If you want to see a good British-film-with-Indians-in-it, check out "East is East".
I don't think we have to worry about this. Two reasons:
1. The Earth is really big. Like, really really big.
2. Tonnes and tonnes of stuff is falling to Earth every day in the form of meteors etc., adding to the overall weight of the earth. Even if they burn up it re-entry, the remaining dust and gases or whatever have still got to weigh the same as the original rock.
If you're looking for stuff like that to worry about, worry that low-Earth orbit is getting too cluttered, and that one day there might be what the Scottish Sci-Fi author Ken Macleod called an ablation cascade in his book The Sky Road.
An ablation cascade is when a small-ish collision in orbit results n a whole bunch of high-speed fragments flying off and causing secondary collisions, and the whole thing spiralling off into a domino-rally-type exponentially-increasing SNAFU, until the Earth is surrounded by deadly high-speed fragments of metal meaning that we can't leave the planet for hundreds and hundreds of years.
now that's scary.
If you're going to be pedantic the King James Bible wasn't "written in several-hundred-year-old English".
It was written in completely contemporary, up-to-date English, several hundred years ago.
Thanks for the link, but really, that's the most boring space picture I have ever seen. the caption begins:
The bright spot on the left-hand side of this picture is the back side of Beagle 2
It's not hard to spot, because there's nothing else in the picture apart from a fuzzy white dot.
I have no idea how this could be of any interest to anybody other than maybe the engineers who know beagle 2 well enough that they might, maybe, be able to get some useful data from it.
Re:Global Cooling Theories
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you read the article, global dimming does not equal global cooling. It is, in fact, compatible with global warming. The theory is either that (as stated above) atmospheric pollutants are blocking sunlight, or that global warming is resulting in more water vapour being carried in the air - in other words, it's getting cloudier.
the paper whose unique selling point for 35 years has been the tits on Page 3
Speaking as a British guy, what I'd like to see is an intelligently written, liberal newspaper with good world news and analaysis, AND with tits on page 3. What, is it only right-wing illiterates who appreciate pictures of naked ladies?
Once you have [democracy] then free markets can flourish...
Likely but not definite - Democracy does not equal free-market capitalism. If given totally free elections (yeah, right), the Iraqis might elect a fundamentalist theocracy (oops!) or even a socialist govenment (double oops!).
Ahh, who am I kidding. "Democracy" might have meant "rule by the people" once, but it doesn't anymore I guess - more like "rule by the markets" or "rule by the people as long as they vote in someone with whom the US can do business".
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I can see what you're saying, but I guess what I was saying is that the phenomenon of a truly free market, as advocated by economic libertarians, etc, is a helluva lot rarer than some people make out.
Like Communists who, when you point out that Communism didn't work that well in the USSR, say "yeah, but that wasn't true Communism".
Maybe Communism does work in theory, just like the free market does work in theory. The trouble is that one tends to turn into a totalitarian dictatorship and the other one ends up being strangled by a bunch of cartels and monopolies.
An economic model is only useful if it works in practice.
Don't worry. Because, as we all know, the Free Market will always end up providing the best solution for everybody, where consumers can choose the best product at the best price and everything sorts itself out, magically, until we're all rich and free and happy. Or something.
Honestly, though; first DVD regionalisation, then this. Yeah, maybe the free market would be a good idea, if it actually existed.
What people refer to as the "free market" currently is better described as a global welfare state for fat guys in suits.
And then you have to factor in the fuel used by the air cover and so on, which also has to be transported to base - so, in order to move a gallon of fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad, you've got to move a hell of a lot of fuel about other places, too, to power the vehicles that:
1. Carry the fuel
2. Protect the vehicle carrying the fuel
3. Carry fuel to the vehicles protecting the vehicle carrying the fuel
4. Protect the vehicles in point 3
5. Ad infinitum.
So, once you've worked out a realistic base-rate per mile per gallon for fuel transportation costs, you should probably square it or something, due to the recursive nature of the overheads.
It could be a fun resources-management strategy game.
what happened before Creation?
Small kid: "What's North of the North pole, daddy?"
Dad: "Nothing, son. you can't go North of the North Pole."
SK: "yeah, but, daddy, suppose you did? What would be there?"
Dad: "Nothing."
SK: "You mean, like, a big empty space?"
Dad: "No, I don't mean a big empty space, I mean, no space at all, nothing, there's nothing North of the North Pole becuase that's as North as you can get."
SK: "So, if you're at the North Pole, and you go North, which direction do you go in?"
Dad: "You CAN'T go North of the North pole, because there is no North from there!"
SK: "So, suppose you're half a mile south of the North Pole, and you walk north for a mile, where are you?"
Dad: "You're still half a mile South of the North pole, but on the other side."
You know, I was tempted to foe you for dissing Patrick Stewart higher up in the thread, but decided that that would have been childish.
However, you have now left me with no choice.
Star Trek TNG and Buffy are two of the finest television programmes ever made and if you can't at least appreciate why someone might like them then I really don't know what you're doing posting in a thread about TV, as you obviously know nothing about the subject.
No, the Santa Cruise Operation was a real police operation here in London a few years back, when the Met. were attempting to trap the notorious "gay santa" who had been hanging round the gents' conveniences on Clapham Common, scaring small boys.
At the height of the tabloid hysteria, several BBC radio stations were forced to remove songs such as "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" from their playlists becuase of all the tasteless double-entendres that could be read into the lyrics if you were thinking about the "gay santa".
I don't think they ever caught him - I haven't got time to look it up, but searching news.bbc.co.uk would probably turn something up.
What I don't understad, is what did it score 1/10 for? I mean, what did it do in order to earn that one point? Not getting 0/10 suggests that it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but at no point in the review do they mention anything even remotely non-borken about the game.
I guess that it loaded, at least. And there were trucks on it.
It reminds me of the tests we had school where the first 10% of your score was for getting your name right.
Silly Hobbitses, It's Starbuckses!
FWD 10
Does NASA really direct the Rover using LOGO? (Was that what it was called? Oldskool vector-graphics / robot-turtle-control language?)<br>
Man, I learned that when I was like ten, on a BBC Microcomputer. Can I have a job at NASA?
If my memories of early-eighties BBC drama areanything to go by (not Dr Who, but other contemporaneous stuff), then they filmed indoor stuff with video, and outdoor stuff on film, reason being that early video was cheap but looked rubbish used with natural light. or something.
No, you've got that the wrong way round: "realize" is an accepted alternate spelling of "realise". Thanks.
For my wife's birthday recently, I spent a whole lot of money on a watch. Then she had me take it back to the shop becuase it was losing about forty minutes a day.
I could have just told her it was a Mars Watch, but instead I get it "fixed" to show plain old boring GMT. Darn.
No, he doesn't think it's science fiction because he found parts of it hard to understand. Science fiction, as we all know, is only read by subliterate teenagers. If the grandparent poster, obviously a man of superior intellect, couldn't understand parts of it, how on earth would one expect the average spotty Sci-fi fan to cope? Ergo, it is not Sci-fi.
How many times do I have to say this?
Pepsi doesn't trash keyboards,
People trash keyboards.
The idea that soft-drink manufacturers should somehow be responsible for what a few whackos choose to do with thier product is stupid, as well as in direct contravention of the Second Amendment.
If you define "liberal" as "lots of boobs and sex", then yes, hollywood is too liberal as well.
Er, have to disagree with you there, in the strongest possible terms, I'm afraid. If you're talking about mainstream Hollywood films, then I'm constantly shocked at the lack of "boobs and sex" in them, compared to, say, European, or even British, Cinema. I think it's getting worse, too. I'm sure that there used to be more nudity in hollywood films, say fifteen years ago. This is a worrying trend. Violence is getting more acceptable, and wholesome natural human "boobs and sex" less so.
Monsoon Wedding isn't a Bollywood movie. It's made by a British company, with British money. The director might have an Indian name, but I'm pretty sure she's British, too.
And it's rubbish, anyway.
If you want to see a good British-film-with-Indians-in-it, check out "East is East".
I don't think we have to worry about this. Two reasons:
1. The Earth is really big. Like, really really big.
2. Tonnes and tonnes of stuff is falling to Earth every day in the form of meteors etc., adding to the overall weight of the earth. Even if they burn up it re-entry, the remaining dust and gases or whatever have still got to weigh the same as the original rock.
If you're looking for stuff like that to worry about, worry that low-Earth orbit is getting too cluttered, and that one day there might be what the Scottish Sci-Fi author Ken Macleod called an ablation cascade in his book The Sky Road.
An ablation cascade is when a small-ish collision in orbit results n a whole bunch of high-speed fragments flying off and causing secondary collisions, and the whole thing spiralling off into a domino-rally-type exponentially-increasing SNAFU, until the Earth is surrounded by deadly high-speed fragments of metal meaning that we can't leave the planet for hundreds and hundreds of years.
now that's scary.
Hadrian's Wall was a Roman project, surely??
Yeah, the project managers might have been Romans, but you can bet that they outsourced the actual development and maintenance to the local barbarii.
If you're going to be pedantic the King James Bible wasn't "written in several-hundred-year-old English".
It was written in completely contemporary, up-to-date English, several hundred years ago.
Er, you want to send him to Baghdad?
Thanks for the link, but really, that's the most boring space picture I have ever seen. the caption begins:
The bright spot on the left-hand side of this picture is the back side of Beagle 2
It's not hard to spot, because there's nothing else in the picture apart from a fuzzy white dot.
I have no idea how this could be of any interest to anybody other than maybe the engineers who know beagle 2 well enough that they might, maybe, be able to get some useful data from it.
If you read the article, global dimming does not equal global cooling. It is, in fact, compatible with global warming. The theory is either that (as stated above) atmospheric pollutants are blocking sunlight, or that global warming is resulting in more water vapour being carried in the air - in other words, it's getting cloudier.
the paper whose unique selling point for 35 years has been the tits on Page 3
Speaking as a British guy, what I'd like to see is an intelligently written, liberal newspaper with good world news and analaysis, AND with tits on page 3. What, is it only right-wing illiterates who appreciate pictures of naked ladies?
Once you have [democracy] then free markets can flourish...
Likely but not definite - Democracy does not equal free-market capitalism. If given totally free elections (yeah, right), the Iraqis might elect a fundamentalist theocracy (oops!) or even a socialist govenment (double oops!).
Ahh, who am I kidding. "Democracy" might have meant "rule by the people" once, but it doesn't anymore I guess - more like "rule by the markets" or "rule by the people as long as they vote in someone with whom the US can do business".
Surely it would be easier to create a huge black hole in the centre of the galaxy, and have the stars come to you.