Whilst letting the billions of people who live in undeveloped areas just starve isn't an answer, neither is destroying out environment to produce enough crops to feed billions up billions of humans when Earth can longer sustain our population....
The key to world hunger isn't food. It's a combination of better (and more environmentally stable) production, so we have less pollution, better crop yields, and a more sustained environment (so we can remove the fear of major climate change), contraception and better family-planning so we can reduce the Earth's population down to a more reasonable 4 Billion (3 would be better), and believe me when I say that better production isn't the bigger of the two.
We have, quite simply, too many people. For the entire history of our species, the population was less than it is now. We are exceeding the Earth's ability to sustain all of us. famine, disease and warfare are the natural means of re-balancing the system. Or we can do it purposefully by instituting ZPG (Zero Population Growth) by various means, including financial incentives to have 2 or less children free and easy-to-reach contraception and abortion to cut down on unwanted children, and especially in 3rd world countries, education to inform the youth as to what happens if you stick your wee-wee in little Sashca.
Of course, none of this will happen, the religious fruitcakes will insist their invisible-man-in-the-sky has banned condoms or abortions, or that they have to have kids to provide the magic purple dinosaur with more worshippers or some other irrelevant superstitious bullshit, and like climate change, the world will only wake up when it's too late to do much about it (except go back to the natural alternative which will raise it's heads, namely war, famine, pestilence)
Re:This article seems to be anti-hacker
on
How To Hire a Hacker
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· Score: 2, Funny
No, he's a tard.....
One of the billions of people who's main function to the species and the planet as a whole is to dig ditches, answer phone lines, inhale oxygen, exhale CO2 and in general use up slightly less resources than their taxes and spending cause to be created/recycled.
Ignorance knows no bounds of age.
I'd heard of Turing before I was 10 years old, and I'm now the ripe old age of 26. Yet I know someone in his early forties who thought I was talking about "some bloke down the kebab shop"....
Actually, the EFA is probably close to the F22. We'll never know for sure because EFA was a clusterfuck of bad project management, so most of the cooler options have been nixed/mothballed....
And the USA *did* offer the F22 to the RAF, but because of EFA they had to turn it down. I happen to know this for fact, it might not have been high on the public radar, but I spent some down time listening to an RAF fighter pilot who got to fly the F22 on an exchange program setup with the possibility of the British buying some F22's. He was most displeased some dickhead suit in London caused it to fall through. Apparently the USAF were quite looking forward to getting the RAF to take up some slack in Afghanistan etc. with deployment in ~2012 of a few squadrons of F22, but thanks to said nameless suits who have too much tied up in EFA, no go.
Pity really, 'cause sure the EFA is a good fighter, and may not even be too bad at Ground Attack, but to have the RAF and USAF both operating the same airframe again would be very helpful. Since the UK's military budget is pretty huge and a lot seems to go on research into shit that never happens, if they changed their priorities, they could licence some US tech, maybe even option to build it in the UK thus saving the political face & jobs, then take the research budget down a few notches and have 5 or 6 more squadrons of fighters, or a few aircraft carriers again.......
Dreams are nice, but it'll never happen though...
In addition to the dude who pointed out how conclusive your fail was regarding aluminium, which IUPAC actually prefer (although they do allow the yanks to use their own misspelling), I thought I'd ad that the only reason "american english" exists in the form of such conclusive misspellings is that Webster was a massive fan of "logical spelling" and the new Congress encouraged use of his dictionary with it's new "american" spellings because they sought to remove influence of British schoolbooks from US schools, as well as build up more of the vision that the English-born people like Washington were "american" and thus spelling differences made the language different.....
And every dictionary is "made-up", since all languages are made up. The difference being is that the English dictionaries of the day used the common spelling most people used, and thus accurately reflected the language as was spoken.
Websters accurately reflected his huge hard-on for getting rid of the letter "u" and changing every possible spelling he could because he was a little rabid on the whole "burn the british" thing.....
His dictionary *caused* American English to exist, not the other way around, so if you want to start charging around screaming about "deliberate misspellings", then start looking a little closer to home than Chaucer, pal. Chaucer didn't insist anyone else use his style, people just did, it became the norm, the standard. Chaucer was the Linus of his day, saying "hey, look what I made!". Webster was the Microsoftian "Hey, use this or else".
But, hey, let's not have facts getting in the way of your little rant.....
As long as you do so when I'm not using my mac, and you don't cause damage to my existing stuff, sure.
After all, you can copy my stuff, since I've still got my stuff, nothing's lost, nothing's damaged.
Exactly like sharing films etc. No money is "lost", no damages occur. All that happens is people decide not to buy your shitty film. Well, a lot of pirates don't buy films anyway. If I can't download the latest film from TPB, then I'll just not see it. No biggy to me personally.
If I download it, feel it's immensely awesome, I'lll buy a copy so I have a nice store-qulity release, with disc-artwork etc. just like I did with LOTR.
I'm not alone in this. I'd estimate at LEAST half of all downloaders share my opinion on this. So all shutting down TPB et al does is deprive the movie studio of any chance folks like me will buy their overpriced products.
Oh, and music studios are far worse. They're not just ripping off consumers, they're ripping artists off as well, so fuck them and their outdated business model.
Nice troll though.
Yeah, it really would be a lot better if our Government followed the American model and militarised the coastguard and brought all the independent agencies under the one umbrella.
Perhaps when Scotland finally achieve independence we can do this, since Scottish waters are so large, and contain all those oil wells, we'd need a good Coastguard and fisheries protection model anyway, might as well bring all the helicopters and boats into it. Save on overheads, administration etc.
For the americans on here who are quite rightly confused about who and what the RNLI are, they're like the US Coastguard. They go out in boats in insane conditions and save people from sinking. They don't have any helicopters (our navy do that), but aside from that they're pretty much the same. With one minor exception:
They receive no funding from the Government whatsoever. Insane though it sounds, they get all their funds from charity donations.
Give generously.
I'm sorry, where else are you supposed to put them? If you're using disposables, they go in the trash.
Obviously the better solution would be to go with cloth nappies and get them cleaned (and there's a burgeoning cottage industry of washing other people's soiled nappies. Some of them even offer a "carbon-neutral" process where they plant some trees or some shit to offset the washing costs), but sometimes, due to cost, location or just plain practicality people will choose disposables. Now, I don't have kids but I imagine if I did I'd probably use disposables. There's being green and there's making your life ridiculously unpleasant for a slight to negligent environmental effect.
Disposables are unfortunately the way to go, and so they go in the trash.
Unless you're one of the truly dumb motherfuckers that put them down the toilet. I doubt it since you're able to type a coherent sentence, and most of the mouthbreathers that flush nappies down the pan are too stupid for even that. You wouldn't believe how much it costs the water companies each year to go into the sewers and water-treatment plants and remove the build-up of used nappies....
That'll make for some lovely family reunions, won't it.
"Mommy, where did *you* come from?"
"Well dear" explains the now 31-year old 1st test-tube baby, "when Granny and Granpa were a lot younger, granpa's gun was firing blanks, so him and granny went to the fertility clinic and a very pretty nurse in a 1970's uniform asked granpa to wank off to some cheesy porn into a pot...hey, wait, why are you running away?"
The fascists, the communists, the oppressors; these people are on the wrong side of history. They will learn, as the leaders in Iran are learning, that you cannot keep information from your populace any more. The internet's biggest contribution to humanity could well be the end of tyranny. If these leaders were smart, they would have never let the net in. But now, the cat is out of the bag; these countries need the internet for their economies, and their people want the internet so much they do not dare take it away lest the people revolt. But it is merely a stay of execution. As we see ever more information available at the tap of a key to even the most remote and backward of places, casual violence, tyranny, oppression and torture will no longer be tolerated apathetically by the masses. I give the communists in China 25 more years at more. Before that's up, they'll either have moderated themselves to the point of elections and thus been voted out or there will be another revolution, hopefully with someone nice at the head of it, not just another thug like their current imbeciles.
Look at Iran though. As I type, it's happening there. The youth in Iran (25) make up more than 33% of their population. They've grown up, as have we, with the internet, with being able to speak to someone on another continent being "normal". They've also grown up seeing all these western freedoms, then wondering why in the west a woman can publish videos of herself getting gangbanged and no one cares, but in Iran if she walks down the street without wearing a headscarf, she'll get arrested for "indecency". They've grown up seeing internet sites in the west discussing the ethical differences between atheism, christianity and islam, with people saying "there is no God, it's a silly idea anyway", and then seeing the religious police walk past outside to make sure everyone prays at the right time. As I type this, there is likely another demonstration happening in Tehran of the sort we saw in recent weeks. But there's a difference now. Moussavi, long a supporter of the regime, is no longer in control of these. What started as a simple wish for the mostly-powerless president to be the one they voted for has no turned into a call for full democracy, an end to oppression, an end to the tyranny. "Death To The Dictator" they scream. And you think the internet isn't changing anything? Why do you think the Chinese are trying to ween the kids off the internet. It's not because they think they're spending too long playing WoW. Hell, the Chinese Govt. would probably love their populace all wired up to it, happily playing their game, not bothering anyone or calling for reform. No, it's in case after their 12-hour marathon WoW session, they talk to some western kid, and wonder why they can't read uncensored news, why they're "less worthy" than the european kid. It's a brave new world all right but there's no place in it for the ignorant fascism of yesteryear. Blind obedience from the people is no longer possible.
My advice would be to stop building houses so far apart. Centralisation of resources is much more efficient for economic & environmental purposes. Or stop moaning when it takes you longer to get places once oil runs out/gets unfeasibly expensive (ie when we stop burning it and start using it for the manufacture of plastic etc.)
300 km is pretty good for one charge. Admittedly if you're needing to go further than that you'd need to take a 45minute pitstop, although 5 minute mega-charging will be here "soon". That said, a 45 minute break every 300km is a good idea anyway, so meh. As for your facetious argument about the "next town", even in the Highlands here in Scotland the next town is never more than 5-60 miles away.
It's a luxury sedan. Try looking up the price for a new mercedes or 5 -series BMW. Then come back and realise this has better performance than either and STILL has that great feature of costing sod-all practically to run since you get all kinds of nifty tax breaks and it just sucks up your electricity. You could even fuel it from the sun (if you like a house with solar panels and live in Califonia I suppose)...
To be fair, Obama has kept the dignity of the office fairly well. This was a press dinner, ie, although it's broadcast in various places, with clips here and there, it's not really a public address. Obama himself was making some pretty roasting jokes (more so at the White House Correspondents dinner), and John was pretty respectful in many ways, talking up Obama's intellect and how he's doing a good-job...
Discipline is most certainly not the key to maintaining authority and respect. He has authority because the US populace gave him it; he maintains respect by respecting the US peope who put him there, and being open and transparent, and not "talking down" to them, acting as though he's some sort of God purely because of his job. In fact Obama has made many self deprecating jokes about how some supporters seem to idolise him but he himself doesn't take it at all seriously. I'm thinking of the "And on the seventy-third day, I shall rest" joke in particular...
Very true.. To add to this, a scottish perspective (and maybe a little backdrop since the main papers here are basically either independent politically, and stick to to whomever they feel deserves it, SNP-loyal, or Labour-loyal; all the papers are much more political in Scotland) would be to add in the Scottish dailies; obviously i'm not going to include the "scottish" Sun etc. since they are exactly the same as the UK version, just with a story about how all Scots are thieving lying benefit-scheating heroin addicts every 2 pages...
The Record: Biggest scottish daily. Owned by trinity mirror, much like the Mirror itself, really. Heavily, extremely pro-Labour, anti-SNP, anti-Scotland and anti-anything-Labour-tell-them-to-be. On the day of the 2007 Scottish elections (which the SNP won), their editorial predicted a plague on all your houses if you vote SNP etc. Going out of business fairly soon if they continue to lose readers...
The Scotsman: broadsheet, mostly independent; seems to moderately support the SNP now, as well as other liberal ideals. Quite a nice paper, if I bought a daily it'd probably be this...
The Herald: broadsheet; biggest selling "proper" paper in Scotland now, having overtaken the Scotsman. Politically independent (mostly), and will occasionally criticise Labour or SNP alike. May well be also folding, many many job losses in recent years.
There are others but I can't be bothered and they're mostly all small-fry anyway....
oh, they are still getting screwed. Just less than on a record. Like on a t-shirt, they'll maybe see 10%, even 20% direct profit to them. On a record it can be 1%. As for the handing it back to the label crap on that score I have nothing but sympathy, but suggest that if the industry unionised up a bit, and started refusing shitty contracts, like actors do to a degree, then they'd see less of this crap.
Speaking as a content provider of sorts (I do graphics, icons etc., not music, but it's still "IP"), if I sold the rights to one of my creations with a deal like most musicians get, if I later found out people were downloading my creation for free, thus screwing me out of a cut, I wouldn't be pissed at them. I'd be flattered that they took the time to download my stuff, and I'd ask, if they've got some spare cash they want to reward me for my work, then they could paypal me whatever they like. Kinda like donationware... I say this because if just 1 in 100 downloaders gave the musician $1, then they'd already be getting about 5 times as much as a lot of record labels give their creators. If you want to support a band, paypal them, or go see a concert, or buy some hoodies or t-shirts. If you want to give more money to the soulless scumbags who would literally try and sue the dead, only to then try and sue the living descendants of said deceased for "damages" that could not feasibly be real (on the order of tens of thousands of times the actual value of damages inflicted), then completely wreck the grieving families lives through court cases, legal fees, media scrums etc. only to find said deceased was completely innocent and not even have the god damned common fucking courtesy to say sorry; if you want to do that, buy a record.
I'd rather buy conflict diamonds from africa, and have some vietnamese $1-a-day wage-slave set it into a ring made of nazi-gold than ever buy anything ever made by the labels that are part of the BPI or the RIAA or the MPAA. Only by starving these grubby little parasites of their money can we begin to set right the system whereby an artisan gets paid a fair amount for their work, and their art is allowed to become part of teh social consciousness.
Never mind Bush; look at your nation's founding. Your ancestors asked (quite nicely at first) for moderate tax relief from the British Government. The British ignored them. Your ancestors then started asking about representation in Parliament; if the current people won't change the taxes, maybe we can get some of us elected to help persuade them. The British still ignored them. Result: full out warfare and for the want of a 10% drop in basic tax, a few MP's and a end to the tea and cotton taxes, they lost the entire American colonies...
The Irani people are an increasingly connected, modern and well-educated (by Middle east standards) lot. Eventually, too many lame excuses by the crackpots will push the majority into outward disobedience. Then a lot of people will get shot, and public anger will rise, eventually resulting in another revolution. Hopefully this time without the Council of Nutjobs and the Supreme unelected Loony they currently have at the top of the tree. Unless they start moderating towards the public opinion, it will only make this happen faster.
No, I am not stupid. They *are* scientifically plausible. Whether they happen or not is another issue entirely. Looking forward to your views on techlepathy as well, some of the things Kevin Warwick is doing in this field is truly "mindblowing", if you'll pardon the pun.
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Whilst letting the billions of people who live in undeveloped areas just starve isn't an answer, neither is destroying out environment to produce enough crops to feed billions up billions of humans when Earth can longer sustain our population.... The key to world hunger isn't food. It's a combination of better (and more environmentally stable) production, so we have less pollution, better crop yields, and a more sustained environment (so we can remove the fear of major climate change), contraception and better family-planning so we can reduce the Earth's population down to a more reasonable 4 Billion (3 would be better), and believe me when I say that better production isn't the bigger of the two. We have, quite simply, too many people. For the entire history of our species, the population was less than it is now. We are exceeding the Earth's ability to sustain all of us. famine, disease and warfare are the natural means of re-balancing the system. Or we can do it purposefully by instituting ZPG (Zero Population Growth) by various means, including financial incentives to have 2 or less children free and easy-to-reach contraception and abortion to cut down on unwanted children, and especially in 3rd world countries, education to inform the youth as to what happens if you stick your wee-wee in little Sashca. Of course, none of this will happen, the religious fruitcakes will insist their invisible-man-in-the-sky has banned condoms or abortions, or that they have to have kids to provide the magic purple dinosaur with more worshippers or some other irrelevant superstitious bullshit, and like climate change, the world will only wake up when it's too late to do much about it (except go back to the natural alternative which will raise it's heads, namely war, famine, pestilence)
Too soon dude.
No, he's a tard..... One of the billions of people who's main function to the species and the planet as a whole is to dig ditches, answer phone lines, inhale oxygen, exhale CO2 and in general use up slightly less resources than their taxes and spending cause to be created/recycled.
Ignorance knows no bounds of age. I'd heard of Turing before I was 10 years old, and I'm now the ripe old age of 26. Yet I know someone in his early forties who thought I was talking about "some bloke down the kebab shop"....
Actually, the EFA is probably close to the F22. We'll never know for sure because EFA was a clusterfuck of bad project management, so most of the cooler options have been nixed/mothballed.... And the USA *did* offer the F22 to the RAF, but because of EFA they had to turn it down. I happen to know this for fact, it might not have been high on the public radar, but I spent some down time listening to an RAF fighter pilot who got to fly the F22 on an exchange program setup with the possibility of the British buying some F22's. He was most displeased some dickhead suit in London caused it to fall through. Apparently the USAF were quite looking forward to getting the RAF to take up some slack in Afghanistan etc. with deployment in ~2012 of a few squadrons of F22, but thanks to said nameless suits who have too much tied up in EFA, no go. Pity really, 'cause sure the EFA is a good fighter, and may not even be too bad at Ground Attack, but to have the RAF and USAF both operating the same airframe again would be very helpful. Since the UK's military budget is pretty huge and a lot seems to go on research into shit that never happens, if they changed their priorities, they could licence some US tech, maybe even option to build it in the UK thus saving the political face & jobs, then take the research budget down a few notches and have 5 or 6 more squadrons of fighters, or a few aircraft carriers again....... Dreams are nice, but it'll never happen though...
In addition to the dude who pointed out how conclusive your fail was regarding aluminium, which IUPAC actually prefer (although they do allow the yanks to use their own misspelling), I thought I'd ad that the only reason "american english" exists in the form of such conclusive misspellings is that Webster was a massive fan of "logical spelling" and the new Congress encouraged use of his dictionary with it's new "american" spellings because they sought to remove influence of British schoolbooks from US schools, as well as build up more of the vision that the English-born people like Washington were "american" and thus spelling differences made the language different..... And every dictionary is "made-up", since all languages are made up. The difference being is that the English dictionaries of the day used the common spelling most people used, and thus accurately reflected the language as was spoken. Websters accurately reflected his huge hard-on for getting rid of the letter "u" and changing every possible spelling he could because he was a little rabid on the whole "burn the british" thing..... His dictionary *caused* American English to exist, not the other way around, so if you want to start charging around screaming about "deliberate misspellings", then start looking a little closer to home than Chaucer, pal. Chaucer didn't insist anyone else use his style, people just did, it became the norm, the standard. Chaucer was the Linus of his day, saying "hey, look what I made!". Webster was the Microsoftian "Hey, use this or else". But, hey, let's not have facts getting in the way of your little rant.....
Who knows, perhaps he's on Jaguar still.... Using IE.... urggghh. No, I think I prefer the idea he's just a troll!
And anyone that knows Objective-C can pretty much write for iPhone. Specious argument really.
As long as you do so when I'm not using my mac, and you don't cause damage to my existing stuff, sure. After all, you can copy my stuff, since I've still got my stuff, nothing's lost, nothing's damaged. Exactly like sharing films etc. No money is "lost", no damages occur. All that happens is people decide not to buy your shitty film. Well, a lot of pirates don't buy films anyway. If I can't download the latest film from TPB, then I'll just not see it. No biggy to me personally. If I download it, feel it's immensely awesome, I'lll buy a copy so I have a nice store-qulity release, with disc-artwork etc. just like I did with LOTR. I'm not alone in this. I'd estimate at LEAST half of all downloaders share my opinion on this. So all shutting down TPB et al does is deprive the movie studio of any chance folks like me will buy their overpriced products. Oh, and music studios are far worse. They're not just ripping off consumers, they're ripping artists off as well, so fuck them and their outdated business model. Nice troll though.
And, eh...you were like *that*, eh? (picture Karen Dunbar making various hand motions...)
Yeah, it really would be a lot better if our Government followed the American model and militarised the coastguard and brought all the independent agencies under the one umbrella. Perhaps when Scotland finally achieve independence we can do this, since Scottish waters are so large, and contain all those oil wells, we'd need a good Coastguard and fisheries protection model anyway, might as well bring all the helicopters and boats into it. Save on overheads, administration etc.
For the americans on here who are quite rightly confused about who and what the RNLI are, they're like the US Coastguard. They go out in boats in insane conditions and save people from sinking. They don't have any helicopters (our navy do that), but aside from that they're pretty much the same. With one minor exception: They receive no funding from the Government whatsoever. Insane though it sounds, they get all their funds from charity donations. Give generously.
I'm sorry, where else are you supposed to put them? If you're using disposables, they go in the trash. Obviously the better solution would be to go with cloth nappies and get them cleaned (and there's a burgeoning cottage industry of washing other people's soiled nappies. Some of them even offer a "carbon-neutral" process where they plant some trees or some shit to offset the washing costs), but sometimes, due to cost, location or just plain practicality people will choose disposables. Now, I don't have kids but I imagine if I did I'd probably use disposables. There's being green and there's making your life ridiculously unpleasant for a slight to negligent environmental effect. Disposables are unfortunately the way to go, and so they go in the trash. Unless you're one of the truly dumb motherfuckers that put them down the toilet. I doubt it since you're able to type a coherent sentence, and most of the mouthbreathers that flush nappies down the pan are too stupid for even that. You wouldn't believe how much it costs the water companies each year to go into the sewers and water-treatment plants and remove the build-up of used nappies....
That'll make for some lovely family reunions, won't it. "Mommy, where did *you* come from?" "Well dear" explains the now 31-year old 1st test-tube baby, "when Granny and Granpa were a lot younger, granpa's gun was firing blanks, so him and granny went to the fertility clinic and a very pretty nurse in a 1970's uniform asked granpa to wank off to some cheesy porn into a pot...hey, wait, why are you running away?"
Fucking awesome. That's getting copied mate. Thanks :D
The fascists, the communists, the oppressors; these people are on the wrong side of history. They will learn, as the leaders in Iran are learning, that you cannot keep information from your populace any more. The internet's biggest contribution to humanity could well be the end of tyranny.
If these leaders were smart, they would have never let the net in. But now, the cat is out of the bag; these countries need the internet for their economies, and their people want the internet so much they do not dare take it away lest the people revolt.
But it is merely a stay of execution. As we see ever more information available at the tap of a key to even the most remote and backward of places, casual violence, tyranny, oppression and torture will no longer be tolerated apathetically by the masses. I give the communists in China 25 more years at more. Before that's up, they'll either have moderated themselves to the point of elections and thus been voted out or there will be another revolution, hopefully with someone nice at the head of it, not just another thug like their current imbeciles.
Look at Iran though. As I type, it's happening there. The youth in Iran (25) make up more than 33% of their population. They've grown up, as have we, with the internet, with being able to speak to someone on another continent being "normal". They've also grown up seeing all these western freedoms, then wondering why in the west a woman can publish videos of herself getting gangbanged and no one cares, but in Iran if she walks down the street without wearing a headscarf, she'll get arrested for "indecency".
They've grown up seeing internet sites in the west discussing the ethical differences between atheism, christianity and islam, with people saying "there is no God, it's a silly idea anyway", and then seeing the religious police walk past outside to make sure everyone prays at the right time.
As I type this, there is likely another demonstration happening in Tehran of the sort we saw in recent weeks. But there's a difference now. Moussavi, long a supporter of the regime, is no longer in control of these. What started as a simple wish for the mostly-powerless president to be the one they voted for has no turned into a call for full democracy, an end to oppression, an end to the tyranny. "Death To The Dictator" they scream. And you think the internet isn't changing anything?
Why do you think the Chinese are trying to ween the kids off the internet. It's not because they think they're spending too long playing WoW. Hell, the Chinese Govt. would probably love their populace all wired up to it, happily playing their game, not bothering anyone or calling for reform.
No, it's in case after their 12-hour marathon WoW session, they talk to some western kid, and wonder why they can't read uncensored news, why they're "less worthy" than the european kid.
It's a brave new world all right but there's no place in it for the ignorant fascism of yesteryear. Blind obedience from the people is no longer possible.
My advice would be to stop building houses so far apart. Centralisation of resources is much more efficient for economic & environmental purposes. Or stop moaning when it takes you longer to get places once oil runs out/gets unfeasibly expensive (ie when we stop burning it and start using it for the manufacture of plastic etc.)
300 km is pretty good for one charge. Admittedly if you're needing to go further than that you'd need to take a 45minute pitstop, although 5 minute mega-charging will be here "soon". That said, a 45 minute break every 300km is a good idea anyway, so meh.
As for your facetious argument about the "next town", even in the Highlands here in Scotland the next town is never more than 5-60 miles away.
It's a luxury sedan. Try looking up the price for a new mercedes or 5 -series BMW. Then come back and realise this has better performance than either and STILL has that great feature of costing sod-all practically to run since you get all kinds of nifty tax breaks and it just sucks up your electricity. You could even fuel it from the sun (if you like a house with solar panels and live in Califonia I suppose)...
To be fair, Obama has kept the dignity of the office fairly well. This was a press dinner, ie, although it's broadcast in various places, with clips here and there, it's not really a public address. Obama himself was making some pretty roasting jokes (more so at the White House Correspondents dinner), and John was pretty respectful in many ways, talking up Obama's intellect and how he's doing a good-job...
Discipline is most certainly not the key to maintaining authority and respect. He has authority because the US populace gave him it; he maintains respect by respecting the US peope who put him there, and being open and transparent, and not "talking down" to them, acting as though he's some sort of God purely because of his job. In fact Obama has made many self deprecating jokes about how some supporters seem to idolise him but he himself doesn't take it at all seriously.
I'm thinking of the "And on the seventy-third day, I shall rest" joke in particular...
Very true..
To add to this, a scottish perspective (and maybe a little backdrop since the main papers here are basically either independent politically, and stick to to whomever they feel deserves it, SNP-loyal, or Labour-loyal; all the papers are much more political in Scotland) would be to add in the Scottish dailies; obviously i'm not going to include the "scottish" Sun etc. since they are exactly the same as the UK version, just with a story about how all Scots are thieving lying benefit-scheating heroin addicts every 2 pages...
The Record: Biggest scottish daily. Owned by trinity mirror, much like the Mirror itself, really. Heavily, extremely pro-Labour, anti-SNP, anti-Scotland and anti-anything-Labour-tell-them-to-be. On the day of the 2007 Scottish elections (which the SNP won), their editorial predicted a plague on all your houses if you vote SNP etc. Going out of business fairly soon if they continue to lose readers...
The Scotsman: broadsheet, mostly independent; seems to moderately support the SNP now, as well as other liberal ideals. Quite a nice paper, if I bought a daily it'd probably be this...
The Herald: broadsheet; biggest selling "proper" paper in Scotland now, having overtaken the Scotsman. Politically independent (mostly), and will occasionally criticise Labour or SNP alike. May well be also folding, many many job losses in recent years.
There are others but I can't be bothered and they're mostly all small-fry anyway....
oh, they are still getting screwed. Just less than on a record. Like on a t-shirt, they'll maybe see 10%, even 20% direct profit to them. On a record it can be 1%.
As for the handing it back to the label crap on that score I have nothing but sympathy, but suggest that if the industry unionised up a bit, and started refusing shitty contracts, like actors do to a degree, then they'd see less of this crap.
Speaking as a content provider of sorts (I do graphics, icons etc., not music, but it's still "IP"), if I sold the rights to one of my creations with a deal like most musicians get, if I later found out people were downloading my creation for free, thus screwing me out of a cut, I wouldn't be pissed at them. I'd be flattered that they took the time to download my stuff, and I'd ask, if they've got some spare cash they want to reward me for my work, then they could paypal me whatever they like. Kinda like donationware...
I say this because if just 1 in 100 downloaders gave the musician $1, then they'd already be getting about 5 times as much as a lot of record labels give their creators.
If you want to support a band, paypal them, or go see a concert, or buy some hoodies or t-shirts.
If you want to give more money to the soulless scumbags who would literally try and sue the dead, only to then try and sue the living descendants of said deceased for "damages" that could not feasibly be real (on the order of tens of thousands of times the actual value of damages inflicted), then completely wreck the grieving families lives through court cases, legal fees, media scrums etc. only to find said deceased was completely innocent and not even have the god damned common fucking courtesy to say sorry; if you want to do that, buy a record.
I'd rather buy conflict diamonds from africa, and have some vietnamese $1-a-day wage-slave set it into a ring made of nazi-gold than ever buy anything ever made by the labels that are part of the BPI or the RIAA or the MPAA. Only by starving these grubby little parasites of their money can we begin to set right the system whereby an artisan gets paid a fair amount for their work, and their art is allowed to become part of teh social consciousness.
Never mind Bush; look at your nation's founding.
Your ancestors asked (quite nicely at first) for moderate tax relief from the British Government.
The British ignored them.
Your ancestors then started asking about representation in Parliament; if the current people won't change the taxes, maybe we can get some of us elected to help persuade them.
The British still ignored them. Result: full out warfare and for the want of a 10% drop in basic tax, a few MP's and a end to the tea and cotton taxes, they lost the entire American colonies...
The Irani people are an increasingly connected, modern and well-educated (by Middle east standards) lot. Eventually, too many lame excuses by the crackpots will push the majority into outward disobedience. Then a lot of people will get shot, and public anger will rise, eventually resulting in another revolution. Hopefully this time without the Council of Nutjobs and the Supreme unelected Loony they currently have at the top of the tree.
Unless they start moderating towards the public opinion, it will only make this happen faster.
Again with the ad hominem attacks. Plato weeps.
No, I am not stupid. They *are* scientifically plausible. Whether they happen or not is another issue entirely.
Looking forward to your views on techlepathy as well, some of the things Kevin Warwick is doing in this field is truly "mindblowing", if you'll pardon the pun.