Incidentally, in most states, there's no requirement to go through a funeral home or funeral director (I know New York is an exception, incidentally), so as long as the ground is designated for burial, you have permission for digging the plot, and you go about it properly (depth of burial, etc), it's legal. Personally, I'm kind of considering ultrasonic pulverization. Basically, they dip you in liquid nitrogen, then submit you to a round of ultrasonics. You get a pile of freeze-dried human kibble that can then be directly put back in the environment as fertilizer. Although I do plan on some kind of memorial site for the sake of family who feel they must visit.
Their argument reminds me far too much of that argument by the auto industry against using safety glass in windshields because it would cause people to drive faster because they would feel too safe.
*shrug* In cases of nuclear warfare, missiles can be launched and arrive at their target in minutes. It's frequently been argued that it is necessary to ultimately only have one person involved in the decision because any comittee won't even get past minutes of the previous meetings before the matter becomes moot. Now of course, there'd likely be extensive screening and continuous testing to be sure that this one person was sane and informed and stayed sane and informed. I would not put a politician in that position, let alone any president we've had forgoing perhaps one of the really early ones like Washington.
There was actually a very interesting Sci-Fi story along those lines, following the life of the guy in charge for launching the nukes for the US. Something falls from the sky, wiping out half of the population of Washington D.C. including the White House. There's no information on what exactly it is, so the narrative focusses on him trying to decide if he should push the button to launch nukes at the Soviets (this being a Cold War story) and wondering whether his counterpart had already pushed the button, if his counterpart was innocent but would push the button in fear of the US launching nukes, etcetera. Really a very interesting little story.
From IMDB: Chet Pussy: Pussy, pussy, pussy! All pussy must go. At the Titty Twister we're slashing pussy in half! This is a pussy blow out! Make us an offer on our vast selection of pussy! We got white pussy, black pussy, Spanish pussy, yellow pussy, hot pussy, cold pussy, wet pussy, tight pussy, big pussy, bloody pussy, fat pussy, hairy pussy, smelly pussy, velvet pussy, silk pussy, Naugahyde pussy, snappin' pussy, horse pussy, dog pussy, chicken pussy, fake pussy! If we don't have it, you don't want it!
Woohoo! Another site with pretty pictures for me to link to! I'm sure they won't mind the free advertising from people backtracking the picture links...
And yes, I am kidding, although the scorpion and tarantula pictures are pretty nice.
Main Entry: 1gird
Pronunciation: 'g&rd
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): girded/'g&r-d&d/; orgirt/'g&rt/; girding
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English gyrdan; akin to Old English geard yard -- more at YARD transitive senses 1 a: to encircle or bind with a flexible band (as a belt) b: to make fast (as a sword by a belt or clothing with a cord) c: SURROUND 2: PROVIDE, EQUIP; especially: to invest with the sword of knighthood 3: to prepare (oneself) for action intransitive senses: to prepare for action - gird one's loins: to prepare for action: muster up one's resources
Sounds like girding one's loins would indeed be like a jock-strap rather than a cup. Although, I believe Sumo wrestler loincloths provide some protection by pushing the testicles up and out of the way. (Although, even though it's alluded to in a Bond movie, they do not have the rumored ability to actually retract them back into the body.)
You don't think that GMail and G-Mail are confusingly similar?
Especially given that there's still no consensus as to whether to refer to electronic mail as "email" or "e-mail"...
On the off chance that you're serious in your ignorance, "girding [one's] loins" is a turn of phrase stating that one is preparing for action with the allusion to battle. It's kind of the equivalent of putting on a jock-strap.
Make sure your message says "I don't return calls unless you're a friend or relative or I recognize your number".
That won't stop the spam, although the keyword suggestion below will theoretically weed out entries pretty quickly for deletion. Hmmm... and I could have all of the fun of listening to people saying banana, everything from the exasperated to the deadly serious who are convinced I have a program to delete messages where banana isn't said at the beginning.
Och... my poor grandmother though, she'd go into conniptions, figuring she'd said "banana" incorrectly, so I'd get a series of messages along the lines of "Banana. I don't know if you got my last message, Sean, because I think my voice quavered at the end. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you..."
Oh goodness... do you really want to encourage the ones who target the machine? When I lived in California, I came to dread coming home and checking the answering machine. There's always be series of "Sean, this is Mark of A1 Banking. I hate to say it, but we've run into a problem with your account. Call me immediately at 1-555-555-5555 so we can fix this" with inevitably routed to a credit card pitch. *sigh* One would think false advertising would apply somewhere in there. If you picked up the phone while the message was being logged, they immediately hung up.
Also, why doesn't Lance Armstrong fly? His max power output is 1100W, not the 100W attributted to humans. Sustained is about 500W or about what a normal horse will produce.
And yet, oddly enough, we can't even power a helicopter by human power... Although admittedly the last projected I saw which looked viable, the pedaller was not a professional cyclist, just an amateur. They had some fairly impressive figures on how much speed and power was required...
Gosh, someone else who grew up with those. FWIW, there are a number of sites out there with emulators and images of the games. One of these days, I'll find a copy of Interbank incident and finally beat it...
Incidentally, I don't know if you got at all hooked on Robot Odyssey, but there's a free Java port of it called Droidquest out there. I know it brought back a lot of happy memories for me.
Grog is still sold under that name throughout much of Europe, although most of the versions I ran into were Rum, tea, lemon, and sugar. Delicious stuff... pretty much constituted my drinking throughout the choir tour. Only catch is that you never really knew how much rum you were going to get in your grog so a single drink could be everything from vaguely rum-flavored tea to a mug that would leave you staggering away from the burger place.
Women can't play other video games?
{Leans over and whispers in a conspirational manner} It's the boobies. They get in the way of proper joystick movements.
Doh! It's three periods for an elipsis, people, not two, not four. And if placing a word after it to continue the same sentence, don't add a space. Only add a space (two, actually) if it ends a sentence before beginning the next.
And properly, an ellipsis should only be used to indicate missing words in a quotation, not as a dramatic pause, but to quote my English teacher, "That's... good enough." (There were several sentences of invective including a negation in that ellipsis, but if it's good enough for newspaper reporters to warp statements with strategic placement of ellipses, it's good enough for me.)
For what it's worth, I'm a DoD employee with the Air Force in the area of measurement calibration. While I have a secret clearance, I have yet to have to use it. We get them basically so that we can access equipment that has frequencies related to radar, IFF, etc. Most of the time, we just abstract it out and let the people on-base plug in their secret frequencies. *wry grin* Led to one of my co-workers nearly getting tackled by MP when he accidentally figured out the secret radar code. That's the last time that base will try to hide their frequency by giving a range that was plus or minus a set number...
Supposedly, the greater danger is amalgating publically known information. If you read the public pages of various Air Force bases, you can infer a lot about what's going on and when. It's like the "pizza delivery" indication of national crisis. At one point, news outlets watched for pizza deliveries to the Pentagon because when there was something big going down, pizza delivery would spike as people stayed late to work on the problem. Supposedly the Pentagon now randomly orders out for large amounts of pizza just to throw off such news outlets.
& Whats wrong with reduced fertility anyway? Do we need more people? especially if they will all be living longer.
You're dealing with the human race who has driven several species to extinction without considering the potential harm, often not even realizing they were driving the species to extinction. *wry grin* Or look at some of the Asian companies where they're having to import people because there's not enough population to do the menial labor. Heck, in China a few years ago, they were facing a situation where the one-child-only requirement and the preference for boys led to them pretty near not having enough females to perpetuate the next generation.
Given human history regarding population control, I don't find it at all implausible that we could sterilize ourselves away intentionally or unintentionally.
One of the reasons is that shit's everywhere. No matter how much you disinfect the surfaces of your home, short of wearing a breathing mask at all times or clean-room level filtering, you're breathing in shit every day. Every bit of food has shit in it from exposure to the air. And the water you're drinking? {peers side to side to check to see if anyone's listening, leans in to whisper} Fish have peed in it...
Cities in Spain and France tend to be more walkable. It is common to walk everywhere, occasionally taking a train. Every place I have lived in the United States, it is common to drive everywhere.
I think the key word here is "walkable." Most European countries and cities are comparatively small. Shame reason things like electric cars and smart cars haven't done as well here in the US as in Europe.
^_^ This is actual a rehash of old gameplay with updated graphics (well, not even really that updated), but check out Droidquest. It's a Java remake of the old TLC game, Robot Odyssey. Basic gameplay is that you program 3 (eventually 4) robots to solve various puzzles using digital logic gates. The game was marketing as "for 8 and up," but the later levels are touching on topics that usually come up in college-level digital logic courses. If you really want a challenge, the author has included a super-secret 6th level with even harder puzzles that even he hasn't successfully completed yet. If you're unfamiliar with the tenets of digital logic, the game has a series of seven tutorials that take you from the very basics to advanced techniques like robot teamwork.
As of right now, the interface is kind of limited and the graphics are not wonderful. Thomas Foote wrote the game as a remake of the original, so the graphics and interface are almost entirely drawn from the original game, which came out in the 80's. However, he also has the complete source code of the game available for those who want to tinker with it. ^_^ It's a retro game that requires you to think and has open source. What's not to like?
Rich enough that one partner (oh, you can't be divorced either really) essentially doesn't have to work and that you can buy all the materials required. OK, thats the bar just for you to do it, we'll assume you and yours are bright enough to do it and one of you despite these qualities and drives doesn't feel much like a career.
First of all, have you ever considered the costs of a dual-income family? What with child care costs and higher taxes on the higher incomes, I wonder how much money these second jobs really pull in. Secondly, I take mild offense at your assumption that someone who decides to stay at home to be a full-time parent is betraying their "qualities and drives" by that choice. Parenting is a full-time job in itself and I feel you are implying that a person who chooses that job is aiming low in life. Lastly, I'm a little confused by you feeling that one has to be rich to support oneself with the income from just one job. If you live modestly, it's really quite possible. People do it every day.
For the record, I was not home-schooled. I went to a private elementary school through 6th grade because my parents liked the idea of us attending a Catholic school and because we could get a better education there. I attended public schools for the last 6 years. Throughout my life, my mother stayed at home to help raise us. It was what she wanted to do, what she felt was right to do. She was educated with a BA in Psychology. Now that all of her children are in school of one sort or another, she's picked up a job.
While interracting with adults is important, I think interacting with your peers is even more important. Kids need to be kids.
I don't know about you, but I grew up seeing the adults as my peers, or at least the people I related to best. Given Slashdot is largely composed of highly intelligent individuals, I wouldn't be surprised if others felt the same way growing up. I just didn't relate to people my age. For the most part, I still don't.
Slashdot Mirror
And here I was just thinking that we'd finally solved the problem of perpetual roadkill.
Meh, no problem. Just get yourself a cookbook.
Incidentally, in most states, there's no requirement to go through a funeral home or funeral director (I know New York is an exception, incidentally), so as long as the ground is designated for burial, you have permission for digging the plot, and you go about it properly (depth of burial, etc), it's legal. Personally, I'm kind of considering ultrasonic pulverization. Basically, they dip you in liquid nitrogen, then submit you to a round of ultrasonics. You get a pile of freeze-dried human kibble that can then be directly put back in the environment as fertilizer. Although I do plan on some kind of memorial site for the sake of family who feel they must visit.
Their argument reminds me far too much of that argument by the auto industry against using safety glass in windshields because it would cause people to drive faster because they would feel too safe.
There was actually a very interesting Sci-Fi story along those lines, following the life of the guy in charge for launching the nukes for the US. Something falls from the sky, wiping out half of the population of Washington D.C. including the White House. There's no information on what exactly it is, so the narrative focusses on him trying to decide if he should push the button to launch nukes at the Soviets (this being a Cold War story) and wondering whether his counterpart had already pushed the button, if his counterpart was innocent but would push the button in fear of the US launching nukes, etcetera. Really a very interesting little story.
From IMDB:
Chet Pussy: Pussy, pussy, pussy! All pussy must go. At the Titty Twister we're slashing pussy in half! This is a pussy blow out! Make us an offer on our vast selection of pussy! We got white pussy, black pussy, Spanish pussy, yellow pussy, hot pussy, cold pussy, wet pussy, tight pussy, big pussy, bloody pussy, fat pussy, hairy pussy, smelly pussy, velvet pussy, silk pussy, Naugahyde pussy, snappin' pussy, horse pussy, dog pussy, chicken pussy, fake pussy! If we don't have it, you don't want it!
And yes, I am kidding, although the scorpion and tarantula pictures are pretty nice.
Actually a most of New York is farmland or woods. It's just that when you say "New York," people hear "New York City."
Main Entry: 1gird /'g&r-d&d/; or girt /'g&rt/; girding : to encircle or bind with a flexible band (as a belt) b : to make fast (as a sword by a belt or clothing with a cord) c : SURROUND : to invest with the sword of knighthood : to prepare (oneself) for action : to prepare for action : to prepare for action : muster up one's resources
Pronunciation: 'g&rd
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): girded
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English gyrdan; akin to Old English geard yard -- more at YARD
transitive senses
1 a
2 : PROVIDE, EQUIP ; especially
3
intransitive senses
- gird one's loins
Sounds like girding one's loins would indeed be like a jock-strap rather than a cup. Although, I believe Sumo wrestler loincloths provide some protection by pushing the testicles up and out of the way. (Although, even though it's alluded to in a Bond movie, they do not have the rumored ability to actually retract them back into the body.)
You don't think that GMail and G-Mail are confusingly similar?
Especially given that there's still no consensus as to whether to refer to electronic mail as "email" or "e-mail"...
On the off chance that you're serious in your ignorance, "girding [one's] loins" is a turn of phrase stating that one is preparing for action with the allusion to battle. It's kind of the equivalent of putting on a jock-strap.
That won't stop the spam, although the keyword suggestion below will theoretically weed out entries pretty quickly for deletion. Hmmm... and I could have all of the fun of listening to people saying banana, everything from the exasperated to the deadly serious who are convinced I have a program to delete messages where banana isn't said at the beginning.
Och... my poor grandmother though, she'd go into conniptions, figuring she'd said "banana" incorrectly, so I'd get a series of messages along the lines of "Banana. I don't know if you got my last message, Sean, because I think my voice quavered at the end. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you..."
Oh goodness... do you really want to encourage the ones who target the machine? When I lived in California, I came to dread coming home and checking the answering machine. There's always be series of "Sean, this is Mark of A1 Banking. I hate to say it, but we've run into a problem with your account. Call me immediately at 1-555-555-5555 so we can fix this" with inevitably routed to a credit card pitch. *sigh* One would think false advertising would apply somewhere in there. If you picked up the phone while the message was being logged, they immediately hung up.
Also, why doesn't Lance Armstrong fly? His max power output is 1100W, not the 100W attributted to humans. Sustained is about 500W or about what a normal horse will produce.
And yet, oddly enough, we can't even power a helicopter by human power... Although admittedly the last projected I saw which looked viable, the pedaller was not a professional cyclist, just an amateur. They had some fairly impressive figures on how much speed and power was required...
Incidentally, I don't know if you got at all hooked on Robot Odyssey, but there's a free Java port of it called Droidquest out there. I know it brought back a lot of happy memories for me.
Grog is still sold under that name throughout much of Europe, although most of the versions I ran into were Rum, tea, lemon, and sugar. Delicious stuff... pretty much constituted my drinking throughout the choir tour. Only catch is that you never really knew how much rum you were going to get in your grog so a single drink could be everything from vaguely rum-flavored tea to a mug that would leave you staggering away from the burger place.
Women can't play other video games?
{Leans over and whispers in a conspirational manner} It's the boobies. They get in the way of proper joystick movements.
Doh! It's three periods for an elipsis, people, not two, not four. And if placing a word after it to continue the same sentence, don't add a space. Only add a space (two, actually) if it ends a sentence before beginning the next. ... good enough." (There were several sentences of invective including a negation in that ellipsis, but if it's good enough for newspaper reporters to warp statements with strategic placement of ellipses, it's good enough for me.)
And properly, an ellipsis should only be used to indicate missing words in a quotation, not as a dramatic pause, but to quote my English teacher, "That's
Supposedly, the greater danger is amalgating publically known information. If you read the public pages of various Air Force bases, you can infer a lot about what's going on and when. It's like the "pizza delivery" indication of national crisis. At one point, news outlets watched for pizza deliveries to the Pentagon because when there was something big going down, pizza delivery would spike as people stayed late to work on the problem. Supposedly the Pentagon now randomly orders out for large amounts of pizza just to throw off such news outlets.
You're dealing with the human race who has driven several species to extinction without considering the potential harm, often not even realizing they were driving the species to extinction. *wry grin* Or look at some of the Asian companies where they're having to import people because there's not enough population to do the menial labor. Heck, in China a few years ago, they were facing a situation where the one-child-only requirement and the preference for boys led to them pretty near not having enough females to perpetuate the next generation.
Given human history regarding population control, I don't find it at all implausible that we could sterilize ourselves away intentionally or unintentionally.
One of the reasons is that shit's everywhere. No matter how much you disinfect the surfaces of your home, short of wearing a breathing mask at all times or clean-room level filtering, you're breathing in shit every day. Every bit of food has shit in it from exposure to the air. And the water you're drinking? {peers side to side to check to see if anyone's listening, leans in to whisper} Fish have peed in it...
Cities in Spain and France tend to be more walkable. It is common to walk everywhere, occasionally taking a train. Every place I have lived in the United States, it is common to drive everywhere.
I think the key word here is "walkable." Most European countries and cities are comparatively small. Shame reason things like electric cars and smart cars haven't done as well here in the US as in Europe.
As of right now, the interface is kind of limited and the graphics are not wonderful. Thomas Foote wrote the game as a remake of the original, so the graphics and interface are almost entirely drawn from the original game, which came out in the 80's. However, he also has the complete source code of the game available for those who want to tinker with it. ^_^ It's a retro game that requires you to think and has open source. What's not to like?
So what do you call an ill tempered geek who used to beat up guys on the football team?
Sir.
First of all, have you ever considered the costs of a dual-income family? What with child care costs and higher taxes on the higher incomes, I wonder how much money these second jobs really pull in. Secondly, I take mild offense at your assumption that someone who decides to stay at home to be a full-time parent is betraying their "qualities and drives" by that choice. Parenting is a full-time job in itself and I feel you are implying that a person who chooses that job is aiming low in life. Lastly, I'm a little confused by you feeling that one has to be rich to support oneself with the income from just one job. If you live modestly, it's really quite possible. People do it every day.
For the record, I was not home-schooled. I went to a private elementary school through 6th grade because my parents liked the idea of us attending a Catholic school and because we could get a better education there. I attended public schools for the last 6 years. Throughout my life, my mother stayed at home to help raise us. It was what she wanted to do, what she felt was right to do. She was educated with a BA in Psychology. Now that all of her children are in school of one sort or another, she's picked up a job.
While interracting with adults is important, I think interacting with your peers is even more important. Kids need to be kids.
I don't know about you, but I grew up seeing the adults as my peers, or at least the people I related to best. Given Slashdot is largely composed of highly intelligent individuals, I wouldn't be surprised if others felt the same way growing up. I just didn't relate to people my age. For the most part, I still don't.