Netscape 4.x was the last version that was widely released for the Unix crowd. I think it was more "native" on Unix workstations (coming from the NCSA after all) and I never had any problems with stability - despite being forced to use it up to v4.8 because there was no alternative until Mozilla started to become available. Considering the number of platforms they were supporting, I'm not surprised that some were not particularly stable, but fortunately for me, SGI was not one of them, and it's was pretty easy to dismiss Windows 95 and Mac OS users complaints about stability as clearly being related to their choice of OS.
I perused the Xdefaults file for Netscape 4 one day, and it was full of fascinating comments from the developers. A lot of them were expressing bitterness about arbitrary, non-standard, and downright buggy differences between various platforms that they were supporting, which evidently led to a lot of pain and suffering. No surprise that after Netscape 4, the Unix crowd was left in the dustbin - it was the easiest way to cut the number of supported platforms by 80% and focus their development on the PC market.
The only part I think Jackson totally screwed up was the army of the dead in RotK.
You forgot to mention, they glowed green. Green!
Considering the SFX and artistic achievement of Gollum, the Balrog, the Witch King, Sauron, the Nazgul's winged steeds, the Mumakil, numerous Trolls, and literally thousands of orcs and goblins, the best they could do with a freakin' ARMY OF THE DEAD was make them look like a cheap video effect from Disneyland's Haunted House?
Why shouldn't web browsers say "this page is broken" and stop rendering at that point?
For starters, it's undefined what "broken" HTML is. The standard includes forward- and backward-compatibility conditions that require invalid/illegal/unrecognized tags and attributes to be ignored. It's not required to declare which standard you are coding to, so there is an implied <!DOCTYPE DOGS_BREAKFAST>. Missing closing tags can be inferred and are syntactic sugar in many cases, anyway. For instance, I'm leaving the </p> tag off the end of my paragraphs here (although slashcode might catch that). Even with grossly misformatted documents, closing open elements at the end of a block or document produces something readable most of the time, and it easy for the parser to do, so why not do it? (Bearing in mind that Netscape 4's parser could not handle unclosed tables properly, and it did indeed refuse to render such pages; this contributed to the general impression that it was a piece of crap.)
Furthermore, a general-purpose browser has to have parsing algorithms to handle all of the various HTML specs, so you have code in place to handle all kinds of constructions that are invalid in once case and valid in another. Which means it's not that much more difficult to bend the rules from time to time, since you're already allowing construction X in other situations. Which in turn makes it possible to throw together a frankenstein parser that handles the maximum number of constructions, regardless of formal validity. This is called "quirks mode", and it is the Duct Tape that binds the web together. What you are really asking for is that browsers disable quirks mode. That's like asking a super-hero to disable his most potent superpower.
Correct code works as specified on less that 1% of the browser base, and therefore is a topic that is only meaningfully discussed by academics, utopians, and others who don't live in the real world.
Broken code works on 99% of the browser base, and therefore is what the rest of us actually use. The fact that there is no specification for what particular witches' brew of broken code will get the job done is a point of annoyance for web developers, but it does not change the fact that following the specifications will break your web site.
Since we're getting all pedantic, he *did* tell a story about his experience with Vista, so it *is* an anecdote. And the whole point of the "anecdote != data" meme is that data is plural. One anecdote is a datum, not data. And while it might be an empirical datum, it is still not empirical data, not until he has enough additional anecdotes to measure a trend, calculate the errors, and declare a confidence level. After all, you can fit any curve you like to a single data point - and get a perfect fit, to boot.
More seriously, I think it will work for bullets, since bullets burst fabrics by stretching them to the point of failure (and bullet-proof fabrics like Kevlar work by having a high tensile strength). The only question becomes how far does the bullet have to stretch the fabric until the strength rises enough to stop it? More than a couple of inches, and the bullet is into your internal organs anyway, so you have to reduce the looseness and flexibility of the fabric to prevent that from happening. The most obvious way to do that is the same way you do it for conventional bullet-proof vests: by adding hard plates or other rigid materials into the vest. The difference here is you might be able to use light materials that are themselves not bullet-proof (eg. wood, foam). The bullet could puncture these materials easily, but in dragging the material into the resulting bullet hole, the stretch factor would rise very rapidly and the fabric would suddenly become very strong.
If *I* had 50 billion dollars in cash in the bank, I'm pretty sure I could make scads of money without a single customer.
And given my experience running a business that depends on happy customers, if I could tell my customers to f*ck off, and yet still make unbelievable amounts of money off my $50bil in cash, I probably would.
Honestly are HTML authors really that damn stupid and lazy that they can't manage to write compliant XHTML 1.0? Really, people, it ISN'T THAT BAD. It's far worse than you know. In my own experience as a web developer, 99% of HTML comes from the following sources:
artists whip up templates using design applications that compose their own HTML
site builders integrate the templates with web apps that compose their own HTML, and cut-and-paste HTML snippets to link into various 3rd-party web services
site owners insert content through CMS systems that accept a pastiche of uploads, pastes from Word, raw HTML, rich-text updates, and plain-text form data, and use these to compose their own HTML
web developers write applications that compose their own HTML, often using HTML generation libraries written by other developers.
With that many sources for the HTML on a single page (many of which are outside my control), I'm blown away if the mashup that results is compliant with anything. I'm usually pretty happy if it's 98% HTML 4.01/Transitional, and raise a toast to quirks mode for the other 2%.
Okay, let's take your reference point... a good sword was the equivalent of a car for us. So if you could afford the equivalent of a car (plus maybe a house to get the armor too) then you were equipped with cutting edge weaponry and ready to go up against anyone.
Well, if you could afford a car (ie. a horse) and house, you would own a horse and a house. You were probably a middle-class burgher. To be a knight, you had to own not just a horse and house, but have enough left over for *another* horse and house so you could buy the sword and armor. So the minimum required to play is the wealth to own two cars and two houses. More realistically, you went to war with several horses, and the staff to care for them, so we are talking about a high level of wealth to support a single horseman on the field.
What does a stealth bomber go for these days? An F-22? An aircraft carrier? Nuclear sub? Lots more than a car and a house. You can't even buy a single cruise missile for that price, and a single cruise missile does not a war make.
I figure an aircraft carrier goes for about the same as a major castle or fortified city did, and they pretty much serve the same purpose. A sub is probably comparable to a trireme, again to similar purpose. A cruise missile was probably about the same as a good catapult, and required similar technical expertise to design and operate. I don't have any good analogies for the stealth bomber and F-22, because there was no air war back then. But suffice it to say that the ancient world had their bag-ticket high-tech military toys, too. The resources to pay for these things could only be mustered by the state, and they required technological expertise that was only possessed by the most advanced civilizations of the day. And in the face of that kind of superiority, inferior powers had no choice but to resort to asymmetrical warfare methods. Ie. you don't storm the castle, or attack the fleet of triremes; instead you engage in banditry and piracy against weaker and unprotected groups.
By going back to hunter-gatherer times, you only shrink the equivalent of the "state" down to the size of a village, so that a single craftsman could be responsible for making key weapons. But that still makes you superior to the small band who doesn't have the resources to support a dedicated craftsman. And they in turn were superior to the caveman who has to do everything by himself.
Before high technology in warfare, if you wanted to fight someone you convinced some people to join up with you to form an army, made yourselves some swords and bows (it's handy to have a carpenter and a blacksmith), and off you went.
Swords are ridiculously expensive to make in a non-industrial society -- especially steel swords, which required extensive workmanship to produce a blade that didn't bend or break on the first blow. That's why swords have always been the signature weapon of the aristocracy, whereas most ancient infantries were based on the spear and bow. When steel manufacture was first discovered (probably by the Hittites) it remained a closely guarded state secret for hundreds of years, and even after the collapse of the Hittite Empire, steel making remained quite secretive and expensive for nearly two thousand years. For a medieval knight, it is said that the cost of a good sword would have been comparable to the cost of a new car for us, and a good suit of armor would be equivalent to the cost of a house. Even among the ancient Greeks with their citizen armies, the hoplites were restricted to the upper classes, who could afford to maintain a suit of armor. Before the hoplites, the weapon of choice was the chariot, also restricted to the rich. Basically, since the advent of the wheel and metalworking, there hasn't been a time when war was not dominated by high technology.
The quick-and-dirty explanation is that the E8 "object" is a nasty-ass shape that exists in 248 dimensions, and which is notable for various reasons that only mathematicians can really grasp fully, but can be understood by the layman as pertaining to the concept of symmetry. It was discovered in the 1890s, but due to its size was never fully computed until a couple of years ago (the solution is a massive matrix of polynomials taking up 60 GB of storage). Oddly, various aspects of the E8 solution were reminiscent of formulae in the Standard Model, and Lisi has managed to come up with a coherent explanation of why this is. Various aspects of the E8 object's structure appear to explain formerly mysterious facts, such as why elementary particles are grouped into their various families. They also suggest new and undiscovered particles, which may give this theory a very clear set of test cases if it survives that long.
Take the $1 million, and invest it. Assuming a conservative 5% return, take the $50,000 per year, or $200,000 per presidential cycle, and make 6-figure donations to select candidates. That should be enough to buy you a few minutes of face time with an aspiring president, and a suitable amount of groveling from his cadre of cash-hungry fund-raisers when the party machine sweeps through town. I dare say that would add up to a hell of a lot more political influence than one measly vote.
Conservatism is about supporting entrenched interests, as opposed to replacing them with new interests. That is the fundamental meaning of the term. Being against foreign adventures, big government, etc. is understood as conservative in the USA because historically that happens to be what the U.S. government was like up until the 1930s, so it's the system under which all of the great families of the U.S.A. (the old guard, so to speak) achieved their positions of wealth and power. What conservatives of this ilk fail to understand is that from the 1940s onward, the U.S. establishment has progressively been taken over by new interests that are heavily invested in the military-industrial complex. This is a consequence of the Allied victory in WWII and the subsequent Cold War. This new establishment achieved its position of wealth and power in a system of corporate welfare through massive military spending, and the foreign adventures that resulted. It is now two or three generations old -- it can rightfully claim the mantle of Conservatism in the U.S.A. because there is a well-established system of privilege to conserve.
That's the fuckin' thing man, how do you break the duopoly? I know it's fucked, my friends know it's fucked, my family, coworkers... People know it's fucked. How do you un-fuck it?
The traditional way. Wait for the fuckedness to bring about an economic collapse, then line whatever bastards happen to be in charge up against a wall and shoot them (don't worry about this part, it will usually be taken care of by the billionaires who entrusted the bastards to protect their wealth). Then wait ten years for the black markets and organized crime to sort out who the new oligarchy should be. Then enjoy a generation or two of prosperity before things slowly start to get re-fucked.
Europe's wars were primarily about borders or cultures, and fueled by various governments trying to make land grabs. Middle east conflicts on the other hand are primarily fueled by religion
All wars are fueled by governments trying to make land grabs. If the two governments happen to have different religions, then that will be used as a convenient propaganda device to build support for the war. If a formerly allied region falls under the control of a competing religious faction, then it's all about liberating the noble people of Fooland from the infidel. But really it's about getting Fooland. This was true in the Muslim conquests of the 8th and 9th Centuries, the Crusades of the 11th-14th Centuries, the Reconquista of Spain, the Thirty Years War, the wars against the Ottomans from the 15th through 20th Centuries, the Arab-Israeli Wars, and the Gulf Wars. All of which could be (and were) spun to be about religion. You can bet the people financing those wars knew better, though.
The Silver Dart name is intended to ride on the coat-tails of the original Silver Dart, which also flew out of Nova Scotia. The Canadian Arrow company name also seems to be intended to ride on the coat-tails of the Avro Arrow. So they are trying to associate themselves with the two most famous aircraft in Canadian history, despite having nothing to do with either. And they seem to have overlooked the fact that both of these famous aircraft met ignominious ends, which can't be good for luck.
It might well be that the first interstellar colonists aren't leaving the nutbars with imaginary friends behind (sorry, I meant 'culturally diverse people with deeply held beliefs'..), instead they might be running from them.
Not if the history of colonization is anything to go by--the nutbars will establish the first colonies and flock to it in droves, build their own private communes, establish their own religious courts, decide what is and is not science, prohibit books, burn their own witches, and do all those other things that pesky secular society makes so difficult. If there were any hospitable places left on Earth to be doing these things in peace and quiet, they would be there in a heartbeat. As soon as it is feasible to do so on Mars, they'll be among the first to go, just like they were in the New World.
Well, PATH_INFO cannot contain a bare '?', whereas the QUERY_STRING can. Other than that, they're pretty much identical - QUERY_STRING is not parsed by the server, which treats it as a plain-old-string. (It may be automatically parsed by your web development or CMS framework, however.)
Otherwise, you'll probably find different behaviours from a caching and SEO viewpoint. PATH_INFO queries look more static, will be cached more aggressively, may rank better (because they are expected to be the same or similar on subsequent views), and may reduce server load. QUERY_STRING queries look more dynamic, may not be cached at all, may rank poorly, but are more likely to result in an actual server hit, and will show current state more accurately.
Which of these is the more powerful behaviour depends on the application, of course.
Search Amazon for anything on "pagan christ" and you'll find a number of popular books covering the subject. Most should have decent bibliographies pointing you to original or academic sources if you want to dig deeper. Some are pro-Christian in the sense that they see these discoveries as a way to rediscover and revitalize a moribund Christianity, while others are anti-Christian and present it all as a grand fraud (see my reply below for an example). So you can really take it any way you choose.
Any history that claims the church was well-established at the time of the Council of Nicaea is so biased as to be worthless. Of course the official history of the church will make such a claim, but that's hardly surprising.
The proof of this is quite obvious if you think about it. The Council of Nicaea was held in 326. Only 13 years earlier (the date of the Edict of Milan, in 313), it was illegal to be Christian in the western empire, and as late as 320 this was true in the eastern empire. You would get your property confiscated and you could be thrown to the lions. Christianity was an illegal, underground cult during the earlier career of most, if not every participant at the Council of Nicaea. Furthermore, it was the council of Nicaea that established the first official creed and the first official Bible. It's hard to have a well-established church without those. (A divisive church rife with heresies, sure, but not a well-established church.)
It should be obvious that prior to 313 or 320 there must have been some other, tolerated religions in the Roman Empire, while the Christians were getting persecuted and martyred. These did not die out in the few years that passed before the Council of Nicaea. In fact, they were persecuted quite vigourously for centuries after. (The Olympic Games, for example, were a festival of Zeus, which was not suppressed by Christian authorities until 393.)
What does the official history of the Council of Nicaea tell us about these rival religions of Rome? Not much, of course. It's as if they did not exist. The real history was deleted, edited, and revised to emphasize the pre-eminence and universality of the church. You have to turn to modern archaeology and scholars of ancient pagan religion to determine what the actual situation was like, and they have been discovering that the pagan cults had many of the trappings of Christianity before Christianity even existed. But it remains a topic of discussion mostly for academics.
As for the connections between Christianity and the sun god, the most direct evidence is probably in the depictions of Emperor Constantine. On coinage he was associated with both "Sol Invictus" (a form of Apollo), and chi-rho (Christ). The New Catholic Encyclopedia mentions that at the dedication of Constantinople in 330 the Cross of Christ was placed over the head of the Sun-God's chariot. (This info and references for it can be found in the Wikipedia article on Constantine.) At any rate, the iconography of official religion mashed it all up during those years.
See my reply above for info on popular books on the subject. For a pro-Christian viewpoint, try the "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur. For a colourful anti-Christian viewpoint, try this article from Nexus magazine. I take issue with some of its assertions, but it's well-referenced, so it's an informative and entertaining read regardless.
5) Virgin births are rampant throughout ancient mythology, and most sun gods underwent a virgin birth on December 25 (it being the traditionally accepted date when the days visibly begin to grow in length). Many also had 3 wise men follow a star in the east to see the birth. It was practically a requirement of godhood in an age when sun gods were generally considered the most important deities. If you didn't have the trappings of a sun god, you would not have been accepted by Roman society. (This also explains why the Christian sabbath is Sunday.)
Astrologically, the story is explained by the belt of Orion (the three wise men) pointing to Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) which was low in the eastern sky where the sun rose on the winter solstice, all of which occured under the sign of Virgo (the virgin).
Incidentally, the sun gods as a rule traveled the world with their 12 disciples, were then killed, placed into a cave for 3 days, and then resurrected, thereby saving humanity. Astrologically, this is just esoteric symbolism for the sun traversing the 12 signs of the Zodiac, finally losing the war against the forces of darkness on the Winter Solstice, remaining in this darkest mode for 3 days where the sun spent more time "under" the earth than over it, before being reborn again, initiating a new year and new crops, which were essential to the survival of humanity.
The most prevalent sun god during the Roman Empire was probably Mithras, who had Persian origins. The story of Mithras had all of these elements, but also borrowed them from earlier traditions. The oldest one we know of, and possibly the original, was the Egyptian god Horus. The sun-disk on Horus' head was adopted directly into Christian iconography, eventually evolving into the modern halo. Horus was called Iu-em-hetep, or Iusa in Egyptian, a name which evolved to Yeshua (Hebrew), then Iesu (Greek, who had to drop the trailing 'a' which would have implied the feminine), then Iesus (Latinate form of Iesu), then finally Jesus around the 1600s when the letter J came into usage.
The current Christian version of the sun god story comes from the Council of Nicaea, which at its heart was an attempt to establish a universal Roman religion to eliminate the religious feuds that were occupying the empire at that time. As a universal religion it had to incorporate the essential elements of all the major competing sects of the day, so sun god symbolism figured heavily in the resulting unified doctrine. Constantine's miraculous "conversion" however, was more likely political expediency - an attempt to centralize and control worship from Rome. And it worked, for over 1000 years. Still doing a half-decent job today, in fact.
there is one crucial factor which plays a pivotal role: no evolutionary pressure...
As a matter of fact, the delusional wackos seem (instinctively I presume) bent on propagating as much as possible, demanding polygamy and 5-10 kids per wife, while smarter people see kids as a grave responsibility and usualy have 1 or 2.
Some would argue that this ultimately leads to a sustainability crisis where a rather severe selection effect will kick in. Others would argue that we are currently on the leading edge of this crisis.
The difficult question is whether the selection pressure that results will favour sentience or more animalistic behaviour.
It doesn't matter. The point is: currency values mean very little unless you trade them or are measuring inflation. Any more analysis is a discussion of macro-economic theory and world money supply. A topic best left to the economists. Unless:
you quote on projects to American clients, in US dollars
you receive payment for those projects in US dollars
you have existing service contracts with American clients, paid in US dollars
you maintain US dollar bank accounts for those funds to avoid exchange fees
you have contractors on staff who are paid in US dollars
But I guess that never happens in your part of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape 4.x was the last version that was widely released for the Unix crowd. I think it was more "native" on Unix workstations (coming from the NCSA after all) and I never had any problems with stability - despite being forced to use it up to v4.8 because there was no alternative until Mozilla started to become available. Considering the number of platforms they were supporting, I'm not surprised that some were not particularly stable, but fortunately for me, SGI was not one of them, and it's was pretty easy to dismiss Windows 95 and Mac OS users complaints about stability as clearly being related to their choice of OS.
I perused the Xdefaults file for Netscape 4 one day, and it was full of fascinating comments from the developers. A lot of them were expressing bitterness about arbitrary, non-standard, and downright buggy differences between various platforms that they were supporting, which evidently led to a lot of pain and suffering. No surprise that after Netscape 4, the Unix crowd was left in the dustbin - it was the easiest way to cut the number of supported platforms by 80% and focus their development on the PC market.
You forgot to mention, they glowed green. Green!
Considering the SFX and artistic achievement of Gollum, the Balrog, the Witch King, Sauron, the Nazgul's winged steeds, the Mumakil, numerous Trolls, and literally thousands of orcs and goblins, the best they could do with a freakin' ARMY OF THE DEAD was make them look like a cheap video effect from Disneyland's Haunted House?
Didn't he already shoot the sequel to The Hobbit?
For starters, it's undefined what "broken" HTML is. The standard includes forward- and backward-compatibility conditions that require invalid/illegal/unrecognized tags and attributes to be ignored. It's not required to declare which standard you are coding to, so there is an implied <!DOCTYPE DOGS_BREAKFAST>. Missing closing tags can be inferred and are syntactic sugar in many cases, anyway. For instance, I'm leaving the </p> tag off the end of my paragraphs here (although slashcode might catch that). Even with grossly misformatted documents, closing open elements at the end of a block or document produces something readable most of the time, and it easy for the parser to do, so why not do it? (Bearing in mind that Netscape 4's parser could not handle unclosed tables properly, and it did indeed refuse to render such pages; this contributed to the general impression that it was a piece of crap.)
Furthermore, a general-purpose browser has to have parsing algorithms to handle all of the various HTML specs, so you have code in place to handle all kinds of constructions that are invalid in once case and valid in another. Which means it's not that much more difficult to bend the rules from time to time, since you're already allowing construction X in other situations. Which in turn makes it possible to throw together a frankenstein parser that handles the maximum number of constructions, regardless of formal validity. This is called "quirks mode", and it is the Duct Tape that binds the web together. What you are really asking for is that browsers disable quirks mode. That's like asking a super-hero to disable his most potent superpower.
Correct code works as specified on less that 1% of the browser base, and therefore is a topic that is only meaningfully discussed by academics, utopians, and others who don't live in the real world.
Broken code works on 99% of the browser base, and therefore is what the rest of us actually use. The fact that there is no specification for what particular witches' brew of broken code will get the job done is a point of annoyance for web developers, but it does not change the fact that following the specifications will break your web site.
Since we're getting all pedantic, he *did* tell a story about his experience with Vista, so it *is* an anecdote. And the whole point of the "anecdote != data" meme is that data is plural. One anecdote is a datum, not data. And while it might be an empirical datum, it is still not empirical data, not until he has enough additional anecdotes to measure a trend, calculate the errors, and declare a confidence level. After all, you can fit any curve you like to a single data point - and get a perfect fit, to boot.
Good news for pirates, then!
More seriously, I think it will work for bullets, since bullets burst fabrics by stretching them to the point of failure (and bullet-proof fabrics like Kevlar work by having a high tensile strength). The only question becomes how far does the bullet have to stretch the fabric until the strength rises enough to stop it? More than a couple of inches, and the bullet is into your internal organs anyway, so you have to reduce the looseness and flexibility of the fabric to prevent that from happening. The most obvious way to do that is the same way you do it for conventional bullet-proof vests: by adding hard plates or other rigid materials into the vest. The difference here is you might be able to use light materials that are themselves not bullet-proof (eg. wood, foam). The bullet could puncture these materials easily, but in dragging the material into the resulting bullet hole, the stretch factor would rise very rapidly and the fabric would suddenly become very strong.
Sorry can you please explain what this "capitalism" thing you speak of has to do with the free market?
If *I* had 50 billion dollars in cash in the bank, I'm pretty sure I could make scads of money without a single customer.
And given my experience running a business that depends on happy customers, if I could tell my customers to f*ck off, and yet still make unbelievable amounts of money off my $50bil in cash, I probably would.
- artists whip up templates using design applications that compose their own HTML
- site builders integrate the templates with web apps that compose their own HTML, and cut-and-paste HTML snippets to link into various 3rd-party web services
- site owners insert content through CMS systems that accept a pastiche of uploads, pastes from Word, raw HTML, rich-text updates, and plain-text form data, and use these to compose their own HTML
- web developers write applications that compose their own HTML, often using HTML generation libraries written by other developers.
With that many sources for the HTML on a single page (many of which are outside my control), I'm blown away if the mashup that results is compliant with anything. I'm usually pretty happy if it's 98% HTML 4.01/Transitional, and raise a toast to quirks mode for the other 2%.Well, if you could afford a car (ie. a horse) and house, you would own a horse and a house. You were probably a middle-class burgher. To be a knight, you had to own not just a horse and house, but have enough left over for *another* horse and house so you could buy the sword and armor. So the minimum required to play is the wealth to own two cars and two houses. More realistically, you went to war with several horses, and the staff to care for them, so we are talking about a high level of wealth to support a single horseman on the field.
What does a stealth bomber go for these days? An F-22? An aircraft carrier? Nuclear sub? Lots more than a car and a house. You can't even buy a single cruise missile for that price, and a single cruise missile does not a war make.I figure an aircraft carrier goes for about the same as a major castle or fortified city did, and they pretty much serve the same purpose. A sub is probably comparable to a trireme, again to similar purpose. A cruise missile was probably about the same as a good catapult, and required similar technical expertise to design and operate. I don't have any good analogies for the stealth bomber and F-22, because there was no air war back then. But suffice it to say that the ancient world had their bag-ticket high-tech military toys, too. The resources to pay for these things could only be mustered by the state, and they required technological expertise that was only possessed by the most advanced civilizations of the day. And in the face of that kind of superiority, inferior powers had no choice but to resort to asymmetrical warfare methods. Ie. you don't storm the castle, or attack the fleet of triremes; instead you engage in banditry and piracy against weaker and unprotected groups.
By going back to hunter-gatherer times, you only shrink the equivalent of the "state" down to the size of a village, so that a single craftsman could be responsible for making key weapons. But that still makes you superior to the small band who doesn't have the resources to support a dedicated craftsman. And they in turn were superior to the caveman who has to do everything by himself.
Swords are ridiculously expensive to make in a non-industrial society -- especially steel swords, which required extensive workmanship to produce a blade that didn't bend or break on the first blow. That's why swords have always been the signature weapon of the aristocracy, whereas most ancient infantries were based on the spear and bow. When steel manufacture was first discovered (probably by the Hittites) it remained a closely guarded state secret for hundreds of years, and even after the collapse of the Hittite Empire, steel making remained quite secretive and expensive for nearly two thousand years. For a medieval knight, it is said that the cost of a good sword would have been comparable to the cost of a new car for us, and a good suit of armor would be equivalent to the cost of a house. Even among the ancient Greeks with their citizen armies, the hoplites were restricted to the upper classes, who could afford to maintain a suit of armor. Before the hoplites, the weapon of choice was the chariot, also restricted to the rich. Basically, since the advent of the wheel and metalworking, there hasn't been a time when war was not dominated by high technology.
The quick-and-dirty explanation is that the E8 "object" is a nasty-ass shape that exists in 248 dimensions, and which is notable for various reasons that only mathematicians can really grasp fully, but can be understood by the layman as pertaining to the concept of symmetry. It was discovered in the 1890s, but due to its size was never fully computed until a couple of years ago (the solution is a massive matrix of polynomials taking up 60 GB of storage). Oddly, various aspects of the E8 solution were reminiscent of formulae in the Standard Model, and Lisi has managed to come up with a coherent explanation of why this is. Various aspects of the E8 object's structure appear to explain formerly mysterious facts, such as why elementary particles are grouped into their various families. They also suggest new and undiscovered particles, which may give this theory a very clear set of test cases if it survives that long.
Take the $1 million, and invest it. Assuming a conservative 5% return, take the $50,000 per year, or $200,000 per presidential cycle, and make 6-figure donations to select candidates. That should be enough to buy you a few minutes of face time with an aspiring president, and a suitable amount of groveling from his cadre of cash-hungry fund-raisers when the party machine sweeps through town. I dare say that would add up to a hell of a lot more political influence than one measly vote.
Conservatism is about supporting entrenched interests, as opposed to replacing them with new interests. That is the fundamental meaning of the term. Being against foreign adventures, big government, etc. is understood as conservative in the USA because historically that happens to be what the U.S. government was like up until the 1930s, so it's the system under which all of the great families of the U.S.A. (the old guard, so to speak) achieved their positions of wealth and power. What conservatives of this ilk fail to understand is that from the 1940s onward, the U.S. establishment has progressively been taken over by new interests that are heavily invested in the military-industrial complex. This is a consequence of the Allied victory in WWII and the subsequent Cold War. This new establishment achieved its position of wealth and power in a system of corporate welfare through massive military spending, and the foreign adventures that resulted. It is now two or three generations old -- it can rightfully claim the mantle of Conservatism in the U.S.A. because there is a well-established system of privilege to conserve.
The traditional way. Wait for the fuckedness to bring about an economic collapse, then line whatever bastards happen to be in charge up against a wall and shoot them (don't worry about this part, it will usually be taken care of by the billionaires who entrusted the bastards to protect their wealth). Then wait ten years for the black markets and organized crime to sort out who the new oligarchy should be. Then enjoy a generation or two of prosperity before things slowly start to get re-fucked.
All wars are fueled by governments trying to make land grabs. If the two governments happen to have different religions, then that will be used as a convenient propaganda device to build support for the war. If a formerly allied region falls under the control of a competing religious faction, then it's all about liberating the noble people of Fooland from the infidel. But really it's about getting Fooland. This was true in the Muslim conquests of the 8th and 9th Centuries, the Crusades of the 11th-14th Centuries, the Reconquista of Spain, the Thirty Years War, the wars against the Ottomans from the 15th through 20th Centuries, the Arab-Israeli Wars, and the Gulf Wars. All of which could be (and were) spun to be about religion. You can bet the people financing those wars knew better, though.
The Silver Dart name is intended to ride on the coat-tails of the original Silver Dart, which also flew out of Nova Scotia. The Canadian Arrow company name also seems to be intended to ride on the coat-tails of the Avro Arrow. So they are trying to associate themselves with the two most famous aircraft in Canadian history, despite having nothing to do with either. And they seem to have overlooked the fact that both of these famous aircraft met ignominious ends, which can't be good for luck.
Not if the history of colonization is anything to go by--the nutbars will establish the first colonies and flock to it in droves, build their own private communes, establish their own religious courts, decide what is and is not science, prohibit books, burn their own witches, and do all those other things that pesky secular society makes so difficult. If there were any hospitable places left on Earth to be doing these things in peace and quiet, they would be there in a heartbeat. As soon as it is feasible to do so on Mars, they'll be among the first to go, just like they were in the New World.
Well, PATH_INFO cannot contain a bare '?', whereas the QUERY_STRING can. Other than that, they're pretty much identical - QUERY_STRING is not parsed by the server, which treats it as a plain-old-string. (It may be automatically parsed by your web development or CMS framework, however.)
Otherwise, you'll probably find different behaviours from a caching and SEO viewpoint. PATH_INFO queries look more static, will be cached more aggressively, may rank better (because they are expected to be the same or similar on subsequent views), and may reduce server load. QUERY_STRING queries look more dynamic, may not be cached at all, may rank poorly, but are more likely to result in an actual server hit, and will show current state more accurately.
Which of these is the more powerful behaviour depends on the application, of course.
Search Amazon for anything on "pagan christ" and you'll find a number of popular books covering the subject. Most should have decent bibliographies pointing you to original or academic sources if you want to dig deeper. Some are pro-Christian in the sense that they see these discoveries as a way to rediscover and revitalize a moribund Christianity, while others are anti-Christian and present it all as a grand fraud (see my reply below for an example). So you can really take it any way you choose.
Any history that claims the church was well-established at the time of the Council of Nicaea is so biased as to be worthless. Of course the official history of the church will make such a claim, but that's hardly surprising.
The proof of this is quite obvious if you think about it. The Council of Nicaea was held in 326. Only 13 years earlier (the date of the Edict of Milan, in 313), it was illegal to be Christian in the western empire, and as late as 320 this was true in the eastern empire. You would get your property confiscated and you could be thrown to the lions. Christianity was an illegal, underground cult during the earlier career of most, if not every participant at the Council of Nicaea. Furthermore, it was the council of Nicaea that established the first official creed and the first official Bible. It's hard to have a well-established church without those. (A divisive church rife with heresies, sure, but not a well-established church.)
It should be obvious that prior to 313 or 320 there must have been some other, tolerated religions in the Roman Empire, while the Christians were getting persecuted and martyred. These did not die out in the few years that passed before the Council of Nicaea. In fact, they were persecuted quite vigourously for centuries after. (The Olympic Games, for example, were a festival of Zeus, which was not suppressed by Christian authorities until 393.)
What does the official history of the Council of Nicaea tell us about these rival religions of Rome? Not much, of course. It's as if they did not exist. The real history was deleted, edited, and revised to emphasize the pre-eminence and universality of the church. You have to turn to modern archaeology and scholars of ancient pagan religion to determine what the actual situation was like, and they have been discovering that the pagan cults had many of the trappings of Christianity before Christianity even existed. But it remains a topic of discussion mostly for academics.
As for the connections between Christianity and the sun god, the most direct evidence is probably in the depictions of Emperor Constantine. On coinage he was associated with both "Sol Invictus" (a form of Apollo), and chi-rho (Christ). The New Catholic Encyclopedia mentions that at the dedication of Constantinople in 330 the Cross of Christ was placed over the head of the Sun-God's chariot. (This info and references for it can be found in the Wikipedia article on Constantine.) At any rate, the iconography of official religion mashed it all up during those years.
See my reply above for info on popular books on the subject. For a pro-Christian viewpoint, try the "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur. For a colourful anti-Christian viewpoint, try this article from Nexus magazine. I take issue with some of its assertions, but it's well-referenced, so it's an informative and entertaining read regardless.
5) Virgin births are rampant throughout ancient mythology, and most sun gods underwent a virgin birth on December 25 (it being the traditionally accepted date when the days visibly begin to grow in length). Many also had 3 wise men follow a star in the east to see the birth. It was practically a requirement of godhood in an age when sun gods were generally considered the most important deities. If you didn't have the trappings of a sun god, you would not have been accepted by Roman society. (This also explains why the Christian sabbath is Sunday.)
Astrologically, the story is explained by the belt of Orion (the three wise men) pointing to Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) which was low in the eastern sky where the sun rose on the winter solstice, all of which occured under the sign of Virgo (the virgin).
Incidentally, the sun gods as a rule traveled the world with their 12 disciples, were then killed, placed into a cave for 3 days, and then resurrected, thereby saving humanity. Astrologically, this is just esoteric symbolism for the sun traversing the 12 signs of the Zodiac, finally losing the war against the forces of darkness on the Winter Solstice, remaining in this darkest mode for 3 days where the sun spent more time "under" the earth than over it, before being reborn again, initiating a new year and new crops, which were essential to the survival of humanity.
The most prevalent sun god during the Roman Empire was probably Mithras, who had Persian origins. The story of Mithras had all of these elements, but also borrowed them from earlier traditions. The oldest one we know of, and possibly the original, was the Egyptian god Horus. The sun-disk on Horus' head was adopted directly into Christian iconography, eventually evolving into the modern halo. Horus was called Iu-em-hetep, or Iusa in Egyptian, a name which evolved to Yeshua (Hebrew), then Iesu (Greek, who had to drop the trailing 'a' which would have implied the feminine), then Iesus (Latinate form of Iesu), then finally Jesus around the 1600s when the letter J came into usage.
The current Christian version of the sun god story comes from the Council of Nicaea, which at its heart was an attempt to establish a universal Roman religion to eliminate the religious feuds that were occupying the empire at that time. As a universal religion it had to incorporate the essential elements of all the major competing sects of the day, so sun god symbolism figured heavily in the resulting unified doctrine. Constantine's miraculous "conversion" however, was more likely political expediency - an attempt to centralize and control worship from Rome. And it worked, for over 1000 years. Still doing a half-decent job today, in fact.
Some would argue that this ultimately leads to a sustainability crisis where a rather severe selection effect will kick in. Others would argue that we are currently on the leading edge of this crisis.
The difficult question is whether the selection pressure that results will favour sentience or more animalistic behaviour.
- you quote on projects to American clients, in US dollars
- you receive payment for those projects in US dollars
- you have existing service contracts with American clients, paid in US dollars
- you maintain US dollar bank accounts for those funds to avoid exchange fees
- you have contractors on staff who are paid in US dollars
But I guess that never happens in your part of the country.