I just re-read the original H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" a few months back, and I was surprised at how much of it is applicable to modern society. While the story itself is somewhat dated because technology has passed it by so completely, the human issues in it are just as modern and prevalent today as they were when it was published.
In a way, I think that's what any SciFi/Fantasy literature course should get across -- that the stories are not just about whiz-bang special effects -- a lot of the time they are far more pointed descriptions and explorations of the human condition than are written in any of the "serious" literature.
War of the Worlds, for example, is a very strong commentary/criticism of English Imperialism and Colonialism and the horrendous toll it took on the peoples of Africa. Even the ending (Spoiler: It's microorganisms) is a comment that the myriad diseases of Africa were eventually the only thing that "saved" Africa from the utter dominance of European occupation.
At the time, had Wells written a non-fantasy book about the same subject, he would have been looking at prison time for sedition against the crown, instead, he sold a best-seller about Martians attacking the Earth.
Re:Time scales don't jive with the rest of the SGv
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Stargate Universe
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· Score: 1
They claim early on in the show that they are doing, "Faster than light travel, but not though hyperspace."
The ship has been traveling for 100,000 years, so you have to use Ancient technology from Atlantis minus 90,000 years. So, that's the equivalent of pushing the human race from space-flight back to before the Clovis Point culture.
So, it's entirely likely that this ship is not the "latest and greatest" intergalactic hyperspace super-cruiser capable of the Kessel run in under 5 parsecs. (Sorry, mixing metaphors.)
The ancients were sending these ships out to other galaxies because it was prohibitive for them to make the journey in ships, that would indicate years, decades, or centuries to do inter-galactic travel. The course they showed on the monitor -- "Billions of light years" -- took 100,000 years, that's a speed roughly 10,000 times the speed of light. That sounds fast, but still represents a 3.4 hour trip from Earth to Proxima Centauri (3.8 light years). Fast enough for interstellar travel, but nothing like what you'd need to hop galaxies.
So, just like we send unmanned probes out to Pluto (New Horizons), the ancients sent an un-manned vessel to other galaxies. Then, if it takes 50 years, who cares? It's not like anyone has to ride it.
The sex scene was obnoxious. Both my kids love Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and I had to sit poised over the "Skip" button when I let them watch Universe.
It was ridiculous, and could have been played just as well with them fully clothed and embracing/kissing without making it into a moment where I had to jump the show.
It was there only for the "titillation" of showing "We're like Battlestar Galactica!" rather than just keeping it a bit more wholesome.
Re:Troubleshooting skills.
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Stargate Universe
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So, in other words, the Ancients were a lot like us.
Consider this. We could build cars, boats, airplanes, etc, with 100+ year lifespans. They'd need a lot of redundant systems, over-engineering, and be massively expensive and power-hungry.
Or, we can assume that we'll still be around in a 100 years, and still able to build newer, and better system with the technology we've discovered in 100 years.
This is actually a recent phenomena, roughly coincident with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, things were built to last, because people didn't want to go through the massive effort of redoing it every few years. Buildings were big, massive things (think castles, pyramids, cathedrals) and made to last centuries. No expense was spared, because you had hundreds of years of living in it before you'd need to worry about doing it again.
Today, even our most advanced structures (skyscrapers, stadiums, bridges) come with lifetimes. We build *exactly* as strong as it needs to be. We build with materials that are exactly as sturdy and long-lived as they need to be, but no longer. What's the point of putting titanium/molybdenum panels that will not corrode in a 100,000 years, on a building that, if it's lucky, will be torn down in 50 years to make room for the newest skyscraper?
To me, it's amazing, given that propensity, that Las Vegas isn't made from paper mache and spit-wads. There's barely a building there over 20 years old now.
With the ancients, you have a race that can, more or less, build anything, with technology that lets them warp space and time to their liking, and you think they're going to waste time engineering a vessel to last 100 millenium? I'd imagine it was a standard, galaxy-limited ship that they built for seeding the Milky Way with stargates, which they then modified for inter-galactic travel, along with a system whereby they could go visit if it ever found anything "really cool". They sent it towards Andromeda to seed that galaxy with gates, and then on to Pegasus, etc, etc. I imagine they retro-engineered and patched the ship up so it could survive quite a long trip, but then they ascended, so there was no need to go check on it any more. Which means that, according to Dr. Rush, the ship is 100,000 years old, and hasn't been maintained in at least 10,000 years.
The only thing on Earth that humans made even close to that age is the great pyramids, and look at how damaged they are.
Overall, I think the ancients did a darn good job given the circumstances.
In fact, I just went back and checked, and the ruling came from one GWB judge and two Clinton Appointees in panel review. So you have a "liberal majority" on the panel that decided this. Now, will you be man enough to retract your statement?
Sorry, Third Circus is 6-6 Republican vs. Democrat nominees. And it has two vacancies being filled by Obama, that will make it 8-6 in favor of left-leaning judges. And that ignores the fact that the last judge appointed by GWB was one of the ones that had to get through the "Gang of 14" compromise that seated a *lot* of left-leaning judges. The court also has a seat that's been empty since 2006 (seat 4).
All we need to do is return one part of the original design of corporations, that of the responsibility of the shareholders. Let me explain.
Until the late 19th century, a shareholder bought shares in the company, perhaps 1%. That meant that, if the corporation were sued, then that shareholder, that partial-owner, was held account for up to 1% of their net worth. They held 1% of the corporation, therefore they risked 1% of their net worth. This made the legal fiction of a one-man corporation meaningless. Since they held all the shares, they still put 100% of their worth at risk.
Today, you can hold 100% of the shares of a corporation, and there is no legal penalty should the corporation go into drug-smuggling or weapons trafficking. Your total "cost" would be the loss of the value of the shares. This leads to people willing to invest in dangerously risky, morally questionable, high-return corporations. There is no incentive for responsibility on the part of the shareholders. In other words, they can reap all the rewards while facing none of the risks.
This is wrong. It has led to the "just make this quarter good and damn the future" mentality of our corporations. Restore that original risk/reward balance, and I can assure you that the shareholder meetings will not be simple rubber-stamps of the board.
This was tried, it doesn't work. Please learn the history of the Great Depression. Hoover forced the companies to do exactly this in 1930. It ended up making everything worse. Raising the minimum wage simply means that the company can afford to hire less people. That means more unemployed, more pain, less consumption and a deepening of the problem.
The very, very best solution is for the government to do... nothing. Not a damn thing. Get out of the way. Let the market adjust. When this is done, it's painful, but it's quick. It's over. Like ripping off a band-aid.
When the government steps in and takes steps like you advocate, it's like slowly tugging it off. Drawing out the pain of each pulled hair and stretched skin. It's more painful for a longer period of time. There are already economists looking at what Obama and Bush did and saying it will take 20 years to recover. In the meantime, in countries where the government stood back and did nothing (mostly due to gridlock over what they *should* do), there's a lot of evidence that they are already well on the path to recovery. Canada is among those countries. They fought over what to do for so long, that the market fixed itself.
Know what happens when times get tough? People save more. They put money away in the banks for safe keeping. That money re-funds the bank, allowing it to make more loans, more loans stimulate the economy, allowing businesses to get moving again, and people to buy things again.
The absolute last thing we need right now is to put a drain on the banks by forcing them to reserve more funds... oh wait, TARP already did that, and banks aren't making loans. Gosh. Go figure.
If you think more government is the answer to the economy, then you don't understand what led to this problem in the first place. Read "Rethinking the Great Depression" to learn what *really* caused the depression (hint, it has to do with America being the arsenal to the world back in WW I, and the disastrous way they restored the gold standard after the war). Learn that Hoover did everything you suggested in your message, and just extended the depression, and then read why almost every historian and economist today recognizes that the Keynsian philosophy embraced by FDR not only made the Great Depression longer, it gave us the Depression within the Depression.
Learn your history, for deity's sake, or we are all doomed to repeat it. It's 1929 right now, and you don't even know it, and you're cheering the same philosophies that gave us Hoovervilles and the Dust Bowl.
And yeah, they could move to Oklahoma or India, but how many of the really valuable employees are going to want to live in a backwards locality?
Ah, the quiet contempt and class prejudice that liberals have for the small communities that used to be called "The Heart and Soul of America" shines through. There's a reason it's called the "Heartland" of America. Strange that the founder of what is now the Democrat party once said, "Cities are the festering scabs on the face of America. So long as it is the honest, hard-working farmer -- close to the earth -- who drives this nation, America shall continue to prosper and strive towards greatness."
"No man who has never planted a tomato, watched it grow, and harvested its fruit, should be allowed to vote." -- Thomas Jefferson
Actually, as a bone-deep conservative, my philosophy is, "Follow the law, unless you find it to be a morally unacceptable one. If that's the case, break the law. But in any situation, whether legal or illegal, be prepared to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions." The main problem I have with the liberal philosophy (as used in the United States) is that they lose the last sentence. They want to be able to cause damage to themselves or others without consequence, and have a nanny-state pick up the pieces. It's the philosophy of childhood -- stretch the rules to the breaking point, and then mommy and daddy will come clean up afterward. The Democrat party has simply replaced mommy and daddy with an overarching federal government instead.
The real problem with our current government (and by "current" I mean at least the last 30+ years so no Obama/Bush snarking, please) is that they think they're actually important people. Somehow our nation has become enamored of the idea that something a Senator says is in any way more important or more informed than something the guy who slops the pigs on a farm says. At least the pig farmer is doing an honest day's work.
Do you really believe that corporations like Microsoft have a big giant vault in their main office with stacks of gold coins in it so they can swim around like Scrooge McDuck in his Money Bin?
Companies do not like to cut employees when the economy slumps just so they can keep more shiny gold in their swim trunks. They cut employees, because employment costs money (usually the largest single expense for any company is payroll).
When a company like Microsoft fires an employee, they pay penalties in the loss of manpower, and the loss of experience and knowledge. I was at a company that fired three employees during a downturn and suddenly realized there was an entire critical system that no one knew anything about. Heck, we had a layoff here in April that took both the project lead and project manager off of a major project and set us back at least 2 months on a release date and cost the remaining employees lots of late nights and weekends to make up the manpower lost.
On average, paying an employee $5 costs the employer at least $7, all in costs you don't see as an employee. I know this because my brother ran a company, and hired me W-2 for one day to consult on a project, he paid me $500. It cost him $732 to do that after covering unemployment insurance, workman's comp, matching FICA and Medicare, and a half dozen other little fees. After taxes, I took home about $349. So, to hire me for $349 of real, take-home pay, the government and it's affiliates took home $383. Since then, the state he hired me in (Wisconsin) has increased taxes.
When the economy turns down, companies lose money. They have to make hard decisions. Microsoft had the debacle of Vista to pay for -- I've heard reports as high as 50,000 coders working for 2 years on Vista. Assuming a very, very low estimate of $50,000 per coder, that works out to a $2,500,000,000 a year, or $5 BILLION in development costs. I've heard that Vista sales are so dismal they have yet to make up even half their development costs.
But keep living in your "Scrooge McDuck" economic world. Much easier than facing the world the way it really is.
Uh, Darwin spent so much of the early part of that voyage seasick, that the rest of the crew finally got tired of it and put him ashore at the Galapagos Islands, and then came back to get him on the return trip. Darwin was left on the island with nothing to do, and being a keen pigeon breeder, noticed the incredibly different and diverse group of pigeons on the islands, like nothing he'd ever seen before, which led him to study the rest of the animals. It was, in fact, one of Darwin's friends who was the naturalist, and who he'd met through the bizarrely English fascination with breeding pigeons, that led to his interest in animals. I believe he humbly says at the start of "Origin of Species" that it should be his friend writing the book, since he's really just a total amateur at natural science and it was only with his friend's help that he wrote the book.
Maybe instead of listening to your jingoistic anti-American indoctrinators, you should read the Federalist papers, and the Anti-federalist, and the notes from the constitutional convention, and the history of the debate on the Declaration of Independence. I have read all these, and it is *very* clear what the founders thought of large, centralized, monolithic governments, because they were about to/had just shed blood, sweat, and treasure getting rid of one.
Thomas Jefferson: That government which governs best, governs least. (Aside: Yes, there's some argument if it was Jefferson or Paine who said this, but as both had a lot to do with the founding of the country, the point is identical.)
But get off your high horse and admit that your success is likely equal parts hard work and luck with a little state-sponsored encouragement thrown in.
Absolutely not. What "luck" I've had has been crappy. My father died of cancer before his 60th birthday. I've worked at jobs where I've had literally tens of thousands of dollars stolen from me. I've had an insurance company refuse to pay a penny for my son's birth (an instant $10K out of pocket expense.) I've had medical bills that totaled in excess of $50,000 and worked to pay them off. I've had medical conditions of my own, and my wife has had more than her fair share as well, including a stroke and brain tumor during her second pregnancy. She had a miscarriage of what would have been my third child.
I've been a victim of a pissed off police officer at the end of his shift after a bad day who decided to light me up for $400 in fines on a bogus charge just because I happened to drive past him. My wife had her car destroyed by an illegal immigrant driving without a license and without insurance.
Everything in my life I've worked for -- with one exception -- I LIVE IN AMERICA. A country founded by a brilliant group of men 233 years ago. Men who said, "We need a government, but that government's job should be to STAY OUT OF YOUR WAY as much as possible." To let you excel, to let you, the individual accomplish as much as you are willing to achieve. And with the right to succeed comes the even more important right to fail.
I've failed in my life, or been handed a bum deal too many times to count. But I always knew that, no matter what, I would have the right to try again and not be told, "Oh gosh, you lost, game over, here's your consolation prize."
Until I'm dead, I can always try again. That's why it says, "Life, Liberty, and the PURSUIT of Happiness". Any other option than those three is Tyranny. It doesn't say you *get* happiness, it says you have the right to *pursue* it. The government is there only to assure you have the right to *pursue* it. If you say, "too bad, you're a loser at life's game," then you've taken away that right.
As for roads? I pay taxes for them. As for Sewage? I pay a monthly utility bill for that. As for Power? I pay that bill every month. As for education, taxes again - and privately earned money for college. Fire and Police - Taxes. Security of an Army protecting my shores? More taxes than I ever paid in mortgage. And for all of those (except for the privately run utilities, and except for education, which is a system I think is utterly corrupt and failing in this country -- and my wife's a teacher, so I don't say that lightly or without knowledge) I'm happy to pay for them *BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE JOB OF GOVERNMENT*.
Thing is, it's *NOT* the job of the Federal Government to make sure that Johnny Dopehead has clean needles for his heroin, paid for with my money, or that Suzy Sleepsaround gets her abortions, child care, and syphillis shots paid for with my money. Where exactly in "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" does supporting crack heads and sluts come into the picture? When I went through bad times I PAID FOR IT. I didn't expect anyone to come to my rescue. The time I went to the welfare office was only because my wife spent a week badgering me into it. I never wanted to go. And I never took a penny of their money either. The only check I ever got from them was returned to them before it was ever cashed. It's called personal responsibility. You take it for yourself. If you don't, you take the consequences, and hope that someone is charitable enough to help you.
But you don't go to the Federal Government and ask them to fix your bad decisions. That's not CHARITY. It's TYRANNY. Plain and simple. The sooner you get that through your head, the sooner you're going to understand what made this country great in the first place.
Clearly, a poor black child, raised in a broken home, dragged from place to place by his single mother, eventually tossed back to a grandparent, living in poverty, and exposed to the horrible public school system, turning to drug use in his teen years -- he has no chance to amount to anything. He should be written off as a lost cause; incapable of improving his situation.
He will end his life poor, divorced, and addicted to drugs.
Or he's the President. But that would destroy your argument.
Let's see: Just shy of 72 years ago, my grandfather arrived in this country with $32 and unable to speak the language. He lived in a ghetto style apartment with a brother who had come over to America from Europe 18 months earlier. He spent a week learning enough English to get a job in a machine shop for about $1 an hour.
In short, he was just about as low as you can go on the totem pole in America.
40 years later, he died, living in a house he had built and paid for, on 40 acres of land overlooking a river. He had married and had a daughter (my mom). He left a small, but not unsubstantial amount of money behind.
My parents were lower-middle-class, but my dad managed to start his own tool and die business, (he was also the son of pennyless immigrants who came from Germany in 1919) and lived a comfortable, if not extravagant lifestyle.
I was able to go to college, working to pay for most of it, and get a degree in Computer Science, my brother has a degree in Chemistry and Math. We have both made good livings, and live on the high-end of middle class, bordering on upper class.
My parents weren't given anything. They didn't grow up in a mansion. Their parents literally had *NOTHING* on coming to America. Nothing was given to them either. They lived through the Great Depression and World War II. About the only break my parents ever had was that my dad *wasn't* drafted to go to Vietnam.
I've been saving money, I've bought used cars, I've paid off bills, and by the time I retire, I'll have enough money socked away that, were I to choose to do it, I could reasonably provide for my children for the rest of their lives.
I did all of that *WITHOUT THE CHARITY OF OTHERS*. All I had to do was make good choices and work at what was important. No, my parents weren't drug addicts (surprising, being teens in the 60's), but they worked their way up from nothing. No one gave them a house or car or college education. They worked for everything they got. It takes one good decision to break the cycle, but you would rather claim that no one can make that decision, and that the "privileged few" are somehow so enlightened and empowered that they should make decisions for the poor. But you ignore the consequences.
Had my grandfather come to the United States and been told, "Nope, you can't work your way up on your own. Here's your free money, and free house, and free education from your government because you can't do it yourself," do you think he would have ever become more than a mooch off of society?
Although, given his personality, he would probably have spit in the face of someone who tried to do that. And that's the point. If you have a government who can come into a home and tear up a family for a "good" reason, then they can do it for a "bad" reason too. If they can give you health care, then they can take it away from you too. And government builds *nothing* - they produce no products - they only take from the people. Every penny spent by the government was first earned by someone else's work, and then stolen at gun point (because only a government can steal money out of your wallet and then throw *YOU* in jail if you resist) from the person who earned it.
That grandfather knew exactly what a government that hands out health care and registered guns "to cut crime" and who complained about people "earning too much money" was like, because he came from Germany in 1938. His family would lose everything the next year when all their money and land was seized because they were "too rich" and the money and resources were needed by the Third Reich. That's what a government that can give you anything can do -- they can take *everything* away from you.
I donate more money to charities each year than Obama and Al Gore put together (according to their released tax returns -- though, admittedly, that's not hard) because I know "there but for the grace of God go I," but I do it *voluntarily*. The same way you should if you feel pity for those people.
Spoken like someone who's never coded in Assembly. While I almost never touch assembly any more, there's very little fact in your statement. In assembler, everything is in front of you. There's no need to worry about what the libraries are doing, or whether the call to some function is going to cause side effects or something you didn't intend, or whether some compiler quirk is going to make your code take ten times longer to run.
Having written in assembly on 8048, 8051, 8086 and DEC Vax boxes, I can tell you right now that debugging most of that code was a lot easier than chasing down the side effect from some array overwrite on leaked memory from a third-party library that you didn't even know was being linked into your code.
Writing in a compiled language is easier, faster, and usually has a better set of pre-written functionality, but never, ever claim that it's going to be more optimized. Even with pipelining updates from the compilers that help the look-ahead caches on the CPU, there's very few times that hand-coded assembler isn't going to be faster.
Go look at the assembler that some of these compilers produce. It's frightening to see the amount of overhead they cost on even simple assignment operations. I saw one compiler (Microsoft's Visual C++) that took a simple x=10; in C++ and turned it into 15 assembly language operations that, had it been coded by hand, would have been one MOV statement. The compiler turned it into conditional conversions for type, did some byte order and range checking on it (for a hard assign to a constant -- rolls eyes) and then finally did the same MOV AX, 0x0a that you would have coded by hand.
Actually, having gone to the site and read their "Earth Sciences" textbook, I think you're talking about the wrong choir. They were decrying carbon release and promoting environmentalism in their description of the scientific method. I kid you not. Three pages into the book they were already talking about evil farmers raping the land with tillage farming, and causing greenhouse gas releases. In their description of the scientific method.
They have a section on Nuclear power (although I should call it a paragraph) where they stress that, although nuclear power releases no pollutants to the atmosphere, it creates massively dangerous nuclear waste, which will kill everyone and no one knows what to do with any of it. I'd be happy to let that slide if they were talking about Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors, but they never even mention alternatives like Gen 5 molten salt reactors that can even "burn off" existing nuclear wastes into non-dangerous long-life waste (over 200,000 years and no more dangerous than the ores the fuel was mined from), or easily contained short-term waste (under 90 years). We could replace all the coal fired plants in the country with simple, safe MSR reactors for less than $1T.
On the other hand, solar energy is touted as "producing no pollution." Have you seen the crap that comes from making a single solar cell? Even the final wash used to prep the surface for sealing is a greenhouse gas 200 times more potent than CO2, and which, if we ever made a terawatt of solar panels (roughly the requirement to replace US Coal plants) would exceed the current effect of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.. And cost about $4 Trillion
So, you might be worried about the ID crowd, but you should be just as worried about the "pushing a political agenda" crowd that has as much intellectual honesty as the ID bunch.
What's amusing to me, in this day and age of massive civil suits against private corporations, that there are people that think corporations are unaccountable.
Except, if you RTFA, you'd find out that the Conservative parties are the ones who voted against the law, while the liberal, tree-huggers (Green Party) are the ones who voted for it.
Of course, that was after they defined Blasphemy as not having "artistic, social, or Academic Merit."
So, now they can actually claim that anything that goes against the "scientific consensus" view is Blasphemy and fine you E25,000. Takes care of that whole "global warming isn't happening" debate.
In the meantime, putting crucifixes in bottles of urine or dumping elephant dung on the Virgin Mary are both obviously steeped in artistic merit, so that's fine.
All Ireland has done is swap one set of religious zealots for a different set.
Wrong, he sold it when he owned it. The transfer occurred in 1969, it was the payment that was delayed. They bought a product. I'd like to see you walk into a store with a TV you bought 30 years ago and say, "Hey, this thing's a piece of crap, I deserve my money back."
Heck, did you ever pay at a restaurant with a credit card? Can you call the credit card company 24 hours later and say, "I don't have to pay for that, because the restaurant doesn't own it anymore and now it's a pile of sh*t!"
Absolutely wrong. I sell you an apple today. You agree to pay for it a week from now. You come back and say, "Hey, it's been a week, the apple is rotten, I don't want to pay you any more." That's wrong. It wasn't Tolkien's fault that the movie companies waited 35 years to make a movie.
Otherwise every studio company would simply negotiate back end contracts, wait however long until copyright ran out, and then say, "screw you."
Doesn't work, legally, morally, or even logically.
Argue all you want about copyright being too long, but it has nothing to do with this.
Personally, I'm in favor of life of the author, or 15 years from first publish if the author is dead. Then every year after that 15, you can pay $100/year^2 to maintain the copyright. Or $100 the first year, $400 the second, then $900, $1600, $2500, etc. That way, morons like Disney who really want to pay for something, can, but most works fall into the public domain after the author dies. Thus, the original creator gets rewarded -- or supports his kids if he croaks after writing for 15 years -- and then the work goes public. If a work is still earning money after 15 years, they can choose to pay to maintain the copyright and still earn, like Beatles albums.
The contract was signed by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1969. Copyright doesn't even enter into the argument. New Line, Time Warner, and MGM are all bound by the original contract, signed by J.R.R. Tolkien. As the Inheritor of his estate, Chris Tokien has the right, along with the Tolkien Trust, to enforce the terms of the contract through civil action.
I hate to make this sound angry, but it has nothing to do with Chris Tolkien, other than he's the one who inherited the money. J.R.R. Tolkien sold a product for a specific fee, partly up front, and partly to be paid later. The studio is now using fraudulent accounting techniques to avoid paying the "later" part. If J.R.R. Tolkien were still alive, he would be the one suing. Hes not, but the contract is still binding, so his estate is suing.
Copyright doesn't even show up in this equation. Nor does whether his heirs added anything to the mythos (which he has through his clean up and publishing of all the remaining Tolkien works and notes.)
This is just simple, every day, contract law.
Disclaimer: IANAL, and this is my opinions, based on reading TFA.
FedEx ships all priority mail packages for the Post Office. And if we could subsidize our rates by moving 600M pieces of mail a day across town, we could charge $8 too.
Go through some of my other responses, we use the same HP Linux servers, running Red Hat Linux. Our transactions are every event on a package. I could keep going, but I feel like I typed the same message about five times now. Go back and read some of my other messages before you criticize me as biased.
If you had, you know our transactions don't come in evenly throughout the day either, that we get most of them in a 4-6 hour time frame, that as another item delivery company, almost all of our processing is very similar to that of the Post Office.
There's at least three other messages where I went into detailed comparisons. Give me a break.
Slashdot Mirror
I just re-read the original H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" a few months back, and I was surprised at how much of it is applicable to modern society. While the story itself is somewhat dated because technology has passed it by so completely, the human issues in it are just as modern and prevalent today as they were when it was published.
In a way, I think that's what any SciFi/Fantasy literature course should get across -- that the stories are not just about whiz-bang special effects -- a lot of the time they are far more pointed descriptions and explorations of the human condition than are written in any of the "serious" literature.
War of the Worlds, for example, is a very strong commentary/criticism of English Imperialism and Colonialism and the horrendous toll it took on the peoples of Africa. Even the ending (Spoiler: It's microorganisms) is a comment that the myriad diseases of Africa were eventually the only thing that "saved" Africa from the utter dominance of European occupation.
At the time, had Wells written a non-fantasy book about the same subject, he would have been looking at prison time for sedition against the crown, instead, he sold a best-seller about Martians attacking the Earth.
They claim early on in the show that they are doing, "Faster than light travel, but not though hyperspace."
The ship has been traveling for 100,000 years, so you have to use Ancient technology from Atlantis minus 90,000 years. So, that's the equivalent of pushing the human race from space-flight back to before the Clovis Point culture.
So, it's entirely likely that this ship is not the "latest and greatest" intergalactic hyperspace super-cruiser capable of the Kessel run in under 5 parsecs. (Sorry, mixing metaphors.)
The ancients were sending these ships out to other galaxies because it was prohibitive for them to make the journey in ships, that would indicate years, decades, or centuries to do inter-galactic travel. The course they showed on the monitor -- "Billions of light years" -- took 100,000 years, that's a speed roughly 10,000 times the speed of light. That sounds fast, but still represents a 3.4 hour trip from Earth to Proxima Centauri (3.8 light years). Fast enough for interstellar travel, but nothing like what you'd need to hop galaxies.
So, just like we send unmanned probes out to Pluto (New Horizons), the ancients sent an un-manned vessel to other galaxies. Then, if it takes 50 years, who cares? It's not like anyone has to ride it.
The sex scene was obnoxious. Both my kids love Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and I had to sit poised over the "Skip" button when I let them watch Universe.
It was ridiculous, and could have been played just as well with them fully clothed and embracing/kissing without making it into a moment where I had to jump the show.
It was there only for the "titillation" of showing "We're like Battlestar Galactica!" rather than just keeping it a bit more wholesome.
So, in other words, the Ancients were a lot like us.
Consider this. We could build cars, boats, airplanes, etc, with 100+ year lifespans. They'd need a lot of redundant systems, over-engineering, and be massively expensive and power-hungry.
Or, we can assume that we'll still be around in a 100 years, and still able to build newer, and better system with the technology we've discovered in 100 years.
This is actually a recent phenomena, roughly coincident with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, things were built to last, because people didn't want to go through the massive effort of redoing it every few years. Buildings were big, massive things (think castles, pyramids, cathedrals) and made to last centuries. No expense was spared, because you had hundreds of years of living in it before you'd need to worry about doing it again.
Today, even our most advanced structures (skyscrapers, stadiums, bridges) come with lifetimes. We build *exactly* as strong as it needs to be. We build with materials that are exactly as sturdy and long-lived as they need to be, but no longer. What's the point of putting titanium/molybdenum panels that will not corrode in a 100,000 years, on a building that, if it's lucky, will be torn down in 50 years to make room for the newest skyscraper?
To me, it's amazing, given that propensity, that Las Vegas isn't made from paper mache and spit-wads. There's barely a building there over 20 years old now.
With the ancients, you have a race that can, more or less, build anything, with technology that lets them warp space and time to their liking, and you think they're going to waste time engineering a vessel to last 100 millenium? I'd imagine it was a standard, galaxy-limited ship that they built for seeding the Milky Way with stargates, which they then modified for inter-galactic travel, along with a system whereby they could go visit if it ever found anything "really cool". They sent it towards Andromeda to seed that galaxy with gates, and then on to Pegasus, etc, etc. I imagine they retro-engineered and patched the ship up so it could survive quite a long trip, but then they ascended, so there was no need to go check on it any more. Which means that, according to Dr. Rush, the ship is 100,000 years old, and hasn't been maintained in at least 10,000 years.
The only thing on Earth that humans made even close to that age is the great pyramids, and look at how damaged they are.
Overall, I think the ancients did a darn good job given the circumstances.
In fact, I just went back and checked, and the ruling came from one GWB judge and two Clinton Appointees in panel review. So you have a "liberal majority" on the panel that decided this. Now, will you be man enough to retract your statement?
I guess we have GOP judge.
Sorry, Third Circus is 6-6 Republican vs. Democrat nominees. And it has two vacancies being filled by Obama, that will make it 8-6 in favor of left-leaning judges. And that ignores the fact that the last judge appointed by GWB was one of the ones that had to get through the "Gang of 14" compromise that seated a *lot* of left-leaning judges. The court also has a seat that's been empty since 2006 (seat 4).
All we need to do is return one part of the original design of corporations, that of the responsibility of the shareholders. Let me explain.
Until the late 19th century, a shareholder bought shares in the company, perhaps 1%. That meant that, if the corporation were sued, then that shareholder, that partial-owner, was held account for up to 1% of their net worth. They held 1% of the corporation, therefore they risked 1% of their net worth. This made the legal fiction of a one-man corporation meaningless. Since they held all the shares, they still put 100% of their worth at risk.
Today, you can hold 100% of the shares of a corporation, and there is no legal penalty should the corporation go into drug-smuggling or weapons trafficking. Your total "cost" would be the loss of the value of the shares. This leads to people willing to invest in dangerously risky, morally questionable, high-return corporations. There is no incentive for responsibility on the part of the shareholders. In other words, they can reap all the rewards while facing none of the risks.
This is wrong. It has led to the "just make this quarter good and damn the future" mentality of our corporations. Restore that original risk/reward balance, and I can assure you that the shareholder meetings will not be simple rubber-stamps of the board.
This was tried, it doesn't work. Please learn the history of the Great Depression. Hoover forced the companies to do exactly this in 1930. It ended up making everything worse. Raising the minimum wage simply means that the company can afford to hire less people. That means more unemployed, more pain, less consumption and a deepening of the problem.
The very, very best solution is for the government to do... nothing. Not a damn thing. Get out of the way. Let the market adjust. When this is done, it's painful, but it's quick. It's over. Like ripping off a band-aid.
When the government steps in and takes steps like you advocate, it's like slowly tugging it off. Drawing out the pain of each pulled hair and stretched skin. It's more painful for a longer period of time. There are already economists looking at what Obama and Bush did and saying it will take 20 years to recover. In the meantime, in countries where the government stood back and did nothing (mostly due to gridlock over what they *should* do), there's a lot of evidence that they are already well on the path to recovery. Canada is among those countries. They fought over what to do for so long, that the market fixed itself.
Know what happens when times get tough? People save more. They put money away in the banks for safe keeping. That money re-funds the bank, allowing it to make more loans, more loans stimulate the economy, allowing businesses to get moving again, and people to buy things again.
The absolute last thing we need right now is to put a drain on the banks by forcing them to reserve more funds... oh wait, TARP already did that, and banks aren't making loans. Gosh. Go figure.
If you think more government is the answer to the economy, then you don't understand what led to this problem in the first place. Read "Rethinking the Great Depression" to learn what *really* caused the depression (hint, it has to do with America being the arsenal to the world back in WW I, and the disastrous way they restored the gold standard after the war). Learn that Hoover did everything you suggested in your message, and just extended the depression, and then read why almost every historian and economist today recognizes that the Keynsian philosophy embraced by FDR not only made the Great Depression longer, it gave us the Depression within the Depression.
Learn your history, for deity's sake, or we are all doomed to repeat it. It's 1929 right now, and you don't even know it, and you're cheering the same philosophies that gave us Hoovervilles and the Dust Bowl.
And yeah, they could move to Oklahoma or India, but how many of the really valuable employees are going to want to live in a backwards locality?
Ah, the quiet contempt and class prejudice that liberals have for the small communities that used to be called "The Heart and Soul of America" shines through. There's a reason it's called the "Heartland" of America. Strange that the founder of what is now the Democrat party once said, "Cities are the festering scabs on the face of America. So long as it is the honest, hard-working farmer -- close to the earth -- who drives this nation, America shall continue to prosper and strive towards greatness."
"No man who has never planted a tomato, watched it grow, and harvested its fruit, should be allowed to vote." -- Thomas Jefferson
Actually, as a bone-deep conservative, my philosophy is, "Follow the law, unless you find it to be a morally unacceptable one. If that's the case, break the law. But in any situation, whether legal or illegal, be prepared to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions." The main problem I have with the liberal philosophy (as used in the United States) is that they lose the last sentence. They want to be able to cause damage to themselves or others without consequence, and have a nanny-state pick up the pieces. It's the philosophy of childhood -- stretch the rules to the breaking point, and then mommy and daddy will come clean up afterward. The Democrat party has simply replaced mommy and daddy with an overarching federal government instead.
The real problem with our current government (and by "current" I mean at least the last 30+ years so no Obama/Bush snarking, please) is that they think they're actually important people. Somehow our nation has become enamored of the idea that something a Senator says is in any way more important or more informed than something the guy who slops the pigs on a farm says. At least the pig farmer is doing an honest day's work.
Do you really believe that corporations like Microsoft have a big giant vault in their main office with stacks of gold coins in it so they can swim around like Scrooge McDuck in his Money Bin?
Companies do not like to cut employees when the economy slumps just so they can keep more shiny gold in their swim trunks. They cut employees, because employment costs money (usually the largest single expense for any company is payroll).
When a company like Microsoft fires an employee, they pay penalties in the loss of manpower, and the loss of experience and knowledge. I was at a company that fired three employees during a downturn and suddenly realized there was an entire critical system that no one knew anything about. Heck, we had a layoff here in April that took both the project lead and project manager off of a major project and set us back at least 2 months on a release date and cost the remaining employees lots of late nights and weekends to make up the manpower lost.
On average, paying an employee $5 costs the employer at least $7, all in costs you don't see as an employee. I know this because my brother ran a company, and hired me W-2 for one day to consult on a project, he paid me $500. It cost him $732 to do that after covering unemployment insurance, workman's comp, matching FICA and Medicare, and a half dozen other little fees. After taxes, I took home about $349. So, to hire me for $349 of real, take-home pay, the government and it's affiliates took home $383. Since then, the state he hired me in (Wisconsin) has increased taxes.
When the economy turns down, companies lose money. They have to make hard decisions. Microsoft had the debacle of Vista to pay for -- I've heard reports as high as 50,000 coders working for 2 years on Vista. Assuming a very, very low estimate of $50,000 per coder, that works out to a $2,500,000,000 a year, or $5 BILLION in development costs. I've heard that Vista sales are so dismal they have yet to make up even half their development costs.
But keep living in your "Scrooge McDuck" economic world. Much easier than facing the world the way it really is.
Uh, Darwin spent so much of the early part of that voyage seasick, that the rest of the crew finally got tired of it and put him ashore at the Galapagos Islands, and then came back to get him on the return trip. Darwin was left on the island with nothing to do, and being a keen pigeon breeder, noticed the incredibly different and diverse group of pigeons on the islands, like nothing he'd ever seen before, which led him to study the rest of the animals. It was, in fact, one of Darwin's friends who was the naturalist, and who he'd met through the bizarrely English fascination with breeding pigeons, that led to his interest in animals. I believe he humbly says at the start of "Origin of Species" that it should be his friend writing the book, since he's really just a total amateur at natural science and it was only with his friend's help that he wrote the book.
Maybe instead of listening to your jingoistic anti-American indoctrinators, you should read the Federalist papers, and the Anti-federalist, and the notes from the constitutional convention, and the history of the debate on the Declaration of Independence. I have read all these, and it is *very* clear what the founders thought of large, centralized, monolithic governments, because they were about to/had just shed blood, sweat, and treasure getting rid of one.
Thomas Jefferson: That government which governs best, governs least. (Aside: Yes, there's some argument if it was Jefferson or Paine who said this, but as both had a lot to do with the founding of the country, the point is identical.)
But get off your high horse and admit that your success is likely equal parts hard work and luck with a little state-sponsored encouragement thrown in.
Absolutely not. What "luck" I've had has been crappy. My father died of cancer before his 60th birthday. I've worked at jobs where I've had literally tens of thousands of dollars stolen from me. I've had an insurance company refuse to pay a penny for my son's birth (an instant $10K out of pocket expense.) I've had medical bills that totaled in excess of $50,000 and worked to pay them off. I've had medical conditions of my own, and my wife has had more than her fair share as well, including a stroke and brain tumor during her second pregnancy. She had a miscarriage of what would have been my third child.
I've been a victim of a pissed off police officer at the end of his shift after a bad day who decided to light me up for $400 in fines on a bogus charge just because I happened to drive past him. My wife had her car destroyed by an illegal immigrant driving without a license and without insurance.
Everything in my life I've worked for -- with one exception -- I LIVE IN AMERICA. A country founded by a brilliant group of men 233 years ago. Men who said, "We need a government, but that government's job should be to STAY OUT OF YOUR WAY as much as possible." To let you excel, to let you, the individual accomplish as much as you are willing to achieve. And with the right to succeed comes the even more important right to fail.
I've failed in my life, or been handed a bum deal too many times to count. But I always knew that, no matter what, I would have the right to try again and not be told, "Oh gosh, you lost, game over, here's your consolation prize."
Until I'm dead, I can always try again. That's why it says, "Life, Liberty, and the PURSUIT of Happiness". Any other option than those three is Tyranny. It doesn't say you *get* happiness, it says you have the right to *pursue* it. The government is there only to assure you have the right to *pursue* it. If you say, "too bad, you're a loser at life's game," then you've taken away that right.
As for roads? I pay taxes for them. As for Sewage? I pay a monthly utility bill for that. As for Power? I pay that bill every month. As for education, taxes again - and privately earned money for college. Fire and Police - Taxes. Security of an Army protecting my shores? More taxes than I ever paid in mortgage. And for all of those (except for the privately run utilities, and except for education, which is a system I think is utterly corrupt and failing in this country -- and my wife's a teacher, so I don't say that lightly or without knowledge) I'm happy to pay for them *BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE JOB OF GOVERNMENT*.
Thing is, it's *NOT* the job of the Federal Government to make sure that Johnny Dopehead has clean needles for his heroin, paid for with my money, or that Suzy Sleepsaround gets her abortions, child care, and syphillis shots paid for with my money. Where exactly in "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" does supporting crack heads and sluts come into the picture? When I went through bad times I PAID FOR IT. I didn't expect anyone to come to my rescue. The time I went to the welfare office was only because my wife spent a week badgering me into it. I never wanted to go. And I never took a penny of their money either. The only check I ever got from them was returned to them before it was ever cashed. It's called personal responsibility. You take it for yourself. If you don't, you take the consequences, and hope that someone is charitable enough to help you.
But you don't go to the Federal Government and ask them to fix your bad decisions. That's not CHARITY. It's TYRANNY. Plain and simple. The sooner you get that through your head, the sooner you're going to understand what made this country great in the first place.
Clearly, a poor black child, raised in a broken home, dragged from place to place by his single mother, eventually tossed back to a grandparent, living in poverty, and exposed to the horrible public school system, turning to drug use in his teen years -- he has no chance to amount to anything. He should be written off as a lost cause; incapable of improving his situation.
He will end his life poor, divorced, and addicted to drugs.
Or he's the President. But that would destroy your argument.
Let's see: Just shy of 72 years ago, my grandfather arrived in this country with $32 and unable to speak the language. He lived in a ghetto style apartment with a brother who had come over to America from Europe 18 months earlier. He spent a week learning enough English to get a job in a machine shop for about $1 an hour.
In short, he was just about as low as you can go on the totem pole in America.
40 years later, he died, living in a house he had built and paid for, on 40 acres of land overlooking a river. He had married and had a daughter (my mom). He left a small, but not unsubstantial amount of money behind.
My parents were lower-middle-class, but my dad managed to start his own tool and die business, (he was also the son of pennyless immigrants who came from Germany in 1919) and lived a comfortable, if not extravagant lifestyle.
I was able to go to college, working to pay for most of it, and get a degree in Computer Science, my brother has a degree in Chemistry and Math. We have both made good livings, and live on the high-end of middle class, bordering on upper class.
My parents weren't given anything. They didn't grow up in a mansion. Their parents literally had *NOTHING* on coming to America. Nothing was given to them either. They lived through the Great Depression and World War II. About the only break my parents ever had was that my dad *wasn't* drafted to go to Vietnam.
I've been saving money, I've bought used cars, I've paid off bills, and by the time I retire, I'll have enough money socked away that, were I to choose to do it, I could reasonably provide for my children for the rest of their lives.
I did all of that *WITHOUT THE CHARITY OF OTHERS*. All I had to do was make good choices and work at what was important. No, my parents weren't drug addicts (surprising, being teens in the 60's), but they worked their way up from nothing. No one gave them a house or car or college education. They worked for everything they got. It takes one good decision to break the cycle, but you would rather claim that no one can make that decision, and that the "privileged few" are somehow so enlightened and empowered that they should make decisions for the poor. But you ignore the consequences.
Had my grandfather come to the United States and been told, "Nope, you can't work your way up on your own. Here's your free money, and free house, and free education from your government because you can't do it yourself," do you think he would have ever become more than a mooch off of society?
Although, given his personality, he would probably have spit in the face of someone who tried to do that. And that's the point. If you have a government who can come into a home and tear up a family for a "good" reason, then they can do it for a "bad" reason too. If they can give you health care, then they can take it away from you too. And government builds *nothing* - they produce no products - they only take from the people. Every penny spent by the government was first earned by someone else's work, and then stolen at gun point (because only a government can steal money out of your wallet and then throw *YOU* in jail if you resist) from the person who earned it.
That grandfather knew exactly what a government that hands out health care and registered guns "to cut crime" and who complained about people "earning too much money" was like, because he came from Germany in 1938. His family would lose everything the next year when all their money and land was seized because they were "too rich" and the money and resources were needed by the Third Reich. That's what a government that can give you anything can do -- they can take *everything* away from you.
I donate more money to charities each year than Obama and Al Gore put together (according to their released tax returns -- though, admittedly, that's not hard) because I know "there but for the grace of God go I," but I do it *voluntarily*. The same way you should if you feel pity for those people.
Spoken like someone who's never coded in Assembly. While I almost never touch assembly any more, there's very little fact in your statement. In assembler, everything is in front of you. There's no need to worry about what the libraries are doing, or whether the call to some function is going to cause side effects or something you didn't intend, or whether some compiler quirk is going to make your code take ten times longer to run.
Having written in assembly on 8048, 8051, 8086 and DEC Vax boxes, I can tell you right now that debugging most of that code was a lot easier than chasing down the side effect from some array overwrite on leaked memory from a third-party library that you didn't even know was being linked into your code.
Writing in a compiled language is easier, faster, and usually has a better set of pre-written functionality, but never, ever claim that it's going to be more optimized. Even with pipelining updates from the compilers that help the look-ahead caches on the CPU, there's very few times that hand-coded assembler isn't going to be faster.
Go look at the assembler that some of these compilers produce. It's frightening to see the amount of overhead they cost on even simple assignment operations. I saw one compiler (Microsoft's Visual C++) that took a simple x=10; in C++ and turned it into 15 assembly language operations that, had it been coded by hand, would have been one MOV statement. The compiler turned it into conditional conversions for type, did some byte order and range checking on it (for a hard assign to a constant -- rolls eyes) and then finally did the same MOV AX, 0x0a that you would have coded by hand.
Actually, having gone to the site and read their "Earth Sciences" textbook, I think you're talking about the wrong choir. They were decrying carbon release and promoting environmentalism in their description of the scientific method. I kid you not. Three pages into the book they were already talking about evil farmers raping the land with tillage farming, and causing greenhouse gas releases. In their description of the scientific method.
They have a section on Nuclear power (although I should call it a paragraph) where they stress that, although nuclear power releases no pollutants to the atmosphere, it creates massively dangerous nuclear waste, which will kill everyone and no one knows what to do with any of it. I'd be happy to let that slide if they were talking about Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors, but they never even mention alternatives like Gen 5 molten salt reactors that can even "burn off" existing nuclear wastes into non-dangerous long-life waste (over 200,000 years and no more dangerous than the ores the fuel was mined from), or easily contained short-term waste (under 90 years). We could replace all the coal fired plants in the country with simple, safe MSR reactors for less than $1T.
On the other hand, solar energy is touted as "producing no pollution." Have you seen the crap that comes from making a single solar cell? Even the final wash used to prep the surface for sealing is a greenhouse gas 200 times more potent than CO2, and which, if we ever made a terawatt of solar panels (roughly the requirement to replace US Coal plants) would exceed the current effect of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.. And cost about $4 Trillion
So, you might be worried about the ID crowd, but you should be just as worried about the "pushing a political agenda" crowd that has as much intellectual honesty as the ID bunch.
What's amusing to me, in this day and age of massive civil suits against private corporations, that there are people that think corporations are unaccountable.
Except, if you RTFA, you'd find out that the Conservative parties are the ones who voted against the law, while the liberal, tree-huggers (Green Party) are the ones who voted for it.
Of course, that was after they defined Blasphemy as not having "artistic, social, or Academic Merit."
So, now they can actually claim that anything that goes against the "scientific consensus" view is Blasphemy and fine you E25,000. Takes care of that whole "global warming isn't happening" debate.
In the meantime, putting crucifixes in bottles of urine or dumping elephant dung on the Virgin Mary are both obviously steeped in artistic merit, so that's fine.
All Ireland has done is swap one set of religious zealots for a different set.
Wrong, he sold it when he owned it. The transfer occurred in 1969, it was the payment that was delayed. They bought a product. I'd like to see you walk into a store with a TV you bought 30 years ago and say, "Hey, this thing's a piece of crap, I deserve my money back."
Heck, did you ever pay at a restaurant with a credit card? Can you call the credit card company 24 hours later and say, "I don't have to pay for that, because the restaurant doesn't own it anymore and now it's a pile of sh*t!"
Absolutely wrong. I sell you an apple today. You agree to pay for it a week from now. You come back and say, "Hey, it's been a week, the apple is rotten, I don't want to pay you any more." That's wrong. It wasn't Tolkien's fault that the movie companies waited 35 years to make a movie.
Otherwise every studio company would simply negotiate back end contracts, wait however long until copyright ran out, and then say, "screw you."
Doesn't work, legally, morally, or even logically.
Argue all you want about copyright being too long, but it has nothing to do with this.
Personally, I'm in favor of life of the author, or 15 years from first publish if the author is dead. Then every year after that 15, you can pay $100/year^2 to maintain the copyright. Or $100 the first year, $400 the second, then $900, $1600, $2500, etc. That way, morons like Disney who really want to pay for something, can, but most works fall into the public domain after the author dies. Thus, the original creator gets rewarded -- or supports his kids if he croaks after writing for 15 years -- and then the work goes public. If a work is still earning money after 15 years, they can choose to pay to maintain the copyright and still earn, like Beatles albums.
The contract was signed by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1969. Copyright doesn't even enter into the argument. New Line, Time Warner, and MGM are all bound by the original contract, signed by J.R.R. Tolkien. As the Inheritor of his estate, Chris Tokien has the right, along with the Tolkien Trust, to enforce the terms of the contract through civil action.
I hate to make this sound angry, but it has nothing to do with Chris Tolkien, other than he's the one who inherited the money. J.R.R. Tolkien sold a product for a specific fee, partly up front, and partly to be paid later. The studio is now using fraudulent accounting techniques to avoid paying the "later" part. If J.R.R. Tolkien were still alive, he would be the one suing. Hes not, but the contract is still binding, so his estate is suing.
Copyright doesn't even show up in this equation. Nor does whether his heirs added anything to the mythos (which he has through his clean up and publishing of all the remaining Tolkien works and notes.)
This is just simple, every day, contract law.
Disclaimer: IANAL, and this is my opinions, based on reading TFA.
FedEx ships all priority mail packages for the Post Office. And if we could subsidize our rates by moving 600M pieces of mail a day across town, we could charge $8 too.
Go through some of my other responses, we use the same HP Linux servers, running Red Hat Linux. Our transactions are every event on a package. I could keep going, but I feel like I typed the same message about five times now. Go back and read some of my other messages before you criticize me as biased.
If you had, you know our transactions don't come in evenly throughout the day either, that we get most of them in a 4-6 hour time frame, that as another item delivery company, almost all of our processing is very similar to that of the Post Office.
There's at least three other messages where I went into detailed comparisons. Give me a break.