Damn! I googled Tori Amos Assholes Are Free Today thinking it was a joke name. But here are the lyrics!
So beautifully written. It's poetry.
''Assholes are cheap today (assholes are cheap today). Cheaper than yesterday (cheaper than yesterday). Small ones are a half a crown (small ones are a half a crown). Sitting up or lying down (sitting up or lying down).''
With talent like that I can't understand why the music industry is in a slump.
The universal myth of a great flood refers to the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. Huge glaciers that covered half the northern hemisphere all melted relatively swiftly. Maybe in as little as a few decades. Meltwater made sea levels rise 100 meters to create the coastlines we see today. All of the early human cities, were built close to water, rivers or seashore. So every early human city was flooded and buried under silt. All the farmland gone too. The survivors had to start over from scratch. Hence the universality of the story of the great flood. This may also account for the legends of great cities lost under the flood.
Think what would happen to human civilization today if sea levels quickly rose 100 meters. Almost all the cities would be wiped out. Many who survived the flood would die from starvation or disease. Great bodies of knowledge would be lost.
This seems to apply to newspapers as much as to TV news. And the decline of both.
''And in the networks' endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask what is the end value--to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result--to inform or to confuse? How does the ongoing exploration for more action, more excitement, more drama, serve our national search for internal peace and stability?
Gresham's law seems to be operating in the network news. Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational.
What has this passionate pursuit of ''controversy'' done to the politics of progress through logical compromise, essential to the functioning of a democratic society?
The members of Congress who follow their principles and philosophy quietly in a spirit of compromise are unknown to many Americans--while the loudest and most extreme dissenters on every issue are known to every man in the street.
How many marches and demonstrations would we have if the marchers did not know that the ever-faithful TV cameras would be there to record their antics for the next news show?
In this search for excitement and controversy, has more than equal time gone to that minority of Americans who specialize in attacking the United States, its institutions and its citizens? ''
Vice President Spiro Agnew Des Moines, Iowa, November 13, 1969
''i find it funny how alot of "pro-lifers" are for the death penalty here in the US''
That's simple. We think killing babies is always wrong. And killing violent criminals is sometimes okay.
This is the opposite of the Liberal 'Pro-Choice' mob who insist that killing violent criminals is always wrong and killing babies is everyone's rightful freedom of choice.
If we agree that the state should never kill then that will put an end to the death penalty and it will also close every abortion clinic. The Liberals won't stand for that.
Large parts of the D.C. city government are both corrupt and incompetent. Think of it as New Orleans on the Potomac. Remember this is a population which saw videotape of Mayor Marion Barry smoking a crack pipe in a hotel room with his mistress and then re-elected him when he got out of jail.
In example, the officers and members of the Teacher's Union did not notice that five million dollars was missing. They didn't figure out something was wrong until union leaders were coming in to work wearing mink coats. Stuff like this happens all the time in D.C.
Teachers' Union Trial Nears End URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/a rticle/2005/08/18/AR2005081801769.html
To understand why some Muslims kill their neighbors you have only to read the Koran. You don't need to blame politicians and secret conspiracies. Find the Koran online and search for the words 'unbeliever' and 'punish' and 'kill'. Read the Koran's instructions on how faithful Muslims should treat non-Mulsims. In a few examples out of many:
Koran - Time [76.4] Surely We have prepared for the unbelievers chains and shackles and a burning fire.
Koran - The Immunity [9.5] So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush
Koran - The Victory [48.6] And (that) He may punish the hypocritical men and the hypocritical women, and the polytheistic men and the polytheistic women, the entertainers of evil thoughts about Allah. On them is the evil turn, and Allah is wroth with them and has cursed them and prepared hell for them, and evil is the resort.
Fundamentalist Mullahs and Imams use this dogma to teach the gullible that jihad, killing infidels, is the only sure way into Paradise.
We have a secretary who kept fucking up the inventory. She was too busy yapping with her friends to pay attention to what she was typing. All she did was type too fast and put the date value in the quantity field.
I want 20041231 units of printer cartridges
Had to get a programmer to limit the quantity field so nobody ever ordered more than 100 of anything.
Notice the irony. Writers, whose only skill is the written word, who have strongly criticized the poverty of TV/movies/video, are being presented by CNN in a low quality video format.
I'd prefer to read a transcript of the interview than:
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
All my life there have been 'experts' predicting doom and gloom. They've warned us of urgent threats of catastrophes coming soon. They've urged the frightened audience to make huge changes to society to prevent the next catastrophe. Some of the forecasts I remember:
- Communists will enslave everyone on Earth.
- pesticides will kill all the animals in the world.
- fluoridated water will turn us all into brain washed zombies.
- air pollution will make us all choke to death on sulphur and nitrogen oxides.
- acid rain will kill all lakes and rivers.
- the human population was growing much faster than crop production so in ten years famines would kill two billion people
- the human population is growing uncontrolled, increasing exponentially. We'll have 12 Billion people on earth by 2020 AD and we'll be reduced to feeding on krill, algae and Soylent Green.
But look at what really happened. Communism is dying of its own incompetence. Air polution is much, much better, thanks in part to Nixon creating the EPA. Crop production grew faster while population growth suddenly slowed down, mostly for social reasons.
Today many of you are in a panic about Global Warming.
Sorry guys. But I'm burned out listening to the endless cries about how bad everything will be unless we give lots of power to Prophets of Doom.
Remember the ''Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!''' In the last fifty years I've heard 'expert's cry 'Wolf!' too many times. I don't believe them anymore. It's just a con. Some group is trying to panic the herd so they can gain wealth or power during the stampede.
I looked at the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight last week and I'm researching them now. A few observations.
One of the ways the hybrid cars get very high gas milage is by modifying the driver's behavior. That's why they put a big LCD screen right in front of you with the current MPG rating in big numbers. When you accelerate fast and brake fast, like in normal traffic, you get lower MPG and it's displayed as driver feedback. When you modify your behavior to maximise MPG, and the MPG feedback displayed right in front of you, you have to accelerate nice and slow and gradually and brake slowly. To maximise MPG you have to drive like Grandma!
While you're calculating the cost of your MPG don't forget to add in the cost of replacing the battery pack. I haven't found a definitive source. But some sources say it may be 'several thousand dollars' to replace the whole battery pack.
It's warrantied for 80,000 miles or 100,000 miles. Do you really believe the battery pack will be reliable in five to ten years from today? Do you get the full, warrantied lifespan on the battery in your laptop ?
Do you think the batteries and other components in a Prius or Insight will actually still be running down the road, fully operational, in 20 years? I feel doubts.
Right now I'm driving a 19 year old Saab with 230,000 miles on it and it still averages 24 MPG combined and that's driving 70 mph with freeway traffic. I could get 32 MPG if I drove 50 mph but the SUVs and trucks would force me off the road.
Mature technology is often reliable than a new tech.
A Chi-Com bureaucrat promoting U.N control of the Internet is like . ..
Woody Allen taking Girl Scouts camping for the weekend . . .
Michael Jackson babysitting your kids . . .
the rats guarding the hens.
Imagine having what you can do and say on the Internet being decided by the leaders of France, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, etc.
There was a time, only a generation ago, when Dean Clark would have rejected you if you were a homosexual or a draft dodger or had received a less than Honorable discharge from the military or if you'd had an abortion or if you were convicted of sodomy. But today all those things are considered to be NOT immoral and not unethical by about half of Americans.
Dean Clark was stupid enough to think ''Obscurity is Security''. He got busted being careless and now he's going to punish a hundred people just to protect his ego.
So if you're going to throw away 119 accepted students (for showing bad judgement) then you should also throw out Dean Clark for showing bad judgement.
Typing in a URL to peek at a hidden file on a public server does not seem like a crime to me.
If you don't want people to see it then don't put it on a fucking public server.
Here's one plot I'd like to see. Remember in TOS the Klingons looked like humans with a little makeup. Then in TNG the Klingons looked like professional wrestlers with big hair behind the crab shell on their forehead. They even had a time travel episode where the TNG crew were on the space station with Kirk and the tribbles and they didn't recognize the Klingons. Riker asked Worf ''What happened?'' and Worf said ''We don't speak of it.''
Write a story arc for Enterprise where the Klingons try to genetically engineer their whole race to be super warriors. Build part of the plot on a racial war between almost human appearing Klingons versus the professional wrestler, butt ugly Klingons. The big ugly Klingons do a Rwanda style genocide and wipe out the human appearing Klingons and rewrite their whole history to make it appear they were the original Klingons.
I have really fond memories of watching the original Star Trek way back in 1967-1968. I wanted to enjoy Enterprise. I really hoped they'd explore all the loose threads such as whatever caused the creation of the Prime Directive and First Contact with different alien cultures.
But I just got sick and tired of the stupid time travel stories. They travel back to the 1970's to play 'Starsky & Hutch' with aliens! He travels back to WWII to fight Nazi aliens! That was sooo disappointing.
They had a whole galaxy to explore and instead they wanted to remake the old Time Tunnel series! So I turned off the tv.
I expect Berman's big idea for a movie is just another time travel episode.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn! I googled Tori Amos Assholes Are Free Today thinking it was a joke name. But here are the lyrics!
So beautifully written. It's poetry.
''Assholes are cheap today (assholes are cheap today).
Cheaper than yesterday (cheaper than yesterday).
Small ones are a half a crown (small ones are a half a crown).
Sitting up or lying down (sitting up or lying down).''
With talent like that I can't understand why the music industry is in a slump.
Is this what Al Gore had in mind when he said ''There is no controlling legal authority''!
The universal myth of a great flood refers to the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. Huge glaciers that covered half the northern hemisphere all melted relatively swiftly. Maybe in as little as a few decades. Meltwater made sea levels rise 100 meters to create the coastlines we see today. All of the early human cities, were built close to water, rivers or seashore. So every early human city was flooded and buried under silt. All the farmland gone too. The survivors had to start over from scratch. Hence the universality of the story of the great flood. This may also account for the legends of great cities lost under the flood.
Think what would happen to human civilization today if sea levels quickly rose 100 meters. Almost all the cities would be wiped out. Many who survived the flood would die from starvation or disease. Great bodies of knowledge would be lost.
This seems to apply to newspapers as much as to TV news. And the decline of both.
''And in the networks' endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask what is the end value--to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result--to inform or to confuse? How does the ongoing exploration for more action, more excitement, more drama, serve our national search for internal peace and stability?
Gresham's law seems to be operating in the network news. Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational.
What has this passionate pursuit of ''controversy'' done to the politics of progress through logical compromise, essential to the functioning of a democratic society?
The members of Congress who follow their principles and philosophy quietly in a spirit of compromise are unknown to many Americans--while the loudest and most extreme dissenters on every issue are known to every man in the street.
How many marches and demonstrations would we have if the marchers did not know that the ever-faithful TV cameras would be there to record their antics for the next news show?
In this search for excitement and controversy, has more than equal time gone to that minority of Americans who specialize in attacking the United States, its institutions and its citizens? ''
Vice President Spiro Agnew
Des Moines, Iowa, November 13, 1969
They've forgotten some cheese:
Planet of the Apes, the series
Time Tunnel
Land of the Giants
ALF
''i find it funny how alot of "pro-lifers" are for the death penalty here in the US''
That's simple. We think killing babies is always wrong. And killing violent criminals is sometimes okay.
This is the opposite of the Liberal 'Pro-Choice' mob who insist that killing violent criminals is always wrong and killing babies is everyone's rightful freedom of choice.
If we agree that the state should never kill then that will put an end to the death penalty and it will also close every abortion clinic. The Liberals won't stand for that.
Large parts of the D.C. city government are both corrupt and incompetent. Think of it as New Orleans on the Potomac. Remember this is a population which saw videotape of Mayor Marion Barry smoking a crack pipe in a hotel room with his mistress and then re-elected him when he got out of jail.
a rticle/2005/08/18/AR2005081801769.html
c le/2005/08/18/AR2005081801769.html
In example, the officers and members of the Teacher's Union did not notice that five million dollars was missing. They didn't figure out something was wrong until union leaders were coming in to work wearing mink coats. Stuff like this happens all the time in D.C.
Teachers' Union Trial Nears End
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
''It's dead, Jim!''
because it's hiding deep in the darkness
I thought Celine Dion is the Queen of Canada!
Or maybe it's William Shatner.
No. Wait. He's the Drama Queen of Canada.
Homer Simpson.
To understand why some Muslims kill their neighbors you have only to read the Koran. You don't need to blame politicians and secret conspiracies. Find the Koran online and search for the words 'unbeliever' and 'punish' and 'kill'. Read the Koran's instructions on how faithful Muslims should treat non-Mulsims. In a few examples out of many:
Koran - Time [76.4] Surely We have prepared for the unbelievers chains and shackles and a burning fire.
Koran - The Immunity [9.5] So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush
Koran - The Victory [48.6] And (that) He may punish the hypocritical men and the hypocritical women, and the polytheistic men and the polytheistic women, the entertainers of evil thoughts about Allah. On them is the evil turn, and Allah is wroth with them and has cursed them and prepared hell for them, and evil is the resort.
Fundamentalist Mullahs and Imams use this dogma to teach the gullible that jihad, killing infidels, is the only sure way into Paradise.
We have a secretary who kept fucking up the inventory. She was too busy yapping with her friends to pay attention to what she was typing. All she did was type too fast and put the date value in the quantity field.
I want 20041231 units of printer cartridges
Had to get a programmer to limit the quantity field so nobody ever ordered more than 100 of anything.
Notice the irony. Writers, whose only skill is the written word, who have strongly criticized the poverty of TV/movies/video, are being presented by CNN in a low quality video format.
I'd prefer to read a transcript of the interview than:
- wait for a 40 meg download to
- watch low resolution video
- with low resolution audio of talking heads.
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
All my life there have been 'experts' predicting doom and gloom. They've warned us of urgent threats of catastrophes coming soon. They've urged the frightened audience to make huge changes to society to prevent the next catastrophe. Some of the forecasts I remember:
- Communists will enslave everyone on Earth.
- pesticides will kill all the animals in the world.
- fluoridated water will turn us all into brain washed zombies.
- air pollution will make us all choke to death on sulphur and nitrogen oxides.
- acid rain will kill all lakes and rivers.
- the human population was growing much faster than crop production so in ten years famines would kill two billion people
- the human population is growing uncontrolled, increasing exponentially. We'll have 12 Billion people on earth by 2020 AD and we'll be reduced to feeding on krill, algae and Soylent Green.
But look at what really happened. Communism is dying of its own incompetence. Air polution is much, much better, thanks in part to Nixon creating the EPA. Crop production grew faster while population growth suddenly slowed down, mostly for social reasons.
Today many of you are in a panic about Global Warming.
Sorry guys. But I'm burned out listening to the endless cries about how bad everything will be unless we give lots of power to Prophets of Doom.
Remember the ''Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!''' In the last fifty years I've heard 'expert's cry 'Wolf!' too many times. I don't believe them anymore. It's just a con. Some group is trying to panic the herd so they can gain wealth or power during the stampede.
Find out who paid for the poll! Then you'll know which party's agenda is behind the slant.
Wasn't Senator Clinton recently asking questions about censoring bloggers?
I looked at the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight last week and I'm researching them now. A few observations.
One of the ways the hybrid cars get very high gas milage is by modifying the driver's behavior. That's why they put a big LCD screen right in front of you with the current MPG rating in big numbers. When you accelerate fast and brake fast, like in normal traffic, you get lower MPG and it's displayed as driver feedback. When you modify your behavior to maximise MPG, and the MPG feedback displayed right in front of you, you have to accelerate nice and slow and gradually and brake slowly. To maximise MPG you have to drive like Grandma!
While you're calculating the cost of your MPG don't forget to add in the cost of replacing the battery pack. I haven't found a definitive source. But some sources say it may be 'several thousand dollars' to replace the whole battery pack.
It's warrantied for 80,000 miles or 100,000 miles. Do you really believe the battery pack will be reliable in five to ten years from today? Do you get the full, warrantied lifespan on the battery in your laptop ?
Do you think the batteries and other components in a Prius or Insight will actually still be running down the road, fully operational, in 20 years? I feel doubts.
Right now I'm driving a 19 year old Saab with 230,000 miles on it and it still averages 24 MPG combined and that's driving 70 mph with freeway traffic. I could get 32 MPG if I drove 50 mph but the SUVs and trucks would force me off the road.
Mature technology is often reliable than a new tech.
Senator Ted Kennedy has killed more women than me and my video games.
A Chi-Com bureaucrat promoting U.N control of the Internet is like . . .
Woody Allen taking Girl Scouts camping for the weekend . . .
Michael Jackson babysitting your kids . . .
the rats guarding the hens.
Imagine having what you can do and say on the Internet being decided by the leaders of France, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, etc.
In 2006 Lucas will release episodes 4 to 6 in Smell-o-vision.
You can smell the oily robots.
You can smell Luke's sweaty shirt.
You can smell the ozone as light sabers split the air.
You can smell it when Lord Vader's battle cruiser dumps the garbage! (ignore that it was in a vacuum)
And best of all! You can smell Princess Leia's hot, sweaty, brass bikini!
There was a time, only a generation ago, when Dean Clark would have rejected you if you were a homosexual or a draft dodger or had received a less than Honorable discharge from the military or if you'd had an abortion or if you were convicted of sodomy. But today all those things are considered to be NOT immoral and not unethical by about half of Americans.
Dean Clark was stupid enough to think ''Obscurity is Security''. He got busted being careless and now he's going to punish a hundred people just to protect his ego.
So if you're going to throw away 119 accepted students (for showing bad judgement) then you should also throw out Dean Clark for showing bad judgement.
Typing in a URL to peek at a hidden file on a public server does not seem like a crime to me.
If you don't want people to see it then don't put it on a fucking public server.
It's dead, Jim!
''As the Separatist Droid Army attempts to flee the besieged capital with their turgid hostage''
Turgid hostage!
Did Senator Palpatine get a woody while being held down ?
Turgid:
1. Excessively ornate or complex in style or language; grandiloquent: turgid prose.
2. Swollen or distended, as from a fluid; bloated: a turgid bladder; turgid veins.
On the other hand you can say that all the Lucas movies are turgid.
Here's one plot I'd like to see. Remember in TOS the Klingons looked like humans with a little makeup. Then in TNG the Klingons looked like professional wrestlers with big hair behind the crab shell on their forehead. They even had a time travel episode where the TNG crew were on the space station with Kirk and the tribbles and they didn't recognize the Klingons. Riker asked Worf ''What happened?'' and Worf said ''We don't speak of it.''
Write a story arc for Enterprise where the Klingons try to genetically engineer their whole race to be super warriors. Build part of the plot on a racial war between almost human appearing Klingons versus the professional wrestler, butt ugly Klingons. The big ugly Klingons do a Rwanda style genocide and wipe out the human appearing Klingons and rewrite their whole history to make it appear they were the original Klingons.
Of course it's too late to do that now.
I have really fond memories of watching the original Star Trek way back in 1967-1968. I wanted to enjoy Enterprise. I really hoped they'd explore all the loose threads such as whatever caused the creation of the Prime Directive and First Contact with different alien cultures.
But I just got sick and tired of the stupid time travel stories. They travel back to the 1970's to play 'Starsky & Hutch' with aliens! He travels back to WWII to fight Nazi aliens! That was sooo disappointing.
They had a whole galaxy to explore and instead they wanted to remake the old Time Tunnel series! So I turned off the tv.
I expect Berman's big idea for a movie is just another time travel episode.