Honestly, I don't see the practical implications. OK, great, giants can now resist Magneto. But how many mutants are also giants? I mean I guess Colossus is pretty large so maybe he would count, but basically the majority of the X-men are just as powerless against him as before.
You're posting on slashdot. You're a geek. You wouldn't be driving off with it. They'd likely catch you in the thing as you're mid-climax.
And you wouldn't? Come on, do you have any idea how much porn one of these shipping containers could store? I bet I could fit my entire collection in like, just three or four of them.
I'm calling bullshit on that one, a slight scald from a overly warm battery sure, foot high flames stopped by "glossy" paper yeah right, sounds more like a bullshit entry to the Liability Lottery to me.
"Ok, uh, we found this mouse in a bottle of Elsinore beer that we bought
at your beer store, eh? And we heard that when that happens you get
your beer free."
Don't you see what is really going on here? The Japanese government is trying to stop leaks from the ministry about their top secret military research. This includes their top-secret giant robot research, and their genetic laboratory's efforts to create a race of super-soldiers with spiky blonde hair!
,i>this map needs a lot of interpretation: the southern hemisphere looks dark compared to the north, but that's because of the way population is distributed.
I don't think so. If you ignore brightness, and compare the number of connections coming out of a large American city like Seattle, San Franciso, or LA to any South American city, it simply has more connections.
It's not the principle of accountability that's got me pissed off about this. I have no problem with the idea that she should pay if she did it. We all break the law sometimes, and we can't cry too loud when we get caught. It's the principle of proportionality, though.
It's like getting a year in jail for a speeding ticket, or a $1000 fine for eating a grape in the supermarket produce section. It's just completely out of proportion to the punishment deserved. Sure, the music companies have the right to defend their interests, but fining a single, working mother more than she probably makes in five years is just vicious.
Congrats, RIAA. I wonder if that 200,000 dollars will make up for all the people alienated by the action? If you consider how many millions of dollars companies spend on advertising, the bad press generated by this story would be more than enough to offset the financial gain created by the fines and any reduced piracy. I mean, personally, the overwhelming majority of my music has been legally acquired in the past few years, but this makes me wonder why the hell I'm doing that, and whether I should actually be pirating more. Yes, I want to support the artists who produce the music, but I don't want to support these bullies.
There is actually some logic to this: grass had not evolved while the Dinosaurs were around. There are now not many places on the planet where there is no grass except where nothing grows so volcanoes and deserts are logical locations. This was mentioned in the "Making of Walking With Dinosaurs" as one of the biggest problems with finding good filming locations.
Actually, there is some evidence for grasses in the Cretaceous. However, they were nowhere near as common as they are today, so there almost certainly there were no grasslands. Grasslands don't become common until relatively recently (a few tens of millions of years ago).
Grass is so common today, of course, that artists seem to have trouble imagining what would have covered the ground. There are a few possibilities. One is that forests and brush may have been much, much more widespread in the past than they are today. Many familiar trees were abundant in the Cretaceous- you had conifers like the Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia), the ginkgo, palms, and magnolias, and towards the end the flowering plants were really on a roll, so they may have been forming much of the canopy and a lot of the forest understory. It's also possible that other plant groups took the place of grass in plains environments. In some modern semiarid environments, such as the Northern Great Plains, low-growing junipers cover much of the ground. In other environments, particularly the wetter ones, ferns may grow in huge, dense fields, so there may have been "fernlands" instead of grasslands.
Many of the Mongolian dinosaurs did actually inhabit a desert environment. But still, there must have been a significant number of plants there for them to eat, otherwise they would have starved to death. It probably would have been scrubby desert, rather than a barren waste.
It's not so much a problem with the religion itself as it is the organization. The common factor: there's power in the hands of the people in charge of the religious establishment that goes beyond the bounds of religion.
To play the Devil's advocate (no pun intended), why is it that these religious leaders have so much power? Isn't their power and influence a direct result of people believing that these leaders speak for God? If people didn't have so much faith, these leaders would have little or no influence.
Personally, I'm agnostic about religion. By which I mean, I'm an atheist, but I'm not sure whether religion has done us more good or more harm. Much of the abolitionist movement was motivated by religious beliefs, for instance, and many of the core principles of our secular society (do unto others as you would have done unto you) come directly from Christianity. But I look around at the damage wrought by narrow-minded religious zealots like Bin Laden and George W., Mormon polygamist cults and Islamic suicide bombers, and I really have to wonder if Dawkins is right, and religion is something we'd be better off without. Dawkins, of course, is an ironic example. He's convinced that religion is evil, and no facts or counterexamples can possibly convince him otherwise. In other words, it is his belief that religion is wrong, his dogma. He's a fundamentalist atheist, just as narrow minded as the people he attacks.
Though something happened in the past couple weeks that made me rethink things, to think that maybe religion isn't all bad, and that's the Buddhist monks in Burma. There's a shining example of belief motivating people in a positive way, bringing out something not just good but positively heroic in people. So I guess I'd say that it's not religion as such that's evil. Faith is a powerful force, and like anything it can be used to good ends or evil ends. The devil, as they say, can quote scripture to serve his own ends.
Today we gun down simulated fellow humans for fun and pretend it hasn't changed us.
I doubt it really has. We've always been violent monkeys, interested in violent entertainment. Before CounterStrike and Halo 3, kids pretended their sticks were guns or swords. Adults blasted the shit out of some deer, watched the hockey game, or watched Hamlet. Even by modern movie standards, Shakespeare closes the curtain on a decent pile of corpses. And hell, there was a time when public executions used to be a spectator sport, and let's not forget that before the movie "Gladiator", there were the real gladiatorial games, where people watched real human beings kill each other. And because they couldn't rent "Predator" on DVD, the Vikings sat around, got pissed on mead, and listened to "Beowulf". "Whoa, totally awesome! Grendel like ripped fifty guys to shreds, but then Beowulf comes in and like rips his whole freakin' arm off, and there's blood everywhere!"
As for nobody caring about the death of civilians in Iraq, go back to World War II, when strategic bombing campaigns deliberately started firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I could be wrong, but I don't think there was a massive public outcry over it. It was war, and they were on the other side, so who gave a shit? I think we've come a long way, that people even stop to think about the Iraqi dead and what we've done to their country, not that it's much consolation for the Iraqis.
When was the last time Europe refused to back military intervention? How's that working out for you?
"We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."
Robert McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968.
Exactly; Newton didn't "eventually flop". From what I've read, it flopped on Day 1, but then became useable and a decent product. However, the Newton was never able to overcome the baggage of all that initial bad press. Building a good product isn't enough, you've also got to market it right.
And what if the Nazis had won WWII, like in Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle? Instead of having little Windows icons on our start menus, we'd have little swastikas!
Then again, given that the Allies were the leaders in computing during WWII, a victory by the Third Reich would probably have delayed the PC revolution by many years. So really, Google couldn't have happened without Germany's disastrous decision to assault the Soviet Union... and we all know who made thatdecision. What that means, of course, is that Google really owes their very existence to Hitler.
Hmm. I've noticed the link between conspiracy theories and drugs before. There's a certain irony in some pothead insisting that pot is harmless and then launching into a conspiracy filled rant that shows strong signs of clinical paranoia. Not that they can appreciate the irony anymore of course.
I've never used pot on a regular basis, but I've noticed that (1) it helps the mind bring together seemingly unrelated facts, events, and patterns (2) when this happens, you get that strong sense of discovery or enlightenment, just like you normally get when solving problems, a cartoon light-bulb moment when everything sort of goes "click" upstairs and suddenly makes obvious sense (like when I solve a geometry problem, figure out a scientific puzzle, or realize who did it in a mystery movie), and (3) many of these seemingly unrelated things, well, actually are completely unrelated. But I suspect many people just trust the gut feeling that they've discovered something even when they haven't.
Pot did once help me come to a realization about my love life ("wait a minute... the reason she acts so uninterested in me... is because she really isn't interested in me! Whoa! Heavy, man!"). And I could see how occasional use might be handy if you are a scientist, and even heavy use might be good for a writer, musician, or other artist. But yeah I wouldn't be too surprised if long term use would severely hinder your critical thinking and promote elaborate conspiracy theories. I suspect the writers of the X-files were probably buying the stuff by the bale.
So you would handicap our troops with even more "Rules of Engagement?" Incredible. When will you people realize that civilian casualties are a part of war?
God, you're an idiot. Please do us all a favor and don't vote or reproduce. In a counterinsurgency you've got to avoid killing civilians at all costs, because the civilians are the goal of the fight. It's not about territory occupied, or body counts, or about how many 'bad guys' we kill per U.S. soldier lost, it's about gaining the support of the populace and denying the enemy the support of the populace. You can't do either when you're treating the civilian populace as expendible. If you do that, then increasingly they will support the insurgents, and for every insurgent you kill, you're going to have two more ready to take his place. Stop getting your military tactics from Rambo movies.
to be pedantic, not many people call themselves grammar nazis.
Heinrich Himmler did. He once had a dude shot when the guy used an apostrophe where he wasn't supposed to. And he had an entire detachment of the S.S. tasked with tracking down misused umlauts.
I was in Beijing less than a week ago, and while I was there I had tea with some Chinese scientists. I was surprised to learn (I had to be told, since I know about three words in Mandarin) that they were actually having an argument about, well, politics. I guess I'd just sort of assumed that talking about politics in China was like talking about your sex life in front of your parents, something you just didn't do. I then had an interesting discussion with a senior scientist there; she argued that Chinese socialism was the worst system of all because of all the abuses and corruption, mentioning numerous instances where Chinese scientists and officials would bill the government for personal expenses, meals, family vacations, and soforth.
I can't claim that this has given me any profound insight into how the system affects the Chinese. What I did find was striking was this- I wrote an email about this experience to a friend. And afterwards, suddenly I started to worry. Not about myself, but about the Chinese woman I'd had a discussion with. I concluded it probably wasn't a problem, since all I did was mention that we "discussed socialism" which could mean just about anything. But knowing that my communications could be watched, and that the government could potentially harm someone because of what I said... well, our conversation was one of the most interesting experiences I had while I was there, but I didn't bother to mention it in any of my other emails to friends. So for me, that was the really scary thing, not the knowledge that the government could harm me, but that it could harm the people around me if I wasn't careful about what I said. So certainly, the system seemed to be having the desired effect with me, and I'm a westerner used to free (as in consequence-free) expression, and I was just there for a week.
What I have to wonder is, what's going to happen at the Olympics? Beijing is going to be flooded with foreigners. And unlike the Tienanmen square uprising, there will be cameras- digital cameras, video cameras, cell phone cameras, news cameras- everywhere, and I don't see how the Chinese government can possibly control the flow of information. All it's going to take is a few media-savvy demonstrators who want to make a scene, and either the government will have to tolerate them (which will be bad for them) or crack down (and have everyone witness it, which will be worse). I don't know... I think they may have gotten more than they bargained with in getting the international attention of the Olympics.
American that I cannot stand (I am Australian). Your country dominates the world (just as italy, england, greece, persia, france etc etc etc all did in their day) and you are ashamed?
I'm not ashamed of my country having a lot of power. And I'm not ashamed of my country using it- if you have power, you've got a responsibility to use it. With great power comes great responsibility, as Stan Lee said. I say, if a carefully planned, well thought out military intervention is the best option (not that war is ever a great option, but sometimes it is better than not going to war) then, well, bombs away.
What I'm deeply ashamed of is the shitty job we've done in using it. Bullying our allies, running secret prisons, detentions without trial, torturing people to death, losing much of the headway we made in Afghanistan, and making Iraq into a place so terrifyingly bloody that people actually long for the days when it was merely ruled by a psychopathic dictator... the past few years have been shameful. Anyone who could look at what we've done in the past few years and feel any sort of pride is either deeply in denial or a sociopath. I have no problem with America using its power to advance its own interests and improve the world, but we haven't been doing either.
So the idea while interesting at first glance really is far from practical.
I have an idea- how about mounting some LEDs on the wings which could help boost the amount of light the solar panels recieve? You could keep going for like, forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I don't see the practical implications. OK, great, giants can now resist Magneto. But how many mutants are also giants? I mean I guess Colossus is pretty large so maybe he would count, but basically the majority of the X-men are just as powerless against him as before.
All I know is, my boss has now declared that our fifteen-minute breaks are to be replaced by 15-centimeter breaks. Asshole.
And you wouldn't? Come on, do you have any idea how much porn one of these shipping containers could store? I bet I could fit my entire collection in like, just three or four of them.
What, so all we have to do is like, have the government pass a law declaring open season?
Sounds like I need to write my senator and then go clean my shotgun!
"Ok, uh, we found this mouse in a bottle of Elsinore beer that we bought at your beer store, eh? And we heard that when that happens you get your beer free."
Don't you see what is really going on here? The Japanese government is trying to stop leaks from the ministry about their top secret military research. This includes their top-secret giant robot research, and their genetic laboratory's efforts to create a race of super-soldiers with spiky blonde hair!
I don't think so. If you ignore brightness, and compare the number of connections coming out of a large American city like Seattle, San Franciso, or LA to any South American city, it simply has more connections.
It's like getting a year in jail for a speeding ticket, or a $1000 fine for eating a grape in the supermarket produce section. It's just completely out of proportion to the punishment deserved. Sure, the music companies have the right to defend their interests, but fining a single, working mother more than she probably makes in five years is just vicious.
Congrats, RIAA. I wonder if that 200,000 dollars will make up for all the people alienated by the action? If you consider how many millions of dollars companies spend on advertising, the bad press generated by this story would be more than enough to offset the financial gain created by the fines and any reduced piracy. I mean, personally, the overwhelming majority of my music has been legally acquired in the past few years, but this makes me wonder why the hell I'm doing that, and whether I should actually be pirating more. Yes, I want to support the artists who produce the music, but I don't want to support these bullies.
Actually, there is some evidence for grasses in the Cretaceous. However, they were nowhere near as common as they are today, so there almost certainly there were no grasslands. Grasslands don't become common until relatively recently (a few tens of millions of years ago).
Grass is so common today, of course, that artists seem to have trouble imagining what would have covered the ground. There are a few possibilities. One is that forests and brush may have been much, much more widespread in the past than they are today. Many familiar trees were abundant in the Cretaceous- you had conifers like the Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia), the ginkgo, palms, and magnolias, and towards the end the flowering plants were really on a roll, so they may have been forming much of the canopy and a lot of the forest understory. It's also possible that other plant groups took the place of grass in plains environments. In some modern semiarid environments, such as the Northern Great Plains, low-growing junipers cover much of the ground. In other environments, particularly the wetter ones, ferns may grow in huge, dense fields, so there may have been "fernlands" instead of grasslands.
Many of the Mongolian dinosaurs did actually inhabit a desert environment. But still, there must have been a significant number of plants there for them to eat, otherwise they would have starved to death. It probably would have been scrubby desert, rather than a barren waste.
Put a dog in the front seat. And shave him.
You know, the way stuff is going, Microsoft might have better luck selling ponies than selling Zunes.
To play the Devil's advocate (no pun intended), why is it that these religious leaders have so much power? Isn't their power and influence a direct result of people believing that these leaders speak for God? If people didn't have so much faith, these leaders would have little or no influence.
Personally, I'm agnostic about religion. By which I mean, I'm an atheist, but I'm not sure whether religion has done us more good or more harm. Much of the abolitionist movement was motivated by religious beliefs, for instance, and many of the core principles of our secular society (do unto others as you would have done unto you) come directly from Christianity. But I look around at the damage wrought by narrow-minded religious zealots like Bin Laden and George W., Mormon polygamist cults and Islamic suicide bombers, and I really have to wonder if Dawkins is right, and religion is something we'd be better off without. Dawkins, of course, is an ironic example. He's convinced that religion is evil, and no facts or counterexamples can possibly convince him otherwise. In other words, it is his belief that religion is wrong, his dogma. He's a fundamentalist atheist, just as narrow minded as the people he attacks.
Though something happened in the past couple weeks that made me rethink things, to think that maybe religion isn't all bad, and that's the Buddhist monks in Burma. There's a shining example of belief motivating people in a positive way, bringing out something not just good but positively heroic in people. So I guess I'd say that it's not religion as such that's evil. Faith is a powerful force, and like anything it can be used to good ends or evil ends. The devil, as they say, can quote scripture to serve his own ends.
I doubt it really has. We've always been violent monkeys, interested in violent entertainment. Before CounterStrike and Halo 3, kids pretended their sticks were guns or swords. Adults blasted the shit out of some deer, watched the hockey game, or watched Hamlet. Even by modern movie standards, Shakespeare closes the curtain on a decent pile of corpses. And hell, there was a time when public executions used to be a spectator sport, and let's not forget that before the movie "Gladiator", there were the real gladiatorial games, where people watched real human beings kill each other. And because they couldn't rent "Predator" on DVD, the Vikings sat around, got pissed on mead, and listened to "Beowulf". "Whoa, totally awesome! Grendel like ripped fifty guys to shreds, but then Beowulf comes in and like rips his whole freakin' arm off, and there's blood everywhere!"
As for nobody caring about the death of civilians in Iraq, go back to World War II, when strategic bombing campaigns deliberately started firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I could be wrong, but I don't think there was a massive public outcry over it. It was war, and they were on the other side, so who gave a shit? I think we've come a long way, that people even stop to think about the Iraqi dead and what we've done to their country, not that it's much consolation for the Iraqis.
"We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."
Robert McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968.
Exactly; Newton didn't "eventually flop". From what I've read, it flopped on Day 1, but then became useable and a decent product. However, the Newton was never able to overcome the baggage of all that initial bad press. Building a good product isn't enough, you've also got to market it right.
This is the kind of thing perpetrate by evil nitwits Uzbekistan, who as everybody know, is very nosey people with a bone in middle of their brain.
Then again, given that the Allies were the leaders in computing during WWII, a victory by the Third Reich would probably have delayed the PC revolution by many years. So really, Google couldn't have happened without Germany's disastrous decision to assault the Soviet Union... and we all know who made thatdecision. What that means, of course, is that Google really owes their very existence to Hitler.
I've never used pot on a regular basis, but I've noticed that (1) it helps the mind bring together seemingly unrelated facts, events, and patterns (2) when this happens, you get that strong sense of discovery or enlightenment, just like you normally get when solving problems, a cartoon light-bulb moment when everything sort of goes "click" upstairs and suddenly makes obvious sense (like when I solve a geometry problem, figure out a scientific puzzle, or realize who did it in a mystery movie), and (3) many of these seemingly unrelated things, well, actually are completely unrelated. But I suspect many people just trust the gut feeling that they've discovered something even when they haven't.
Pot did once help me come to a realization about my love life ("wait a minute... the reason she acts so uninterested in me... is because she really isn't interested in me! Whoa! Heavy, man!"). And I could see how occasional use might be handy if you are a scientist, and even heavy use might be good for a writer, musician, or other artist. But yeah I wouldn't be too surprised if long term use would severely hinder your critical thinking and promote elaborate conspiracy theories. I suspect the writers of the X-files were probably buying the stuff by the bale.
God, you're an idiot. Please do us all a favor and don't vote or reproduce. In a counterinsurgency you've got to avoid killing civilians at all costs, because the civilians are the goal of the fight. It's not about territory occupied, or body counts, or about how many 'bad guys' we kill per U.S. soldier lost, it's about gaining the support of the populace and denying the enemy the support of the populace. You can't do either when you're treating the civilian populace as expendible. If you do that, then increasingly they will support the insurgents, and for every insurgent you kill, you're going to have two more ready to take his place. Stop getting your military tactics from Rambo movies.
How big was Gandhi's fuel air explosive?
Heinrich Himmler did. He once had a dude shot when the guy used an apostrophe where he wasn't supposed to. And he had an entire detachment of the S.S. tasked with tracking down misused umlauts.
I can't claim that this has given me any profound insight into how the system affects the Chinese. What I did find was striking was this- I wrote an email about this experience to a friend. And afterwards, suddenly I started to worry. Not about myself, but about the Chinese woman I'd had a discussion with. I concluded it probably wasn't a problem, since all I did was mention that we "discussed socialism" which could mean just about anything. But knowing that my communications could be watched, and that the government could potentially harm someone because of what I said... well, our conversation was one of the most interesting experiences I had while I was there, but I didn't bother to mention it in any of my other emails to friends. So for me, that was the really scary thing, not the knowledge that the government could harm me, but that it could harm the people around me if I wasn't careful about what I said. So certainly, the system seemed to be having the desired effect with me, and I'm a westerner used to free (as in consequence-free) expression, and I was just there for a week.
What I have to wonder is, what's going to happen at the Olympics? Beijing is going to be flooded with foreigners. And unlike the Tienanmen square uprising, there will be cameras- digital cameras, video cameras, cell phone cameras, news cameras- everywhere, and I don't see how the Chinese government can possibly control the flow of information. All it's going to take is a few media-savvy demonstrators who want to make a scene, and either the government will have to tolerate them (which will be bad for them) or crack down (and have everyone witness it, which will be worse). I don't know... I think they may have gotten more than they bargained with in getting the international attention of the Olympics.
It's completely ineffective and a waste of resources. All the Mongolian internet users just look for a weak point and then pour through in hordes.
I'm not ashamed of my country having a lot of power. And I'm not ashamed of my country using it- if you have power, you've got a responsibility to use it. With great power comes great responsibility, as Stan Lee said. I say, if a carefully planned, well thought out military intervention is the best option (not that war is ever a great option, but sometimes it is better than not going to war) then, well, bombs away.
What I'm deeply ashamed of is the shitty job we've done in using it. Bullying our allies, running secret prisons, detentions without trial, torturing people to death, losing much of the headway we made in Afghanistan, and making Iraq into a place so terrifyingly bloody that people actually long for the days when it was merely ruled by a psychopathic dictator... the past few years have been shameful. Anyone who could look at what we've done in the past few years and feel any sort of pride is either deeply in denial or a sociopath. I have no problem with America using its power to advance its own interests and improve the world, but we haven't been doing either.
I have an idea- how about mounting some LEDs on the wings which could help boost the amount of light the solar panels recieve? You could keep going for like, forever.