Yes, but that original story became very inconsistent in both language and setting as the rest of it developed. You could not simply take it and present it as the tale without considerable alteration. Tolkien never completed an updated version.
It's not entirely Christopher's fault. His father tinkered with these stories for over 50 years. There were layers upon layers of revisions, with a manuscript that finally was a literal palimpsest. There really were many new things to discover; it's astonishing that he kept at it for as long as he did. Thanks to this approach, virtually all of Tolkien's mythological work at most of its stages is available to anyone interested in it.
The story of Feanor wasn't really a stand-alone; it was more of the setup to everything that followed and didn't end until the War of Wrath. Tuor's story was never actually finished, which is a pity. The Narn i hin Hurin was the most developed of all of them, including Beren and Luthien, and the most tragic. I've always thought it would made a great opera, if it didn't come out too similar in places to the Ring cycle.
CJRT is "somewhat of a Tolkien scholar". The Pope is "a well-known Catholic". The Sun is "a nearby star". Michael Moore "is not entirely pleased with the Bush administration". Slashdot "occasionally posts dupes"....
If the US government did that, then you'd be complaining about censorship.
Furthermore, the US government can't do that. It's not technically feasable. We don't have a single, nationwide firewall like some countries do that can be configured to block out arbitrary foreign sites.
I suppose it's far easier to arrest a single foreign national -- even though what he's doing is perfectly legal in his own country -- than it is to arrest his American customers, who really are committing crimes on US soil. Less unpopular in an election year, too, off-year or not.
I find dramatically different estimates on the contribution to global warming of HFC and HCFCs (the actual replacements for CFCs, as opposed to my guess of CO2.) From where I sit, I'm in no position to evaluate which of them are correct. It appears, though, that the most alarming estimates are based on worst-case scenarios involving the most wide-spread adoption of the most damaging replacements. It's not clear this has actually happened. (I'd not rely on news sources for this. They always get scientific stories wrong.)
BP means "Before Present". That's "present" as in "now", not as in "gift". It sidesteps the BC/BCE issue completely so that no one gets whining rights. Very handy.
No, not always. But the ozone layer and global warming issues are not (or were not) closely related. I suppose the difference in the estimate has to do with the fact that CO2 was a commonly used replacement aerosol propellant. Whether or not that estimate is correct depends on where the CO2 mostly comes from. But note that we can have 10,000 times the effect and still not have much of an effect overall. I never heard that CFCs were much of a contributor to global warming at all.
ALL (without exception) predictions in the past have been 100% wrong: over population, over pollution, lack of food and even Global Cooling (!! Remember all the predictions in the 70s and 80s that we were heading into an ice age??) -- all have proven to be completely false.
These aren't really fair comparisons. Overpopulation was a concern, if population growth had continued along trends current at the time. It's still a concern, as someone else pointed out, in areas like India and China where the population is still growing. What came as something of a surprise here was that economic prosperity is the chief indicator of zero population growth.
Over-pollution was indeed a problem. You're probably too young to remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire, and how hazardous it once was to come into contact with the waters of the lower Hudson River. (The river itself was a Superfund site!) It stopped being a problem because we put significant pollution controls in place. Again, had current trends continued the problem would have been serious. It became less so because we did something about it.
There is a food problem in much of the world. Count yourself fortunate that you don't live in a place where this is so. But for unanticipated technological advances in farming, even the US would be a tad hungry right now.
Global cooling theories were creations of the media. They never represented the consensus opinion of climatologists.
The lesson here is not that problems go away on their own, but that we have it in our power to do something about them when they arise. We did it for the ozone layer, which is now recovering thanks to the banning of the substances that were damaging it. If a significant proportion of global warming is in fact anthropogenic, then what you have really shown us here is that not only should we do something about it, but that we probably can.
Before irrigation, Egypt was green. GREEN! Now it's a fucking desert.
I'm sorry, but this is exactly the kind of falsely alarmist crap that's causing so many people to be skeptical of the environmental movement.
Egypt and the surrounding desert was green about 6,000 BP because of an period of unusually heavy precipitation in the region called the Neolithic Subpluvial. It supported agriculture in what is now desert, yes, and also a pastoral economy. Desertification resumed about 5,000 BP not because of these activities -- there were, for example, no forests to cut down -- but because the rain stopped. (And this was also not due to human activity, which was at a relatively low level at the time.) Agriculture in the Nile Valley has ever since, and until the construction of the dams at Aswan, been reliant on the annual Nile flood. This flood irrigates fields all by itself, without human intervention. There was a degree of artificial irrigation, true, but it had little effect on the progress of desertification.
Troll? I guess there are some very sacred cows here on/. You're hardly the first person to think this, but I suppose there are some things that just can't be said around here.
You could write a book about engineering companies that have gone down the tubes when the beancounters took over and immediately slashed all that "wasteful" basic research. These people simply do not understand the kind of resources that kind of company needs for its long-term health.
You haven't really rebutted anything at all; you just made a counter-assertion. I suggest you consult your OED. "Colour" may date from the 14th century, but "color" came into use in the 15th. It's not an American innovation, and is certainly not Webster's. The spellings of "labor" and "favor" were never consistent from the 14th century.
These words are of French origin which itself only settled on the "u" consistently in recent centuries. But who cares about that? If we speak neither Latin nor German, then neither do we speak French.
In words like "analyze", the "z" is generally the older form.
Of course older doesn't mean more correct. Neither does newer.
You forgot the part where the interface is identical to one usable on anything with a screen for navigating through lists of hundreds of generic items.
"Yo" doesn't mean "you", it's a call across a distance like "yoo-hoo" or "haloo". It's not polite usage, and in the context you probably have in mind it's actually very rude, and Blair was being a wimp by taking it so meekly. And the "u" in "colour" is an affectation without warrant. (Although I wouldn't go as far as this guy in spelling reform. The extreme reforms obscure meaning.) This is one case where the Americans have preserved the older usage.
There is no implied u following a q in English. It's always explicit. There are a few words in use in English where q is not followed by a u, but the overwhelming majority are foreign loanwords. In no case is it pronounced "kw". (Except for "qwerty", but the "w" comes from the "w" and not an implied "u".)
It's a tactic. You see, Mr. Wilson didn't work for IBM. He worked for AT&T, and the thing he knows about is the terms under which that company licensed Unix. Since these terms don't support the kind of control SCO wants over IBM's Unix-based products (even assuming they owned Unix, something they're going to have considerable trouble proving because they probably don't) SCO really wants to impeach his testimony. They can do this in two ways. They can either get this retired, elderly gentleman so flustered that he has trouble recalling some of the details on which he was earlier deposed and contradicts himself. Or they can try to impeach his character and make him out to be untrustworthy. Either will serve their purpose.
I generally don't do PowerPoint. Once I did, though. My group was presenting a concept of operations for our software as applied to a new project. There were many sections to the presentation, and several of us were assigned portions of it relative to the parts of the system we were most familiar with. I did my section, which I thought was concise and informative, and sent it in to my manager to be placed in order with the rest. The plan was for each of us to actually talk to the section of the presentation he or she had worked on.
So here I am standing in front of a room full of my users, and my company's customers and subcontractors, only to discover at that moment that my manager had "adjusted" my slides by rearranging the points, rewording half of them, and introducing several inaccuracies along the way. I ended up saying what I was going to say anyhow, and the slides were no help to the audience at all. Except, of course, they all had a hardcopy in their hands, and that was their "notes" for the presentation unless they jotted something else down.
It ended up going well, and I received some compliments for the way I handled it (I was speaking from my own knowledge anyway and not from notes or the slides) but it was not my idea of a relaxing afternoon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but that original story became very inconsistent in both language and setting as the rest of it developed. You could not simply take it and present it as the tale without considerable alteration. Tolkien never completed an updated version.
And reveals himself as.... Darth Fallible!
It's not entirely Christopher's fault. His father tinkered with these stories for over 50 years. There were layers upon layers of revisions, with a manuscript that finally was a literal palimpsest. There really were many new things to discover; it's astonishing that he kept at it for as long as he did. Thanks to this approach, virtually all of Tolkien's mythological work at most of its stages is available to anyone interested in it.
The story of Feanor wasn't really a stand-alone; it was more of the setup to everything that followed and didn't end until the War of Wrath. Tuor's story was never actually finished, which is a pity. The Narn i hin Hurin was the most developed of all of them, including Beren and Luthien, and the most tragic. I've always thought it would made a great opera, if it didn't come out too similar in places to the Ring cycle.
CJRT is "somewhat of a Tolkien scholar". The Pope is "a well-known Catholic". The Sun is "a nearby star". Michael Moore "is not entirely pleased with the Bush administration". Slashdot "occasionally posts dupes"....
Erm, no. That's stupid, both as policy and as an inference from what I said.
If the US government did that, then you'd be complaining about censorship.
Furthermore, the US government can't do that. It's not technically feasable. We don't have a single, nationwide firewall like some countries do that can be configured to block out arbitrary foreign sites.
I suppose it's far easier to arrest a single foreign national -- even though what he's doing is perfectly legal in his own country -- than it is to arrest his American customers, who really are committing crimes on US soil. Less unpopular in an election year, too, off-year or not.
Look, GP was from BadAnalogyGuy. It was a bad analogy, OK? It's what the boy does. You might as well get annoyed at the Pope for being Catholic.
I find dramatically different estimates on the contribution to global warming of HFC and HCFCs (the actual replacements for CFCs, as opposed to my guess of CO2.) From where I sit, I'm in no position to evaluate which of them are correct. It appears, though, that the most alarming estimates are based on worst-case scenarios involving the most wide-spread adoption of the most damaging replacements. It's not clear this has actually happened. (I'd not rely on news sources for this. They always get scientific stories wrong.)
BP means "Before Present". That's "present" as in "now", not as in "gift". It sidesteps the BC/BCE issue completely so that no one gets whining rights. Very handy.
No, not always. But the ozone layer and global warming issues are not (or were not) closely related. I suppose the difference in the estimate has to do with the fact that CO2 was a commonly used replacement aerosol propellant. Whether or not that estimate is correct depends on where the CO2 mostly comes from. But note that we can have 10,000 times the effect and still not have much of an effect overall. I never heard that CFCs were much of a contributor to global warming at all.
ALL (without exception) predictions in the past have been 100% wrong: over population, over pollution, lack of food and even Global Cooling (!! Remember all the predictions in the 70s and 80s that we were heading into an ice age??) -- all have proven to be completely false.
These aren't really fair comparisons. Overpopulation was a concern, if population growth had continued along trends current at the time. It's still a concern, as someone else pointed out, in areas like India and China where the population is still growing. What came as something of a surprise here was that economic prosperity is the chief indicator of zero population growth.
Over-pollution was indeed a problem. You're probably too young to remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire, and how hazardous it once was to come into contact with the waters of the lower Hudson River. (The river itself was a Superfund site!) It stopped being a problem because we put significant pollution controls in place. Again, had current trends continued the problem would have been serious. It became less so because we did something about it.
There is a food problem in much of the world. Count yourself fortunate that you don't live in a place where this is so. But for unanticipated technological advances in farming, even the US would be a tad hungry right now.
Global cooling theories were creations of the media. They never represented the consensus opinion of climatologists.
The lesson here is not that problems go away on their own, but that we have it in our power to do something about them when they arise. We did it for the ozone layer, which is now recovering thanks to the banning of the substances that were damaging it. If a significant proportion of global warming is in fact anthropogenic, then what you have really shown us here is that not only should we do something about it, but that we probably can.
The same beer that only makes a small "psst" when cold will foam all over the place when opened warm.
And have you ever opened a frozen beer? Beer Slurpee geyser!
Before irrigation, Egypt was green. GREEN! Now it's a fucking desert.
I'm sorry, but this is exactly the kind of falsely alarmist crap that's causing so many people to be skeptical of the environmental movement.
Egypt and the surrounding desert was green about 6,000 BP because of an period of unusually heavy precipitation in the region called the Neolithic Subpluvial. It supported agriculture in what is now desert, yes, and also a pastoral economy. Desertification resumed about 5,000 BP not because of these activities -- there were, for example, no forests to cut down -- but because the rain stopped. (And this was also not due to human activity, which was at a relatively low level at the time.) Agriculture in the Nile Valley has ever since, and until the construction of the dams at Aswan, been reliant on the annual Nile flood. This flood irrigates fields all by itself, without human intervention. There was a degree of artificial irrigation, true, but it had little effect on the progress of desertification.
Stick to the truth; you'll be more convincing.
Troll? I guess there are some very sacred cows here on /. You're hardly the first person to think this, but I suppose there are some things that just can't be said around here.
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
Maybe because it's hard to get poetic about something that, when described, sounds like a gargantuan fart.
You could write a book about engineering companies that have gone down the tubes when the beancounters took over and immediately slashed all that "wasteful" basic research. These people simply do not understand the kind of resources that kind of company needs for its long-term health.
You haven't really rebutted anything at all; you just made a counter-assertion. I suggest you consult your OED. "Colour" may date from the 14th century, but "color" came into use in the 15th. It's not an American innovation, and is certainly not Webster's. The spellings of "labor" and "favor" were never consistent from the 14th century.
These words are of French origin which itself only settled on the "u" consistently in recent centuries. But who cares about that? If we speak neither Latin nor German, then neither do we speak French.
In words like "analyze", the "z" is generally the older form.
Of course older doesn't mean more correct. Neither does newer.
You forgot the part where the interface is identical to one usable on anything with a screen for navigating through lists of hundreds of generic items.
I'm just pointing out that the 'for a music player' bit makes a big difference.
Yeah. Just like "on the Internet" makes such a big difference to an otherwise hoary business method.
"Yo" doesn't mean "you", it's a call across a distance like "yoo-hoo" or "haloo". It's not polite usage, and in the context you probably have in mind it's actually very rude, and Blair was being a wimp by taking it so meekly. And the "u" in "colour" is an affectation without warrant. (Although I wouldn't go as far as this guy in spelling reform. The extreme reforms obscure meaning.) This is one case where the Americans have preserved the older usage.
Im nawt korrexting the sppeling. Im korrrecting the pronunnseeashen.
There is no implied u following a q in English. It's always explicit. There are a few words in use in English where q is not followed by a u, but the overwhelming majority are foreign loanwords. In no case is it pronounced "kw". (Except for "qwerty", but the "w" comes from the "w" and not an implied "u".)
If they want it spelled right, they should stop pronouncing it as if there was a "u" in there. It should be "q" as in "Qatar".
It's a tactic. You see, Mr. Wilson didn't work for IBM. He worked for AT&T, and the thing he knows about is the terms under which that company licensed Unix. Since these terms don't support the kind of control SCO wants over IBM's Unix-based products (even assuming they owned Unix, something they're going to have considerable trouble proving because they probably don't) SCO really wants to impeach his testimony. They can do this in two ways. They can either get this retired, elderly gentleman so flustered that he has trouble recalling some of the details on which he was earlier deposed and contradicts himself. Or they can try to impeach his character and make him out to be untrustworthy. Either will serve their purpose.
I generally don't do PowerPoint. Once I did, though. My group was presenting a concept of operations for our software as applied to a new project. There were many sections to the presentation, and several of us were assigned portions of it relative to the parts of the system we were most familiar with. I did my section, which I thought was concise and informative, and sent it in to my manager to be placed in order with the rest. The plan was for each of us to actually talk to the section of the presentation he or she had worked on.
So here I am standing in front of a room full of my users, and my company's customers and subcontractors, only to discover at that moment that my manager had "adjusted" my slides by rearranging the points, rewording half of them, and introducing several inaccuracies along the way. I ended up saying what I was going to say anyhow, and the slides were no help to the audience at all. Except, of course, they all had a hardcopy in their hands, and that was their "notes" for the presentation unless they jotted something else down.
It ended up going well, and I received some compliments for the way I handled it (I was speaking from my own knowledge anyway and not from notes or the slides) but it was not my idea of a relaxing afternoon.