"Worse yet, I hear that you are always forced (peer pressure?) to donate away your award"
I am going to guess that anybody who is nominated for awards like this isn't making do flipping burgers in the local MacDonalds... as poorly paid as the university environment is, I am sure that Professors Emeritus (and the like) get a little more than subsistence wages, and probably don't have too hard a time finding employers who might be interested in them. I get the feeling these folk are probably motivated by more than just cash... ("Screw your Nobel Prize! Phone me when you're offering ten times that much, and make sure it is Euros, cash up front!").
At least, it would be nice to believe that they're not just in it for the money. I thought that was the role of large corporates and the whole patent-everything-and-close-down-scientific-freedo m philosophy.
When do you reckon they'll launch a version with a seat for people who complain that standing is too much effort?:-))
I think it's really interesting somebody's having a go at selling self-balancing machines, I got a feeling the practical use for this might come pop up in a completely different area (military? industrial? space?). May help put some research time into alternative fuel power supplies as well. Maybe even get "urban transport lanes " (bicycles, skates, etc) into more towns outside of Denmark and Netherlands, which would be a good thing.
Me, I think the self propelled transport angle is a loser, I go with the other postings which vote for the zero-emission ultra-efficient, gets-you-fit option, the bicycle. You can do an office job and cycle in, you just don't have to cycle for an Olympic Gold sprint medal. Cycle easy and you'll still get there in a third the time it takes to walk:-)
Iran/Contra was the last time the government broke the law in a "the ends justify the means" sense
Hmmm, with all due respect I'd be very suprised if this is the last time the US government broke the law. I am sure some interesting stuff will come out in ten or twenty years about vested interests in certain Middle Eastern countries, for a start.
The Iran / Contra history certainly is one of those events US citizens should bear in mind when they get all suprised at other people's lack of trust in their government or its aims. Though I am in no way suggesting any other country is necessarily more ethical about the manner in which it pursues its aims...
Reckon you could be right. I'm a bit more suspicious and (certainly here in the UK) I think the authorities like to keep a handy bunch of spare laws standing by in case they want to grab hold of you / don't want you about but don't really have anything to pin on you.
"Well Mr. , we can't prove you're doing anything wrong, but we don't really want you around here. We just don't really like you hanging out here. How about you just move along 30 miles or we may find a handy little law to get you out of the way?..."..kind of thing. My rather suspicious mind believes that sometimes it's convenient for authorities to have a bunch of these little grey area laws around when they would just rather prefer journalists or members of the public weren't around a place.. I accept your point about information being significant though.
Ok not a troll, honest, but at what point does the line blur between Sensitive (i.e. we'll bust you for telling this) and Common Sense (err, we can't expect to keep this from anybody who lives round here)? or is it the communicating of this information? At what point is it Giving Away Military Information to Terrorists (lots of military aircraft taking off) vs. The Media Informing The Public of Something in their Interest? (uh-oh, scandal about to break in Whitehouse, all the Presidents PR Office are working late)?
I suppose it depends on the govt. and laws of the land. Same way some countries will put you in jail for taking a photo with a bridge or an airport in the background (or any other feature of potential military significance)?
Yeah I get your point but I think the man Colon had better PR but not a lot else (hence US school kids poem). It became very important for politics to make a big deal out of what he did (Spanish / Portuguese empire aspirations and influencing the Pope). There's some well proven archeological evidence of Viking presence (documents referring to Bjarni Herjolfsson's trip in 986 etc) and various written reports about the later European fishing industry. Columbus had an interest to publicise his discoveries, as did his sponsors, they wanted payback and he wanted more money to find that route through to India. I am more interested in the fishing industry metaphor for the parent thread as here was a group of people who were resource-picking rather than intending to settle. This I think is more likely our way to the stars or at least further exploration of the near solar system within our life time. They kept quiet because they didn't want their taxmen and kings finding out about their rich new fishing fields....
I think it's all a bit murky about the 'clearly identifiable' - I think he was the man who got the PR sorted well, plenty of Europeans had been sniffing round that part of the world. Mr Colon (as the Spanish and Portuguese prefer to call him) discovered Cuba and Hispaniola on that first trip, explored Venezuala in 1498 and did such a bad job of mismanaging his colony even by the rather low human rights levels of that time that he was taken back to Spain in chains in 1500.
Yeah, damn commies! give them a look at our free market system and whadda ya know, they go and do a better job of it than us. We should never have shared our ideas with them in the first place!
...and Columbus was a latecomer in the list of Europeans visiting America. The vikings had already explored down the coast looking for suitable settlements, while North European fishermen had been fishing the coasts of the North West for a couple of hundred years.
Perhaps the latter would be a better analogy as they were specifically looking for reaping commercial rewards, rather than than settlement. The only building they carried out were work places and temporary accomodation when it wasn't possible to get back (as far as I remember, feel free to correct me).
Come on guys, where are the conspiracy theories???
UT hosted HAL2001 last year, surely it was the FBI / CIA / KGB / SMERSH / Mysterons / [enter your bad guys of choice...] getting back at those pesky linux hackers?
What happens when?... it gets slashdotted! Help them out, slashdot!
Anybody get a mirror? Maybe slashdot should think about providing mirrors of small time operators' sites when an article like this is posted. We all *know* the poor little guy is going to get slashdotted. At best, he can't show his girlfriend/ dad/ best friends what he is up to. At worst, he gets a hefty bandwidth bill from his ISP. Linking to IBM etc is another thing, but surely slashdot could show a bit of community spirit and responsibility and offer a mirror before posting up articles with links to little guys?
My impression when I was in India was that English is seen as a language of prestige and there is an association of English with being well educated. It's used as a lingua franca and so I don't think the use of English with computers is *perceived* as a problem, far the opposite. Computer bookshops in Connaught Place, Delhi, are stuffed with locally licenced copies of O'Reilly books in English.
Can any slashdot readers from India comment? I'd be interested to hear their opinion on the whole matter...
I can't remember if English is an official language for business but it seems close to it. I've been to some pretty small places in India and there always seems to be a fair smattering of English. I think education is better valued there than in my home country, UK. I couldn't see you going to a small town in the UK and being confident the local ticket collectors on the train station will able to speak to you in a second or third language....
not as xenophobically defined
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 2
Ah, I was responding to the original poster's assumption that "You should assume like I do that the police are massively crooked whenever you go to a foreign nation..", i.e. the indication that *every* country apart from the poster's own are corrupt. I find this rather a grand statement to make. You make a more moderate statement which I think is a bit closer to the truth. I've travelled to quite a few countries myself and would agree corruption seems to be more prevalent in developing countries than the Western world (though not exclusively so by any means, after all, the common term 'mafia' refers originally to an Italian organisation that heavily infiltrated the USA).
But I think our friend the original poster is acting with rather too much paranoia bordering on the xenophobic to assume all police outside their own country are corrupt. Another poster has picked me up on my assumption that the original poster was from the US, and I accept it is unfair for me to make that assumption.
Fair comment. I still think this poster was naïve bordering on xenophobic, but I definitely don't think all US citizens are (I avoid the term American as my Canadian friends would probably be upset if I indicated North America = USA).
I suppose I get a bit annoyed when somebody indicates that all police forces in all countries apart from their own are corrupt - a grand and sweeping statement. Though as you point out I didn't do myself any favours by also making an asumption.
My experiences of travelling across the USA have been by and large very positive, and I have more than a few well travelled and open minded US friends. I think the world would be a better place if people travelled more.
while in USA everything is a for profit business?
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I kind of assumed in USA *everything* was a "for profit business".
Certainly US-slashdot posters often indicate a preference for no government unless avoidable, no taxes where possible, etc. I read this as one of the messages from the original article, that local authorities were collecting income from people through indirect taxation rather than direct taxation.
Maybe things just cost money, and paying for them ultimately comes down to each of us, but it simply boils down to how the organisations get the money out of us.
(BTW I find your assumption that "police are massively crooked whenever you go to a foreign nation", i.e. the whole world is crooked apart from the USA, naive and xenophobic to say the least. Some of your police hardly have an international reputation for integrity).
Oops Fat Casper,apologies, got my distances wrong. Lon - Edi 412 miles apparently so NY-Detroit approx 1.5 times Lon-Edi. Still sticking with the rest of my stuff though;-) Happy travelling! and don't forget which bit is England, and which is Scotland !
Fair comment on the size of the countries, perhaps a better analogy is Europe to the USA. I think we have a much better city - city infrastructure for trains and coaches (only way to travel London - Paris is Eurostar!).I agree people travel longer distances by plane, more of that later...! I think part of it is a difference in basic cultural attitude towards public transport, *but* heavily influenced by taxation on different fuels.
Ignore the social side of things for a moment, if gasoline *was* 5 dollars a gallon in the USA and there was nothing you could do about it, I really do think after a few years people would think about travelling in different ways.
New York - Detroit = 650 miles
London - Edinburgh = 496 miles
So actually I'd beg to differ that NY-Detroit = Lon-Edi-Lon. Cost is about 70 pounds for a return ticket by train, petrol for 1000 miles will cost approx 80 pounds, plane tickets go from about 60 if you get a cheap flight to about 120-150 for a standard scheduled. My personal rant is that air fuel has no tax on it, if it was taxed to the equivalent of car fuel, you can only imagine the price increases and how people's preference for travel modes might change.
A small aside - Edinburgh is in Scotland. Please don't confuse England and Britain/UK as being the same, it might get you into a bit of trouble when you are wandering around Edinburgh.
Jez, US public transport makes the UK system look good (how rude is that!).
I was over there in February and I tried to get a train from New York to Detroit. Kind of assumed I could wander down to the train station and book a ticket for the next day and it wouldn't cost too much. Bit like how you would pop into Kings Cross London and get a ticket for Edinburgh or Glasgow. Hmmm.... well it was going to take something like 12 hours for a start compared to an hour's flight and the cost was far worse than the flight. Would have to book my place on a sleeper.Nobody takes intercity trains over any distance as far as I can work out. Imagine if London to Edinburgh was going to take 12 hours by train, with only one or two a day going there? Even in the UK we'd get upset. As for what people think about Greyhound coaches...
I believe a city in the West Coast had a big bus service back in the 60s , all painted red, and the oil companies pretty well closed it down to force people into cars.
Long distance, it's the same as over here - flying - and guess what, same tax on air fuel - zero. Have you ever wondered why those flights across Europe are so cheap? zero tax on fuel. I think we'd be taking the ferry/Eurostar more often if the airlines had to pay equivalent taxes for all that gas.
Rant over! (In fairness I am pretty impressed by Santa Monica's blue buses and the New York Metro, they got me round ok).
I'd be interested to see the reaction in USA if gas prices were brought to European levels (in the UK we pay somewhat over 4 dollars a gallon). I think you'd see a shift towards more fuel efficient cars. Can't see it happening, mind...
"Don't invade countries, steal all their wealth, enslave their citizens, destroy their infrastructure and put in a puppet government otherwise it will become an economic basket case and in a hundred years time you will have to loan them millions of dollars to help them rebuild a basic infrastructure and not become a hotbed of hatred against your country"?
The current world is a result of previous generations empire-building. We should try our best to avoid these mistakes again. A lot of countries are in debt because they were forced into these situations by other countries, usually through military force.
As my friend in Cambodia said to me, it's hard to get excited about IT when you're trying to clear up the landmines that no one else cares about any more. It needs to be part of a bigger solution.
And we might have had two shuttle fleets not one, by all acccounts Buran was a better vehicle with greater potential. Whether that's true or not the two different engineering teams could have learnt a hell of a lot from each other. I reallllly hope the Buran team's knowledge and expertise is being used by somebody right now.
Do you really plan to be stuck on this planet for the next 4 billion years?
Well I kind of assumed I'd be dead within the next hundred, can you let me into your secret of near eternal life?
Anywhere you want to show off tech ability?
on
Making A Videowall
·
· Score: 2
I dunno, how about anywhere you might want to do a bit of high tech / glam PR...industry conventions, sales shows, University open days, art galleries - hey, the kind of places people hire this kit for in Europe or USA.... What a thought.
I agree it seems a bit of overkill for a school, but why not the above reasons?
.
As for why do it, do you really think justification is required for a tech project on/. ? Seems a damn sight better use of tech than stuffing a computer into a rotting vegetable (halloween jack-o-computer). This guy might get a bit of a business out of it as well.
Cop this picture of Wattie (out of The Exploited) being dead serious in the 80s.
Yeah there were some hard edges as well, I got my copy of Dead Cities by The Exploited etc. (one of the best ever episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC, that was, when they appeared). Yeah the police moved in on shows and there was a fair bit of street fighting, but that first wave of punk really shook up the culture of the UK (sorry, can't speak for other countries), really changed things for ever.
Who cares if it all fragmented and moved in different directions quickly, I think that was part of its success. It was always a lot of people with a lot of ideas, and we had some damn fine silly fun in the 80s as well as the angry stuff as well. "Where's Captain Kirk?" by Spizzenergi, anybody?
It was Bill Grundy on Thames Today. Transcript is behind the hyperlink, Pistols and their friends mumbled some rude words in the interview and Grundy encouraged the naughty little punks to say something rude out loud.
"GRUNDY: Well keep going, chief. Keep going. Go on, you've got another ten seconds. Say something outrageous.". Brief exchange ended up with Steve Jones saying "You fucking rotter!".
(Note for non UK folk: the word 'fucking' was most definitely extremely shocking and banned on tv at that time of day in the 70's, and 'rotter' is the kind of word you would imagine a rich aristocratic kid to use with his school chums. Stick them together and you have comic genius;-) )
...since Sid hardly qualifies for the M word)... (muscician)
Hehe but that's the point, maaaan! You're there worrying about postmodernist intrepretations of popular cultural music, and _Sid_couldn't_play_ and _we_didn't_give_a_fuck!
What a breath of fresh air punk was. We all knew it was a laugh and it was taking the piss and if were in their boots we'd take the money and run! Skool kids wearing safety pins and singing "Frigging in the Rigging" in the school playground, punks on telly swearing at boring old middle aged presenters, bands that couldn't play a note and didn't care any more than their fans, the Metropolitan Police trying to ban the Never Mind the Bollocks album cover for obscenity and losing. Total breath of fresh air after the analytic self -infatuated prog rock triple album scene we'd had in the UK. Kicked against an incredibly conservative society and culture.
Wot a laugh! I think that's something a lot of these (mainly US) punk bands nowadays forget, they all take themselves terribly seriously..IT WAS A LAUGH!:-))
By the way, on your list of 'important artists' I think you missed the seminal band The Snivelling Shits.
Slashdot Mirror
"Worse yet, I hear that you are always forced (peer pressure?) to donate away your award"
I am going to guess that anybody who is nominated for awards like this isn't making do flipping burgers in the local MacDonalds... as poorly paid as the university environment is, I am sure that Professors Emeritus (and the like) get a little more than subsistence wages, and probably don't have too hard a time finding employers who might be interested in them. I get the feeling these folk are probably motivated by more than just cash... ("Screw your Nobel Prize! Phone me when you're offering ten times that much, and make sure it is Euros, cash up front!").
At least, it would be nice to believe that they're not just in it for the money. I thought that was the role of large corporates and the whole patent-everything-and-close-down-scientific-freedo m philosophy.
When do you reckon they'll launch a version with a seat for people who complain that standing is too much effort? :-))
I think it's really interesting somebody's having a go at selling self-balancing machines, I got a feeling the practical use for this might come pop up in a completely different area (military? industrial? space?). May help put some research time into alternative fuel power supplies as well. Maybe even get "urban transport lanes " (bicycles, skates, etc) into more towns outside of Denmark and Netherlands, which would be a good thing.
Me, I think the self propelled transport angle is a loser, I go with the other postings which vote for the zero-emission ultra-efficient, gets-you-fit option, the bicycle. You can do an office job and cycle in, you just don't have to cycle for an Olympic Gold sprint medal. Cycle easy and you'll still get there in a third the time it takes to walk :-)
Hmmm, with all due respect I'd be very suprised if this is the last time the US government broke the law. I am sure some interesting stuff will come out in ten or twenty years about vested interests in certain Middle Eastern countries, for a start.
The Iran / Contra history certainly is one of those events US citizens should bear in mind when they get all suprised at other people's lack of trust in their government or its aims. Though I am in no way suggesting any other country is necessarily more ethical about the manner in which it pursues its aims...
Reckon you could be right. I'm a bit more suspicious and (certainly here in the UK) I think the authorities like to keep a handy bunch of spare laws standing by in case they want to grab hold of you / don't want you about but don't really have anything to pin on you.
"Well Mr. , we can't prove you're doing anything wrong, but we don't really want you around here. We just don't really like you hanging out here. How about you just move along 30 miles or we may find a handy little law to get you out of the way?..." ..kind of thing. My rather suspicious mind believes that sometimes it's convenient for authorities to have a bunch of these little grey area laws around when they would just rather prefer journalists or members of the public weren't around a place.. I accept your point about information being significant though.
Ok not a troll, honest, but at what point does the line blur between Sensitive (i.e. we'll bust you for telling this) and Common Sense (err, we can't expect to keep this from anybody who lives round here)? or is it the communicating of this information? At what point is it Giving Away Military Information to Terrorists (lots of military aircraft taking off) vs. The Media Informing The Public of Something in their Interest? (uh-oh, scandal about to break in Whitehouse, all the Presidents PR Office are working late)?
I suppose it depends on the govt. and laws of the land. Same way some countries will put you in jail for taking a photo with a bridge or an airport in the background (or any other feature of potential military significance)?
Yeah I get your point but I think the man Colon had better PR but not a lot else (hence US school kids poem). It became very important for politics to make a big deal out of what he did (Spanish / Portuguese empire aspirations and influencing the Pope). There's some well proven archeological evidence of Viking presence (documents referring to Bjarni Herjolfsson's trip in 986 etc) and various written reports about the later European fishing industry. Columbus had an interest to publicise his discoveries, as did his sponsors, they wanted payback and he wanted more money to find that route through to India. I am more interested in the fishing industry metaphor for the parent thread as here was a group of people who were resource-picking rather than intending to settle. This I think is more likely our way to the stars or at least further exploration of the near solar system within our life time. They kept quiet because they didn't want their taxmen and kings finding out about their rich new fishing fields....
I think it's all a bit murky about the 'clearly identifiable' - I think he was the man who got the PR sorted well, plenty of Europeans had been sniffing round that part of the world. Mr Colon (as the Spanish and Portuguese prefer to call him) discovered Cuba and Hispaniola on that first trip, explored Venezuala in 1498 and did such a bad job of mismanaging his colony even by the rather low human rights levels of that time that he was taken back to Spain in chains in 1500.
Yeah, damn commies! give them a look at our free market system and whadda ya know, they go and do a better job of it than us. We should never have shared our ideas with them in the first place!
...and Columbus was a latecomer in the list of Europeans visiting America. The vikings had already explored down the coast looking for suitable settlements, while North European fishermen had been fishing the coasts of the North West for a couple of hundred years.
Perhaps the latter would be a better analogy as they were specifically looking for reaping commercial rewards, rather than than settlement. The only building they carried out were work places and temporary accomodation when it wasn't possible to get back (as far as I remember, feel free to correct me).
Come on guys, where are the conspiracy theories???
UT hosted HAL2001 last year, surely it was the FBI / CIA / KGB / SMERSH / Mysterons / [enter your bad guys of choice...] getting back at those pesky linux hackers?
What happens when?... it gets slashdotted! Help them out, slashdot!
Anybody get a mirror? Maybe slashdot should think about providing mirrors of small time operators' sites when an article like this is posted. We all *know* the poor little guy is going to get slashdotted. At best, he can't show his girlfriend/ dad/ best friends what he is up to. At worst, he gets a hefty bandwidth bill from his ISP. Linking to IBM etc is another thing, but surely slashdot could show a bit of community spirit and responsibility and offer a mirror before posting up articles with links to little guys?
My impression when I was in India was that English is seen as a language of prestige and there is an association of English with being well educated. It's used as a lingua franca and so I don't think the use of English with computers is *perceived* as a problem, far the opposite. Computer bookshops in Connaught Place, Delhi, are stuffed with locally licenced copies of O'Reilly books in English.
Can any slashdot readers from India comment? I'd be interested to hear their opinion on the whole matter...
I can't remember if English is an official language for business but it seems close to it. I've been to some pretty small places in India and there always seems to be a fair smattering of English. I think education is better valued there than in my home country, UK. I couldn't see you going to a small town in the UK and being confident the local ticket collectors on the train station will able to speak to you in a second or third language....
Ah, I was responding to the original poster's assumption that "You should assume like I do that the police are massively crooked whenever you go to a foreign nation..", i.e. the indication that *every* country apart from the poster's own are corrupt. I find this rather a grand statement to make. You make a more moderate statement which I think is a bit closer to the truth. I've travelled to quite a few countries myself and would agree corruption seems to be more prevalent in developing countries than the Western world (though not exclusively so by any means, after all, the common term 'mafia' refers originally to an Italian organisation that heavily infiltrated the USA).
But I think our friend the original poster is acting with rather too much paranoia bordering on the xenophobic to assume all police outside their own country are corrupt. Another poster has picked me up on my assumption that the original poster was from the US, and I accept it is unfair for me to make that assumption.
Fair comment. I still think this poster was naïve bordering on xenophobic, but I definitely don't think all US citizens are (I avoid the term American as my Canadian friends would probably be upset if I indicated North America = USA).
I suppose I get a bit annoyed when somebody indicates that all police forces in all countries apart from their own are corrupt - a grand and sweeping statement. Though as you point out I didn't do myself any favours by also making an asumption.
My experiences of travelling across the USA have been by and large very positive, and I have more than a few well travelled and open minded US friends. I think the world would be a better place if people travelled more.
I kind of assumed in USA *everything* was a "for profit business".
Certainly US-slashdot posters often indicate a preference for no government unless avoidable, no taxes where possible, etc. I read this as one of the messages from the original article, that local authorities were collecting income from people through indirect taxation rather than direct taxation.
Maybe things just cost money, and paying for them ultimately comes down to each of us, but it simply boils down to how the organisations get the money out of us.
(BTW I find your assumption that "police are massively crooked whenever you go to a foreign nation", i.e. the whole world is crooked apart from the USA, naive and xenophobic to say the least. Some of your police hardly have an international reputation for integrity).
Oops Fat Casper,apologies, got my distances wrong. Lon - Edi 412 miles apparently so NY-Detroit approx 1.5 times Lon-Edi. Still sticking with the rest of my stuff though ;-) Happy travelling! and don't forget which bit is England, and which is Scotland !
Fair comment on the size of the countries, perhaps a better analogy is Europe to the USA. I think we have a much better city - city infrastructure for trains and coaches (only way to travel London - Paris is Eurostar!).I agree people travel longer distances by plane, more of that later...! I think part of it is a difference in basic cultural attitude towards public transport, *but* heavily influenced by taxation on different fuels.
Ignore the social side of things for a moment, if gasoline *was* 5 dollars a gallon in the USA and there was nothing you could do about it, I really do think after a few years people would think about travelling in different ways.
New York - Detroit = 650 miles
London - Edinburgh = 496 miles
So actually I'd beg to differ that NY-Detroit = Lon-Edi-Lon. Cost is about 70 pounds for a return ticket by train, petrol for 1000 miles will cost approx 80 pounds, plane tickets go from about 60 if you get a cheap flight to about 120-150 for a standard scheduled. My personal rant is that air fuel has no tax on it, if it was taxed to the equivalent of car fuel, you can only imagine the price increases and how people's preference for travel modes might change.
A small aside - Edinburgh is in Scotland. Please don't confuse England and Britain/UK as being the same, it might get you into a bit of trouble when you are wandering around Edinburgh.
Jez, US public transport makes the UK system look good (how rude is that!).
I was over there in February and I tried to get a train from New York to Detroit. Kind of assumed I could wander down to the train station and book a ticket for the next day and it wouldn't cost too much. Bit like how you would pop into Kings Cross London and get a ticket for Edinburgh or Glasgow. Hmmm.... well it was going to take something like 12 hours for a start compared to an hour's flight and the cost was far worse than the flight. Would have to book my place on a sleeper.Nobody takes intercity trains over any distance as far as I can work out. Imagine if London to Edinburgh was going to take 12 hours by train, with only one or two a day going there? Even in the UK we'd get upset. As for what people think about Greyhound coaches...
I believe a city in the West Coast had a big bus service back in the 60s , all painted red, and the oil companies pretty well closed it down to force people into cars.
Long distance, it's the same as over here - flying - and guess what, same tax on air fuel - zero. Have you ever wondered why those flights across Europe are so cheap? zero tax on fuel. I think we'd be taking the ferry /Eurostar more often if the airlines had to pay equivalent taxes for all that gas.
Rant over! (In fairness I am pretty impressed by Santa Monica's blue buses and the New York Metro, they got me round ok).
I'd be interested to see the reaction in USA if gas prices were brought to European levels (in the UK we pay somewhat over 4 dollars a gallon). I think you'd see a shift towards more fuel efficient cars. Can't see it happening, mind...
How about :
"Don't invade countries, steal all their wealth, enslave their citizens, destroy their infrastructure and put in a puppet government otherwise it will become an economic basket case and in a hundred years time you will have to loan them millions of dollars to help them rebuild a basic infrastructure and not become a hotbed of hatred against your country"?
The current world is a result of previous generations empire-building. We should try our best to avoid these mistakes again. A lot of countries are in debt because they were forced into these situations by other countries, usually through military force.
As my friend in Cambodia said to me, it's hard to get excited about IT when you're trying to clear up the landmines that no one else cares about any more. It needs to be part of a bigger solution.
And we might have had two shuttle fleets not one, by all acccounts Buran was a better vehicle with greater potential. Whether that's true or not the two different engineering teams could have learnt a hell of a lot from each other. I reallllly hope the Buran team's knowledge and expertise is being used by somebody right now.
Do you really plan to be stuck on this planet for the next 4 billion years?
Well I kind of assumed I'd be dead within the next hundred, can you let me into your secret of near eternal life?
I dunno, how about anywhere you might want to do a bit of high tech / glam PR ...industry conventions, sales shows, University open days, art galleries - hey, the kind of places people hire this kit for in Europe or USA.... What a thought.
I agree it seems a bit of overkill for a school, but why not the above reasons?
.As for why do it, do you really think justification is required for a tech project on /. ? Seems a damn sight better use of tech than stuffing a computer into a rotting vegetable (halloween jack-o-computer). This guy might get a bit of a business out of it as well.
Cop this picture of Wattie (out of The Exploited) being dead serious in the 80s.
Yeah there were some hard edges as well, I got my copy of Dead Cities by The Exploited etc. (one of the best ever episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC, that was, when they appeared). Yeah the police moved in on shows and there was a fair bit of street fighting, but that first wave of punk really shook up the culture of the UK (sorry, can't speak for other countries), really changed things for ever.
Who cares if it all fragmented and moved in different directions quickly, I think that was part of its success. It was always a lot of people with a lot of ideas, and we had some damn fine silly fun in the 80s as well as the angry stuff as well. "Where's Captain Kirk?" by Spizzenergi, anybody?
It was Bill Grundy on Thames Today. Transcript is behind the hyperlink, Pistols and their friends mumbled some rude words in the interview and Grundy encouraged the naughty little punks to say something rude out loud.
"GRUNDY: Well keep going, chief. Keep going. Go on, you've got another ten seconds. Say something outrageous.".
Brief exchange ended up with Steve Jones saying "You fucking rotter!".
(Note for non UK folk: the word 'fucking' was most definitely extremely shocking and banned on tv at that time of day in the 70's, and 'rotter' is the kind of word you would imagine a rich aristocratic kid to use with his school chums. Stick them together and you have comic genius ;-) )
Hehe but that's the point, maaaan! You're there worrying about postmodernist intrepretations of popular cultural music, and _Sid_couldn't_play_ and _we_didn't_give_a_fuck!
What a breath of fresh air punk was. We all knew it was a laugh and it was taking the piss and if were in their boots we'd take the money and run! Skool kids wearing safety pins and singing "Frigging in the Rigging" in the school playground, punks on telly swearing at boring old middle aged presenters, bands that couldn't play a note and didn't care any more than their fans, the Metropolitan Police trying to ban the Never Mind the Bollocks album cover for obscenity and losing. Total breath of fresh air after the analytic self -infatuated prog rock triple album scene we'd had in the UK. Kicked against an incredibly conservative society and culture.
Wot a laugh! I think that's something a lot of these (mainly US) punk bands nowadays forget, they all take themselves terribly seriously..IT WAS A LAUGH! :-))
By the way, on your list of 'important artists' I think you missed the seminal band The Snivelling Shits.