Dug up all the strong-rooted prairie plants so that we could plant crops there, and the first really big storm that came along made a hell of a mess. Turned the Aral Sea into a poisonous sump. Wiped out a whole lot of species. Introduced other species that severely disturbed the local dynamic equilibrium.
When humans set out to change the Earth they're pretty good at it. When they interfere with systems that they don't understand, unforeseen consequences occur, especially if they happen to coincide with undesirable natural phenomena. I think you underestimate the human power to screw things up.
Any way you look at it, dumping large quantities of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere ain't really a great idea.
Its cause is not fully understood, but that hardly matters; we have to live with it no matter what causes it.
Ever notice how it's the same deluded people (political conservatives, for some reason) who claim that evolution doesn't happen (hello? antibiotic-resistant bugs?) as claim that global warming doesn't happen?
Barnum tried to buy the Cardiff Giant off its owners, but they wouldn't sell. So he had one of his own carved, and traveled around exhibiting it. Barnum was showing a fake fake.
In chemistry, you can get funding for anything as long as you can relate it to cancer, no matter how tenuously.
"Terrorism" is the "cancer" of security folks -- magically gets them support and funding. Used to be Communism, but that is SO 20th century.
If we ever reach a state where we don't have anything to be afraid of, the security-freaks will have to invent something in order to keep their jobs. Oh, wait...
The only function of the wavebubble is to violate the law and screw things up for other people. It has no positive use, full stop. We use the same reasoning to ban switchblades and private ownership of atomic bombs.
Perhaps you'd like to see atom bombs legalized for everyone? Right to bear arms, and all that kind of thing?
If you think a hundred million people were killed by gun control, you are seriously confused -- they were shot by people with guns. (And please, please don't repeat the tired old lie that if they'd had guns they could have prevented dictatorship. Not even the NRA believes that hogwash any more. Hitler was democratically voted into power.)
They took everybody's weapons away, provided full employment (even if most of the jobs were pointless makework), and had a near-zero crime rate. Then the Soviet Union fell apart, guns came back in, and now Russia is run by gangsters.
Don't tell me gun control doesn't work. You just have to take ALL the guns away. I have no problem with that.
I'm going to use my gun to force her to give up HER gun before she has the chance to find it in her handbag (how many women are prepared to wear shoulder holsters with their cocktail dresses?). Oh, and rapists don't generally attack women who are accompanied by men -- and when they do, it's because the rapist pulled his gun first.
The problem with relying on "packing heat" to keep the streets safe is that criminals can always pack more heat than civilians can, and will use it without hesitation or regard for innocent bystanders. Yet gun enthusiasts persist in obstructing every effort to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
I oppose governmental controls on speech and prefer self-control. Ministries of Acceptability are not acceptable. Saying, "Hey, everybody! Here's how you can totally screw up the emergency services!" is just, well, sort of a bad idea, don't you think?
The only defense against anarchy in a free society is self-control.
The next time I grab a 15-year-old girl to rape and kill her, I'm going to be sure I've got one of these things along just so she can't use her cell phone in last few seconds before I have total control of her.
Could also be great fun at the scene of fires or disasters, jamming firefighters' or ambulances' radios.
For that matter, take one down to the airport and watch the fun begin with air traffic control.
Just because you CAN build something doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. I'm all for freedom of speech, but could we exercise a little self-control over what we say and publish?
They don't like to hear that grandma at the nursing home who plays gin rummy on Yahoo is a gamer. But the opinions of hardcore gamers are getting to be less and less important as the market expands. Grandma is seeing the ads that pay for gin rummy, and that's what counts.
"Gamer" no longer refers to an elite group of nerds with too much time on their hands. It means anybody who plays computer and video games (and mobile phone games, and handheld games, and...), because that's where the money comes from.
Dream on, dream on, dream on. Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away.
This reasoning makes about as much sense as saying that the recession will cause wanna-be novelists to stop writing. Nothing will stop them writing, and nothing will stop hackers hacking (except maybe a power outage).
Why should I tolerate the abusive behavior of some pimpled 13-year-old virgin online when I can have a good time playing with someone I genuinely like?
The behavior in persistent worlds will only improve when they begin to impose cash fines for obnoxiousness on players' credit cards, doubling in amount with each incident. Failure to pay (i.e. card declined) locks up the account.
Apparently a number of people who try to slit their wrists do so with common kitchen knives. Is there a technical solution to this? Should kitchen knives all be sold as dull as a butter knife?
A dumbass is a dumbass. If you blow out your ears with your iPod you have no one to blame but yourself.
Clearly some buffoon at Amazon imported a whole lot of them and now they're trying to get rid of them. Yet another example of financial incompetence that's dragging the world economy down.
Nobody in Europe is crass enough to watch, and certainly not stupid enough to pay for, the A-Team. They might as well give it away; it has no value on this continent.
It costs money and does not generate any revenue (unlike college sports, which the colleges are now so dependent on for income that not even a 12-step program could help them). It makes heroes out of kids who are good at running, jumping, and throwing and catching balls. Yeah, those are skills the world really needs.
Put all the money spent on high school sports into hiring GOOD math and science teachers. The reason math and science teaching sucks is that really bright, charismatic people can find better-paying jobs elsewhere.
If we ban high school sports, college recruiters will go away and college sports scholarships will dry up, because nobody will know who's good at running and jumping. The colleges will have to play with whoever turns up, like they used to in the old days. College sports will be exciting and fun again, instead of being semi-professional. In the meantime, the sports scholarship money can go to recruiting math and science whizzes, who are the people that universities are intended for in the first place -- not runners and jumpers.
Make heroes out of the kids who win the science fair, or the ones who ace the math SATs. Load them down with scholarships. Print their pictures in the newspaper. Send 'em to meet the President. Hire hot models (male and female) to be in pictures with them to give the impression that they're sexy. The message will get out.
Before long, however, we'll do electrolysis of water using electricity from nukes and clean sources.
Fossil fuels are done -- get used to it. In 100 years we're gonna seem like the Victorians with their enthusiasm for steam (and lung disease), and science fiction writers will be writing "petro-punk."
If the National Security Agency is doing a lot of toking, that would explain quite a bit about their recent performance... millions of innocent Americans being spied on without warrants, and Osama Bin Laden still out there.
It was clearly written by a Democrat. A good Republican should be doing his or her best to discourage or even prevent new voters from registering. That trick of using recent mortgage foreclosures to challenge voter registrations on the grounds that the voter no longer has a clear home address... sheer genius, my hat is off to whatever GOP'er thought up something that low.
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> On that we agree. CO2 isn't one of said toxic chemicals though.
Try breathing it instead of oxygen.
Dug up all the strong-rooted prairie plants so that we could plant crops there, and the first really big storm that came along made a hell of a mess. Turned the Aral Sea into a poisonous sump. Wiped out a whole lot of species. Introduced other species that severely disturbed the local dynamic equilibrium.
When humans set out to change the Earth they're pretty good at it. When they interfere with systems that they don't understand, unforeseen consequences occur, especially if they happen to coincide with undesirable natural phenomena. I think you underestimate the human power to screw things up.
Any way you look at it, dumping large quantities of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere ain't really a great idea.
Its cause is not fully understood, but that hardly matters; we have to live with it no matter what causes it.
Ever notice how it's the same deluded people (political conservatives, for some reason) who claim that evolution doesn't happen (hello? antibiotic-resistant bugs?) as claim that global warming doesn't happen?
Barnum tried to buy the Cardiff Giant off its owners, but they wouldn't sell. So he had one of his own carved, and traveled around exhibiting it. Barnum was showing a fake fake.
"Compliance officer" in an IT business... you crack me up. You should take your show on the road.
Hospitals have compliance officers because a) they're regulated, inspected, etc. and b) people can die and they can be sued to Kingdom Come.
The IT business is about as regulated as Somalia.
In chemistry, you can get funding for anything as long as you can relate it to cancer, no matter how tenuously.
"Terrorism" is the "cancer" of security folks -- magically gets them support and funding. Used to be Communism, but that is SO 20th century.
If we ever reach a state where we don't have anything to be afraid of, the security-freaks will have to invent something in order to keep their jobs. Oh, wait...
The only function of the wavebubble is to violate the law and screw things up for other people. It has no positive use, full stop. We use the same reasoning to ban switchblades and private ownership of atomic bombs.
Perhaps you'd like to see atom bombs legalized for everyone? Right to bear arms, and all that kind of thing?
If you think a hundred million people were killed by gun control, you are seriously confused -- they were shot by people with guns. (And please, please don't repeat the tired old lie that if they'd had guns they could have prevented dictatorship. Not even the NRA believes that hogwash any more. Hitler was democratically voted into power.)
They took everybody's weapons away, provided full employment (even if most of the jobs were pointless makework), and had a near-zero crime rate. Then the Soviet Union fell apart, guns came back in, and now Russia is run by gangsters.
Don't tell me gun control doesn't work. You just have to take ALL the guns away. I have no problem with that.
I'm going to use my gun to force her to give up HER gun before she has the chance to find it in her handbag (how many women are prepared to wear shoulder holsters with their cocktail dresses?). Oh, and rapists don't generally attack women who are accompanied by men -- and when they do, it's because the rapist pulled his gun first.
The problem with relying on "packing heat" to keep the streets safe is that criminals can always pack more heat than civilians can, and will use it without hesitation or regard for innocent bystanders. Yet gun enthusiasts persist in obstructing every effort to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
I oppose governmental controls on speech and prefer self-control. Ministries of Acceptability are not acceptable. Saying, "Hey, everybody! Here's how you can totally screw up the emergency services!" is just, well, sort of a bad idea, don't you think?
The only defense against anarchy in a free society is self-control.
The next time I grab a 15-year-old girl to rape and kill her, I'm going to be sure I've got one of these things along just so she can't use her cell phone in last few seconds before I have total control of her.
Could also be great fun at the scene of fires or disasters, jamming firefighters' or ambulances' radios.
For that matter, take one down to the airport and watch the fun begin with air traffic control.
Just because you CAN build something doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. I'm all for freedom of speech, but could we exercise a little self-control over what we say and publish?
They don't like to hear that grandma at the nursing home who plays gin rummy on Yahoo is a gamer. But the opinions of hardcore gamers are getting to be less and less important as the market expands. Grandma is seeing the ads that pay for gin rummy, and that's what counts.
"Gamer" no longer refers to an elite group of nerds with too much time on their hands. It means anybody who plays computer and video games (and mobile phone games, and handheld games, and...), because that's where the money comes from.
Dream on, dream on, dream on.
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away.
This reasoning makes about as much sense as saying that the recession will cause wanna-be novelists to stop writing. Nothing will stop them writing, and nothing will stop hackers hacking (except maybe a power outage).
Why should I tolerate the abusive behavior of some pimpled 13-year-old virgin online when I can have a good time playing with someone I genuinely like?
The behavior in persistent worlds will only improve when they begin to impose cash fines for obnoxiousness on players' credit cards, doubling in amount with each incident. Failure to pay (i.e. card declined) locks up the account.
Apparently a number of people who try to slit their wrists do so with common kitchen knives. Is there a technical solution to this? Should kitchen knives all be sold as dull as a butter knife?
A dumbass is a dumbass. If you blow out your ears with your iPod you have no one to blame but yourself.
Clearly some buffoon at Amazon imported a whole lot of them and now they're trying to get rid of them. Yet another example of financial incompetence that's dragging the world economy down.
Nobody in Europe is crass enough to watch, and certainly not stupid enough to pay for, the A-Team. They might as well give it away; it has no value on this continent.
It's called the WORLD WIDE Web, assholes.
I don't think I can take seriously the opinions of anybody so badly-educated that they think "surveilled" is a word.
It costs money and does not generate any revenue (unlike college sports, which the colleges are now so dependent on for income that not even a 12-step program could help them). It makes heroes out of kids who are good at running, jumping, and throwing and catching balls. Yeah, those are skills the world really needs.
Put all the money spent on high school sports into hiring GOOD math and science teachers. The reason math and science teaching sucks is that really bright, charismatic people can find better-paying jobs elsewhere.
If we ban high school sports, college recruiters will go away and college sports scholarships will dry up, because nobody will know who's good at running and jumping. The colleges will have to play with whoever turns up, like they used to in the old days. College sports will be exciting and fun again, instead of being semi-professional. In the meantime, the sports scholarship money can go to recruiting math and science whizzes, who are the people that universities are intended for in the first place -- not runners and jumpers.
Make heroes out of the kids who win the science fair, or the ones who ace the math SATs. Load them down with scholarships. Print their pictures in the newspaper. Send 'em to meet the President. Hire hot models (male and female) to be in pictures with them to give the impression that they're sexy. The message will get out.
Before long, however, we'll do electrolysis of water using electricity from nukes and clean sources.
Fossil fuels are done -- get used to it. In 100 years we're gonna seem like the Victorians with their enthusiasm for steam (and lung disease), and science fiction writers will be writing "petro-punk."
See, there's this thing called electricity. You get it from wind and solar panels. And if you run it through plain water, you get hydrogen and oxygen.
If the National Security Agency is doing a lot of toking, that would explain quite a bit about their recent performance... millions of innocent Americans being spied on without warrants, and Osama Bin Laden still out there.
It was clearly written by a Democrat. A good Republican should be doing his or her best to discourage or even prevent new voters from registering. That trick of using recent mortgage foreclosures to challenge voter registrations on the grounds that the voter no longer has a clear home address... sheer genius, my hat is off to whatever GOP'er thought up something that low.