Now read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and count how many times the word the word "nigger" is used and think about the context of what you are reading before you recoil from seeing letters arranged on pages that make you feel....uncomfortable.

Other suggested reading:
http://www.tommyduggan.com/teacher.html

Oh, and Joseph Conrad "NIgger of the Narcissus" ??...Here's a moronic move by the publisher re-issuing the book in 2009(about the time when all this N-Word nonsense started??) written in 1897, the new printing calls it, "The N-Word of the Narcissus"
in a dull and vapid move to not hurt anyone's wittle feeewings when gazing at it on the shelf??! WTF?! Censorship of an issue someone has with semantics and etymology, etc....ludicrous.

Racist books should be read to kids to school them on HISTORY as well as guide them in a path to understanding the species and the social cauldron we live in now. You can't help the old fuckers, they're gonna have to work it out on their own...But please, teaching your children to reference a word by it's first letter?? Someone hand me that airplane bag, still got a few hours left on the flight.

I lapse into this diatribe for your benefit and edification EDB, not trying to be mean-I believe the recent fervor over Django Unchained got me back on the subject, as well as the inappropriate title of this offering.

I also believe that it is part of the natural order of the species to survive, and to avail oneself of all the tools necessary to do so during one's tenure here should be a no-brainer to modern man with an I.Q. of 90 or above, hence my stance on being able to bear arms with as many bullets as needed to accomplish the task by birthright-Why should only cunts have guns, eh? Makes no sense.

Hope you understand my stance on guns now...I ain't no ya-hoo and I know my way around all the guns I own and the ones I've had a chance to get my hands on after about 50 rounds with an unfamiliar handgun?? Holes in holes at 10 yards, all day long!

Oh and BTW, I called that phone number on this advert. "No Longer in Service"

Is this freal??

I like to explain memory vs storage like this:
Memory is just like a person's memory. When that person dies, nobody knows what they were thinking unless they wrote it down.

Being morbid is not just for my amusement, you can also bet it will stick with the person.

While computers operate in essentially the same way now as they did then, and while stupid people are just as stupid now as they were then, what's changed is that you no longer need to know all this stuff. Anything off the shelf is going to be more than capable of handling the things stupid people are looking to do.

Dear Lego, Consumer Services.

From the day I saw it on the shelf I've wanted the Star Wars Jabba's Palace Lego set. It looks relay cool and it comes with a Lego Jabba, the only set that does. It is my dream to own this set but my wife says, "Not in this lifetime are we spending $150 on a Lego set." (only she used some colourful metaphors.) My dreams have been crushed. If you can think of a way that I might be able to acquire one of these (perhaps from corporate headquarters), I would be happy to listen to your suggestions.
Sincerely, A lifelong Lego and Star Wars Fan,
Sagemind

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/9516_Jabba%27s_Palace?file=9516_alt1.png

Well it's clearly Canon gear, but I can't make out the exact models.
If he shoots for NatGeo, it's bound to be all top shelf stuff, although it doesn't look like he went with a 1D variant. Probably to save weight and be able to conceal it easier. Definitely a fullframe though, so perhaps a 5D.

No clue on the lens, but it's an L prime between 200 and 400mm.

In reply to this comment by ant:
>> ^PlayhousePals:

>> ^ant:
>> ^PlayhousePals:
>> ^ant:
>> ^PlayhousePals:
length=18
Must have been a shallow one

Imagine an 8+ sized.

No thanks ... been in a couple nearing 7.0 that's enough for me =o(

Which ones and where? The biggest and closest was near L.A. of 6.1 IIRC. As a callow, I just left my ant nest with my queen ant and was walking to my school bus pickup spot. I didn't feel it at first until my queen told me to stop and things were shaking. I saw windows were shaking/vibrating and stuff. Scary! My first (earth)quake ever in my life!

A 6.5 and a 6.8 ... both in Seattle. My first experience occurred as I was walking through a park on my way to grade school one spring morning. It struck me as odd that there were no birds to be seen [or heard]. A few minutes later I was standing on the playfield, waiting for school to begin, when I noticed a series of rolling waves in the asphalt heading toward me. Then came a deafening rumble as I watched chimney's collapse off several houses across the street. Two story high windows behind me were bowing in and out as the cleaners fell off the scaffolding. I was barely able to keep my footing. Our school was the only one in the neighborhood that remained open that day. It had been rebuilt after it had been destroyed in a 7.1 shaker back in 1949 [before my time]. Scary stuff indeed!


Wow, I remember seeing/hearing the big quake in Seattle a few years ago. Are/Were you still up there and felt that one?


More than a few years ... I think you are referring to the 6.8 on feb 28, 2001. I was asleep ... it jolted awake. Two of my neighbors lost their chimney's in that one. No damage to my house, just some pictures tilted and the contents of one display shelf were thrown across the room. I shoulda clued in that something was up when my cat wouldn't come in to sleep with me [which was highly unusual]. He ended up running to the basement and would not come out from behind the furnace for three days =o(

I love Hitchcock. I have the Truffaut interview handy on my shelf.

Hmmm, favorite... probably Dial M for Murder (the remake).

Only if it's top shelf. >> ^00Scud00:

I'm not really into drugs, can I trade that marijuana in for a forth pussy?

>> ^Reefie:

Access denied. Access denied. Access denied access denied accessdenied accessdeniedaccessdenied ... Access Granted.


So weird that you picked that. I just pulled that movie off my shelf to watch it again.

You know in part, I understand the companies point of view. Markups protect their software from reverse engineering, and also protect them from people who don't return equipment thinking they will just buy the box and not pay the rental on it. Also, you seem to think that the company is out to screw the customer, its not the case at all. I don't have to apologive to see the rational behind these actions, they make perfect sense and keep the resposibility on the customer for leased equipment. Also, as I said before this guy should not be paying anything himself because Geico should be covering this loss. This is another good reason not to forgive this fee, because it should reasonably be covered, thus neither the victim or the media company is bearing the burden.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^jmd:
#1 DVR's are always marked up higher then their raw components. It is the usual tax on having the convenience of the set top box.
#2 DVR with cable decoding hardware like this are generally constructed a bit better then off the shelf hardware thus adding to the cost. Also the cable decoder hardware itself is always expensive. The equipment is built to go through more then one customer in its life span.
#3 the dvr might have offered advanced features like whole house DVR (even in consumer Tivo boxs, this is big money) even if the user didn't pay for them.
The finance department doesn't go out of there way to gouge customers who have to pay for damaged hardware. Instead it is customers finding out that the finance departments are getting ripped off on the hardware they pay for.

Ok I have another question. What kind of fucking asshole defends a giant corporation like Verizon against the common man? In the war against these fucks, you apologists are first to go!

>> ^Kalle:

One serious question that bothers me is.. why isnt it possible to use gravity as an energy source?
Would such a machine be a perpetual motion machine?

There is a bottom to a gravity well (apart from Black Holes? I don't know ). Say you drop an object and harvest some of its kinetic energy as it falls...what do you do once it reaches the bottom of the well? You must exert energy to pull it back out of the well, and that energy is greater than what you gained from dropping it. In a sense a pendulum makes this transaction with every swing. It does it very efficiently, only losing a fraction of its energy with each exchange but none the less it does lose energy. In a sense we never truly generate energy, we simply move it around. We break chemical bonds and withdraw a portion of the energy that was needed to make those bonds. Whenever we put an object with any mass on a high shelf we use some our energy and give it potential energy. Should it fall from the shelf this potential is converted to kinetic. The most plentiful supply of locked away energy? Probably mass. The speed of light squared is a big number, as GeesussFreek says, the future is probably fusion. If we can convert just a tiny fraction of this planets mass to energy cheaply and safely then our energy problems are more or less solved.

Anyway, I hope that somewhat answered your question. Its one of those questions that on the face of it seems simply to answer but once I tried I realised it wasn't so easy

To me this object looks like an extremely efficient pendulum. I actually love its design. The fact the ball "orbits" is actually very apt. I don't think its perpetual motion, but if it really had been going at near constant speed for that long then it is still a very impressive piece of engineering. He should patent and start making more. I'd bet people would pay a pretty sum for a scaled down version sitting on their desk. I would. Even better, put a lightbulb in the centre, surround it with 8 concentric rings for each planet and tweak the weights/magnets so the balls orbit at approximately the right speed...that would be fucking sweet.

I'm not sure if you intended to sound like a dick, but you fail in the use of the sarcasm check box.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^jmd:
#1 DVR's are always marked up higher then their raw components. It is the usual tax on having the convenience of the set top box.
#2 DVR with cable decoding hardware like this are generally constructed a bit better then off the shelf hardware thus adding to the cost. Also the cable decoder hardware itself is always expensive. The equipment is built to go through more then one customer in its life span.
#3 the dvr might have offered advanced features like whole house DVR (even in consumer Tivo boxs, this is big money) even if the user didn't pay for them.
The finance department doesn't go out of there way to gouge customers who have to pay for damaged hardware. Instead it is customers finding out that the finance departments are getting ripped off on the hardware they pay for.

Ok I have another question. What kind of fucking asshole defends a giant corporation like Verizon against the common man? In the war against these fucks, you apologists are first to go!

#1 DVR's are always marked up higher then their raw components. It is the usual tax on having the convenience of the set top box.

#2 DVR with cable decoding hardware like this are generally constructed a bit better then off the shelf hardware thus adding to the cost. Also the cable decoder hardware itself is always expensive. The equipment is built to go through more then one customer in its life span.

#3 the dvr might have offered advanced features like whole house DVR (even in consumer Tivo boxs, this is big money) even if the user didn't pay for them.

The finance department doesn't go out of there way to gouge customers who have to pay for damaged hardware. Instead it is customers finding out that the finance departments are getting ripped off on the hardware they pay for.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^arekin:
>> ^Yogi:
I'm sorry but what HIGH Amazing Technology is in a Cable Box that makes it cost more than my last 3 top of the line PCs combined? That's utter BS.

Depends on the cable box really, DVR's have a replacement value of arround $500 each, an EMTA is $300-$600 (depends on the model). I'm assuming we are talking about 4-5 boxes and a modem, which could well be around the amount he was billed. There may also be cable cards in some of his boxes that are billed separately, but they would not be near the cost. Also despite the 5-6 years he owned them cable technology doesn't change that rapidly, so a standard 2way set top box from back in 2000-2002 may still be refurbished and used and may still be a well functioning box. Electronics values depreciate based on reduced function (or continued ability to do what is needed in the current cable television market), and cable boxes don't tend to lose function (as long as they are not 1990's analog equipment), thus they don't tend to lose value.

That's fucking bullshit. For $500 I can build a top of the line PC, how in the fuck is a box with a hard drive in it that much money? That doesn't make any sense...is it made out of gold!?

>> ^braindonut:

I want a new Tie Fighter so bad... SO bad...
And none of this stupid arcade action. Joystick, keyboard... just like the old days, but new graphics.
I want this SO bad.


I still have my Wingman Extreme sitting high on a shelf, just waiting for a new PC Tie Fighter or MechWarrior. Single player campaigns/missions, LAN, no consolitis bullshit, FULLY configurable keyboard and controller assignments. I don't even care if it's purty. Just don't let LucasArts, Ubisoft, id, EA, Blizzard, or Microsoft anywhere near it.

Sadly, I've seen worse.

There was a guy where I used to work, brought a home-made cardboard gremlin thingie, with a shelf-hand. Had a bunch of demo-reels, so a few guys grabbed them, just to see. Later one of them spotted the guy hiding behind a potted plant in the lobby, he'd run out and replace the videos whenever the stock was running low.

I mean, I've gotta give him props for effort, but if he put half that effort into the actual reel he'd have been further ahead.