Well, thinking about it, I can see a market for curios and souvenirs between the two planets. Even factoring in the extreme fuel costs to haul them, some+ people will want them precisely because they're extremely expensive, as status symbols. Heck, maybe even some wines and exotic fruits and such. I can see some Andromedan billionaire flaunting a bottle of genuine californian vodka at a party, or some Earth billionaire flaunting a precious bottle of genuine Andromedan "Targ Piss" beer.
I just don't see the "conquistador" scenario I was answering to. Most of the costs there would be in the transport, and actually hauling an army to conquer whoever is making those curios would cost more than you save there.
Libertarian dogma that ignores the advances brought by collective solutions like interpersonal trade and even cities. Do you selfish apes never tire of using the safeties and niceties of the modern civilization to pine for the self-sufficiency of the stone age?
Read some Adam Smith instead of Ayn "Freaky" Rand - or even Aleister Crowley.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Since all girlfriends cost you money one way or another,
Girlfriends don't cost money, doing fun stuff together costs money. Mortgages costs money. Kids cost money. Girlfriends should, on average, have about just as much income as you do. And she gets that income from you, then she's not your girlfriend. There's another word for that.
So do we need to take Bender's lead and start to pollute like we've never polluted before?
Only if it's the right kind of pollution. Small particles high in the upper atmosphere is what we need.
'We've got to do some work about having them believe and feel that printing isn't a sort of environmental negative.'
But it is an environmental negative.
What's the confusion over? It often requires work to convince people of lies. The RIAA, coal, pharmecutical and other industries only make it -look- easy.
I tried out the voice activation on my new netbook just this past Saturday, and the first thing I discovered was it won't work when the TV is on. So much for using it at Felber's with all the noisy drunks, except maybe outside in the beer garden.
IIRC, it required something like 8M RAM at a time when 4 was considered generous. Only power-users had that much RAM, and MS admitted that BoB wasn't for power-users.
"Vote your heart. "
No no a thousand times NO! Vote with your brain. THINK. voting with your heart just gets people to vote what feel right without any logical decision making, without thinking about a persons past action.
Voting with your heart means people just vote whichever party the people at the church vote for. Voting with ones heart is why Neo-Cons have just about taken' over the country and shove their stupid ass religion down our throats.
Do all the consoles support OpenGL? My understanding was this wasn't the case.
[...] before you go on about how 'quaint' CDs are, keep in mind how nice it is to own something physical. You have, as a physical object, evidence of your licensing of personal enjoyment of that media.
Though the short life expectancy of CDs appears to have been greatly exaggerated, they do have a finite lifespan while music in a more transient form can happily be saved from one hermetically sealed hard disk to the next. Either way, all the CRC checks in the world can't guarantee immortality of any data.
Speaking of transient... I've lived most of my teens going from one place to the next, often losing or giving away my possessions in the process. Those quaint, physical goods meant bullshit to me sleeping in an alley or at so-and-so's couch for the week.
What did comfort me was recovering collections of music from friends I shared with since the days of Napster, an impossibility if relying solely on CDs, regardless of the legality.
I'm an immaterial girl living in an immaterial world. Well, except for my recent journey into my PS3 and buying up used games for it. At least Blu-rays are a little sturdier than DVDs and CDs.
If you were going to the hospital for open heart surgery, would you want the lowest paid doctor that has no incentive for good performance cutting you open?
Are you really saying that most surgeons don't take their job seriously? That their main motivation for keeping you alive and doing a good job isn't their sense of ethics and pride as a doctor, but their income?
I'd want the super-star doctor that drives the Porche.
There is a Porsche in the staff parking lot of our public hospital. Some governments actually pay their doctors quite well.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
