And you thought that I was going to say something vulgar and metaphorical about the president....

No, I'm reminded of the atomic-pile simulation that used to be taught to kids. You remember, the one where there is a big floor filled with set mousetraps. And each trap has two ping-pong balls ~gently~ placed on the spring. A single ball is tossed in, and ~zap!~ a trap goes off, more balls are released, more traps go off, a few here and there, and then the big crescendo... balls flying everywhere.

Climate change is like that. We are just seeing the beginning now. It's small enough that stupid people can convince themselves that it's not happening. But as the Siberian tundra melts, and the 100,000,000 year old methane stored there gets released, and the polar ice caps melt, and the changing salinity alters the north-south oceanic current flows, and the mean temperature of the tropic regions rises to 140 degrees F for an average day.... well, balls flying everywhere.

A billion dollars tossed at a global problem of this magnitude of problem is nothing. A billion dollars is about the size of the heavy-metal music industry, a heaping spoonful of the toilet paper industry, and most of the "Hello Kitty" trinket industry. More chickensh*t public posturing from a man who has spent most of his adult life publicly posturing about chickenshit.

National Geographic recently published a series of maps of what the Earth would look like in 100 or so years from now when the ice caps have melted. They missed out on the fact that most of the earth except for the polar regions will be bright yellow instead of green. Yellow as in areas where nothing will grow and nothing will live. You probable live in one of these regions now. Best to spend the next decade ignoring the bozospeak coming from corporate and governmental entities. Instead find a place on those maps that presently has temperate weather, internet access, indoor plumbing, and civilized people.

  Move there; move your family there. And as the decades go by and all the billions of doomed people start to realize that they deserve to be in that place instead of you, well, prepare yourself to have to deal with them like they are all one big surplus giraffe.

Gnome Sane?

No comment necessary. Stupid is what stupid does. This is South Carolina. North Carolina is just the same, all you do is just change the name. In fact the whole South is like this. And not to put too fine a point on it, every point on earth south of the Mason Dixon latitude line is like this. (except Australia and New Zealand).

Don't move there. Don't take a job there. Unless you have the money to deal with stupid sh*t like this.
But you'll need a lot of money. Because there are a lot of just plain stupid people in the South.

And you thought that I was going to say something vulgar and metaphorical about Mr. Kerry....

No, I'm reminded of the atomic-pile simulation that used to be taught to kids. You remember, the one where there is a big floor filled with set mousetraps. And each trap has two ping-pong balls ~gently~ placed on the spring. A single ball is tossed in, and ~zap!~ a trap goes off, more balls are released, more traps go off, a few here and there, and then the big crescendo... balls flying everywhere.

Climate change is like that. We are just seeing the beginning now. It's small enough that stupid people can convince themselves that it's not happening. But as the Siberian tundra melts, and the 100,000,000 year old methane stored there gets released, and the polar ice caps melt, and the changing salinity alters the north-south oceanic current flows, and the mean temperature of the tropic regions rises to 140 degrees F for an average day.... well, balls flying everywhere.

A billion dollars here and there tossed at a global problem of this magnitude of problem is nothing. A billion dollars is about the size of the heavy-metal music industry, a heaping spoonful of the toilet paper industry, and most of the "Hello Kitty" trinket industry.

National Geographic recently published a series of maps of what the Earth would look like in 100 or so years from now when the ice caps have melted. Indonesia was gone. John Kerry is just giving them a 'head's up" warning.

NG also missed out on the fact that most of the earth except for the polar regions will be bright yellow instead of green. Yellow as in areas where nothing will grow and nothing will live. You probable live in one of these regions now. Best to spend the next decade ignoring the bozospeak coming from corporate and governmental entities. Instead find a place on those maps that presently has temperate weather, internet access, indoor plumbing, and civilized people.

  Move there; move your family there. And as the decades go by and all the billions of doomed people start to realize that they deserve to be in that place instead of you, well, prepare yourself to have to deal with them like they are all one big surplus giraffe.

Gnome Sane?

Get used professional MIDI tone modules on eBay for your musical instruments. The 10-20 year-old stuff is rapidly increasing in resale value so you can always resell any piece of equipment on eBay for what you paid for it.Get a Yamaha MOTIF, Korg Kronos, Roland Fantom G, or something in this class. The interfaces are awkward with lots of rack-mount front panel button pressing, but the sounds are good enough. You can build interactive MIDI controllers with Arduinos to overcome the inherent user-interface difficulties of these MIDI modules.

    Try all the cheap and free software before buying anything. Anything that you buy that costs more than a few hundred dollars is going to make you sound like everyone else who bought the same program.

If you live in Norway, stick with proven technology. Like gasoline engines. Let's face it. Norway is often very cold in the winter. Cold enough that people die from cold unless they have machines to keep them warm. When you live in places that have extreme weather, you HAVE to accept that proven working technology like gasoline-engines-for -transportation overrides any emotional feelings of needing to serve as a test site for so-called green technology. In California it doesn't matter. But Norway's not California. If you fuck up and buy a 'green' car that won't start in the cold, then you die in the cold. Act accordingly. Nobody in California gives a shit whether or not you freeze to death because their technology failed.

    This very expensive automobile has demonstratively failed to meet the needs of people who live north of the 55th meridian. Norwegians should not buy it. Buy a Volvo: Swedes understand cold and their cars can be coaxed to start in extremely cold weather.

    And there is this briefly mentioned problem of the fucking Norwegian electrical connectors not mating with standard electric car connectors... You'all need to find the guy responsible for this, strip him to underwear, and dump out into the snow. Be sure to leave him with an electric heater that has a plug that just quite doesn't fit into the socket needed to stay alive. If he lives, then he won't be doing stupid shit like this any more. If he dies, well, just one more soul sacrifice to the Viking gods.

You never learned of subjunctive, conditional, imperative, indicative? All native english speakers I talk to said they did.

-- They learned a few of those terms when studying french. There's only one unusual use of pure subjunctive mode in English that I know of: the grammatically correct use of "if I were..." instead of the common form "if I was..."

French needs all of its tenses because it has such a high percentage of vowel-based phonemic constructions and the tenses (with all their slightly different endings) are needed to tell them apart.

French is now, always has been, and will continue to be the language of diplomacy. When you are in the presence of your enemies and they refuse to debase themselves by speaking your language and you would rather die than actually hear the sound of their language come out of your mouth, then you both speak French to each other. It's pretentious and stupid, but it works.

I learned a little French in secondary school. But no one (except for the Europeans) learns enough of a language in secondary school to actually speak or use the language. I am relearning French by using Hollywood movie DVDs. In North America all the DVDS of Hollywood movies have French language subtitles and audio dialog tracks. I watch the movie first in English to know what's going on. Then I set both the subtitles and audio track to French and re-watch it. They NEVER match because the subtitles are done in France and the audio dubbing is done in Quebec. It just means that we have to develop our ears to hear when the words spoken mean more-or-less what the subtitles are showing. As far as I can tell, this is the only realistic way to learn conversational French in the modern world (outside of actually being in Quebec or France). Since secondary school, I've been in francophonic countries two or three times and could never understand anything that was said to me. Now after about a year of DVD movie training, I understand about 30% of spoken dialog in French audio tracks of Hollywood films.
    French films are worthless for this training as they almost never have subtitles in french (for deaf people, etc...). Only two DVDs I've found had french audio that exactly matched the french subtitles: Luc Besson's 'La femme Nikita' (1992 with Tcherky Karlo and Jean Reno) and Truffaut's 'La Nuit Americain' (1974 with gorgeous Jackie Bissett)

Europe is nothing more than a bunch of weird small countries. Always has been, always will be.

Lighten up on the Americans. Their famed lack of precision knowledge in any individual field is basically inconsequential now that there are Google computers that can instantly deliver the general facts that we laugh at them for not knowing.

Here's your best friend's conversation:

(American receptionist) Hello,
(your best friend) Allo Bonjour Est-ce que vous parlez francais? Je voudrais que mon order soit avait envoyer a Europe? Combien ca coutera?
(Amer) Sorry, I don't speak spanish.
(your best friend) I want to have my order sent to Europe.
(Amer gal) What part of the USA is Europe?
(your best friend) No Europe, Europe.. Specifically to the Netherlands. You know Holland? with dikes, tulips, windmills, Heiniken beer.
-- superior European snicker and contemptuous laughter --
(Amer gal) Oh, that Europe! Wij zullen het uit aan u vanavond verschepen. Dank u voor het roepen!

In 25 years the Baby Boomers will be just as influential as they are now. But there will be a lot fewer of them around.

The English language is not dying. In fact, it is the fastest growing language in the world. When Finnish businessmen sell telephones to Indonesia in exchange for tropical wood lumber and spices, no one speaks Finnish or Indonesian. They speak English.

Also note that in 25 years, when people who only speak English need to communicate with peasants that only speak legacy languages, they will smile gracefully and speak into a microphone and their personal-translator unit will reproduce their translated words into that legacy language.

It's not that difficult to learn sufficient Spanish as an adult. About one third of the vocabulary is cognitively identical to English. Its grammar is functionally similar to all the other Romance languages. The Romance linguistic framework is not hard for people who have learned English in a structured school environment, because other Romance language speakers (the French and the Normans) ruled England for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages and set the grammar rules that continue to be used to this day.

Wasn't it George Gilder who said that the only languages that anyone needed to know to be successful today are English and C++?

So what that Kentucky uses a programming language like BASIC to satisfy their foreign language 'requirement'? It's not like anyone speaks a foreign language in Kentucky. Except Spanish, and the Mexicans aren't going to know the difference between Kentuckians speaking KY_BASIC and KY_Spanish anyway.

10 ? "I'm smart, educated, trained, and ready for world-class productivity employment"
20 Goto 10

Was it Bill Gates who invented using the question mark as the PRINT token? If I recall correctly, he personally brought back to life the BASIC language by writing assembly language interpreters for every microprocessor available in the 1970s. Does he speak any foreign language?

I'm always stunned and amazed at what so-called academic professionals will write about the near future. This one is 'predicting' that there will be mostly electric cars in , what, 16 years and that gasoline engine service stations are going to obsolete and gone by that time?. He actually gets paid for this?

    Girlfriend, in 16 years the only thing that is really likely to change is the color of the table counter-tops at the local Burger King and the name on the alcohol/caffeine combo drink sold at the Arco Mini-mart. Plus the annoying junk-mail and stuff that you are throwing away now is going worth a lot of money to retarded collectors of 2010-era nostalgia that have too much money.

    These guys are almost as dumb as the Hollywood types that do CGI graphics of cities 20-years in the future that look like cities may be in 1000 years if techno development continues at the same pace that it has in the past 100 years. Like the 2010 city in 1983's Blade Runner.

$100,000 is only 200 girl/hours in Back Bay Boston. Are you sure that that is enough research? It would probably buy more research in Africa, but you better be sure that they work before you do any advanced research there.

    Speaking from one girl to another, are you sure that all your gentleman callers actually know that the lube goes on the !inside! of the condom? And that if they are using gelatin based lube like KY that they need to add 3-4 drops of water to a toothbrush-sized dab of KY to make sure that his fully-erect penis will glide between the lube layer and the condom side?

    Girlfriend, this is when you start 'training' the boy, i.e. getting him fully erect and in your vagina and keeping himself in a state where he is just balancing on the edge of ejacuation, but still being ~just able to keep it from blasting off.

I will love Prince of Persia as long as I live because it was a formative game for me. It taught me to have guts and just jump, but to practice my ass off before doing so. I will die at some point though (probably), and so will everyone else that feels like me. So I think odds are pretty strong that games like this will fade into oblivion. Think about it this way: do you know what board game your great-great-great-grandpa liked?

This is a great assassination tool! Make it strong enough to carry a small anti-personnel bomb. Say for example a wad of C4 explosive about the size of a walnut surrounded by B-Bs or small ball bearings. Use the camera to get it close to your target. Use the novelty value of the device as a way to allow it to get close to the person who needs killing. Then when within range, BOOM! using a radio controlled detonator.

    Think: " Black Sunday " (a 1976 film with Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller about a massive terrorist attack on the NFL SuperBowl) using this device focused on an individual instead of the Goodyear blimp.

    I'm a German-American blond male. Of course, I think like this.

My aunt is an original programmer from the 1960s. She programs satellite orbits to keep the metal boxes circling the earth. She knew Grace Hopper. I think that she has a Knuth check for $2.56.
Men find it fascinating that they can build a machine that can change its physical operation by the manipulation of symbols. It is the primal Promethean creation ability.
Women get the same emotional fulfillment through the creation of real living human beings. Women get the thrill of creating real life; creating artificial life doesn't hold the same kick.
It has nothing to do with sexism. In fact I personally don't think that sexism, as the feminist professors have defined it, actually exists.
When computers get as smart, cute, and interesting as babies, women will become more interested in guiding their development.

We need to face the possibility that Egypt is a basket case and we might just have to let it go back to the 13th century. If they cut the cable that connects them to the civilized world, then let them reconnect it when they are ready and able to. It's not our concern.

www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ME10Ak01.html

  We can't do everything for everybody in the world. At best we can save 'our people' techies, rock musicians, and gays, from Egypt's mad mullahs and the hungry hoards. I realize that this is a complicated issue. But it all boils down to the two sentences above.