[Master Fibbles]

Cable/satellite is a waste of time. I suppose if you wanted to watch talking heads or mostly crap with the occasional gem...but you could just pay a little for something like Netflix and get what you want when you want it (mostly).

[Micky C]

I remember about 10 years ago, an Australian cable tv service, Foxtel (of which Fox holds the majority of shares), offered free installation and a month of channels so we took them up on it, and we discovered that when we had all the extra channels, we felt compelled to watch it to get our money's worth, and that we lived fine without it, so we chose not to renew our contract. Hey hey one big sentence, I probably should have broken that up more.

[Master Fibbles]

You should be executed for your comma splices. I am coming for you, Micky C.

[LeoD]

Mr.Flibble, on 02 April 2011 - 04:29 PM, said:

You should be executed for your comma splices. I am coming for you, Micky C.

In your perfect world I'd already be dead.

[Master Fibbles]

Maybe you are...maybe you are...

[Lunick]

Change of dicussion:

There is something I have been wondering for a while, what happened on 11 May 2009? Because that's the date when the record amount of users were on. I haven't been around Duke4 for a while and I can't seem to find what happened around then.

[Master Fibbles]

Isn't that when 3DR closed?

[Lunick]

Mr.Flibble, on 02 April 2011 - 06:37 PM, said:

Isn't that when 3DR closed?

Ah so it is, thanks

[Master Fibbles]

People panicked. There were a few places that suddenly had a ton of visitors and there was a jump in posts...but it was temporary.

Aside/new topic:

I have been seeing these commercials for the Chevy Volt. The car is charged through a standard outlet. It occurred to me that because people are stupid they are bound to destroy those batteries to a point that they can't hold even half their original charge within a year of ownership.

[Micky C]

So it's a purely electric car? The very concept is false advertising. When people think electric car, they think no greenhouse gas emissions, no burning of fossil fuels. Yet all it really does is shift the emissions and fuel consumption from coming out of your car to coming out of a power plant, people aren't saving anything except some trips to the petrol station. Unless you're in America where the majority of power is nuclear, which has other problems.
In Australia we're like 90% coal powered, there's probably a few natural gas power plants scattered around, there's one in my city. But I know for sure there's no nuclear power plants, at least not yet anyway. It's kind of weird when you think about it, because we're one of the top uranium mining countries in the world and we're selling it all to China. I wonder what they're doing with it

Actually we sell a lot of raw minerals to china and then buy them back processed with a huge overhead.

[CruX]

Micky C, on 03 April 2011 - 02:27 AM, said:

So it's a purely electric car? The very concept is false advertising. When people think electric car, they think no greenhouse gas emissions, no burning of fossil fuels. Yet all it really does is shift the emissions and fuel consumption from coming out of your car to coming out of a power plant, people aren't saving anything except some trips to the petrol station. Unless you're in America where the majority of power is nuclear, which has other problems.
In Australia we're like 90% coal powered, there's probably a few natural gas power plants scattered around, there's one in my city. But I know for sure there's no nuclear power plants, at least not yet anyway. It's kind of weird when you think about it, because we're one of the top uranium mining countries in the world and we're selling it all to China. I wonder what they're doing with it

Actually we sell a lot of raw minerals to china and then buy them back processed with a huge overhead.

The Nissan Leaf is another electric car. I think the best benefit that'd come out of it is the fact that it'd greatly reduce consumer's dependence on petroleum. And now that the price of oil is going right back through the roof, this has got to be more of a good thing than a bad thing.

...too bad the Leaf is completely out of my price range.

[Micky C]

That's true.

I'm worried about what's going to happen to the world after oil starts running out, we'll find an alternate means of energy easily enough but we also use oil for plastics and medicines and all sorts of things

[High Treason]

A lot of electricity is generated from the use of oil if I remember correctly.

I think the worst thing is those energy saving lightbulbs, when you first switch them on they use a hell of a lot of electricity as they require an arch to ignite. A regular lightbulb contains glass, copper and steel. Energy saving bulbs contain all kinds of nasty stuff, plastic, mercury, phosphor and poisonous gasses, I know what I would rather be throwing into the ground.

[CruX]

...and hot DAMN, the Volt is sexy. It looks kind of like a cross between a Camaro and a MiniCooper.

[Master Fibbles]

I don't think it is purely electric. I'm pretty sure there is a gas engine in there for trips over like 30 miles. But, like I said, people are stupid and are going to destroy the poor thing so that the gas engine will take over at 10 miles and then at some point it won't be an electric car anymore.

In regards to oil running out....the US has 300 years worth just sitting there but the pussy tree huggers won't let us drill it.

[CruX]

Mr.Flibble, on 03 April 2011 - 05:44 AM, said:

In regards to oil running out....the US has 300 years worth just sitting there

I'm assuming you're talking about the ANWR, and if you are, can I get a source on that figure? Because as of 2010, there's only about 900 million barrels thought to actually be there, and U.S consumption is just shy of 19 million barrels a day. At that rate, the ANWR only has enough oil to last about 40 or so years, not 300. And of course, that's assuming that everything pulled from the ANWR is kept just in the U.S.

Mr.Flibble, on 03 April 2011 - 05:44 AM, said:

but the pussy tree huggers won't let us drill it.

That's a pretty polarized thing to say. Sure, environmentalists have made it an issue, but there have been plenty of Republicans (the Bush family, ironically) that have opposed drilling as well. George W. Bush didn't start changing his tune on ANWR till 2008 when it looked like the U.S was on the cusp of an energy crisis. Before that, daddy Bush signed an executive order that banned offshore drilling, and John McCain opposes it as well (albeit he flip-flops on the issue quite a bit.) I wouldn't really call any of those three people "pussy tree huggers".

[Jeff]

EmericaSkater, on 03 April 2011 - 06:25 AM, said:

I'm assuming you're talking about the ANWR, and if you are, can I get a source on that figure? Because as of 2010, there's only about 900 million barrels thought to actually be there, and U.S consumption is just shy of 19 million barrels a day.

Don't you mean 900 billion? If America uses 19 million barrels a day, then we would run out in about two months or less.

[CruX]

My mistake, I saw the million from the estimate and tacked that onto the usage without thinking about it. The exact daily usage is 18,771,000 barrels. The 800 million estimate is accurate. They used to think there'd be more, but it's starting to look more and more like the majority of it is natural gas.

[Master Fibbles]

About Bush and McCain and such not supporting drilling:
If national oil reserves were tapped, oil prices would drop and so profit margins for oil tycoons would also drop. Politicians have this terrible habit of wanting to get elected so they say whatever people want to hear at the time and they work for lobbies. Obama was bought into office by unions, so he has done a lot to help unions.



Addendum:
The English (and probably related languages) words "work" and "orgy" are related linguistically. Discuss.

[Hank]

Mr.Flibble, on 04 April 2011 - 07:16 AM, said:

Addendum:
The English (and probably related languages) words "work" and "orgy" are related linguistically. Discuss.

I think it depends on which definition you'll apply.

Work as in Energy: you could sort of go via the creek path 'ergon' which is supposed to be similar to orgia? No clue about greek, their food sucks, so I have no one to ask. But Oxford Dictionary says so; but to me this is a linguistic stretch, even for English.

Work as in labour: you'll reach the German word 'werk' and that is more related to creation and not the energy required to create.

[Master Fibbles]

The Greek word ἔργον is actually from the root ϝεργ (digamma-epsilon-rho-gamma) which is from the Indo-European root worg/werg. In Greek, the digamma (ϝ) always drops out and is sometimes visible in forms (verbs with an initial digamma have a unique perfect system marker and verbs with a final digamma do not contract when one would expect them to). In Germanic languages, the /w/ sound persists. In Latin, the /w/ becomes a v/u (video = to see, ϝειδω = to see; vision, video, etc in English). The presence of a k rather than a g in German/English is not a problem since they are both velars.

The e/o change is not uncommon and may just represent different nuances in the main root consonants. At this point, I'd have to do further research to justify my claim of consonantal roots, but the relationship is very much there: work, (en)ergy, orgy, etc are all the same basic word in Indo-European.

In the words of my friend:

Quote

God bless Greek's loss of digamma and Germanic plosive shifts (uvular to velar, of course).

[Hank]

OK, but for usage, I think it represents a stretch. I can find similarities between action and movement. Is movement an action and are both words related to work? Why do I have those two words? What does work actually mean? - An orgy can be very energetic but would I consider having three girls at once, work, action, movement or pure pleasure?

My lamentation about languages is that they are hard to translate. How does one judge how the ancient people interpreted their own words. We ( I mean professors) can not be sure. Because, who do you ask for a validation? I can check modern Greek with a guy from Greece. I can only assume the accuracy of terms like Indi-European. What does that mean?

Quote

Thank the Lord for C++ and PHP - clear, logical and universal - Hank-Y-Phoo

[Master Fibbles]

Wonderful things like the Rosetta Stone and other parallel or translated texts; there are many ways to determine what a word or phrase means within its own context of a text or inscription. A really neat thing is that, often, as a language begins to enter disuse the things which have been written in that language are translated into a newer language for posterity. Aristotle was first introduced to Europe in Arabic translated to Latin. We later found Greek manuscripts (which made some of his drama and such make much more sense). There are hexapla of both Christian and Hebrew scriptures from centuries ago (I have seen a facsimile of at least one here at school in our Semitics department. I hope to eventually use it for research). 6 translations of the same text all together. It is intense stuff. For when there are no early translations or other clear indicators of what a word means, there is phonology (such as what I did this morning and as was demonstrated above) which depends on language development and comparative methods to determine the meaning of words. It takes time to figure out the alphabet or sigla of languages but once it is deciphered, things get much easier. I mean, there is just one alphabet with many variations.
a=α=א=ܐ
And so one.

Indo-European is a language family that includes such groups as Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages (including English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, German, Farsi, Iranian, and Russian). Semitic is another language family that has groups designated by location (Northwest, Southern, etc) and includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Ge'ez (Ethiopic), Ugaritic, and Syriac. I can't remember the terms for the other families (African languages, East Asian, I think even the Pacific Islands are their own, and then there is the Meso-American groups).

[High Treason]

A forum I regular got a bit out of hand today, we told this guy his ISP was crap so he is coming to our houses tomorrow for a "word" - how immature.

[Jeff]

So I'm walking home from work this afternoon and someone asks me for a minute to tell me about sponsoring some kids. They wanted me to pay them $35 per month to do it. I told them I can't afford that. They went on and questioned me why I can't donate and such. Damn people, if I said I can't donate, what part of that do they not understand. Besides, $35 per month is like an extra cable bill. Or at least tack on cable to my internet bill.

[bullerbullerseven]

The term "donation" is broken. I never donate lol.

[Master Fibbles]

I feel like I ought to use the US 2nd amendment to the letter...the right to bear arms for a standing militia because when the shit hits the fan, I don't want to be the one with shit on his face.

[bullerbullerseven]

"Cough" Larry david moment "cough".

[High Treason]

Ok... Would you say what I did here justified a ban? http://karooforums.n...2.html#msg23082

The guy who flipped out at me said before that he does not consider himself as NextGenUs staff because he is doing it voluntarily, funny how he changes his mind as and when it suits him isn't it?

[Splat]

Looks like innocent quarrel. Can't ban people for arguing once or twice.