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>"Evolution would have gotten rid of it if this part were useless."

Evolution takes time. Hence the darwin awards

Also, its a "moving target", since evolution alters the environment (predators, food chain, etc.), one consequence is the current "solution" is always sub-prime.

If OOXML finally dies, shall we give Microsoft a Darwin Award? Or perhaps a Richard Dawkins Award since it's a dying meme?

It's all just evolution doing it's thing - prime candidates for a Darwin Award.

Much simpler: Energy = 1/2 * Capacitance * Voltage^2

Stored energy for a 500F capacitor at 9V: 1/2 * 500F * 81 V^2 = 20.25 KJ.
Average power for a one-second total discharge: 20.25 KW (obviously).
9V battery energy: about 2.5 amp-hours (varies widely) or about 80 KJ.

You should be able to charge the capacitor off a single 9V battery, provided you can keep the voltage stepped up (which you can do at a fair efficiency with a single IC these days) and avoid losing too much to heat. It will take a lot longer to charge the capacitor than to discharge it, though, due to the battery's internal resistance. I doubt you could get a sustained 15W out of a standard 9V battery without an elaborate cooling system -- less when you consider losses in the step-up power supply -- and even then you'd need to run it for over a thousand hours to fully charge the capacitor at a constant current. Once it was charged, though, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near those leads. Even a partial charge could easily be deadly, particularly if one somehow managed to bypass the normal skin resistance in imitation of this Darwin Award winner.

I'm guessing the ACME rocket is not so good.

I guess you are no fan of the Darwin Awards.

Indeed, what would happen to our beloved Darwin Awards without these idiots?

#117002
<YuFFie> SO U HACKING ME THEN HUH
<YuFFie> WElL I GOT NEWS FOR U MISTER I GOT MORE FIREWALL POWERS NOW SO IM SECURE AND IM USING WINDOWS 98 SO IM REALLY SECURE FROM HACKERS LIKE YOU SO YOU BETTA JUST GIVE UP CUZ U GOT NO HOPE MISTER.
* YuFFie (~mirc@3B942731.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net) Quit (Quit: Owned.)
* YuFFie (~mirc@3B942731.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net) has joined #
<YuFFie> HELP MY MOUSE IS MOVING BY IT SELF

and, after all, the darwin awards are there for a purpose...

Well, the entertainment value diminishes with exposure. Today, I just wonder why they had to survive.

Don't get me wrong, I don't wish for anyone's death. But with some people, you get the impression that they're essentially a waste of precious oxygen. And you don't even have to read the darwin awards to get the impression that with some people it's been a blessing for humanity that they succeeded.

Inserts obligatory reference to the Darwin Awards http://www.darwinawards.com/

... like this?

Picture this...

Guy 1: Hey did you know humans can fly?

Guy 2: No way man, you're trippin!

Guy 1: Na-ah, I've seen it in my own eyes! I saw it... in a movie!

Guy 2: OK, if humans can fly - prove it!

Guy 1: No problem, watch this...

-----
And the crowd goes chanting "Darwin! Darwin! Darwin!"

If you have difficulty understanding the concept, you might wish to visit this website to see it graphically illustrated.

No need to push, they push themselves:

"Lawyer Aloft -- 1996 Darwin Award
Confirmed True by Darwin

"(1996, Toronto) Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane of glass with his shoulder and plunged twenty-four floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry, thirty-nine, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower as he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law students. Garry had previously conducted the demonstration of window strength without mishap, according to police reports. The managing partner of the law firm that employed the deceased told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Garry was 'one of the best and brightest' members of the two-hundred-man association."

Reference: http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1996-01.html

"And yes, this is a really big deal. Other than maybe OS/400 I know of no system where file system operations can be done atomically with database operations." "Yes, Microsoft does innovate sometimes. This is one of those occasions."

I'm sure, over the years, many people have been tempted to tease elephants, but it takes a special kind of idiot to actually do it. The moral? It's innovation, just not the good kind.

Tell that to this guy http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1993-01.h tml

Hmmm, I think of the concept of sexbots a sort of self-induced natural selection. The people who will straight-up refuse to be with their human counterparts will basically remove themselves from evolution; Not unlike the people who've removed themselves with some of these amazing award winning performances.

Cheers,

The Nazis practiced genocide and encouraged eugenics. The fact that the distasteful former has so completely colored the latter to the point of tainting its meaning is obvious in your case.

Eugenics is practiced with every prenatal screening, gene screening to discover genetic abnormalities prior to conception, and with almost every in-vitro process. Do you consider those "horrible"?

This is merely encouraging a subset to remove themselves from the gene pool. There's a major difference between showing someone cliff-diving and describing its wonders vs forcibly shoving someone off a cliff.

Or do you hold that the Darwin Awards website is an abomination as well?

"You know, some people do enjoy building things and getting them to work on their own."

Somebody thoughtfully provided a site for them

"Not everything is about having something, the journey to get it can be very important too."

I get excited driving to the pharmacy to pickup my viagra.

You are correct, the bezoar (hairball) story is not worthy of a Darwin Award; that story was written a long time ago, and the rules and my understanding evolved over time.

This deceased woman? NO Darwin. I did not know it was so easy to kill yourself drinking water, particularly as the participants couldn't pee. How much can one drink in that situation? Yeah, yeah, a lot of you in this thread apparently knew, but most people don't, and people who do know are met with disbelief when they say so.

The sad family left behind is not generally a factor in the selection of a Darwin Award, as many families still see the humor, despite their loss; it can become a beloved story of dear departed Donna. "Gosh, Mom really loved us!" "Don't drip tears onto Mom at the funeral, she might explode!" or whatever. Humor helps people cope with loss.

But this one: NO Darwin. She was just ardent and unfortunate. And forget the nurse who called the station. A warning from a random talk-show caller with dubious credentials, is not a warning from trusted-Aunt-Renee-the-nurse.

Best wishes,
Wendy Northcutt
www.DarwinAwards.com

On a similar note, how about them Darwin Awards?...of course I draw the line when the stupid ones stop removing their own genes from the genome and start removing those others... however in evolution theory endangering their children is actually equivalent...

Uh, she is not ineligible.

Darwin Awards http://www.darwinawards.com/

Boise State stumbles across the Fatal Stupidity Gene while analysing the DNA of this couple.

Well don't get _too_ attached to your vacuuming robots.

No point in arguing, but I will clarify. For the "modern medicine", I'm not speaking of the sick and weak but more specifically dealing with the people that do dumb things that result in shooting themselves in the face or drinking themselves to oblivion and then being fixed up in the hospital.

From the Darwin Awards rules page at:

http://darwinawards.com/rules/rules2.html

"Those who participate in extreme sports are not automatically eligible, as they knowingly assume an increased risk of death. They are, in a sense, correctly applying their judgment that the entertainment is worth the risk. However bizarre the sport, an additional misapplication of judgment must be present in order for the deceased to qualify for a Darwin Award."

Be careful what you wish for. 2005 has an account of a winner who believed similarly.

They do claim these are true stories. I can attest for at least one of them. The 1996 silly-sad tale of the lawyer jumping against the windows in the skyscraper office where he worked was in many Toronto news sources at the time. Where this event occurred is a very busy area, so there were plenty of witnesses.

It was later that same year when I heard of the Darwin awards, as someone mentioned that this well-known story was nominated.

I'm not saying there should be capital punishment for stupidity

Unfortunately, the ESRB provides those ratings strictly for consumer self-recognisance and parental benefit. They state that that are "the game industry's self-regulating body", not a department of state.

As far as I'm aware, the ratings can't be legally enforced outside of sanctions/penalties within the gaming industry.

Besides, there's a chance of mis-placed ratings...

• Under "T for Teen" ratings, you'll find titles like Battlefield 2142 [future, guns, war, blow-stuff-up] and Medal of Honor: Heroes [same, but WWII]. War=violence, and yet "suitable for ages 13+" However...
  
• Under "M for Mature" ratings, you will find titles like Dungeon Keeper [1 and 2, both are whimsically comical, and as unrealistic as it gets]
  Neither of these titles advocates war in any way (except for the implied "war between good and evil")
  
• Check under "E for Everyone" (yes, even those under 10) ratings and you'll see Need for Speed: Most Wanted [excessive driving, property damage and evading authorities] Of course it's safe! Your child won't be driving a car for another 10 years or so! They will have long forgotten the zany antics of running from the cops. </sarcasm>

I have to return this thread to the sentiment of so many others here today; it's not the games, the game-makers, or the game-platform-makers... it's the parents. Why do people deny that parents are the directly culpable party when it comes to the misbehavior of minors? That's right! When that makes them the culpable party.

Blaming the games is like blaming Hollywood for all the... [ahem] would-be stuntpersons appearing in the Darwin Awards every year.

In that light, if I suggest you shoot yourself right now, and you go do it, would I be guilty of murder? Nobody would be able to prove it.

Then there's Robert Patrick Modell; but that's just an X-Files episode.

Excerpt from "Pusher":
[After MODELL's acquittal, he runs into MULDER and SCULLY in the foyer.]
MULDER: Your shoe's untied.
[MODELL looks down at his feet, quickly gets the "joke" and then meets MULDER'S steely gaze once again, slightly amused]
MULDER: So how do you do it?

Well this is pretty scary. My website usage? Out of 150,000 cgi hits in October... rounded to one sig digit...

126,000 Windows NT
9,000 Mac OS X
2,000 Yahoo! Slurp
3,000 Windows 98 (or Win98)
2,000 Linux
600 Windows CE
400 Mac_PowerPC
200 Windows 95
200 Windows ME
70 Windows CE
40 Blackberry
and approx 162 misc entries.

I had no idea the world was so overwhelmingly Windows! Grrr.

I can do this also for the 7,000,000 monthly "regular" page hits (as opposed to cgi) but I assume I'd get about the same results.

I remember some of the tricks MS did to gain market share, back when, such as beefing up the logs with their bogus 404 requests for favicon.ico... few webmasters weed out these spurious hits when compiling stats.

the day when a person was held responsable for their own actions?

--
proof people are stupid

http://www.darwinawards.com/

They should get an Honorable Mention from the Darwin Awards, it can be a full Darwin Award after they quit this world.

http://darwinawards.com/stupid/

Here you go.

An alternative.

Manned flight? Already done in 1982.

Remember that guy with the meteorological balloon and the lawn chair who floating into the airspace of LAX?

http://www.darwinawards.com/stupid/stupid1998-11.h tml

He should get himself a really warm coat and an aqualung, and go a bit higher!

Maybe these suggestions could be helpfull:

http://www.darwinawards.com/

Yes they can, but the universe will fire back by creating bigger morons next generation.

The issue here is that humanity has separated itself from the good ol' natural selection, thus morons don't get booted out of the gene pool anymore.

Worse, so few morons die that we actually have to give them awards to try and get other morons to follow suit!

You havent been paying attention, have you? (and it's not just Americans) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_ele ction,_2000/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_preside ntial_election,_2004/ http://www.darwinawards.com/ http://www.dumb.com/pictures.htm/ I could go on and on and on...but why?

"Most people don't know or don't care about the difference. They'll go with anything that looks the shiniest."

That's their right. We have these prizes for the winners

Hell, cars can be rockets (Remember the Darwin award for the guy who strapped one to his car and is now embedded in a cliffside?).

Confirmed Bogus. Although others have strapped rockets to cars before, your reference has been known to be false for a while.

I figure anyone who actually tries it deserves one of these

Kind of like the oakie who went to the doctor for a vasectomy:

Oakie: I want to get a vasectomy.
Dr: Just put a cherry bomb in an empty beer can and count to 10.

... Oakie sees 3 doctors, and they all say the same thing ... until finally ...

Dr: No problem, my secretary can book you an appointment.
Oakie: Great doc. Hey, can you explain why all the other docs said I should just stick a cherry bomb in an empty beer can and count to ten?
Dr: Oh, you're an oakie? Sorry, just stick a cherry bomb in a beer can and count to 10. It works.

Later that day ... Oakie has his buddy over, explains how the docs all told him the same thing.

Billy-Bod: Youy gonna try it?
Oakie: Might as well ...

(Oakie puts lit cherry bomb in tin can, holds can in one hand, starts counting on his fingers with the other hand ..
1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 5 ...

(runs out of fingers, holds tin can between thighs so he can continue counting ...)

How to kill yourself with a 9 volt battery:
http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.h tml

I assume a car battery would have an even easier time.

Seriously, folks this is a situation where a story about a candidate for a Darwin Award has been spun so hard I'm still reeling. From the article, he climbed over a safety fence. One would presume the fence was there because the robot within that fence was not designed to shut itself off in the event someone entered. And then he complicates matters by [failing] to switch the robot off properly.

This unsigned article-writer from The Economist really wants to talk about Robots and making them safe and "human-proof." And that's probably a good idea. But Darwin Awards candidates probably are bad examples to start with.

"I think that you are being overly generous. Steve Balmer was only called on to do something that an end user of his (consumer!) product would want to do."

That some idiot "wants to do" something is hardly a criterion for classifying something as the normal operation of a product. People "want to do" stupid things they're not qualified for every day. Some want to repair their TV and get zapped by a still charged capacitor. Some want to weld an acetylene tank to their roof while doing repairs there. Some want to run in a drag race with a solid rocket booster strapped to their car. Darwin Awards is full of people who thought that arc welding a grenade to a chain is normal consumer business. It doesn't automatically make it so.

It _is_ possible to operate a Windows PC for years without ever having to remove a single item of spyware. _That's_ the equivalent of driving a car. Or you can be an idiot and drive your car against the wall, or install Claria and everyhing else in sight on your Windows PC. Getting either your car or your PC back to good as new is already a repair job, not the day-to-day business of a normal consumer.

Basically the whole exercise isn't like expecting a BMW executive to be able to drive a BMW. It's more like asking a BMW executive to come fix your paint and tyres after you drove the car through a bed of roses. It's just not his job.

"A better analogy would be that you shouldn't expect an executive at a car manufacturer to be able to drive the company's cars. But of course you would."

Even then, I wouldn't. E.g.:

- most car manufacturers also make trucks (e.g., check out some of the big Mercedes Benz ones), cranes, bulldozers, etc. Acting like it's the exec's job to have a license to operate each of those is just stupid. A lot also make special F1 or rally models. I _don't_ expect them to be able to drive those either. E.g., I don't expect a Honda executive to be able to drive a McLarren-Honda in the F1 races. It's just not his job.

- I also don't expect Boeing executives to be able to fly a plane. Not even a small consumer one, like the Cessna. If he can, kudos to him, but if not, it wasn't his job to start with.

- I don't even expect a console maker to be a l33t console gamer. (And it's a consumer product, right?) Nintendo, for example, used to have someone at the helm who took _pride_ in never having played a video game. The guy used to spew such highly insulting stuff about the gamers, as that RPG fans are losers playing in the dark in their parents' basement. Yet it's the company which pwned the market in the NES and SNES days.

Etc.

Who cares? It's not their job to personally do those things, nor even to personally understand those things. His job is to hire someone who does. _The_ most important thing about management -- and often the difference between a good manager and a PHB -- is knowing when and how to delegate. You can't personally know everything and do everything.

If they survived, then they are not unfit. It's just that we changed the environment, so that those traits are not negative. But natural selection's still working

That must be why it's called the Darwin server.

Personally, I don't think that the handguns issue is one America is better at. Homicide statistics, and the associated Darwin Awards, maybe...

You are right though, that you're driving towards the fact that there exists no perfect country*

[*except Belgium. But then, perfection is boring. :)]