Slashdot Mirror
Sodium + Private Lake = Fun
travisbean writes "This should be enough to pique your interest. Add to the story that the guy has his own pond and I think we can all see where this is going... 'The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.'"
It's permanently burned into my memory from my days on AOL.
http://saveie6.com/
OK
ATDT 5551212
BUSY
A/
BUSY
A/
CONNECT 1200
Those were the days.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I don't even have a modem in a machine anymore. I've got an old external in the closet in case both of my broadband connects go belly up at the same time, hardly likely. My nephew has never used a computer with a modem in it period.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Naah, these were the days:
Me, a sysop in Ohio, trying to dial in to a friend's BBS in Florida, and finding it busy. Since I had S11 cranked down to 11 or 12ms (or whatever the fastest speed the phone company was capable of processing that week was), I was redialing like mad (God bless Supra for mailing me, -free-, firmware which supported such insane speeds), and with the busy detection also cranked down to just-barely-reliable periods, I was redialling like mad.
After a minute or two, instead of the usual touble-tap busy signal, half-second silence, and a rapid-fire redial, I heard prolonged silence and then a slight click.
Strange, I thought. I let the machine continue to redial.
After a few more minutes, the same thing happened again: no busy signal, no ringback, just dead silence.
I quickly exited to a terminal, picked up a phone, typed ATX3D, and hung the phone back up. I heard the modems negotiate and connect.
The guy in Florida, who thought he was calling a local BBS, was instead connected (at my expense) to my Telemate session..
We talked for a bit in Telemate's split-screen chat. He was obviously quite surprised to find me typing to him from Ohio when he thought he was calling a BBS across town. I told him how to fire up his WWIV BBS using the existing connection, without dropping carrier, and we talked for a bit more using WWIV's superior (and still un-matched) split-screen chat before I checked for new files and logged off.
Those were the days.
Kid-proof tablet..
scratch that. ATX3D should read ATA. Indeed, how AT commands fade from memory...
:-/
Now I feel like a senile old man, instead of just clever grown-up kid.
Kid-proof tablet..
What planet are you from? Practically every set of laws and morals tha we have on this lump of rock we call Earth is derived from laws received from Deity(God) thousands of years ago from 10 laws carved into two slabs of stone - they're call the 10 Commandments, my friend.
Killing is wrong ("Thou Shall Not Kill")
Taking what is not yours is wrong ("Thou Shall Not Kill", "Thou Shall Not Covet", "Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery").
Most of the laws that we have are based on the desire to protect life, liberty, freedom and property - every law that isn't directly related to those two concepts is eventually related to them in some fashion or another.
The old and tired "Harm No One" that all of the wiccan/new-agers want to hang on to is way to simplistic for a modern society. For example, does "harm" deonte pain - and if it is, is a painless death or murder ok if you didn't "Harm" the person?
Ignoring Deity(God) or not believing in the existenct of God does not mean that God does not exist.
Two people were discussing this very topic, and one said to the other: "I don't believe in God because I don't see any hard evidence of his existence". The other person spoke to the first and said "Do you see this fine watch I'm wearing? Do you see the watchmaker when you see it?" The first person said "No...", to whit the second person sait "Then how do you know the watchmaker exists, without seeing him or having proof of his actual existence?" The first person then said "Well, I know that someone must have made this watch, because watches don't just automagically come into existence". The second person then said: "So, you're trusting information given you about the making of watches, but you're not willing to trust information given to you about the Creating of Worlds and who or what caused this World to be created - how odd!!!"
Your supposed model of a "true moral system" is pure fantasy, because people are not all the same, they have different desires and motivations, and some of them are are, for the most part, going to do things that will break what ever "moral code" you create in this "utopia" that you eluded to.
You sound like a passe` Marxist.
Enjoy the Ride!
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
Or my all time favourite - the 6809. I remember when I used to write so much assembly code for the 6809 I ended up thinking and writing my apps directly in Hex. The only bugger being the calculation of offsets for branch instructions:-)
I wonder if that filled my brain up? I need some excuse for being as thick as mince now.
to kill the snakeheads in that Maryland pond.
The correct response to that conjecture is "Yes, because I see evidence of Watchmaking before my eyes, and if I take the instructions given in the Watchmaking manual and follow them correctly, I will end up with a watch. Your so-called-God has not left any reproducible evidence of his existence or that his methodologies for creating a World work...therefore alternative theories have credence as well"
I cannot get a bunch of sand and make my own computer chips. Since these so-called chip-manufacturers have not left any reproducible evidence of their methodologies, I must assume that computer chips are the result of random reactions in nature.
Take a look around, friend. Everything you see is evidence that there is a God. Once, there was nothing, and now, there is everything. Physical laws cannot explain this, but the bible can. And no, He didn't leave a "Creating Worlds for Dummies" book laying around; he's God, which means there are things He is capable of that we are not, and that He understands things that we do not.
As for alternative theories, it basically ammounts to this. There is a God, or we got really, really lucky. The strength of the atomic forces, or gravity, the distance of the earth to the sun, and a whole host of other values are tuned for the existance of life. Some of these values, if altered by a thousandth of a percent, would have gaurenteed that the universe would have imploded into a fireball, or drifted away into nothingness. But here we are.
Self-Interest works really, really well...religion...well...not so well.
When people lost religion, they lost morality, pure and simlple. You are correct, however, that when religion became state-sponsored, trouble followed closely.
Self interest gives us Enron. State-sponsored religion gives us the Inquisition. God, on the other hand, gives us such hard-to-swallow concepts as "don't go around killing each other" and "feed the poor."
Thomas Galvin