It's good for these little conspirators to have to face reality at some point in time. They make great entertainment fodder for the rest of us, but they also represent unsustainability and social insulation. They're just as prone to injection as any of their targets, and due to human traits (including our major hallmark, error) there's no patching that vulnerability. Everything has its infancy; in the future the major cyberattacks will be undertaken and executed without grandstanding, seemingly developmentally arrested childishness, or motivations outside the accumulation of political and financial power. Given a few more years of this high-intensity cyber bullying and cowboying, large corporations will get the clue that it's no longer a futuristic dream or a super-expensive option and will have undocumented cyber attack teams by rote. Governments will fail to prosecute because the methods will be too slick and professional. So, if you enjoy a good take-down or some shit, might as well keep your eyes glued because years down the line you won't even hear about the attacks as it won't pay to mention them when repecussions can't be brought to bear.
what about the REST of the Amazon experience (as described) makes you so relish the idea of up-see-daisy, heigh-ho, howdy-doody, just up and doing "the right thing" (or wtfe) and waiting (NO NOT TWO WEEKs, THE GUY ENDED UP WAITING FUCKING FOUR WEEKS OVER A SINGLE BYTE THAT COULD'VE BEEN RESOLVED MORE QUICKLY ELSEWAYS) for a Long, Long Time for The Right Thing to Come About As SHould Be.
tell me, what's so tan-ta-fucking-lyzing about the REST of the Amazon experience that has you fucking them so slowly.
*shrug* I never paid any attention to png. I thought it was like a step away from raw bmp or something, and hence was why it was always seen being used with tiny, tiny images.
If you can tell me why it would be better to save it as png rather than a 32-color.GIF (which, btw, is also loss-less compression, although from about ten years ago comes with a potential legal and financial liability) then I'll do so.
In either case, if you at least say you want to have the image in a better format no matter what format that is, I'll put it that way. It'll only take me about an hour.
I'm one of those people who had good memory and cognitive skills before the internet, and post-internet as well. I don't understand what the article is referring to. I just generally see the populations around me growing more retarded every day, but I assuming it's because of other factors:
1. bad parenting worsening over generations without correction
2. economic bubbles making entertainment more valuable than productivity
3. despite bad economy, we can still afford the bleeding-heart resource of forking tax monies over to the mentally retarded despite their inability to aid either of the above points OR any other point you might think of besides "we don't have enough retards in this macdonalds, Billy!" In states that don't have laws against those with hereditary mental disability procreating, they do so. And though it's sad that they often do so with their peers, thus creating generations worse off than they were, I've also seen many viable women who were simply lazy and pathetic decide to wed and breed men who any intelligent person would agree had something wrong with them dating from gestation (and it's politically incorrect to point this out for some *coughreligiousscumbagcough* reason, so... and the beat goes on -- even in the midst of economic turmoil, predictably, even if we went into full-on "depression").
4. Nobody is doing anything about the Mid-West. It's branching out and normalizing everything it touches. If there's no differentiation between one thing and another, they appear to be the same. Well as you graduate through degrees of separation, pinpointing a coordinate of one specific person, you pass by many others who -- if they decline by intelligence only so much one to the next -- mark no major difference to the pinpointing observer, who finally reaches the person (a retarded CEO let's say) and who fails to recognize that they've happened across a retard. Gradual changes in environment go unnoticed, things get sublimated, etc.
Anyways, you get the picture. It's this way because it was allowed to slip in a little a time, like anyone understands. We were cuckolded into this dismal future by the laziness, indifference and neglect brought to our table by excess, hoarding and over-competition. The symptoms of those pressures were corpulence, ignorance, and anti-social behaviour, and look how those trends are faring; they rule. Look at Michigan, crazy-crown-King of the Midwest. It's frequently holding positions both at the bottom of education and the top of percentage of body-fat.
I think blaming the internet is something done, frankly, ONLY by people suffering from problems like autism or Asperger's, who have no fucking real grip on reality whatsoever, and who are jacking off on the face of slashdot and contributing to the fucking stupid mess of nonsense and idiocy it's slowly become over the years.
I also learned to program "pre-internet" (really, pre-innarwebs) in 1986 on an Atari 130 and a Sinclair ZX-81. Later, the Atari was upgraded; the Sinclair was not.
My programming book was "Basic Atari BASIC". It worked. The experience was much as you describe. I continued with that experience through Borland TurboPascal, MS QuickBASIC, and Borland C++.
However, I never became a decent and logical programmer until I gave up programming for awhile and returned to it post-internet, and learned entirely from textfile "tutorials" and other online data collections and guides. I would have to say the quality of conciseness and thoroughness offered by the average long-lived internet FAQ more is more than quadruple what you would get out of your average published tree-killer. In fact the most striking memory I have of those books was supplementing them with things they failed to include, cribbing notes into them or printing the notes out and taping them into the margins of appropriate pages.
And yet, I have no idea how you can program without memorizing a set of commands and at least most of a working syntax. But I program strictly in C, so. . . I have no idea what the wacky, OOP types are shooting up or snorting these days.
In retrospect, saving it as a 16-color.GIF wasn't a hot idea, but it looked better before I saved (a bug in Photofiltre). I should've saved in 32 colors. Oh, well. It was only 31 caps and I still have all of those and the progress.BMP of composite-1-20 (eleven caps to go). If anybody was really interested in a better version, I could make it, but to tell you the truth, the actual thing isn't any more legible than the 16-color.GIF . . . just being honest.
... but the cablemap app was really annoying, it slowed Firefox down like hell, and there was no way (that I could discern) of easily seeing the whole world map at a high resolution, so I made some screen caps and put them together in Photofiltre. I gave the author credit in several places on the map.
Noting that pot brings rastafarians closer to God means less to me, but says the same thing as, noting that pot complicates schizophrenia and that the same part of the brain is excited by both religious and schizophrenic episodes.... and, the nation in the article was Austria, not Australia.
Everything about this story suggests that the author is an honest, underselling, competitive and straight dealer. I can't BELIEVE the fuckups here who are badmouthing him, who obviously didn't even RTFA.
I had a post prepared where I point out the problems but why reproduce TFA? Anyways I hit a stray key and it got lost. I'll try to do a decent job of a synapsis, again, anyway.
1. The review process took two weeks. He was told he would have to use HTTPS. He grumbles about server load but that isn't the point: he put the extra god damn byte in and put the app back in for review. AND WAITED ANOTHER TWO GOD DAMN WEEKS. Over an "S". Meanwhile, where in the fuck was the policy statement: "make sure your app is secure or you'll have to spend two weeks wishing we'd told you about it beforehand". Because obviously the author had no problem with the security policy; he made the change. So people applauding Amazon for their security policy ought to think about how they go about enforcing it, and whether it's worth the extra review time when they could have said to each other "oh, I have the app open right here mister author, and we'll need to type S right here in order for it to be okay to publish. Agreed?"
2. Here's the author's main point of contention as far as "costing too much": he can't write the app for every device on the market because he can't go out and buy every fucking device on the market for testing. Why, you ask, would he even want to? Why, you wonder, would he bother caring about every device on the market? Because Amazon doesn't filter. He included a manifest that says what devices to reject or accept when users come to download the app, and Amazon ignored it, letting hundreds and hundreds of people download the app -- free or otherwise (oh, yeah, they made him spend a day giving it away free in exchange for it being visible in the app store) -- and plenty were pissed when it wouldn't work or their screen was too small to see it. The author had already thought about all this, he uses a manifest through another service that properly filters the customer base. Not Amazon. So to be successful through Amazon he'd need to go out and buy all these devices, write and test the app on the devices, and then launch. He'd no doubt need to hire a household of people to aid in the effort so it wouldn't take him four years of full time work to complete. Now do you get the fucking point?
3. He's used to getting feedback email. He gets plenty of these every day. He uses it to tailor the app to the customer base's wishes. He uses it to launch bugfixes. After his "free day" that Amazon made him go through, wherein the app was downloaded 180,000 times, he got 2 emails. Despite dozens of no doubt unhappy customers. He feels that Amazon isn't doing enough to help customers contact authors.
4. Part of his business practice is to refund unhappy customers. So people saying he's some kind of greedy person need to talk a walk. Well, Amazon doesn't let you refund your product which is a major "helloooo" point for me. WTF, Amazon!
5. One customer left a really shitty review that made unjust claims about the game and was rife with paranoia. It was written by an actual paranoiac who claimed the app was "tracking" him. This review became "the most helpful" review and is now at the top of the page when you go to the app. The author was unable to comment-back to the comment. Guess why? Amazon doesn't let authors have free access to their review page. You might feel "secure" about that, but consider the liberties that users can take such as the paranoiac above. The author would have to purchase his own app in order to comment on the reviews. He can't: he's in Sweden, Amazon services only to U.S. customers. He's fucked! Amazon won't do squat about it.
6. Oh, no, that's right. Amazon did do something: they cut his price in half AGAIN. Without asking him. Now he's the author of a one-dollar app that the top "most helpful" review claims is tied to an ad service and is a tracking device (both lies) with othe
Thanks God!!! From now on (and because of that), those moons do have some chances to develop life...
Only if the scientist who wrote that entered the sphere.
Or if the formation of life is somehow dependent on observation (via Heisenberg "uncertainty"). In which case moons of this type in our observable universe would indeed have increased in their chance of producing life.
From what I hear, through people some may consider eccentric (undue criticism), vultures show amazing prescience and aptitude. But they've been under prejudice (perhaps well earned) for so long that they are one of those animals that haven't been as thoroughly studied as something cuter or more docile (and not associated with being the last thing you see before you die).
I wonder what the third vulture is thinking. Is there some vulture rule of thumb that only two need to be in the air to find a body, and the third is just doviding tasks by staying on tthe ground (since he noticed that that's what his caretakers are doing)? Or, if theybwere in the wild, perhaps hunting parties include ground members that use tracking skills and other faculties that can't be applied in the air? Or maybe he's just another lazy pig?
Space Travel - Unfit for Humanity by Gabriel Arthur Petrie, 11-22-2009
A lot of people on Earth would like to believe that one day, maybe even in their own lifetimes, humanity will reach for the stars in great shimmering vessels. Scientists, sci-fi fans, new-age believers, and imaginative young people around the world share a common dream of exploring and colonizing the near and distant planets, even one day meeting with fellow intelligent races in this galaxy or perhaps, given enough travel time, some other galaxy.
These dreams are all very grandiose, and as engineering visions go, even noble. That we can as a species manage to conquer the stars is a warming and supportive sentiment. That we can actually achieve it within our limited means and resources from Earth is, conversely, as flighty and half-baked as any idea anyone could have. And to actually embark upon such a project, with the world's situation as it is now and obviously for the rest of time, is selfish, rude, arrogant, perhaps sadistic, and surely despotic and tyrannical if on behalf of any government.
The resources required for such an undertaking may exist here on Earth in one form or another, but those resources are too direly needed by the planet's current population to allow it all to be seized up in some dream works that are not guaranteed to produce any positive results.
The inventions brought to us by the space programs of the past are just that -- inventions, not discoveries. There is no cosmos full of advances in textiles, communications, and soft drinks waiting for us to grab it all up. If anything, we might feel sad at the wealth of new things we have in our lives brought to us by the space program, because it means there are fewer things left to be invented in the future, therefore we face a less valuable future in space program commodities enrichment.
Anyone who unwaveringly insists that there are infinite worthwhile inventions for humans (or infinite ways to improve upon what commodities do exist) has as much sense as an inbred dog and need not read further (for objective truth is wasted upon them). I should not have to explain the faulted logic behind those sorts of beliefs, and it is sad that the space program has so many supporters by way of pure stupidity. In any case, to dispel such sturdy beliefs tends to require more example than explanation, and short of witnessing firsthand the dismal ruin of humanity due to the prolonged pursuit of this sci-fi "space-faring" drama, there is not much that can convince the shuttle-hugger to change their ways.
Now, I am not saying that the space program is pure nonsense or entirely worthless. Who knows, there may be a few more inventions or advances in Earthly science that can be mined from space program research projects, but all of this can be achieved in near space. For the sake of using the space program for mere scientific advancements in entirely unrelated fields, there is no need whatsoever to set our sights on far-off places.
And metaphor be damned: this isn't a matter of the poor, humble telescope viewer being suppressed by the superstitious monarch, or a matter of how little we would know now were it not for those brave enough to cross forbidden seas in the distant past.
Building and manning a ship, making a voyage to presumably the edge of the flat earth, these are undertakings that consumed, historically, so little resource overall that compared to today's energy consumption (in, say, Spain) it is not even a fraction of a drop in a bucket. Conversely, when we talk about travel to distant stars and humanity's future among them, we're speaking of energy consumption measurable in the mineral wealth of whole planets, starting with our own, and environmental impacts that will never, ever be recovered from, right here on our home planet. And as for suppression, there simply isn't anyone to blame any more: this is a round planet and that's all that it is, and those boundaries are more firm and more unyielding than any belief that keeps one from
Oh, they did? That's what I get for barely paying attention. All I've been seeing is Sony issuing ridiculous declarations, lying to investors and consumers about their technical expertise, etc. I guess getting bit in the ass probably moved them through court a bit faster than I would expect them to be. Well, I guess we'll see what happens when they apologise.
Frankly, if the (net) hackers don't lay off after the public apology that's coming up, I would have to agree with another user here that they might deserve further police action. As much as I hate to say it, despite the law's early encounters with hacking involving totally impolitic and heavy-handed approach, I don't relish the idea of aimless and ultimately fruitless hacking that's done with no sense of greater purpose except as a thin facade for nuisance. They'll just make demonizing DIY hackers like GeoHot more presentable if they keep it up.
Don't they realize they would gain much more by apologizing for and desisting against GeoHot than they would be trying to sentimentally appease investors who are already losing their asses due to Sony's complete unawareness of ALL simple, cultural matters related to information and security? All they've done this whole episode is show their complete idiocy: in failing to understand the proper and graceful way to accept having a device defeated by a hacker; failing to understand that hackers are serious about their claims and abilities; failing to understand most of the underlying principles not only of technology being used but information theory itself and pertinent concepts like retention of information and where it applies to real-world security models such as trust-based networks. It seems nobody these days in any position of much worth or prominence has even a clue about the workings and mechanisms of governance, of security, of infrastructure, any of it. Sony is just the epitome of what the generations have come down to and how very little they're capable of maintaining rational thought and in-the-now presence. This disgraceful, wretched form of half-witted aggression against normal, common people has become pandemic amongst those wherein whom political and economic power is found consolidated, and their very lowbrow and disdainful perception of what the average human being constitutes in their need and capability is almost villain like. There are very few people amongst either the completely unaffected (yet exposed to the story via media) and those directly affected (Sony's clientele and consumer-base) who are rooting for the company in these recent matters, meanwhile, the company seeks to appease investors instead of the common person or their clientele, showing almost complete apathy towards those who have proffered substantial sums for broken-down old "services". This also goes to show you what the common person is reduced to in terms of buyer awareness and consumer savvy, that this decrepit network -- apparently run by people barely associated with the concepts involved beyond marketing and financing -- is one of the widest-selling entertainment services in the modern world. And yet Sony still manages to fail to find a friend in the world! Bewildering!
Slashdot Mirror
It's good for these little conspirators to have to face reality at some point in time. They make great entertainment fodder for the rest of us, but they also represent unsustainability and social insulation. They're just as prone to injection as any of their targets, and due to human traits (including our major hallmark, error) there's no patching that vulnerability. Everything has its infancy; in the future the major cyberattacks will be undertaken and executed without grandstanding, seemingly developmentally arrested childishness, or motivations outside the accumulation of political and financial power. Given a few more years of this high-intensity cyber bullying and cowboying, large corporations will get the clue that it's no longer a futuristic dream or a super-expensive option and will have undocumented cyber attack teams by rote. Governments will fail to prosecute because the methods will be too slick and professional. So, if you enjoy a good take-down or some shit, might as well keep your eyes glued because years down the line you won't even hear about the attacks as it won't pay to mention them when repecussions can't be brought to bear.
Wowweee whoooaaaa fffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu --
Man. Reading that... makes me want to go play more Powder.
because everybody else on /. ran off to join the tournament.
oh, smart. so, tell me:
what about the REST of the Amazon experience (as described) makes you so relish the idea of up-see-daisy, heigh-ho, howdy-doody, just up and doing "the right thing" (or wtfe) and waiting (NO NOT TWO WEEKs, THE GUY ENDED UP WAITING FUCKING FOUR WEEKS OVER A SINGLE BYTE THAT COULD'VE BEEN RESOLVED MORE QUICKLY ELSEWAYS) for a Long, Long Time for The Right Thing to Come About As SHould Be.
tell me, what's so tan-ta-fucking-lyzing about the REST of the Amazon experience that has you fucking them so slowly.
*ach!* cut me some damn slack!
if people are talking out of their asses and obviously not RTFA, maybe just maybe they ARE reading comments!
and maybe those comments can do a better job of 'splainin' shit to the fuckheads than they've run across in the headline!
espcially if it can somehow engage them.
anyways. it's too late for a 'pile o' gi's.
*sigh*
there's no "t" in schizophrenia.
aside from that, you're all set to research it on your own. i wouldn't mislead you.
*shrug* I never paid any attention to png. I thought it was like a step away from raw bmp or something, and hence was why it was always seen being used with tiny, tiny images.
If you can tell me why it would be better to save it as png rather than a 32-color .GIF (which, btw, is also loss-less compression, although from about ten years ago comes with a potential legal and financial liability) then I'll do so.
In either case, if you at least say you want to have the image in a better format no matter what format that is, I'll put it that way. It'll only take me about an hour.
I'm one of those people who had good memory and cognitive skills before the internet, and post-internet as well. I don't understand what the article is referring to. I just generally see the populations around me growing more retarded every day, but I assuming it's because of other factors:
1. bad parenting worsening over generations without correction
2. economic bubbles making entertainment more valuable than productivity
3. despite bad economy, we can still afford the bleeding-heart resource of forking tax monies over to the mentally retarded despite their inability to aid either of the above points OR any other point you might think of besides "we don't have enough retards in this macdonalds, Billy!" In states that don't have laws against those with hereditary mental disability procreating, they do so. And though it's sad that they often do so with their peers, thus creating generations worse off than they were, I've also seen many viable women who were simply lazy and pathetic decide to wed and breed men who any intelligent person would agree had something wrong with them dating from gestation (and it's politically incorrect to point this out for some *coughreligiousscumbagcough* reason, so... and the beat goes on -- even in the midst of economic turmoil, predictably, even if we went into full-on "depression").
4. Nobody is doing anything about the Mid-West. It's branching out and normalizing everything it touches. If there's no differentiation between one thing and another, they appear to be the same. Well as you graduate through degrees of separation, pinpointing a coordinate of one specific person, you pass by many others who -- if they decline by intelligence only so much one to the next -- mark no major difference to the pinpointing observer, who finally reaches the person (a retarded CEO let's say) and who fails to recognize that they've happened across a retard. Gradual changes in environment go unnoticed, things get sublimated, etc.
Anyways, you get the picture. It's this way because it was allowed to slip in a little a time, like anyone understands. We were cuckolded into this dismal future by the laziness, indifference and neglect brought to our table by excess, hoarding and over-competition. The symptoms of those pressures were corpulence, ignorance, and anti-social behaviour, and look how those trends are faring; they rule. Look at Michigan, crazy-crown-King of the Midwest. It's frequently holding positions both at the bottom of education and the top of percentage of body-fat.
I think blaming the internet is something done, frankly, ONLY by people suffering from problems like autism or Asperger's, who have no fucking real grip on reality whatsoever, and who are jacking off on the face of slashdot and contributing to the fucking stupid mess of nonsense and idiocy it's slowly become over the years.
The facts that can be remembered can be forgotten;
The facts that are remembered are not the eternal facts.
Funny; just the last few days I have been ruminating on how these days, "meritocracy" is a very dirty word.
I also learned to program "pre-internet" (really, pre-innarwebs) in 1986 on an Atari 130 and a Sinclair ZX-81. Later, the Atari was upgraded; the Sinclair was not.
My programming book was "Basic Atari BASIC". It worked. The experience was much as you describe. I continued with that experience through Borland TurboPascal, MS QuickBASIC, and Borland C++.
However, I never became a decent and logical programmer until I gave up programming for awhile and returned to it post-internet, and learned entirely from textfile "tutorials" and other online data collections and guides. I would have to say the quality of conciseness and thoroughness offered by the average long-lived internet FAQ more is more than quadruple what you would get out of your average published tree-killer. In fact the most striking memory I have of those books was supplementing them with things they failed to include, cribbing notes into them or printing the notes out and taping them into the margins of appropriate pages.
And yet, I have no idea how you can program without memorizing a set of commands and at least most of a working syntax. But I program strictly in C, so. . . I have no idea what the wacky, OOP types are shooting up or snorting these days.
In retrospect, saving it as a 16-color .GIF wasn't a hot idea, but it looked better before I saved (a bug in Photofiltre). I should've saved in 32 colors. Oh, well. It was only 31 caps and I still have all of those and the progress .BMP of composite-1-20 (eleven caps to go). If anybody was really interested in a better version, I could make it, but to tell you the truth, the actual thing isn't any more legible than the 16-color .GIF . . . just being honest.
... but the cablemap app was really annoying, it slowed Firefox down like hell, and there was no way (that I could discern) of easily seeing the whole world map at a high resolution, so I made some screen caps and put them together in Photofiltre. I gave the author credit in several places on the map.
http://db.tt/UEjKBo5
Noting that pot brings rastafarians closer to God means less to me, but says the same thing as, noting that pot complicates schizophrenia and that the same part of the brain is excited by both religious and schizophrenic episodes. ... and, the nation in the article was Austria, not Australia.
Everything about this story suggests that the author is an honest, underselling, competitive and straight dealer. I can't BELIEVE the fuckups here who are badmouthing him, who obviously didn't even RTFA.
I had a post prepared where I point out the problems but why reproduce TFA? Anyways I hit a stray key and it got lost. I'll try to do a decent job of a synapsis, again, anyway.
1. The review process took two weeks. He was told he would have to use HTTPS. He grumbles about server load but that isn't the point: he put the extra god damn byte in and put the app back in for review. AND WAITED ANOTHER TWO GOD DAMN WEEKS. Over an "S". Meanwhile, where in the fuck was the policy statement: "make sure your app is secure or you'll have to spend two weeks wishing we'd told you about it beforehand". Because obviously the author had no problem with the security policy; he made the change. So people applauding Amazon for their security policy ought to think about how they go about enforcing it, and whether it's worth the extra review time when they could have said to each other "oh, I have the app open right here mister author, and we'll need to type S right here in order for it to be okay to publish. Agreed?"
2. Here's the author's main point of contention as far as "costing too much": he can't write the app for every device on the market because he can't go out and buy every fucking device on the market for testing. Why, you ask, would he even want to? Why, you wonder, would he bother caring about every device on the market? Because Amazon doesn't filter. He included a manifest that says what devices to reject or accept when users come to download the app, and Amazon ignored it, letting hundreds and hundreds of people download the app -- free or otherwise (oh, yeah, they made him spend a day giving it away free in exchange for it being visible in the app store) -- and plenty were pissed when it wouldn't work or their screen was too small to see it. The author had already thought about all this, he uses a manifest through another service that properly filters the customer base. Not Amazon. So to be successful through Amazon he'd need to go out and buy all these devices, write and test the app on the devices, and then launch. He'd no doubt need to hire a household of people to aid in the effort so it wouldn't take him four years of full time work to complete. Now do you get the fucking point?
3. He's used to getting feedback email. He gets plenty of these every day. He uses it to tailor the app to the customer base's wishes. He uses it to launch bugfixes. After his "free day" that Amazon made him go through, wherein the app was downloaded 180,000 times, he got 2 emails. Despite dozens of no doubt unhappy customers. He feels that Amazon isn't doing enough to help customers contact authors.
4. Part of his business practice is to refund unhappy customers. So people saying he's some kind of greedy person need to talk a walk. Well, Amazon doesn't let you refund your product which is a major "helloooo" point for me. WTF, Amazon!
5. One customer left a really shitty review that made unjust claims about the game and was rife with paranoia. It was written by an actual paranoiac who claimed the app was "tracking" him. This review became "the most helpful" review and is now at the top of the page when you go to the app. The author was unable to comment-back to the comment. Guess why? Amazon doesn't let authors have free access to their review page. You might feel "secure" about that, but consider the liberties that users can take such as the paranoiac above. The author would have to purchase his own app in order to comment on the reviews. He can't: he's in Sweden, Amazon services only to U.S. customers. He's fucked! Amazon won't do squat about it.
6. Oh, no, that's right. Amazon did do something: they cut his price in half AGAIN. Without asking him. Now he's the author of a one-dollar app that the top "most helpful" review claims is tied to an ad service and is a tracking device (both lies) with othe
Isn't it venocide if eradicate an entire genus? *shrug*
Hold still. There's one on your eyeball.
Thanks God!!! From now on (and because of that), those moons do have some chances to develop life...
Only if the scientist who wrote that entered the sphere.
Or if the formation of life is somehow dependent on observation (via Heisenberg "uncertainty"). In which case moons of this type in our observable universe would indeed have increased in their chance of producing life.
it tupid
From what I hear, through people some may consider eccentric (undue criticism), vultures show amazing prescience and aptitude. But they've been under prejudice (perhaps well earned) for so long that they are one of those animals that haven't been as thoroughly studied as something cuter or more docile (and not associated with being the last thing you see before you die).
I wonder what the third vulture is thinking. Is there some vulture rule of thumb that only two need to be in the air to find a body, and the third is just doviding tasks by staying on tthe ground (since he noticed that that's what his caretakers are doing)? Or, if theybwere in the wild, perhaps hunting parties include ground members that use tracking skills and other faculties that can't be applied in the air? Or maybe he's just another lazy pig?
Science!
Space Travel - Unfit for Humanity
by Gabriel Arthur Petrie, 11-22-2009
A lot of people on Earth would like to believe that one day, maybe even in their own lifetimes, humanity will reach for the stars in great shimmering vessels. Scientists, sci-fi fans, new-age believers, and imaginative young people around the world share a common dream of exploring and colonizing the near and distant planets, even one day meeting with fellow intelligent races in this galaxy or perhaps, given enough travel time, some other galaxy.
These dreams are all very grandiose, and as engineering visions go, even noble. That we can as a species manage to conquer the stars is a warming and supportive sentiment. That we can actually achieve it within our limited means and resources from Earth is, conversely, as flighty and half-baked as any idea anyone could have. And to actually embark upon such a project, with the world's situation as it is now and obviously for the rest of time, is selfish, rude, arrogant, perhaps sadistic, and surely despotic and tyrannical if on behalf of any government.
The resources required for such an undertaking may exist here on Earth in one form or another, but those resources are too direly needed by the planet's current population to allow it all to be seized up in some dream works that are not guaranteed to produce any positive results.
The inventions brought to us by the space programs of the past are just that -- inventions, not discoveries. There is no cosmos full of advances in textiles, communications, and soft drinks waiting for us to grab it all up. If anything, we might feel sad at the wealth of new things we have in our lives brought to us by the space program, because it means there are fewer things left to be invented in the future, therefore we face a less valuable future in space program commodities enrichment.
Anyone who unwaveringly insists that there are infinite worthwhile inventions for humans (or infinite ways to improve upon what commodities do exist) has as much sense as an inbred dog and need not read further (for objective truth is wasted upon them). I should not have to explain the faulted logic behind those sorts of beliefs, and it is sad that the space program has so many supporters by way of pure stupidity. In any case, to dispel such sturdy beliefs tends to require more example than explanation, and short of witnessing firsthand the dismal ruin of humanity due to the prolonged pursuit of this sci-fi "space-faring" drama, there is not much that can convince the shuttle-hugger to change their ways.
Now, I am not saying that the space program is pure nonsense or entirely worthless. Who knows, there may be a few more inventions or advances in Earthly science that can be mined from space program research projects, but all of this can be achieved in near space. For the sake of using the space program for mere scientific advancements in entirely unrelated fields, there is no need whatsoever to set our sights on far-off places.
And metaphor be damned: this isn't a matter of the poor, humble telescope viewer being suppressed by the superstitious monarch, or a matter of how little we would know now were it not for those brave enough to cross forbidden seas in the distant past.
Building and manning a ship, making a voyage to presumably the edge of the flat earth, these are undertakings that consumed, historically, so little resource overall that compared to today's energy consumption (in, say, Spain) it is not even a fraction of a drop in a bucket. Conversely, when we talk about travel to distant stars and humanity's future among them, we're speaking of energy consumption measurable in the mineral wealth of whole planets, starting with our own, and environmental impacts that will never, ever be recovered from, right here on our home planet. And as for suppression, there simply isn't anyone to blame any more: this is a round planet and that's all that it is, and those boundaries are more firm and more unyielding than any belief that keeps one from
Oh, they did? That's what I get for barely paying attention. All I've been seeing is Sony issuing ridiculous declarations, lying to investors and consumers about their technical expertise, etc. I guess getting bit in the ass probably moved them through court a bit faster than I would expect them to be. Well, I guess we'll see what happens when they apologise.
Frankly, if the (net) hackers don't lay off after the public apology that's coming up, I would have to agree with another user here that they might deserve further police action. As much as I hate to say it, despite the law's early encounters with hacking involving totally impolitic and heavy-handed approach, I don't relish the idea of aimless and ultimately fruitless hacking that's done with no sense of greater purpose except as a thin facade for nuisance. They'll just make demonizing DIY hackers like GeoHot more presentable if they keep it up.
Don't they realize they would gain much more by apologizing for and desisting against GeoHot than they would be trying to sentimentally appease investors who are already losing their asses due to Sony's complete unawareness of ALL simple, cultural matters related to information and security? All they've done this whole episode is show their complete idiocy: in failing to understand the proper and graceful way to accept having a device defeated by a hacker; failing to understand that hackers are serious about their claims and abilities; failing to understand most of the underlying principles not only of technology being used but information theory itself and pertinent concepts like retention of information and where it applies to real-world security models such as trust-based networks. It seems nobody these days in any position of much worth or prominence has even a clue about the workings and mechanisms of governance, of security, of infrastructure, any of it. Sony is just the epitome of what the generations have come down to and how very little they're capable of maintaining rational thought and in-the-now presence. This disgraceful, wretched form of half-witted aggression against normal, common people has become pandemic amongst those wherein whom political and economic power is found consolidated, and their very lowbrow and disdainful perception of what the average human being constitutes in their need and capability is almost villain like. There are very few people amongst either the completely unaffected (yet exposed to the story via media) and those directly affected (Sony's clientele and consumer-base) who are rooting for the company in these recent matters, meanwhile, the company seeks to appease investors instead of the common person or their clientele, showing almost complete apathy towards those who have proffered substantial sums for broken-down old "services". This also goes to show you what the common person is reduced to in terms of buyer awareness and consumer savvy, that this decrepit network -- apparently run by people barely associated with the concepts involved beyond marketing and financing -- is one of the widest-selling entertainment services in the modern world. And yet Sony still manages to fail to find a friend in the world! Bewildering!
There is water at the bottom of the ocean. Under the water, carry the water. On the moon.