"I'm curious. You didn't name the country where you live. Are you also afraid of doing that?"
Yes, Yes he is. He doesn't want a massive wave of slashdotters migrating there.
In all reality, I'd suggest he's posting from Sweeden, but I know there may be a few other European countries with such fast access and Japan and S.Korea almost certainly have it.
You also had the problem that for most cases where you DID need a skill such as jump, use rope, forgery...etc., there was a spell that either completely replaced it (fly > jump & climb +40), or there were spells that granted a quite sizeable bonus to a single skill check. If you could find two such spells that stacked, you were generally golden, as the DM would have to be a total dick to make the check something that d20+ (10-15) + ability mod (5+ at higher levels) couldn't make the check. This use of magic really unbalanced certain factors of the game for any skill check that didn't need to be done frequently - for about 10-20k party gold you could get a large number of these +15 to any skill check wands/scrolls, which was about one encounter or less at higher level.
This was also the case with certain frequently used skills - armor could be enhanced with +15 move silently/hide bonuses for ~70k, but there was no such ability for listen/spot, save rings or trying to convince your DM to allow you to put it on a helmet in a similar fashion. Thus rogues couldn't see themselves, the cleric who somehow maxed spot as a non-CC skill couldn't see them... Similar abuses were allowed with diplomacy, but that was more a skill description problem than anything else. Still by level 5 you could get bards who could turn angry level 20 NPCs into the friendliest guys... and have rolled a 1 doing it.
Hopefully they get rid of a bit of the insane absolute skill checks, which while balanced for a normal character, are in no way balanced for someone specializing in it.
The only real solution as a DM to all of this was to put up an epic level anti-magic field occasionally and go... you need to cross this gap. See also combat with a lower level CR but who uses all (ex) abilities vs a party who uses a ton of magic. It's a bit annoying to the players, but it can help balance things at higher levels...
I have to say that sounds like a much better idea... Although no one wants to be marketed something with the idea of '30 gb transfer/month' or something. The average American doesn't understand this, and they want unlimited. They may never go over 10 gb, but they don't want 30, they want unlimited, even if the unlimited is 20 gb/month
Also you'd have people saying 'I'm only using 40% of my bandwidth/month. I want a cheaper plan!', and the cable companies wouldn't want to give it to them since they are the most profitable customers.
Theoretically your approach increases people's awareness of what they pay and allows for a more accurate use of marginal consumer/producer surplus. As I mentioned though I'm fairly certain they'd lose more by billing the average American less and the few massive p2p users more.
Of course they could just upgrade the 'tubes' and then care less about p2p traffic, but that's a discussion for another slashdot story...and another...
Yes, obviously rape victims should accept this fact and get on with life.
I can accept we have far too many people with a victim mentality; I can accept that this has a large potential for abuse. I can't say that someone who can't live a normal life because of a traumatic event in the past shouldn't get treatment. Yes it will be a very ethically complex drug even if it worked perfectly, but to deny all uses of the drug? I imagine it might also have some uses in military personel, but... yes, it's a very slippery slope.
You evil, evil person. Do you have any idea the effect you're having on the american economy by not viewing the '510,000$ mortgage for $1491' ads? Or what about the 'Punch the Monkey and get a PS3' Not embracing these ideals that we can get something for almost nothing is completely un-American.
Bottom line? Be patriotic! Use IE 6! Punch the monkey! Take out a loan you can't afford!
As for actually corrupting the quality of the song, I highly doubt it will do that more than the encoding process already does - not to mention it could be put at higher/lower than human hearing range (though this would make it easier to find), or it could possibly be removed by comparison of multiple tracks (as mentioned by another poster).
Finally... If they're going to transfer the file anyway, someone could just buy the CD and rip that... but I understand this will likely deter the common user from transfering files, which is ultimately the point. No DRM stands up to dedicated hackers, but the average user will get too annoyed to bother to learn how to crack it...
I suppose the general question i have is one similar to the new computer speeds. I'm sure there may be new uses for them, but they certainly aren't really here now. I don't think I know anyone with a core 2 who says 'this is just too slow. I can only have 20 tabs open, word, IM, a torrent and do light photoshopping... before i notice any real slowdown... even running vista' Yes, there are specialized applications that use this speed, and yes it still takes some time to encode a DVD on a quad 2.4ghz, but i can encode and browse and do just about any other routine task without a problem.
Some things MS is doing (seadragon, photosynth, table computing...) are interesting, but these actually run reasonably fast on current generation hardware - and the most revolutionary one, table computing, seems to be more constrained by displays and sensors than actual processing speeds. Oh well. I suppose there could always be DRM, but I think the newest revolution will be cheap computing, making it more ubiquitous - if you can bundle a screen and a computer capable of browsing the internet or other light tasks for 50$, and make it small... you have a lot more applications.
So yes, will there be a next big thing? I'd certainly think so. It might even be big enough to generate huge sums of money, and in order to lead the market you'd need the infrastructure, but I just don't see it happening all that soon. Youtube is great, and it's nice to be able to view random videos online, but there's still no real way to generate a profit from it, and the easiest way to do so (monthly subscription fee to stream X hours of TV content - anything from the past 30+years) would be held up far more by the IP holders than the bandwidth. We shouldn't fall into a there's no use for bandwidth, so don't develop it, there's no infrastructure so I can't create this application, but the low hanging fruit would be mostly picked at 30 mbps (at which point you could stream high quality video to one computer and watch higher quality youtube videos on other computers, while downloading - which sounds a lot like my above example of a typical computer user)
Also I'm not aware of any really advanced things coming out of Korea/Japan/Europe, which all have bandwidth available in 30-100 mbps quantities fairly cheaply. If there is something, I'd love to know about it.
I'm as much for true broadband as the next guy, but what exactly are the economic benefits of having a 45 (or 100) mbps symmetric connection? Yes, it obviously offers an advantage over the 768 kbps dsl line that repeatedly drops you or throttles down to 200 kbps during busy times, but what about over a 10 or 15 mbps symmetric connection? I realize if you have a resource people will find a way of using it, but give me a good example of something you can't do over a 15 mbps line that you can over a 45 mbps line. (and to steal someone's +5 funny, porn is not an acceptable answer) I think HD tv would be on of the few examples, and it's a fairly lame example - i could watch a really high quality broadcast vs an acceptable one. Perhaps remote storage/desktops, but even there you'd get a 300 mb file quite fast, and beyond video or heavy duty programs you'll find few files over 300 mb... and the economic advantage of me being able to stream videos from my PC at home to work is negative....
The last point is very big. See also the fact that George Bush will probably be the best president China ever had, just like Nevile Chamberlin was the best Prime Minister Germany ever had.
It's intrinsically harder to do useful work that raw work, just like it's easier to destroy than create....
It could also be that it's a brute force attempt to force cohesion, and since force must be met with equal force it's very difficult. That also assumes it could concentrate the exact amount of energy at exactly the right point. Just imagine trying to not only stop a terrorist attack, but subdue them without lethal force. They need one leak to win. You need a perfect record.
People who carry 1 gene for it suffer very little from it's effects, but are very resistant to malaria. People with both required genes are pretty much immune, but have other problems to deal with. If two resistant people procreate, there's a 25% chance they'll get full blown sickle cell anemia...
I don't think I'd call what they're doing a rebound... Closing 282 stores this year, in addition to past closures... and the almighty stock price is near it's lowest 5 year point of 4$/share (to be fair it's been there a few times before though...)
Human evolution died out a long time ago... The first death blow was us being social creatures, which allowed those somewhat less able to live, though perhaps not in great comfort. There definitely was still some of it in existence - Europeans were far more resistant to diseases than most other cultures, due to living in a relatively crowded cesspit. Lack of tools and abilities also showed our diversity - A professor told me black slaves lived longer than white slaves (indentured servants) in the south/Caribbean and reversed in New England (due to resistance to diseases in the respective climates. Incidentally this is part of the reason slavery was less common in the north (it also had to do with relative uses for labor and optimum economic size of producers.))
Thanks to the advent of medicine and technology this is no longer the case. Pretty much all intrinsic advantages against diseases are equalized as hospital care will tend to beat a good immune system any day. People with poor eyesight suffer no disadvantage over those with, those with potentially crippling childhood disabilities can be treated in some cases... the list goes on, and is getting smaller every day. We've even gotten to the point of attempting to remove social darwinism from the system, and to some extent we have. You won't starve in America or Europe if you're stupid. You may not be a great success in other measures, but you'll do fine eating, and more than fine reproducing.
I'd go on about reverse evolution, but I've probably pissed off enough people already. Regardless it shouldn't be too big an issue. If science makes the advances in the next 50 years that it made in the last 50 years, we'll be fine.
It really depends on how far away you are. I'd imagine anywhere much past earth and you aren't picking up a significant portion from the sun.
Fortunately as the other poster mentioned, you have relatively little to worry about with the cold - although there is an extreme temperature difference, there's also a near vacuum, which makes heat transfer very difficult (it only happens through radiation, which may not be the kind you're thinking)
The liquid on your skin would boil away, but it would boil at a very low temperature because of the low pressure. It's possible to have a pot of water boil at 33 degrees... (and probably much lower - look up a phase change diagram) Anyways, since the water on your skin would already be 'hot' enough to boil, I don't believe it would draw any heat from you.
As far as the space station and heat/cooling, it's not the best example - everything depends on how it's positioned relative to the earth/sun. I'm sure it requires heating if the earth obscures the sun from it,and cooling if it's facing the sun... The lack of an atmosphere makes places like the moon change hundreds of degrees in minutes.
If we accept for the sake of argument that global warming exists, and that it is caused by human activities (namely those involving the production of energy), then I highly doubt it will have a significant impact. Reason? The sun provides a lot of energy to the planet. Increasing the amount retained by a small percent is bound to have a much greater impact that releasing energy that was already beneath us (although fairly well insulated). Although I hate to say definitively with current uses for energy this should have no significant impact one way or another... Of course humans have a way of consuming to the point where what was once an unthinkable amount of power is a severe limitation later on. See 640k should be enough for anyone, the US being inexhaustible of land, depleting aquifers that held trillions upon trillions of gallons of water, depleting oil...
Still it is hard to foresee a person consuming something like 1000+ times what the average American already does, and that's allowing for most 3rd world countries to consume at those levels, as well as some population expansion. Not impossible, just very very difficult at this time. I suspect we'd run into other problems first, such as room to hold all these electricity consuming gadgets, materials to make them, etc.
Besides if worse comes to worse, we can just use the electricity to power A/Cs......yes, i know they actually increase the amount of heat, it was a joke. Laugh.
I'd probably have to disagree. WC3 probably suffers from this more than SC(probably due in part to heroes, smaller battle scale, autocasting, less resource management), but neither one of them suffers from it entirely, and it looks like they may be going to an extreme away from this in SC2. Strategy games boil down into being good at a few things, being the best at any one but failing the others generally won't get you wins.
1. Resource management/Building - Having more units on the battlefield is an advantage, and having them first, fastest is too. You also need the right units (anti-air vs air, etc.) This leads to... 2. Intelligence/Fog of War - You need to be able to keep tabs on what the enemy is doing, where they are, etc. This not only helps you build the correct units to counter the enemy, but also to be able to attack at the right time. If he is teching, rush. If he is rushing, defend and tech. I'll also put positioning of troops, concentration vs weak points, hit and run, etc. in there. 3. Micromanagement - Really this is tactics, not strategy, but battles can easily be pushed in favor of one or the other by precise maneuvering of troops, taking high ground, using special abilities, etc.
I dare you to simply do one of those and win at any decently balanced RTS. Any good player needs to do all three; it's true that 1 is probably the easiest to master, so you see a lot more of it in games however I've watched replays of people who beat me handily and they tended to do all three (because at a high level everyone has mastered the easy things - build orders. 2&3 play a much bigger importance.) Unless there is one unit/build path which when produced in an effective manner can noticeably crush any defense(and hence victory) at a given point in time (and leaves no significant weaknesses to be exploited beforehand) your argument falls apart.
Further, if there is no play (skill), then you should have very little problem building an AI to consistently crush human players without the advantages typically given them (more resources, omniscience), since though testing you could come up with the optimum build order, one which no human should be able to match. You even have the advantage in a SC like game (without autocast) that your AI could theoretically use every unit's special ability at the same time, something no human could do. So hop to it; I want a very good SC AI from you, focusing mostly on build paths.
With respect, insightful? Yes, it is true that the telecoms do give themselves preferential treatment, but such an ill-formed comment. Yes, the fact that we pay more for ten plus times less is very very sad, but this isn't digg... Vocabulary. A more elegant weapon for a more civilized time. See also capitalization.
Good enough for raster graphics, not so good for vector graphics or 3D due to there being only 8 FPUs on the die, with only twice the floating point throughput of the terrible-at-floating-point T1. Unless you do swap some of the throughput for soft-floating-point.
From TFA: "8 Sparc cores; 4-MB L2 cache; Integrated floating-point units into each core pipeline Double the performance per watt of the predecessor Niagara 1; Order of magnitude (10 times, for you non-math types) improvement in floating-point performance; Two on-chip 10G Ethernet ports: Eight cryptographic units, to support running both Ethernet ports encrypted"
I'm not debating your point (don't know enough to), just pointing that out.
The two best players I have ever played played as peach. This includes someone who was able to tell me that my attack was canceled because it executes at the end of the animation and his at the start, i.e. someone who played it way too much. Her dress twirl, hover, and up+a smash are all winners. The dress twirl (down + a) can add 30-40 damage in a hit, and a mushroomed character can be hit 2-3 times by it.
All that said, fox is one of the cheapest mofos around, and probably the best. With good timing of the deflector, you can almost get through a match with just that. Ranged is next to useless, and melee... well, he's very fast. Good luck getting any of the slower attacks off against him.
Of course i might have been a wee bit upset since i played as samus, and the reflector really negates her nice abilities. Still she's a great balance - heavy, fast, strong... Can't wait to see zero suit...
Yes, that's true, it's hard to get around a fundamental limit in our DNA. However 50 years ago we couldn't scan into the human brain, our ability to treat cancer was quite limited, most major operations required weeks or months recovery time and huge scars - now its 3 or 4 small incisions and much less time. My point is that save the advances in medicine that were so important because they were so fundamental - like washing of hands, discovery of bacteria and viruses as agents of infection, the first antibiotics, immunizations - the last 50 years have probably seen more medical advances than the rest of human history combined. Certainly the past 150 has (and includes all of the aforementioned advances.) Maybe DNA will be a hard limit to break, but it isn't impossible.
They've also already proven in rats/mice (and very much so in worms) that by reducing energy input to nearly starvation levels (think 1000 calories a day for an average human), it was possible to extend their lives by a factor of 50-100%. I want to say they did something like have a 700% increase in the worms when they stopped sexual maturity from happening. No, starving and no sex isn't a good way to go through life, but it does mean that it's possible. (though neither of these dealt with the lack of telomerase, merely reduced cellular reproduction)
I could be wrong on some of this, but the jist is correct. Certainly not an easy problem, but not an impossible one. Our grasp of medicine may be like that of computers in 1950 "In the year 2000 for 10,000 dollars you too will be able to own your own computer, the size of a large refrigerator, able to perform several million calculations a second!", or we may have gotten most of the low hanging fruit.
In retrospect a lot of us were born just a 'little too early'. It only goes to highlight the progress that has been made in the past 50 years, especially in medicine.
If it's any consolation to your ankle, provided we can avoid any major setbacks to progress, the first human that will live to see 200 is probably already alive. The amount of change s/he'll see... add to the fact that once you get that far, you'll probably live as old as you want to be, if we haven't become borg at that point...
Yes, I was taking an economic evolution course at a university, and the professor made a point of the various life expectancies - by general time period between 1700s-1900s, and the expected years to live if you had reached a certain point (0,15,30,60 years). I think in the past 200 years the industrialized world added 10 years to your life expectancy if you made it to 60, but added something like 40 to the average person from birth. Almost all these gains are from the aforementioned sanitation and clean water supplies (as well as very basic practices, such as washing your hands between patients, or cures to infantile diseases that cost pennies.)
Chlorine in the water was the primary reason for adding about 20+ of those years.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd be prepared to shoot teens for the sake of morality."
Yes! I mean, Who will think of the children?!
Wait a minu...
Well, it's got the word quantum in it, so it's gotta be good... right?
What are the odds that we see this in the next 15 years? 20?
"I'm curious. You didn't name the country where you live. Are you also afraid of doing that?"
Yes, Yes he is. He doesn't want a massive wave of slashdotters migrating there.
In all reality, I'd suggest he's posting from Sweeden, but I know there may be a few other European countries with such fast access and Japan and S.Korea almost certainly have it.
You also had the problem that for most cases where you DID need a skill such as jump, use rope, forgery...etc., there was a spell that either completely replaced it (fly > jump & climb +40), or there were spells that granted a quite sizeable bonus to a single skill check. If you could find two such spells that stacked, you were generally golden, as the DM would have to be a total dick to make the check something that d20+ (10-15) + ability mod (5+ at higher levels) couldn't make the check. This use of magic really unbalanced certain factors of the game for any skill check that didn't need to be done frequently - for about 10-20k party gold you could get a large number of these +15 to any skill check wands/scrolls, which was about one encounter or less at higher level.
This was also the case with certain frequently used skills - armor could be enhanced with +15 move silently/hide bonuses for ~70k, but there was no such ability for listen/spot, save rings or trying to convince your DM to allow you to put it on a helmet in a similar fashion. Thus rogues couldn't see themselves, the cleric who somehow maxed spot as a non-CC skill couldn't see them... Similar abuses were allowed with diplomacy, but that was more a skill description problem than anything else. Still by level 5 you could get bards who could turn angry level 20 NPCs into the friendliest guys... and have rolled a 1 doing it.
Hopefully they get rid of a bit of the insane absolute skill checks, which while balanced for a normal character, are in no way balanced for someone specializing in it.
The only real solution as a DM to all of this was to put up an epic level anti-magic field occasionally and go... you need to cross this gap. See also combat with a lower level CR but who uses all (ex) abilities vs a party who uses a ton of magic. It's a bit annoying to the players, but it can help balance things at higher levels...
I have to say that sounds like a much better idea... Although no one wants to be marketed something with the idea of '30 gb transfer/month' or something. The average American doesn't understand this, and they want unlimited. They may never go over 10 gb, but they don't want 30, they want unlimited, even if the unlimited is 20 gb/month
Also you'd have people saying 'I'm only using 40% of my bandwidth/month. I want a cheaper plan!', and the cable companies wouldn't want to give it to them since they are the most profitable customers.
Theoretically your approach increases people's awareness of what they pay and allows for a more accurate use of marginal consumer/producer surplus. As I mentioned though I'm fairly certain they'd lose more by billing the average American less and the few massive p2p users more.
Of course they could just upgrade the 'tubes' and then care less about p2p traffic, but that's a discussion for another slashdot story...and another...
Yes, obviously rape victims should accept this fact and get on with life.
I can accept we have far too many people with a victim mentality; I can accept that this has a large potential for abuse. I can't say that someone who can't live a normal life because of a traumatic event in the past shouldn't get treatment. Yes it will be a very ethically complex drug even if it worked perfectly, but to deny all uses of the drug? I imagine it might also have some uses in military personel, but... yes, it's a very slippery slope.
You evil, evil person. Do you have any idea the effect you're having on the american economy by not viewing the '510,000$ mortgage for $1491' ads? Or what about the 'Punch the Monkey and get a PS3' Not embracing these ideals that we can get something for almost nothing is completely un-American.
Bottom line? Be patriotic! Use IE 6! Punch the monkey! Take out a loan you can't afford!
iTunes already does this. http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/05/ 31/eff-drm-free-itunes-files-carry-more-than-just- names-and-e-mail-addresses/
n wateritunesplus/index.php/
Granted it's not contained within the actual music data to my knowledge, so your idea for removal does work http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/u
As for actually corrupting the quality of the song, I highly doubt it will do that more than the encoding process already does - not to mention it could be put at higher/lower than human hearing range (though this would make it easier to find), or it could possibly be removed by comparison of multiple tracks (as mentioned by another poster).
Finally... If they're going to transfer the file anyway, someone could just buy the CD and rip that... but I understand this will likely deter the common user from transfering files, which is ultimately the point. No DRM stands up to dedicated hackers, but the average user will get too annoyed to bother to learn how to crack it...
I suppose the general question i have is one similar to the new computer speeds. I'm sure there may be new uses for them, but they certainly aren't really here now. I don't think I know anyone with a core 2 who says 'this is just too slow. I can only have 20 tabs open, word, IM, a torrent and do light photoshopping... before i notice any real slowdown... even running vista' Yes, there are specialized applications that use this speed, and yes it still takes some time to encode a DVD on a quad 2.4ghz, but i can encode and browse and do just about any other routine task without a problem.
Some things MS is doing (seadragon, photosynth, table computing...) are interesting, but these actually run reasonably fast on current generation hardware - and the most revolutionary one, table computing, seems to be more constrained by displays and sensors than actual processing speeds. Oh well. I suppose there could always be DRM, but I think the newest revolution will be cheap computing, making it more ubiquitous - if you can bundle a screen and a computer capable of browsing the internet or other light tasks for 50$, and make it small... you have a lot more applications.
So yes, will there be a next big thing? I'd certainly think so. It might even be big enough to generate huge sums of money, and in order to lead the market you'd need the infrastructure, but I just don't see it happening all that soon. Youtube is great, and it's nice to be able to view random videos online, but there's still no real way to generate a profit from it, and the easiest way to do so (monthly subscription fee to stream X hours of TV content - anything from the past 30+years) would be held up far more by the IP holders than the bandwidth. We shouldn't fall into a there's no use for bandwidth, so don't develop it, there's no infrastructure so I can't create this application, but the low hanging fruit would be mostly picked at 30 mbps (at which point you could stream high quality video to one computer and watch higher quality youtube videos on other computers, while downloading - which sounds a lot like my above example of a typical computer user)
Also I'm not aware of any really advanced things coming out of Korea/Japan/Europe, which all have bandwidth available in 30-100 mbps quantities fairly cheaply. If there is something, I'd love to know about it.
I'm as much for true broadband as the next guy, but what exactly are the economic benefits of having a 45 (or 100) mbps symmetric connection? Yes, it obviously offers an advantage over the 768 kbps dsl line that repeatedly drops you or throttles down to 200 kbps during busy times, but what about over a 10 or 15 mbps symmetric connection? I realize if you have a resource people will find a way of using it, but give me a good example of something you can't do over a 15 mbps line that you can over a 45 mbps line. (and to steal someone's +5 funny, porn is not an acceptable answer) I think HD tv would be on of the few examples, and it's a fairly lame example - i could watch a really high quality broadcast vs an acceptable one. Perhaps remote storage/desktops, but even there you'd get a 300 mb file quite fast, and beyond video or heavy duty programs you'll find few files over 300 mb... and the economic advantage of me being able to stream videos from my PC at home to work is negative....
The last point is very big. See also the fact that George Bush will probably be the best president China ever had, just like Nevile Chamberlin was the best Prime Minister Germany ever had.
It's intrinsically harder to do useful work that raw work, just like it's easier to destroy than create....
It could also be that it's a brute force attempt to force cohesion, and since force must be met with equal force it's very difficult. That also assumes it could concentrate the exact amount of energy at exactly the right point. Just imagine trying to not only stop a terrorist attack, but subdue them without lethal force. They need one leak to win. You need a perfect record.
To be fair, nature's solution to malaria is less than ideal...
e netics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_anemia#G
People who carry 1 gene for it suffer very little from it's effects, but are very resistant to malaria. People with both required genes are pretty much immune, but have other problems to deal with. If two resistant people procreate, there's a 25% chance they'll get full blown sickle cell anemia...
I don't think I'd call what they're doing a rebound... Closing 282 stores this year, in addition to past closures... and the almighty stock price is near it's lowest 5 year point of 4$/share (to be fair it's been there a few times before though...)
_ closing.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070628/blockbuster_stores
towel soon to follow.
Human evolution died out a long time ago... The first death blow was us being social creatures, which allowed those somewhat less able to live, though perhaps not in great comfort. There definitely was still some of it in existence - Europeans were far more resistant to diseases than most other cultures, due to living in a relatively crowded cesspit. Lack of tools and abilities also showed our diversity - A professor told me black slaves lived longer than white slaves (indentured servants) in the south/Caribbean and reversed in New England (due to resistance to diseases in the respective climates. Incidentally this is part of the reason slavery was less common in the north (it also had to do with relative uses for labor and optimum economic size of producers.))
Thanks to the advent of medicine and technology this is no longer the case. Pretty much all intrinsic advantages against diseases are equalized as hospital care will tend to beat a good immune system any day. People with poor eyesight suffer no disadvantage over those with, those with potentially crippling childhood disabilities can be treated in some cases... the list goes on, and is getting smaller every day. We've even gotten to the point of attempting to remove social darwinism from the system, and to some extent we have. You won't starve in America or Europe if you're stupid. You may not be a great success in other measures, but you'll do fine eating, and more than fine reproducing.
I'd go on about reverse evolution, but I've probably pissed off enough people already. Regardless it shouldn't be too big an issue. If science makes the advances in the next 50 years that it made in the last 50 years, we'll be fine.
It really depends on how far away you are. I'd imagine anywhere much past earth and you aren't picking up a significant portion from the sun.
Fortunately as the other poster mentioned, you have relatively little to worry about with the cold - although there is an extreme temperature difference, there's also a near vacuum, which makes heat transfer very difficult (it only happens through radiation, which may not be the kind you're thinking)
The liquid on your skin would boil away, but it would boil at a very low temperature because of the low pressure. It's possible to have a pot of water boil at 33 degrees... (and probably much lower - look up a phase change diagram) Anyways, since the water on your skin would already be 'hot' enough to boil, I don't believe it would draw any heat from you.
As far as the space station and heat/cooling, it's not the best example - everything depends on how it's positioned relative to the earth/sun. I'm sure it requires heating if the earth obscures the sun from it,and cooling if it's facing the sun... The lack of an atmosphere makes places like the moon change hundreds of degrees in minutes.
Maybe that helps.
If we accept for the sake of argument that global warming exists, and that it is caused by human activities (namely those involving the production of energy), then I highly doubt it will have a significant impact. Reason? The sun provides a lot of energy to the planet. Increasing the amount retained by a small percent is bound to have a much greater impact that releasing energy that was already beneath us (although fairly well insulated). Although I hate to say definitively with current uses for energy this should have no significant impact one way or another... Of course humans have a way of consuming to the point where what was once an unthinkable amount of power is a severe limitation later on. See 640k should be enough for anyone, the US being inexhaustible of land, depleting aquifers that held trillions upon trillions of gallons of water, depleting oil...
...yes, i know they actually increase the amount of heat, it was a joke. Laugh.
Still it is hard to foresee a person consuming something like 1000+ times what the average American already does, and that's allowing for most 3rd world countries to consume at those levels, as well as some population expansion. Not impossible, just very very difficult at this time. I suspect we'd run into other problems first, such as room to hold all these electricity consuming gadgets, materials to make them, etc.
Besides if worse comes to worse, we can just use the electricity to power A/Cs...
I'd probably have to disagree. WC3 probably suffers from this more than SC(probably due in part to heroes, smaller battle scale, autocasting, less resource management), but neither one of them suffers from it entirely, and it looks like they may be going to an extreme away from this in SC2. Strategy games boil down into being good at a few things, being the best at any one but failing the others generally won't get you wins.
1. Resource management/Building - Having more units on the battlefield is an advantage, and having them first, fastest is too. You also need the right units (anti-air vs air, etc.) This leads to...
2. Intelligence/Fog of War - You need to be able to keep tabs on what the enemy is doing, where they are, etc. This not only helps you build the correct units to counter the enemy, but also to be able to attack at the right time. If he is teching, rush. If he is rushing, defend and tech. I'll also put positioning of troops, concentration vs weak points, hit and run, etc. in there.
3. Micromanagement - Really this is tactics, not strategy, but battles can easily be pushed in favor of one or the other by precise maneuvering of troops, taking high ground, using special abilities, etc.
I dare you to simply do one of those and win at any decently balanced RTS. Any good player needs to do all three; it's true that 1 is probably the easiest to master, so you see a lot more of it in games however I've watched replays of people who beat me handily and they tended to do all three (because at a high level everyone has mastered the easy things - build orders. 2&3 play a much bigger importance.) Unless there is one unit/build path which when produced in an effective manner can noticeably crush any defense(and hence victory) at a given point in time (and leaves no significant weaknesses to be exploited beforehand) your argument falls apart.
Further, if there is no play (skill), then you should have very little problem building an AI to consistently crush human players without the advantages typically given them (more resources, omniscience), since though testing you could come up with the optimum build order, one which no human should be able to match. You even have the advantage in a SC like game (without autocast) that your AI could theoretically use every unit's special ability at the same time, something no human could do. So hop to it; I want a very good SC AI from you, focusing mostly on build paths.
With respect, insightful? Yes, it is true that the telecoms do give themselves preferential treatment, but such an ill-formed comment. Yes, the fact that we pay more for ten plus times less is very very sad, but this isn't digg... Vocabulary. A more elegant weapon for a more civilized time. See also capitalization.
Good enough for raster graphics, not so good for vector graphics or 3D due to there being only 8 FPUs on the die, with only twice the floating point throughput of the terrible-at-floating-point T1. Unless you do swap some of the throughput for soft-floating-point.
From TFA:
"8 Sparc cores;
4-MB L2 cache;
Integrated floating-point units into each core pipeline
Double the performance per watt of the predecessor Niagara 1;
Order of magnitude (10 times, for you non-math types) improvement in floating-point performance;
Two on-chip 10G Ethernet ports:
Eight cryptographic units, to support running both Ethernet ports encrypted"
I'm not debating your point (don't know enough to), just pointing that out.
The two best players I have ever played played as peach. This includes someone who was able to tell me that my attack was canceled because it executes at the end of the animation and his at the start, i.e. someone who played it way too much. Her dress twirl, hover, and up+a smash are all winners. The dress twirl (down + a) can add 30-40 damage in a hit, and a mushroomed character can be hit 2-3 times by it.
All that said, fox is one of the cheapest mofos around, and probably the best. With good timing of the deflector, you can almost get through a match with just that. Ranged is next to useless, and melee... well, he's very fast. Good luck getting any of the slower attacks off against him.
Of course i might have been a wee bit upset since i played as samus, and the reflector really negates her nice abilities. Still she's a great balance - heavy, fast, strong... Can't wait to see zero suit...
Yes, that's true, it's hard to get around a fundamental limit in our DNA. However 50 years ago we couldn't scan into the human brain, our ability to treat cancer was quite limited, most major operations required weeks or months recovery time and huge scars - now its 3 or 4 small incisions and much less time. My point is that save the advances in medicine that were so important because they were so fundamental - like washing of hands, discovery of bacteria and viruses as agents of infection, the first antibiotics, immunizations - the last 50 years have probably seen more medical advances than the rest of human history combined. Certainly the past 150 has (and includes all of the aforementioned advances.) Maybe DNA will be a hard limit to break, but it isn't impossible.
They've also already proven in rats/mice (and very much so in worms) that by reducing energy input to nearly starvation levels (think 1000 calories a day for an average human), it was possible to extend their lives by a factor of 50-100%. I want to say they did something like have a 700% increase in the worms when they stopped sexual maturity from happening. No, starving and no sex isn't a good way to go through life, but it does mean that it's possible. (though neither of these dealt with the lack of telomerase, merely reduced cellular reproduction)
I could be wrong on some of this, but the jist is correct. Certainly not an easy problem, but not an impossible one. Our grasp of medicine may be like that of computers in 1950 "In the year 2000 for 10,000 dollars you too will be able to own your own computer, the size of a large refrigerator, able to perform several million calculations a second!", or we may have gotten most of the low hanging fruit.
In retrospect a lot of us were born just a 'little too early'. It only goes to highlight the progress that has been made in the past 50 years, especially in medicine.
If it's any consolation to your ankle, provided we can avoid any major setbacks to progress, the first human that will live to see 200 is probably already alive. The amount of change s/he'll see... add to the fact that once you get that far, you'll probably live as old as you want to be, if we haven't become borg at that point...
Good luck on the operation though.
Yes, I was taking an economic evolution course at a university, and the professor made a point of the various life expectancies - by general time period between 1700s-1900s, and the expected years to live if you had reached a certain point (0,15,30,60 years). I think in the past 200 years the industrialized world added 10 years to your life expectancy if you made it to 60, but added something like 40 to the average person from birth. Almost all these gains are from the aforementioned sanitation and clean water supplies (as well as very basic practices, such as washing your hands between patients, or cures to infantile diseases that cost pennies.)
Chlorine in the water was the primary reason for adding about 20+ of those years.