Err, we don't need to know anything about the speed we have been moving at to get the time.
It's 13.2 billion ligh years away so the light we are seeing now is 13.2 billion light years old because that's the time it takes for it to travel here.
Survival of the species and all that, if a superbug wipes out all of the available hosts, it has nothing left to spread into and propagate, so it dies out. Not good, so they tend to mutate quickly into less-lethal ones. Flu is a good example, it has potential to be really big one like 1918 spanish flu, but are most strains like that? No.
Of course such a screw-ups still end up wiping up helluva lot of people every now and then, but they are the exception, not rule.
Engineered disease on the other hand can be targeted to have optimal incubation time to spread very far and then just kill, it doesn't care about its own survival.
[Of course, the solution to this is to hire a chauffer, who makes significantly less than you do, and just pay all of his/her fines for them]
Well, most of the very rich people probably already have a chauffer for most things, but at least the younger ones might want to cruise around and boast with their shiny new sports cars themselves every now and then...
Are you claiming people really _use_ alarm clocks that are connected to the grid?
I haven't even seen one in years, why bother with something like that when cell phone, battery powered or even mechanical clock is much smaller and usually simpler?
Even if standing perfectly still, there's bound to be muscle vibration and other movement to just about every direction in your body. It doesn't really matter if it's the conductor or field that's moving...
No idea what kind of frequency it might correspond to, though, and everything would be rather chaotically moving in relation to the field.
I still have to wonder why they didn't do the obvious third experiment: low-level field, 10 minutes a day, over the lifetime of the rat.
Well, that's simple.
Because there wouldn't have been any damage. It wouldn't sell to alarmists, what good is junk science if you don't get yourself to headlines with the bunk, even for few days.
The antibiotic issue is a serious one, I agree, but it certainly can't be as dire as the over-prescribing of human antibiotics to humans.
If there would only be a food poisoning to worry about, maybe, but it's clear that is not the only way for bacteria to get from animals to humans.
Not to mention they also have those nice ways of exchanging genetic material and giving their new-found antibiotic resistance to neighbours.
All it takes is one real bad strain, at that point, who cares if it came from over-prescribing or feeding antibiotics to cows like it was candy?
Re:impossible to do honest work
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
The sad reality is that auto repair is very expensive work, and the places must cheat you just to make ends meet, less they charge higher rates, and steer away customers, and go out of business.
If they can't get customers without resorting to cheating, then they shouldn't even try to do the goddamnit business.
Cutting corners on cars might end up costing someones life.
Temperature and pressure there _vastly_ exceeds anything you'd ever found on Earth, so you can bet that "very highly compressed" is a huge understatement.
This is not probably even a diamond nothing resembling the ones we have at least, it's much more tightly pressed than the lowly stones Earth has.
Sure it is, it's rare, though, and quite unlike gemstones, can not be synthesized (transmuted, yes, but that costs way more than gold itself).
And cash is just ink and paper.
Yes, it is. In that respect, you're right, cash is just like diamonds - it's only valuable because it's controlled by someone - but unlike diamonds, cash is not controlled by illegal cartel. Some people won't like governments or other administrative organizations, but I don't think anyone thinks money would be better of in hands of de Beers than central banks of nations.
These things have value because people believe they have, but they also have value because they are at least somewhat rare, due to someone controlling the supply. If you put unlimited amount of cash to market, it leads inevitably to inflation, pieces of ink and paper no longer have any value because there are too many of them.
If you put enough diamonds on market, same thing happens, they lose any value they had, be it real or imaginary.
2.- What is very cold? Why it should be harder to read?
He's right on this one.
LCD displays do get dimmer when it's cold, they also update S-L-O-W. Few degrees celsius under zero will do nicely, and the colder it gets, the more noticeable these effects are.
You want binary packages? You get them from a distributor. That's what distributors do.
Be prepared to wait few months for them, though.
Distributors (well, those whose products one would actually use, at least) do not just get new tarballs from KDE, compile them and whip new packages to errata list.
This is a major update and so requires quite a bit of work (especially testing). You probably won't get update packages of this magnitude at all, instead expect it to hit next version of distribution.
J2EE? Maybe, but even then it's nothing inherent in Java, the language, but that one specific framework.
There are plenty of very complicated frameworks written in C(++) too, or if you want to use inetd instead of J2EE stuff for web service, well, there's nothing preventing you from writing simple daemon that reads from stdin and writes to stdout in java as well.
1st off, he was joking. Why else would he start talking about Doom?
Lowest common denominator. Unfortunately there are plenty of people capable of thinking Doom is perfectly credible scenario. Many idiots do actually believe this kind of experiments will cause end of the world (or universe). Many are against genetic engineering because they think Jurassic Park is true. Maybe this one was joke, but it resembles some "serious" arguments quite a bit.
They are notoriously hard to create, and need massive energies to do so.
Yup, they need pretty massive energies to do, but that's about it. Nothing more than smashing two things together very hard, the notoriously hard part is to get some useful data out of it, and to get those things going fast enough.
But there are cosmic rays out there with orders of magnitude more energy than we can create in our pathetic little particle accelerators, and they eventually tend to smash into things, including our atmosphere.
Err, they did create element with 115 protons. It was very unstable and almost instantly decayed to one with 113, which in turn became something else in 1.2 seconds until they end up with something stable n+1 splits later. Very fast decay is pretty much expected and the norm for superheavy elements.
And unfortunately there are plenty of idiots on Slashdot who really think what you joked about, that high energy particle physics are somehow dangerous and will destroy the universe. And that Doom is pretty much real, so it's damn hard to tell.
Slashdot Mirror
We DO know for sure.
It's been, what, a whole month? Since the ESA orbiter confirmed water ice in polar caps.
Maybe it would have been, if done a lifetime ago.
Water on Mars? Boo hoo. Does it get _any_ older than that?
Why should media even bother to handle this again, they've already ran 10000 "water on mars" findings during the last 50 years.
Err, we don't need to know anything about the speed we have been moving at to get the time.
It's 13.2 billion ligh years away so the light we are seeing now is 13.2 billion light years old because that's the time it takes for it to travel here.
But then Darl McBride would be preserved for all of eternity!
Can you think any more heinous crimes for undoing of entire universe?
For the same reason kazillion of other books you can get for free online continue selling pretty well in paper form?
Not all people are on the 'net all the time, and reading from a monitor is damn inconvenient compared to a book.
On the other hand, you can search an electronic much easier, they both have big pros and cons.
There are few other games using Python, Temple of Elemental Evil comes to mind.
The deadly ones are mostly mistakes in nature.
Survival of the species and all that, if a superbug wipes out all of the available hosts, it has nothing left to spread into and propagate, so it dies out. Not good, so they tend to mutate quickly into less-lethal ones. Flu is a good example, it has potential to be really big one like 1918 spanish flu, but are most strains like that? No.
Of course such a screw-ups still end up wiping up helluva lot of people every now and then, but they are the exception, not rule.
Engineered disease on the other hand can be targeted to have optimal incubation time to spread very far and then just kill, it doesn't care about its own survival.
[Of course, the solution to this is to hire a chauffer, who makes significantly less than you do, and just pay all of his/her fines for them]
Well, most of the very rich people probably already have a chauffer for most things, but at least the younger ones might want to cruise around and boast with their shiny new sports cars themselves every now and then...
Are you claiming people really _use_ alarm clocks that are connected to the grid?
I haven't even seen one in years, why bother with something like that when cell phone, battery powered or even mechanical clock is much smaller and usually simpler?
Earth's field may be static, but you are not.
Even if standing perfectly still, there's bound to be muscle vibration and other movement to just about every direction in your body. It doesn't really matter if it's the conductor or field that's moving...
No idea what kind of frequency it might correspond to, though, and everything would be rather chaotically moving in relation to the field.
I still have to wonder why they didn't do the obvious third experiment: low-level field, 10 minutes a day, over the lifetime of the rat.
Well, that's simple.
Because there wouldn't have been any damage. It wouldn't sell to alarmists, what good is junk science if you don't get yourself to headlines with the bunk, even for few days.
The antibiotic issue is a serious one, I agree, but it certainly can't be as dire as the over-prescribing of human antibiotics to humans.
If there would only be a food poisoning to worry about, maybe, but it's clear that is not the only way for bacteria to get from animals to humans.
Not to mention they also have those nice ways of exchanging genetic material and giving their new-found antibiotic resistance to neighbours.
All it takes is one real bad strain, at that point, who cares if it came from over-prescribing or feeding antibiotics to cows like it was candy?
The sad reality is that auto repair is very expensive work, and the places must cheat you just to make ends meet, less they charge higher rates, and steer away customers, and go out of business.
If they can't get customers without resorting to cheating, then they shouldn't even try to do the goddamnit business.
Cutting corners on cars might end up costing someones life.
Crystallized carbon in core of white dwarf will probably be nothing even near any of the forms we are familiar with.
It's something else we don't even have a name for, aside from general "degenerate matter"
It's a white dwarf.
Not quite neutronium, but yes, those small little things pack a helluva lot matter into small volume.
Um, it's a heart of a (ex-)star.
Temperature and pressure there _vastly_ exceeds anything you'd ever found on Earth, so you can bet that "very highly compressed" is a huge understatement.
This is not probably even a diamond nothing resembling the ones we have at least, it's much more tightly pressed than the lowly stones Earth has.
And gold is just a shiny metal.
Sure it is, it's rare, though, and quite unlike gemstones, can not be synthesized (transmuted, yes, but that costs way more than gold itself).
And cash is just ink and paper.
Yes, it is. In that respect, you're right, cash is just like diamonds - it's only valuable because it's controlled by someone - but unlike diamonds, cash is not controlled by illegal cartel. Some people won't like governments or other administrative organizations, but I don't think anyone thinks money would be better of in hands of de Beers than central banks of nations.
These things have value because people believe they have, but they also have value because they are at least somewhat rare, due to someone controlling the supply. If you put unlimited amount of cash to market, it leads inevitably to inflation, pieces of ink and paper no longer have any value because there are too many of them.
If you put enough diamonds on market, same thing happens, they lose any value they had, be it real or imaginary.
That's not going to happen. Ever.
So you may as well stop bitching about it, if you want one setup, use one setup and let other people use whatever they wish.
2.- What is very cold? Why it should be harder to read?
He's right on this one.
LCD displays do get dimmer when it's cold, they also update S-L-O-W. Few degrees celsius under zero will do nicely, and the colder it gets, the more noticeable these effects are.
You do know that those "mechanical works of art" are today really "silicon gadgets" with a stepper motor instead of LCD, don't you?
Wow, what a high-tech finemechanical piece of art indeed.
You want binary packages? You get them from a distributor. That's what distributors do.
Be prepared to wait few months for them, though.
Distributors (well, those whose products one would actually use, at least) do not just get new tarballs from KDE, compile them and whip new packages to errata list.
This is a major update and so requires quite a bit of work (especially testing). You probably won't get update packages of this magnitude at all, instead expect it to hit next version of distribution.
J2EE? Maybe, but even then it's nothing inherent in Java, the language, but that one specific framework.
There are plenty of very complicated frameworks written in C(++) too, or if you want to use inetd instead of J2EE stuff for web service, well, there's nothing preventing you from writing simple daemon that reads from stdin and writes to stdout in java as well.
Idiotproofing, that is? Won't work. Don't you know that nature _always_ invents better idiot.
1st off, he was joking. Why else would he start talking about Doom?
Lowest common denominator. Unfortunately there are plenty of people capable of thinking Doom is perfectly credible scenario. Many idiots do actually believe this kind of experiments will cause end of the world (or universe). Many are against genetic engineering because they think Jurassic Park is true. Maybe this one was joke, but it resembles some "serious" arguments quite a bit.
They are notoriously hard to create, and need massive energies to do so.
Yup, they need pretty massive energies to do, but that's about it. Nothing more than smashing two things together very hard, the notoriously hard part is to get some useful data out of it, and to get those things going fast enough.
But there are cosmic rays out there with orders of magnitude more energy than we can create in our pathetic little particle accelerators, and they eventually tend to smash into things, including our atmosphere.
Err, they did create element with 115 protons. It was very unstable and almost instantly decayed to one with 113, which in turn became something else in 1.2 seconds until they end up with something stable n+1 splits later. Very fast decay is pretty much expected and the norm for superheavy elements.
And unfortunately there are plenty of idiots on Slashdot who really think what you joked about, that high energy particle physics are somehow dangerous and will destroy the universe. And that Doom is pretty much real, so it's damn hard to tell.