I'm currently under negotiations with Google to see if I can use their massive ammounts of Pidgeon Clusters and a few statues I have handy to do some studies on the dynamics of white dialetric material.
I'll probably just end up bullshitting the answers instead.
Okay. It's 1993. I think. I was somewhere between 8 and 10, so maybe it was '94. Anyway, it's not important.
I was learning to program at the time, and my uncle who is four years older than me decided that since I was a rather dull child, with wit as sharp as a rubber ball, I should start with QBASIC.
So I created a grand program: A DOS Shell. It would let you look around, cd, all that fancy stuff. I added colours.
It was all good.
So, anyway, I didn't really have a good concept of exactly what an OS was, and I decided I'd written one, so, (this was back in the day you understand, and my parents really weren't too computer savvy) I got on their AOL account and uploaded it to AOL's file center, billing it as a revolutionary new operation system called DHDMP. I think. That or DHCMP. I forget.
The instructions went something along the lines of, STEP 1: Uninstall DOS.
You get the picture.
Well, after around 9 thousand downloads, my parent's AOL account was canceled.
I'd like to think I did a great deal of good via those 9 thousand downloads.
Just because I'm blessed and cursed with a pedantic bent and a masochistic one, respectively, I'm going to futilely attempt to enlighten you, Anonymous Coward.
I direct your attention to Operation Downfall, the proposed plan for the United States' invasion of Japan. The estimated casualties for United States forces alone were estimated to be nearly one million men to take the island.
When you consider at the time that Japanese soldiers and even civilians who had been forced to retreat to caves refused to surrender, fought to the death, and had to be flame-throwered in the caves because they would have done everything in their power to kill American Soldiers, combined with the fact that virtually everyone in Japan who would have been able to wield any form of weapon would have made resistance, you are looking at not only the deaths of 1 Million US Service personnel, but practically the total elimination of the Japanese Population.
So, in short, yes, I think 100,000 lives were worth it. I happen to like Japan, and am glad that we dropped the bombs on them, because if we hadn't I doubt very much Japan would be around today.
The problem with America is it has gone too far from the ideals of the founding fathers. When they spoke of 'minority rights,' what minority do you think they were speaking of?
They were speaking about themselves. They knew, as has become evident, that the majority is a bunch of silly fellows who have no idea what is going on or what is good for them, and that the minority of people who do understand should be protected from the idiots.
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
You don't. That's the whole point. You mine the materials on the moon, where the cost of putting something up is much lower because of the approximately 1/6th G field the moon has.
Get people on the moon, establish a base that has supplies and abilities to search for and extract and refine raw materials. That's the expensive part. It always costs money to set something up. But once you are there, the materials are at hand and you no longer need ferry things up save for components which must be manufactured earthside, such as computer parts and luxury items.
I played EQII starting the day it came out for about three months till I lost my job and had to cut back on non-vital expenses. The graphics are absolutely amazing. I mean AMAZING. My computer is an Athlon XP at 1.94 GHZ with 512 MB DDR RAM and a Radeon 9600 XP card, and I had to run the game at the lowest detail setting to make it playable (say, 40 FPS it seemed to be, unless in a hugely populated zone, like a cityscape) and it still looked good.
I can't wait till next year or the one after that when there will be graphics cards available that can actually play it on High.
Note: The game itself in the configuration settings for video quality says to the effect: There is nothing available to the home user at this time that can play on Highest Detail. It requires atleast 512MB of RAM for Textures on the Card.
This is/. and the man has a girlfriend... Why should he listen to any of us lesser geeks?
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
If the thing is assembled in orbit I don't care if the Orion blows up, I am confident that we will be relatively unaffected.
An Orion spacecraft would be shaped like a bullet. The flat part would be steel about fifty feet thick with a hole bored down the center through which is thrown an atomic bomb. The bomb is detonated, and the force of the explosion hits the plate and propels the craft forward.
What makes you think I'm the person who owns the computer the copy of Windows is on?
And their is no hipocracy in reading the New York Times On-line for free. They are giving it away online for free. If they value it (in electronic form) as worthless, then I should not have to exchange anything of worth to view it.
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
I cannot think of a problem with constructing an Orion spacecraft in orbit, using materials ferried and mined from the moon, and then letting it activate its drive in orbit. We have a whole magnetosphere for shielding to the poles all those dangerous particles.
Anyway, unlike Antarctica, no one lives in Canada.
You know what? Most of us don't mind paying real money for things that have real worth. I payed fifty dollars for Neverwinter Nights when it came out, while my roommate had a 'free' copy the same day.
I will gladly pay money for something I like to make sure that the people who make it will make more. That's how the market economy works. If something has real value, it's only logical to compensate the persons who made it.
Which is entirely why I have never paid for Windows.
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
So we can throw big rocks at people on Earth when they do stupid things.
Isn't that right, Mike?
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
Spraying the planet with refined nuclear material is not a problem, and more anon if it did happen.
We send nuclear powered things into space all the time. Like the Voyager probes. Anything that goes into space that is a nuclear power source is hardened to the point that it could survice reentry, erratic, accidental reentry.
Even if a ship burned up in the atmosphere, such as a certain probe did in the past, we're talking about forces that spread bits of it around the globe in such small chunks that it doesn't even do much. Every human live has an atom of plutonium in their body due to a failed launch. But for the life of me, I can't remember the name.
The problem that we need to get over is our fear of nuclear things. Humans are really the only things that have to fear radiation. It kills us much more quickly than nearly everything else. We are able today, through the advancement of our knowledge since the dawn of the Atomic Age, to do things safely. We need to get over this irrational fear of anything with the name 'nuclear.' I still insist on calling it 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging.'
Slashdot Mirror
We have weather?!
I can't see anything through all this blasted fog! Why didn't anyone tell me this before!
I'm currently under negotiations with Google to see if I can use their massive ammounts of Pidgeon Clusters and a few statues I have handy to do some studies on the dynamics of white dialetric material.
I'll probably just end up bullshitting the answers instead.
You wanna hear a really fucked up story?
Okay. It's 1993. I think. I was somewhere between 8 and 10, so maybe it was '94. Anyway, it's not important.
I was learning to program at the time, and my uncle who is four years older than me decided that since I was a rather dull child, with wit as sharp as a rubber ball, I should start with QBASIC.
So I created a grand program: A DOS Shell. It would let you look around, cd, all that fancy stuff. I added colours.
It was all good.
So, anyway, I didn't really have a good concept of exactly what an OS was, and I decided I'd written one, so, (this was back in the day you understand, and my parents really weren't too computer savvy) I got on their AOL account and uploaded it to AOL's file center, billing it as a revolutionary new operation system called DHDMP. I think. That or DHCMP. I forget.
The instructions went something along the lines of, STEP 1: Uninstall DOS.
You get the picture.
Well, after around 9 thousand downloads, my parent's AOL account was canceled.
I'd like to think I did a great deal of good via those 9 thousand downloads.
Just because I'm blessed and cursed with a pedantic bent and a masochistic one, respectively, I'm going to futilely attempt to enlighten you, Anonymous Coward.
I direct your attention to Operation Downfall, the proposed plan for the United States' invasion of Japan. The estimated casualties for United States forces alone were estimated to be nearly one million men to take the island.
When you consider at the time that Japanese soldiers and even civilians who had been forced to retreat to caves refused to surrender, fought to the death, and had to be flame-throwered in the caves because they would have done everything in their power to kill American Soldiers, combined with the fact that virtually everyone in Japan who would have been able to wield any form of weapon would have made resistance, you are looking at not only the deaths of 1 Million US Service personnel, but practically the total elimination of the Japanese Population.
So, in short, yes, I think 100,000 lives were worth it. I happen to like Japan, and am glad that we dropped the bombs on them, because if we hadn't I doubt very much Japan would be around today.
The problem with America is it has gone too far from the ideals of the founding fathers. When they spoke of 'minority rights,' what minority do you think they were speaking of?
They were speaking about themselves. They knew, as has become evident, that the majority is a bunch of silly fellows who have no idea what is going on or what is good for them, and that the minority of people who do understand should be protected from the idiots.
You don't. That's the whole point. You mine the materials on the moon, where the cost of putting something up is much lower because of the approximately 1/6th G field the moon has.
Get people on the moon, establish a base that has supplies and abilities to search for and extract and refine raw materials. That's the expensive part. It always costs money to set something up. But once you are there, the materials are at hand and you no longer need ferry things up save for components which must be manufactured earthside, such as computer parts and luxury items.
Yes, I do. I hate babies. They grow up into people, who breathe my precious, precious oxygen.
My oxygen.
I played EQII starting the day it came out for about three months till I lost my job and had to cut back on non-vital expenses. The graphics are absolutely amazing. I mean AMAZING. My computer is an Athlon XP at 1.94 GHZ with 512 MB DDR RAM and a Radeon 9600 XP card, and I had to run the game at the lowest detail setting to make it playable (say, 40 FPS it seemed to be, unless in a hugely populated zone, like a cityscape) and it still looked good.
I can't wait till next year or the one after that when there will be graphics cards available that can actually play it on High.
Note: The game itself in the configuration settings for video quality says to the effect: There is nothing available to the home user at this time that can play on Highest Detail. It requires atleast 512MB of RAM for Textures on the Card.
Also, the gameplay was pretty neat-o too.
This is /. and the man has a girlfriend... Why should he listen to any of us lesser geeks?
If the thing is assembled in orbit I don't care if the Orion blows up, I am confident that we will be relatively unaffected.
An Orion spacecraft would be shaped like a bullet. The flat part would be steel about fifty feet thick with a hole bored down the center through which is thrown an atomic bomb. The bomb is detonated, and the force of the explosion hits the plate and propels the craft forward.
Oi! That's what I'm calling my MUD!
What makes you think I'm the person who owns the computer the copy of Windows is on?
And their is no hipocracy in reading the New York Times On-line for free. They are giving it away online for free. If they value it (in electronic form) as worthless, then I should not have to exchange anything of worth to view it.
I cannot think of a problem with constructing an Orion spacecraft in orbit, using materials ferried and mined from the moon, and then letting it activate its drive in orbit. We have a whole magnetosphere for shielding to the poles all those dangerous particles.
Anyway, unlike Antarctica, no one lives in Canada.
You know what? Most of us don't mind paying real money for things that have real worth. I payed fifty dollars for Neverwinter Nights when it came out, while my roommate had a 'free' copy the same day.
I will gladly pay money for something I like to make sure that the people who make it will make more. That's how the market economy works. If something has real value, it's only logical to compensate the persons who made it.
Which is entirely why I have never paid for Windows.
So we can throw big rocks at people on Earth when they do stupid things.
Isn't that right, Mike?
Spraying the planet with refined nuclear material is not a problem, and more anon if it did happen.
We send nuclear powered things into space all the time. Like the Voyager probes. Anything that goes into space that is a nuclear power source is hardened to the point that it could survice reentry, erratic, accidental reentry.
Even if a ship burned up in the atmosphere, such as a certain probe did in the past, we're talking about forces that spread bits of it around the globe in such small chunks that it doesn't even do much. Every human live has an atom of plutonium in their body due to a failed launch. But for the life of me, I can't remember the name.
The problem that we need to get over is our fear of nuclear things. Humans are really the only things that have to fear radiation. It kills us much more quickly than nearly everything else. We are able today, through the advancement of our knowledge since the dawn of the Atomic Age, to do things safely. We need to get over this irrational fear of anything with the name 'nuclear.' I still insist on calling it 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging.'
C'mon, folks. It's funny.
It's a Ringworld -- Larry Niven is the inventor. They called it 'Halo' so they wouldn't get sued.
You try to say that right when you're in non-euclidea- - Oh my God the tentacle came out of WHE-
NO CARRIER
Pssh. You're too young. Just wait till you're asked to take the oath for when you hear it for the billionth time.
AI AI CTHULHU FTHAGN!
You're already in. You always have been. We just wanted to make sure you knew it.
Now hop on the Erisian Locomotion and get ready for a real ride.
I got the gestalt of it, and that's what counts in translation.
Thank you, by the way, for your translation.
Worship Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Confusion!
I speak Latin, and I think you said, "The world is ended. The Canadians wonder why to go on?"
[Bender]No, that's just unfortunate.[/Bender]