And how does this little creature somehow synthesise diamond for it's mandibles? On a diet of animals and trees it's supposed to create the environmental conditions (45-60 kilobars & 900-1300C) for the creation of diamond? How does it mould them into mandibles? If you're going to make this lifeform exempt from following a realistic energy budget, then they might as well warp drives on their back for what it's worth. They can't exist because you ignored the bedrock, the very foundation of life, the main input: energy.
I know a guy who goes on similar flights of fancy with transhumanism. Even after I mention the current energy crisis (how we can barely support current fossil fuel consumption) and metal depletion (copper depletion at 26% and zinc depletion at 19%) he still believes that us living in server farms in a couple of years is a realistic scenario. Even after citing projections that complete depletion of certain key metals would occur if the OECD's current computer infrastructure were developed worldwide, he still won't listen. I don't understand how he can believe that the earth will be covered in even contemporary computer infrastructure anytime soon, let alone the ginormous dense grid required for the future Raymond Kurzweil envisioned.
But it's understandable. People easily get gripped by flights of fancy; crap based on a unquestioned assumptions; axioms of a contemporary episteme they operate within. Chief among these romantic ideals is: "Imagination is the only limitation on creation". Not true at all. There are plenty of limits and constraints on earth that govern what can continue on in this chain reaction of replication we call "life". There is a definite energy budget on earth. Save for radioactive decay in the mantle, only so much energy reaches each square metre of earth per day from the sun and only so much of that is available to do work. On this energy budget I think there is a definite limit to what can thrive; grey goo, cyborgs, run-away AI and other transhumanist wet-dreams not being among them. Fossil fuels being just concentrated sunlight from a time long past, the sun is still the ultimate supplier of energy and these fanciful creations people think up wouldn't be living within their means. Unfortunately for them the earth is a harsh banker. You either live on the stream of income from the sun, or you're gone; no entering the red or getting overdrawn. There is a budget and these pie-in-the-sky ideas ignore it.
Energy consumption is a necessity. It should be the first criterion when assessing whether something is realistic or not.
Think his point is that there is some loss of energy as the gas must be compressed and pushed down the pipelines. And for LNG I guess lots more energy is wasted liquefying it.
So I guess the energy cost in the transport of it is somewhat analogous to the loss of energy from electricities transportation, although they obviously aren't equivalent in method of energy loss, and probably aren't equivalent in amount of energy loss either.
Although I realise now you said that there was "little to no loss in pumping the gas", so you did in fact acknowledge there was some loss. Guess this makes my post redundant, but I'll just make it anyway.:p
You're extremely misguided. Even a regional nuclear war with the large thermonuclear weapons prevalent now, would emit enough radiation to obliterate the whole ozone layer. The subsequent UV radiation would kill mostly everything on earth except very hardy bacteria, and deep marine life I suppose.
And anthropogenic climate change causing a runaway greenhouse effect, like what's on Venus, is a possibility. Humans potentially do have the power to trigger the release of large quantities of methane from the methane hydrates in the seabead, the permafrost of Siberia, etc. Eventually if the temperature gets high enough carbon sequestered away in rocks could sublimate and the oceans could boil. The CO2 and H2O emitted from these events into the atmosphere would almost certainly make the temperature increase permanent. Whether we'll ever make the temperature high enough to release the large amounts of methane in the first place is uncertain but it's a possibility.
So while the runaway greenhouse effect may not be high on the list, the destruction of all life on earth due to nuclear weapons certainly is.
Chemical and biological weapons, of course are harmless in the grand scheme of things. But lumping nuclear in with them is ridiculous. The consequences of nuclear weapons are devastating.
Hmmm thanks. At least you said they were interesting and didn't discard them like most people do with my views. Anyway.
I'm not dismissing how efficient machinery can lower the price of a good. Neither am I dismissing the fact that losing a good deal of your workforce lowers your production capacity. I just mean to say that energy is the first step in everything and I think it needs to be the first thing examined in human history/current events. After energy the rest of the raw inputs should be looked at. And finally the machinery by which these raw materials are processed should be the last thing examined in the search for a reason or "cause" for a current/past event.
You may be right that Great Britain and its Commonwealth survived due to Middle Eastern oil, but I don't think that disproves my point. I think that when a geographical region is a net energy importer it loses a great deal of its power. I'm not saying the UK collapsed overnight after coal production peaked, but rather it began to decline rather than grow "power"-wise as it had before. That's the important thing. It was a gradual trend.
Similarly the USA has survived due to Middle Eastern oil and it certainly hasn't "collapsed" overnight in the last 30 years. But I really think it too, as it became a net energy importer, began to lose "power" due to ever increasing debt. People cite the Vietnam war as maybe a "turning point" for the USA, but I would say it was because it became a net energy importer around the end of said war. It's focus shifted from being able to fight actual war, to securing energy supplies, especially in the Middle East.
It's like the schoolyard bully. He beats the crap out of those who like Nirvana or rock music, those who possess an opposing ideology; an opposing way of living their lives. He does it just because he's enabled to do so; he has a full stomach from a good breakfast and lunch he gets from the nearby shop with his allowance his mother gives him everyday. But suddenly things change. His mother loses her job. They have to cut back. He no longer gets an allowance. He no longer can afford lunch. He has to eat the crappy stuff they serve at school, some horrible soup. But he won't stand for this. He's accustomed to the way things used to be. So now he uses his "bullying" prowess to verbally and psychologically harass his richest yet weakest classmates for their lunch money. Things are good again.
Anyway, the point of that was to say this is the shift that America underwent. It could no longer fight wars on "principle". It couldn't afford to continue on it's anti-communist skirmishes that it had partaken in in Vietnam, Korea and Japan (at the end of WW2 where it dropped A bombs just to end the war quick enough so the USSR wouldn't get a slice.) Like the bully it then switched to energy supply protection mode. It couldn't even afford to physically fight wars as debt was rising just MAINTAINING the American way of doing things. Rather it just intimidated nations with it's military prowess, backed sides in little mini-proxy wars and at times was forced to invade to maintain the energy supply. (Both Gulf wars) So I wouldn't say Vietnam was a "turning point" as such. It sure as hell didn't help. Rather America switching to a net energy importer was the turning point. It really re-prioritised everything.
Anyway. About Rome. The theory is, its crop yields had been falling since the 2nd century AD when the horrible currency devaluation took place. It had been declining for some time before the "Fall" that people always are told about. The reason it's so hard to pinpoint a "cause" is because not even the bloody "symptoms" (return to subsistence agriculture, etc.) were recorded. These are really only inferred from the records. Even the dieoffs are only recently corroborated with pollen analyses in ice (I think). So you can imagine if nothing actually useful about economics and social conditions was recorded how hard it would be to determine a "cause" for all this. So my explanation for their fall
It's all tied to energy why empires decline. You're merely listing the symptoms of it.
For instance you said, "A further contributory cause was the loss of trade opportunities when cheaper and more efficient American goods became available to England's traditional customer base.".
Why do you think American goods were cheaper? Because they were more "efficient"? What does that even mean? Isn't it more likely that energy (the first input in any process) became more "costly"/rare in the United Kingdom, while becoming cheaper and more common in the United States? Isn't that more likely the reason behind why subsequent manufactured goods became less expensive to be purchased from the USA than from the UK?
As UK coal production declined it lost its Empire. It no longer had ever more abundant amounts of energy to throw at everything; wars, manufacturing, etc. As America's oil production increased year-on-year at the same time it became more powerful on the world stage.
Rome as you also point out fell. It was also due to declining availability of energy. Historians never cite any concrete reasons for its collapse rather symptoms which they pretend are "causes"; mass migration from the cities to the country villas (forming most of today's Western European villages and towns), a return to subsistence agriculture, ever increasing debt in the urban bureaucracy as they attempted to maintain the paternalism and philantrophy the populations of their cities had become accustomed to. I've not even mentioned the obvious military losses and enemy encroachments that the empire suffered, as I find the more socio-economic problems the most telling.
Why couldn't the councillors and patricians of the cities and towns maintain their paternalistic practices of free grain (a primitive form of social welfare) and philantrophy? Because there was horrible inflation. Everything became more expensive while money became worthless. Why did everything become so expensive? Because of a declining supply of energy. Crop yields were crashing. No food, no energy, since oxen and slaves did most of the "work" in the Roman Empire. There was massive famine and pestilence and alot of the land returned to forests and scrubland as the population fell. Rome, the city, fell from 1.5 million to 15,000 over the early middle ages. It was a simple declining amount of energy that caused all this. Soil erosion and mineral leaching across the Mediterranean, desertification across North Africa all but destroyed the breadbaskets of the Roman Empire leading to declining crop yields and the declining ability to do "work" with the machinery of the day (oxen/slaves).
People seem to overlook the importance of energy at every turn nowadays. Maybe they always did? If you actually say that sentence to yourself you'll realise how ridiculous peoples beliefs are:
"People overlook the importance of energy"
When I say it I think "How the hell could they? It's the first input into any process/event in the universe!" But it actually is ignored most of the time when studying anything to do with history/current affairs.
I think we all realise how it is THE most important thing in the universe but prefer to believe in fairy tales and anthropocentric delusions like "Humans make their own history" and "Humans are greater than other animals and don't have to obey the Laws of Thermodynamics like ALL other organisms".
A bacterial colony will grow with cheap abundant energy, it will crest and decline with ever more expensive energy, competition over said energy and the detrimental effects of the pollutants created during the growth phase.
Human civilizations/empires/factions/tribes/communities are no different. They rise with abundant cheap sources of energy, crest and decline as the energy becomes more geographically disparate and more difficult to extract; in other words when extracting and transporting energy become more energy intensive than it used to be. That coupled with the fact of lower production volumes of the energy source means a rapid year-on-year decline of energy for the end-us
Humorous and apt but, sadly, misleading.
EMTs on average would be called for people who have already had the average number of offspring. Perhaps even the kids have moved out by that age and thus the death of the parents will have virtually no effect on the offspring's "survival" in the world.
So, while you can come up with as many uncanny and creepy examples of people, who have yet to have the average number of offspring, dying of wacky incidents in the home, it still doesn't negate the fact that, on average, EMTs will be required most by elderly-ish people who have suffered Strokes, Heart Attacks, etc. Not young people about to have, or in the course of raising, offspring.
If indeed EMTs are required by youth or early middle-aged people it is usually out of the home; perhaps in an accident in a social setting or in a car crash.
So, in closing, your post was a good read but it's misleading. I'm sure the "selection" against these people is so minute that far stronger mitigating factors, such as social status, wealth, good nutrition, and in the end, private health care will all negate any evolutionary disadvantage you posit.
Yeah but "extremists" or whatever you want to call them, only think in black and white. You either say All of us support the film or None, because anything else is incomprehensible to them.
Well very few will get released then. In that case the people who invented the detection technology have won then, haven't they? Fewer fakes released because the bar has been raised a lot now in terms of "quality control".
Just because some photoshop nerd uses this for quality control doesn't mean it'll embue him with the power to photoshop pure gold fakes everytime he lays his hand on the mouse. If everyone implemented this as quality control before they released, there would be a lot less releases per week/month/year/whatever. Sure some people will still get through the net with fakes that fool this detection technology. But the point is very little will. So either a lot more fakes will get caught when this proliferates, or a lot more fakers will spend more time (a lot more) in photoshop trying to make an image that won't be found out to be a fake. A lot of them will probably never be able to release then, or will have to release with now-detectable faults in their image, because the bar is just too high now.
No seriously. It's not a matter of who's signing the paychecks. EA really can ruin games. They ruined C&C as far as I'm concerned. They scrapped Tiberian Twilight and made that horrible monstrosity Generals (the expansion of which I had to return because it was so buggy). Tiberium Wars slightly makes up for it, but I wish Westwood had made Tiberian Twilight all those years ago. Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge I guess were partly influenced by EA, and they were good games, but they ruined the whole storyline.
Heart Disease? Ha!
I don't have to worry about such a trivial problem with that clowder of cats by my side; trixie, dixie , frixie; always raiding my fridge of those evil fatty foods! Oh Bless my furry friends! Always thinking of my health.
Very well put. I made a comment earlier but I can't find it on this page (but I can see it on my User Info page. Dunno. Don't really understand Slashdot.) Anyway, in the comment I was saying something along the same lines, that DST is nothing about "Energy" and anyone who thinks it was ever about it is seriously stupid. It was about actually being awake at times when there is actual "Daylight", thus making people feel a lot better. But I guess you could say it helps "productivity" because business terms like that people seem to pay attention to. No one cares how anyone feels, just if their a more efficient cog in the machine than they would be otherwise, in a given situtation.
I got a Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 with Vista Business. Runs fine. What specs you got?
It originally came with Vista Home Basic and 512MBs of RAM, but I upgaded to Vista Business and put in 2GBs of DDR2 and it runs like a charm still. I guess you just need to have the RAM proportional to the version of the OS. I still have the same crappy integrated GFX card though, a Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset, not the 915 chipset that the lawsuit is about though, thank god. Maybe if that's what you have I feel sorry for you. But really if you have anything higher and you're content with Windows Vista Basic, and not Aero, as your theme then I wouldn't say Vista is too bad.
Oh and of course RAM RAM RAM! You need a good deal more than XP needed, but of course it's proportionate to the OS version I think. So less for Basic and more for Ultimate. And if you can't stuff anymore RAM into it then avail of the ReadyBoost feature. Get a flash USB key/SD memory card with a 1ms read speed and use readyboost with it. You'll see a difference! I think it's the new SuperFetch that needs all the RAM. But it's not really a bad thing. Superfetch is a cool new feature if you read up on how it works.
Um. Well hailing from the land of Ire this doesn't come as a surprise. Maybe they "marketed" DST as energy saving in the States but over here everyone does it because it's bloody well dark in the morning and we all want to stay in the damn bed for another hour. Who the hell said it was about saving energy?
And the bit at the end made me actually laugh: "'I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,' the professor said." Like maybe it was so clear and unambiguous because it was so blatantly obvious in the first place?!
Just because some using some twisted logic "dAyLite => RAyZ ov thee Sunn => N.R.G.zzzz" doesn't mean that Daylight savings time = N.R.G. SAVINGS TIME! Like do you guys seriously believe that Daylight Savings Time was invented to save energy? It was just so I didn't have to get out of bed when they sky's still pitch black... That professor should go back to schoolz. What a tard.
I agree whole-heartedly. I too own a business, I write software and provide solutions, and I'll be damned if anyone were to tell be what I can and cannot do with my own products.
That said, if I ran Apple, and this came across my desk, and I wanted to be civil about it, I'd say something like:
ah, that's not an undocumented feature, it's a bug in the documentation. It's a low-priority bug and will get fixed in a future version of the documentation.
By which point, of course, the feature would be renamed.
So, if Microsoft had makes it so that every other browser on XP run slower compared to the evil monstrosity called IE6, then it would be fine?
I really don't think so. You'd have people saying ranting and raving with the usual diatribe: "This is the last straw! Microsoft had better wake up or else everyone will buy a Mac or switch over to Linux!"
But when Apple does it it's fine. It's there right. When Microsoft gives IE or WMP an unfair advantage by packaging it with their OS, then they get fined a couple billion. But when Apple does it it's fair game because they make trendy products.
Slashdot Mirror
And how does this little creature somehow synthesise diamond for it's mandibles? On a diet of animals and trees it's supposed to create the environmental conditions (45-60 kilobars & 900-1300C) for the creation of diamond? How does it mould them into mandibles? If you're going to make this lifeform exempt from following a realistic energy budget, then they might as well warp drives on their back for what it's worth. They can't exist because you ignored the bedrock, the very foundation of life, the main input: energy.
I know a guy who goes on similar flights of fancy with transhumanism. Even after I mention the current energy crisis (how we can barely support current fossil fuel consumption) and metal depletion (copper depletion at 26% and zinc depletion at 19%) he still believes that us living in server farms in a couple of years is a realistic scenario. Even after citing projections that complete depletion of certain key metals would occur if the OECD's current computer infrastructure were developed worldwide, he still won't listen. I don't understand how he can believe that the earth will be covered in even contemporary computer infrastructure anytime soon, let alone the ginormous dense grid required for the future Raymond Kurzweil envisioned.
But it's understandable. People easily get gripped by flights of fancy; crap based on a unquestioned assumptions; axioms of a contemporary episteme they operate within. Chief among these romantic ideals is: "Imagination is the only limitation on creation". Not true at all. There are plenty of limits and constraints on earth that govern what can continue on in this chain reaction of replication we call "life". There is a definite energy budget on earth. Save for radioactive decay in the mantle, only so much energy reaches each square metre of earth per day from the sun and only so much of that is available to do work. On this energy budget I think there is a definite limit to what can thrive; grey goo, cyborgs, run-away AI and other transhumanist wet-dreams not being among them. Fossil fuels being just concentrated sunlight from a time long past, the sun is still the ultimate supplier of energy and these fanciful creations people think up wouldn't be living within their means. Unfortunately for them the earth is a harsh banker. You either live on the stream of income from the sun, or you're gone; no entering the red or getting overdrawn. There is a budget and these pie-in-the-sky ideas ignore it.
Energy consumption is a necessity. It should be the first criterion when assessing whether something is realistic or not.
Think his point is that there is some loss of energy as the gas must be compressed and pushed down the pipelines. And for LNG I guess lots more energy is wasted liquefying it.
So I guess the energy cost in the transport of it is somewhat analogous to the loss of energy from electricities transportation, although they obviously aren't equivalent in method of energy loss, and probably aren't equivalent in amount of energy loss either.
Although I realise now you said that there was "little to no loss in pumping the gas", so you did in fact acknowledge there was some loss. Guess this makes my post redundant, but I'll just make it anyway. :p
You're extremely misguided. Even a regional nuclear war with the large thermonuclear weapons prevalent now, would emit enough radiation to obliterate the whole ozone layer. The subsequent UV radiation would kill mostly everything on earth except very hardy bacteria, and deep marine life I suppose.
And anthropogenic climate change causing a runaway greenhouse effect, like what's on Venus, is a possibility. Humans potentially do have the power to trigger the release of large quantities of methane from the methane hydrates in the seabead, the permafrost of Siberia, etc. Eventually if the temperature gets high enough carbon sequestered away in rocks could sublimate and the oceans could boil. The CO2 and H2O emitted from these events into the atmosphere would almost certainly make the temperature increase permanent. Whether we'll ever make the temperature high enough to release the large amounts of methane in the first place is uncertain but it's a possibility.
So while the runaway greenhouse effect may not be high on the list, the destruction of all life on earth due to nuclear weapons certainly is.
Chemical and biological weapons, of course are harmless in the grand scheme of things. But lumping nuclear in with them is ridiculous. The consequences of nuclear weapons are devastating.
Nicely put.
This is the occupation. Who says it can't be fun!
Hmmm thanks. At least you said they were interesting and didn't discard them like most people do with my views. Anyway.
I'm not dismissing how efficient machinery can lower the price of a good. Neither am I dismissing the fact that losing a good deal of your workforce lowers your production capacity. I just mean to say that energy is the first step in everything and I think it needs to be the first thing examined in human history/current events. After energy the rest of the raw inputs should be looked at. And finally the machinery by which these raw materials are processed should be the last thing examined in the search for a reason or "cause" for a current/past event.
You may be right that Great Britain and its Commonwealth survived due to Middle Eastern oil, but I don't think that disproves my point. I think that when a geographical region is a net energy importer it loses a great deal of its power. I'm not saying the UK collapsed overnight after coal production peaked, but rather it began to decline rather than grow "power"-wise as it had before. That's the important thing. It was a gradual trend.
Similarly the USA has survived due to Middle Eastern oil and it certainly hasn't "collapsed" overnight in the last 30 years. But I really think it too, as it became a net energy importer, began to lose "power" due to ever increasing debt. People cite the Vietnam war as maybe a "turning point" for the USA, but I would say it was because it became a net energy importer around the end of said war. It's focus shifted from being able to fight actual war, to securing energy supplies, especially in the Middle East.
It's like the schoolyard bully. He beats the crap out of those who like Nirvana or rock music, those who possess an opposing ideology; an opposing way of living their lives. He does it just because he's enabled to do so; he has a full stomach from a good breakfast and lunch he gets from the nearby shop with his allowance his mother gives him everyday. But suddenly things change. His mother loses her job. They have to cut back. He no longer gets an allowance. He no longer can afford lunch. He has to eat the crappy stuff they serve at school, some horrible soup. But he won't stand for this. He's accustomed to the way things used to be. So now he uses his "bullying" prowess to verbally and psychologically harass his richest yet weakest classmates for their lunch money. Things are good again.
Anyway, the point of that was to say this is the shift that America underwent. It could no longer fight wars on "principle". It couldn't afford to continue on it's anti-communist skirmishes that it had partaken in in Vietnam, Korea and Japan (at the end of WW2 where it dropped A bombs just to end the war quick enough so the USSR wouldn't get a slice.) Like the bully it then switched to energy supply protection mode. It couldn't even afford to physically fight wars as debt was rising just MAINTAINING the American way of doing things. Rather it just intimidated nations with it's military prowess, backed sides in little mini-proxy wars and at times was forced to invade to maintain the energy supply. (Both Gulf wars) So I wouldn't say Vietnam was a "turning point" as such. It sure as hell didn't help. Rather America switching to a net energy importer was the turning point. It really re-prioritised everything.
Anyway. About Rome. The theory is, its crop yields had been falling since the 2nd century AD when the horrible currency devaluation took place. It had been declining for some time before the "Fall" that people always are told about. The reason it's so hard to pinpoint a "cause" is because not even the bloody "symptoms" (return to subsistence agriculture, etc.) were recorded. These are really only inferred from the records. Even the dieoffs are only recently corroborated with pollen analyses in ice (I think). So you can imagine if nothing actually useful about economics and social conditions was recorded how hard it would be to determine a "cause" for all this. So my explanation for their fall
It's all tied to energy why empires decline. You're merely listing the symptoms of it. For instance you said, "A further contributory cause was the loss of trade opportunities when cheaper and more efficient American goods became available to England's traditional customer base.". Why do you think American goods were cheaper? Because they were more "efficient"? What does that even mean? Isn't it more likely that energy (the first input in any process) became more "costly"/rare in the United Kingdom, while becoming cheaper and more common in the United States? Isn't that more likely the reason behind why subsequent manufactured goods became less expensive to be purchased from the USA than from the UK? As UK coal production declined it lost its Empire. It no longer had ever more abundant amounts of energy to throw at everything; wars, manufacturing, etc. As America's oil production increased year-on-year at the same time it became more powerful on the world stage. Rome as you also point out fell. It was also due to declining availability of energy. Historians never cite any concrete reasons for its collapse rather symptoms which they pretend are "causes"; mass migration from the cities to the country villas (forming most of today's Western European villages and towns), a return to subsistence agriculture, ever increasing debt in the urban bureaucracy as they attempted to maintain the paternalism and philantrophy the populations of their cities had become accustomed to. I've not even mentioned the obvious military losses and enemy encroachments that the empire suffered, as I find the more socio-economic problems the most telling. Why couldn't the councillors and patricians of the cities and towns maintain their paternalistic practices of free grain (a primitive form of social welfare) and philantrophy? Because there was horrible inflation. Everything became more expensive while money became worthless. Why did everything become so expensive? Because of a declining supply of energy. Crop yields were crashing. No food, no energy, since oxen and slaves did most of the "work" in the Roman Empire. There was massive famine and pestilence and alot of the land returned to forests and scrubland as the population fell. Rome, the city, fell from 1.5 million to 15,000 over the early middle ages. It was a simple declining amount of energy that caused all this. Soil erosion and mineral leaching across the Mediterranean, desertification across North Africa all but destroyed the breadbaskets of the Roman Empire leading to declining crop yields and the declining ability to do "work" with the machinery of the day (oxen/slaves). People seem to overlook the importance of energy at every turn nowadays. Maybe they always did? If you actually say that sentence to yourself you'll realise how ridiculous peoples beliefs are: "People overlook the importance of energy" When I say it I think "How the hell could they? It's the first input into any process/event in the universe!" But it actually is ignored most of the time when studying anything to do with history/current affairs. I think we all realise how it is THE most important thing in the universe but prefer to believe in fairy tales and anthropocentric delusions like "Humans make their own history" and "Humans are greater than other animals and don't have to obey the Laws of Thermodynamics like ALL other organisms". A bacterial colony will grow with cheap abundant energy, it will crest and decline with ever more expensive energy, competition over said energy and the detrimental effects of the pollutants created during the growth phase. Human civilizations/empires/factions/tribes/communities are no different. They rise with abundant cheap sources of energy, crest and decline as the energy becomes more geographically disparate and more difficult to extract; in other words when extracting and transporting energy become more energy intensive than it used to be. That coupled with the fact of lower production volumes of the energy source means a rapid year-on-year decline of energy for the end-us
Humorous and apt but, sadly, misleading. EMTs on average would be called for people who have already had the average number of offspring. Perhaps even the kids have moved out by that age and thus the death of the parents will have virtually no effect on the offspring's "survival" in the world. So, while you can come up with as many uncanny and creepy examples of people, who have yet to have the average number of offspring, dying of wacky incidents in the home, it still doesn't negate the fact that, on average, EMTs will be required most by elderly-ish people who have suffered Strokes, Heart Attacks, etc. Not young people about to have, or in the course of raising, offspring. If indeed EMTs are required by youth or early middle-aged people it is usually out of the home; perhaps in an accident in a social setting or in a car crash. So, in closing, your post was a good read but it's misleading. I'm sure the "selection" against these people is so minute that far stronger mitigating factors, such as social status, wealth, good nutrition, and in the end, private health care will all negate any evolutionary disadvantage you posit.
Yeah but "extremists" or whatever you want to call them, only think in black and white. You either say All of us support the film or None, because anything else is incomprehensible to them.
Well very few will get released then. In that case the people who invented the detection technology have won then, haven't they? Fewer fakes released because the bar has been raised a lot now in terms of "quality control". Just because some photoshop nerd uses this for quality control doesn't mean it'll embue him with the power to photoshop pure gold fakes everytime he lays his hand on the mouse. If everyone implemented this as quality control before they released, there would be a lot less releases per week/month/year/whatever. Sure some people will still get through the net with fakes that fool this detection technology. But the point is very little will. So either a lot more fakes will get caught when this proliferates, or a lot more fakers will spend more time (a lot more) in photoshop trying to make an image that won't be found out to be a fake. A lot of them will probably never be able to release then, or will have to release with now-detectable faults in their image, because the bar is just too high now.
Lol. Why did this guy get insightful? This is hilarious!
Everyone prefers clouds of toxic toxic chemicals to rockets...
No seriously. It's not a matter of who's signing the paychecks. EA really can ruin games. They ruined C&C as far as I'm concerned. They scrapped Tiberian Twilight and made that horrible monstrosity Generals (the expansion of which I had to return because it was so buggy). Tiberium Wars slightly makes up for it, but I wish Westwood had made Tiberian Twilight all those years ago. Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge I guess were partly influenced by EA, and they were good games, but they ruined the whole storyline.
Heart Disease? Ha! I don't have to worry about such a trivial problem with that clowder of cats by my side; trixie, dixie , frixie; always raiding my fridge of those evil fatty foods! Oh Bless my furry friends! Always thinking of my health.
Um why was he modded "Informative"? It was obviously a joke... I hope...
Very well put. I made a comment earlier but I can't find it on this page (but I can see it on my User Info page. Dunno. Don't really understand Slashdot.) Anyway, in the comment I was saying something along the same lines, that DST is nothing about "Energy" and anyone who thinks it was ever about it is seriously stupid. It was about actually being awake at times when there is actual "Daylight", thus making people feel a lot better. But I guess you could say it helps "productivity" because business terms like that people seem to pay attention to. No one cares how anyone feels, just if their a more efficient cog in the machine than they would be otherwise, in a given situtation.
That was very well put. If I knew how to give people points I'd give you the max.
I got a Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 with Vista Business. Runs fine. What specs you got? It originally came with Vista Home Basic and 512MBs of RAM, but I upgaded to Vista Business and put in 2GBs of DDR2 and it runs like a charm still. I guess you just need to have the RAM proportional to the version of the OS. I still have the same crappy integrated GFX card though, a Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset, not the 915 chipset that the lawsuit is about though, thank god. Maybe if that's what you have I feel sorry for you. But really if you have anything higher and you're content with Windows Vista Basic, and not Aero, as your theme then I wouldn't say Vista is too bad. Oh and of course RAM RAM RAM! You need a good deal more than XP needed, but of course it's proportionate to the OS version I think. So less for Basic and more for Ultimate. And if you can't stuff anymore RAM into it then avail of the ReadyBoost feature. Get a flash USB key/SD memory card with a 1ms read speed and use readyboost with it. You'll see a difference! I think it's the new SuperFetch that needs all the RAM. But it's not really a bad thing. Superfetch is a cool new feature if you read up on how it works.
Um. Well hailing from the land of Ire this doesn't come as a surprise. Maybe they "marketed" DST as energy saving in the States but over here everyone does it because it's bloody well dark in the morning and we all want to stay in the damn bed for another hour. Who the hell said it was about saving energy? And the bit at the end made me actually laugh: "'I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,' the professor said." Like maybe it was so clear and unambiguous because it was so blatantly obvious in the first place?! Just because some using some twisted logic "dAyLite => RAyZ ov thee Sunn => N.R.G.zzzz" doesn't mean that Daylight savings time = N.R.G. SAVINGS TIME! Like do you guys seriously believe that Daylight Savings Time was invented to save energy? It was just so I didn't have to get out of bed when they sky's still pitch black... That professor should go back to schoolz. What a tard.
I agree whole-heartedly. I too own a business, I write software and provide solutions, and I'll be damned if anyone were to tell be what I can and cannot do with my own products. That said, if I ran Apple, and this came across my desk, and I wanted to be civil about it, I'd say something like: ah, that's not an undocumented feature, it's a bug in the documentation. It's a low-priority bug and will get fixed in a future version of the documentation. By which point, of course, the feature would be renamed. So, if Microsoft had makes it so that every other browser on XP run slower compared to the evil monstrosity called IE6, then it would be fine? I really don't think so. You'd have people saying ranting and raving with the usual diatribe: "This is the last straw! Microsoft had better wake up or else everyone will buy a Mac or switch over to Linux!" But when Apple does it it's fine. It's there right. When Microsoft gives IE or WMP an unfair advantage by packaging it with their OS, then they get fined a couple billion. But when Apple does it it's fair game because they make trendy products.