I like slashdot because of that. We can be absurdly hypocritical, and make snarky comments about it, all at the same time! I think that this has to do with there being actual thinking people posting here, as opposed to other parts of the internet who really do promote only one viewpoint. Now, if we examine your comment, are you (1) pointing out a valid problem with the general consensus of posts here (2) attacking a strawman as some form of preemptive retribution (my favorite kind!), (3) CowboyNeal, or (4) one or more of the above?
That's all slashdot, and it's all good. Except where it results in me getting modded into oblivion. Then it's unjust and the moderation system is broken:)
I would post that sort of nonsense as an AC, too. For those that are unaware, the theory of a luminiferous aether posits that there exists some sort of medium in interstellar space which conducts light. It was completely superseded around the beginning of the last century, mostly by the theories of a man named Einstein. Which explain quite well our observations of the universe on a large scale. Dark matter is an entirely unrelated question related to the amount of matter in the universe. Dark energy, zero-point field...you're just throwing around terms. What we know about the forces in the universe is not exhaustive, but to invent a completely new one just to account for a minor anomaly is not good science. What you are doing here is the equivalent of fighting for the Flat Earth theory, and it disturbs me to see that modded informative here...
Home users are definitely more likely to switch; they are the ones who get shafted by Vista's difficulties. Most users in a corporate environment have an IT-knowledgeable person they can go to for help. Home users can call someone in India, or pay to talk to Microsoft, or struggle to find a phone number of someone--anyone--who can help them. These are, generally, the people who fall between the categories of 'total drooling idiot' and 'power user'. These are the people that hate Vista. I hear it all the time, "I've been using windows for sixteen years, but I hate this Vista crap." People are clinging to XP like a liferaft, and every bad experience with Vista, every incompatible program, every driver problem gets repeated and amplified, spreading that good old FUD all over the place. People who haven't had experience with Vista yet are extremely wary of it, and far more likely to blame the OS if anything goes wrong. Microsoft needs to hit a home run with their next OS to regain public opinion, and they need to do it soon.
Now, for the last few months, whenever I've been asked about Vista, I've said very neutral things. "Most people are stupid," I thought, "Why get them worked up about inevitabilities?" Now it seems that the tides of fortune are turning rather more quickly than I had imagined, and I begin to suspect that the right effort from the right people could help that process along. So I've decided to take an active hand in the matter, and I would encourage the rest of my fellow slashdotters to do the same. Encourage people to seek alternatives to Vista. Distribute liveCDs, or Wubi. Instill doubt into those who have already switched. The sooner we act, the sooner they may topple...
...did you hear the rumor that Microsoft was going to cripple XP to force people to switch to Vista? >:)
Got bored of trying to get the link formatted? What part of don't you understand? Someone with a lower UID than mine, get this person to surrender their geek card!
It's absolutely terrific that you managed to spell queue correctly (are you using Firefox?) but the word in question would actually be "cue". Webster tells me that it's mangled Latin.
Usage:
"Cue the trumpets and the chorus, for Tene has arrived!"
"Tell me the one where the drummer doesn't come in on cue."
Lastly, we have the normal/. usage, "Cue the flamers!" **ducks and runs**
You're probably correct in what you say, but there may also be other factors involved. But the real question is, would we be able to make a globally significant difference in the amount of algae? If we do, would it result in an Oceanic Anoxic Event? Is it worth it at all to spend thousands of years trying to effect something this massive, or would the effort be better spent converting to other sources of energy? I'm going to bet that we're probably not going to be interested in oil millions of years from now when a project like this would come to fruition.
Rereading what you wrote, I may have misunderstood you. If you're talking about reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere...I have to leave for work right now, but the test of that idea would be in statistics for CO2 absorption, and I'd still be worried about the GOE thing. We're far too likely to trigger such a thing as it is...
...that's just Apple's new, super-duper secure iPhone OS.
But I hear that when Windows Vista CE comes out, it'll be like, way more secure. And it'll make your coffee in the morning!
Rumor has it that there's a linux distribution that's had those features for years, but so far only Linus Torvalds has been able to figure out how to install and use it so far.
Not to argue with or detract from any of the points that you are making, but the reference to your high school experience would be a wonderful thing to omit, for the greatest amount of credibility and influence.
...does Word/Office still have Clippy? I always thought that was kind of a lame holdover from the Microsoft Bob thing. It's been years since I've used anything other than notepad or OpenOffice on a Windows machine; I'd hoped Clippy had died a natural and unmourned death in the interval.
Your asshole needs to stop posting under your name here.
You're splitting hairs here and not really responding to anything I said. Clearly factual debate is not your strong point. But I'll try to parse what you're saying here. You're defining the "lifetime of the universe" as a finite span of time (i.e. having a beginning and an end point) as being less than another postulated span of time, the "lifetime of the proton". Now, "lifetime" is a really terrible word to use for either of these time spans, as neither are alive to begin with, and furthermore the relevant time span to the discussion of proton decay is the half-life. "Lifetime," as applied to the universe, can be arbitrarily defined, as clearly you have chosen to do. Presumably the beginning would be at or near the beginning of the universe, but maybe you are only choosing to consider the period of time during which the universe could conceivably sustain life. That could possibly be reconciled with your comments, but it is a vague enough definition to make it almost useless. So, when trying to define your poorly-chosen terms, the first thing that comes to mind as an end point for the "life time of the universe" is the fucking end of the fucking universe!
...and even that is not a perfect definition, so we'll define the end of the universe as the state after which no further states are possible, where everything of note that can happen has already occurred. Given the nature of particle decay, if proton decay is possible then it is already happening, at an extremely low rate of occurrence. Clearly this could not have been what you meant by "their life time," so we'll shoot for a more reasonable definition: the end of proton matter in the universe. If we assume that protons do indeed decay, and dismiss cases where protons and the universe cease to exist simultaneously, then it can be said that on the longest possible time scales, the universe will likely exist in some form when protons have ceased to exist. But definitely go ahead and explain the special definition of your words that makes you so arrogantly right in your beliefs. I'll be over here in the corner taking a nap, as I've already given your words far more attention than they ever deserved.
Infinite is a good approximation, but if the universe continues expanding infinitely, then any patient observers would likely see all of the black holes evaporate into an incomprehensibly vast, cold, and dark void.
According to the best science available, there is no such thing as a naked singularity. The singularity, as you know, is a point of infinite density---where God divided by zero, as they say. If you can figure out how to cross a singularity, you may be Chuck Norris...
Longer than the end of the universe? I think you jest. If we don't end up with a Big Rip type end of the universe, then we're likely looking at a Heat Death situation. The only way that I can think that the universe might end before any protons decay would be in a Big Crunch, where the expansion of the universe stops accelerating (well, reverses the sign of the acceleration, anyway) and collapses into itself. There *are* certain conditions where this would be possible, but it's almost certainly not going to happen. The most likely situation is that if it's possible for protons to decay, then it will happen (and humanity will not exist when it does).
Plus, how do you propagate a 'helpful' worm? Same way as any other? Probably going to get caught by antivirus/firewalls. Work out some deal with AV/firewall vendors? How do you stop others from exploiting this exception? And from the user standpoint: do you really want anything that propagates as a worm doing whatever it wants on your box? As a sysadmin, do you want something unauthorized eating up network resources?
Basically we call the solution to the virus problem a 'patch' and give people the option of whether and when to install it.
And I think, "wow! how cool would that be, for humanity to be able to watch a binary star form!" Except for the follow-up thought which is that none of us will actually be around to watch it happen...this 'stellar timescale' thing sucks. I wanna go back to the beta days, seems like things were happening a lot faster back when this 'universe' project was just getting started...
For some odd reason this post reminded me of a short story by Borges called The Garden of Forking Paths (which is short and well worth the read). It's an unusual solution to the problem of how to communicate using a limited and noisy channel...
You may have a valid point there, or at least it suggests an interesting view of the issue. If you're familiar with the concept of memes, then assuming other evolutionary ideas are at all valid for discussing the subject, then an 'arms race', whether involving actual arms or some other form of technology, could be looked at as an example of the Red Queen Effect.
The concept of the meme is rather intriguing. It is somewhat absurd to think that one can make comparisons between (e.g.) nuclear weapons and lolcats, and talk about them as if they were part of the same general category of things. In fact, it's absurd enough to make me tend to doubt the validity of any conclusions drawn from such a perspective. Still, it's an interesting lens to put to human history.
Oh, and I take back what I said: you don't really have a valid point there. My bad...
There are no constitutional barriers, but the RIAA has been using MediaSentry as an investigative service in states that MediaSentry is not licensed to be such, AFAIK.
Unless you can point me to something specific in the Constitution that would explain why you think that the abusive, frequently illegal and deceitful measures undertaken by the RIAA in protecting their copyrights are in any way a fundamental right of each citizen, then I'm afraid your reference to that document is merely a non sequitur.
Now before you get all riled up and try to play one of the Amendment cards, understand that I'm not arguing that the RIAA (or any other person, whether I like what they do or not) has no right to try to protect their copyrights. This is/., but even so I would think to find few indeed who would deny them that right. So let's clear that one up, all right? Instead, the thing that has garnered the recording industry so much ill will and resentment is the methods they use to effect their goals. Granted, their problem is large and intractable, and it will likely to prove impossible by any means to stop filesharing. That does not, however, grant them the right to go above the law to try and prevent people from doing so. If you've been following these events, you should know exactly how questionable their methods are. If not, slashdot has a pretty good archive of articles relating to the RIAA court cases.
The inanity of your last line defies a response.
All this from intelligent design. Who would have thought that after the FSM took all that trouble to design an animal with all of these noodly appendages, we focus on the damn thing's beak?
Slashdot Mirror
That's all slashdot, and it's all good. Except where it results in me getting modded into oblivion. Then it's unjust and the moderation system is broken :)
I would post that sort of nonsense as an AC, too. For those that are unaware, the theory of a luminiferous aether posits that there exists some sort of medium in interstellar space which conducts light. It was completely superseded around the beginning of the last century, mostly by the theories of a man named Einstein. Which explain quite well our observations of the universe on a large scale. Dark matter is an entirely unrelated question related to the amount of matter in the universe. Dark energy, zero-point field...you're just throwing around terms. What we know about the forces in the universe is not exhaustive, but to invent a completely new one just to account for a minor anomaly is not good science. What you are doing here is the equivalent of fighting for the Flat Earth theory, and it disturbs me to see that modded informative here...
Now, for the last few months, whenever I've been asked about Vista, I've said very neutral things. "Most people are stupid," I thought, "Why get them worked up about inevitabilities?" Now it seems that the tides of fortune are turning rather more quickly than I had imagined, and I begin to suspect that the right effort from the right people could help that process along. So I've decided to take an active hand in the matter, and I would encourage the rest of my fellow slashdotters to do the same. Encourage people to seek alternatives to Vista. Distribute liveCDs, or Wubi. Instill doubt into those who have already switched. The sooner we act, the sooner they may topple...
...did you hear the rumor that Microsoft was going to cripple XP to force people to switch to Vista? >:)
Got bored of trying to get the link formatted? What part of don't you understand? Someone with a lower UID than mine, get this person to surrender their geek card!
Usage:
"Cue the trumpets and the chorus, for Tene has arrived!"
"Tell me the one where the drummer doesn't come in on cue."
Lastly, we have the normal /. usage, "Cue the flamers!" **ducks and runs**
Probably we wouldn't see a thing...
You're probably correct in what you say, but there may also be other factors involved. But the real question is, would we be able to make a globally significant difference in the amount of algae? If we do, would it result in an Oceanic Anoxic Event? Is it worth it at all to spend thousands of years trying to effect something this massive, or would the effort be better spent converting to other sources of energy? I'm going to bet that we're probably not going to be interested in oil millions of years from now when a project like this would come to fruition.
Rereading what you wrote, I may have misunderstood you. If you're talking about reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere...I have to leave for work right now, but the test of that idea would be in statistics for CO2 absorption, and I'd still be worried about the GOE thing. We're far too likely to trigger such a thing as it is...
But I hear that when Windows Vista CE comes out, it'll be like, way more secure. And it'll make your coffee in the morning!
Rumor has it that there's a linux distribution that's had those features for years, but so far only Linus Torvalds has been able to figure out how to install and use it so far.
Have I left anyone out yet? Oh yeah, BSD sucks.
I don't know about you, but I don't have a CPU. I just have a room full of chinese guys that crunch numbers for me. Take that, John Searle!
...does Word/Office still have Clippy? I always thought that was kind of a lame holdover from the Microsoft Bob thing. It's been years since I've used anything other than notepad or OpenOffice on a Windows machine; I'd hoped Clippy had died a natural and unmourned death in the interval.
You're splitting hairs here and not really responding to anything I said. Clearly factual debate is not your strong point. But I'll try to parse what you're saying here. You're defining the "lifetime of the universe" as a finite span of time (i.e. having a beginning and an end point) as being less than another postulated span of time, the "lifetime of the proton". Now, "lifetime" is a really terrible word to use for either of these time spans, as neither are alive to begin with, and furthermore the relevant time span to the discussion of proton decay is the half-life. "Lifetime," as applied to the universe, can be arbitrarily defined, as clearly you have chosen to do. Presumably the beginning would be at or near the beginning of the universe, but maybe you are only choosing to consider the period of time during which the universe could conceivably sustain life. That could possibly be reconciled with your comments, but it is a vague enough definition to make it almost useless. So, when trying to define your poorly-chosen terms, the first thing that comes to mind as an end point for the "life time of the universe" is the fucking end of the fucking universe!
Infinite is a good approximation, but if the universe continues expanding infinitely, then any patient observers would likely see all of the black holes evaporate into an incomprehensibly vast, cold, and dark void.
According to the best science available, there is no such thing as a naked singularity. The singularity, as you know, is a point of infinite density---where God divided by zero, as they say. If you can figure out how to cross a singularity, you may be Chuck Norris...
Longer than the end of the universe? I think you jest. If we don't end up with a Big Rip type end of the universe, then we're likely looking at a Heat Death situation. The only way that I can think that the universe might end before any protons decay would be in a Big Crunch, where the expansion of the universe stops accelerating (well, reverses the sign of the acceleration, anyway) and collapses into itself. There *are* certain conditions where this would be possible, but it's almost certainly not going to happen. The most likely situation is that if it's possible for protons to decay, then it will happen (and humanity will not exist when it does).
So, in other words, you're saying, "Bring them on."? Which team are you batting for again?
Basically we call the solution to the virus problem a 'patch' and give people the option of whether and when to install it.
And I think, "wow! how cool would that be, for humanity to be able to watch a binary star form!" Except for the follow-up thought which is that none of us will actually be around to watch it happen...this 'stellar timescale' thing sucks. I wanna go back to the beta days, seems like things were happening a lot faster back when this 'universe' project was just getting started...
For some odd reason this post reminded me of a short story by Borges called The Garden of Forking Paths (which is short and well worth the read). It's an unusual solution to the problem of how to communicate using a limited and noisy channel...
The concept of the meme is rather intriguing. It is somewhat absurd to think that one can make comparisons between (e.g.) nuclear weapons and lolcats, and talk about them as if they were part of the same general category of things. In fact, it's absurd enough to make me tend to doubt the validity of any conclusions drawn from such a perspective. Still, it's an interesting lens to put to human history.
Oh, and I take back what I said: you don't really have a valid point there. My bad...
Lucky for us in the USA we went for the plan with the best of both worlds: government mandated corporate monopolies!
There are no constitutional barriers, but the RIAA has been using MediaSentry as an investigative service in states that MediaSentry is not licensed to be such, AFAIK.
Unless you can point me to something specific in the Constitution that would explain why you think that the abusive, frequently illegal and deceitful measures undertaken by the RIAA in protecting their copyrights are in any way a fundamental right of each citizen, then I'm afraid your reference to that document is merely a non sequitur. Now before you get all riled up and try to play one of the Amendment cards, understand that I'm not arguing that the RIAA (or any other person, whether I like what they do or not) has no right to try to protect their copyrights. This is /., but even so I would think to find few indeed who would deny them that right. So let's clear that one up, all right? Instead, the thing that has garnered the recording industry so much ill will and resentment is the methods they use to effect their goals. Granted, their problem is large and intractable, and it will likely to prove impossible by any means to stop filesharing. That does not, however, grant them the right to go above the law to try and prevent people from doing so. If you've been following these events, you should know exactly how questionable their methods are. If not, slashdot has a pretty good archive of articles relating to the RIAA court cases.
The inanity of your last line defies a response.
All this from intelligent design. Who would have thought that after the FSM took all that trouble to design an animal with all of these noodly appendages, we focus on the damn thing's beak?