Like air, water, a magnetosphere, people? Like that? What, precisely do you think is on the Moon that we don't have here? It's the same table of chemical elements all across the universe as far as I know.
Hmm, water, hence air, check. Relatively low gravity well, check. Plenty of sunlight sans atmosphere, check. It's a stupendous gas/water station as soon as someone gets a water => oxygen/hydrogen facility running there. Yeah, getting there in the 1st place is pretty hard but once you have ability to refill tanks from moon..
There's English Al Jazeera which you can buy at least in Finland as a part of pay tv packages. Apparently they're by far more balanced with their reporting than the Arabian version is. Not too surprising, perhaps, considering their target audience.
Well, WB and BG are donating serious amounts of money to charities. After a couple of billions I do think you can start thinking a little bit out of the box beyond accumulating the next billion. Bill Gates has made his personal foundation focus on curing Malaria. Whatever you think of history of Microsoft, that's pretty worthy goal.
No sci-fi appeal, thought. Unless they device mosquito genotherapy that goes horribly wrong..
This could happen in our lifetime. We could already be living this if NASA hadn't given up on Orion in the 1960s because of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This is the future of space travel, not tiny chemical rockets which cost tens of thousands of dollars to move a kilogram.
But you see, son, we did those nuclear tests for a good cause. Without those tests we wouldn't have the capability to destroy all life on earth five times over today. God bless America!
Seriously, thought, if you think of the rabid opposition to patently clean, efficient and safe nuclear fission power plants, you'd have ecoterrorists suicidebombing the project from get go. Luckily we have other options rather than the crude nuclear impulse engine. Some examples do things like using reactor core to superheat propellant which gives you crazy delta-v for the mass, bit like ion engines. Only this thing can generate serious thrust as well.
Still has bad nucular-word in it. Let's hope Obama's IMHO smart push to privatise space industry allows private launch companies to think out of the box on this one. After all a private company doesn't really answer to voters the same way as goverment institutions do. Unfortunately the goverment still regulates private efforts..
Still, Greenpeace spreads scaremongering about some rather modest fission piles contained in space probes wiping out half of the population on earth (or something like that), just imagine the propaganda about bona fide serious nuclear propulsion..
While the pirate attacks really push the "They are attacking Us" buttons, and the outcomes are occasionally really bad for unlucky crew members, none of the responses from shippers, insurers, or countries involved suggest that they are a serious economic nuisance.
There is in fact navy presence in the area. Even a well-known blue waters superpower like Finland sent a corvette.
The problem is that a) Actual warships are tremendously expensive b) Warships are meant to fight other warships, not to deter pirates, so they're a tremendous overkill
British navy guy in The Register suggested some time ago that the right naval response for pirate hunting would be to get some freight ships and convert them to helo tenders. Helicopters can go all around the place quickly so they can in fact respond to pirate attacks at sea. On the other hand the fleet auxiliary tender would be rather cheap compared to a billion-euro destroyer full of high tech gizmos designed to fight nuclear submarines, jet fighters and seaskimming missiles.
Would a stint hunting somali pirates in a glorified freighter be exciting to naval officers and/or boost for career? Hell no. So therefore such low-cost solution is not considered, instead we get nice lines on CV for captains of destroyers looking for a position in admiralty..
At any rate, it isn't that the MT-32 was the be-all, end-all or anything, it is that the person doing the demo didn't understand what they were doing. Also I suspect the original track was composed for the MT-32. A lot of games in that era were composed for the MT-32, and then arranged for other popular devices like the Adlib.
The fact is that Roland MT-32 / LAPC-1 were for long time be-all end-all of PC audio. In fact most game music was composed for this particular synth was exactly because the alternatives were SO bad and the composers, being musically oriented people, wanted something that didn't sound like absolute crap. It's not like MT-32/LAPC-1 ever was that popular. And Sierra's Larry 3 theme sure made you soil your pants on Roland after cheap tinny synth-sound of Adlib/Soundblaster..
This is actually one lost piece of computer history. As far as I know, there is no real emulator for MT-32 which can reproduce the customized instruments possible with that synth and used extensively by composers. Even if you have the (copyrighted) original ROM, it just gives you the stock samples, not the customization, unless there's an emulator for the actual syntheziser chip.
PC sound was really stagnated for really long time, much thanks to creative's absolute domination of the market. GUS was a brave attempt at a paradigm shift but ultimately fell flat on it's face, only to be reincarnated by creative copying the concept with AWE32 and such. With Win95 standardizing the audio interface, Creative came up with EAX to again get a stranglehold of PC audio. It wasn't until Vista made soundcard a commodity DAC with no special hardware caps used at all that the sound card scene became open. Unfortunately it also made lowest common denominator (AC'97 with digital out) de-facto standard. As far as I know, if you want to have fancy audio processing, it has to be all done in software now. Not that it REALLY matters when everyone has at least dual core with majority of games not using the 2nd core (3rd, 4th..) core for anything much.
Acer... they just pulled the screw your existing customers by not supporting them stunt on the Liquid One. While having good hardware, the phone is a no buy.
In fact, there are drugs for colic. Well, at least for some of the cases. It's just the "common mom wisdom" that there's nothing that works and the doctors do not often bring it up unless directly asked. cf. infecting your children with horrible diseases instead of getting them shots..
I would be delighted to switch my window manager back to the Workplace Shell (well, provided that there were keyboard shortcuts). I would not be so delighted to again deal with the SIQ lockups (but I imagine a port of WPS to X11 wouldn't have that problem, except to the extent that its own components might themselves use their own queue). I also would worry about EA corruption, which was always a concern with OS/2 as the collection of cruft in EAs kept growing and often a little mistake led one to need to repair them (or reinstall the system).
SIQ was not even a crippling problem in the end as there was one programmer on IBM team that made an heroic effort and implemented kind of watchdog functionality into the kernel. So if one program hogs the input queue, it gets booted to the corner. Kids today probably can't imagine a situation where you have no access to keyboard because a trivial 3rd party app is misbehaving. I do not remember when we got the fix, but probably either out of box with 3.0 or with a service pack.
The real killer was complete inability of the kernel to kill a process which was unable to terminate gracefully. There simply was no "kill -9" equivalent. Don't try telling me your favourite app z fixed that because they never worked properly and I tried them all back in the day. Maybe one time in 5 you got lucky and the offending app got zapped but in the end you had to reboot because you had half-dozen zombi apps cluttering the desktop..
Personally I actually gave up home computing for a couple of years between giving up OS/2 and before Win2k came out. I skipped the dos extender garbage completely.
Real reasons for OS/2 failure are pretty simple to enumerate: 1) you really honestly needed at least 16MB of memory and that was the time when the RAM cartel was in full swing and almost everyone was squeaking along with 8MB that was completely insufficient as memory was more expensive than ever. 2) Microsoft promptly and thoroughly sabotaged OS/2 ability to run windows programs by "updating" Win32s API to allocate processes beyond 2GB, which OS/2 couldn't handle. This was the real death knell, ability to gain Win32 apps was regained only far too late by very very nifty executable converters that could actually take MS Office and convert the binaries to OS/2 binaries (OS/2 implemented natively about 80% of Win32 api anyways) 3) It was totally different from what people were used to. See how much problem MS has dragging XP users to Vista/7 and they have near-absolute monopoly to back them up.
There are/were solid technical limitations (Back at the day only thing MS shills wanted to talk about was symmetric multiprocessing that only became reality with dual cores more than a decade later..) but they were largely irrelevant to the real success and/or failure.
There's an easy way to generate a strong password. Pick a passphrase of your choice and make an acronym out of it.
Picard Would Kick Kirk's Ass Any Day => PWKKAAD
Good luck trying password attack on that one. It's rather easy to come up with these things once in a while. Add your birday or something if they have daft letters and numbers policy in place.
Learn not to grab hot soldering iron by the barrel or tip.
Surprisingly, getting your fingers repeatedly burned will teach you this lesson sooner or later. It just becomes a learned instinct to look at the soldering iron every time you're reaching for it...
It's a nice reference. Once in a while you just have to get right back to the basics and remind yourself how some common BJT circuits such as current mirrors work. Ditto with basic opamp circuits.
Depending what's understood with "electronics" it's big and sprawling subject with many sub-disciplines. You can get into EMI quagmire and never really come out of it, for example.
I was interviewed with one company where "cad heads" and designers are quite separate with layout designers being the less appreciated job.
In any case, there are many, many things to learn and you only become really good when years go by and you accumulate knowledge. You do, however, probably become good only in subset of things you've worked with.
For example. Mosfets are voltage controlled devices and you do not have to worry about power to the gate, right? Wrong. The gate charge, while very small _does_ add up hugely in SMPS circuits and such when you're charging and discharging that small capacitor 100000 times a second or so.
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 10e60, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes
Homeopathic remedies are *literally* water - they have *no* medical benefit whatsoever apart from as placebos. (and placebos can be pretty powerful - but there is no magic - you could replace all those remedies with tap water and say it was a treatment and the effect would be the same).
Tap water tastes like water, hence it sucks as a placebo. For placebo to work, the person has to believe it's actually medicine so it should taste/smell/look/cost like actual medicine. Or you should be daft enough to be conditioned that plain water is a real cure.
WRT this homeopathic remedy stuff, I'm darn sure it'd be really very hard to actually produce such a pure solution assuming you've been handling substance z in any meaningful quantity in the premises.
"magic infinite energy source" is spelled interstellar hydrogen, no? Bussard Ramjet can conceivably generate "free" energy. Besides which, consider extremely advanced society with wast resources. Then consider George W. Are you scared yet?
It doesn't take many people acting irrationally to screw you up sideways if they have a slice of huge resource base. You have to consider aliens might be acting for religious or ideological basis, and just a small minority of their society.
In any case, "invasion fleet" would need about exactly one ship, one. We have zero defense against a spaceship which has capability to move in stellar space, never mind interstellar.
Yeah, if they're kind and give us couple of years, we can for sure build orion and go get them. no, no, not the nasa boondoggle killed in crib, the real deal from 50s! Unfortunately "they" would have the absolute high ground and would most likely have the means to take out fairly primitive nuclear propulsion spacecraft without breaking sweat.
Now that they have de facto taken governor generalship of earth, what are they going to do with it? Occupy earth? Ha. Hardly likely. More like some kind of deal where X amount of industrial and energy output would be devoted to whatever our saviours bloody well want. Or else. Then again, what would they want? If it's more starships, they'd be giving us the technology and industrial base to go get them. Bring us freedom? Convert us? Make us biggest reality TV show ever?
For the very few men that have been circumsized as an adult and had an opportunity to experience sex both ways -- they say that sex is very disappointing after. Some become suicidally depressed.
As an male who had his weenie chopped in his 30s, I can say I enjoy sex whole a lot more without the painful splits in the foreskin that take forever to heal and general constriction/pain due to naturally moderately undersized foreskin.
I only wish public healthcare didn't drag their heels about it for a decade due to general perceptions over here.
After quick googling, shift-f10 is used for booting Win7 from a virtual HDD image. That's hardly something you need to know for anything closely resembling a normal setup. I do assume your anecdote about APIC/PIC/APIC dance is somehow related for that too.
So, yes, installing some kind of weird virtual machine windows 7is somewhat complicated. And this is relevant to the 99% of setups not using virtualization, how?
Normal home desktop installation definitely does not need any of that crap, I've installed W7 on acer laptop, my desktop PC and a HTPC, each of which went with no hitches whatsoever despite not having cherry picked hardware as they started life as XP machines originally.
Actually best explanation I've heard for the phenomenom uses gun analogy.
You shouldn't think of the laser pointer (flashlight, whatever) as a water hose, but as a machinegun. The bullets from the machinegun (photons) travel at a set speed, despite you moving the aiming point. Therefore the "dot" moving at FTL does not mean much.
Paying bills on a machine was exciting enough in early 90s but online banking beats that hands down without trying. For one thing, no waiting in a bloody line to pay your bills.
I guess it could be done, but it might take some creativity.
Umm. No. Since most of the world can handle electronic cash transfers between banks without any hassle, there's hardly any creativity involved. Just copy the system of your preference from another country.
In most reasonable countries you can make money transfers between private accounts in an ATM. So if you're making a deal, take the guy to the ATM and give/show him the receipt of the transfer. Plus, you're going to make any deal involving reasonable money in writing, right? You can naturally do this online as well if you preferer.
Most commercial bills come with a pre-filled form you can take to a bank (if you're a granny with technophobia) or pay it on a machine or online. Bill has necessary details to make the bank transfer and a reference number that the recipients automated billing system can recognize.
In practise any semi-decent bank will let you set up a recurring payment to a private account as well so you don't have to bother to remember to do it every time when the rent is due.
Paper trail? Old fashioned people get a statement once a month on paper, rest have online account management which shows transfers for last 2 years or whatever. (and up to 5 years for a fee).
What's hard is waiting in line to turn in some daft piece of paper which is then scanned and sent as an image to a check clearing house.. At least these days they don't apparently send the physical piece around anymore which means your money is in limbo for weeks.
Amen brother. And for us old farts, we tried Linux before google existed. Think about that for a second and you may start to understand where some well founded antipathy to linux community comes from.
The only reasonable way to figure out linux and/or university HP-UX was to get some reference books. This task was made easier of course by the borderline linux gurus who hated books and would abuse anyone asking for a good reference book.
By personal first experience with world of unix was HP-UX system not. configured. at. all. for. users. Just imagine a poor sod who tries to write email with elm and they are dumped into vi. Ha-ha. Being old school geek type I persevered and eventually found a guy from another university who had written short pamflet about how to set up some basic things such as setting up EMACS with reasonable defaults and support for national characters. Emacs is hardly wonderful but if your choices are vi and Emacs, at least you have fighting chance with the latter.
So I learned and figured out how to do things but all the while I had ever-increasing feeling "This is stupid. I have other things to do with my time." and eventually this contributed to my choice to pursue career of electronics design, not computer science.
Personally I jumped into NT bandwagon when W2k came out and never really looked back. I had for a while a linux server box running at home but I figured out I'm getting very modest benefit for a lot of work and replaced the damn thing with an ADSL router that can do the firewall-bit without me fiddling with obscure router rulesets.
I did another foray with trying to set up a HTPC running on linux year'n'half ago but after 2 weeks of wasted vacation time trying to get the damn thing play ball I just had to give up. Linux audio support ha-ha-ha... I had XP HTPC with DVBViewer running pretty within the same day I started installing from scratch. Yes, it was existing leftover parts box, not one bought with careful research to provide linux compatibility but I never had to bother with that with windows.
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"There's plenty to be found on the moon."
Like air, water, a magnetosphere, people? Like that? What, precisely do you think is on the Moon that we don't have here? It's the same table of chemical elements all across the universe as far as I know.
Hmm, water, hence air, check. Relatively low gravity well, check. Plenty of sunlight sans atmosphere, check. It's a stupendous gas/water station as soon as someone gets a water => oxygen/hydrogen facility running there. Yeah, getting there in the 1st place is pretty hard but once you have ability to refill tanks from moon..
Oh my.
Customer segment A buys 1000pcs of a product with $8 profit/sale
Customer segment B buys 20000pcs of a product with $2 profit/sale
Which one made the company more revenue?
Looks like the links from your profile's "comment" page are busted. You cannot view your own comments in the thread to see what people replied to you.
There's English Al Jazeera which you can buy at least in Finland as a part of pay tv packages. Apparently they're by far more balanced with their reporting than the Arabian version is. Not too surprising, perhaps, considering their target audience.
Well, WB and BG are donating serious amounts of money to charities. After a couple of billions I do think you can start thinking a little bit out of the box beyond accumulating the next billion. Bill Gates has made his personal foundation focus on curing Malaria. Whatever you think of history of Microsoft, that's pretty worthy goal.
No sci-fi appeal, thought. Unless they device mosquito genotherapy that goes horribly wrong..
If you seriously want to exit Earth, you need to starting thinking about how to restructure society to look beyond the quarterly report.
Ironically, Warren Buffet could fund his own serious space program if he wanted.
This could happen in our lifetime. We could already be living this if NASA hadn't given up on Orion in the 1960s because of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This is the future of space travel, not tiny chemical rockets which cost tens of thousands of dollars to move a kilogram.
But you see, son, we did those nuclear tests for a good cause. Without those tests we wouldn't have the capability to destroy all life on earth five times over today. God bless America!
Seriously, thought, if you think of the rabid opposition to patently clean, efficient and safe nuclear fission power plants, you'd have ecoterrorists suicidebombing the project from get go. Luckily we have other options rather than the crude nuclear impulse engine. Some examples do things like using reactor core to superheat propellant which gives you crazy delta-v for the mass, bit like ion engines. Only this thing can generate serious thrust as well.
Still has bad nucular-word in it. Let's hope Obama's IMHO smart push to privatise space industry allows private launch companies to think out of the box on this one. After all a private company doesn't really answer to voters the same way as goverment institutions do. Unfortunately the goverment still regulates private efforts..
Still, Greenpeace spreads scaremongering about some rather modest fission piles contained in space probes wiping out half of the population on earth (or something like that), just imagine the propaganda about bona fide serious nuclear propulsion..
While the pirate attacks really push the "They are attacking Us" buttons, and the outcomes are occasionally really bad for unlucky crew members, none of the responses from shippers, insurers, or countries involved suggest that they are a serious economic nuisance.
There is in fact navy presence in the area. Even a well-known blue waters superpower like Finland sent a corvette.
The problem is that
a) Actual warships are tremendously expensive
b) Warships are meant to fight other warships, not to deter pirates, so they're a tremendous overkill
British navy guy in The Register suggested some time ago that the right naval response for pirate hunting would be to get some freight ships and convert them to helo tenders. Helicopters can go all around the place quickly so they can in fact respond to pirate attacks at sea. On the other hand the fleet auxiliary tender would be rather cheap compared to a billion-euro destroyer full of high tech gizmos designed to fight nuclear submarines, jet fighters and seaskimming missiles.
Would a stint hunting somali pirates in a glorified freighter be exciting to naval officers and/or boost for career? Hell no. So therefore such low-cost solution is not considered, instead we get nice lines on CV for captains of destroyers looking for a position in admiralty..
At any rate, it isn't that the MT-32 was the be-all, end-all or anything, it is that the person doing the demo didn't understand what they were doing. Also I suspect the original track was composed for the MT-32. A lot of games in that era were composed for the MT-32, and then arranged for other popular devices like the Adlib.
The fact is that Roland MT-32 / LAPC-1 were for long time be-all end-all of PC audio. In fact most game music was composed for this particular synth was exactly because the alternatives were SO bad and the composers, being musically oriented people, wanted something that didn't sound like absolute crap. It's not like MT-32/LAPC-1 ever was that popular. And Sierra's Larry 3 theme sure made you soil your pants on Roland after cheap tinny synth-sound of Adlib/Soundblaster..
This is actually one lost piece of computer history. As far as I know, there is no real emulator for MT-32 which can reproduce the customized instruments possible with that synth and used extensively by composers. Even if you have the (copyrighted) original ROM, it just gives you the stock samples, not the customization, unless there's an emulator for the actual syntheziser chip.
PC sound was really stagnated for really long time, much thanks to creative's absolute domination of the market. GUS was a brave attempt at a paradigm shift but ultimately fell flat on it's face, only to be reincarnated by creative copying the concept with AWE32 and such. With Win95 standardizing the audio interface, Creative came up with EAX to again get a stranglehold of PC audio. It wasn't until Vista made soundcard a commodity DAC with no special hardware caps used at all that the sound card scene became open. Unfortunately it also made lowest common denominator (AC'97 with digital out) de-facto standard. As far as I know, if you want to have fancy audio processing, it has to be all done in software now. Not that it REALLY matters when everyone has at least dual core with majority of games not using the 2nd core (3rd, 4th..) core for anything much.
Acer... they just pulled the screw your existing customers by not supporting them stunt on the Liquid One. While having good hardware, the phone is a no buy.
Excuse me?
The 2.1 firmware leaks for A1 are apparently falling from the sky then? It's not like Acer is about to publish official eclair firmware? In modaco forum they're up to 3rd leaked 2.1 firmware now unless I'm mistaken.
Acer has also released 1.6 firmware update that helps on the abysmal release battery life. This phone still needs a 3rd party battery, thought.
Darn, I read that headline as "three-patent embryo" and thought it's some kind of IP gripe article.
Never mind, I'm sure the number of patents on this is bigger by the order of magnitude anyways.
In fact, there are drugs for colic. Well, at least for some of the cases. It's just the "common mom wisdom" that there's nothing that works and the doctors do not often bring it up unless directly asked. cf. infecting your children with horrible diseases instead of getting them shots..
I would be delighted to switch my window manager back to the Workplace Shell (well, provided that there were keyboard shortcuts). I would not be so delighted to again deal with the SIQ lockups (but I imagine a port of WPS to X11 wouldn't have that problem, except to the extent that its own components might themselves use their own queue). I also would worry about EA corruption, which was always a concern with OS/2 as the collection of cruft in EAs kept growing and often a little mistake led one to need to repair them (or reinstall the system).
SIQ was not even a crippling problem in the end as there was one programmer on IBM team that made an heroic effort and implemented kind of watchdog functionality into the kernel. So if one program hogs the input queue, it gets booted to the corner. Kids today probably can't imagine a situation where you have no access to keyboard because a trivial 3rd party app is misbehaving. I do not remember when we got the fix, but probably either out of box with 3.0 or with a service pack.
The real killer was complete inability of the kernel to kill a process which was unable to terminate gracefully. There simply was no "kill -9" equivalent. Don't try telling me your favourite app z fixed that because they never worked properly and I tried them all back in the day. Maybe one time in 5 you got lucky and the offending app got zapped but in the end you had to reboot because you had half-dozen zombi apps cluttering the desktop..
Personally I actually gave up home computing for a couple of years between giving up OS/2 and before Win2k came out. I skipped the dos extender garbage completely.
Real reasons for OS/2 failure are pretty simple to enumerate:
1) you really honestly needed at least 16MB of memory and that was the time when the RAM cartel was in full swing and almost everyone was squeaking along with 8MB that was completely insufficient as memory was more expensive than ever.
2) Microsoft promptly and thoroughly sabotaged OS/2 ability to run windows programs by "updating" Win32s API to allocate processes beyond 2GB, which OS/2 couldn't handle. This was the real death knell, ability to gain Win32 apps was regained only far too late by very very nifty executable converters that could actually take MS Office and convert the binaries to OS/2 binaries (OS/2 implemented natively about 80% of Win32 api anyways)
3) It was totally different from what people were used to. See how much problem MS has dragging XP users to Vista/7 and they have near-absolute monopoly to back them up.
There are/were solid technical limitations (Back at the day only thing MS shills wanted to talk about was symmetric multiprocessing that only became reality with dual cores more than a decade later..) but they were largely irrelevant to the real success and/or failure.
There's an easy way to generate a strong password. Pick a passphrase of your choice and make an acronym out of it.
Picard Would Kick Kirk's Ass Any Day => PWKKAAD
Good luck trying password attack on that one. It's rather easy to come up with these things once in a while. Add your birday or something if they have daft letters and numbers policy in place.
Learn not to grab hot soldering iron by the barrel or tip.
Surprisingly, getting your fingers repeatedly burned will teach you this lesson sooner or later. It just becomes a learned instinct to look at the soldering iron every time you're reaching for it...
It's a nice reference. Once in a while you just have to get right back to the basics and remind yourself how some common BJT circuits such as current mirrors work. Ditto with basic opamp circuits.
Depending what's understood with "electronics" it's big and sprawling subject with many sub-disciplines. You can get into EMI quagmire and never really come out of it, for example.
I was interviewed with one company where "cad heads" and designers are quite separate with layout designers being the less appreciated job.
In any case, there are many, many things to learn and you only become really good when years go by and you accumulate knowledge. You do, however, probably become good only in subset of things you've worked with.
For example. Mosfets are voltage controlled devices and you do not have to worry about power to the gate, right? Wrong. The gate charge, while very small _does_ add up hugely in SMPS circuits and such when you're charging and discharging that small capacitor 100000 times a second or so.
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 10e60, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes
Homeopathic remedies are *literally* water - they have *no* medical benefit whatsoever apart from as placebos. (and placebos can be pretty powerful - but there is no magic - you could replace all those remedies with tap water and say it was a treatment and the effect would be the same).
Tap water tastes like water, hence it sucks as a placebo. For placebo to work, the person has to believe it's actually medicine so it should taste/smell/look/cost like actual medicine. Or you should be daft enough to be conditioned that plain water is a real cure.
WRT this homeopathic remedy stuff, I'm darn sure it'd be really very hard to actually produce such a pure solution assuming you've been handling substance z in any meaningful quantity in the premises.
"magic infinite energy source" is spelled interstellar hydrogen, no? Bussard Ramjet can conceivably generate "free" energy. Besides which, consider extremely advanced society with wast resources. Then consider George W. Are you scared yet?
It doesn't take many people acting irrationally to screw you up sideways if they have a slice of huge resource base. You have to consider aliens might be acting for religious or ideological basis, and just a small minority of their society.
In any case, "invasion fleet" would need about exactly one ship, one. We have zero defense against a spaceship which has capability to move in stellar space, never mind interstellar.
Yeah, if they're kind and give us couple of years, we can for sure build orion and go get them. no, no, not the nasa boondoggle killed in crib, the real deal from 50s! Unfortunately "they" would have the absolute high ground and would most likely have the means to take out fairly primitive nuclear propulsion spacecraft without breaking sweat.
Now that they have de facto taken governor generalship of earth, what are they going to do with it? Occupy earth? Ha. Hardly likely. More like some kind of deal where X amount of industrial and energy output would be devoted to whatever our saviours bloody well want. Or else. Then again, what would they want? If it's more starships, they'd be giving us the technology and industrial base to go get them. Bring us freedom? Convert us? Make us biggest reality TV show ever?
Who knows.
For the very few men that have been circumsized as an adult and had an opportunity to experience sex both ways -- they say that sex is very disappointing after. Some become suicidally depressed.
As an male who had his weenie chopped in his 30s, I can say I enjoy sex whole a lot more without the painful splits in the foreskin that take forever to heal and general constriction/pain due to naturally moderately undersized foreskin.
I only wish public healthcare didn't drag their heels about it for a decade due to general perceptions over here.
Uh, what?
After quick googling, shift-f10 is used for booting Win7 from a virtual HDD image. That's hardly something you need to know for anything closely resembling a normal setup. I do assume your anecdote about APIC/PIC/APIC dance is somehow related for that too.
So, yes, installing some kind of weird virtual machine windows 7is somewhat complicated. And this is relevant to the 99% of setups not using virtualization, how?
Normal home desktop installation definitely does not need any of that crap, I've installed W7 on acer laptop, my desktop PC and a HTPC, each of which went with no hitches whatsoever despite not having cherry picked hardware as they started life as XP machines originally.
Actually best explanation I've heard for the phenomenom uses gun analogy.
You shouldn't think of the laser pointer (flashlight, whatever) as a water hose, but as a machinegun. The bullets from the machinegun (photons) travel at a set speed, despite you moving the aiming point. Therefore the "dot" moving at FTL does not mean much.
The movie caught pretty damn well the fascism is all right, m'kay theme and made serious fun about it.
Pretty hilarious, unlike the book which was just serious about it all, really.
Paying bills on a machine was exciting enough in early 90s but online banking beats that hands down without trying. For one thing, no waiting in a bloody line to pay your bills.
I guess it could be done, but it might take some creativity.
Umm. No. Since most of the world can handle electronic cash transfers between banks without any hassle, there's hardly any creativity involved. Just copy the system of your preference from another country.
In most reasonable countries you can make money transfers between private accounts in an ATM. So if you're making a deal, take the guy to the ATM and give/show him the receipt of the transfer. Plus, you're going to make any deal involving reasonable money in writing, right? You can naturally do this online as well if you preferer.
Most commercial bills come with a pre-filled form you can take to a bank (if you're a granny with technophobia) or pay it on a machine or online. Bill has necessary details to make the bank transfer and a reference number that the recipients automated billing system can recognize.
In practise any semi-decent bank will let you set up a recurring payment to a private account as well so you don't have to bother to remember to do it every time when the rent is due.
Paper trail? Old fashioned people get a statement once a month on paper, rest have online account management which shows transfers for last 2 years or whatever. (and up to 5 years for a fee).
What's hard is waiting in line to turn in some daft piece of paper which is then scanned and sent as an image to a check clearing house.. At least these days they don't apparently send the physical piece around anymore which means your money is in limbo for weeks.
Amen brother. And for us old farts, we tried Linux before google existed. Think about that for a second and you may start to understand where some well founded antipathy to linux community comes from.
The only reasonable way to figure out linux and/or university HP-UX was to get some reference books. This task was made easier of course by the borderline linux gurus who hated books and would abuse anyone asking for a good reference book.
By personal first experience with world of unix was HP-UX system not. configured. at. all. for. users. Just imagine a poor sod who tries to write email with elm and they are dumped into vi. Ha-ha. Being old school geek type I persevered and eventually found a guy from another university who had written short pamflet about how to set up some basic things such as setting up EMACS with reasonable defaults and support for national characters. Emacs is hardly wonderful but if your choices are vi and Emacs, at least you have fighting chance with the latter.
So I learned and figured out how to do things but all the while I had ever-increasing feeling "This is stupid. I have other things to do with my time." and eventually this contributed to my choice to pursue career of electronics design, not computer science.
Personally I jumped into NT bandwagon when W2k came out and never really looked back. I had for a while a linux server box running at home but I figured out I'm getting very modest benefit for a lot of work and replaced the damn thing with an ADSL router that can do the firewall-bit without me fiddling with obscure router rulesets.
I did another foray with trying to set up a HTPC running on linux year'n'half ago but after 2 weeks of wasted vacation time trying to get the damn thing play ball I just had to give up. Linux audio support ha-ha-ha... I had XP HTPC with DVBViewer running pretty within the same day I started installing from scratch. Yes, it was existing leftover parts box, not one bought with careful research to provide linux compatibility but I never had to bother with that with windows.