You didn't go for anything, you eyed it and carefully prodded it from a distance with a stick.
You think? I spent three years without a job, writing code 10 to 12 hours a day on weekdays and 2-4 hours a day on weekends. I spent my entire (liquid) life savings staying current on that mortgage and paying for utilities and food. I had $600 left in the bank when my first paycheck at my new job arrived. I don't know what your definition of "went for it" is, but that should be good enough for anyone.
(Actually I spent 34 months without a job, if you want to be excruciatingly precise.)
I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?
I went for it.
I failed.
I have no debt other than the mortgage I started with, excellent credit, and a good job. What did I do differently?
I gave up when the money ran out and went back to work for The Man, rather than throw good money after bad. Trying to launch a startup is a gamble and should be treated precisely the same way. Only use money you can afford to lose and do not spend one thin dime of money you don't have trying to "win it all back" if you hit bottom. Quit and go home.
Too late for you, but for other people thinking about it, this can't be repeated enough.
Women are largely window dressings except for one major character who is ignored or used as a damsel in distress as much as possible.
Clarissa MacDougall was eventually upgraded to an actual character. By the time Children of the Lens came around, she was a mental match for her husband. "Doc" Smith was one of several Golden Age writers who actually moved with the times. The Golden Age faded, but at least the survivors lost some of their prejudices.
Just get a CuBox-i. 2"x2"x2" cube, available in three editions. The quad-core with 2 GB of RAM version that's equivalent to this Amazon thing is $130 and it has a microSD card slot, so you can fill it with as much or as little flash memory as you feel like paying for. I run Android on mine, but it also boots any of several different Linux distributions. It doesn't come with a remote or a game controller, but it has USB, and the quad-core version has BlueTooth. All versions have an IR receiver. No Amazon prime subscription needed, no custom manufacturer-mangled smart TV version of Android required, and it has access to the Google Play store.
Small business that doesn't have a "tie the world to our services" agenda can still deliver a product designed for customers, rather than consumers.
Dropbox does delta syncs using a modified version of rsync, so it only uploads change portions of a file.
They had better not be. Dropbox offers no source downloads, but rsync is GPL. If they are using some form of the rsync protocol, they had better be using their own clean-room implementation, or they're currently in violation of the GPL.
The logistics sound impossible. They are going to need a lot or equipment, including a huge tank to store the cold saline solution and another for the blood. They cannot send this out with every ambulance.
You watch way too many horror movies. The average adult male has about 1 gallon of blood. The average adult female has about a pint less. It's not a very big tank.
So they can distribute "Bill of Rights" posters with the Second Amendment deleted?
Disingenuous post is disingenuous. The poster illustrates the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th 8th, 9th, 15th, and 19th amendments. Leaving out the 2nd is not some grand conspiracy. It illustrates what the ACLU fights hardest for, and everyone knows the ACLU doesn't bother with the 2nd amendment. There's an entire organization devoted to just that one, so no need to duplicate effort.
The only way virtual reality can really work, a virtual reality full immersion gym or hotel (hotel implies you spend social time outside of the virtual environment)...
Right. Because that was so necessary when 3D games took off, especially first person shooters. The only way Duke Nukem 3D could ever have been popular is in "a full body harness with active and resistive joints, hand sockets and a headset." What the hell are you smoking and why haven't you shared with the rest of us?
A finer example of the Dunning-Kruger effect I haven't seen in quite a long time.
No, I meant exactly what I said. Without fuel -- and they will be without fuel -- the machines that do the harvesting won't run...
No, they won't be without fuel.
I grew up on a farm. Where do you think tractors get fuel? I'll give you a hint. You'll never see a tractor at your local gas station. Farms, even very small farms, have their own large fuel dumps and buy fuel in bulk.
The farm I lived on had both a gasoline tank and a diesel tank. Diesel is a no-brainer—farms buy it in bulk, colored pink, because it's much cheaper than buying fuel from a retail station because it's exempt from road taxes. Not all tractors run on diesel however, so you also buy gasoline by the tanker-load. On the farm on which I lived, we kept approximately one year of operating fuel on site. Larger farms keep less than that, but still keep a very large quantity on hand. Oh, and the gasoline tank? The pump was hand-cranked. No power outage could stop me from pumping gasoline, and gasoline is what is used to power portable generators, and the goddamn diesel pump has a goddamn plug. If the power is out and you want diesel, you plunk your generator down next to it and plug it in. There is no "OMG fuel is impossibly inaccessible" scenario. Retail stations are a little bit harder to deal with, but not nearly as hard as you seem to think.
No, I just have an up-to-date understanding of modern inventory practices, something you clearly lack.
You have something you read online somewhere and now you think you know everything. My cousin has worked in a food distribution warehouse for the past 8 years. Not all supply chains are created equal. Yes, there is very little depth in perishables, but perishables are neither essential nor even the bulk of what is eaten. Dry goods have a supply chain as much as half a year deep. Canned goods have a supply chain as much as two years deep. Other non-perishables have supply chains that run at least three months deep. That Easter candy you're buying right now? It was made five or six months ago. It was packaged for retail sale 3 months ago. It sits in a warehouse between times.
That doesn't even count unprocessed grains in silos, of which there are many millions of tons, already harvested (in case your "OMG combine harvester fuel is permanently inaccessible" scenario actually does come to pass). The farm I lived on and all the neighboring farms siloed the harvest and kept it, usually for months. Any modern successful farm is being run by someone who is watching the commodities and futures markets and making sale decisions that maximize financial gain. The farmer has explicit control over when he sells and when he delivers. It is only very loosely tied to the seasons, and the larger the farm, the looser the connection, since the largest farms can afford the largest silo complexes.
But all of this is irrelevant.
Look. I'm an engineer. I not only know a good deal about most "shit", as you put it, I have designed more than one system from end to end and I am not intimidated in the least by any system you could think of in normal use. What you seem to lack is any understanding at all of how things actually work...
Really. I don't believe you.
I am an engineer, but I have expertise you so obviously lack in the field that matters here. I spent six years writing software for testing equipment for electrical wires, including power wiring. I don't have a Ph.D. in power systems engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla, but my coworker in the office across the hall from mine did. I know how power systems work. Most importantly, I know the thing about the grid that you don't. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood circuit breaker. You should read the whole article.
We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.
Isn't that precisely what this research result is all about? It's not like they're hawking a product. We knew learning was affected by electrical currents already. Slashdot covered that story. One presumes this result fines that down in terms of what parts of the brain are involved. Or possibly it broadens the study group. I don't know since I can't read the article, but it's going to be something like that. It's research. Experimental research, rather than empty hypothesizing. These researchers are learning how the brain works, and whether or not it's a "delicate organ" as you claim. You only have a hypothesis. They're finding out.
From the Cosmos show, the key ingredient of all life is the DNA factory in the cell. Where the DNA is stripped and duplicated and new cells are created. This is true for all life...
Except some viruses, which have no DNA at all. Some have DNA. Some have only single-helix RNA. Some have double-helix RNA. They're the last surviving remnant of the simpler system from which DNA life evolved. DNA life was so successful in its expansion across the planet it obliterated its precursor (essentially by eating it).
The unanswered question, is how does this DNA duplication factory happen by accident? Not to mention the accidental creation of DNA in the first place.
The only way we will ever see that in action "in the wild" is by exploring other worlds. Unless and until we find DNA precursor life on another world, we will only have laboratory experiments to show us how we got here. Eventually those laboratory experiments will be as reliable as the experiments that prove how your microwave works, but they will always be artificial. If you want to see it happening live, get out and explore the galaxy.
I gather at least some of the complaints about the game industry is that the scenario you've outlined doesn't ever happen. Instead, openly gay characters are rare to the point of nonexistent in games. The closest we come is the androgynous characters of Japanese-made games. On rare occasions, one of those androgynous characters turns out to be a gay guy—in the Japanese version. When the game is translated for the US audience, somehow that aspect of the character mysteriously vanishes. Similarly, characters who are physically disabled are very rare, unless you count grotesque cyborgs, who are invariably evil.
Until recently, the only people with dark skin in games were non-human, and essentially all of them were evil. Because everyone knows demons are swarthy, right? That built-in bias is still phenomenally powerful. In the movie Constantine, the archangel Gabriel was written as evil, while being portrayed by a lily-white actress. The intent was to be shocking, and the casting very much reflected the societal assumption that white is good, dark is bad, and the violated expectation was part and parcel of the affect the movie wanted to have. That movie was released in 2005. Thirty years after the American civil rights movement, Hollywood still taps in to that cultural expectation, despite a generation of heavy political correctness in a much more visible medium than games. What chance do games have, in the face of that?
These people and others like them are making the proposition that games should become part of the engine of social engineering that has made such a ham-fisted mess of television and movies, particularly for children. They think that games are for kids, and should therefore be used to condition children the same way they try to use TV. It would be unfortunate if that were to happen. If games are to have any hope of being recognized as art, they have to be culturally relevant, and not be used as a bludgeon against culture.
When a game manages to highlight a social injustice without feeling like a bludgeon, then maybe there will be art.
Turn in your nerd card, as you obviously don't understand that Sherlock can easily launch moon boulders into ballistic trajectories whose CEP is sufficiently small to wreak havoc on Earth cities.
Mycroft, not Sherlock. Accompanied by a demand for forfeiting a nerd card, that was particularly sad.
This is just a bid to get bargain basement pricing on the next Microsoft OS. Threaten to move to Linux and the Microsoft Sales Droids will cut the licensing fee for whatever Windows you want down to an almost reasonable price.
Though without Ballmer, that's not the slam dunk prediction it used to be...
No fuel pumped for transport; none delivered -- so no troops, no relief forces unless from the other side of the planet
It doesn't take a very big generator to power a fuel pump capable of filling a tanker truck, and the fuel to power the generator is right there. If his car is running, tractor-trailers still are too, so fuel will still be delivered. Gas stations can rig up the same hack to keep pumping fuel. Not conveniently, but there's about a million rednecks in the country who could do it with nothing but the tools lying loose in their trucks. The generators will still work for the same reasons the vehicles will still work—no long wires involved.
No food production -- uh oh
Does corn or wheat stop growing when the power goes out? Perhaps you meant food preparation. Yeah, fresh bread gets scarce in a hurry. But I've got a case of ramen sitting in my pantry that I'd forgotten about, and a charcoal grill and a bag of matchlight charcoal in the garage, so I've got enough staples to live on for a month, not even counting everything else in the pantry. Most of my neighbors have fancy-ass gas grills with a propane tank underneath, and I'm sure they've got ramen too. Yeah, asshole hipsters in New York and San Francisco are going to get hungry 'cause they can't go to the corner store every day anymore, but that's not my problem. If they started walking when the power goes out, they might get here by the time the power comes back on. But I doubt it. Half of them would start walking in the wrong direction and end up drowning.
No food transport -- guess it doesn't matter there won't be any produced -- starving, desperate people everywhere, then dead ones
See above concerning fuel transport. The hipsters can survive on Twinkies for a while. They might have to eat some transfats. Oh the horror.
Manufacturing stops -- Everything you consume regularly will run out very quickly. Meds. Food. Soap. Clothing.
You have a strange list of consumables, and an even stranger idea of how fast things get consumed. I don't think the Great Ejection Disaster is going to set my shirt on fire. A lack of new socks isn't going to bother me, not even for half a year. I've got enough soap to last that long too, 'cause I always buy the Walmart six pack. Food, already addressed. Medication, yeah, anybody who didn't just refill their prescriptions will have a problem, though it's not like every Walgreens is going to evaporate overnight. There are stocks on the shelves. Get in line early if you take something life-preserving.
Would a major coronal mass ejection hitting Earth be a serious disaster? Definitely. Would it be as apocalyptic as you seem to think? Not even close. Just because you don't know what it takes to maintain a water delivery system doesn't mean someone else doesn't know, and doesn't deal with it every day. In some parts of the country, water delivery isn't even interrupted during such an event. In Denver, for instance, much of the metro area's water supply is gravity-pumped. Sewage almost everywhere is largely gravity-pumped, and there are many millions of septic tanks in use that don't require any pumps at all. Everywhere else, there's somebody who can open the breaker on the pump's power connection, and close it after the event is over. This happens all the time. It's not even unusual. Everything that moves needs maintenance, and somebody knows where the breaker box is.
---
What's with people lately. Two "shit could break" stories in a week and Slashdot is jammed to the walls with Zombie Apocalypse comments. Get over it.
There are people who get paid every day to keep civilization running. They're called blue collar workers, and if you weren't so busy lamenting their inevitable fate, you might be aware that they still exist, they still go to work every day, and they know how to fix shit you don't even know exis
Installations like the major interties will likely fail catastrophically, and without power, where do you think replacement parts will come from?
A warehouse in Topeka?
The major utilities are indeed run by greedy bastards, but even greedy bastards keep spare parts on hand, especially of cheap things that are basically just big hunks of wood or metal. My local power company has at least a dozen house transformers sitting in the neighborhood depot that I've seen with my own eyes, so even slightly complicated spare parts are on hand. Now my local power company is an award-winning co-op, so maybe they're better run than some. Still, there are spares locally available pretty much everywhere. Not enough to replace every piece of the grid, but enough to get things moving again.
You think the rank-and-file at Google knew anything about what the NSA wanted? Or any of the other companies, for that matter. The actual secret order was undoubtedly seen only by C-level executives and higher. The peons weren't told a thing about what the random extra piece of equipment was for, and most of the peons never knew there was an extra piece of equipment sitting in the datacenter.
Those of us with ideals that conflict with the privileged do not get to become C-level executives of billion dollar companies. Not without a long process that grinds the ideals off first, at least. If we object to the beginning of that process (because someone erroneously selected one of us to be subjected to it), it quietly ends and no more will be said about it. And no promotions in that direction will ever be forthcoming, either.
Because it makes certain types of collaboration harder and LibreOffice requires Java which you may not desire for security reasons.
LibreOffice is eliminating Java as a matter of policy. It's unnecessary and irrelevant bloat shoehorned into OpenOffice because Sun->Java! otherwise no funding. Since LibreOffice doesn't involve the Java owners, they're ripping it out. Eventually it will be gone entirely.
I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina.
Says here it's as much as 30% alumina, depending on what's being burned. That sounds like a practically free feedstock for refining aluminum, though apparently something would have to be done besides the Bayer process. Oddly, that possibility is absent from the list of uses of coal ash. The alternative to the Bayer process must be difficult.
So is it 10,000 or 25,000? I can't be arsed to read the article, because as another poster succinctly observed "oh no, thousands of infected unpatched Wordpress installations", but it sounds like the ESET people trying to make a quick buck off of some FUD can't even get their FUD straight. As if tripwire hasn't been available for a couple of decades...
DRM-free works for GOG just fine, why not also for movies?
Because this...
The big ones will follow as they see that the concept is working.
...is not true. The US movie studios are an incredibly tightly knit incestuous little group of rabid ideologues and the greediest fucking bastards you ever hope not to meet. Their owners all go to the same golf clubs and strip clubs and yacht clubs, send their kids to the same prep schools and universities, and they marry their kids off to each others' kids. They set themselves against digital distribution a generation ago and they will never ever ever admit they were wrong. Two full generations of owners will literally have to die before their stance on digital distribution could possibly change, and I'd bet long odds it never will.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't go for anything, you eyed it and carefully prodded it from a distance with a stick.
You think? I spent three years without a job, writing code 10 to 12 hours a day on weekdays and 2-4 hours a day on weekends. I spent my entire (liquid) life savings staying current on that mortgage and paying for utilities and food. I had $600 left in the bank when my first paycheck at my new job arrived. I don't know what your definition of "went for it" is, but that should be good enough for anyone.
(Actually I spent 34 months without a job, if you want to be excruciatingly precise.)
I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?
I went for it.
I failed.
I have no debt other than the mortgage I started with, excellent credit, and a good job. What did I do differently?
I gave up when the money ran out and went back to work for The Man, rather than throw good money after bad. Trying to launch a startup is a gamble and should be treated precisely the same way. Only use money you can afford to lose and do not spend one thin dime of money you don't have trying to "win it all back" if you hit bottom. Quit and go home.
Too late for you, but for other people thinking about it, this can't be repeated enough.
Women are largely window dressings except for one major character who is ignored or used as a damsel in distress as much as possible.
Clarissa MacDougall was eventually upgraded to an actual character. By the time Children of the Lens came around, she was a mental match for her husband. "Doc" Smith was one of several Golden Age writers who actually moved with the times. The Golden Age faded, but at least the survivors lost some of their prejudices.
Just get a CuBox-i. 2"x2"x2" cube, available in three editions. The quad-core with 2 GB of RAM version that's equivalent to this Amazon thing is $130 and it has a microSD card slot, so you can fill it with as much or as little flash memory as you feel like paying for. I run Android on mine, but it also boots any of several different Linux distributions. It doesn't come with a remote or a game controller, but it has USB, and the quad-core version has BlueTooth. All versions have an IR receiver. No Amazon prime subscription needed, no custom manufacturer-mangled smart TV version of Android required, and it has access to the Google Play store.
Small business that doesn't have a "tie the world to our services" agenda can still deliver a product designed for customers, rather than consumers.
Somebody actually remembers that pine could read news, not just email. Talk about obscure...
Dropbox does delta syncs using a modified version of rsync, so it only uploads change portions of a file.
They had better not be. Dropbox offers no source downloads, but rsync is GPL. If they are using some form of the rsync protocol, they had better be using their own clean-room implementation, or they're currently in violation of the GPL.
The logistics sound impossible. They are going to need a lot or equipment, including a huge tank to store the cold saline solution and another for the blood. They cannot send this out with every ambulance.
You watch way too many horror movies. The average adult male has about 1 gallon of blood. The average adult female has about a pint less. It's not a very big tank.
So they can distribute "Bill of Rights" posters with the Second Amendment deleted?
Disingenuous post is disingenuous. The poster illustrates the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th 8th, 9th, 15th, and 19th amendments. Leaving out the 2nd is not some grand conspiracy. It illustrates what the ACLU fights hardest for, and everyone knows the ACLU doesn't bother with the 2nd amendment. There's an entire organization devoted to just that one, so no need to duplicate effort.
The only way virtual reality can really work, a virtual reality full immersion gym or hotel (hotel implies you spend social time outside of the virtual environment)...
Right. Because that was so necessary when 3D games took off, especially first person shooters. The only way Duke Nukem 3D could ever have been popular is in "a full body harness with active and resistive joints, hand sockets and a headset." What the hell are you smoking and why haven't you shared with the rest of us?
It would be like convincing 50% of a country to try scamming the other 50%.
I see you're acquainted with the US political system...
A finer example of the Dunning-Kruger effect I haven't seen in quite a long time.
No, I meant exactly what I said. Without fuel -- and they will be without fuel -- the machines that do the harvesting won't run...
No, they won't be without fuel.
I grew up on a farm. Where do you think tractors get fuel? I'll give you a hint. You'll never see a tractor at your local gas station. Farms, even very small farms, have their own large fuel dumps and buy fuel in bulk.
The farm I lived on had both a gasoline tank and a diesel tank. Diesel is a no-brainer—farms buy it in bulk, colored pink, because it's much cheaper than buying fuel from a retail station because it's exempt from road taxes. Not all tractors run on diesel however, so you also buy gasoline by the tanker-load. On the farm on which I lived, we kept approximately one year of operating fuel on site. Larger farms keep less than that, but still keep a very large quantity on hand. Oh, and the gasoline tank? The pump was hand-cranked. No power outage could stop me from pumping gasoline, and gasoline is what is used to power portable generators, and the goddamn diesel pump has a goddamn plug. If the power is out and you want diesel, you plunk your generator down next to it and plug it in. There is no "OMG fuel is impossibly inaccessible" scenario. Retail stations are a little bit harder to deal with, but not nearly as hard as you seem to think.
No, I just have an up-to-date understanding of modern inventory practices, something you clearly lack.
You have something you read online somewhere and now you think you know everything. My cousin has worked in a food distribution warehouse for the past 8 years. Not all supply chains are created equal. Yes, there is very little depth in perishables, but perishables are neither essential nor even the bulk of what is eaten. Dry goods have a supply chain as much as half a year deep. Canned goods have a supply chain as much as two years deep. Other non-perishables have supply chains that run at least three months deep. That Easter candy you're buying right now? It was made five or six months ago. It was packaged for retail sale 3 months ago. It sits in a warehouse between times.
That doesn't even count unprocessed grains in silos, of which there are many millions of tons, already harvested (in case your "OMG combine harvester fuel is permanently inaccessible" scenario actually does come to pass). The farm I lived on and all the neighboring farms siloed the harvest and kept it, usually for months. Any modern successful farm is being run by someone who is watching the commodities and futures markets and making sale decisions that maximize financial gain. The farmer has explicit control over when he sells and when he delivers. It is only very loosely tied to the seasons, and the larger the farm, the looser the connection, since the largest farms can afford the largest silo complexes.
But all of this is irrelevant.
Look. I'm an engineer. I not only know a good deal about most "shit", as you put it, I have designed more than one system from end to end and I am not intimidated in the least by any system you could think of in normal use. What you seem to lack is any understanding at all of how things actually work...
Really. I don't believe you.
I am an engineer, but I have expertise you so obviously lack in the field that matters here. I spent six years writing software for testing equipment for electrical wires, including power wiring. I don't have a Ph.D. in power systems engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla, but my coworker in the office across the hall from mine did. I know how power systems work. Most importantly, I know the thing about the grid that you don't. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood circuit breaker. You should read the whole article.
We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.
Isn't that precisely what this research result is all about? It's not like they're hawking a product. We knew learning was affected by electrical currents already. Slashdot covered that story. One presumes this result fines that down in terms of what parts of the brain are involved. Or possibly it broadens the study group. I don't know since I can't read the article, but it's going to be something like that. It's research. Experimental research, rather than empty hypothesizing. These researchers are learning how the brain works, and whether or not it's a "delicate organ" as you claim. You only have a hypothesis. They're finding out.
From the Cosmos show, the key ingredient of all life is the DNA factory in the cell. Where the DNA is stripped and duplicated and new cells are created. This is true for all life...
Except some viruses, which have no DNA at all. Some have DNA. Some have only single-helix RNA. Some have double-helix RNA. They're the last surviving remnant of the simpler system from which DNA life evolved. DNA life was so successful in its expansion across the planet it obliterated its precursor (essentially by eating it).
The unanswered question, is how does this DNA duplication factory happen by accident? Not to mention the accidental creation of DNA in the first place.
The only way we will ever see that in action "in the wild" is by exploring other worlds. Unless and until we find DNA precursor life on another world, we will only have laboratory experiments to show us how we got here. Eventually those laboratory experiments will be as reliable as the experiments that prove how your microwave works, but they will always be artificial. If you want to see it happening live, get out and explore the galaxy.
I'd be just fine with taxing like other entertainment businesses.
They already are.
I gather at least some of the complaints about the game industry is that the scenario you've outlined doesn't ever happen. Instead, openly gay characters are rare to the point of nonexistent in games. The closest we come is the androgynous characters of Japanese-made games. On rare occasions, one of those androgynous characters turns out to be a gay guy—in the Japanese version. When the game is translated for the US audience, somehow that aspect of the character mysteriously vanishes. Similarly, characters who are physically disabled are very rare, unless you count grotesque cyborgs, who are invariably evil.
Until recently, the only people with dark skin in games were non-human, and essentially all of them were evil. Because everyone knows demons are swarthy, right? That built-in bias is still phenomenally powerful. In the movie Constantine, the archangel Gabriel was written as evil, while being portrayed by a lily-white actress. The intent was to be shocking, and the casting very much reflected the societal assumption that white is good, dark is bad, and the violated expectation was part and parcel of the affect the movie wanted to have. That movie was released in 2005. Thirty years after the American civil rights movement, Hollywood still taps in to that cultural expectation, despite a generation of heavy political correctness in a much more visible medium than games. What chance do games have, in the face of that?
These people and others like them are making the proposition that games should become part of the engine of social engineering that has made such a ham-fisted mess of television and movies, particularly for children. They think that games are for kids, and should therefore be used to condition children the same way they try to use TV. It would be unfortunate if that were to happen. If games are to have any hope of being recognized as art, they have to be culturally relevant, and not be used as a bludgeon against culture.
When a game manages to highlight a social injustice without feeling like a bludgeon, then maybe there will be art.
Turn in your nerd card, as you obviously don't understand that Sherlock can easily launch moon boulders into ballistic trajectories whose CEP is sufficiently small to wreak havoc on Earth cities.
Mycroft, not Sherlock. Accompanied by a demand for forfeiting a nerd card, that was particularly sad.
This is just a bid to get bargain basement pricing on the next Microsoft OS. Threaten to move to Linux and the Microsoft Sales Droids will cut the licensing fee for whatever Windows you want down to an almost reasonable price.
Though without Ballmer, that's not the slam dunk prediction it used to be...
No fuel pumped for transport; none delivered -- so no troops, no relief forces unless from the other side of the planet
It doesn't take a very big generator to power a fuel pump capable of filling a tanker truck, and the fuel to power the generator is right there. If his car is running, tractor-trailers still are too, so fuel will still be delivered. Gas stations can rig up the same hack to keep pumping fuel. Not conveniently, but there's about a million rednecks in the country who could do it with nothing but the tools lying loose in their trucks. The generators will still work for the same reasons the vehicles will still work—no long wires involved.
No food production -- uh oh
Does corn or wheat stop growing when the power goes out? Perhaps you meant food preparation. Yeah, fresh bread gets scarce in a hurry. But I've got a case of ramen sitting in my pantry that I'd forgotten about, and a charcoal grill and a bag of matchlight charcoal in the garage, so I've got enough staples to live on for a month, not even counting everything else in the pantry. Most of my neighbors have fancy-ass gas grills with a propane tank underneath, and I'm sure they've got ramen too. Yeah, asshole hipsters in New York and San Francisco are going to get hungry 'cause they can't go to the corner store every day anymore, but that's not my problem. If they started walking when the power goes out, they might get here by the time the power comes back on. But I doubt it. Half of them would start walking in the wrong direction and end up drowning.
No food transport -- guess it doesn't matter there won't be any produced -- starving, desperate people everywhere, then dead ones
See above concerning fuel transport. The hipsters can survive on Twinkies for a while. They might have to eat some transfats. Oh the horror.
Manufacturing stops -- Everything you consume regularly will run out very quickly. Meds. Food. Soap. Clothing.
You have a strange list of consumables, and an even stranger idea of how fast things get consumed. I don't think the Great Ejection Disaster is going to set my shirt on fire. A lack of new socks isn't going to bother me, not even for half a year. I've got enough soap to last that long too, 'cause I always buy the Walmart six pack. Food, already addressed. Medication, yeah, anybody who didn't just refill their prescriptions will have a problem, though it's not like every Walgreens is going to evaporate overnight. There are stocks on the shelves. Get in line early if you take something life-preserving.
Would a major coronal mass ejection hitting Earth be a serious disaster? Definitely. Would it be as apocalyptic as you seem to think? Not even close. Just because you don't know what it takes to maintain a water delivery system doesn't mean someone else doesn't know, and doesn't deal with it every day. In some parts of the country, water delivery isn't even interrupted during such an event. In Denver, for instance, much of the metro area's water supply is gravity-pumped. Sewage almost everywhere is largely gravity-pumped, and there are many millions of septic tanks in use that don't require any pumps at all. Everywhere else, there's somebody who can open the breaker on the pump's power connection, and close it after the event is over. This happens all the time. It's not even unusual. Everything that moves needs maintenance, and somebody knows where the breaker box is.
---
What's with people lately. Two "shit could break" stories in a week and Slashdot is jammed to the walls with Zombie Apocalypse comments. Get over it.
There are people who get paid every day to keep civilization running. They're called blue collar workers, and if you weren't so busy lamenting their inevitable fate, you might be aware that they still exist, they still go to work every day, and they know how to fix shit you don't even know exis
Installations like the major interties will likely fail catastrophically, and without power, where do you think replacement parts will come from?
A warehouse in Topeka?
The major utilities are indeed run by greedy bastards, but even greedy bastards keep spare parts on hand, especially of cheap things that are basically just big hunks of wood or metal. My local power company has at least a dozen house transformers sitting in the neighborhood depot that I've seen with my own eyes, so even slightly complicated spare parts are on hand. Now my local power company is an award-winning co-op, so maybe they're better run than some. Still, there are spares locally available pretty much everywhere. Not enough to replace every piece of the grid, but enough to get things moving again.
You think the rank-and-file at Google knew anything about what the NSA wanted? Or any of the other companies, for that matter. The actual secret order was undoubtedly seen only by C-level executives and higher. The peons weren't told a thing about what the random extra piece of equipment was for, and most of the peons never knew there was an extra piece of equipment sitting in the datacenter.
Those of us with ideals that conflict with the privileged do not get to become C-level executives of billion dollar companies. Not without a long process that grinds the ideals off first, at least. If we object to the beginning of that process (because someone erroneously selected one of us to be subjected to it), it quietly ends and no more will be said about it. And no promotions in that direction will ever be forthcoming, either.
Because it makes certain types of collaboration harder and LibreOffice requires Java which you may not desire for security reasons.
LibreOffice is eliminating Java as a matter of policy. It's unnecessary and irrelevant bloat shoehorned into OpenOffice because Sun->Java! otherwise no funding. Since LibreOffice doesn't involve the Java owners, they're ripping it out. Eventually it will be gone entirely.
I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina.
Says here it's as much as 30% alumina, depending on what's being burned. That sounds like a practically free feedstock for refining aluminum, though apparently something would have to be done besides the Bayer process. Oddly, that possibility is absent from the list of uses of coal ash. The alternative to the Bayer process must be difficult.
So is it 10,000 or 25,000? I can't be arsed to read the article, because as another poster succinctly observed "oh no, thousands of infected unpatched Wordpress installations", but it sounds like the ESET people trying to make a quick buck off of some FUD can't even get their FUD straight. As if tripwire hasn't been available for a couple of decades...
So when is someone going to clone a Moa so we can have tasty Moa burgers?
What's the point? They just taste like chicken.
DRM-free works for GOG just fine, why not also for movies?
Because this...
The big ones will follow as they see that the concept is working.