If you are lucky, then you can get one warhead to kill a city. It depends a lot on how large the warhead is and how large the city is, of course. According to http://www.world-gazetteer.com/st/statd.htm, the number of cities in the world of all sizes is roughly (I'm too lazy to go through and add all the numbers together, so this is an estimate) 50,000. At one point there were 50,000 total warheads in inventory, but there aren't now. This also ignores the fact that a nuclear strike on a city will not automatically kill everyone who lives there; lots and lots and lots of people will survive. Also, half of the population of the planet doesn't live in a city of any kind.
The above analysis also ignores the realities of any real nuclear war scenario. No matter who the countries involved are, they are not going to carefully target cities so as to eliminate the greatest amount of population possible. The primary targets in a nuclear war are the other guy's nuclear forces. This means missile fields, strategic air bases, missile submarine docks, possibly aircraft carriers. With the possible exception of docks, none of these are known for being located in populated areas. Secondary targets are the other guy's conventional forces. These are air, army, and navy bases of all kinds, radar stations, air defense installations, etc. Some of these are located in populated areas, some are not. Tertiary targets are the other guy's infrastructure: airports, rail yards, major commercial hubs, and so on. These are generally located in populated areas but the population is not the target. last, coming in at #4, is the other guy's population. If and when you get to this point, you have already lost, but the threat of taking out a hefty chunk of the other guy's population can be a good insurance policy against war, and of course the threat has to be real for it to work.
By the time you've had a good-sized nuclear exchange, you've destroyed a bunch of warheads before they were exploded (warheads in missiles, aircraft, and ships that were destroyed in the fighting before they could fire), and, from the point of view of wiping out humanity, wasted a lot more warheads on relatively unpopulated areas. A bunch of cities have died, either because they contained critical infrastructure or just because they were important collections of people, but large portions of the population of both sides remains alive. More of them will die from radiation poisoning (although many fewer than most people think), starvation due to destruction of transport or 'nuclear winter', or just plain civil disorder, but you'll still have a lot left. And this is just in the two countries who went at it and their assorted allies; in any conceivable war scenario, the majority of the world will simply sit it out and hope none of the shit falls on them.
Chemical weapons aren't much of a threat to the survival of the race. Chemical and nuclear weapons are essentially the same as far as killing people goes; they can both do a good job at it, but only if everybody is in the same place, and it's just not something that the militaries of the world are going to bother with. Not to mention that nobody is wasteful enough to load chemical weapons onto strategic delivery systems, so in any armageddon scenario, the chemical weapons simply don't come into play.
Now we come to biological weapons. This is the only wildcard, because they are self-replicating. However, germs that make good war weapons don't make good extermination weapons, In fact, germs don't really make good extermination weapons at all. Either they kill so fast that they burn out (black plague, ebola) or they kill so slowly that the victim still has time to live a fairly normal life and have kids before they die (AIDS). Biological weapons are useless for war unless they can kill quickly. This means that they simply cannot wipe out an entire population, because they will burn out. Especially in
We don't even have one. The very best we can do is kill a whole lot of people and put a big dent in civilization. But we can't even come close to killing all of humanity, much less all life.
The speed doesn't make as much of a difference as you'd think. You're going faster, but you also have much less time for the heating to have any effect. The direction of travel is also important. If the asteroid were traveling perpendicular to the atmosphere, the parts of the atmosphere that matter are only about 50 miles thick. Typical combined speeds for an object coming from solar orbit are in the range of 20-30 miles per second. In that case, the asteroid would only have about two seconds to completely vaporize before it met the ground. Even if it did vaporize, you still get all of the energy it contains being released in a giant explosion. Assuming this rock is made of solid iron (which is most likely not correct, but it should be roughly correct for the density), I get a figure of about 100 thousand tons for its mass. By contrast, Skylab was 76,295kg; less than a thousandth of the mass.
I understood perfectly well. Using your argument, dorm internet access is not academically necessary at all. Anything you can do on your dorm connection you can do from a lab, after all. Of course, maybe dorm internet isn't provided for academic purposes, but rather for the same reason that other utilities, like water, phone, electricity, etc. are provided. But I don't think this is true, because most dorms were wired long before anybody considered internet access to be a necessity. In conclusion, yes, you can do that research from elsewhere, but IMO that isn't terribly relevant.
UDP has plenty of practical, legit uses, such as online games or video conferencing, but lacks any important academic use.
Yeah, I mean, nobody ever does any research into media streaming, multiplayer game architectures, or alternative file-transfer protocols at universities.
It seems a very simple solution to the problem, but there could be some blindingly obvious reason why it wouldn't work. Could anyone in the know provide any feedback?
NOTICE FOR LARGE DOWNLOADS
Downloads of files over 200MB in size are not permitted on the University network. If you wish to obtain a file greater than this size, please fill out a copy of Form 54B and place it into the "Large Download Requests" mailbox on the fifth floor of Smith Hall. Your request will be evaluated and you will receive an e-mail within four to six days.
I think this could be a bad idea, depending on the administration. It's very much a "Everything is forbidden except that which is expressly permitted" idea.
I hope that some day we can use something other than money to motivate people. Otherwise we're doomed.
Er, why? It's worked pretty well so far. I mean, sure, using money as the motivator causes all kinds of problems, but there's a reason that there are no societies of any significant technological advancement that don't have money. Money is a wonderful device. I know that we see it as evil, but imagine what the world would be without it. How would you motivate people, how would you decide who gets what, how would you decide anything without money? Invention has always been motivated by money, and that motivation has produced an awful lot.
Re:Sedna, Sedna, Sedna ...
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 0, Redundant
They sure as hell aren't designed for my height, so I would say "yes".
Are doors built to accomodate pregnant women?
What does that mean? Doors open when you push on them. Pregnant women are still capable of pushing on doors. Pregnant women are not too large to fit through a door that does not also inconvenience "normal" people. So, "yes".
Are computers designed to accomodate women's cultural thought processes?
What is a "cultural thought process" and how does a woman's differ from a man's? I don't understand the question so I can't answer.
I haven't got the exact figures, but I reckon 95% of all operating systems out there must be a version of Windows. There must be SOME reason alternative OSes are not so popular.
Alternative OSes are only good in theory. Sure, you can easily get a basic install up and running, but they depend too much on arcane instructions. The OS will ultimately be used by a human; humans are visual, remember?
Thus, there's a MASSIVE usability loss when an alternative OS is used by any normal person. Because Windows is best adapted to how humans think and work. That's why we should stick to Windows.
The day someone actually invents an alternative OS that a normal person can use, we could start promoting these fringe languages. Till then, let's keep Linux as part of CS811.
(My apologies, I don't mean to be insulting, just point out the flaws in the argument with some good old sarcasm.)
you do not have a right to circumvent the cost factor of these websites
No? Why not? Does it actually say somewhere in a contract which I agreed to that I must not download content from NYT or slashdot or any other site without first looking at the ads or registering? I've never seen such a notice anywhere on slashdot, and I don't recall seeing one on NYT although I don't look at the registration page that hard. Why don't I have the right to only download some images on a page but not others? Why don't I have the right to share a login/password for a free site with a friend, or to register for one with bogus information? Yes, they are implicitly using that information as payment for the content, but unless they actually come out and make it explicit, I don't see anything wrong with it.
When you take somebody else's work and sell it for your own profit without the permission of the author/rights holder, that is what has been called "piracy", and there's no reason not to continue calling it just that.
However, the situation of widespread non-profit copying simply hasn't been around that long, because it wasn't possible until the technology allowed it, starting around the mid-90s. Sure, there was stuff like copying tapes and maybe photocopying books before that, but nothing very widespread. "Piracy" does not apply to this behavior because the participants don't profit from the infringement.
People who sell DVDs on street corners for $1 apiece are involved in piracy. The old Napster may have been involved in piracy. Napster's users were not. (At least in my opinion.)
Building a computer from parts might be easy for you, but that does not make it "easy". Most people can't handle it. They want to buy a computer and take it out of the box and plug it in and turn it on. This goes for PCs or Macs.
Have you used a Mac that was manufactured in the past half decade? You can use any USB mouse with them, including your seven-buttons-with-scroll-wheel optical mouse. They use PCI, AGP, ATA, and USB for expansion. They have a "taskbar", it's called the Dock.
Windows's popularity is entirely attributable to Worse is Better.
Twinkle is irrelevant. It is not any kind of design or math breakthrough, it's just a really fast factoring engine. As such, it decreases the time to crack a key by a constant factor. Just increase your key length accordingly. 512-bit keys are already insecure in a theoretical sense, and Twinkle doesn't change that, it just makes it cheaper. 1024-bit keys are still beyond hope, and the true paranoids who use 4096-bit keys can rest easy.
The possibility of backdoors is interesting, but not directly related to cracking crypto. (Of course, if they have a backdoor into your computer, cracking your crypto becomes trivial.) It's easy to get around, though; just run an OS that isn't by Microsoft. If you're extra paranoid, run only OSes and components that are open-source. I don't care how nefarious the ever-magical NSA is, I'm pretty sure they don't have a backdoor in OpenBSD.
People have been crashing airplanes into things in order to destroy them for sixty years. Even in the terrorist world, this idea predates Debt of Honor; an Algerian terrorist group hijacked a French airliner with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, the same year that the book was released. Fortunately, they stopped for fuel and negotiations, and the plane was raided before they could take off. Planning operations like that takes time, so it's very doubtful it was inspired by the book.
I have never heard anything that indicates Clancy has special sources into the military and intelligence community. Hunt for Red October caused a tizzy in the Navy because it was so accurate about various things, but it was discovered that he simply did a hell of a lot of research using public sources. Unfortunately, his later books have slid rather downhill.
The idea that the NSA has a quantum computer powerful enough to be used to crack cryptography while private researchers are struggling to make ones that can factor the number 15 is ridiculous. Working for the NSA does not automatically turn you into a Grade A genius, so their genius population is necessarily limited and proportionate to the level found in the private sector.
I know that it's fun and exciting to believe that the NSA, CIA, and FBI are these amazing, magical places where things can be done that can't be done in the regular work-a-day world, and certainly this image is constantly perpetuated by books and movies, but reality is more mundane. They are government bureaucracies like all others, which happen to work in a certain area and are reasonably good at getting their job done. They are populated by people; inexperienced new guys, career politicians, mediocre middle managers, etc.
Yeah, that's real informative. You already gave two separate time zones there, which are an hour apart, so which one would it be? Plus, the submitter didn't say it was local time for the race. Maybe he lives in micronesia and he meant local time for him. How can we know?
According to Charles Stross, the CIA has a cache of alien portals that they use to travel to other planets, and the Russians are keeping Cthulhu in a bunker near the Baltic Sea.
Yes, it still applies. Don't pay attention to the doom-and-gloom types. This is hardly the first time various organizations in the US have gotten a bit power-mad and nobody bothered to stop them for a while. It always gets stopped eventually. Americans may seem apathetic, but once you get us annoyed enough, we wake up and set things right. That hasn't changed.
This is very tin-foil hat. There is absolutely no evidence that reasonable crypto like blowfish, AES, or RSA can be cracked without enormous amounts (read: more than currently exists) of computing power if you use a reasonable key size. The NSA may have some top-notch people, but the private sector has more. If some amazing mathematical technique were discovered that made cracking these problems tractable, it's extremely implausible that it could be discovered inside NSA and never get independently discovered. The same goes for magical computing techniques that would allow these things to be cracked with existing math.
Wisconsin is just plain fucked up. Yes, they (we? I'm not sure if I still count as being 'from' Wisconsin or not) vote for progressives, and denounce the patriot act. Wisconsin also elected our good buddies Joe McCarthy and Bill Proxmire, and was home to Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein. Those last four pretty much destroy all hope I have for the state.
The only relatively pure TLD is.edu, the rest of the TLDs mean absolutely nothing..com can mean anything.
Don't forget about.gov and.mil. Also, a lot of the country-specific TLDs really are country-specific; you can be pretty sure that a.uk is in UK or a.fr is in France.
My God.... My primary school teacher called me that when I was 8 - because I didn't like any of the books aimed at 8-year-olds. Life was hell for months after that. Great to finally see someone admitting to being an intellectual snob!
I think I finally realized this after failing to sit through several chinese movies that my girlfriend downloaded. They're all the same. Successful, talented, or handsome guy meets girl. Hijinks ensue. Finally they get together at the end. I can't stand them, not because I don't like romantic comedies but because they had no depth at all.
But you find guns, explosions and sex to be only interesting, not entertaining?:-)
I might have put those words backwards. Enough intelligence to make things interesting for intellectual snobs, and enough guns, explosions, and sex to make things exciting. That's better.
Dealing with conspiracy theorists is somewhat like dealing with a rabid squirrel that's fixated on you. If you make even the slightest wrong move, he's all over you. The difference is that conspirancy theorists can do no damage and deserve no respect, whereas one should respect a rabid squirrel if one has one's own best interests at heart.
And if these answers are setting off alarm bells in your head, you are either irrationally afraid of the conspiracy bunch or you're one of them. Either way it's not good.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just ridiculous.
If you are lucky, then you can get one warhead to kill a city. It depends a lot on how large the warhead is and how large the city is, of course. According to http://www.world-gazetteer.com/st/statd.htm, the number of cities in the world of all sizes is roughly (I'm too lazy to go through and add all the numbers together, so this is an estimate) 50,000. At one point there were 50,000 total warheads in inventory, but there aren't now. This also ignores the fact that a nuclear strike on a city will not automatically kill everyone who lives there; lots and lots and lots of people will survive. Also, half of the population of the planet doesn't live in a city of any kind.
The above analysis also ignores the realities of any real nuclear war scenario. No matter who the countries involved are, they are not going to carefully target cities so as to eliminate the greatest amount of population possible. The primary targets in a nuclear war are the other guy's nuclear forces. This means missile fields, strategic air bases, missile submarine docks, possibly aircraft carriers. With the possible exception of docks, none of these are known for being located in populated areas. Secondary targets are the other guy's conventional forces. These are air, army, and navy bases of all kinds, radar stations, air defense installations, etc. Some of these are located in populated areas, some are not. Tertiary targets are the other guy's infrastructure: airports, rail yards, major commercial hubs, and so on. These are generally located in populated areas but the population is not the target. last, coming in at #4, is the other guy's population. If and when you get to this point, you have already lost, but the threat of taking out a hefty chunk of the other guy's population can be a good insurance policy against war, and of course the threat has to be real for it to work.
By the time you've had a good-sized nuclear exchange, you've destroyed a bunch of warheads before they were exploded (warheads in missiles, aircraft, and ships that were destroyed in the fighting before they could fire), and, from the point of view of wiping out humanity, wasted a lot more warheads on relatively unpopulated areas. A bunch of cities have died, either because they contained critical infrastructure or just because they were important collections of people, but large portions of the population of both sides remains alive. More of them will die from radiation poisoning (although many fewer than most people think), starvation due to destruction of transport or 'nuclear winter', or just plain civil disorder, but you'll still have a lot left. And this is just in the two countries who went at it and their assorted allies; in any conceivable war scenario, the majority of the world will simply sit it out and hope none of the shit falls on them.
Chemical weapons aren't much of a threat to the survival of the race. Chemical and nuclear weapons are essentially the same as far as killing people goes; they can both do a good job at it, but only if everybody is in the same place, and it's just not something that the militaries of the world are going to bother with. Not to mention that nobody is wasteful enough to load chemical weapons onto strategic delivery systems, so in any armageddon scenario, the chemical weapons simply don't come into play.
Now we come to biological weapons. This is the only wildcard, because they are self-replicating. However, germs that make good war weapons don't make good extermination weapons, In fact, germs don't really make good extermination weapons at all. Either they kill so fast that they burn out (black plague, ebola) or they kill so slowly that the victim still has time to live a fairly normal life and have kids before they die (AIDS). Biological weapons are useless for war unless they can kill quickly. This means that they simply cannot wipe out an entire population, because they will burn out. Especially in
We don't even have one. The very best we can do is kill a whole lot of people and put a big dent in civilization. But we can't even come close to killing all of humanity, much less all life.
The speed doesn't make as much of a difference as you'd think. You're going faster, but you also have much less time for the heating to have any effect. The direction of travel is also important. If the asteroid were traveling perpendicular to the atmosphere, the parts of the atmosphere that matter are only about 50 miles thick. Typical combined speeds for an object coming from solar orbit are in the range of 20-30 miles per second. In that case, the asteroid would only have about two seconds to completely vaporize before it met the ground. Even if it did vaporize, you still get all of the energy it contains being released in a giant explosion. Assuming this rock is made of solid iron (which is most likely not correct, but it should be roughly correct for the density), I get a figure of about 100 thousand tons for its mass. By contrast, Skylab was 76,295kg; less than a thousandth of the mass.
I understood perfectly well. Using your argument, dorm internet access is not academically necessary at all. Anything you can do on your dorm connection you can do from a lab, after all. Of course, maybe dorm internet isn't provided for academic purposes, but rather for the same reason that other utilities, like water, phone, electricity, etc. are provided. But I don't think this is true, because most dorms were wired long before anybody considered internet access to be a necessity. In conclusion, yes, you can do that research from elsewhere, but IMO that isn't terribly relevant.
UDP has plenty of practical, legit uses, such as online games or video conferencing, but lacks any important academic use.
Yeah, I mean, nobody ever does any research into media streaming, multiplayer game architectures, or alternative file-transfer protocols at universities.
I think this could be a bad idea, depending on the administration. It's very much a "Everything is forbidden except that which is expressly permitted" idea.
I hope that some day we can use something other than money to motivate people. Otherwise we're doomed.
Er, why? It's worked pretty well so far. I mean, sure, using money as the motivator causes all kinds of problems, but there's a reason that there are no societies of any significant technological advancement that don't have money. Money is a wonderful device. I know that we see it as evil, but imagine what the world would be without it. How would you motivate people, how would you decide who gets what, how would you decide anything without money? Invention has always been motivated by money, and that motivation has produced an awful lot.
Well, it was just discovered, you know.
Are countertops designed around a woman's height?
They sure as hell aren't designed for my height, so I would say "yes".
Are doors built to accomodate pregnant women?
What does that mean? Doors open when you push on them. Pregnant women are still capable of pushing on doors. Pregnant women are not too large to fit through a door that does not also inconvenience "normal" people. So, "yes".
Are computers designed to accomodate women's cultural thought processes?
What is a "cultural thought process" and how does a woman's differ from a man's? I don't understand the question so I can't answer.
I haven't got the exact figures, but I reckon 95% of all operating systems out there must be a version of Windows. There must be SOME reason alternative OSes are not so popular.
Alternative OSes are only good in theory. Sure, you can easily get a basic install up and running, but they depend too much on arcane instructions. The OS will ultimately be used by a human; humans are visual, remember?
Thus, there's a MASSIVE usability loss when an alternative OS is used by any normal person. Because Windows is best adapted to how humans think and work. That's why we should stick to Windows.
The day someone actually invents an alternative OS that a normal person can use, we could start promoting these fringe languages. Till then, let's keep Linux as part of CS811.
(My apologies, I don't mean to be insulting, just point out the flaws in the argument with some good old sarcasm.)
you do not have a right to circumvent the cost factor of these websites
No? Why not? Does it actually say somewhere in a contract which I agreed to that I must not download content from NYT or slashdot or any other site without first looking at the ads or registering? I've never seen such a notice anywhere on slashdot, and I don't recall seeing one on NYT although I don't look at the registration page that hard. Why don't I have the right to only download some images on a page but not others? Why don't I have the right to share a login/password for a free site with a friend, or to register for one with bogus information? Yes, they are implicitly using that information as payment for the content, but unless they actually come out and make it explicit, I don't see anything wrong with it.
I half agree.
When you take somebody else's work and sell it for your own profit without the permission of the author/rights holder, that is what has been called "piracy", and there's no reason not to continue calling it just that.
However, the situation of widespread non-profit copying simply hasn't been around that long, because it wasn't possible until the technology allowed it, starting around the mid-90s. Sure, there was stuff like copying tapes and maybe photocopying books before that, but nothing very widespread. "Piracy" does not apply to this behavior because the participants don't profit from the infringement.
People who sell DVDs on street corners for $1 apiece are involved in piracy. The old Napster may have been involved in piracy. Napster's users were not. (At least in my opinion.)
Hotmail has become the choice for people that know nothing about IT and just want something simple that works.
And now Hotmail will become the choice for people that know nothing about IT and just want something simple.
Jeez.
Building a computer from parts might be easy for you, but that does not make it "easy". Most people can't handle it. They want to buy a computer and take it out of the box and plug it in and turn it on. This goes for PCs or Macs.
Have you used a Mac that was manufactured in the past half decade? You can use any USB mouse with them, including your seven-buttons-with-scroll-wheel optical mouse. They use PCI, AGP, ATA, and USB for expansion. They have a "taskbar", it's called the Dock.
Windows's popularity is entirely attributable to Worse is Better.
Twinkle is irrelevant. It is not any kind of design or math breakthrough, it's just a really fast factoring engine. As such, it decreases the time to crack a key by a constant factor. Just increase your key length accordingly. 512-bit keys are already insecure in a theoretical sense, and Twinkle doesn't change that, it just makes it cheaper. 1024-bit keys are still beyond hope, and the true paranoids who use 4096-bit keys can rest easy.
The possibility of backdoors is interesting, but not directly related to cracking crypto. (Of course, if they have a backdoor into your computer, cracking your crypto becomes trivial.) It's easy to get around, though; just run an OS that isn't by Microsoft. If you're extra paranoid, run only OSes and components that are open-source. I don't care how nefarious the ever-magical NSA is, I'm pretty sure they don't have a backdoor in OpenBSD.
People have been crashing airplanes into things in order to destroy them for sixty years. Even in the terrorist world, this idea predates Debt of Honor; an Algerian terrorist group hijacked a French airliner with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, the same year that the book was released. Fortunately, they stopped for fuel and negotiations, and the plane was raided before they could take off. Planning operations like that takes time, so it's very doubtful it was inspired by the book.
I have never heard anything that indicates Clancy has special sources into the military and intelligence community. Hunt for Red October caused a tizzy in the Navy because it was so accurate about various things, but it was discovered that he simply did a hell of a lot of research using public sources. Unfortunately, his later books have slid rather downhill.
The idea that the NSA has a quantum computer powerful enough to be used to crack cryptography while private researchers are struggling to make ones that can factor the number 15 is ridiculous. Working for the NSA does not automatically turn you into a Grade A genius, so their genius population is necessarily limited and proportionate to the level found in the private sector.
I know that it's fun and exciting to believe that the NSA, CIA, and FBI are these amazing, magical places where things can be done that can't be done in the regular work-a-day world, and certainly this image is constantly perpetuated by books and movies, but reality is more mundane. They are government bureaucracies like all others, which happen to work in a certain area and are reasonably good at getting their job done. They are populated by people; inexperienced new guys, career politicians, mediocre middle managers, etc.
Yeah, that's real informative. You already gave two separate time zones there, which are an hour apart, so which one would it be? Plus, the submitter didn't say it was local time for the race. Maybe he lives in micronesia and he meant local time for him. How can we know?
According to Charles Stross, the CIA has a cache of alien portals that they use to travel to other planets, and the Russians are keeping Cthulhu in a bunker near the Baltic Sea.
What was your point?
Yes, it still applies. Don't pay attention to the doom-and-gloom types. This is hardly the first time various organizations in the US have gotten a bit power-mad and nobody bothered to stop them for a while. It always gets stopped eventually. Americans may seem apathetic, but once you get us annoyed enough, we wake up and set things right. That hasn't changed.
This is very tin-foil hat. There is absolutely no evidence that reasonable crypto like blowfish, AES, or RSA can be cracked without enormous amounts (read: more than currently exists) of computing power if you use a reasonable key size. The NSA may have some top-notch people, but the private sector has more. If some amazing mathematical technique were discovered that made cracking these problems tractable, it's extremely implausible that it could be discovered inside NSA and never get independently discovered. The same goes for magical computing techniques that would allow these things to be cracked with existing math.
Wisconsin is just plain fucked up. Yes, they (we? I'm not sure if I still count as being 'from' Wisconsin or not) vote for progressives, and denounce the patriot act. Wisconsin also elected our good buddies Joe McCarthy and Bill Proxmire, and was home to Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein. Those last four pretty much destroy all hope I have for the state.
It's called Google. Get one of the things that adds a google search bar next to your address bar. Guessing URLs is so 20th century.
The only relatively pure TLD is .edu, the rest of the TLDs mean absolutely nothing. .com can mean anything.
.gov and .mil. Also, a lot of the country-specific TLDs really are country-specific; you can be pretty sure that a .uk is in UK or a .fr is in France.
Don't forget about
My God.... My primary school teacher called me that when I was 8 - because I didn't like any of the books aimed at 8-year-olds. Life was hell for months after that. Great to finally see someone admitting to being an intellectual snob!
:-)
I think I finally realized this after failing to sit through several chinese movies that my girlfriend downloaded. They're all the same. Successful, talented, or handsome guy meets girl. Hijinks ensue. Finally they get together at the end. I can't stand them, not because I don't like romantic comedies but because they had no depth at all.
But you find guns, explosions and sex to be only interesting, not entertaining?
I might have put those words backwards. Enough intelligence to make things interesting for intellectual snobs, and enough guns, explosions, and sex to make things exciting. That's better.
Dealing with conspiracy theorists is somewhat like dealing with a rabid squirrel that's fixated on you. If you make even the slightest wrong move, he's all over you. The difference is that conspirancy theorists can do no damage and deserve no respect, whereas one should respect a rabid squirrel if one has one's own best interests at heart.
And if these answers are setting off alarm bells in your head, you are either irrationally afraid of the conspiracy bunch or you're one of them. Either way it's not good.