The US military has FINALLY upgraded to the MDC battle system. It is about fucking time. They will however ph33r m3 in my Glitterboy Mk I power armor. I shall fuck them up railgun style.
Explain why? What part don't you get, the OS isn't going to work without hardware drivers. For every piece of hardware an OEM wants to use in their system that is one more driver required by the OS. MacOS doesn't come with a CD full of drivers like Windows does. Apple would have to get OEMs and hardware vendors to make Mac ports of their hardware drivers (using the Mac driver API) which is a bit of work. IBM has several times the market capitalization then Apple does and they couldn't get hardware vendors to support OS/2. What makes you think they're going to support Apple?
Why the fuck does this retarded shit keep coming up from supposedly intelligent industry writers? Wow Apple could abandon all of their supporters and turn into a software company? I suppose I should pat Cringely on the back for that suggestion? The upside for Apple is a downhill slope. Mac users as it is are faced with smaller numbers of available software titles than Windows users. Some companies refuse to make Mac ports of their software *cough*Sierra*cough*. If Mac had an x86 port little would change because it is still MacOS and said company will refuse to support it. Then you've got the problem of current Mac developers telling Apple to go fuck themselves because they're not going to spend even more money their not making in order to make x86 ports of their Mac software. While ports between ISAs using the same API isn't too terribly difficult it still requires man hours to accomplish, time is money, hence it cuts into your bottom line. Then there is the messy issues of hardware support. Apple shipping MacOS on x86 systems means having to deal with thousands upon thousands of combinations of hardware. Are hardware vendors who already shun support for any OS besides Windows are going to spend much time supporting their hardware on MacOS? Ask IBM and Be what happens when you run on the same ISA as Windows but are the under dog.
This is the nth concurrent Cringely article posted on slashdot in as many weeks, would you people fucking knock it off? Timmah: cut it the fuck out. It is getting ridiculous that the best you can do is post YACA (yet another Cringely article), there has got to be more in the submission bin than just links to pbs.com. Hasn't someone posted a story from ZDNet or Wired you can link to instead?
Read the link please. The style is similar to the Apple Pro mouse except instead of a single click action you lean the mouse to the left for a left click and lean to the right for a right click. The only thing thise mouse lacks in comparison to a regular optical mouse is a scroll wheel which would drive me batty like my Apple Pro mouse does on my Powerbook. I know a scroll wheel doesn't look as asthetic but PLEASE reading a long web page without a scrool wheel (or PDF document) is madness.
Sure they would be, it wouldn't be the sort of recycling you might think of though. The corpse would be broken down into constitutant molecules. Whether this was in some facy plasma incinerator or by genetically altered bacteria which could digest someone in a matter of hours it would still be required. Everything in a closed environment is a source of food, throwing it overboard would be ridiculous. After a thousand years of launching corpses into space you'd have wasted thousands of people worth of biodegradable organic matter.
Uh...actually Mr.Newton agrees with me in saying increased mass means increased inertia. A solar sail needs to be large so many particles strike it so that they might impart their kinetic energy into the craft. Increased surface area of a solar sail means that there is a larger amount of mass imparting kinetic energy on the sail (just like on water, bigger sails collect more wind). Unfortunately in free space mass is still subject to inertia. I don't move anywhere without something pushing me in one direction while it goes in another. Acceleration has little to do with the fact I need a big fucking sail to get enough energy just to begin accelerating. The bigger my sail is the more it weighs thus the more sail area I need to collect energy to overcome intertia. Acceleration caused from taking energy from solar wind particles is also not linear or infinite like you retardedly believe. You'll accelerate for a while until you begin to move as fast as the particles are moving at which point the energy derived from them declines steadily. The acceleration gained is an integral based on the density and speed of the solar wind particles as well as your craft's velocity. The density of solar wind decreases exponentially the farther out you go in the solar system and your velocity is dependant on solar wind density providing thrust over a period of time. Do the math if possible. You don't accelerate indefinitely so your.001g of thrust doesn't isn't going to last for very long once you're on the outskirts of a solar system.
As for wanting to go to the other side of the galaxy, it doesn't matter how far you want to go. Solar sails are only going to provide some initial thrust for you inside the solar system you're leaving. The only benefit over solar sails or chemical propulsion is not having to carry fuel from the surface of the Earth to a space craft which requires a bit of energy to be expended. Heading to Proxima Centauri on a light sail craft is going to take almost as long as with a chemical rocket. If you got your lightsail craft moving as fast as Voyager 1 (17.4km/s) it would take you 309,808 years. Or so. STFU.
You've obviously failed your science courses. Entropic decay is natural order. Forcing order (building things, self perpetuating organisms) requires energy. The only thing not requiring massive amounts of energy is natural entopic decay. Ergo moving from place to place, making babies, eating, shitting, whining about the world with a viewpoint stemming from poorly constructed ecological models that are 40 years old all require energy. Ir requires energy to get hydrogen out of water in order to burn with oxygen to make water. It requires energy to make greenpeace friendly solar panels (whose manufacture is actually fairly dirty in ecological terms). It requires energy to grow plants in order to have fucking food. You can't get energy from something without putting some energy into the collection of energy and no energy collection is 100% efficient. Waste is a natural part of manufacture. Thus in simple terms you probably still won't understand there's no energy source that creates no waste. Solar panels don't emit noxious gases but the collection of silicon does (unless you are going it by hand) and I know you're not rubbing sand grains to temperatures hot enough to refine silicon to make pure ingots on it. Dams just fuck up natural ecologies and create single points of failure when Murphy's law comes to town. Wind farms also fuck up local ecologies by shifting wind patterns and can be dangerous in areas of extreme winds because a 20' windmill blade being ripped loose and flying through the air at 70 miles per hour is no one's friend.
Conservation is much different from your peculiar form of mental retardation. Besides the basic flaw in your argument is posting such drivel on a computer messageboard. That is a great way to prove a point, using your actions to contradict yourself. Please go toddle off to your cave before you hurt yourself. Just remember, nuke all the unborn baby whales.
Your "what ifs" are answered simply by: your OEM doesn't want you doing anything with your computer that doesn't in some way involve software they put there. The reason is they don't support this third party software and thus make no money selling support contracts for it. PC manufacturers make their money from selling services to people, not hardware. If you buy hardware from them with no service contract (which in reality many people don't do) they would rather not have your business. This pertains to restore disks in that don't let you do a "fresh" install of an OS. Looking to the DOJ to try to put PC OEMs out of business is ridiculous. No matter what software they stick on their systems be in Linux or Windows they are not interested in just selling you cheap pre-assembled hardware. If this practice stops expect many hardware vendors to close their doors pretty quickly. You don't remove a profit point from products in a low margin market without screwing yourself over badly. If you just want hardware build a system yourself or buy a bare bones system from a local vendor (or any vendor selling bare bones systems).
If you're a vendor it makes sense not to package installation media along with your product. While two slashdotters shit themselves at the suggestion just now it is true. Selling a low margin product doesn't make you a whole lot of money thus you need to sell the extras like a support contract, you know the thing a saleman tries to forcibly ram up your ass? If you give a customer the ability to fix their computer qualms with little hassle you are asking to be put in operational red. There's a percentage of people who can fix a computer at least marginally, statistically people who don't know how to fix their computer know at least one person they can bother because their "printer got a virus and the power light doesn't come on anymore", the sort of people who inspire ever so funny Tech Support from Hell banter. These people often work for free or at least for much less than it costs to pay a "professional" (sic) to fix their problem. This ain't no good for suppliers of service contracts like OEMs. If Grandma decides the pie chart of her disk space has too much blue on it she is going to start hitting the delete key, nevermind she just deleted all the DLL files her favourite program needed to run. The purple wedge got bigger. If she can call up grandson/daughter to come over to fix her now useless program that comes up with twenty missing file errors who merely inserts an install disk and is done with the whole mess the OEMs just lost out on some lucrative nickel and diming. A recovery partition or special recovery disk can at least obfuscate things just enough to garner a couple extra support contracts from people. OEMs also want to get software back on systems they spent a pretty penny for to put there in the first place. This might be useless crap but they just want some eyeball time on it.
You could never put several generations of humans on some form of interstellar ark and then have then continue as they had on Earth once they got there. A couple generations removed from the rest of human society would cause them to develope independantly from the rest of the human race both physically and socially. As an example many cultures cremate or bury their dead after performing some traditional rite. This is unrealistic in a self contained environment thus the dead would be recycled to eventually become food for the living. Lets say a voyage was launched tomorrow, how much do you think the culture on the ship would change in 20 years after several people died from various causes, natural and unnatural. A whole dogma might form around the mere act of eating, on an ark you would be eating the remains of your dead* on a daily basis. In a hostile environment (which deep space certainly qualifies as) the weak either die or become a burden on the rest of society. Unproductive members of society would be a waste of resources. Like samurai warriors or elder Eskimos ritual suicide would be a common and revered cultural dogma. Any culture being sent into the wilds of deep space would not have an analog back on Earth, in fact they would be almost an entirely new culture, a result of people adapting to a dangerous environment.
Thus it is of my opinion that sending people to the stars without a warp drive does little to preserve a culture or way of life which when it comes down to it is the only real difference between any of us. Spaceborne cultures would not resemble anything we've seen here on Earth specifically because they weren't born there. If a decendant of some space colonist were to meet a human from Earth they would be as alien to them as anything else dispite the similarity of their DNA and maybe even the fact they share a common ancestor. It wouldn't matter what you did to prepare people for the rigors of a generations long journey into space they would become wholly alien to anyone back here.
As for the technical feasibility of enormous solar sails propelling people to stars that is 99.99% bunk. The people envisioning such systems disclaim their theories by saying "if we could only find a way..." which usually requires something along the lines of changing the physical laws of nature. I'm sorry but even the magical properties of carbon nanotubes isn't going to solve any inherent problems in using a giant physical structure to capture photons. I groan every time I see this idea rehashed. The key factor in sails all of all sorts if the ratio between the sail surface area (for much force is can use for propulsion) to that of the overall mass of the craft (how much force it needs to get going). While a giant solar sail might work fine for sending a ship to Mars (albeit a small one), getting megatons of personnel and equipment outside the solar system is another matter entirely. The sail needed for a colony ship would be stupendously large which means increased mass and you guessed it needs more force to get it moving. The bigger they are the bigger they need to be to have the energy to get them going. Say the ship is heading to the other side of the galaxy and a solar sail ship is doing about 10% lightspeed by some means. Relative to the rest of the universe not doing 10% lightspeed the vessel would have to survive 600,000 years worth of cosmic travel without something going HCF. Even with relativistic time dialation which would only save you about 2,390 years ship relative off of the 600k that is still quite the feat. Humans not frozen, kept in some form of stasis, or otherwise inert would have evolved into a completely alien species by then. Shit it'd been only recently the last of the other monkeys in our genus died out. Wake me when we hit.99999999c that way it will only take me about 8.5 years ship relative to shoot out of the other side of the galaxy. That's one fast rocket monkey.
However the fact remains that people who don't fucking pay attention to their children have children, usually because their fucking condom broke. These people far outweigh those who ought to have kids and thus cause problems for those with a little more intelligence. Video games don't make bad children, that is ridiculous but they do however provide a negative stimulous for them. When they kill people their score goes up rather than down. This is like a Skinner box, rewarded actions are repeated, punished actions are avoided. It doesn't matter that kids sneak off and do what they please, making that more difficult is not a bad thing, making parents accountable for their children's actions is not a bad thing either. Think about the cases where a parent blames a video game for some violent act, if there was a law saying that child should not have been able to buy that video game without the parent's consent that gives the courts legal basis for telling the parent they are fuckups and punishing them accoringly. If a child does something wrong and has to face a court and a parent blames a movie they saw as inspiration for their act and that movie is rated above what the child SHOULD have been allowed to see on their own the parent is officially neglegent and has no legal ground to stand on.
Man that was a great comeback. I guess you told me turbo. Was that you I saw running in the special olympics? I know you were proud about the gold medal but everyone wins one of those.
While I believe that anonymity is the backbone of democracy, anonymity provides security for the minority from the majority when the minority disagrees with the majority. Saying someone ought to put their necks on the chopping block so somebody else can preserve their anonymity sort of invalidates your point. You're asking someone to take one for the team which in itself mocks the concept of pursuing life, liberty, and happiness. I would even say that getting your ass thown in jail because you let people download pictures of naked kids would be the antithesis of pursuing happiness and liberty. Prisons are notorious for their drab colours and lack of personal liberty, unless that is the libery to get anally raped by bigger inmates. Don't mock people's unwillingness to risk the structure integrity of their assholes because you don't want anyone knowing you voted for the other guy.
The fact you talk about killing your teacher is the problem. Your idiotic notions that saying you're going to kill someone is ok causes ten times as many problems as playing violent video games. The fact you wouldn't kill someone out of respect for guns is sad considering your respect for human life is less than that for guns. That's pretty fucked up and sad. I would have said the same thing when I was sixteen even though I played violent video games and had a gun. I guess video games didn't fuck me up or I just wasn't stupid.
The same part of "fiction" lawyers don't understand is the same part the kids don't understand when they jump off their bunk bed imitating a move they saw on WWF wrestling. The law since you didn't care to read it says that a retailer needs to see some verification a minor is old enough to buy the video game based on its ESRB rating. Theaters are supposed to card kids when they buy tickets to R rated movies. This is little different. A 10 year old doesn't need to play Counter Strike. I can tag someone with a head shot with an AWP and not be phased by it. I don't presume to think that if I really shot someone in the head with a rifle that they would come back to life in five minutes with an MP5 gunning for me. A 10 year old however might. You reply well the descisions of what a 10 year old can and cannot play is the onus of the parent (your version would be much more inflamatory). This is true. However often times a parent doesn't really know what their kid is byuing. The mow some lawns and raise 40$ or get some birthday money and go buy their video game without Mom or Dad asking anything about it. What the lawyers in Georgia are attempting to do is force the parents to be at least a little accountable for their children and make them buy the game for them or at least be there when they buy it. The parent doesn't have to do shit afterwards, they just have to be present which in many cases is more effort than many parents put into raising their kid unfortunately.
I think for many non-professional buyers heat is definitely not an issue in terms of overall lifespan of the system or in terms of noise. They are afterall buying a chip that gobbles down 70 watts needing a heat sink so large as to need mounting to the chassis of the systems. The P4 systems aren't exactly sipping electricity to begin with. The heat generated by the RAM is marginal compared to that of the processor. You definitely wouldn't stick a P4 system in the closet with shitty ventilation. The point I was trying to make which I think most people missed is that RDRAM has more flaws then heat which is an implimentation issue, not a design issue. There's more pressing design issues like high latency which I think take precedent over the heat problem which has more to do with the manufacturer of the RAM than with the actual design of the system.
What the fuck is it with people not reading everything people post. I was saying the argument of interleved memory and heat is a retarded basis for disliking RDRAM. I fucking said one of the problems with RDRAM is the high latency. Issues with a system's implimentation (ie. heat) as less important than a system's performance. The guy not liking RDRAM based on heat issues and the fact it is interleved is a bit ridculous when there are far worse problems with it, like latency as I originally said and you decided to repeat for your own benefit. RDRAM is a crappy technology and I wouldn't buy a system using it. I used to have a HX chipset in a Sony Vaio that used EDO RAM. The HX chipset was interleved so like you said I had to upgrade my SIMMs in pairs from the same vendor. This is a logistical hassle and prone to errors on my part and on the part of whoever is supplying me with the chips. I don't know why someone would design a system with more heat inherent in its operational design. I wouldn't personally as I am not a proponent of RDRAM or Rambus as a company. Because I said the guy was picking on two minor flaws in the design of RDRAM doesn't mean I have a Rambus t-shirt and posters on my walls.
I was assuming the dual channel PC1600 RDRAM which is the highest speed RDRAM I've read about. Of course this is a comparison between the slowest DDR RAM speed and fastest RDRAM speed but that is the qualifier for that statement. It was just to show that the heat generated is inversely proportional to the speed of the chip.
While Rambus memory might not be the best design in the world your arguments for why it is garbage are retarded. The memory is interleved and runs hot. There's nothing wrong with interleved memory designs except the fact you have to buy two modules rather than one. If you use memory from different manufacturers in SDRAM based systems you can wind up with a system not booting too. It depends on how robust your memory controller is. They run hot but have twice the memory bandwidth of PC2100 memory. That sort of tradeoff is always inherent in a computer. You could say RDRAM is garbage because of the limited number of suppliers or patent issues or memory even the high latency. Instead you picked the fact it was interleaved and hot.
You'd be limited with UWB in "bandwidth" which should read transmission capacity only by the speed with which you couple pulse a radio signal. If I can get 100 pulses of a 30m signal that is a hundred bits per second I can send you. The more pulses I can transmit the more data I can transmit. At least this is the best understanding of UWB I have. Old habits die hard for a lot of people. Here is a good EE Times story about UWB.
All the trolls said Rob was gay...I don't know what to think now. Well congrats anyhow Rob. I guess it is time to retire the "I [heart] Rob" shrine that has gotten me many a karma points. So...is CowboyNeal...a real cowboy?
For mines that aren't above ground it wouldn't be too difficult to stick a millimeter wave or small doppler radar unit on the front and change a software module. Voila you've got a robot that can see a couple feet below the surface of the ground. While this still isn't going to see EVERYTHING it gives you a bit more flexibility and lets you at least find the mines. Small dopplar radar units are used by archeologists and paleontologists to find artifacts or fossils shallowly buried in dirt. Even if the robots could provide a good mine map of an area it would save some lives or limbs.
Way long ago my jr. high solved this problem by having a voicebox systems. At the end of the day the teachers went to the office and recorded their assignments for the day for each class. You could call up and put in the teacher and they would read off the assignments for that day. They had enough lines hooked up to it (the lines were free since it was a public school) to handle a pretty decent sized number of calls. Suggest it to your school's administration. It is the same concept but available to anyone with a telephone (98% of the country) as opposed to people with internet access (51% of the country).
Sites with content only available to links from authorized referers is going to stop search engine spiders from getting at a good percentage of porn videos on various websites. The same goes for any content protected in this fashion. Those spiders don't need to be looking at that sort of stuff anyways!
Sculpting out of clay or play-doh is a free form exercise. It is important to feel what you are intereacting with, especially for a young child. Modeling with a computer program is nothing like it. Computer modeling is merely reshaping primitives to fit into a general scheme that looks like something. There are no primitives when you're sculpting with clay. One of the hardest art projects I ever did was I had to sculpt my own bust. I can draw alright and am a decent painter but I'd never sculpted before. It turned out I could sculpt better than I could paint. I had to put a lot of effort into getting the nose and cheeks just right, I didn't my sculpture to look like some abstract art piece. The eyes took me the longest time because eyeballs are more spherical than just about any part of the body. It was a bit of effort to make an eye that was shaped like an eye. A computer program would have made the shape for me. What does that teach me exactly? How to use a computer? Big fucking whoop. I'm much happier knowing I can take a lump of clay and make it into something that resembles my head.
Teaching children to be office workers? What the fuck is that anyways? Elementary schools aren't vocational training centers. Neither are high schools. Having kids write programs doesn't teach them anything. Having them approach problems logically is teaching them something. I run into far too many people that could not pass a logical thought through their brain if their lives depended on it. Logical thinking lends itself to doing all sorts of stuff including working in an office environment. Office work is thinking and living inside of a box, do you know anyone working in an office that enjoys it? In terms of banality it ranks right about repetitive stress injury prone assembly line work. Autocad to learn math an engineering? That's fucking ludicrous. Give them building blocks and tell them to build something. They'll get more engineering concepts out of watching their sky scraper topple over a dozen times than looking at some lines on a computer screen.
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The US military has FINALLY upgraded to the MDC battle system. It is about fucking time. They will however ph33r m3 in my Glitterboy Mk I power armor. I shall fuck them up railgun style.
Explain why? What part don't you get, the OS isn't going to work without hardware drivers. For every piece of hardware an OEM wants to use in their system that is one more driver required by the OS. MacOS doesn't come with a CD full of drivers like Windows does. Apple would have to get OEMs and hardware vendors to make Mac ports of their hardware drivers (using the Mac driver API) which is a bit of work. IBM has several times the market capitalization then Apple does and they couldn't get hardware vendors to support OS/2. What makes you think they're going to support Apple?
Why the fuck does this retarded shit keep coming up from supposedly intelligent industry writers? Wow Apple could abandon all of their supporters and turn into a software company? I suppose I should pat Cringely on the back for that suggestion? The upside for Apple is a downhill slope. Mac users as it is are faced with smaller numbers of available software titles than Windows users. Some companies refuse to make Mac ports of their software *cough*Sierra*cough*. If Mac had an x86 port little would change because it is still MacOS and said company will refuse to support it. Then you've got the problem of current Mac developers telling Apple to go fuck themselves because they're not going to spend even more money their not making in order to make x86 ports of their Mac software. While ports between ISAs using the same API isn't too terribly difficult it still requires man hours to accomplish, time is money, hence it cuts into your bottom line. Then there is the messy issues of hardware support. Apple shipping MacOS on x86 systems means having to deal with thousands upon thousands of combinations of hardware. Are hardware vendors who already shun support for any OS besides Windows are going to spend much time supporting their hardware on MacOS? Ask IBM and Be what happens when you run on the same ISA as Windows but are the under dog.
This is the nth concurrent Cringely article posted on slashdot in as many weeks, would you people fucking knock it off? Timmah: cut it the fuck out. It is getting ridiculous that the best you can do is post YACA (yet another Cringely article), there has got to be more in the submission bin than just links to pbs.com. Hasn't someone posted a story from ZDNet or Wired you can link to instead?
Read the link please. The style is similar to the Apple Pro mouse except instead of a single click action you lean the mouse to the left for a left click and lean to the right for a right click. The only thing thise mouse lacks in comparison to a regular optical mouse is a scroll wheel which would drive me batty like my Apple Pro mouse does on my Powerbook. I know a scroll wheel doesn't look as asthetic but PLEASE reading a long web page without a scrool wheel (or PDF document) is madness.
Sure they would be, it wouldn't be the sort of recycling you might think of though. The corpse would be broken down into constitutant molecules. Whether this was in some facy plasma incinerator or by genetically altered bacteria which could digest someone in a matter of hours it would still be required. Everything in a closed environment is a source of food, throwing it overboard would be ridiculous. After a thousand years of launching corpses into space you'd have wasted thousands of people worth of biodegradable organic matter.
Uh...actually Mr.Newton agrees with me in saying increased mass means increased inertia. A solar sail needs to be large so many particles strike it so that they might impart their kinetic energy into the craft. Increased surface area of a solar sail means that there is a larger amount of mass imparting kinetic energy on the sail (just like on water, bigger sails collect more wind). Unfortunately in free space mass is still subject to inertia. I don't move anywhere without something pushing me in one direction while it goes in another. Acceleration has little to do with the fact I need a big fucking sail to get enough energy just to begin accelerating. The bigger my sail is the more it weighs thus the more sail area I need to collect energy to overcome intertia. Acceleration caused from taking energy from solar wind particles is also not linear or infinite like you retardedly believe. You'll accelerate for a while until you begin to move as fast as the particles are moving at which point the energy derived from them declines steadily. The acceleration gained is an integral based on the density and speed of the solar wind particles as well as your craft's velocity. The density of solar wind decreases exponentially the farther out you go in the solar system and your velocity is dependant on solar wind density providing thrust over a period of time. Do the math if possible. You don't accelerate indefinitely so your .001g of thrust doesn't isn't going to last for very long once you're on the outskirts of a solar system.
As for wanting to go to the other side of the galaxy, it doesn't matter how far you want to go. Solar sails are only going to provide some initial thrust for you inside the solar system you're leaving. The only benefit over solar sails or chemical propulsion is not having to carry fuel from the surface of the Earth to a space craft which requires a bit of energy to be expended. Heading to Proxima Centauri on a light sail craft is going to take almost as long as with a chemical rocket. If you got your lightsail craft moving as fast as Voyager 1 (17.4km/s) it would take you 309,808 years. Or so. STFU.
You've obviously failed your science courses. Entropic decay is natural order. Forcing order (building things, self perpetuating organisms) requires energy. The only thing not requiring massive amounts of energy is natural entopic decay. Ergo moving from place to place, making babies, eating, shitting, whining about the world with a viewpoint stemming from poorly constructed ecological models that are 40 years old all require energy. Ir requires energy to get hydrogen out of water in order to burn with oxygen to make water. It requires energy to make greenpeace friendly solar panels (whose manufacture is actually fairly dirty in ecological terms). It requires energy to grow plants in order to have fucking food. You can't get energy from something without putting some energy into the collection of energy and no energy collection is 100% efficient. Waste is a natural part of manufacture. Thus in simple terms you probably still won't understand there's no energy source that creates no waste. Solar panels don't emit noxious gases but the collection of silicon does (unless you are going it by hand) and I know you're not rubbing sand grains to temperatures hot enough to refine silicon to make pure ingots on it. Dams just fuck up natural ecologies and create single points of failure when Murphy's law comes to town. Wind farms also fuck up local ecologies by shifting wind patterns and can be dangerous in areas of extreme winds because a 20' windmill blade being ripped loose and flying through the air at 70 miles per hour is no one's friend.
Conservation is much different from your peculiar form of mental retardation. Besides the basic flaw in your argument is posting such drivel on a computer messageboard. That is a great way to prove a point, using your actions to contradict yourself. Please go toddle off to your cave before you hurt yourself. Just remember, nuke all the unborn baby whales.
Your "what ifs" are answered simply by: your OEM doesn't want you doing anything with your computer that doesn't in some way involve software they put there. The reason is they don't support this third party software and thus make no money selling support contracts for it. PC manufacturers make their money from selling services to people, not hardware. If you buy hardware from them with no service contract (which in reality many people don't do) they would rather not have your business. This pertains to restore disks in that don't let you do a "fresh" install of an OS. Looking to the DOJ to try to put PC OEMs out of business is ridiculous. No matter what software they stick on their systems be in Linux or Windows they are not interested in just selling you cheap pre-assembled hardware. If this practice stops expect many hardware vendors to close their doors pretty quickly. You don't remove a profit point from products in a low margin market without screwing yourself over badly. If you just want hardware build a system yourself or buy a bare bones system from a local vendor (or any vendor selling bare bones systems).
If you're a vendor it makes sense not to package installation media along with your product. While two slashdotters shit themselves at the suggestion just now it is true. Selling a low margin product doesn't make you a whole lot of money thus you need to sell the extras like a support contract, you know the thing a saleman tries to forcibly ram up your ass? If you give a customer the ability to fix their computer qualms with little hassle you are asking to be put in operational red. There's a percentage of people who can fix a computer at least marginally, statistically people who don't know how to fix their computer know at least one person they can bother because their "printer got a virus and the power light doesn't come on anymore", the sort of people who inspire ever so funny Tech Support from Hell banter. These people often work for free or at least for much less than it costs to pay a "professional" (sic) to fix their problem. This ain't no good for suppliers of service contracts like OEMs. If Grandma decides the pie chart of her disk space has too much blue on it she is going to start hitting the delete key, nevermind she just deleted all the DLL files her favourite program needed to run. The purple wedge got bigger. If she can call up grandson/daughter to come over to fix her now useless program that comes up with twenty missing file errors who merely inserts an install disk and is done with the whole mess the OEMs just lost out on some lucrative nickel and diming. A recovery partition or special recovery disk can at least obfuscate things just enough to garner a couple extra support contracts from people. OEMs also want to get software back on systems they spent a pretty penny for to put there in the first place. This might be useless crap but they just want some eyeball time on it.
You could never put several generations of humans on some form of interstellar ark and then have then continue as they had on Earth once they got there. A couple generations removed from the rest of human society would cause them to develope independantly from the rest of the human race both physically and socially. As an example many cultures cremate or bury their dead after performing some traditional rite. This is unrealistic in a self contained environment thus the dead would be recycled to eventually become food for the living. Lets say a voyage was launched tomorrow, how much do you think the culture on the ship would change in 20 years after several people died from various causes, natural and unnatural. A whole dogma might form around the mere act of eating, on an ark you would be eating the remains of your dead* on a daily basis. In a hostile environment (which deep space certainly qualifies as) the weak either die or become a burden on the rest of society. Unproductive members of society would be a waste of resources. Like samurai warriors or elder Eskimos ritual suicide would be a common and revered cultural dogma. Any culture being sent into the wilds of deep space would not have an analog back on Earth, in fact they would be almost an entirely new culture, a result of people adapting to a dangerous environment.
.99999999c that way it will only take me about 8.5 years ship relative to shoot out of the other side of the galaxy. That's one fast rocket monkey.
Thus it is of my opinion that sending people to the stars without a warp drive does little to preserve a culture or way of life which when it comes down to it is the only real difference between any of us. Spaceborne cultures would not resemble anything we've seen here on Earth specifically because they weren't born there. If a decendant of some space colonist were to meet a human from Earth they would be as alien to them as anything else dispite the similarity of their DNA and maybe even the fact they share a common ancestor. It wouldn't matter what you did to prepare people for the rigors of a generations long journey into space they would become wholly alien to anyone back here.
As for the technical feasibility of enormous solar sails propelling people to stars that is 99.99% bunk. The people envisioning such systems disclaim their theories by saying "if we could only find a way..." which usually requires something along the lines of changing the physical laws of nature. I'm sorry but even the magical properties of carbon nanotubes isn't going to solve any inherent problems in using a giant physical structure to capture photons. I groan every time I see this idea rehashed. The key factor in sails all of all sorts if the ratio between the sail surface area (for much force is can use for propulsion) to that of the overall mass of the craft (how much force it needs to get going). While a giant solar sail might work fine for sending a ship to Mars (albeit a small one), getting megatons of personnel and equipment outside the solar system is another matter entirely. The sail needed for a colony ship would be stupendously large which means increased mass and you guessed it needs more force to get it moving. The bigger they are the bigger they need to be to have the energy to get them going. Say the ship is heading to the other side of the galaxy and a solar sail ship is doing about 10% lightspeed by some means. Relative to the rest of the universe not doing 10% lightspeed the vessel would have to survive 600,000 years worth of cosmic travel without something going HCF. Even with relativistic time dialation which would only save you about 2,390 years ship relative off of the 600k that is still quite the feat. Humans not frozen, kept in some form of stasis, or otherwise inert would have evolved into a completely alien species by then. Shit it'd been only recently the last of the other monkeys in our genus died out. Wake me when we hit
However the fact remains that people who don't fucking pay attention to their children have children, usually because their fucking condom broke. These people far outweigh those who ought to have kids and thus cause problems for those with a little more intelligence. Video games don't make bad children, that is ridiculous but they do however provide a negative stimulous for them. When they kill people their score goes up rather than down. This is like a Skinner box, rewarded actions are repeated, punished actions are avoided. It doesn't matter that kids sneak off and do what they please, making that more difficult is not a bad thing, making parents accountable for their children's actions is not a bad thing either. Think about the cases where a parent blames a video game for some violent act, if there was a law saying that child should not have been able to buy that video game without the parent's consent that gives the courts legal basis for telling the parent they are fuckups and punishing them accoringly. If a child does something wrong and has to face a court and a parent blames a movie they saw as inspiration for their act and that movie is rated above what the child SHOULD have been allowed to see on their own the parent is officially neglegent and has no legal ground to stand on.
Man that was a great comeback. I guess you told me turbo. Was that you I saw running in the special olympics? I know you were proud about the gold medal but everyone wins one of those.
While I believe that anonymity is the backbone of democracy, anonymity provides security for the minority from the majority when the minority disagrees with the majority. Saying someone ought to put their necks on the chopping block so somebody else can preserve their anonymity sort of invalidates your point. You're asking someone to take one for the team which in itself mocks the concept of pursuing life, liberty, and happiness. I would even say that getting your ass thown in jail because you let people download pictures of naked kids would be the antithesis of pursuing happiness and liberty. Prisons are notorious for their drab colours and lack of personal liberty, unless that is the libery to get anally raped by bigger inmates. Don't mock people's unwillingness to risk the structure integrity of their assholes because you don't want anyone knowing you voted for the other guy.
The fact you talk about killing your teacher is the problem. Your idiotic notions that saying you're going to kill someone is ok causes ten times as many problems as playing violent video games. The fact you wouldn't kill someone out of respect for guns is sad considering your respect for human life is less than that for guns. That's pretty fucked up and sad. I would have said the same thing when I was sixteen even though I played violent video games and had a gun. I guess video games didn't fuck me up or I just wasn't stupid.
The same part of "fiction" lawyers don't understand is the same part the kids don't understand when they jump off their bunk bed imitating a move they saw on WWF wrestling. The law since you didn't care to read it says that a retailer needs to see some verification a minor is old enough to buy the video game based on its ESRB rating. Theaters are supposed to card kids when they buy tickets to R rated movies. This is little different. A 10 year old doesn't need to play Counter Strike. I can tag someone with a head shot with an AWP and not be phased by it. I don't presume to think that if I really shot someone in the head with a rifle that they would come back to life in five minutes with an MP5 gunning for me. A 10 year old however might. You reply well the descisions of what a 10 year old can and cannot play is the onus of the parent (your version would be much more inflamatory). This is true. However often times a parent doesn't really know what their kid is byuing. The mow some lawns and raise 40$ or get some birthday money and go buy their video game without Mom or Dad asking anything about it. What the lawyers in Georgia are attempting to do is force the parents to be at least a little accountable for their children and make them buy the game for them or at least be there when they buy it. The parent doesn't have to do shit afterwards, they just have to be present which in many cases is more effort than many parents put into raising their kid unfortunately.
I think for many non-professional buyers heat is definitely not an issue in terms of overall lifespan of the system or in terms of noise. They are afterall buying a chip that gobbles down 70 watts needing a heat sink so large as to need mounting to the chassis of the systems. The P4 systems aren't exactly sipping electricity to begin with. The heat generated by the RAM is marginal compared to that of the processor. You definitely wouldn't stick a P4 system in the closet with shitty ventilation. The point I was trying to make which I think most people missed is that RDRAM has more flaws then heat which is an implimentation issue, not a design issue. There's more pressing design issues like high latency which I think take precedent over the heat problem which has more to do with the manufacturer of the RAM than with the actual design of the system.
What the fuck is it with people not reading everything people post. I was saying the argument of interleved memory and heat is a retarded basis for disliking RDRAM. I fucking said one of the problems with RDRAM is the high latency. Issues with a system's implimentation (ie. heat) as less important than a system's performance. The guy not liking RDRAM based on heat issues and the fact it is interleved is a bit ridculous when there are far worse problems with it, like latency as I originally said and you decided to repeat for your own benefit. RDRAM is a crappy technology and I wouldn't buy a system using it. I used to have a HX chipset in a Sony Vaio that used EDO RAM. The HX chipset was interleved so like you said I had to upgrade my SIMMs in pairs from the same vendor. This is a logistical hassle and prone to errors on my part and on the part of whoever is supplying me with the chips. I don't know why someone would design a system with more heat inherent in its operational design. I wouldn't personally as I am not a proponent of RDRAM or Rambus as a company. Because I said the guy was picking on two minor flaws in the design of RDRAM doesn't mean I have a Rambus t-shirt and posters on my walls.
I was assuming the dual channel PC1600 RDRAM which is the highest speed RDRAM I've read about. Of course this is a comparison between the slowest DDR RAM speed and fastest RDRAM speed but that is the qualifier for that statement. It was just to show that the heat generated is inversely proportional to the speed of the chip.
While Rambus memory might not be the best design in the world your arguments for why it is garbage are retarded. The memory is interleved and runs hot. There's nothing wrong with interleved memory designs except the fact you have to buy two modules rather than one. If you use memory from different manufacturers in SDRAM based systems you can wind up with a system not booting too. It depends on how robust your memory controller is. They run hot but have twice the memory bandwidth of PC2100 memory. That sort of tradeoff is always inherent in a computer. You could say RDRAM is garbage because of the limited number of suppliers or patent issues or memory even the high latency. Instead you picked the fact it was interleaved and hot.
You'd be limited with UWB in "bandwidth" which should read transmission capacity only by the speed with which you couple pulse a radio signal. If I can get 100 pulses of a 30m signal that is a hundred bits per second I can send you. The more pulses I can transmit the more data I can transmit. At least this is the best understanding of UWB I have. Old habits die hard for a lot of people. Here is a good EE Times story about UWB.
All the trolls said Rob was gay...I don't know what to think now. Well congrats anyhow Rob. I guess it is time to retire the "I [heart] Rob" shrine that has gotten me many a karma points. So...is CowboyNeal...a real cowboy?
For mines that aren't above ground it wouldn't be too difficult to stick a millimeter wave or small doppler radar unit on the front and change a software module. Voila you've got a robot that can see a couple feet below the surface of the ground. While this still isn't going to see EVERYTHING it gives you a bit more flexibility and lets you at least find the mines. Small dopplar radar units are used by archeologists and paleontologists to find artifacts or fossils shallowly buried in dirt. Even if the robots could provide a good mine map of an area it would save some lives or limbs.
Way long ago my jr. high solved this problem by having a voicebox systems. At the end of the day the teachers went to the office and recorded their assignments for the day for each class. You could call up and put in the teacher and they would read off the assignments for that day. They had enough lines hooked up to it (the lines were free since it was a public school) to handle a pretty decent sized number of calls. Suggest it to your school's administration. It is the same concept but available to anyone with a telephone (98% of the country) as opposed to people with internet access (51% of the country).
Sites with content only available to links from authorized referers is going to stop search engine spiders from getting at a good percentage of porn videos on various websites. The same goes for any content protected in this fashion. Those spiders don't need to be looking at that sort of stuff anyways!
Sculpting out of clay or play-doh is a free form exercise. It is important to feel what you are intereacting with, especially for a young child. Modeling with a computer program is nothing like it. Computer modeling is merely reshaping primitives to fit into a general scheme that looks like something. There are no primitives when you're sculpting with clay. One of the hardest art projects I ever did was I had to sculpt my own bust. I can draw alright and am a decent painter but I'd never sculpted before. It turned out I could sculpt better than I could paint. I had to put a lot of effort into getting the nose and cheeks just right, I didn't my sculpture to look like some abstract art piece. The eyes took me the longest time because eyeballs are more spherical than just about any part of the body. It was a bit of effort to make an eye that was shaped like an eye. A computer program would have made the shape for me. What does that teach me exactly? How to use a computer? Big fucking whoop. I'm much happier knowing I can take a lump of clay and make it into something that resembles my head.
Teaching children to be office workers? What the fuck is that anyways? Elementary schools aren't vocational training centers. Neither are high schools. Having kids write programs doesn't teach them anything. Having them approach problems logically is teaching them something. I run into far too many people that could not pass a logical thought through their brain if their lives depended on it. Logical thinking lends itself to doing all sorts of stuff including working in an office environment. Office work is thinking and living inside of a box, do you know anyone working in an office that enjoys it? In terms of banality it ranks right about repetitive stress injury prone assembly line work. Autocad to learn math an engineering? That's fucking ludicrous. Give them building blocks and tell them to build something. They'll get more engineering concepts out of watching their sky scraper topple over a dozen times than looking at some lines on a computer screen.