>>I would like to see them just roll high school into community college completely and be done with it.
A friend of mine teaches at a joint high school / community college. The Willow International School, in Fresno.
I think they require all high school kids to take at least one or two community college classes in order to graduate... they have some of the highest test scores in the state, too.
>>Exactly. That's why we're only sending the top students. There will always be outliers who will be able to fit in at a collegeriate level when they're 16. That's the whole point of this program.
Exactly. I started college at the age of 16 via the EAH program at UC San Diego. It was a great experience - I took high school classes in mornings (I was in 12th grade at the time) and classes at the university all afternoon.
I think that approach really was ideal - it let me take computer science and calculus classes that they didn't offer at my high school, while still being around people my own age. In other words, I could have a social life and date, but I got to enjoy all the benefits of college life, and essentially ditch out on high school each day at lunch. Good times. Really good times. I still look back on that year fondly.
Another approach is to offer community college classes on campus. In 11th grade, I took calculus from a community college professor that would come to Serra High two periods a day. It worked out pretty well, though trying to get the PTA to determine if these classes should count for Valedictorian status was a real mess.
I'd recommend that schools and universities offer these sorts of dual-enrollment programs in preference to just boosting kids directly into college. One of my friends in grad school did just that, but it really hurt her social skills, starting college after 10th grade. Personally, I was annoyed by the fact that college girls would tend to refuse to date 16 or 17 year old guys.
>>I know it will result in a much more natural city-radius, but adapting to the new tile shape will be hard at first. After almost two decades of playing Civ games (both the main line and the various spin-offs) i've got that "5x5 with the corners cut off" plus shape imprinted in my mind at some basic level.
I agree... the notion of hexes is really painful to me. And I play with hexes in some of my tabletop games, too.
The "fat plus" is one of those sacred cows of the Civ franchise, I don't think they should have messed with it.
Also, the graphics look like it is a chimeric blend of Settlers of Catan and Civ Revolution, both of which are perfectly fine games in their own right, but not something I want in a real Civ experience.
It's been a couple years since I researched this, and I think there's some benchmark that gets applied. I can't find the document that I read a while back, though. I think the main difference is if it is a sale/lease in actuality vs. a sale/lease in principle. You can't just call something a lease when it looks and smells like a sale.
There's also tough limits on things like EULAs, and other contracts where one party is not given an option to negotiate the terms.
While I'm actually not a fan of big or intrusive government, I actually think the EU has it right - contracts are designed to be between two consenting entities, and when one entity has no ability to strike out provisions in a contract then there should indeed be strict limits on what you can get them to agree to.
But someone like MS would include a tricky license agreement with the product which says something like "By opening this box you agree that you did not actually purchase this hardware but are only leasing it indefinitely from Microsoft Corporation" blah blah blah which allows them to break it remotely or take it back from you if you harm it.
In the EU, at least, that's illegal.
They have a doctrine of customer rights or something (I can't recall what it's called) which actually stops a lot of the bullshit that we have to deal with from companies that want to sell us stuff but not really.
My point is: why on earth would we want to add another point of failure to the gaming environment? Requiring online access in Mass Effect 2 is annoying enough as it is... after you turn on the game, there's a 10 or 20 second delay while it tries to access the overloaded Cerberus Network servers, and it won't let you start the game until it downloads the useless MOTD from the servers.
There's absolutely no excuse for a single player offline game to quit running if the internet connection goes down. I've had routers in the past (most of them Netgears) who would crap out or reboot at random intervals, and everyone's had trouble in the past with wireless connections being unreliable. It's not just the internet connection, but all these other semi-flaky technologies that you're making the equivalent of a computer crash for a system that completely doesn't need it.
>>Internet connections these days are pretty damn reliable. Mine croaks maybe once or twice a year, and usually only for a few hours at worst.
So losing all your progress once or twice a year is fine by you? If I lost my data because the internet went down after, say, finally beating a particularly tough license test in Gran Turismo, I think I'd throw a brick through the company's front window.
My internet connection through DSL and now U-Verse dropped probably forty times in the last year, with 11 service calls to AT&T needed until they finally fixed the problem. The worst was around Thanksgiving, when it went out for an entire week, and I was stuck having to do all my work on a tight deadline at the local Denny's.
>>So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place.
Warden's Keep came with my copy of the game, but I agree the whole DLC thing has become kind of despicable. Sure, they're free to do whatever they want to make more money and kill the resale market or whatever, but when something becomes blatantly mercentary, there's blowback from annoyed customers.
Build up enough of a rage meter on your customers, and they'll start refusing to buy your products. I refused to buy L4D2 for similar reasons, though I'm sure it's a perfectly good game.
What's your point? I was talking about public perception, not reactor design. Joe Schmo knows fuckall about pebble-bed vs MSRs. My point was that the percentage of people who recognize "Chernobyl" is much higher than some movie made in 1979. And that *that* is the source of inertia on nuclear power.
Fair enough.
You'd think the recent explosion in Connecticut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Connecticut_power_plant_explosion) would trigger the same feelings of irrational fear and outrage we see with nuclear, with people clamoring for us to decomission gas and oil power plants nationwide, but...
The fact that you would correlate Chernobyl with American nuclear power plants means you don't understand anything about the design of nuclear reactors, such as the difference between positive and negative feedback loops. Chernobyl was designed with positive feedback, Americans' with negative. In other words, we have to actively act to keep a reactor running - they had to actively act to keep it from melting down.
But then again, you think that in a million years the place will still be dead, so I guess it's kind of clear that you don't know much about radioactivity. For a fun exercise, calculate how much of the radioactive material released will be still around in a million years, given a half life of: 30 years (Cesium-137), 2 years (Cesium-134), 6 weeks (Iodine-131) and 28 years (Strontium-90).
Failure to respond will indicate you did the math and just realized how fucking stupid your statement was.
Please. I do agree with what you say, but nuclear is also a "green technology", no matter how much eco-crazies try to spin it differently. By contrasting nuclear against "green", you're playing into their hands.
Nuclear is the choice of a pragmatic, responsible conservationalist. Greenpeace and other fundies don't talk for all of us.
Fair enough. Nuclear is (absurdly) hated by the Green Party, which is why I don't call it green. But you're absolutely right - we need to change the language to include nuclear in the list of green solutions out there.
Greenpeace doesn't like nuclear power, but the co-founder of it does. He explains that back in the day they equated nuclear power with nuclear war, and so the power plants got tainted by the wide brush.
>>you have no right to declare what environmentalists should or should not be. That environmentalists should logically be pro nuclear is absurd.
I have the right to declare anti-nuke environmentalists to be self-contradictory nutjobs. It's my right as an American, in fact.
The entire notion that environmentalism and anti-nuclear activism go hand-in-hand is what is absurd. Your only excuse as a green to be anti-nuke would be if you hated ALL power, and want us all to go back to living in caves and eating granola bars which magically fall from the sky by an all-loving Mother Earth.
Consider: If America had built nuclear power plants for the last 30 years instead of coal, our CO2 output would be half what it is right now, while having cheap and reliable energy and eliminating countless tons of pollution and radiation from the atmosphere.
I'd mention all the thousands of lives saved from coal mining accidents and pollution reduction, but greens don't seem to care much about that.
>>Several hundred hours, or internet research. Good for you. I have a PhD in energy conversion and I've spent 9 years researching this full-time.
Ah, Dr. Coward. Yes, I've heard of you. You're world famous, in fact.
If you're going to put your credentials on the line, then put them on the line. I posted references (which are just a fraction of my total notes and references on the subject) with more data than you can shake a stick at. You posted nothing. The cost estimates from California's Department of Energy to build out solar shows just how economically infeasible it is. Even if you can get the 6x to 150x the cost of coal down to half that (as you claim, and I won't doubt you), that's still economic suicide to switch to.
>>I'm saddened at your mainstream short-sighted view that think technology should only be adopted when it can compete economically with 200 years and 60 trillion dollars of infrastructure.
Who will pay for the buildout of trillions of dollars worth of solar plants? Your magic fairy wand? Who will pay for the increased cost of power if solar can't compete economically? Businesses? The government? Obama's magical dollars that come from nowhere?
But if solar becomes cost competitive (as you predict it will), then sure, switch to it. Why not?
And don't pretend we don't have massive clean power plant subsidies and R&D grants pushing the way on the development of solar energy.
The actual cost of the plants they're building in the south are half this. And a lot of the cost has to do with NIMBYs and (ironically enough) environmentalists, who ought to all be very pro-nuclear. The actual cost of nuclear per KWH is the only source comparable to coal. Dirty coal. CC Coal Plants are 2x to 3x the cost per KWH of dirty coal.
You want to know what doesn't make economic sense? Anything that costs more than double or triple the current cost of energy. Guess what that includes? All green technologies. Solar costs roughly 6x to 150x the cost of coal.
It's a good thing. Because of idiot movies like the China Syndrome, people think that nuclear power is dangerous, when nuclear plants are actually quite safe. Even left-wing France produces the lion's share of its power through nuclear, and has done so very safely for the last 30 years. Compare this with the huge numbers of people killed every year in coal mining accidents and indirectly through the radiation released into the atmosphere by coal.
>>Personal data mining will continue - it will only become more automated.
Mr. Shepard: Our records indicate that you have been dead for the last two years. Have you ever considered looking into Asari burial shrouds? Our burial shrouds are of the finest quality, hand-woven on the Asari homeworld by skilled artisans. You'll appreciate the difference the next time you die!
>>God, your friends are freaks, but it has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything "rational" or anything involved with "science" and it has NOTHING to do with "athiesm".
I love your use of capitals. They make you so much more convincing. Especially since you're trying to convince me that the people I've talked with over the years are just figments of my imagination. No, most of them weren't my friends. The lady who thought that there were just women for millions of years was a speaker at a professional development workshop at Linda Vista Elementary School circa 1995 or so. The woman who could talk to plants (and told me she could sense the oleander "choking" on the CO2 emissions) was a cute Hawaiian girl who did Judo with me. She told me this while we were having smoothies at the Jamba Juice near UCSD, which is above the I-5. After she told me this, I quickly lost interest in her. The one who told me I was psychic because I could tell things about people in photographs was a girl named Jessica T., who was a raver and was a good friend of mine. She was also very good looking. She also believed in aliens. An acquiantance of mine in high school was the one who firmly believed in the four essences of the universe, or whatever you want to call them.
The fact that you've never heard of them doesn't surprise me, because they are indeed nutty ideas. But all are from people I knew in real life.
My point is, atheists are supposed to disbelieve in all sorts of "supernatural crap", but from my experience, quite a few of them (but not all, not by a long shot) have substituted a belief in God with some sort of kooky nonsense, and if there is indeed a region of the brain devoted to religious or supernatural thought, this might be the reason why.
>>Wow, that's pretty funny, and downright ludicrous. What's the point of a vagina if there's no males around to fertilize it?
It was all vag/vag sex back then. As she said with a straight face to a group of elementary school teachers.
But yeah, this isn't to bag on atheists in general, but I have heard a lot of really kooky theories, and I suspect there is something to the notion that humans need to have a belief in some higher power.
>>Actually there are automated "vampire leech" scripts that "rape" bandwidth
The irony is that the titstorming Aussies actually have to pay for bandwidth to the states. So they end up paying money to their ISP in order to DDOS the government.
Or did years ago. I dunno if they still have bandwidth caps nowadays.
>>The Higgs mechanism is often talked about as the source of mass, but what's less well publicised is that it's the dynamics of QCD (the strong interaction) that are responsible for the majority of the mass of ordinary matter, by a similar mechanism.
If mass really exists, which it may or may not.
In general relativity, the concept of mass is kind of a vague one. Momentum is a lot easier to work with. Photons have momentum but no mass. What most people think of as "mass" means something along the lines of "solid" or "can't move through each other", but atoms have solidity due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle preventing electron waves from nearby atoms from interpenetrating with each other, not mass. Photons have the opposite effect, and try to enter similar states, hence stimulated emission and lasers.
I'm actually curious about what the ultimate nature of mass really is. As well as the ultimate nature of spacetime, dark energy and matter (if they exist), the Pioneer effect, and a lot of other things. But without enough background in math (I only had two years of Calculus in college), I'm too frustratingly ignorant to calculate my ideas about these sorts of things. It's kind of frustrating.
So, let me get this right. You could more or less get a list of addresses, and they would accept commands without question if you just typed in the commands and the right address? Sounds like the worst security system ever.
In UNIX systems, circa 1997 and before, they'd allow anyone to write to any TTY. This was how Talk worked, for instance.
So when I wanted to mess with my friends, I'd cat poetry or/dev/random > their TTY and watch them start cursing in the lab.
Oddly enough, after I restarted after this patch, my *UPS* went out. High pitched shrill beeping and everything.
Could have been just a weird coincidence, but since my linux box is also running off the same UPS, then... yeah. Windows patches can take down linux boxes.
Fortunately my UPS has enough juice to power both machines with their monitors for at least 15 minutes, so I got everything shut down safely.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I would like to see them just roll high school into community college completely and be done with it.
A friend of mine teaches at a joint high school / community college. The Willow International School, in Fresno.
I think they require all high school kids to take at least one or two community college classes in order to graduate... they have some of the highest test scores in the state, too.
>>Exactly. That's why we're only sending the top students. There will always be outliers who will be able to fit in at a collegeriate level when they're 16. That's the whole point of this program.
Exactly. I started college at the age of 16 via the EAH program at UC San Diego. It was a great experience - I took high school classes in mornings (I was in 12th grade at the time) and classes at the university all afternoon.
I think that approach really was ideal - it let me take computer science and calculus classes that they didn't offer at my high school, while still being around people my own age. In other words, I could have a social life and date, but I got to enjoy all the benefits of college life, and essentially ditch out on high school each day at lunch. Good times. Really good times. I still look back on that year fondly.
Another approach is to offer community college classes on campus. In 11th grade, I took calculus from a community college professor that would come to Serra High two periods a day. It worked out pretty well, though trying to get the PTA to determine if these classes should count for Valedictorian status was a real mess.
I'd recommend that schools and universities offer these sorts of dual-enrollment programs in preference to just boosting kids directly into college. One of my friends in grad school did just that, but it really hurt her social skills, starting college after 10th grade. Personally, I was annoyed by the fact that college girls would tend to refuse to date 16 or 17 year old guys.
>>I know it will result in a much more natural city-radius, but adapting to the new tile shape will be hard at first. After almost two decades of playing Civ games (both the main line and the various spin-offs) i've got that "5x5 with the corners cut off" plus shape imprinted in my mind at some basic level.
I agree... the notion of hexes is really painful to me. And I play with hexes in some of my tabletop games, too.
The "fat plus" is one of those sacred cows of the Civ franchise, I don't think they should have messed with it.
Also, the graphics look like it is a chimeric blend of Settlers of Catan and Civ Revolution, both of which are perfectly fine games in their own right, but not something I want in a real Civ experience.
It's been a couple years since I researched this, and I think there's some benchmark that gets applied. I can't find the document that I read a while back, though. I think the main difference is if it is a sale/lease in actuality vs. a sale/lease in principle. You can't just call something a lease when it looks and smells like a sale.
There's also tough limits on things like EULAs, and other contracts where one party is not given an option to negotiate the terms.
While I'm actually not a fan of big or intrusive government, I actually think the EU has it right - contracts are designed to be between two consenting entities, and when one entity has no ability to strike out provisions in a contract then there should indeed be strict limits on what you can get them to agree to.
If it looks like a sale, then it is a sale. If need be, a judge looks at it and decides.
If it's a sale, then they can't pretend it's not a sale, or make a customer waive his rights.
In the EU, at least, that's illegal.
They have a doctrine of customer rights or something (I can't recall what it's called) which actually stops a lot of the bullshit that we have to deal with from companies that want to sell us stuff but not really.
My point is: why on earth would we want to add another point of failure to the gaming environment? Requiring online access in Mass Effect 2 is annoying enough as it is... after you turn on the game, there's a 10 or 20 second delay while it tries to access the overloaded Cerberus Network servers, and it won't let you start the game until it downloads the useless MOTD from the servers.
There's absolutely no excuse for a single player offline game to quit running if the internet connection goes down. I've had routers in the past (most of them Netgears) who would crap out or reboot at random intervals, and everyone's had trouble in the past with wireless connections being unreliable. It's not just the internet connection, but all these other semi-flaky technologies that you're making the equivalent of a computer crash for a system that completely doesn't need it.
>>Internet connections these days are pretty damn reliable. Mine croaks maybe once or twice a year, and usually only for a few hours at worst.
So losing all your progress once or twice a year is fine by you? If I lost my data because the internet went down after, say, finally beating a particularly tough license test in Gran Turismo, I think I'd throw a brick through the company's front window.
My internet connection through DSL and now U-Verse dropped probably forty times in the last year, with 11 service calls to AT&T needed until they finally fixed the problem. The worst was around Thanksgiving, when it went out for an entire week, and I was stuck having to do all my work on a tight deadline at the local Denny's.
>>Only one legal defence should be needed: I have the right to do whatever I want with stuff I've bought.
Indeed. The doctrine of First Sale is rolling over in its grave.
>>So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place.
Warden's Keep came with my copy of the game, but I agree the whole DLC thing has become kind of despicable. Sure, they're free to do whatever they want to make more money and kill the resale market or whatever, but when something becomes blatantly mercentary, there's blowback from annoyed customers.
Build up enough of a rage meter on your customers, and they'll start refusing to buy your products. I refused to buy L4D2 for similar reasons, though I'm sure it's a perfectly good game.
Fair enough.
You'd think the recent explosion in Connecticut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Connecticut_power_plant_explosion) would trigger the same feelings of irrational fear and outrage we see with nuclear, with people clamoring for us to decomission gas and oil power plants nationwide, but...
The fact that you would correlate Chernobyl with American nuclear power plants means you don't understand anything about the design of nuclear reactors, such as the difference between positive and negative feedback loops. Chernobyl was designed with positive feedback, Americans' with negative. In other words, we have to actively act to keep a reactor running - they had to actively act to keep it from melting down.
But then again, you think that in a million years the place will still be dead, so I guess it's kind of clear that you don't know much about radioactivity. For a fun exercise, calculate how much of the radioactive material released will be still around in a million years, given a half life of: 30 years (Cesium-137), 2 years (Cesium-134), 6 weeks (Iodine-131) and 28 years (Strontium-90).
Failure to respond will indicate you did the math and just realized how fucking stupid your statement was.
Fair enough. Nuclear is (absurdly) hated by the Green Party, which is why I don't call it green. But you're absolutely right - we need to change the language to include nuclear in the list of green solutions out there.
Greenpeace doesn't like nuclear power, but the co-founder of it does. He explains that back in the day they equated nuclear power with nuclear war, and so the power plants got tainted by the wide brush.
http://populistdemocrats.blogspot.com/2009/04/greenpeace-founder-supports-increased.html
Nowadays, I think it is the only power technology that makes sense both economically and environmentally.
>>you have no right to declare what environmentalists should or should not be. That environmentalists should logically be pro nuclear is absurd.
I have the right to declare anti-nuke environmentalists to be self-contradictory nutjobs. It's my right as an American, in fact.
The entire notion that environmentalism and anti-nuclear activism go hand-in-hand is what is absurd. Your only excuse as a green to be anti-nuke would be if you hated ALL power, and want us all to go back to living in caves and eating granola bars which magically fall from the sky by an all-loving Mother Earth.
Consider: If America had built nuclear power plants for the last 30 years instead of coal, our CO2 output would be half what it is right now, while having cheap and reliable energy and eliminating countless tons of pollution and radiation from the atmosphere.
I'd mention all the thousands of lives saved from coal mining accidents and pollution reduction, but greens don't seem to care much about that.
A green that is anti-nuclear? A hypocrite.
Anyone that cites Chernobyl as evidence against nuclear power is just demonstrating their utter ignorance of the issue.
>>Several hundred hours, or internet research. Good for you. I have a PhD in energy conversion and I've spent 9 years researching this full-time.
Ah, Dr. Coward. Yes, I've heard of you. You're world famous, in fact.
If you're going to put your credentials on the line, then put them on the line. I posted references (which are just a fraction of my total notes and references on the subject) with more data than you can shake a stick at. You posted nothing. The cost estimates from California's Department of Energy to build out solar shows just how economically infeasible it is. Even if you can get the 6x to 150x the cost of coal down to half that (as you claim, and I won't doubt you), that's still economic suicide to switch to.
>>I'm saddened at your mainstream short-sighted view that think technology should only be adopted when it can compete economically with 200 years and 60 trillion dollars of infrastructure.
Who will pay for the buildout of trillions of dollars worth of solar plants? Your magic fairy wand? Who will pay for the increased cost of power if solar can't compete economically? Businesses? The government? Obama's magical dollars that come from nowhere?
But if solar becomes cost competitive (as you predict it will), then sure, switch to it. Why not?
And don't pretend we don't have massive clean power plant subsidies and R&D grants pushing the way on the development of solar energy.
I've spent several hundred hours researching this issue. Frankly, you're wron.g
>>1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 (translation: it is expensive)
The actual cost of the plants they're building in the south are half this. And a lot of the cost has to do with NIMBYs and (ironically enough) environmentalists, who ought to all be very pro-nuclear. The actual cost of nuclear per KWH is the only source comparable to coal. Dirty coal. CC Coal Plants are 2x to 3x the cost per KWH of dirty coal.
You want to know what doesn't make economic sense? Anything that costs more than double or triple the current cost of energy. Guess what that includes? All green technologies. Solar costs roughly 6x to 150x the cost of coal.
Look up the costs yourself, and become educated. This is a mix of government, industry, and hippie cost estimates:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/eiaenergy2016.png
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-200-2007-011/CEC-200-2007-011-SD.PDF
http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/ocean_policy/documents/te_workshop_cost_compare.pdf
>>2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
The waste problem is a social construct, not a technical one.
>>3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
It's a good thing. Because of idiot movies like the China Syndrome, people think that nuclear power is dangerous, when nuclear plants are actually quite safe. Even left-wing France produces the lion's share of its power through nuclear, and has done so very safely for the last 30 years. Compare this with the huge numbers of people killed every year in coal mining accidents and indirectly through the radiation released into the atmosphere by coal.
>>4/fuel-dependency
There's plenty.
>>Personal data mining will continue - it will only become more automated.
Mr. Shepard: Our records indicate that you have been dead for the last two years. Have you ever considered looking into Asari burial shrouds? Our burial shrouds are of the finest quality, hand-woven on the Asari homeworld by skilled artisans. You'll appreciate the difference the next time you die!
>>God, your friends are freaks, but it has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything "rational" or anything involved with "science" and it has NOTHING to do with "athiesm".
I love your use of capitals. They make you so much more convincing. Especially since you're trying to convince me that the people I've talked with over the years are just figments of my imagination. No, most of them weren't my friends. The lady who thought that there were just women for millions of years was a speaker at a professional development workshop at Linda Vista Elementary School circa 1995 or so. The woman who could talk to plants (and told me she could sense the oleander "choking" on the CO2 emissions) was a cute Hawaiian girl who did Judo with me. She told me this while we were having smoothies at the Jamba Juice near UCSD, which is above the I-5. After she told me this, I quickly lost interest in her. The one who told me I was psychic because I could tell things about people in photographs was a girl named Jessica T., who was a raver and was a good friend of mine. She was also very good looking. She also believed in aliens. An acquiantance of mine in high school was the one who firmly believed in the four essences of the universe, or whatever you want to call them.
The fact that you've never heard of them doesn't surprise me, because they are indeed nutty ideas. But all are from people I knew in real life.
My point is, atheists are supposed to disbelieve in all sorts of "supernatural crap", but from my experience, quite a few of them (but not all, not by a long shot) have substituted a belief in God with some sort of kooky nonsense, and if there is indeed a region of the brain devoted to religious or supernatural thought, this might be the reason why.
>>Wow, that's pretty funny, and downright ludicrous. What's the point of a vagina if there's no males around to fertilize it?
It was all vag/vag sex back then. As she said with a straight face to a group of elementary school teachers.
But yeah, this isn't to bag on atheists in general, but I have heard a lot of really kooky theories, and I suspect there is something to the notion that humans need to have a belief in some higher power.
>>Actually there are automated "vampire leech" scripts that "rape" bandwidth
The irony is that the titstorming Aussies actually have to pay for bandwidth to the states. So they end up paying money to their ISP in order to DDOS the government.
Or did years ago. I dunno if they still have bandwidth caps nowadays.
>>The Higgs mechanism is often talked about as the source of mass, but what's less well publicised is that it's the dynamics of QCD (the strong interaction) that are responsible for the majority of the mass of ordinary matter, by a similar mechanism.
If mass really exists, which it may or may not.
In general relativity, the concept of mass is kind of a vague one. Momentum is a lot easier to work with. Photons have momentum but no mass. What most people think of as "mass" means something along the lines of "solid" or "can't move through each other", but atoms have solidity due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle preventing electron waves from nearby atoms from interpenetrating with each other, not mass. Photons have the opposite effect, and try to enter similar states, hence stimulated emission and lasers.
I'm actually curious about what the ultimate nature of mass really is. As well as the ultimate nature of spacetime, dark energy and matter (if they exist), the Pioneer effect, and a lot of other things. But without enough background in math (I only had two years of Calculus in college), I'm too frustratingly ignorant to calculate my ideas about these sorts of things. It's kind of frustrating.
So, let me get this right. You could more or less get a list of addresses, and they would accept commands without question if you just typed in the commands and the right address? Sounds like the worst security system ever.
In UNIX systems, circa 1997 and before, they'd allow anyone to write to any TTY. This was how Talk worked, for instance.
So when I wanted to mess with my friends, I'd cat poetry or /dev/random > their TTY and watch them start cursing in the lab.
It's how I taught my friends about ^L.
>>You say this like it's a *bad* thing...
Oddly enough, after I restarted after this patch, my *UPS* went out. High pitched shrill beeping and everything.
Could have been just a weird coincidence, but since my linux box is also running off the same UPS, then... yeah. Windows patches can take down linux boxes.
Fortunately my UPS has enough juice to power both machines with their monitors for at least 15 minutes, so I got everything shut down safely.