I haven't played all of Star Control II yet, but I believe you're referring to the race who, if they were real, will one day be formerly known as the Ilwrath.
As Douglas Adams pointed out in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the ability to travel through time means for a multitude of temporal grammatical tenses.
Um, I was taking the piss out of pipingguy's often-used and tiresome excuse for an argument, "Check out the molecular weight of CO2 sometime", which implies that he really does believes the gasses in the atmosphere are neatly stacked in layers, sorted by molecular weight.
Why some people choose to believe this is a topic worthy of a whole new thread.
I did. I also checked out the molecular weight of oxygen, nitrogen and argon. There's no way oxygen can exist anywhere near ground level. There, the air is made entirely of argon.
If you want to breathe oxygen, you'll have to go up several hundred metres. Unfortunately, it will be relatively pure, highly corrosive even to organic materials and a terrible fire risk. To be safe, you'll have to go up much higher in the atmospheric layer cake to the boundary between the oxygen and nitrogen layers.
Since they have no "souls" (that is, a centre of consciousness), they cannot really suffer. They're just meat robots.
That's why it's fine to forcefully have sex with them (it's not rape when they're your own property). It's why it's fine to make them wear robot suits whenever they leave your house to do your shopping for you. They are as disposable as Christmas Puppies. They're just meat.
OK, I'll stop pretending to be a devout Muslim or a particularly devout Christian of Orange County[1]
What I'm getting at is the way that people often come up with convenient ways to justify their treatment of what they find convenient to torture, rape or kill.
Slashdot readers should take more notice of films like Zardoz[2]. "Oh, you can't equate their feelings with ours!"
---
[1]They are _so_ miffed that marital rape became illegal in all 50 states that they have effectively re-legalised it (and acts of paedophilia, too!) in through marriages of convenience. Seventh degree marriages are fine in Orange County.
[2]Zardoz is ostensibly about a bunch of people trapped in a malaise of artificial immortality, but it's really about cultural elitism. It's much like how Starship Troopers is ostensibly about alien bug-hunting, but is really about fascism.
The key spring for the numeric cluster is a bit sticky, probably from me picking up the keyboard and using it like a baseball bat on the desk in order to shake out the dandruff.
I'll get a blacksmith to look at it when I have the time. I hear that Model M springs are easy to rework.
I've worn out the G key plunger slightly, but I swapped it with "Scroll lock".
I've had it for six years. Not bad for a 1984-vintage keyboard for which I paid 3NZD at Supashed.
Those plsticky keyboards that come with computers, though, last about 7-10 days before my typing destroys their flimsy excuses for switches.
I'm seriously considering printing and laminating copies of those fear posters to use here in New Zealand. First I'll put the rubbish-fear poster on the side of my council wheelie bin.
Then I'll splash the fear-CCTV-watchers poster somewhere prominent in town (I gather there are 30 CCTV in Cathedral Square alone).
I'm more tempted than ever to add a reassuring poster to any traffic counter I see. "ATTENTION, VISITING BOSTONITES: This is not a roadside bomb. It is not even a Mooninite. It is a traffic counter. DO NOT BE AFRAID!"
I expect people to fall over in the streets laughing when they realise that the posters are more than mere derivatives of the propaganda posters in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
The seem to wear out at the crotch after only a year or two. My Utilikilts have proven to be far more durable.
You have to pay a little bit extra for someone of quality not made by slaves, but it's worth it in the long run.
BTW, I'm using a Model M I bought from Supashed (at the refuse station) for NZ$3. It's outlasted my Omnikey 101, though the numeric minus key is a bit stuffed after I banged the keyboard upside down on the desk like a cricket bat once too often, shaking the dandruff out. I take it apart and clean it evener it starts to look or feel grubby.
A Model M is nowhere as robust as a EMP hardened grenade-proof military keyboard[1] I once encountered or the great 7 kilogram cast iron 3278 terminal keyboard I used to use at work. It's good enough for me, though.
---- [1] It was sleek and tough like a broadsword. You could do a lot more than merely bludgeon someone to death with it.
Oooooh! I've been horribly negligent in my duty to augment my spellchecker's vocabulary with useful words like "orificer," "paedosmile" and "catamite."
That would be a sign of weakness, and upon the first such exhibition the ravenous Slashdot hordes will descend upon him, leaving only his empty carcass behind.
Then the rapacious Slashdot hordes get to have a go.
When two neutron stars collide within our own galaxy, the resulting gamma burst can be a serious threat to life on Earth.
How bad would it be if two galactic black holes collided? Would they emit gamma ray bursts as colliding neutron stars do? Would the energy be released in particular directions? If suitably (and very unfavourably) directed, is there any minimum safe distance within the observable universe from such a collision?
Those errors are only applied to the disc as a whole. At the scale of a sector, the head motion is smoothly varying. It doesn't matter if the contribution to the signal from head jitter is greater in amplitude than that of the intended signal.
As said before. Transverse jitter makes reconstruction of the data easier. It's tire tracks from multiple vehicles that don't overlay exactly. The bits at the edges dominated by one track aid the correct weighting of the bits in the middle.
The lousy signal to noise ratio of the previous writes is only from the point of view of the hard disc controller reading the signal in a simple manner. Usable hard discs are not built right to the threshold of reading random noise.
I've seen micrographs of hard disc platters. The previously written bits are as clear as day.
The cool thing is that Gecko's improvements counts towards a win for web standards. Gecko needn't actually continue to exist for much longer for the good work put into it to benefit the web.
Hard discs certainly do store multiple bits worth of information in the space one bit takes when read normally. Hard disc drives are intended to be reliable at reading the last-written data at high speed and without much care for track alignment.
To use a visual analogy (without considering clocking and encoding), imagine a hard disc writing data optically by spraying bit patterns (or printed letters) with small jets of black pigment at 70% opacity and whitewash also at 70% opacity. On reading the disc, the drive the controller treats anything with an an albedo than 50% as a "ink" and anything lighter as "paper."
It's not worth trying to make the pigments more opaque since that would just widen the radius of the portion of the spray that could cause a bit (or a part of a letter) to cross the 50% threshold.
Forensic analysis of the platter involves taking a full grey-scale picture of the platter. Even in the case where the bits line up exactly, it's possible to subtract the last written data in order to reveal the second-to-last written data. This process can be repeated for the write that occurred before that.
When the overlaid bits have differing alignments, either along the track or perpendicular to it, it's possible to clearly resolve more generations of writes than one could with perfectly overlaid writes.
The idea that one's boss could grant or deny another person the right to vote is disturbing. It goes along with:
Did you vote at the right precinct?
Do you register to vote on the new 80-pound paper?
I'm rather fond of New Zealand's convention of voting on a Saturday, being assured of time off work even on a Saturday, and using fool-proof (and presumably machine-readable) ballot papers like this.
I concur. The availability of cheap, good quality, sophisticated and powerful tools makes it even more rewarding to build and mend stuff these days.
That the Internet provides inspiration for D.I.Y. projects is a big factor, too. Sometimes, I'm inspired by the World Wide Web to go to a library, even. Having library services available on the Web makes using a real library all the more worthwhile.
I think calling the Extinction Timeline garbage is an understatement. Sometimes I can make cool stuff out of garbage.
From a nice wee sniping spot, I zap Lerc into oblivion at long range with a railgun as he's running across my field of view. While I'm giggling like a maniac, I failed to notice that he's launched a rocket at me an instant before he snuffed it. Three second later, I'm staring right into the nose cone of a rocket that appeared to grow out from the crosshair, wondering what on Earth could the strange, symmetrical object be. "Hey, isn't that a..." (Shades of The Noah's Ark Principle)
Lerc and I are fighting on an elevated, moving conveyor belt. He knows I have a BFG so he hides in a small room off to one side of the belt, depriving me of a line of sight. I step off the belt and onto the rail and bounce a grenade from the far wall and into the room in which Lerc is cowering.
I turn to gain some extra distance from the imminent explosion and find a big crate in my face. Although I'm not actually on the moving belt, the crate (being carried by the belt) has caught the edge of my body and is pushing me in Lerc's direction. "Arrrgh! No! No! Stop it!"
Shortly there was Lerc and me standing in a small space with a grenade on the floor between us. Sheepishly, I manage to say "Hi!" just before the grenade performs its giblet-making function.
This is one of the reasons I like physically oriented games. Stuff happens that the programmer never explicitly coded.
Your post is a fine demonstration a pure ad-hominem attack. You haven't addressed any of my points or any of the question raised by the site (and the BBC, even). Of particular interest is the spurious Mohammand-porn distribution contrived by imams[1] and the fanciful myth that it was always forbidden to depict the Prophet Mohammad[2].
It is an instinct of theirs to (rabidly) disparage Islam
That's so incredibly corny. It sounds just like "The Poles suck anti-semitism in with their mother's milk."
[1] You'd think being all priestly and well-studied in the Quaran would mean the imams would be imbued with a capacity for moral reasoning and a desire for righteousness. Instead the imams proved to be as morally decrepit as Ann Coulter or some of the most infamous Catholic popes. What hope, then, do the millions of Pudding Muslims have of benefiting from the supposed glory of the Quran?
[2] So which bunch of Muslims are to be sent to Islamic Hell? The ones who drew all those pictures of Mohammed, or the ones who commit the deadly sin of idolatry by making up a spurious or derivative religious law?
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't played all of Star Control II yet, but I believe you're referring to the race who, if they were real, will one day be formerly known as the Ilwrath.
As Douglas Adams pointed out in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the ability to travel through time means for a multitude of temporal grammatical tenses.
Snaller:
Um, I was taking the piss out of pipingguy's often-used and tiresome excuse for an argument, "Check out the molecular weight of CO2 sometime", which implies that he really does believes the gasses in the atmosphere are neatly stacked in layers, sorted by molecular weight.
Why some people choose to believe this is a topic worthy of a whole new thread.
I did. I also checked out the molecular weight of oxygen, nitrogen and argon. There's no way oxygen can exist anywhere near ground level. There, the air is made entirely of argon.
If you want to breathe oxygen, you'll have to go up several hundred metres. Unfortunately, it will be relatively pure, highly corrosive even to organic materials and a terrible fire risk. To be safe, you'll have to go up much higher in the atmospheric layer cake to the boundary between the oxygen and nitrogen layers.
Beautiful! I'll do that!
Since they have no "souls" (that is, a centre of consciousness), they cannot really suffer. They're just meat robots.
That's why it's fine to forcefully have sex with them (it's not rape when they're your own property). It's why it's fine to make them wear robot suits whenever they leave your house to do your shopping for you. They are as disposable as Christmas Puppies. They're just meat.
OK, I'll stop pretending to be a devout Muslim or a particularly devout Christian of Orange County[1]
What I'm getting at is the way that people often come up with convenient ways to justify their treatment of what they find convenient to torture, rape or kill.
Slashdot readers should take more notice of films like Zardoz[2]. "Oh, you can't equate their feelings with ours!"
---
[1]They are _so_ miffed that marital rape became illegal in all 50 states that they have effectively re-legalised it (and acts of paedophilia, too!) in through marriages of convenience. Seventh degree marriages are fine in Orange County.
[2]Zardoz is ostensibly about a bunch of people trapped in a malaise of artificial immortality, but it's really about cultural elitism. It's much like how Starship Troopers is ostensibly about alien bug-hunting, but is really about fascism.
The key spring for the numeric cluster is a bit sticky, probably from me picking up the keyboard and using it like a baseball bat on the desk in order to shake out the dandruff.
I'll get a blacksmith to look at it when I have the time. I hear that Model M springs are easy to rework.
I've worn out the G key plunger slightly, but I swapped it with "Scroll lock".
I've had it for six years. Not bad for a 1984-vintage keyboard for which I paid 3NZD at Supashed.
Those plsticky keyboards that come with computers, though, last about 7-10 days before my typing destroys their flimsy excuses for switches.
Funnily enough, I never have RSI/OOS problems.
I'm seriously considering printing and laminating copies of those fear posters to use here in New Zealand. First I'll put the rubbish-fear poster on the side of my council wheelie bin.
Then I'll splash the fear-CCTV-watchers poster somewhere prominent in town (I gather there are 30 CCTV in Cathedral Square alone).
I'm more tempted than ever to add a reassuring poster to any traffic counter I see. "ATTENTION, VISITING BOSTONITES: This is not a roadside bomb. It is not even a Mooninite. It is a traffic counter. DO NOT BE AFRAID!"
I expect people to fall over in the streets laughing when they realise that the posters are more than mere derivatives of the propaganda posters in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
The seem to wear out at the crotch after only a year or two. My Utilikilts have proven to be far more durable.
You have to pay a little bit extra for someone of quality not made by slaves, but it's worth it in the long run.
BTW, I'm using a Model M I bought from Supashed (at the refuse station) for NZ$3. It's outlasted my Omnikey 101, though the numeric minus key is a bit stuffed after I banged the keyboard upside down on the desk like a cricket bat once too often, shaking the dandruff out. I take it apart and clean it evener it starts to look or feel grubby.
A Model M is nowhere as robust as a EMP hardened grenade-proof military keyboard[1] I once encountered or the great 7 kilogram cast iron 3278 terminal keyboard I used to use at work. It's good enough for me, though.
----
[1] It was sleek and tough like a broadsword. You could do a lot more than merely bludgeon someone to death with it.
Isn't "culture" just another word for collective moral or mental retardation?
Here in New Zealand, we have a "culture" of driving the heads of children through bedroom walls in order to teach them to have respect for authority.
It's what the child abusers and murderers call it, whenever they end up in court.
Oooooh! I've been horribly negligent in my duty to augment my spellchecker's vocabulary with useful words like "orificer," "paedosmile" and "catamite."
[clickety-clack] Added those!
The set of paedophiles also includes orifiers of the CIA, the FBI, the police, court judges and city councillors.
This law, which gives those paedophiles the legal power to use another paedophile's account anywhere, anytime is a paedophile's dream come true.
Well, the "Fair" in Fairpoint's name is a bit like the "Honest" in Honest John's Used Cars.
Then the rapacious Slashdot hordes get to have a go.
Not true. Pale skin appears reddish where the blood vessels are closest to the surface of the skin and slightly yellowish elsewhere.
After submitting my design for the Überbook, I had a quick browse through the efforts of the other users.
What I saw in there was Goatse times a thousand—more than my Joo-Jantas could bear.
Ah, good-o! I guess I shouldn't worry about looking into the pot and finding a neutron star made of haggis, either.
[Sings a bit of Scotland's Depraved]
When two neutron stars collide within our own galaxy, the resulting gamma burst can be a serious threat to life on Earth.
How bad would it be if two galactic black holes collided? Would they emit gamma ray bursts as colliding neutron stars do? Would the energy be released in particular directions? If suitably (and very unfavourably) directed, is there any minimum safe distance within the observable universe from such a collision?
Those errors are only applied to the disc as a whole. At the scale of a sector, the head motion is smoothly varying. It doesn't matter if the contribution to the signal from head jitter is greater in amplitude than that of the intended signal.
As said before. Transverse jitter makes reconstruction of the data easier. It's tire tracks from multiple vehicles that don't overlay exactly. The bits at the edges dominated by one track aid the correct weighting of the bits in the middle.
The lousy signal to noise ratio of the previous writes is only from the point of view of the hard disc controller reading the signal in a simple manner. Usable hard discs are not built right to the threshold of reading random noise.
I've seen micrographs of hard disc platters. The previously written bits are as clear as day.
The cool thing is that Gecko's improvements counts towards a win for web standards. Gecko needn't actually continue to exist for much longer for the good work put into it to benefit the web.
Hard discs certainly do store multiple bits worth of information in the space one bit takes when read normally. Hard disc drives are intended to be reliable at reading the last-written data at high speed and without much care for track alignment.
To use a visual analogy (without considering clocking and encoding), imagine a hard disc writing data optically by spraying bit patterns (or printed letters) with small jets of black pigment at 70% opacity and whitewash also at 70% opacity. On reading the disc, the drive the controller treats anything with an an albedo than 50% as a "ink" and anything lighter as "paper."
It's not worth trying to make the pigments more opaque since that would just widen the radius of the portion of the spray that could cause a bit (or a part of a letter) to cross the 50% threshold.
Forensic analysis of the platter involves taking a full grey-scale picture of the platter. Even in the case where the bits line up exactly, it's possible to subtract the last written data in order to reveal the second-to-last written data. This process can be repeated for the write that occurred before that.
When the overlaid bits have differing alignments, either along the track or perpendicular to it, it's possible to clearly resolve more generations of writes than one could with perfectly overlaid writes.
The idea that one's boss could grant or deny another person the right to vote is disturbing. It goes along with:
Did you vote at the right precinct?
Do you register to vote on the new 80-pound paper?
I'm rather fond of New Zealand's convention of voting on a Saturday, being assured of time off work even on a Saturday, and using fool-proof (and presumably machine-readable) ballot papers like this.
We don't need no steenking voting machines!
I concur. The availability of cheap, good quality, sophisticated and powerful tools makes it even more rewarding to build and mend stuff these days.
That the Internet provides inspiration for D.I.Y. projects is a big factor, too. Sometimes, I'm inspired by the World Wide Web to go to a library, even. Having library services available on the Web makes using a real library all the more worthwhile.
I think calling the Extinction Timeline garbage is an understatement. Sometimes I can make cool stuff out of garbage.
I can't help but be reminded of this article:
Pharmaceutical Company Says Its New Anti-Depressant Is 'Worthless And Dumb'
I agree. A couple of my favourite deaths:
From a nice wee sniping spot, I zap Lerc into oblivion at long range with a railgun as he's running across my field of view. While I'm giggling like a maniac, I failed to notice that he's launched a rocket at me an instant before he snuffed it. Three second later, I'm staring right into the nose cone of a rocket that appeared to grow out from the crosshair, wondering what on Earth could the strange, symmetrical object be. "Hey, isn't that a..." (Shades of The Noah's Ark Principle)
Lerc and I are fighting on an elevated, moving conveyor belt. He knows I have a BFG so he hides in a small room off to one side of the belt, depriving me of a line of sight. I step off the belt and onto the rail and bounce a grenade from the far wall and into the room in which Lerc is cowering.
I turn to gain some extra distance from the imminent explosion and find a big crate in my face. Although I'm not actually on the moving belt, the crate (being carried by the belt) has caught the edge of my body and is pushing me in Lerc's direction. "Arrrgh! No! No! Stop it!"
Shortly there was Lerc and me standing in a small space with a grenade on the floor between us. Sheepishly, I manage to say "Hi!" just before the grenade performs its giblet-making function.
This is one of the reasons I like physically oriented games. Stuff happens that the programmer never explicitly coded.
Your post is a fine demonstration a pure ad-hominem attack. You haven't addressed any of my points or any of the question raised by the site (and the BBC, even). Of particular interest is the spurious Mohammand-porn distribution contrived by imams[1] and the fanciful myth that it was always forbidden to depict the Prophet Mohammad[2].
That's so incredibly corny. It sounds just like "The Poles suck anti-semitism in with their mother's milk."
[1] You'd think being all priestly and well-studied in the Quaran would mean the imams would be imbued with a capacity for moral reasoning and a desire for righteousness. Instead the imams proved to be as morally decrepit as Ann Coulter or some of the most infamous Catholic popes. What hope, then, do the millions of Pudding Muslims have of benefiting from the supposed glory of the Quran?
[2] So which bunch of Muslims are to be sent to Islamic Hell? The ones who drew all those pictures of Mohammed, or the ones who commit the deadly sin of idolatry by making up a spurious or derivative religious law?