Lets see, we'll have duck hunt, deer hunt, rabbit hunt, squirrel hunt, and pokemon hunt. We'll have whack a mole, whack a gopher, or whack a random Nintendo hero/villian. We'll have several young mage with a wand games. We'll have several games like Zelda with bow & arrows.
One of the scariest things I ever did was play SystemShock2 in the dark...
For me it was Doom and the Damn Demons jumping out at about midnight at a friends house. Those things didn't look remotely realistic, but they still made me jump out of the chair. My friends got a big kick out of it all night.
Could it be that Microsoft are superstitious enough to not want to number a feature version of Office as Office 13? Or am I reading too much into this, and did they just use Excel to do the numbering?
Maybe someone should point out to them that missing 13 doesn't make it any less Office 13.
Dude, this is just plain smart marketting from MS. There are lots of things that skip the number 13. People freakout if they are assigned anything with that digit. I could just see it now every IT problem in the company would be blamed on MS Office 13 by the average folks so they are going to skip it and go straight to MSO 14.
What the hell ever happened to putting the user first, to valuing and maximizing the benefit the project provides to non-developers?
That's for that other software building model. Closed source and pay some one else to do it. If you don't like the way an F/OSS project has neglected your bugs/features, then you fork and fix it yourself. No one else is going to do it for you unless you pay them.
Notice I said "billions of people all over the world" Not "billions of people in one country".
I still think that you have your scale off. It may be a few thousand at most in each country. I'd be hard pressed to believe that there are 10 million diverse people from different countries activly working to bring down the U.S. (I'd believe it of a government, but not people in general we need leaders, PR, and a mission/religion to move that many bodies.)
Now, thousands disliking the action's of the U.S. is one thing. I doubt that they'd ever take action against a foreign government though.
Face it, five years from now, an article on a satirical pseudo-cult will be of passing interest. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be an article on it. But it does indicate that the relative priorities of Wikipedia contributors are very short sighted.
In 50-100 years, the AI overlords will think that the Wikipedia offers priceless research in what average individuals of this decade thought was important enough to properly document. That and priceless humor.
I have my own opinions. I don't need a hack writer trying to put forth their opinions as gospel to me.
If anything, I'd say I don't like how men are shown in FF games. They are looking more and more female. I don't want to play a big muscle bound character, but I'd like an average guy character that doesn't look female! I guess to start pleasing the female audience the next FF game should include the stick girl with no boobs, the big butt girl, the girl with thunder thighs, the short girl, and of course the girl with the good personality. The villian would be some one that looks similiar to Luna out of FFX-2 or Tidus from FFX.
The real problem is that billions of people all over the world want to see us suffer and die. You can't just keep making more enemies every day and not expect any consequences. Those billions of people who want to see you die will figure out a way to kill you or spend you into bankrupcy trying to defend yourself.
I think you have it wrong. The only two countries that have billions would India (1,080,264,388 July 2005 est. CIA World Fact Book) and China (1,306,313,812 July 2005 est. CIA World Fact Book.) all of Africa has 896,721,874 according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm. I don't recall any Chineese or Indian terrorists setting off nukes any where. Most African dicators seem happy enough to be warlords of their own country or butchering each other. Most African people most likely would just want stablity and a higher standard of living. What would really be scary is a unified Africa, which isn't likely to happen.
Few countries would come to the US's aid if they nuked Iran. War or no war. The act is simply too repulsive. Sure, there will be official policies, but the regular people on the ground: customs official, the policeman. They will not inforce official policy.
Nukes are 40s technology. The time to learn to get along is now.
Um, bows & arrows, pikes, and spears are all really old tech. It's way past time that we should learn to get along. Um, I hate to let you know, but it isn't as repulsive as you seem to think it is. Why is that? Nukes are a quick instant death. Repulsive would be wide scale genocide, bioware tailored viruses that go after a specific nation's populance, or nano-plagues that we've not even worked on yet. Repulsive is having a draft to have the military folks to send on a puntative mission. The general populance would almost always rather just carpet bomb those foreigners over there rather than have to get personally involved. Most of our citizens wouldn't care if most of Africa, the Middle East and some odd other countries were a nuclear waste land. As long as the weather doesn't blow it back on us, we'd be perfectly happy. Large scale numerical deaths are easy to abstract away. An individual can't picture a city dead in an instant so the thought doesn't get lodged in the head. There would be those that would want to change things to go back to mass warfare. They will be called barbarians that would rather send our civilians to war than just eliminate the threat.
The only hope Iran has of NOT being nuked is to be in a position of nuking the USA.
Um, they could have a treaty with some place like France that if they get pre-emptivly struck then France would automatically handle sending nukes to that offensive country. Of course, then it all come down do you trust France that much to take revenge for you?
How proud would you as an American be if you had nuked Iraq... given that we now know that there was absolutely no trace of WMD's whatsoever?
Yeap, cause every thing that we'd even think of as a weapons R&D center would be toast.
Within 5 years Iran plans to have the bomb. Iran will be pre-emptively nuked by the time they are ready to test their first bomb. Hopefully it won't result in the immediate retaliatory destruction of the USA by the nations of the world whom this attack will anger.
I'd think that France would openly give either the plans or a few working bombs to nations that they consider in danger of destruction. This would lead to a brief war with France as everyone knows France would rather surrender than have Paris nuked. England couldn't believe that they didn't think of it first.
I honestly think it would be in the US long term interests to outright invade Iran and Iraq and give them the option of becoming US states or the same status as Puerto Rico. People would moan and gripe that we'd offer statehood to a region with a large Muslim population. It would be culturally and resourcefully good for the US. Iran and Iraq have some of the world's largest oil fields. Why shouldn't we go for conquest phase? Europe went through a phase like that. The US has just been better at it cause we would repopulate the entire region with those born in the old US and all those presently in Iran or Iraq would be relocated into the central states. Then would come the migration of missionaries from the South attempting the convert those. Give 'em 3 generations and the muslims would be getting a big guilt check for being relocated, be a sizable minority in most states, and the fastest growing religion in the US.
The US needs infusions of culture and immigration every few generations.
Well you laugh or you cry. Bottom line is I'm not a U.S. citizen and don't live in the U.S. I have next to no power to do anything against that cowboy you elected. To make matters worse our prime minister wants to be his best buddy.
I'm glad that the US doesn't had out voting rights to every citizen on the globe. Your prime minister is obviously doing what he believes is in your country's best interest. It's far better for our cowboy to consider him a friend than an enemy or friend to terrorists.
I'm from England, and I know English history pretty well. England had a time like that, under the ruthless dictates of King John, where any person could be arrested on suspicion of an unspecified crime, on the basis of the accuser's uncorroborated "eyewitness testimony". So horrified did England become that it rose up in rebellion and demanded a written constitution (the Magna Carta).
America has a written constitution - although GWB tends to ignore it, and it hasn't been (for the most part) American citizens who have suffered - although there are exceptions. In consequence, there is virtually no chance of any kind of revolt against abuses of power. Nobody who is in a position to has enough to lose or enough to gain. Those who do - well, they're just labelled terrorists and carpet-bombed.
Did France ever revolt against English wars and do French citizen's have "Bill of Rights" in England?
This would be more along the line of England detaining French citizens for supporting Germany during WWII.
Of course, WWII was contiental war. It would be more along the lines of the French not supporting the EU so those French folks that are causing mass street displays would be vanished. The EU doesn't and most likely never will have that kind of power. The US could do it and mostly to foreigners. Foreigners don't fall under the "Bill of Rights" that's for US citizens. Just wait until Manifest Destiny 2 where the US decides to own the entire North and South American contients. We'd agree that China should be incharge of Asia, Arabia would manage the Middle East, and some war lord dicator would be rule Africa with an iron fist. EU would never get along with each other.
I need to stop reading alt history fiction. It's got me thinking that the world would be better off with a different political map.
That act says that the president cannot deploy the US military in the field for more than 100(?) days without congressional authorization. However, in this case (e.g, a pre-emptive strike) it has no bearing. The president is free under the law to do it, provided that he get congressional authorization within 100 days or withdraw the troops.
You know, as long as there are really no long term side effects, it might be a good thing. In a 100 hours, with enough bombs there won't be a need to deploy any troops. Democrats will hate this policy because any president can kick a few butts without spending any US lifes. Terrorists actions against the US wouldn't even be classified as a bad thing though. They would just encourage the US to nuke a few more nations.
I've always wanted to know if it was really true that we'd develop weird PSI powers or become mutants with alot of radiation. I guess we are about to find out.
Good of Kaku to promote the idea, though the world government stuff sounds way too hippy (not to mention being a very bad idea--if said unified government should turn despotic, there'll be no Berlin Wall to flee over).
O.K. If you're civilization can utilize either all planetary or all solar energy output, what is to stop individual nations from vaporizing each other? Forget nukes, they could physically burn contients (or the whole planet) off the map. We tend to think world government is a bad idea because of all of our history. It may be that unified government is the only option to prevent species destruction.
Eveyone knows that we cannot afford to start another war. That's why both Iran and North Korea can happily ignore what we say and do as they please. This draft changes that. We can still threaten them very effectively, and can afford it as well. Very, very dirty move. On par with our friendly Unix vendor, SCO.
As for North Korea, the US would be safer there by secertly agreeing with China that they readily invade the country after we've nuked the sites that China chooses there. South Korea may be a neat tech country, but China is the country that everyone in that region has to play nice with. China would love a valid reason for invading NK. Here's an idea, instead of us visibly bombing any one, we map out some secret weapons development plants in NK, and plant a suitcase nukes and set them off. When the global news catches wind that NK is testing low level open air nukes, we will politely ask our friends the Chineese to please take care of that internal Asian matter.
Iran is a different matter. I can't think of anyone else near by that we'd want to invade them. Heck, it would almost be better if that whole region was just "Arabia" or Persia than all those seperate countries. Maybe, in a few more thousand years, they can learn to get along together.
Not answering or hanging up quickly is actually the nicest thing you can do for them, short of buying what they're pitching. They are paying for employees and equipment by the minute. Assuming you're not paying by the minute for calls you receive, it's better to answer the phone and give them some plausible reason to hang on ("Oh, you want to talk to Dave! Hang on a sec"). Then set the handset down and see how long they wait. You could keep track of what bs line will keep them waiting the longest.
So, all I need to do on my home phone is have a setup where anyone who call (that isn't on my whitelist) is presented with the option of "please wait for when our qualified stranger contact manager is available" and have it wait for 30 minutes or so before it informs a human. Brillant. And if they think that they can automate calls add a random "voice in" and if a relatively human response isn't presented drop the call.
why a backpack? why not use wrist- or ankle-mounted generators, which get a lot more movement, so presumably the generator could be a lot smaller and lighter?
One word: Wires.
O.K. I could see having rechargable batteries in each shoe would be handy, but boots are most likely to get muddy or under 1-2 ft of water while the rest of the body is in a fairly normal condition. (I wouldn't want batteries by my feet while wading across a shallow stream.)
I hate to break it to all my fellow slashdotters, but a BS, MS, or PHD doesn't make you more intelligent than a HS dropout that works as an McDonald's Manager making 30-40K and has 4-5 kids.
Evolution is a process. It doesn't freaking select anything! ID may freaking select something. You have to prove an enity of actually meddling with humanity though to bring up ID though. We could invent some AI that lives in nano-bio-virsus that we inject into everyone and it subtly could control us or aliens could be meddling with us. When God decides to let the basic rules decide it is evolution.
I'd be curious about how humanity has evolved in the last 3000 years. Attendance at educational environments beyond HS or middle school do not show that US humans have evolved to be smarter than those that don't have that educational system in place.
What it does show is that those in attendance to any educational environments beyond HS produce vastly reduced numbers of offspring than those that didn't attend these environments. Attendance at an educational institution has no relation to an individual's intelligence.
What would be interesting is seeing a graphs of occupation and/or income vs number of childern. Hint: those that have less than 2 children are being selected against. Heck, put one up showing different religions vs number of childern or even number of toliets vs number of childern that would trully show a family stress level.
Evolution doesn't even care about numbers though. As long as we muddle through and reproduce and survive that's all that is needed.
Evolution optimizes for survival, nothing else. And unfortunately, in this country, there is a strong selective pressure against intelligence.
Sarcasm and "bling" on the other hand....
Oh, great so when those aliens finally come and visit, we'll just be extremely sarcastic and present them lots of shinies. Well, hopefully our shinies will be wanted by others. As long as we have something that we can sell, we'll do ok.
Plus the average user can always find ways to use up every byte on a HDD by screwing up application options. IE stil defaults to 10% of a HDD for its cache doesn't it? So there's 50GB that somebody will fill up.
But, that's the best place to grab stuff! You know what stuff as well.:) That's my one gripe about FireFox is that it's cache isn't easily viewable by Windows explorer. about:cache sucks. I want to just open up explorer and hit my cache directory and sort by file type and start hunting for those jpgs. Firefox makes that very difficult.
We're getting to a point in storage mediums where size is outgrowing necessity, at least in the consumer aspect. Geeks aside, what everyday user needs a half-terabyte of space?
Um, my mom for when she gets a tivo. That's about the only type of information that I'd trust to this long term without RAID. I'm waiting for some one to sell a RAID5 setup with 5 harddrives aimed at the low end market. RAID for the low end needs work. We are just now getting mirroring RAID for techies. I want Dell, Gateway, and HP to be pushing true hardware RAID5 for the grandmother users.
Maybe if it were some other stuff say a BMW at 90% off, then you'd see some kicking and shoving. But clothing? Shirts or trousers? Nah...
Also most guys know that there's a significant chance that the other guy would kill or severely harm you if you really piss them off. "Damn the consequences" is a common guy thing - just look at the newspapers of people killing and being killed. Mostly guys involved.
So for guys, shoving around other guys is a bad idea.
Ladies/girls often get away with shoving/smacking guys. We tend to be more bemused or sometimes even amused when that happens.
Ah, that's just 'cause we aren't allowed to hit yall over the head and drag ya home any more.
Course once you're home, then ya'll are allowed to hit back as much as you want that's not changed even with this whole civilaztion thing.
Guys know that we'd get our butt thrown in jail if we beat the crap or nearly killed each other that's why we have governments and police now a days. So we'll do what the king or his repesentives 'da government want us to do, plow the ground or build a big freaking burial artifact for his dad or other work like web design (haft have good PR now a days.) The king needs police or bullys of some sort to make sure all of us peasants do what are told. One thing the bullys learned way back was that, hey, them peasants work alot better if they don't beat the crap out of each other first.
That's why we aren't allowed to do that any more. The republics, democracys, communists, and corporate powers have all observed the same thing. The general exception is gladitor sports. That's different. That's us peasants paying the king or government to see each other beat the crap out of each other or kill each other. Big difference in that.
We've generally tried to tone down the killing, added a ball and called the result football.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see, we'll have duck hunt, deer hunt, rabbit hunt, squirrel hunt, and pokemon hunt. We'll have whack a mole, whack a gopher, or whack a random Nintendo hero/villian. We'll have several young mage with a wand games. We'll have several games like Zelda with bow & arrows.
One of the scariest things I ever did was play SystemShock2 in the dark...
For me it was Doom and the Damn Demons jumping out at about midnight at a friends house. Those things didn't look remotely realistic, but they still made me jump out of the chair. My friends got a big kick out of it all night.
Office 14? So what happened to Office 13?
Could it be that Microsoft are superstitious enough to not want to number a feature version of Office as Office 13?
Or am I reading too much into this, and did they just use Excel to do the numbering?
Maybe someone should point out to them that missing 13 doesn't make it any less Office 13.
Dude, this is just plain smart marketting from MS. There are lots of things that skip the number 13. People freakout if they are assigned anything with that digit. I could just see it now every IT problem in the company would be blamed on MS Office 13 by the average folks so they are going to skip it and go straight to MSO 14.
You'd think by now they'd have copied the history panel from Photoshop into all MSO products.
What the hell ever happened to putting the user first, to valuing and maximizing the benefit the project provides to non-developers?
That's for that other software building model. Closed source and pay some one else to do it.
If you don't like the way an F/OSS project has neglected your bugs/features, then you fork and fix it yourself. No one else is going to do it for you unless you pay them.
Notice I said "billions of people all over the world" Not "billions of people in one country".
I still think that you have your scale off. It may be a few thousand at most in each country. I'd be hard pressed to believe that there are 10 million diverse people from different countries activly working to bring down the U.S. (I'd believe it of a government, but not people in general we need leaders, PR, and a mission/religion to move that many bodies.)
Now, thousands disliking the action's of the U.S. is one thing. I doubt that they'd ever take action against a foreign government though.
Face it, five years from now, an article on a satirical pseudo-cult will be of passing interest. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be an article on it. But it does indicate that the relative priorities of Wikipedia contributors are very short sighted.
In 50-100 years, the AI overlords will think that the Wikipedia offers priceless research in what average individuals of this decade thought was important enough to properly document. That and priceless humor.
I have my own opinions. I don't need a hack writer trying to put forth their opinions as gospel to me.
If anything, I'd say I don't like how men are shown in FF games. They are looking more and more female. I don't want to play a big muscle bound character, but I'd like an average guy character that doesn't look female! I guess to start pleasing the female audience the next FF game should include the stick girl with no boobs, the big butt girl, the girl with thunder thighs, the short girl, and of course the girl with the good personality. The villian would be some one that looks similiar to Luna out of FFX-2 or Tidus from FFX.
The real problem is that billions of people all over the world want to see us suffer and die. You can't just keep making more enemies every day and not expect any consequences. Those billions of people who want to see you die will figure out a way to kill you or spend you into bankrupcy trying to defend yourself.
I think you have it wrong. The only two countries that have billions would India (1,080,264,388 July 2005 est. CIA World Fact Book) and China (1,306,313,812 July 2005 est. CIA World Fact Book.) all of Africa has 896,721,874 according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm. I don't recall any Chineese or Indian terrorists setting off nukes any where. Most African dicators seem happy enough to be warlords of their own country or butchering each other. Most African people most likely would just want stablity and a higher standard of living. What would really be scary is a unified Africa, which isn't likely to happen.
Few countries would come to the US's aid if they nuked Iran. War or no war. The act is simply too repulsive. Sure, there will be official policies, but the regular people on the ground: customs official, the policeman. They will not inforce official policy.
Nukes are 40s technology. The time to learn to get along is now.
Um, bows & arrows, pikes, and spears are all really old tech. It's way past time that we should learn to get along. Um, I hate to let you know, but it isn't as repulsive as you seem to think it is. Why is that? Nukes are a quick instant death. Repulsive would be wide scale genocide, bioware tailored viruses that go after a specific nation's populance, or nano-plagues that we've not even worked on yet. Repulsive is having a draft to have the military folks to send on a puntative mission. The general populance would almost always rather just carpet bomb those foreigners over there rather than have to get personally involved. Most of our citizens wouldn't care if most of Africa, the Middle East and some odd other countries were a nuclear waste land. As long as the weather doesn't blow it back on us, we'd be perfectly happy. Large scale numerical deaths are easy to abstract away. An individual can't picture a city dead in an instant so the thought doesn't get lodged in the head. There would be those that would want to change things to go back to mass warfare. They will be called barbarians that would rather send our civilians to war than just eliminate the threat.
The only hope Iran has of NOT being nuked is to be in a position of nuking the USA.
Um, they could have a treaty with some place like France that if they get pre-emptivly struck then France would automatically handle sending nukes to that offensive country. Of course, then it all come down do you trust France that much to take revenge for you?
How proud would you as an American be if you had nuked Iraq ... given that we now know that there was absolutely no trace of WMD's whatsoever?
Yeap, cause every thing that we'd even think of as a weapons R&D center would be toast.
Within 5 years Iran plans to have the bomb.
Iran will be pre-emptively nuked by the time they are ready to test their first bomb. Hopefully it won't result in the immediate retaliatory destruction of the USA by the nations of the world whom this attack will anger.
I'd think that France would openly give either the plans or a few working bombs to nations that they consider in danger of destruction. This would lead to a brief war with France as everyone knows France would rather surrender than have Paris nuked. England couldn't believe that they didn't think of it first.
I honestly think it would be in the US long term interests to outright invade Iran and Iraq and give them the option of becoming US states or the same status as Puerto Rico. People would moan and gripe that we'd offer statehood to a region with a large Muslim population. It would be culturally and resourcefully good for the US. Iran and Iraq have some of the world's largest oil fields. Why shouldn't we go for conquest phase? Europe went through a phase like that. The US has just been better at it cause we would repopulate the entire region with those born in the old US and all those presently in Iran or Iraq would be relocated into the central states. Then would come the migration of missionaries from the South attempting the convert those. Give 'em 3 generations and the muslims would be getting a big guilt check for being relocated, be a sizable minority in most states, and the fastest growing religion in the US.
The US needs infusions of culture and immigration every few generations.
Well you laugh or you cry. Bottom line is I'm not a U.S. citizen and don't live in the U.S. I have next to no power to do anything against that cowboy you elected. To make matters worse our prime minister wants to be his best buddy.
I'm glad that the US doesn't had out voting rights to every citizen on the globe. Your prime minister is obviously doing what he believes is in your country's best interest. It's far better for our cowboy to consider him a friend than an enemy or friend to terrorists.
I'm from England, and I know English history pretty well. England had a time like that, under the ruthless dictates of King John, where any person could be arrested on suspicion of an unspecified crime, on the basis of the accuser's uncorroborated "eyewitness testimony". So horrified did England become that it rose up in rebellion and demanded a written constitution (the Magna Carta).
America has a written constitution - although GWB tends to ignore it, and it hasn't been (for the most part) American citizens who have suffered - although there are exceptions. In consequence, there is virtually no chance of any kind of revolt against abuses of power. Nobody who is in a position to has enough to lose or enough to gain. Those who do - well, they're just labelled terrorists and carpet-bombed.
Did France ever revolt against English wars and do French citizen's have "Bill of Rights" in England?
This would be more along the line of England detaining French citizens for supporting Germany during WWII.
Of course, WWII was contiental war. It would be more along the lines of the French not supporting the EU so those French folks that are causing mass street displays would be vanished. The EU doesn't and most likely never will have that kind of power. The US could do it and mostly to foreigners. Foreigners don't fall under the "Bill of Rights" that's for US citizens. Just wait until Manifest Destiny 2 where the US decides to own the entire North and South American contients. We'd agree that China should be incharge of Asia, Arabia would manage the Middle East, and some war lord dicator would be rule Africa with an iron fist. EU would never get along with each other.
I need to stop reading alt history fiction. It's got me thinking that the world would be better off with a different political map.
That act says that the president cannot deploy the US military in the field for more than 100(?) days without congressional authorization. However, in this case (e.g, a pre-emptive strike) it has no bearing. The president is free under the law to do it, provided that he get congressional authorization within 100 days or withdraw the troops.
You know, as long as there are really no long term side effects, it might be a good thing. In a 100 hours, with enough bombs there won't be a need to deploy any troops. Democrats will hate this policy because any president can kick a few butts without spending any US lifes. Terrorists actions against the US wouldn't even be classified as a bad thing though. They would just encourage the US to nuke a few more nations.
I've always wanted to know if it was really true that we'd develop weird PSI powers or become mutants with alot of radiation. I guess we are about to find out.
Good of Kaku to promote the idea, though the world government stuff sounds way too hippy (not to mention being a very bad idea--if said unified government should turn despotic, there'll be no Berlin Wall to flee over).
O.K. If you're civilization can utilize either all planetary or all solar energy output, what is to stop individual nations from vaporizing each other? Forget nukes, they could physically burn contients (or the whole planet) off the map. We tend to think world government is a bad idea because of all of our history. It may be that unified government is the only option to prevent species destruction.
Eveyone knows that we cannot afford to start another war. That's why both Iran and North Korea can happily ignore what we say and do as they please. This draft changes that. We can still threaten them very effectively, and can afford it as well. Very, very dirty move. On par with our friendly Unix vendor, SCO.
As for North Korea, the US would be safer there by secertly agreeing with China that they readily invade the country after we've nuked the sites that China chooses there. South Korea may be a neat tech country, but China is the country that everyone in that region has to play nice with. China would love a valid reason for invading NK. Here's an idea, instead of us visibly bombing any one, we map out some secret weapons development plants in NK, and plant a suitcase nukes and set them off. When the global news catches wind that NK is testing low level open air nukes, we will politely ask our friends the Chineese to please take care of that internal Asian matter.
Iran is a different matter. I can't think of anyone else near by that we'd want to invade them. Heck, it would almost be better if that whole region was just "Arabia" or Persia than all those seperate countries. Maybe, in a few more thousand years, they can learn to get along together.
Not answering or hanging up quickly is actually the nicest thing you can do for them, short of buying what they're pitching. They are paying for employees and equipment by the minute. Assuming you're not paying by the minute for calls you receive, it's better to answer the phone and give them some plausible reason to hang on ("Oh, you want to talk to Dave! Hang on a sec"). Then set the handset down and see how long they wait. You could keep track of what bs line will keep them waiting the longest.
So, all I need to do on my home phone is have a setup where anyone who call (that isn't on my whitelist) is presented with the option of "please wait for when our qualified stranger contact manager is available" and have it wait for 30 minutes or so before it informs a human. Brillant. And if they think that they can automate calls add a random "voice in" and if a relatively human response isn't presented drop the call.
why a backpack?
why not use wrist- or ankle-mounted generators, which get a lot more movement, so presumably the generator could be a lot smaller and lighter?
One word: Wires.
O.K. I could see having rechargable batteries in each shoe would be handy, but boots are most likely to get muddy or under 1-2 ft of water while the rest of the body is in a fairly normal condition. (I wouldn't want batteries by my feet while wading across a shallow stream.)
I hate to break it to all my fellow slashdotters, but a BS, MS, or PHD doesn't make you more intelligent than a HS dropout that works as an McDonald's Manager making 30-40K and has 4-5 kids.
Evolution is a process. It doesn't freaking select anything! ID may freaking select something. You have to prove an enity of actually meddling with humanity though to bring up ID though. We could invent some AI that lives in nano-bio-virsus that we inject into everyone and it subtly could control us or aliens could be meddling with us. When God decides to let the basic rules decide it is evolution.
I'd be curious about how humanity has evolved in the last 3000 years. Attendance at educational environments beyond HS or middle school do not show that US humans have evolved to be smarter than those that don't have that educational system in place.
What it does show is that those in attendance to any educational environments beyond HS produce vastly reduced numbers of offspring than those that didn't attend these environments. Attendance at an educational institution has no relation to an individual's intelligence.
What would be interesting is seeing a graphs of occupation and/or income vs number of childern. Hint: those that have less than 2 children are being selected against. Heck, put one up showing different religions vs number of childern or even number of toliets vs number of childern that would trully show a family stress level.
Evolution doesn't even care about numbers though. As long as we muddle through and reproduce and survive that's all that is needed.
Evolution optimizes for survival, nothing else. And unfortunately, in this country, there is a strong selective pressure against intelligence.
Sarcasm and "bling" on the other hand....
Oh, great so when those aliens finally come and visit, we'll just be extremely sarcastic and present them lots of shinies. Well, hopefully our shinies will be wanted by others. As long as we have something that we can sell, we'll do ok.
Plus the average user can always find ways to use up every byte on a HDD by screwing up application options. IE stil defaults to 10% of a HDD for its cache doesn't it? So there's 50GB that somebody will fill up.
:) That's my one gripe about FireFox is that it's cache isn't easily viewable by Windows explorer. about:cache sucks. I want to just open up explorer and hit my cache directory and sort by file type and start hunting for those jpgs. Firefox makes that very difficult.
But, that's the best place to grab stuff! You know what stuff as well.
We're getting to a point in storage mediums where size is outgrowing necessity, at least in the consumer aspect. Geeks aside, what everyday user needs a half-terabyte of space?
Um, my mom for when she gets a tivo. That's about the only type of information that I'd trust to this long term without RAID. I'm waiting for some one to sell a RAID5 setup with 5 harddrives aimed at the low end market. RAID for the low end needs work. We are just now getting mirroring RAID for techies. I want Dell, Gateway, and HP to be pushing true hardware RAID5 for the grandmother users.
Maybe if it were some other stuff say a BMW at 90% off, then you'd see some kicking and shoving. But clothing? Shirts or trousers? Nah...
Also most guys know that there's a significant chance that the other guy would kill or severely harm you if you really piss them off. "Damn the consequences" is a common guy thing - just look at the newspapers of people killing and being killed. Mostly guys involved.
So for guys, shoving around other guys is a bad idea.
Ladies/girls often get away with shoving/smacking guys. We tend to be more bemused or sometimes even amused when that happens.
Ah, that's just 'cause we aren't allowed to hit yall over the head and drag ya home any more.
Course once you're home, then ya'll are allowed to hit back as much as you want that's not changed even with this whole civilaztion thing.
Guys know that we'd get our butt thrown in jail if we beat the crap or nearly killed each other that's why we have governments and police now a days. So we'll do what the king or his repesentives 'da government want us to do, plow the ground or build a big freaking burial artifact for his dad or other work like web design (haft have good PR now a days.) The king needs police or bullys of some sort to make sure all of us peasants do what are told. One thing the bullys learned way back was that, hey, them peasants work alot better if they don't beat the crap out of each other first.
That's why we aren't allowed to do that any more. The republics, democracys, communists, and corporate powers have all observed the same thing. The general exception is gladitor sports. That's different. That's us peasants paying the king or government to see each other beat the crap out of each other or kill each other. Big difference in that.
We've generally tried to tone down the killing, added a ball and called the result football.
Sounds like someone got funding from combining two of the coolest buzzwords from the 1950s.
Now, if I can only get funding for my fusion powered flying car idea, I'll be set.