I'll go a step further and say ABS should be on 100% of the time (certain serious off-roading situations are an exception, but in those cases you wouldn't be moving fast enough for ABS to kick in anyway). Numerous tests have shown that even professional race car drivers can't out-brake an equally skilled driver in an ABS-equipped car. When ABS started showing up on high performance cars, it was universally scoffed at by experienced racers, but those days are gone. There just isn't any good reason to disengage it.
Yeah, we Americans are really taking advantage of our access to the vast Iraqui oil supplies -- not to mention the close proximity of our huge military force to the OPEC nations. Why, OPEC is trembling in their boots while we drain Iraq dry! Read all about it here, here, and here.
I'm not forgetting the TIME aspect, but you're pulling numbers out of your ass and presenting them as fact -- again. Few people are paid to travel back and forth to work. The only economic benefit we'd realize would be reduced fuel expenses, and whatever ephemeral side effects we might see from slightly increased liesure time. Those would probably be more than offset by the cost of destroying the enormous auto industry, damaging the oil business, and ripple-effect costs to dependent industries. Saving commute time is primarily a convenience issue.
I own four cars, a truck, two motorcycles, and a race car. I fully realize the hypothetical benefit of forcing everyone to use exactly the same equipment. However, that doesn't make it a good answer. We could save also vast amounts of money and resources by forcing everyone to dress the same, or by rigidly controlling what everyone eats, but nobody wants to live that way. I happen to think that everything Ford builds is total crap. I have a couple of Mustang racing buddies who think my Viper is crap. Who's right? Who gets to decide what drivetrain configuration is finally and permanently "good enough" for everybody, everywhere? Again, you have departed so far from reality that it isn't even funny. If people didn't want to expend huge amounts of money on vehicles -- they WOULDN'T. Most cars last far, far longer than the time people keep them. This is like a giant neon sign explaining the most important point you're missing -- you aren't solving a problem that anyone cares much about -- particularly relevant to the cost and disruption it engenders.
Regarding anonyminity, the fact remains -- if you have to tell a centralized system where to pick you up and drop you off, you've given up a significant part of the anonyminity people enjoy with their own vehicles.
Everyone hates inner city driving? Do some research. The numbers of people who live and work in cities are a *very* small segment of the population -- no more than twenty percent. Most of us never go anywhere near a city. Once again, there is no significant impetus for gutting our society just because some people hate inner city driving. (By the way, you did not originally restrict your statement to "inner city" driving.)
Regarding replacing jets -- that was your idea, not mine. You said, specifically, "If the trains were fast enough, they could be a viable alternative to jets for going most places in America." I fail to see how I was supposed to infer that you were actually talking about local light rail. As for your "dumbass" comment -- fuck you. You're the one who is barely able to communicate on an adult level.
Your "federal project" piece is where your true ignorance shines through.
Turning to the government to give "everyone" a job -- and nevermind that few people have any interest in road construction, even as a stopgap during unemployment -- amounts to building a welfare state. Worse yet, by your own admission, this would only provide "months" of employment at best, since your plan will supposedly permit hyper-accelerated construction schedules, the likes of which have never been seen. Hell, come to think of it, I didn't even begin to pick apart the stupidity of this federal employment idea. You previously said, "this army of workers will transit around the country" -- again, your urge to indulge your childish fantasy totally ignores how the real world operates. People don't have any great desire to be trucked around the country to perform manual labor in service of the few assholes like you who think everyone's lives revolve around a city.
As for shutting down the city, again that was YOUR statement, not mine. Dumbass indeed. So now you're putting your little scheme into operation with the assistance of the national guard? Holy shit, here I thought you were just some stupid college boy pie-in-the-sky dreamer, probably with a bit too much socialism in your blood -- but no, you're a full-on wannabe tin-horn di
In fact, I do think your reply was typical anti-MS rhetoric. This is not diminished by the fact that your post wasn't of the foaming-at-the-mouth variety.
I do apologize (very faintly) for my misinterpretation of your post. It was so poorly written that I failed to recognize when you completely abandoned the topic of discussion and closed with a non sequitur. After all, the subject was "using Excel as a database". What OS you'd like to use is wholly irrelevant.
For your sake, I hope English is your second language (in which case I will further apologize for any related comments I have made). If, however, you are a native speaker of the language, I strongly recommend that you not engage in condescension until your grasp of the language is up to the task.
For the record, there was no trolling involved -- I was genuinely curious about whether you had some specific Linux-based solution in mind. I doubted it, and expressed that doubt, but I was certainly interested in hearing what you had in mind. Apparently, I gave you more credit than you warranted.
And what software would give the Linux user Excel-like convenience with Access-like "suitability of purpopse"? Or were you just invoking the name because all problems stem from Microsoft, and are magically solved by a not-Microsoft OS?
You spent a lot of time on this, and I'm bored today, so I'm going to take some time to explain the many, many reasons this idea is seriously flawed in almost as much detail.
we build small, automated carlike vehicles that traverse a network of tracks all through a city
We have those. They're car-like because... get this... they're actually cars. The network of tracks are called "roads". We have TRILLIONS of dollars invested in this system, and most people are pretty happy with it. Happy enough that most peoples' second largest expenditure is directly related to this activity.
For boarding, each citizens presses a button on their cell phone and specifies what time and which transit station they wish to board at, as well as destination.
I propose an easier system: I go into my garage, I get into my car-like vehicle, and I go somewhere. I don't wait. I'm not stranded if my cell battery is dead. I don't have to ask permission, or tell anyone else what I'm doing.
My system has an added benefit: if I'm not in a hurry, I can sample what I call "the scenic route". On a nice day, I take the top off the car and hit the back roads with -- gasp -- NO DESTINATION AT ALL. Madness.
Some contain cushions and bedding and curtains so that people could sleep or engage in sex while traveling.
You're kidding, right? I mean, you're proposing that people use shared, public vehicles for this purpose? You either haven't actually had sex yet (this IS slashdot after all), or you've never been in a city where taxis are the primary means of transportation. They rapidly become rather disgusting even without people ordering up versions specifically for screwing and sleeping.
a Morman race car driver in a pickup truck may never die in a car wreck
What the hell does that mean???
New social interactions would become possible.
Sorry, but this entire section is just silly. We shouldn't need to gut and revise the entire transportation infrstructure just so you can finally get laid. Navigation isn't that mind-bogglingly difficult. Since you're clearly very Internet-oriented, just about everything except groceries (and even those, in places) can be ordered online for comparable or better prices. About the only truly "new social interaction" is being able to order up a sex-taxi on your cell phone, and I remain unconvinced about the value or attraction of that facet of your plan.
An entire profession would be eliminated, freeing up workers for other sections of the economy.
We have the worst unemployment in a decade, and you're trying to present the destruction of an entire profession as a benefit? Other sectors of the economy don't NEED more people. Self-diagnosis is irrelevant. It's rarely the diagnosis of a problem which occupies much of a mechanic's time. Standardization would be nice, but that doesn't necessarily mean something will break less (look at MS Windows, for example). I also think you severely underestimate the impact of putting every driver in the world out of work.
The population might become slightly to considerably healthier.
Ridiculous. If anything, a fully automated system of transportation will encourage people to use it more -- less walking, less biking. Your introduction of "transit centers" occurs here for the first time, suggesting your proposal doesn't include front-door service, making it even less likely that people will have any interest in this plan.
you could pay $15 extra and you get a car maintained by Bob's Bitchin' Rides that is painted a different color on the outside and has an extremely powerful music system with leather seats and complimentary champagne
You should try renting a specialty vehicle some day. It'll cost you a hell of a lot more than a $15 premium (sans champagne). This well-meaning but naive oversimplification only further serves to call into question the validity of the rest of your assertions.
Now I can hear some of you saying that if the game was any good, this wouldn't happen. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is not always the case, and frequently couldn't be farther from the truth. This happens all over, and not just with the smaller development houses either.
So in other words, Microsoft is just like every other game company in this regard, despite what your opening paragraph seems to imply.
It is impossible for a company on the way down to remake itself.
Neverunderestimate the power of vast cash reserves. IBM is a great example -- they suffered something like NINE consecutive years of severe losses into the early 90's. Microsoft isn't anywhere close to "dying", and it certainly can't be compared to the relatively tiny, limited companies you listed.
Microsoft has always had a rather poor-quality marketing department. It would be a mistake to draw many conclusions about the rest of the company from observations of their marketing group. (Ironically, that point greatly weakens my earlier post except in the rather limited context of their FUD efforts, which I certainly won't deny are real and often painfully transparent.)
A total cost of ownership (TCO) study at XO, comparing the annualized TCO of comparably configured servers built on Linux and the Microsoft solution for Windows Web hosting, (is this a fair comparison, i.e. apples to apples?) reveals that a Linux system costs nearly $1,550 more per server per year than its Windows 2000-based counterpart. The key difference lies not in the cost of hardware or operating system software but in the annual cost of engineering, administration, and security support. (detailed support on file for this claim?)
Linux-based systems are much more subject to hacker attacks than systems built on the Microsoft solution for Windows Web hosting(support on file?)
The point you Linux fanboys are missing in your frenzy to publicly jerk off over relatively boring internal discussions is that they're at least interested in important questions like whether they're making apples-to-apples comparisons and whether they have supporting documentation on file.
You may disagree with their message and methods, or with their conclusions, and you probably won't even concede the validity of their definition of "apples-to-apples", but this is far more responsible than a great deal of the raw bullshit which is accepted as fact 24x7 here on slashdot, and certainly more responsible than Microsoft is ever given credit for around here.
DOS INT 21 services were non-reentrant but it was really, really easy to write your own routines (or buy off-the-shelf replacements), otherwise ten years of TSR's (Terminate & Stay Resident) applications wouldn't have worked well. Also, back then BIOS routines (including keyboard reads at INT 8, disk IO at INT 13, DPMI at INT 31, and so on) were still useful, and they are reentrant.
There wasn't really any attempt to change this (let alone "fix" it). DOS was never intended to multi-task, and since it's services were pretty simple it was common practice -- really just an automatic assumption -- that if you needed reentrancy you'd use your own routines or buy a library. The only way interrupt-driven file IO would corrupt extant IO would be if the interrupt handler was improperly written at a very basic level. It was easy and perfectly possible to do overlapping background IO (remember having to load background disk cache utilities?).
Good old INT 29. I made a lot of money off that interrupt... and the programming was a hell of a lot more fun than any decent paying IT jobs out there today.
Not that I'm in any great rush to die myself, of course, but I have no illusions that I would be chosen to survive. I also doubt I'd "accept" that fate so meekly. Nor I have any insight about how the survivors should be chosen. In fact, it would be a long, hard road to get to the point where the species could survive off-world without the support of Earth, so there is plenty of time to work out those details.
I further suppose that if we had the kind of advance-warning and technology that would be required to allow us to seriously consider saving "everyone" (or any significant portion), we'd probably also have plenty of time to consider and implement ways to destroy the threat (which is not the case with present technology, as I understand it.)
It should also be said that I don't see this as a response to a threat. I would prefer we have people living in all sorts of places off-Earth in self-sufficient ways when that big rock finally lines up with our patch of dirt. Survival comes as a side effect of advancement. The desire for survival makes a pretty great motivator, though.
I bitch about losing jobs to other countries, don't wear Nikes,and use RAM made in Boise, Idaho. It's about putting your money where your mouth is, as much as is possible.
Absolutely. I've "converted" quite a few people here at work to that same line of thought. I am by no means obsessive about it (I know a couple people who are), and I have no illusions about the likelihood that it'll make a difference, but it can't hurt to make the effort.
But seriously, we want to make Mars inhabitable. Why not start a little smaller there pancho. Like Africa.
The absolute worst, most inhospitable Saharan desert is enormously more inhabitable than any part of Mars. Vast areas of Africa are positively lush paradises. Relatively speaking, much of Africa is, in fact.
Why do you have a problem with taking Mars for granted? In fact, what does that even mean? If *we* make it inhabitable, I'd say we have every right to use and abuse it to whatever extent we wish. It isn't as if it's teeming with native life. Frankly I couldn't give a damn if a few random spores or bacteria or whatever gets whacked in the process. Given the alternative, which is mass extinction from a meteor strike -- which the geological record shows WILL happen -- I'm all for kickstarting the terraforming of Mars ASAP.
Finally, I don't think you have a firm grasp of the concept. You can't "terraform Africa", or even more ridiculously confine it to "the desert in southern Africa" as the other guy states. The process is one of GLOBAL atmospheric change. It would take a long time because it's a MASSIVE change, and it would be a fairly cataclysmic process on a world-wide scale. You'll have to look to some other pie-in-the-sky technology for greening the deserts. Terraforming isn't at all related to what you're proposing.
The same might be said for your post. Besides, some people need things spelled out for them. Get it? Spelled out? I should charge you people admission.
Wow, punctuation and everything. With that level of effort and maybe a pass from a spell checker, we might have spent our time having a productive on-topic discussion. Funny how that literacy thing helps you make progress, isn't it?
As far as I can tell, your pursuit of industrial design is wholly irrelevant to this discussion.
It doesn't do anything unless you have a program called "dc" on your machine. I believe that was a "disk compare" program under older versions of Windows left over from the MS-DOS days. It might be in Win98, but I don't think it was part of any later versions.
No idea what it does beyond piping some junk through dc. Hmm. I probably have an old less-than-1GB drive sitting around somewhere with Win95 or DOS on it...
"Next urban legend says, that IL-2 is coded in Java. Again, this assumption is based on rumors only, and has no substance. Java is used in IL-2, but just in small part. C++ is mostly used in coding this baby."
"Uses dirty Java by mixing Java with C++, such that logic and part of the game engine is in Java but all the graphics are in C++."
According to another writeup (which I've been unable to track down again), it essentially used a homebrew Java-based language internally for scripting the user interface and pilot AI. It sounded like there wasn't even a VM or anything along those lines involved.
Of course, it's easy to find fanboy sites breathlessly claiming it's "90% Java"...
Slashdot Mirror
I'll go a step further and say ABS should be on 100% of the time (certain serious off-roading situations are an exception, but in those cases you wouldn't be moving fast enough for ABS to kick in anyway). Numerous tests have shown that even professional race car drivers can't out-brake an equally skilled driver in an ABS-equipped car. When ABS started showing up on high performance cars, it was universally scoffed at by experienced racers, but those days are gone. There just isn't any good reason to disengage it.
any foreign countries that they find Oil in
Yeah, we Americans are really taking advantage of our access to the vast Iraqui oil supplies -- not to mention the close proximity of our huge military force to the OPEC nations. Why, OPEC is trembling in their boots while we drain Iraq dry! Read all about it here, here, and here.
Agreed, drop the intercourse-on-wheels angle.
I'm not forgetting the TIME aspect, but you're pulling numbers out of your ass and presenting them as fact -- again. Few people are paid to travel back and forth to work. The only economic benefit we'd realize would be reduced fuel expenses, and whatever ephemeral side effects we might see from slightly increased liesure time. Those would probably be more than offset by the cost of destroying the enormous auto industry, damaging the oil business, and ripple-effect costs to dependent industries. Saving commute time is primarily a convenience issue.
I own four cars, a truck, two motorcycles, and a race car. I fully realize the hypothetical benefit of forcing everyone to use exactly the same equipment. However, that doesn't make it a good answer. We could save also vast amounts of money and resources by forcing everyone to dress the same, or by rigidly controlling what everyone eats, but nobody wants to live that way. I happen to think that everything Ford builds is total crap. I have a couple of Mustang racing buddies who think my Viper is crap. Who's right? Who gets to decide what drivetrain configuration is finally and permanently "good enough" for everybody, everywhere? Again, you have departed so far from reality that it isn't even funny. If people didn't want to expend huge amounts of money on vehicles -- they WOULDN'T. Most cars last far, far longer than the time people keep them. This is like a giant neon sign explaining the most important point you're missing -- you aren't solving a problem that anyone cares much about -- particularly relevant to the cost and disruption it engenders.
Regarding anonyminity, the fact remains -- if you have to tell a centralized system where to pick you up and drop you off, you've given up a significant part of the anonyminity people enjoy with their own vehicles.
Everyone hates inner city driving? Do some research. The numbers of people who live and work in cities are a *very* small segment of the population -- no more than twenty percent. Most of us never go anywhere near a city. Once again, there is no significant impetus for gutting our society just because some people hate inner city driving. (By the way, you did not originally restrict your statement to "inner city" driving.)
Regarding replacing jets -- that was your idea, not mine. You said, specifically, "If the trains were fast enough, they could be a viable alternative to jets for going most places in America." I fail to see how I was supposed to infer that you were actually talking about local light rail. As for your "dumbass" comment -- fuck you. You're the one who is barely able to communicate on an adult level.
Your "federal project" piece is where your true ignorance shines through.
Turning to the government to give "everyone" a job -- and nevermind that few people have any interest in road construction, even as a stopgap during unemployment -- amounts to building a welfare state. Worse yet, by your own admission, this would only provide "months" of employment at best, since your plan will supposedly permit hyper-accelerated construction schedules, the likes of which have never been seen. Hell, come to think of it, I didn't even begin to pick apart the stupidity of this federal employment idea. You previously said, "this army of workers will transit around the country" -- again, your urge to indulge your childish fantasy totally ignores how the real world operates. People don't have any great desire to be trucked around the country to perform manual labor in service of the few assholes like you who think everyone's lives revolve around a city.
As for shutting down the city, again that was YOUR statement, not mine. Dumbass indeed. So now you're putting your little scheme into operation with the assistance of the national guard? Holy shit, here I thought you were just some stupid college boy pie-in-the-sky dreamer, probably with a bit too much socialism in your blood -- but no, you're a full-on wannabe tin-horn di
In fact, I do think your reply was typical anti-MS rhetoric. This is not diminished by the fact that your post wasn't of the foaming-at-the-mouth variety.
I do apologize (very faintly) for my misinterpretation of your post. It was so poorly written that I failed to recognize when you completely abandoned the topic of discussion and closed with a non sequitur. After all, the subject was "using Excel as a database". What OS you'd like to use is wholly irrelevant.
For your sake, I hope English is your second language (in which case I will further apologize for any related comments I have made). If, however, you are a native speaker of the language, I strongly recommend that you not engage in condescension until your grasp of the language is up to the task.
For the record, there was no trolling involved -- I was genuinely curious about whether you had some specific Linux-based solution in mind. I doubted it, and expressed that doubt, but I was certainly interested in hearing what you had in mind. Apparently, I gave you more credit than you warranted.
And what software would give the Linux user Excel-like convenience with Access-like "suitability of purpopse"? Or were you just invoking the name because all problems stem from Microsoft, and are magically solved by a not-Microsoft OS?
You spent a lot of time on this, and I'm bored today, so I'm going to take some time to explain the many, many reasons this idea is seriously flawed in almost as much detail.
we build small, automated carlike vehicles that traverse a network of tracks all through a city
We have those. They're car-like because... get this... they're actually cars. The network of tracks are called "roads". We have TRILLIONS of dollars invested in this system, and most people are pretty happy with it. Happy enough that most peoples' second largest expenditure is directly related to this activity.
For boarding, each citizens presses a button on their cell phone and specifies what time and which transit station they wish to board at, as well as destination.
I propose an easier system: I go into my garage, I get into my car-like vehicle, and I go somewhere. I don't wait. I'm not stranded if my cell battery is dead. I don't have to ask permission, or tell anyone else what I'm doing.
My system has an added benefit: if I'm not in a hurry, I can sample what I call "the scenic route". On a nice day, I take the top off the car and hit the back roads with -- gasp -- NO DESTINATION AT ALL. Madness.
Some contain cushions and bedding and curtains so that people could sleep or engage in sex while traveling.
You're kidding, right? I mean, you're proposing that people use shared, public vehicles for this purpose? You either haven't actually had sex yet (this IS slashdot after all), or you've never been in a city where taxis are the primary means of transportation. They rapidly become rather disgusting even without people ordering up versions specifically for screwing and sleeping.
a Morman race car driver in a pickup truck may never die in a car wreck
What the hell does that mean???
New social interactions would become possible.
Sorry, but this entire section is just silly. We shouldn't need to gut and revise the entire transportation infrstructure just so you can finally get laid. Navigation isn't that mind-bogglingly difficult. Since you're clearly very Internet-oriented, just about everything except groceries (and even those, in places) can be ordered online for comparable or better prices. About the only truly "new social interaction" is being able to order up a sex-taxi on your cell phone, and I remain unconvinced about the value or attraction of that facet of your plan.
An entire profession would be eliminated, freeing up workers for other sections of the economy.
We have the worst unemployment in a decade, and you're trying to present the destruction of an entire profession as a benefit? Other sectors of the economy don't NEED more people. Self-diagnosis is irrelevant. It's rarely the diagnosis of a problem which occupies much of a mechanic's time. Standardization would be nice, but that doesn't necessarily mean something will break less (look at MS Windows, for example). I also think you severely underestimate the impact of putting every driver in the world out of work.
The population might become slightly to considerably healthier.
Ridiculous. If anything, a fully automated system of transportation will encourage people to use it more -- less walking, less biking. Your introduction of "transit centers" occurs here for the first time, suggesting your proposal doesn't include front-door service, making it even less likely that people will have any interest in this plan.
you could pay $15 extra and you get a car maintained by Bob's Bitchin' Rides that is painted a different color on the outside and has an extremely powerful music system with leather seats and complimentary champagne
You should try renting a specialty vehicle some day. It'll cost you a hell of a lot more than a $15 premium (sans champagne). This well-meaning but naive oversimplification only further serves to call into question the validity of the rest of your assertions.
Now I can hear some of you saying that if the game was any good, this wouldn't happen. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is not always the case, and frequently couldn't be farther from the truth. This happens all over, and not just with the smaller development houses either.
So in other words, Microsoft is just like every other game company in this regard, despite what your opening paragraph seems to imply.
Cool. I *was* a bit confused by what seemed to be a sudden reversal in what you were saying... :)
It is impossible for a company on the way down to remake itself.
Neverunderestimate the power of vast cash reserves. IBM is a great example -- they suffered something like NINE consecutive years of severe losses into the early 90's. Microsoft isn't anywhere close to "dying", and it certainly can't be compared to the relatively tiny, limited companies you listed.
Microsoft has always had a rather poor-quality marketing department. It would be a mistake to draw many conclusions about the rest of the company from observations of their marketing group. (Ironically, that point greatly weakens my earlier post except in the rather limited context of their FUD efforts, which I certainly won't deny are real and often painfully transparent.)
Sorry, DPMI wasn't BIOS of course... I was getting carried away cataloging interrupts as they percolated to the surface... :)
A total cost of ownership (TCO) study at XO, comparing the annualized TCO of comparably configured servers built on Linux and the Microsoft solution for Windows Web hosting, (is this a fair comparison, i.e. apples to apples?) reveals that a Linux system costs nearly $1,550 more per server per year than its Windows 2000-based counterpart. The key difference lies not in the cost of hardware or operating system software but in the annual cost of engineering, administration, and security support. (detailed support on file for this claim?)
Linux-based systems are much more subject to hacker attacks than systems built on the Microsoft solution for Windows Web hosting(support on file?)
The point you Linux fanboys are missing in your frenzy to publicly jerk off over relatively boring internal discussions is that they're at least interested in important questions like whether they're making apples-to-apples comparisons and whether they have supporting documentation on file.
You may disagree with their message and methods, or with their conclusions, and you probably won't even concede the validity of their definition of "apples-to-apples", but this is far more responsible than a great deal of the raw bullshit which is accepted as fact 24x7 here on slashdot, and certainly more responsible than Microsoft is ever given credit for around here.
DOS INT 21 services were non-reentrant but it was really, really easy to write your own routines (or buy off-the-shelf replacements), otherwise ten years of TSR's (Terminate & Stay Resident) applications wouldn't have worked well. Also, back then BIOS routines (including keyboard reads at INT 8, disk IO at INT 13, DPMI at INT 31, and so on) were still useful, and they are reentrant.
There wasn't really any attempt to change this (let alone "fix" it). DOS was never intended to multi-task, and since it's services were pretty simple it was common practice -- really just an automatic assumption -- that if you needed reentrancy you'd use your own routines or buy a library. The only way interrupt-driven file IO would corrupt extant IO would be if the interrupt handler was improperly written at a very basic level. It was easy and perfectly possible to do overlapping background IO (remember having to load background disk cache utilities?).
Good old INT 29. I made a lot of money off that interrupt... and the programming was a hell of a lot more fun than any decent paying IT jobs out there today.
The species, of course.
Not that I'm in any great rush to die myself, of course, but I have no illusions that I would be chosen to survive. I also doubt I'd "accept" that fate so meekly. Nor I have any insight about how the survivors should be chosen. In fact, it would be a long, hard road to get to the point where the species could survive off-world without the support of Earth, so there is plenty of time to work out those details.
I further suppose that if we had the kind of advance-warning and technology that would be required to allow us to seriously consider saving "everyone" (or any significant portion), we'd probably also have plenty of time to consider and implement ways to destroy the threat (which is not the case with present technology, as I understand it.)
It should also be said that I don't see this as a response to a threat. I would prefer we have people living in all sorts of places off-Earth in self-sufficient ways when that big rock finally lines up with our patch of dirt. Survival comes as a side effect of advancement. The desire for survival makes a pretty great motivator, though.
I bitch about losing jobs to other countries, don't wear Nikes,and use RAM made in Boise, Idaho. It's about putting your money where your mouth is, as much as is possible.
Absolutely. I've "converted" quite a few people here at work to that same line of thought. I am by no means obsessive about it (I know a couple people who are), and I have no illusions about the likelihood that it'll make a difference, but it can't hurt to make the effort.
In a society where trash like Stephen King is treated as great literature, even bad sci fi is pretty damned good.
But seriously, we want to make Mars inhabitable. Why not start a little smaller there pancho. Like Africa.
The absolute worst, most inhospitable Saharan desert is enormously more inhabitable than any part of Mars. Vast areas of Africa are positively lush paradises. Relatively speaking, much of Africa is, in fact.
Why do you have a problem with taking Mars for granted? In fact, what does that even mean? If *we* make it inhabitable, I'd say we have every right to use and abuse it to whatever extent we wish. It isn't as if it's teeming with native life. Frankly I couldn't give a damn if a few random spores or bacteria or whatever gets whacked in the process. Given the alternative, which is mass extinction from a meteor strike -- which the geological record shows WILL happen -- I'm all for kickstarting the terraforming of Mars ASAP.
Finally, I don't think you have a firm grasp of the concept. You can't "terraform Africa", or even more ridiculously confine it to "the desert in southern Africa" as the other guy states. The process is one of GLOBAL atmospheric change. It would take a long time because it's a MASSIVE change, and it would be a fairly cataclysmic process on a world-wide scale. You'll have to look to some other pie-in-the-sky technology for greening the deserts. Terraforming isn't at all related to what you're proposing.
*shrug* I had time to kill.
The same might be said for your post. Besides, some people need things spelled out for them. Get it? Spelled out? I should charge you people admission.
Engrish?
Wow, punctuation and everything. With that level of effort and maybe a pass from a spell checker, we might have spent our time having a productive on-topic discussion. Funny how that literacy thing helps you make progress, isn't it?
As far as I can tell, your pursuit of industrial design is wholly irrelevant to this discussion.
[quote]they are truly clueless that there is life beyond redmond.[/quote]
Although there is no life, apparently, beyond UBBCode...
It doesn't do anything unless you have a program called "dc" on your machine.
I believe that was a "disk compare" program under older versions of Windows left over from the MS-DOS days. It might be in Win98, but I don't think it was part of any later versions.
No idea what it does beyond piping some junk through dc. Hmm. I probably have an old less-than-1GB drive sitting around somewhere with Win95 or DOS on it...
You're two for two -- you make a good point, and the 350Z does suck. :)
Only in the most tenacious sense:
avsim.com
"Next urban legend says, that IL-2 is coded in Java. Again, this assumption is based on rumors only, and has no substance. Java is used in IL-2, but just in small part. C++ is mostly used in coding this baby."
rolemaker.dk
"Uses dirty Java by mixing Java with C++, such that logic and part of the game engine is in Java but all the graphics are in C++."
According to another writeup (which I've been unable to track down again), it essentially used a homebrew Java-based language internally for scripting the user interface and pilot AI. It sounded like there wasn't even a VM or anything along those lines involved.
Of course, it's easy to find fanboy sites breathlessly claiming it's "90% Java"...
The only possible people who would be affected would be Windows users.
In other words, almost everybody.
You actually misspelled "use"?
Surely that's a sign of the End Times.