I doubt that anything more than uncomplicated single cell organisms could live on a moon like the one you describe, the gravitational effects wouldn't allow it if it were too near to the gas giant. Just think, every day an organism could be ripped apart by gravity, burned alive by molten lava, blown up by volcanoes or fall down crevasses due to tectonic stress... what a horrid life:0(
Seriously though, in order to be habitable for life complex beings, a dependancy on the sun might be necessary. There are no gas giants in the inner solarsystem, because they would not be able to exist there. (I accept more complex life may exist in oceans on worlds which have hot cores, and we should explore our own solar system for this before jumping to the conclusion). If we can only detect these sorts of planets, we only have a tiny chance of finding complex life.
... so what about software architects and software designers (to name but two)?
You have to know the code and think around corners/be creative. No creativity = no ideas = no program to solve problem.
I often liken programming, architecture and design work to making a jigsaw puzzle whilst having no clue what the end picture will be. In order to visualise the end result, I have to be able to mentally fill in the gaps in between.. AND I have to know the code AND be able to simplify and abstract concepts. Those things take both sides of my brain:)
So you sir, are talking bollocks - no offence intended.
EU legislation is changing the way we live in Europe (our part of it, at least), and though it isn't always comfortable, it is very useful, makes sense, and often means less cost, less administration (true, the EU is very bureaucratic, but think of all the national instituions that are no longer needed due to the EU's multilateral institutions)
<offtopicrant>
What? You mean like the drivers licences that we carry around now - a) we have a picture card b) we have a paper counterpart.
If I could carry one or the other it makes sense, but when it comes to using it, we have to produce both??. Crazy. Whats the point? I have to not only carry around a wad of paper and a card but also pay EXTRA for the convienience? And what about all the additional paperwork that has to be carried out? I have to get it signed by pope john paul before I can send it off and then if I sign it wrong they'll just send it back! What rubbish.
Or how about the man prosecuted for selling bananas in lbs instead of kilos? <sarcasm>Sure, that makes life much easier and makes complete sense.</sarcasm>
</offtopicrant>
Anyway, I've read elsewhere on the threads here that its not the EU anyway, its a different body (EC or sommit) so the point is somewhat moot.
Ok, I'm sure loads of other countries have participated, but it seems to me that this will be nothing but red tape to businesses.
As a citizen of "europe" I have yet to see the EU write one single peice of legislation that a) makes sense, b) actually has an effect other than to annoy people c) does any good. d) doesnt cost tonnes of money for sod all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad government are trying to get a hand into formalising these sorts of things, but what we really need is competant people advising them. I mean, look at what incompetance in these matters gave us the last time.
in most systems I see, the majority of code is the same structural/functional stuff holding it together.
However, what you fail to see is that the "structural/functional stuff" can combine with other structural functional stuff in potentially thousands of different combinations at any point within any part of on section of code. We call it plumbing, and its the plumbing that causes most of the problems in software design. Concurrency is another, but thats a different kettle of salmon.
The "application specific" algorithms make up quite a small part of the code. I've got someone else's "advanced calculation code" in front of me right now, and 98% of what I see can be described by standard patterns. They are put together in what appears to be a creative fashion (although a bit lacking in performance - but I'll fix that).
The code its self may be in a standard form, because he's (sensibly) coded it to be readable and standard. Imagine though, if another programmer now tacked on his own functions/objects somewhere else in the system that called this function slightly incorrectly, or passed an incorrect value or even slightly misinterpretted the resulting figures. Multiply by another 1000 calls that could possibly be made by recurrance, other functions etc and you can see that just because its written in a standard way theres alot of scope for failure. You simply do not have the single rule in programming that "If you do this it will fall over". Unless of course, you're running WINNT and then pretty much everything you do will make it fall over;0)
Plus what about wind, wave and solar power energy to do this?
And whatever happened to geothermal energy or has everyone in the commercial world simply forgotten that our entire planet core is made of molten lava?
Any one of these alternate fuels could turn water into hydrogen via electricity. Its just I suspect that either:
a)oil companies dont want us to use them until they've squeezed every last drop out of the ground, and are therefore currently FUDing the ideas out of existance.
b)governments have lucrative deals with the oil companies and are making far too much income on pollution taxes and fuel taxes to even bother thinking about it yet
c) Its expensive to decomission all those coal/oil burning/nuclear reactors. (This is the standard line).
Saying all this, the UK is getting a new wind farm off the coast somewhere. Maybe its going that way.
Taking into account the majority of comments on the board about heat/knocking/transportation whatever, I'd like to offer another possible cause of drive failure.
About 2 years or so ago I purchased a seagate 8.1g (dont laugh) hard drive. It ran fine for ages, but then one day the IDE cable became dislodged from the drive whilst the machine was running.
Well I wasnt sure if it was the drive because the dislodging the ide cable had the unexpected side effect of scrambling my BIOS. God knows why, but every machine I tried the hard drive in had its bios settings screwed.
Be warned: if you mess around inside your machine doing ANYTHING, check your cables are correctly inserted into their appropriate slots, or you could be in for a lot of trouble.
Btw, any reported problems with the 40gb deskstars that anyone knows about? Its just I bought one to replace the 8gb drive that was scrambled.
Saying all this, I have a really OLD 2gb drive from my first machine with linux on it which has outlasted my cd rom, motherboard and 3 processors!!
Nobody thought of it, I'm sure it just evolved that way. Imagine having to go around saying:
"It is the birthday of Tom" instead of "It's Tom's Birthday" (much easier) or
"Tom has birthday presents that are nice" instead of "Tom's birthday presents are nice" (far shorter).
French is a good language to look at: if you translate french word for word you get something like English grammatical structures would have been pre-apostrophe (pre-atrocity? hmm).
It is my understanding that it is currently impossible to "brand" music in this manner so that the "brand" cannot be removed.
Utter tosh. There are innumerable ways of doing this:
Scramble the first x seconds of the song, or random segments.
Cut the beginning of the song off at a point
cut the end of the song off.
.. and whammo, you no longer have a song fit enough to copy onto a cd and sell.
Face the truth - Napster is the equivalent of a huge cassette tape duplicator that hands out copies of copyrighted material for free. That has never been allowed before and cannot become the rule simply because the format has changed. Paper, 8-track, vinyl, cassette, CD, DVD - the format does not matter. The copyright holder controls the content. People cannot steal content and that is what Napster was allowing.
Eh? Wrong. Napster was the equivalent of the local music library, storing copies of music for the good of all; or should we ban libraries, too? And the fact that my computer keeps a copy of the file downloaded from napster is purely coincidental - it should/was made perfectly clear that if I want to keep the music IT IS ON MY OWN HEAD WHEN I DO SO.
Stop shifting the blame onto Napster and away from Copyright infringers.
Napster could brand any music with something similar that prevents a legal copy from being produced from a shared copy.
Sorry, that should be.. prevents a perfect copy that could be bootlegged being produced from a shared copy. Ta.
since when is it "sharing" when you make another copy of copyrighted material that you do not own?
Its not, but the burden of proof is not/should not be on Napster or any other body. It's on the person who is sharing the material, and if that person should go out and buy the CD after they shared it how are you going to prove otherwise? You can't.
What you can do, and what radio stations and other mediums do with all music videos and music tracks is something that prevents the music from being sold as a "legal copy" on the open marked.. e.g. the MTV symbol at the top of the screen, the DJ talking over intros and so on. Napster could brand any music with something similar that prevents a legal copy from being produced from a shared copy.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that anything more than uncomplicated single cell organisms could live on a moon like the one you describe, the gravitational effects wouldn't allow it if it were too near to the gas giant. Just think, every day an organism could be ripped apart by gravity, burned alive by molten lava, blown up by volcanoes or fall down crevasses due to tectonic stress... what a horrid life :0(
Seriously though, in order to be habitable for life complex beings, a dependancy on the sun might be necessary. There are no gas giants in the inner solarsystem, because they would not be able to exist there. (I accept more complex life may exist in oceans on worlds which have hot cores, and we should explore our own solar system for this before jumping to the conclusion). If we can only detect these sorts of planets, we only have a tiny chance of finding complex life.
I always wondered which planet David Coursey came from... gaseous bags eh?
... so what about software architects and software designers (to name but two)?
.. AND I have to know the code AND be able to simplify and abstract concepts. Those things take both sides of my brain :)
You have to know the code and think around corners/be creative. No creativity = no ideas = no program to solve problem.
I often liken programming, architecture and design work to making a jigsaw puzzle whilst having no clue what the end picture will be. In order to visualise the end result, I have to be able to mentally fill in the gaps in between
So you sir, are talking bollocks - no offence intended.
EU legislation is changing the way we live in Europe (our part of it, at least), and though it isn't always comfortable, it is very useful, makes sense, and often means less cost, less administration (true, the EU is very bureaucratic, but think of all the national instituions that are no longer needed due to the EU's multilateral institutions)
<offtopicrant>
What? You mean like the drivers licences that we carry around now - a) we have a picture card b) we have a paper counterpart.
If I could carry one or the other it makes sense, but when it comes to using it, we have to produce both?? . Crazy. Whats the point? I have to not only carry around a wad of paper and a card but also pay EXTRA for the convienience? And what about all the additional paperwork that has to be carried out? I have to get it signed by pope john paul before I can send it off and then if I sign it wrong they'll just send it back! What rubbish.
Or how about the man prosecuted for selling bananas in lbs instead of kilos? <sarcasm>Sure, that makes life much easier and makes complete sense.</sarcasm>
</offtopicrant>
Anyway, I've read elsewhere on the threads here that its not the EU anyway, its a different body (EC or sommit) so the point is somewhat moot.
I'm dubious.
Ok, I'm sure loads of other countries have participated, but it seems to me that this will be nothing but red tape to businesses.
As a citizen of "europe" I have yet to see the EU write one single peice of legislation that a) makes sense, b) actually has an effect other than to annoy people c) does any good. d) doesnt cost tonnes of money for sod all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad government are trying to get a hand into formalising these sorts of things, but what we really need is competant people advising them. I mean, look at what incompetance in these matters gave us the last time.
I won't hold my breath.
in most systems I see, the majority of code is the same structural/functional stuff holding it together.
;0)
However, what you fail to see is that the "structural/functional stuff" can combine with other structural functional stuff in potentially thousands of different combinations at any point within any part of on section of code. We call it plumbing, and its the plumbing that causes most of the problems in software design. Concurrency is another, but thats a different kettle of salmon.
The "application specific" algorithms make up quite a small part of the code. I've got someone else's "advanced calculation code" in front of me right now, and 98% of what I see can be described by standard patterns. They are put together in what appears to be a creative fashion (although a bit lacking in performance - but I'll fix that).
The code its self may be in a standard form, because he's (sensibly) coded it to be readable and standard. Imagine though, if another programmer now tacked on his own functions/objects somewhere else in the system that called this function slightly incorrectly, or passed an incorrect value or even slightly misinterpretted the resulting figures. Multiply by another 1000 calls that could possibly be made by recurrance, other functions etc and you can see that just because its written in a standard way theres alot of scope for failure. You simply do not have the single rule in programming that "If you do this it will fall over". Unless of course, you're running WINNT and then pretty much everything you do will make it fall over
Perhaps more to the point, who's going to oversee them?
:)</badpunalert>
Perhaps you need to do what us brits do and have a overseeing governing body, similar to something like OFTEL (who monitor BT et al). OFMIC maybe?
<badpunalert> I suppose, tho, without a mic no one would be able to hear them!
..Cardboard boxes don't count either.
"I can't let you switch me on, Dave"
"Why not you %$&%^& car?? I WANNA GET TO WORK!"
"I can't let you pollute the atmosphere, Dave"
"ARRRRRGH!"
Plus what about wind, wave and solar power energy to do this?
And whatever happened to geothermal energy or has everyone in the commercial world simply forgotten that our entire planet core is made of molten lava?
Any one of these alternate fuels could turn water into hydrogen via electricity. Its just I suspect that either:
a)oil companies dont want us to use them until they've squeezed every last drop out of the ground, and are therefore currently FUDing the ideas out of existance.
b)governments have lucrative deals with the oil companies and are making far too much income on pollution taxes and fuel taxes to even bother thinking about it yet
c) Its expensive to decomission all those coal/oil burning/nuclear reactors. (This is the standard line).
Saying all this, the UK is getting a new wind farm off the coast somewhere. Maybe its going that way.
Oh yea.
... but I guess the gif would take up most the screen width :)
Maybe it should be:
"News for nerds, stuff that might of mattered 3 days ago but now its too damn late"
That is SOOOO old.
The BBC covered this story on TUESDAY!!
News for nerds? stuff that matters, remember?
Taking into account the majority of comments on the board about heat/knocking/transportation whatever, I'd like to offer another possible cause of drive failure.
About 2 years or so ago I purchased a seagate 8.1g (dont laugh) hard drive. It ran fine for ages, but then one day the IDE cable became dislodged from the drive whilst the machine was running. Well I wasnt sure if it was the drive because the dislodging the ide cable had the unexpected side effect of scrambling my BIOS. God knows why, but every machine I tried the hard drive in had its bios settings screwed.
Be warned: if you mess around inside your machine doing ANYTHING, check your cables are correctly inserted into their appropriate slots, or you could be in for a lot of trouble.
Btw, any reported problems with the 40gb deskstars that anyone knows about? Its just I bought one to replace the 8gb drive that was scrambled.
Saying all this, I have a really OLD 2gb drive from my first machine with linux on it which has outlasted my cd rom, motherboard and 3 processors!!
.. you forgot
25.806975801127880315188420605149
Square Root of the Beast
29A
Hex of the Beast (Hex 'on' the Beast??)
and of course, most disgusting of all,
2.8234742291703010666122453907739
Log of the Beast
... Actually, black holes were theoretical first, then we started to look for them to see if they occured naturally.
Just setting the record straight..
lol mod this guy up
Damn this HTML stuff.. I posted in POT, but it still didnt show it.
:P
What I meant to say was:
Not to be pedantic, but its <smirk/> not just <smirk> cause its malformed
Not to be pedantic, but its actually not just :)
Nobody thought of it, I'm sure it just evolved that way. Imagine having to go around saying:
"It is the birthday of Tom" instead of "It's Tom's Birthday" (much easier) or
"Tom has birthday presents that are nice" instead of "Tom's birthday presents are nice" (far shorter).
French is a good language to look at: if you translate french word for word you get something like English grammatical structures would have been pre-apostrophe (pre-atrocity? hmm).
Ag, sorry. That should of read:
..particular collection of letters is definately called an ..
:(
Please don't flame me, please don't flame me
That particular collection of letters is called an acronym .
And by the way you'd pluralise it VCR's, as with all acronyms I can think of. Probably.
Scramble the first x seconds of the song, or random segments.
Cut the beginning of the song off at a point
cut the end of the song off.
.. and whammo, you no longer have a song fit enough to copy onto a cd and sell.
Face the truth - Napster is the equivalent of a huge cassette tape duplicator that hands out copies of copyrighted material for free. That has never been allowed before and cannot become the rule simply because the format has changed. Paper, 8-track, vinyl, cassette, CD, DVD - the format does not matter. The copyright holder controls the content. People cannot steal content and that is what Napster was allowing.
Eh? Wrong. Napster was the equivalent of the local music library, storing copies of music for the good of all; or should we ban libraries, too? And the fact that my computer keeps a copy of the file downloaded from napster is purely coincidental - it should/was made perfectly clear that if I want to keep the music IT IS ON MY OWN HEAD WHEN I DO SO.
Stop shifting the blame onto Napster and away from Copyright infringers.
Napster could brand any music with something similar that prevents a legal copy from being produced from a shared copy. .. prevents a perfect copy that could be bootlegged being produced from a shared copy. Ta.
Sorry, that should be
since when is it "sharing" when you make another copy of copyrighted material that you do not own?
Its not, but the burden of proof is not/should not be on Napster or any other body. It's on the person who is sharing the material, and if that person should go out and buy the CD after they shared it how are you going to prove otherwise? You can't.
What you can do, and what radio stations and other mediums do with all music videos and music tracks is something that prevents the music from being sold as a "legal copy" on the open marked.. e.g. the MTV symbol at the top of the screen, the DJ talking over intros and so on. Napster could brand any music with something similar that prevents a legal copy from being produced from a shared copy.
Just my two pence.
Ahh, the hole world is my friend.
Where do you, or anyone else, get off telling me who I can or cannot give things to?