Am I just sick, or do other people find the possibility of this thing hitting to be pretty damn exciting? The chaos, the devestation, the panic, the collapse of all social systems... jeez, that would honestly be one of the coolest (And last) things to ever happen in most of our lives. The timeframe is nice too... many of us that are currently in our late 20's, early 30's will be wiped out before things start going really downhill for us (physically), but we'll have enough time to get a decent bit of fun stuff done too. Bring it on!
If we are due for a large (Tunguska-sized) impact every century or so, perhaps the best way for it to happen would be to hit a relatively sparsely populated part of the US -- say, Helena, Montana, or the such. Basically, we want the city to be large enough so that it stays in the news, but small enough so that the loss of life is (relatively) minimal. I'm picking the US since its the country with a decent space program, yet it has sparsely populated areas.
That way, perhaps we'll catch the meteor that will hit Europe 75 years down the road or so.
Generally when you sign up with an ISP they reserve the right to take your site down for any reason. Choosing to take your site down even though a proper takedown notice wasn't served doesn't violate the law directly, but the ISP wouldn't have the safe harbor provision to fall back on if they were then sued for breach of contract (but again, if the contract says they can take down your site for any reason, then you're screwed).
From my limited understanding of contract law, I might have to disagree. Again, IANAL, but I seem to remember that contracts must be done in good faith: depending on the jurisdiction, arbitrary termination is not consider good faith. So if you have a contract for 12 months of service, and they terminate you in 5 months, you might have grounds for a lawsuit.
I tried googling for this information, and other then finding every TOS for every ISP out there, the only mention that I can find is that Israeli law seems to agree with me. (In the US, there also seems to be regulations against doctors "abandoning" patients, but that seems like a specific case.)
I'd love for a contract lawyer to chime in and tell us what are justifiable causes for termination of a contract.
Sounds like another point for the need for tort reform.
Sounds to me like its a need for someone to actually fight a lawsuit in court. Better yet, if you have money, carry an umbrella policy!
Not only can you get $1,000,000 worth of insurance for relatively very little cost, when you get sued, its the insurance company's money on the line, and they'll fight the case for you. Even, God forbid, if it is your fault, a $1,000,000 tends to cover almost any civil settlement. If you are really paranoid, you can increase the coverage as well.
I hear the words "Tort Reform" alot, and if its from a regular member of John Q. Public, its usually due to one of three things:
Not realizing that yes, under US law, you can file a lawsuit for almost any reason. (Winning is another manner).
Thinking that an urban legend is true (cruise control/RV story, for one).
Hearing about a case that sounds frivilous and not investigating the facts (McDonald's hot coffee case).
Tort reform does not seem to protect individuals. It protects businesses at the expense of individuals. I'm not anti-business, heck, I think that business does a lot of good, but tort reform is one of those things which is just plain wrong.
That a private organization could/can autonomously demand that an ISP shutdown a site without due process is repugnant in the extreme.
A private organization can *demand* anything. Case in point -- SCO demanding linux licenses.
The DMCA goes slightly overboard with its power in regards to server shutdowns, but it isn't that horribly unfair with regards to copywrited material on a server. [Its horribly unfair in other ways though...]
If the RIAA wants an ISP to shutdown a site, it has to make a good faith statement that the material is not legal, and that they are authorized to act for the copyright holder. Note the "good faith" provision -- this is where things have been going wrong, and it is not a problem with the DMCA. It strongly appears that certain agencies are automating searches for material and aren't manually checking the results before sending letters. This is one of the major problems.
Of course, once a site is taken down, the site owner can demand his day in court, and if the RIAA does not file a lawsuit within two weeks, the site should be put back up.
As I said, not horribly unfair. The only "fix" I can see is a grace period for the site's owner to reply to the possible copyright infringement before the site is taken down. (IANAL, but the good-faith provision should already be in effect: Asking for material to be removed without acting in good faith should open the asking party up to a few lawsuits under section 512, part f, but again, IANAL).
The other problem that I am hearing about is that ISPs are taking down sites without valid takedown notices. If I'm reading the law right, this should violate "safe harbor" provisions for ISPs, but I have yet to see an ISP prosecuted for this.
Sir, you question the usefulness of antivirus solutions.
I don't ever plan on being in an automobile accident. I drive cautiously, am alert for other drivers, and don't engage in risky behavior behind the wheel. Although I drive older vehicles, I take pride in basic maintainance and make sure that the brake system and tires are in excellent shape.
I still wear my seatbelt. Its not guarenteed to protect me in an accident. Heck, in a small percentage of automobile accidents, it probably results in more severe injuries. That being said, its a safety device.
Windows antivirus is the same way.
On my windows machine, I run more secure applications. I don't download software from dodgy sites. I am behind a firewall.
I still use antivirus.
How many times have I been infected? 0. Have I found viruses? Many times. Would they have infected me? Probably not. But better safe than sorry.
The reason why this is assumed is that the Gospels mention the shepards being in the fields with their flocks. This would have happened during the lambing season, which is the *tada* spring or early summer.
Oh, and he probably wasn't born in 1 BC. The best argument I've seen calls for a birthdate in about 6 BC, due to astronomical events, but even the 6 BC birthdate has to assume that a certain astronomical event (Halley's Comet) was the Star of Bethelhem, and it would contradict the chronology in the book of Luke.
Also, the date of Jesus's birth wasn't standardized for a few centuries and different groups of Christians used different dates for quite awhile.
You see, the packages in Woody are kept up-to-date in the security department. The age of the packages is irrelevant to the security of the packages. All security fixes are backported to the Debian stable distribution.
I was referring to the test -- which did not involve any security updates.
In such a situation, an unpatched debian woody distro may fall rather quickly.
T minus 10 posts until someone calls Opera bloated.
Unless Opera has changed alot in the past year or two, I'm not sure how anyone can call Opera bloated without using lynx or w3m as a comparision.
Mozilla is hefty. Firefox is decent, but seems to have memory management issues for more than a few people, including myself. Perhaps IE is smaller or faster than Opera, but one isn't significantly more bloated than the other.
It would be an interesting thing to see how the other dists would fare. I suspect Debian and Gentoo should survive quite a bit longer than those 3 months. After all, a default minimal Debian Woody installation is 34MB, compared to 0.5GB of Red Hat, and this means you simply don't have that many unnecessary services that can fail.
Due to age, I am guessing that a Debian woody installation would fall rather quickly -- its just too old. Sure, the minimal install is tiny, with almost nothing to hijack, but a typical default server install has far too many things listening on every interface.
I'm curious how long an older (3.4 or 3.3) version of OpenBSD would have faired with a typical (not default) setup.
(My server right now is running Debian Woody, and has been since Potato was stable.)
If I had the money, I'd be interested in this FOR the genetic reasons, not some mystical notion of it copying the brain state/ experiences of the animal. Not to mention this funds the advancement of the entire science of cloning, which I find to be a very good thing.
If I had the money, I want a pet mammoth.
Laugh all you want -- we do have mammoth DNA (not sure about the condition though) and it has been speculated that modern elephants would carry a mammoth's embryo to term.
$50,000 to clone my cat? Christ, I paid $250 to have the sucker put down, and I thought that was a lot...
Depends on how much enjoyment a cat gives you.
Consider buying a new SUV. After insurance, interest, and taxes, it runs you $50k. After 15 years, the SUV is basically worthless (say, $1k or so). The reason why you choose to buy that SUV is that it brings you enjoyment. Not many people consider a purchaser of an SUV to be nuts.
This person spent $50k on a cat which, if[0] it lives 15 years may give her more enjoyment than a new SUV. Yet society considers that she's nuts.
[0] Big "if": There is speculation that cloned animals start off pre-aged.
Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.
There is probably going to be a comment out there that will tell you exactly what you need to do to get linux running perfectly on your powerbook.
This is not that post.
This is the post that asks "why?" Googling, I see more than a few sites that suggests linux runs fine on Aluminum powerbooks. Yet your question suggests it doesn't. (Your question is a pretty poor question, btw -- next time tell us more information about the laptop, when you last tried it, and what distro + version you tried.)
Linux, for all the spiffy easier-to-use distros (Mandrake, Redhat, etc) tends to benefit from a little tweaking and the user experience benefits a lot from more than a little reading. You don't sound like the person who wants to do either. So why not stick with MacOS X? Its a decent system for a lot of tasks, and you can get many open source applications by using fink.
The "Only those who were opposed to the US were involved in scandalous activities" is a laugh and a half. Keep watching Fox and keep taking those Blue Pills Neo.
All churches are evil. (Sorry mom - it's true. Yours is no exception.)
Your post is a great example how you don't need to go to church to be bigotted.
PS: Muslims attend a mosque. Christians attend a church. According to tradition, the split between those-who-would-become Muslims and those-who-would-become Christians would have taken place over 3500 years ago, so there has been plenty of time to figure out that Christians and Muslims aren't the same religion. It looks pretty stupid to bash something when you don't know the correct terms.
Er, the moral is always "good little japanese girls work hard and don't complain".
I'm trying to apply that thought to Mononoke Hime.
We have the lady Eboshi and her ex-whores. They work hard, but don't complain. Of course, they are manufacturing firearms to fend off the emperor's army, designed to be light enough to be used by women. (The male lepers also don't complain.)
We have San, who is still a girl who ends up attacking the forces of Eboshi alot, but doesn't otherwise complain. The war she's in takes a lot of hard work.
We have Ashitaka, who is male, but also doesn't complain. He seems to be a hard worker though.
Hmmmm, I'm seeing a theme here, and it isn't gender specific. The theme appears to be "don't bitch, just do it" and shows up in a lot of Miyazaki's work.
One question, if you were the soldier that died in Iraq and your heart-broken parents ask you if she can have access to your email box to remember you by, would you say 'no' to protect your piracy? Technology is one thing, but when it comes to family, I am afraid it is only technology.
What happens if the dead man's email is filled with something he doesn't want his parents to see? Perhaps he had an embarrassing medical condition or discussed how he resented a certain family member. Perhaps he had doubts about the family's traditional religion, or converted faiths without telling his family. Perhaps he spoke of things over in Iraq he'd rather not have his family see.
don't keep anything you want to pass on stored on Yahoo! Next problem?
I'm sorry, but that would involve planning for death.
If most 20-somethings died tomorrow, their survivors would have a mess to poke through. Now *that's* a problem. Sure, it would be nice to have the email, but the lack of life insurance, death planning, etc is the real problem.
PS: If this inspires you to put your affairs in order, investigate becoming an organ donor as well. Odds are, you will live for several more decades, but odds are also that when a 20-something dies, they aren't a registered donor.
I hate glomming onto another submitted story, but I have a similar need. I have a Brother word processor circa 1991 that I would love to be able to hook up to my serial port or something. I have a lot of text data that would be convenient to transfer over to my PC.
I understand there might be some difficulty interpreting the word processor code and file structures. It might even be nigh IMPOSSIBLE. Has anyone ever heard of any sort of interpreter for communication with a Brother word processor, or is that info stritclty porprietary and FORBIDDEN?
Have you tried copying the disk image over (dd) and then manually digging through it? Might be FAT12, for all you know.
In that case, perhaps you could reverse engineer the codes themselves.
You're lucky to get five years out of most books. And that assumes that the content in those books never changes. If you subscribe to a flat earth viewpoint, or some other dark ages bullshit, then this might be true.
Its a shame that they discovered that the earth was actually round in 1999. Made all of those 5-year old geography textbooks quite invalid. The recent research into the lack of dragons in Africa and a south polar continent are threatening to change those same textbooks once again.
As for math, if Mayer-Libowitz hadn't proven that 2 + 2 = 4 in 1996, we wouldn't have had to get rid of all those old math textbooks that said 2 + 2 = 5.
Even worse, gravity adjusting to 10.4 m/s^2 in 1993, and then force deciding that it was only going to be 3/4ths of m * A a year later invalidated all our physics textbooks. Not to mention 1997, when acceleration itself decided it would no longer be (v1 - v0)/t.
Don't forget grammar. If the world hadn't decided to get rid of pronouns and instead use indeterminate plural positional nouns instead in 1988, those books might have been valid.
And finally, there is chemisty. Who would have guessed that water would stop freezing at 0C and stop boiling at 100C? Or that it would suddenly decide that it would be H30 instead of H2O.
Alas, its a tipsy turvey world where no textbook is valid for more than a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, perhaps gvim under windows?
With either emacs or gvim, its always good to pick up a copy of LaTeX and bibtex for windows.
>> How long before everyone needs to carry around 5 different RSA keys just to perform daily task?
> How long before everyone needs to carry around 5 different physical keys? Let's see... we have the [...] gun case key
Your daily schedule seems to include riding the fences and looking for varmits.
Be careful for that gray rabbit that stands upright, is always chewing on a carrot, and thinks you have a Ph. D. He's a tricky one.
No matter what you do, never ever try to dynamite him.
Am I just sick, or do other people find the possibility of this thing hitting to be pretty damn exciting? The chaos, the devestation, the panic, the collapse of all social systems... jeez, that would honestly be one of the coolest (And last) things to ever happen in most of our lives. The timeframe is nice too... many of us that are currently in our late 20's, early 30's will be wiped out before things start going really downhill for us (physically), but we'll have enough time to get a decent bit of fun stuff done too. Bring it on!
If we are due for a large (Tunguska-sized) impact every century or so, perhaps the best way for it to happen would be to hit a relatively sparsely populated part of the US -- say, Helena, Montana, or the such. Basically, we want the city to be large enough so that it stays in the news, but small enough so that the loss of life is (relatively) minimal. I'm picking the US since its the country with a decent space program, yet it has sparsely populated areas.
That way, perhaps we'll catch the meteor that will hit Europe 75 years down the road or so.
Generally when you sign up with an ISP they reserve the right to take your site down for any reason. Choosing to take your site down even though a proper takedown notice wasn't served doesn't violate the law directly, but the ISP wouldn't have the safe harbor provision to fall back on if they were then sued for breach of contract (but again, if the contract says they can take down your site for any reason, then you're screwed).
From my limited understanding of contract law, I might have to disagree. Again, IANAL, but I seem to remember that contracts must be done in good faith: depending on the jurisdiction, arbitrary termination is not consider good faith. So if you have a contract for 12 months of service, and they terminate you in 5 months, you might have grounds for a lawsuit.
I tried googling for this information, and other then finding every TOS for every ISP out there, the only mention that I can find is that Israeli law seems to agree with me. (In the US, there also seems to be regulations against doctors "abandoning" patients, but that seems like a specific case.)
I'd love for a contract lawyer to chime in and tell us what are justifiable causes for termination of a contract.
Sounds like another point for the need for tort reform.
Sounds to me like its a need for someone to actually fight a lawsuit in court. Better yet, if you have money, carry an umbrella policy!
Not only can you get $1,000,000 worth of insurance for relatively very little cost, when you get sued, its the insurance company's money on the line, and they'll fight the case for you. Even, God forbid, if it is your fault, a $1,000,000 tends to cover almost any civil settlement. If you are really paranoid, you can increase the coverage as well.
I hear the words "Tort Reform" alot, and if its from a regular member of John Q. Public, its usually due to one of three things:
Tort reform does not seem to protect individuals. It protects businesses at the expense of individuals. I'm not anti-business, heck, I think that business does a lot of good, but tort reform is one of those things which is just plain wrong.
That a private organization could/can autonomously demand that an ISP shutdown a site without due process is repugnant in the extreme.
A private organization can *demand* anything. Case in point -- SCO demanding linux licenses.
The DMCA goes slightly overboard with its power in regards to server shutdowns, but it isn't that horribly unfair with regards to copywrited material on a server. [Its horribly unfair in other ways though...]
If the RIAA wants an ISP to shutdown a site, it has to make a good faith statement that the material is not legal, and that they are authorized to act for the copyright holder. Note the "good faith" provision -- this is where things have been going wrong, and it is not a problem with the DMCA. It strongly appears that certain agencies are automating searches for material and aren't manually checking the results before sending letters. This is one of the major problems.
Of course, once a site is taken down, the site owner can demand his day in court, and if the RIAA does not file a lawsuit within two weeks, the site should be put back up.
As I said, not horribly unfair. The only "fix" I can see is a grace period for the site's owner to reply to the possible copyright infringement before the site is taken down. (IANAL, but the good-faith provision should already be in effect: Asking for material to be removed without acting in good faith should open the asking party up to a few lawsuits under section 512, part f, but again, IANAL).
The other problem that I am hearing about is that ISPs are taking down sites without valid takedown notices. If I'm reading the law right, this should violate "safe harbor" provisions for ISPs, but I have yet to see an ISP prosecuted for this.
Sir, you question the usefulness of antivirus solutions.
I don't ever plan on being in an automobile accident. I drive cautiously,
am alert for other drivers, and don't engage in risky behavior behind the
wheel. Although I drive older vehicles, I take pride in basic maintainance
and make sure that the brake system and tires are in excellent shape.
I still wear my seatbelt. Its not guarenteed to protect me in an
accident. Heck, in a small percentage of automobile accidents, it probably
results in more severe injuries. That being said, its a safety device.
Windows antivirus is the same way.
On my windows machine, I run more secure applications. I don't download
software from dodgy sites. I am behind a firewall.
I still use antivirus.
How many times have I been infected? 0. Have I found viruses? Many times.
Would they have infected me? Probably not. But better safe than sorry.
Yes Jesus was born in the spring or early summer.
The reason why this is assumed is that the Gospels mention the shepards being in the fields with their flocks. This would have happened during the lambing season, which is the *tada* spring or early summer.
Oh, and he probably wasn't born in 1 BC. The best argument I've seen calls for a birthdate in about 6 BC, due to astronomical events, but even the 6 BC birthdate has to assume that a certain astronomical event (Halley's Comet) was the Star of Bethelhem, and it would contradict the chronology in the book of Luke.
Also, the date of Jesus's birth wasn't standardized for a few centuries and different groups of Christians used different dates for quite awhile.
You see, the packages in Woody are kept up-to-date in the security department. The age of the packages is irrelevant to the security of the packages. All security fixes are backported to the Debian stable distribution.
I was referring to the test -- which did not involve any security updates.
In such a situation, an unpatched debian woody distro may fall rather quickly.
"Your question is a pretty poor question" you nasty troll
Not at all
T minus 10 posts until someone calls Opera bloated.
Unless Opera has changed alot in the past year or two, I'm not sure how anyone can call Opera bloated without using lynx or w3m as a comparision.
Mozilla is hefty. Firefox is decent, but seems to have memory management issues for more than a few people, including myself. Perhaps IE is smaller or faster than Opera, but one isn't significantly more bloated than the other.
It would be an interesting thing to see how the other dists would fare. I suspect Debian and Gentoo should survive quite a bit longer than those 3 months. After all, a default minimal Debian Woody installation is 34MB, compared to 0.5GB of Red Hat, and this means you simply don't have that many unnecessary services that can fail.
Due to age, I am guessing that a Debian woody installation would fall rather quickly -- its just too old. Sure, the minimal install is tiny, with almost nothing to hijack, but a typical default server install has far too many things listening on every interface.
I'm curious how long an older (3.4 or 3.3) version of OpenBSD would have faired with a typical (not default) setup.
(My server right now is running Debian Woody, and has been since Potato was stable.)
If I had the money, I'd be interested in this FOR the genetic reasons, not some mystical notion of it copying the brain state/ experiences of the animal. Not to mention this funds the advancement of the entire science of cloning, which I find to be a very good thing.
If I had the money, I want a pet mammoth.
Laugh all you want -- we do have mammoth DNA (not sure about the condition though) and it has been speculated that modern elephants would carry a mammoth's embryo to term.
$50,000 to clone my cat? Christ, I paid $250 to have the sucker put down, and I thought that was a lot...
Depends on how much enjoyment a cat gives you.
Consider buying a new SUV. After insurance, interest, and taxes, it runs you $50k. After 15 years, the SUV is basically worthless (say, $1k or so). The reason why you choose to buy that SUV is that it brings you enjoyment. Not many people consider a purchaser of an SUV to be nuts.
This person spent $50k on a cat which, if[0] it lives 15 years may give her more enjoyment than a new SUV. Yet society considers that she's nuts.
[0] Big "if": There is speculation that cloned animals start off pre-aged.
Um, does it work on my Aluminium 17" yet? Last time I tried linux, the video support was horrible.
There is probably going to be a comment out there that will tell you exactly what you need to do to get linux running perfectly on your powerbook.
This is not that post.
This is the post that asks "why?" Googling, I see more than a few sites that suggests linux runs fine on Aluminum powerbooks. Yet your question suggests it doesn't. (Your question is a pretty poor question, btw -- next time tell us more information about the laptop, when you last tried it, and what distro + version you tried.)
Linux, for all the spiffy easier-to-use distros (Mandrake, Redhat, etc) tends to benefit from a little tweaking and the user experience benefits a lot from more than a little reading. You don't sound like the person who wants to do either. So why not stick with MacOS X? Its a decent system for a lot of tasks, and you can get many open source applications by using fink.
Wouldn't that be better as:
If the First Foundation, er, Nupedia falls, then the Secound Foundation, er, Wikipedia will rise from its ashes?
The answer? 42.
The question? What is 6 times 9.
I always figured that, due to the telephone cleaners et al taking over earth, the resulting answer was flawed.
The real answer would be on the order of "What is seven times six?"
Jafac writes:
[ Snip most of a vast conspiracy theory... ]
The "Only those who were opposed to the US were involved in scandalous activities" is a laugh and a half. Keep watching Fox and keep taking those Blue Pills Neo.
Ah, but what are you hiding?
A quick google search shows Jafac new and used aircraft and aircraft parts. Ah hah! I see your plan:
You were crafty, but not crafty enough for this slashdotter.
PS: My tinfoil hat is tighter than yours.
[ Snip anti-religous ranting... ]
All churches are evil. (Sorry mom - it's true. Yours is no exception.)
Your post is a great example how you don't need to go to church to be bigotted.
PS: Muslims attend a mosque. Christians attend a church. According to tradition, the split between those-who-would-become Muslims and those-who-would-become Christians would have taken place over 3500 years ago, so there has been plenty of time to figure out that Christians and Muslims aren't the same religion. It looks pretty stupid to bash something when you don't know the correct terms.
Er, the moral is always "good little japanese girls work hard and don't complain".
I'm trying to apply that thought to Mononoke Hime.
We have the lady Eboshi and her ex-whores. They work hard, but don't complain. Of course, they are manufacturing firearms to fend off the emperor's army, designed to be light enough to be used by women. (The male lepers also don't complain.)
We have San, who is still a girl who ends up attacking the forces of Eboshi alot, but doesn't otherwise complain. The war she's in takes a lot of hard work.
We have Ashitaka, who is male, but also doesn't complain. He seems to be a hard worker though.
Hmmmm, I'm seeing a theme here, and it isn't gender specific. The theme appears to be "don't bitch, just do it" and shows up in a lot of Miyazaki's work.
One question, if you were the soldier that died in Iraq and your heart-broken parents ask you if she can have access to your email box to remember you by, would you say 'no' to protect your piracy? Technology is one thing, but when it comes to family, I am afraid it is only technology.
What happens if the dead man's email is filled with something he doesn't want his parents to see? Perhaps he had an embarrassing medical condition or discussed how he resented a certain family member. Perhaps he had doubts about the family's traditional religion, or converted faiths without telling his family. Perhaps he spoke of things over in Iraq he'd rather not have his family see.
don't keep anything you want to pass on stored on Yahoo! Next problem?
I'm sorry, but that would involve planning for death.
If most 20-somethings died tomorrow, their survivors would have a mess to poke through. Now *that's* a problem. Sure, it would be nice to have the email, but the lack of life insurance, death planning, etc is the real problem.
PS: If this inspires you to put your affairs in order, investigate becoming an organ donor as well. Odds are, you will live for several more decades, but odds are also that when a 20-something dies, they aren't a registered donor.
I hate glomming onto another submitted story, but I have a similar need. I have a Brother word processor circa 1991 that I would love to be able to hook up to my serial port or something. I have a lot of text data that would be convenient to transfer over to my PC.
I understand there might be some difficulty interpreting the word processor code and file structures. It might even be nigh IMPOSSIBLE. Has anyone ever heard of any sort of interpreter for communication with a Brother word processor, or is that info stritclty porprietary and FORBIDDEN?
Have you tried copying the disk image over (dd) and then manually digging through it? Might be FAT12, for all you know.
In that case, perhaps you could reverse engineer the codes themselves.
You're lucky to get five years out of most books. And that assumes that the content in those books never changes. If you subscribe to a flat earth viewpoint, or some other dark ages bullshit, then this might be true.
Its a shame that they discovered that the earth was actually round in 1999. Made all of those 5-year old geography textbooks quite invalid. The recent research into the lack of dragons in Africa and a south polar continent are threatening to change those same textbooks once again.
As for math, if Mayer-Libowitz hadn't proven that 2 + 2 = 4 in 1996, we wouldn't have had to get rid of all those old math textbooks that said 2 + 2 = 5.
Even worse, gravity adjusting to 10.4 m/s^2 in 1993, and then force deciding that it was only going to be 3/4ths of m * A a year later invalidated all our physics textbooks. Not to mention 1997, when acceleration itself decided it would no longer be (v1 - v0)/t.
Don't forget grammar. If the world hadn't decided to get rid of pronouns and instead use indeterminate plural positional nouns instead in 1988, those books might have been valid.
And finally, there is chemisty. Who would have guessed that water would stop freezing at 0C and stop boiling at 100C? Or that it would suddenly decide that it would be H30 instead of H2O.
Alas, its a tipsy turvey world where no textbook is valid for more than a few years.
The Internet: Where men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents.