Covered with water that things right now are living in... how much water can you purify before you destroy coastal ecosystems? It's not economical to get the water from out in the middle of the ocean... nor is it that less populated. Even with boundless energies, the water needs to come from somewhere and I for one don't think that we have the right to kill off the remaining creatures of the ocean just to keep up our exponential growth curve.
The technology may exist to reuse water sometime in the future but for now we need to conserve what we have just in case... and blind belief in the healing power of future technology won't do a damn thing if science stagnates or only helps out the richest %10 of the planet.
Water. We're running out as is, especially out in the midwest where it's all going to feed cows. The only way we could survive this long would be to be a planet of vegetarians. I'm all for it, but try convincing Texas that it can't eat meat anymore, even with impending doom down the road. Good luck.
I had a mouse a while back called the scrollware 4d, it had a vertical scroll wheel and a horizontal one below that, and the third button was by the thumb. It was useful for browsing large files or on old machines running new software. I wonder if the hooks for the horizontal scroll wheel are similar to those for vertical; if I recall correctly, everything was customizable from the control panel tab.
>Christianity has been blamed for alot of things. Violence, hatred and various other things but it isn't Christianity that is doing these things but people who call themselves Christians but don't even follow what the Bible itself teaches
The ticket is, it's more complex than that. Religion plays a very pervasive role in cutural values, in how you're raised, in what is considered to be good and what is considered to be bad. People who grow up in a home where they're taught repression and submission probably most likely don't have a good sense of themselves. When you don't have a good sense of yourself, how can you have a good sense of others? Here's where the hatred and violence come in. Don't even get me started about how unhealthy it is to be told that you're inherently evil and that you have to look to an outside force just to be happy/whole/complete/not burn for eternity instead of trying to find yourself.
Even if you only go to church once a week or once a month, pretending that all of what they say has no effect on your mind is like saying that advertising has no effect on you. Many people think that but that's part of the point; a well made message makes you think that you thought of it. Christianity has had 2000 years to perfect theirs.
Baldur's Gate was so addictive... I spent an entire week of my summer one year playing it through from start to finish. One of the key elements of Baldur's Gate is that you fight by pausing the game and assigning actions to everyone involved, or just get up and stretch, whatever. At the time my room (and computer) were just a few steps from the kitchen, and when I got to the end of the game and subsequently corrupted my save game I was in a state of shock. I wandered into the kitchen for dinner, started to eat, and realized that I had to go to the bathroom. For about two seconds, my thumb twitched until I realized I couldn't pause real life. Two seconds of abject terror. I think I went into the bathroom and dunked my head in icy water for like a minute to recover from that.
The area of a sphere is 4pi r^2, where r is the radius and pi is 3.14159 etc etc. Electromagnetic radiation, broadcast uniformly in all directions makes a sphere. Double the radius of your sphere and you increase its area by 2^2 or 4. It's still the same amount of electromagnetic radiation, just spread out over 4x the area so its only 1/4 as dense. Tada, the "inverse square law" that pervades gravity, electricity, magnetism, and, you guessed it, electromagnetism.
That's why SETI is so difficult unless alien signals were directed directly at us; by the time you've crossed 10 light years of distance, your signal has spread out over 10^2 or 100 light years in distance. Converted to miles, 100 light years * 5,865,696,000,000 miles (the number of light years in a mile) is 586,569,600,000,000 or 5.86 x 10^14 miles in distance. A signal designed to propigate from surface to surface on a terrestrial planet like ours (and thus our TV and radio signals) would probably not be modulated for anything greater than a fixed point on the planet to any point on the planet so for a planet of 8,000 miles in diameter for earth that's pi d or pi*8000mi or about 25,000 miles. Figuring out how many times the signal strength for a given area of space drops for every time that's doubled I leave up to you (hint, its not going to power your walkman).
As for your banter about the One And Only Truth, I reccomend you read up a little on debating, especially an ad hominem attack and why it makes you look like a fool. I reccomend the rest of the site too.
I'm not saying either way, I'm just saying that neither of you did any more than a crapshot job of trying to convince one another.
>Look, I'm a lot more likely to accept claims made by people with PhDs and 60 years of experience in this stuff than random slashdotters as far as how much food we have for people, BUUUT, that being said, I was only posting quotes from the show.
Granted. Regardless of what alphabet soup you have trailing your name, its hard to fully quantify how much food is made worldwide, its not like everyone who makes food reports to a central authority or anything. I've heard estimates both ways.
Yeah, Greenepeace is probably a little overzealous. I'm trying to remember where it was that I heard someone talking about the wisdom that his father had passed on to him, that it's necessary to have extremists to some extent on both sides to help keep the majority of the population in check... with only arch-conservative or only ultra-liberal factins who speak out (which is really what the majority of the world doesn't do, and that is speak out) the people wouldn't have a difference of opinion to choose from. Anti-government and anti-capitalist forces are necessary, I think anyway, to continually challenge existing systems so they don't become decadent.
>Greepeace is a corporation themselves, and they suck, in too many ways to describe. I think the biggest one is, though, that they LIE, and not just a little, a LOT and OFTEN.
Greenpeace is not for profit organization, which isn't to say that they don't have an agenda (they do) or that they always tell the truth (they don't) but they don't really have a product to sell. They're an activist group like the ACLU on the libertarian side politically or the Christian Coalition on the authoritarian side. As for the lying, not to use the excuse that "everyone does it" but the truth is everyone in politics and economics does do it, intentionally or unintentionally, since they have an adgenda and varying degrees of ethics in achieving said adgenda. I don't think its right to hold them to a higher standard than, oh, anotherfewentities.
I know they're just quotes, but I think it was Orwell who said something about blind reproduction of quotes, stastics, and figures lets others do the thinking for you. Food for thought ^_^.
I spent about an hour writing out an intelligent response to your comment until I realized that its entirely offtopic and already answered in previous questions. Human population is 6.2 billion, not 6.6 billion. We produce enough food worldwide for more than 10 billion people (most estimates peg the amount of food consumed by livestock in the US to be enough to feed at least 8 billion people additionally) but most of it is in industrialized countries that don't need it and don't use it. Zimbabwe didn't accept the food because it would have made their farmers fork over cash for the right to replant their crops, as after 30 years the GM pesticides would no longer be effective against the super-pests that would have survived. Economically, it was a smart move because once their food was contaminated with GM food, then the import laws in the EU would have raised the tariffs to levels that would bankrupt the entire economy. Makes you wonder why the US didn't spend the cash to just ground it into flour beforehand eh?
Penn: "Unless you and yours are starving you need TO SHUT THE FUCK UP".
Yick, by this logic, Penn, by feeling strongly about an issue that doesn't actually affect him (being not a citizen in a third world country) should, quote, shut the fuck up. I disagree, holding an opinion about something that doesn't directly affect you is what brought Norman Borlaug into his line of work and is the same thing that drives many Greenpeace activists to go out and protest things.
This is actually a really good idea. Distributed bandwidth for *everything*, if your algorithms are efficient enough it would create ad-hoc caches. The only issue would be websites with rapidly changing data. It would basically overcome the underlying idea of being an end-user, that you cannot pass packets. Instead, you would make every computer into a node and with enough bandwidth...
It's weird, reading all of these responses I realize how easy life is for me... for the record, I'm in high school right now. I program. I work at an ISP... and everyone who knows that I'm good with computers thinks that it's cool. Maybe I'm lucky that I can talk to girls and stuff, but reading all of these responses really opened my eyes to how hard it is to be on the most bottom rung... I consistantly try to befriend people from all the groups in the school, and I think that being a theater geek AND an art geek AND a computer geek together give me the necessary cross-section of expierences to make social situations workable. I'm also lucky because the football team in my school hasn't won more than 3 games per season in over a decade, and this is the first year they hit 3. The jocks have no power. It's the annoying people who, as other people have said, will smack me on the back of the head sometimes or push me in the hallways that I write off as assholes, get pissed at, and promptly forget about. I can't even remember any of their names, they're like faceless blobs to me... but maybe they're the ones that I should be more friendly with. Blah.
Simple; VoIP systems connected to the public telephone network can be regulated like circut-switched calls, and systems that are purely digital can rely on encryption for their security. Stick the regulatory gizmos at the interfaces. Simple.
Bob Munck makes all the points I was going to make, so I'm not going to rehash them, but check out this site for the first chapter or the complete, 15 MB NASA report, telling you just how fast, cheap, easy to build it would be. Trillions of dollars my arse, get better informed before you try and pick apart someone's arguments.
A space elevator is fast, cheap, affordable, can be created with technology avaible in the next two to there years, and will allow a huge bom in space exploration and be a giant bonus to the worldwide economy, and all for less than the price of developing a new fighter-jet fleet or space shuttle system ($16B each). NASA, make space exploration a reality! Booyah!
Err, the real thing? Since when does Madonna carry around a laser-engraver with her? Maybe Beck has one. I wouldn't put it past him.
Re:I am an anti-environmentalist
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 1
Um...
-snip- By the time we notice the long-term benefits of environmentalist action
-snip
So... that would make you an environmentalist. If you were anti-environmentalist, you wouldn't think there was any long-term benefit of environmentalist action at all.
So you're not really an anti-environmentalist, you're just a pessimist.
Most of your comment is done already. It's called FreeBSD, and if some of the damn Linux programmers would get off their high horse and develop applications for it instead of Linux, it would all be good because FreeBSD is consistent. In everything.
I get 1MB/second from Optimum Online for $40 a month. My friends with DSL one town over are lucky to get 90kB/s. There aren't enough people in my neighborhood to suck up the bandwidth. The tech guys at optonline are total morons. They couldn't block ports if they wanted to.
My advice: look for the dumbist ISP around, and go for it. You'll be glad you did.
Sort of true, but one doesn't just send encrypted data, does one? Unless every civilization out there is communicating with one-time pads (read: very difficult, especially at galactic distances; you have to send your key in plaintext or else have someone physically bring it- no small task in space!), then there is handshaking. There is key distribution. There are (probably) large prime numbers at work. I belive one of the things that SETI@Home checks for is prime numbers, no?
The FreeBSD LiveCD Project is your friend. I've used the CD linux distros and... nyehhh. None of them have the wholesomeness of the LiveCD project. Your only concern is if the machines involved will do Non-Emulation booting, or even CD booting at all. If you can't do non-emulation booting, your best bet is to set up a floppy-boot system that either reads data (bins, configs) from the cd or else off of the internet (if the people involved have high speed connections.) Ignore the ideas about BOOTP and network booting; no router worth its salt will route BOOTP over the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Covered with water that things right now are living in... how much water can you purify before you destroy coastal ecosystems? It's not economical to get the water from out in the middle of the ocean... nor is it that less populated. Even with boundless energies, the water needs to come from somewhere and I for one don't think that we have the right to kill off the remaining creatures of the ocean just to keep up our exponential growth curve.
The technology may exist to reuse water sometime in the future but for now we need to conserve what we have just in case... and blind belief in the healing power of future technology won't do a damn thing if science stagnates or only helps out the richest %10 of the planet.
Just my $.02
Water. We're running out as is, especially out in the midwest where it's all going to feed cows. The only way we could survive this long would be to be a planet of vegetarians. I'm all for it, but try convincing Texas that it can't eat meat anymore, even with impending doom down the road. Good luck.
I had a mouse a while back called the scrollware 4d, it had a vertical scroll wheel and a horizontal one below that, and the third button was by the thumb. It was useful for browsing large files or on old machines running new software. I wonder if the hooks for the horizontal scroll wheel are similar to those for vertical; if I recall correctly, everything was customizable from the control panel tab.
Anyway, you can check out a newer model here
>Christianity has been blamed for alot of things. Violence, hatred and various other things but it isn't Christianity that is doing these things but people who call themselves Christians but don't even follow what the Bible itself teaches
The ticket is, it's more complex than that. Religion plays a very pervasive role in cutural values, in how you're raised, in what is considered to be good and what is considered to be bad. People who grow up in a home where they're taught repression and submission probably most likely don't have a good sense of themselves. When you don't have a good sense of yourself, how can you have a good sense of others? Here's where the hatred and violence come in. Don't even get me started about how unhealthy it is to be told that you're inherently evil and that you have to look to an outside force just to be happy/whole/complete/not burn for eternity instead of trying to find yourself.
Even if you only go to church once a week or once a month, pretending that all of what they say has no effect on your mind is like saying that advertising has no effect on you. Many people think that but that's part of the point; a well made message makes you think that you thought of it. Christianity has had 2000 years to perfect theirs.
I think that they're showing that he's actually more human than Jesus and Buddah by also being a sex god.
Oh, and I would so want to live in a culture based on raving. It was a perfect combination of shamanistic old-world and dance-hall new-world.
Don't forget to divide that number by three; one for each primary display color. A slightly more managble ~million x ~million pixel display ^_^
Baldur's Gate was so addictive... I spent an entire week of my summer one year playing it through from start to finish. One of the key elements of Baldur's Gate is that you fight by pausing the game and assigning actions to everyone involved, or just get up and stretch, whatever. At the time my room (and computer) were just a few steps from the kitchen, and when I got to the end of the game and subsequently corrupted my save game I was in a state of shock. I wandered into the kitchen for dinner, started to eat, and realized that I had to go to the bathroom. For about two seconds, my thumb twitched until I realized I couldn't pause real life. Two seconds of abject terror. I think I went into the bathroom and dunked my head in icy water for like a minute to recover from that.
The area of a sphere is 4pi r^2, where r is the radius and pi is 3.14159 etc etc. Electromagnetic radiation, broadcast uniformly in all directions makes a sphere. Double the radius of your sphere and you increase its area by 2^2 or 4. It's still the same amount of electromagnetic radiation, just spread out over 4x the area so its only 1/4 as dense. Tada, the "inverse square law" that pervades gravity, electricity, magnetism, and, you guessed it, electromagnetism.
That's why SETI is so difficult unless alien signals were directed directly at us; by the time you've crossed 10 light years of distance, your signal has spread out over 10^2 or 100 light years in distance. Converted to miles, 100 light years * 5,865,696,000,000 miles (the number of light years in a mile) is 586,569,600,000,000 or 5.86 x 10^14 miles in distance. A signal designed to propigate from surface to surface on a terrestrial planet like ours (and thus our TV and radio signals) would probably not be modulated for anything greater than a fixed point on the planet to any point on the planet so for a planet of 8,000 miles in diameter for earth that's pi d or pi*8000mi or about 25,000 miles. Figuring out how many times the signal strength for a given area of space drops for every time that's doubled I leave up to you (hint, its not going to power your walkman).
As for your banter about the One And Only Truth, I reccomend you read up a little on debating, especially an ad hominem attack and why it makes you look like a fool. I reccomend the rest of the site too.
I'm not saying either way, I'm just saying that neither of you did any more than a crapshot job of trying to convince one another.
>Look, I'm a lot more likely to accept claims made by people with PhDs and 60 years of experience in this stuff than random slashdotters as far as how much food we have for people, BUUUT, that being said, I was only posting quotes from the show.
Granted. Regardless of what alphabet soup you have trailing your name, its hard to fully quantify how much food is made worldwide, its not like everyone who makes food reports to a central authority or anything. I've heard estimates both ways.
Yeah, Greenepeace is probably a little overzealous. I'm trying to remember where it was that I heard someone talking about the wisdom that his father had passed on to him, that it's necessary to have extremists to some extent on both sides to help keep the majority of the population in check... with only arch-conservative or only ultra-liberal factins who speak out (which is really what the majority of the world doesn't do, and that is speak out) the people wouldn't have a difference of opinion to choose from. Anti-government and anti-capitalist forces are necessary, I think anyway, to continually challenge existing systems so they don't become decadent.
>Greepeace is a corporation themselves, and they suck, in too many ways to describe. I think the biggest one is, though, that they LIE, and not just a little, a LOT and OFTEN.
Greenpeace is not for profit organization, which isn't to say that they don't have an agenda (they do) or that they always tell the truth (they don't) but they don't really have a product to sell. They're an activist group like the ACLU on the libertarian side politically or the Christian Coalition on the authoritarian side. As for the lying, not to use the excuse that "everyone does it" but the truth is everyone in politics and economics does do it, intentionally or unintentionally, since they have an adgenda and varying degrees of ethics in achieving said adgenda. I don't think its right to hold them to a higher standard than, oh, another few entities.
I know they're just quotes, but I think it was Orwell who said something about blind reproduction of quotes, stastics, and figures lets others do the thinking for you. Food for thought ^_^.
I spent about an hour writing out an intelligent response to your comment until I realized that its entirely offtopic and already answered in previous questions. Human population is 6.2 billion, not 6.6 billion. We produce enough food worldwide for more than 10 billion people (most estimates peg the amount of food consumed by livestock in the US to be enough to feed at least 8 billion people additionally) but most of it is in industrialized countries that don't need it and don't use it.
Zimbabwe didn't accept the food because it would have made their farmers fork over cash for the right to replant their crops, as after 30 years the GM pesticides would no longer be effective against the super-pests that would have survived. Economically, it was a smart move because once their food was contaminated with GM food, then the import laws in the EU would have raised the tariffs to levels that would bankrupt the entire economy. Makes you wonder why the US didn't spend the cash to just ground it into flour beforehand eh?
Yick, by this logic, Penn, by feeling strongly about an issue that doesn't actually affect him (being not a citizen in a third world country) should, quote, shut the fuck up. I disagree, holding an opinion about something that doesn't directly affect you is what brought Norman Borlaug into his line of work and is the same thing that drives many Greenpeace activists to go out and protest things.
But, thanks for trying.
This is actually a really good idea. Distributed bandwidth for *everything*, if your algorithms are efficient enough it would create ad-hoc caches. The only issue would be websites with rapidly changing data. It would basically overcome the underlying idea of being an end-user, that you cannot pass packets. Instead, you would make every computer into a node and with enough bandwidth...
Cool. Someone get to work.
RTFA-
it gets heated up, not burned; no byproduct, and the power from the manure goes to keep it hot. So as long as they can grow food, they have power.
It's weird, reading all of these responses I realize how easy life is for me... for the record, I'm in high school right now. I program. I work at an ISP... and everyone who knows that I'm good with computers thinks that it's cool. Maybe I'm lucky that I can talk to girls and stuff, but reading all of these responses really opened my eyes to how hard it is to be on the most bottom rung... I consistantly try to befriend people from all the groups in the school, and I think that being a theater geek AND an art geek AND a computer geek together give me the necessary cross-section of expierences to make social situations workable. I'm also lucky because the football team in my school hasn't won more than 3 games per season in over a decade, and this is the first year they hit 3. The jocks have no power. It's the annoying people who, as other people have said, will smack me on the back of the head sometimes or push me in the hallways that I write off as assholes, get pissed at, and promptly forget about. I can't even remember any of their names, they're like faceless blobs to me... but maybe they're the ones that I should be more friendly with. Blah.
Simple; VoIP systems connected to the public telephone network can be regulated like circut-switched calls, and systems that are purely digital can rely on encryption for their security. Stick the regulatory gizmos at the interfaces. Simple.
Bob Munck makes all the points I was going to make, so I'm not going to rehash them, but check out this site for the first chapter or the complete, 15 MB NASA report, telling you just how fast, cheap, easy to build it would be. Trillions of dollars my arse, get better informed before you try and pick apart someone's arguments.
A space elevator is fast, cheap, affordable, can be created with technology avaible in the next two to there years, and will allow a huge bom in space exploration and be a giant bonus to the worldwide economy, and all for less than the price of developing a new fighter-jet fleet or space shuttle system ($16B each). NASA, make space exploration a reality! Booyah!
Err, the real thing? Since when does Madonna carry around a laser-engraver with her? Maybe Beck has one. I wouldn't put it past him.
Um...
-snip-
By the time we notice the long-term benefits of environmentalist action
-snip
So... that would make you an environmentalist. If you were anti-environmentalist, you wouldn't think there was any long-term benefit of environmentalist action at all.
So you're not really an anti-environmentalist, you're just a pessimist.
Sorry.
Mine were already dead a lot sooner when I switch'd to Linux/BSD.
"You're dead to me now. Go."
Most of your comment is done already. It's called FreeBSD, and if some of the damn Linux programmers would get off their high horse and develop applications for it instead of Linux, it would all be good because FreeBSD is consistent. In everything.
'Cept, now mplayer plays quicktime and java is native for FreeBSD...
*grin*
I get 1MB/second from Optimum Online for $40 a month. My friends with DSL one town over are lucky to get 90kB/s. There aren't enough people in my neighborhood to suck up the bandwidth. The tech guys at optonline are total morons. They couldn't block ports if they wanted to. My advice: look for the dumbist ISP around, and go for it. You'll be glad you did.
Sort of true, but one doesn't just send encrypted data, does one? Unless every civilization out there is communicating with one-time pads (read: very difficult, especially at galactic distances; you have to send your key in plaintext or else have someone physically bring it- no small task in space!), then there is handshaking. There is key distribution. There are (probably) large prime numbers at work. I belive one of the things that SETI@Home checks for is prime numbers, no?
The FreeBSD LiveCD Project is your friend. I've used the CD linux distros and... nyehhh. None of them have the wholesomeness of the LiveCD project. Your only concern is if the machines involved will do Non-Emulation booting, or even CD booting at all. If you can't do non-emulation booting, your best bet is to set up a floppy-boot system that either reads data (bins, configs) from the cd or else off of the internet (if the people involved have high speed connections.) Ignore the ideas about BOOTP and network booting; no router worth its salt will route BOOTP over the Internet.
Except that it will allow me to access things "legally," what benefit does Palladium actually give to the consumer? 'Cuz I'm stumped.