As I understand it, one of the big problems with silicon based life is that the bonds between silicon atoms aren't strong enough. Carbon to carbon bonds are the best game in town, and silicon to silicon bonds just aren't up to snuff. The reason this is important is that life as we know it uses lots of long chain molecules, and the backbone of these molecules is always carbon. A lot of these molecules could have their carbon swapped out for silicon (not all of them), but the resulting molecule wouldn't hold together. Brownian motion, or just structural stresses would tear them apart. Of course, there might be all sorts of ways around these problems (very low temperature living, for one), but it does look like carbon has lot going for it.
Sure, greater technical advancement and intelligence would not neccessarily make the aliens nice. On the other hand, what would a species that advanced possibly want that we have? I can't think of any minerals that wouldn't be easier for them to mine from comets, asteroids, or just planets with lower escape velocities. As far as food goes, they could just grow that in space as well. About the only things I can really think of that aliens might want from Earth are slave labour and real estate. Understand that when I say slave labour, I'm not suggesting that the aliens would actually need living workers. It would be more a matter of sentimentality. It would basically be about power. If the aliens were anything like human beings, then some of them would enjoy having servants who they can think of as lesser than them. Not very nice, but your whole point was that these aren't very nice aliens. Or, maybe these aliens have read "The Most Dangerous Game" one time too many and want intelligent creatures for bloodsports, hmmmm? The reasons the aliens would want real estate are fairly obvious. They would probably have plenty of space to house themselves what with space stations, and terraformed planets or just enclosed cities on other planets. Not to mention the fact that if life is common in the universe, there are probably plenty of planets like earth but with no intelligent species. But, we're assuming that these are fairly decadent evil aliens so individual aliens would probably want as much personal space as they can get. Maybe they'd even want their own little fiefdoms, which neatly merges slave and real estate needs into a pretty little package. I personally don't think most advanced species will be quite that bad. On the other hand, maybe they would consider themselves so far beyond us that they would act in the same way. They might want to restrict our activities and our technology in the interests of conservation. So, just replace slave with pet and we have pretty much the same situation as above. Well, in any case, I hope not.
Your description brings to mind ball lightning. Who knows if that's at all accurate, but it would exlplain a moving bright light near to ground level, the bang, and the catfish vanishing. Catfish are electrically sensitive aren't they? I think I recall that they detect prey, like sharks and duck-billed Platypuses, by detecting the minute electric fields generated by their nervous systems. Then again, it could have just been the light.
As you say, those astronauts were air force test pilots and the like. You know, brave. Not trusting them not to say something embarrassing in the face of imminent death is a terrible thing. It's a pretty poor way to repay people who have just given you their lives in service. Of course they weren't told about these plans, they would have been insulted. Of course, it's a little uncertain what would have _really_ happened if the lunar lander had not been able to relaunch. As others have pointed out, a lot of ham radio operaters were listening in on the communications. Perhaps NASA had some way of shutting off the astronauts radios from Houston, but I doubt it. It's not as if they had very advanced computers to handle that sort of thing automatically. Maybe they could have scrambled the signal somehow. But, anyway, I have to hope that if it had really happened that there would have been people who would have taken a stand and said "I'm not going to do this."
I have a graphic novel version of the Soul Music animated special. It's nowhere near as good as the book. For one thing, it's missing most of the story. It's also missing most of the humor. One of the important things to remember about good books is that they are good books, not neccessarily good movies or cartoons or comic books, just good books.
The Dirk Gently books were pretty good. And the only hitchhikers book I found really off the mark (still enjoyable, just not as good as the others) was Mostly Harmless. That said, I'm really a great fan of Terry Pratchett. The only Pratchett books (other than very recent ones which I have to wait for since I live in Merkia) which I don't own are Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun. I'll find copies of them eventually. Anyway, I have to agree that there are similarities between Pratchett's humor and Adam's humor, but there are big differences as well. Not to mention the differences between their storytelling as well.
That may be one of the basic rules of warfare, but how does it actually apply to cutting off internet access to the rest of the world? "Infrastructure" usually would refer to such things as telephone lines and broadcasting stations _inside_ the country. Frankly, actions like this and bombing TV stations don't really cast NATO in a very good light. Not that I'm saying that people should just sit by and do nothing about the situation, but the whole gung-ho let's bomb 'em back into the stone age, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out methodology that NATO (let's face it, the US really) is using leaves a lot to be desired. The general policy, as usual, seems to be to make life as difficult and miserable as possible for everyone in general, not just the military. These policies seem to come from the same sort of people who think that playing loud rock music at the enemy during a standoff is a good idea.
Considering the collateral damage involved in targetting individuals with nuclear weapons. On the other hand, there's a fair amount of collateral damage involved in massive bombing campaigns of any kind directed at specific individuals.
This device isn't really any sort of "freeze ray" as the article implies. I think whoever wrote the article just liked the sound of it. This device is just a method of delivering an electric shock at a distance without wires. Tasers already exist that can do this by firing a dart with wires trailing back to the hand held unit. In any case, the idea of a device that will deliver an electric charge along a conduit of laser-ionized air is hardly a new one. A patent will probably be issued regardless. There still exists the problem of range, of course. A lot of charge is going to be lost over long distances. This creates a rather large problem if you're going to use this to subdue people without killing them, because the amount of power you'll have to use to hit someone at twenty feet will probably kill a person at five feet. I suppose this could be solved by building in a rangefinder that varies the charge depending on the distance. Not that such problems don't exist with modern stun guns. A stun gun that will be effective against someone who weighs 300 pounds might kill someone who weighs 120 pounds. A more likely situation is that your stun gun won't work on a 300 pound attacker except to cause momentary pain. Anyhow, I don't see how it will help at all in cryonics. I don't think it will even be particularly useful as some form of riot gear, which is what the article seems to imply it would be useful for. Much heavier duty versions might find use as weapons though. Who knows, the technology might have completely different uses. For example, it might be useful as a method of delivering power to remote devices, although maybe not since you can already do that easily with microwaves. Well, it'll probably be pretty neat in any case, even if it isn't all that useful.
The point was that those numbers would be different for non-americans. To Americans, a billion is a thousand million, but a British billion is quite a lot larger.
I think that once people realized how limited Furbies really are, no-one really cared enough. They don't really learn new words, they just have them to begin with and slowly start to use more of them. Assuming that most people who cared think the same way that I do, the real interest was in figuring out a way to teach Furbies truly new words. Looks like the only way to do that is to make your own furby control chips. Sigh, it's a pity, I had mental images of that Halloween Simpsons episode with the evil Krusty doll ("Hello, my name is Krusty, and I'm going to kill you... that's right, you, Homer Simpson!").
But what does that actually mean?
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Yoda Furby
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Will this thing have an IR port that detects that another Yoda is nearby? Will it start off speaking gibberish, and then slowly "learn" new words (that was a major dissapointment to me about the original furbies, the hype I'd heard had left the impression that the furbies really would be able to learn new words, rather than having a full vocabulary from the start and not being able to use it. I really wanted to see an evil, corrupting, viral furby created:> ). What sense would that make in the context of a Yoda doll? For that matter, what sense does it make to spoonfeed Yoda? It doesn't fit in very well with the characterization we're familiar with. Yoda is independant and self sufficient, not some little baby, cute though he may be. About the only thing left is the ability to sense when it's hugged or hung upside down, which also don't really fit very well in my mind. Other than that, it's just another talking doll, just like the Yogurt doll in Spaceballs, but without the pullstring.
In my experience, and from what I've heard, unplugging anything from the PS/2 port while the computer is running will freeze the computer half the time. Apparantly it can even cause permanant damage in some cases. I don't know if the same is true of USB ports, of course. If it is, then I have to agree with you. If not, well, there's one good reason to go with a USB mouse instead of a PS/2 one.
I don't know how much they get. If you follow the link at the top of the article though, the one marked with something like: "Click here to read more about computer companies philanthropy", they mention in that article that the CRC is one of the organizations that MS gives to. It's in the section where they profile the corporate giving of various companies. They lament the fact that more conservative organizations don't get MS money. It's a really revealing article to read as far as characterizing the CRC goes. Apparantly they exist to study philanthropy, but they have some rather extreme, in my opinion, ideas about how it should be used. Since one of there main complaints is that they think that companies should tie in philanthropy with their marketing and products, they must really love Microsoft. After all, a lot of Microsoft's gift giving seems to consist of MS software rather than actual money. Thier philanthropy also includes a lot of marketing. For instance, most gifts of software to schools come with strings attached, like not letting the school use anything else. I've also heard all sorts of things about them essentially bribing computer science professors to say good things about their software. All of the money they spend on that sort of stuff surely goes under the heading of donations when they file tax returns.
This is apparantly the fist time they've found _multiple_ planets around a single star, which apparantly qualifies as a solar system (that's not quite the definition of solar system that I've always used, but I'm not exactly the expert here). To me it sounds vaguely like a sports commentator saying: "...next up to bat is John Smith, who has hit more home runs on wet Tuesdays during his second at bat than any other player in the history of the game!" I'm eagerly awaiting the day they can find something Earth-sized around one of these stars. Such things are sure to exist, whether we actually find them or not, it would just be nice to be able to point to them sometimes. I don't think that there's anything particularly unusual about the huge gas giants they've been seeing. After all, that's about the best they can manage to resolve, so that's what they're going to see if they're out there. The conditions that allow them to detect these planets may also make these planetary systems unusual. So, it's no great surprise that these discoveries throw the existing theories of planet formation on their heads, especially when you consider the fact that all we've had to form theories with is our own system.
Texas is a lot more than a mile wide, so this asteroid is a lot smaller than the one in the movie as well. Much easier to deal with.
Life for four billion years.
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Gene Leakage
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The parent post of the post you're replying to said so. I think the poster had the handle sanity. The number sounded a little large to me, too. I'm pretty sure it's in the billions, just not four billion, somewhere between one and two billion or something like that.
Years with no crops doesn't qualify as "massive"?
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Gene Leakage
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So, you don't see a several year long 50% drop in a countries food supply as "massive consequences"? I can't really agree with that reasoning. Sure, plenty of people would survive, it's just the fact that plenty might die or have their lives destroyed that gets me. The argument that goes "after such and such an amount of time it won't matter because things will be stable again" doesn't wash very well in my opinion. See, the entire point of advising caution is that you may be able to avoid these big disasters. Going through them and then rebuilding is all well and good, but haven't you ever watched news footage about how some town has been flooded for the xxth time and it's going to cost billions to rebuild and wondered what ever possessed people to live there in the first place? Or at least to wonder why they didn't spring for better designed levees? People often say things like "natural selection will eliminate the insect resistant genes" without considering the fact that natural selection is not a gentle process.
Regarding your other examples of FUD... I don't have much to say about a "gender identity crisis" in boys from playing Tomb Raider. On the other hand, I don't think the game helps much in giving boys, or girls realistic expectations of what the human body is supposed to look like, but that's hardly unique to Tomb Raider. As for the reset button on Tamagotchi's (sp?), I'd certainly hope that people can distinguish between toys and real living things. As for POG's, just remember, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, then it's just fun:). As for killer asteroids (or comets), I would agree that there's a lot of Fear and Uncertainty, but, let's face it, there isn't very much doubt. The argument that we're "due" is, of course, a complete fallacy. Probability doesn't really work that way. That kind of thinking is the same law of small numbers that keeps people at the slot machines in casinos. On the other hand, the chances are vanishingly small that we (meaning the planet earth) won't be hit by a large asteroid or comet again. It's a crapshoot (actually, it's not absolutely a crapshoot, since once we know the location, size, mass, speed and direction of all the players and the appropriate, correct laws of physics governing them, it's all pretty deterministic, but we don't know all those things, so it's a crapshoot). It may or may not happen in my lifetime. Chances aren't particularly small that it will. If it does, there's still the fact that most of the Earth's surface can be considered an "isolated area" so an explosion as powerful as many nukes probably won't cause much loss of human life (if it hits in the ocean, some of the waves might be pretty bad, and it might set off secondary cataclysmic events like massive underwater landslides, which have been known to create half kilometer high waves themselves). Of course, there might be a dust cloud which could make things pretty unliveable for a few years in colder parts of the world. And, there's always the danger that the various nuclear powers might think that a huge explosion is a nuclear attack (apparantly, meteorites have set off ICBM warnings before) and follow their standard policies, which pretty much demand that they shoot first and question later. There's also the possibility that the comet or asteroid will be so big that we'll pretty much be wiped out. Of course, that's very improbable (over any given short period of time), but, if so, it begs the question: why do people buy lottery tickets anyway? On the other hand, there's not a lot you can do about killer asteroids/comets. I suppose humans could try ridiculous plans like responsible living. You know, things like planning ahead for the possibility of disaster and working towards getting things into a stable and recoverable order rather than the mess we work with these days.
After all, it can't leave the "realm of toys" (i.e. the intel platform) without ceasing to be intel-based. What exactly is wrong with refusing to compromise with horrific kludges? After all, who can you think of that can afford systems with greater than two gigabytes of memory, but can't afford better base hardware?
New Zealand is "not so sunny"? Ok, true, this contest will be going on during the southern hemisphere's winter, but I'd hardly describe NZ as not sunny if we're talking about summer. After all, there really isn't much of an ozone layer left in that part of the world.
The fact is that he is engaged with technology to some extent and that is a plus (in contrast to those clueless dorks that regularly introduce legislation to outlaw or tax the net or create a Federal Internet Regulatory Agency).
As I understand it, Al Gore was one of the main pushers of the Clipper Chip. In general, he's never seemed to me to be the greatest friend of free and open expression on the internet. He's the sort of guy who can be dangerous when he's championing your cause, because you just know he isn't on the same page as you. In any case, we live in an age of gross misrepresentation of science and technology and their associated experts by the media (I tend to lump campaigning politicians in with the rest of the media). For example, have you ever seen the movie "Deep Impact"? Despite some things I read that insisted that it was well fact checked, I was hard pressed to find anything in the movie that they actually got right, aside from the fact that a large comet hitting the earth makes a big boom. The thing is, most people beleive this stuff, and I think Al Gore would probably be one of them. At the very least I'd hope that, if he were president in such a situation he'd have at least enough sense to evacuate the coastal areas before the last minute. Anyway, that's how Gore stikes me. Like the average professional American who wants to think of himself as a Power User and thinks that it makes him an expert. The average American wants to think of him/herself as techno-savvy and living in a country that is technologically (and politically and spiritually and intellectually and militarily, but I won't get into that) superior to all other countries. At the same time, the average American doesn't want to learn anything if it can be avoided. If a device takes more than a minute to learn to use, it's too complex. Most people just don't want to deal with any of the details, but still want to celebrate the technology.
The picture might not have been completely accurate. Also, the place has its own suspension. When you add to that the fact that in a nuclear strike, the bomb goes off pretty high in the air to maximize the spread of the damage, it doesn't seem far fetched that this place could take a nuclear strike. On the other hand, the typical nuclear weapon in the arsenals of the US and the former USSR has a yield of something like 300 kilotons. For attacking silos, they have weapons with yields well above a megaton. They also have all sorts of funky technologies to make the bombs tunnel underground and so forth. So, a nuclear strike by a well supplied government carried out with the intention of destroying this silo would probably succeed. On the other hand, if this silo were right in the center of a city and the city were bombed with the intention of destroying the city, the silo would be fine.
Could you be a little more specific on the multiple ethernet cards thing. I can't figure out what problem to do with multiple ethernet cards would force you to have to use command line options (I'm assuming you're talking about LILO here) to boot Linux. In what situation can you not just configure LILO to do it for you? Or, if you're not using LILO to boot, what are you using that doesn't let you configure it with boot up options for the OS? Also, I thought a DLL was a library that's dynamically linked to a program at runtime rather than when the program is first compiled. Do I get a cookie?:) But seriously, I don't see what Linux is lacking here. I've recompiled my kernel a number of times, it's easy and it only takes minutes to compile. In theory, the first time I did it was because I wanted sound support to be compiled in instead of being a module, but in reality the main reason for doing it was because I'd never done it before. I certainly didn't do it because I was forced to. The modularity available with NT is available with Linux too, it's just that you have more flexibility. By the way, I don't think NT is quite as modular as you may think. At least, not as far as the typical end user is concerned. Just try pulling bits out and replacing them with your own and see what happens.
If we're talking about Time as the y-axis and Proficiency as the x-axis then, if you take the long view, isn't the learning curve of Unixen actually less steep than the learning curve of GUI intensive operating systems like MS Windows? The reason being that, although it takes longer to gain proficiency with a Unix-type OS, you usually end up much more proficient than you do with some GUI system. In other words, the learning curve for Unixen is steeper in the beginning, but it crosses over with the learning curve for the GUI at about the point where GUI proficiency comes almost to a halt. On the other hand, if Proficiency is the Y-axis and Time is the X-axis... Well, anyway, "steep learning curve" is a nice metaphor, but what does it actually mean?
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As I understand it, one of the big problems with silicon based life is that the bonds between silicon atoms aren't strong enough. Carbon to carbon bonds are the best game in town, and silicon to silicon bonds just aren't up to snuff. The reason this is important is that life as we know it uses lots of long chain molecules, and the backbone of these molecules is always carbon. A lot of these molecules could have their carbon swapped out for silicon (not all of them), but the resulting molecule wouldn't hold together. Brownian motion, or just structural stresses would tear them apart. Of course, there might be all sorts of ways around these problems (very low temperature living, for one), but it does look like carbon has lot going for it.
Sure, greater technical advancement and intelligence would not neccessarily make the aliens nice. On the other hand, what would a species that advanced possibly want that we have? I can't think of any minerals that wouldn't be easier for them to mine from comets, asteroids, or just planets with lower escape velocities. As far as food goes, they could just grow that in space as well.
About the only things I can really think of that aliens might want from Earth are slave labour and real estate. Understand that when I say slave labour, I'm not suggesting that the aliens would actually need living workers. It would be more a matter of sentimentality. It would basically be about power. If the aliens were anything like human beings, then some of them would enjoy having servants who they can think of as lesser than them. Not very nice, but your whole point was that these aren't very nice aliens. Or, maybe these aliens have read "The Most Dangerous Game" one time too many and want intelligent creatures for bloodsports, hmmmm?
The reasons the aliens would want real estate are fairly obvious. They would probably have plenty of space to house themselves what with space stations, and terraformed planets or just enclosed cities on other planets. Not to mention the fact that if life is common in the universe, there are probably plenty of planets like earth but with no intelligent species. But, we're assuming that these are fairly decadent evil aliens so individual aliens would probably want as much personal space as they can get. Maybe they'd even want their own little fiefdoms, which neatly merges slave and real estate needs into a pretty little package.
I personally don't think most advanced species will be quite that bad. On the other hand, maybe they would consider themselves so far beyond us that they would act in the same way. They might want to restrict our activities and our technology in the interests of conservation. So, just replace slave with pet and we have pretty much the same situation as above.
Well, in any case, I hope not.
Your description brings to mind ball lightning. Who knows if that's at all accurate, but it would exlplain a moving bright light near to ground level, the bang, and the catfish vanishing. Catfish are electrically sensitive aren't they? I think I recall that they detect prey, like sharks and duck-billed Platypuses, by detecting the minute electric fields generated by their nervous systems. Then again, it could have just been the light.
As you say, those astronauts were air force test pilots and the like. You know, brave. Not trusting them not to say something embarrassing in the face of imminent death is a terrible thing. It's a pretty poor way to repay people who have just given you their lives in service. Of course they weren't told about these plans, they would have been insulted.
Of course, it's a little uncertain what would have _really_ happened if the lunar lander had not been able to relaunch. As others have pointed out, a lot of ham radio operaters were listening in on the communications. Perhaps NASA had some way of shutting off the astronauts radios from Houston, but I doubt it. It's not as if they had very advanced computers to handle that sort of thing automatically. Maybe they could have scrambled the signal somehow. But, anyway, I have to hope that if it had really happened that there would have been people who would have taken a stand and said "I'm not going to do this."
I have a graphic novel version of the Soul Music animated special. It's nowhere near as good as the book. For one thing, it's missing most of the story. It's also missing most of the humor. One of the important things to remember about good books is that they are good books, not neccessarily good movies or cartoons or comic books, just good books.
The Dirk Gently books were pretty good. And the only hitchhikers book I found really off the mark (still enjoyable, just not as good as the others) was Mostly Harmless.
That said, I'm really a great fan of Terry Pratchett. The only Pratchett books (other than very recent ones which I have to wait for since I live in Merkia) which I don't own are Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun. I'll find copies of them eventually.
Anyway, I have to agree that there are similarities between Pratchett's humor and Adam's humor, but there are big differences as well. Not to mention the differences between their storytelling as well.
That may be one of the basic rules of warfare, but how does it actually apply to cutting off internet access to the rest of the world? "Infrastructure" usually would refer to such things as telephone lines and broadcasting stations _inside_ the country. Frankly, actions like this and bombing TV stations don't really cast NATO in a very good light. Not that I'm saying that people should just sit by and do nothing about the situation, but the whole gung-ho let's bomb 'em back into the stone age, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out methodology that NATO (let's face it, the US really) is using leaves a lot to be desired. The general policy, as usual, seems to be to make life as difficult and miserable as possible for everyone in general, not just the military. These policies seem to come from the same sort of people who think that playing loud rock music at the enemy during a standoff is a good idea.
Considering the collateral damage involved in targetting individuals with nuclear weapons. On the other hand, there's a fair amount of collateral damage involved in massive bombing campaigns of any kind directed at specific individuals.
This device isn't really any sort of "freeze ray" as the article implies. I think whoever wrote the article just liked the sound of it. This device is just a method of delivering an electric shock at a distance without wires. Tasers already exist that can do this by firing a dart with wires trailing back to the hand held unit. In any case, the idea of a device that will deliver an electric charge along a conduit of laser-ionized air is hardly a new one. A patent will probably be issued regardless.
There still exists the problem of range, of course. A lot of charge is going to be lost over long distances. This creates a rather large problem if you're going to use this to subdue people without killing them, because the amount of power you'll have to use to hit someone at twenty feet will probably kill a person at five feet. I suppose this could be solved by building in a rangefinder that varies the charge depending on the distance. Not that such problems don't exist with modern stun guns. A stun gun that will be effective against someone who weighs 300 pounds might kill someone who weighs 120 pounds. A more likely situation is that your stun gun won't work on a 300 pound attacker except to cause momentary pain.
Anyhow, I don't see how it will help at all in cryonics. I don't think it will even be particularly useful as some form of riot gear, which is what the article seems to imply it would be useful for. Much heavier duty versions might find use as weapons though. Who knows, the technology might have completely different uses. For example, it might be useful as a method of delivering power to remote devices, although maybe not since you can already do that easily with microwaves. Well, it'll probably be pretty neat in any case, even if it isn't all that useful.
The point was that those numbers would be different for non-americans. To Americans, a billion is a thousand million, but a British billion is quite a lot larger.
I think that once people realized how limited Furbies really are, no-one really cared enough. They don't really learn new words, they just have them to begin with and slowly start to use more of them. Assuming that most people who cared think the same way that I do, the real interest was in figuring out a way to teach Furbies truly new words. Looks like the only way to do that is to make your own furby control chips. Sigh, it's a pity, I had mental images of that Halloween Simpsons episode with the evil Krusty doll ("Hello, my name is Krusty, and I'm going to kill you... that's right, you, Homer Simpson!").
Will this thing have an IR port that detects that another Yoda is nearby? Will it start off speaking gibberish, and then slowly "learn" new words (that was a major dissapointment to me about the original furbies, the hype I'd heard had left the impression that the furbies really would be able to learn new words, rather than having a full vocabulary from the start and not being able to use it. I really wanted to see an evil, corrupting, viral furby created :> ). What sense would that make in the context of a Yoda doll? For that matter, what sense does it make to spoonfeed Yoda? It doesn't fit in very well with the characterization we're familiar with. Yoda is independant and self sufficient, not some little baby, cute though he may be. About the only thing left is the ability to sense when it's hugged or hung upside down, which also don't really fit very well in my mind. Other than that, it's just another talking doll, just like the Yogurt doll in Spaceballs, but without the pullstring.
In my experience, and from what I've heard, unplugging anything from the PS/2 port while the computer is running will freeze the computer half the time. Apparantly it can even cause permanant damage in some cases. I don't know if the same is true of USB ports, of course. If it is, then I have to agree with you. If not, well, there's one good reason to go with a USB mouse instead of a PS/2 one.
I don't know how much they get. If you follow the link at the top of the article though, the one marked with something like: "Click here to read more about computer companies philanthropy", they mention in that article that the CRC is one of the organizations that MS gives to. It's in the section where they profile the corporate giving of various companies. They lament the fact that more conservative organizations don't get MS money.
It's a really revealing article to read as far as characterizing the CRC goes. Apparantly they exist to study philanthropy, but they have some rather extreme, in my opinion, ideas about how it should be used. Since one of there main complaints is that they think that companies should tie in philanthropy with their marketing and products, they must really love Microsoft. After all, a lot of Microsoft's gift giving seems to consist of MS software rather than actual money. Thier philanthropy also includes a lot of marketing. For instance, most gifts of software to schools come with strings attached, like not letting the school use anything else. I've also heard all sorts of things about them essentially bribing computer science professors to say good things about their software. All of the money they spend on that sort of stuff surely goes under the heading of donations when they file tax returns.
This is apparantly the fist time they've found _multiple_ planets around a single star, which apparantly qualifies as a solar system (that's not quite the definition of solar system that I've always used, but I'm not exactly the expert here). To me it sounds vaguely like a sports commentator saying: "...next up to bat is John Smith, who has hit more home runs on wet Tuesdays during his second at bat than any other player in the history of the game!"
I'm eagerly awaiting the day they can find something Earth-sized around one of these stars. Such things are sure to exist, whether we actually find them or not, it would just be nice to be able to point to them sometimes. I don't think that there's anything particularly unusual about the huge gas giants they've been seeing. After all, that's about the best they can manage to resolve, so that's what they're going to see if they're out there. The conditions that allow them to detect these planets may also make these planetary systems unusual. So, it's no great surprise that these discoveries throw the existing theories of planet formation on their heads, especially when you consider the fact that all we've had to form theories with is our own system.
Texas is a lot more than a mile wide, so this asteroid is a lot smaller than the one in the movie as well. Much easier to deal with.
The parent post of the post you're replying to said so. I think the poster had the handle sanity. The number sounded a little large to me, too. I'm pretty sure it's in the billions, just not four billion, somewhere between one and two billion or something like that.
So, you don't see a several year long 50% drop in a countries food supply as "massive consequences"? I can't really agree with that reasoning. Sure, plenty of people would survive, it's just the fact that plenty might die or have their lives destroyed that gets me. The argument that goes "after such and such an amount of time it won't matter because things will be stable again" doesn't wash very well in my opinion.
:).
See, the entire point of advising caution is that you may be able to avoid these big disasters. Going through them and then rebuilding is all well and good, but haven't you ever watched news footage about how some town has been flooded for the xxth time and it's going to cost billions to rebuild and wondered what ever possessed people to live there in the first place? Or at least to wonder why they didn't spring for better designed levees?
People often say things like "natural selection will eliminate the insect resistant genes" without considering the fact that natural selection is not a gentle process.
Regarding your other examples of FUD... I don't have much to say about a "gender identity crisis" in boys from playing Tomb Raider. On the other hand, I don't think the game helps much in giving boys, or girls realistic expectations of what the human body is supposed to look like, but that's hardly unique to Tomb Raider. As for the reset button on Tamagotchi's (sp?), I'd certainly hope that people can distinguish between toys and real living things. As for POG's, just remember, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, then it's just fun
As for killer asteroids (or comets), I would agree that there's a lot of Fear and Uncertainty, but, let's face it, there isn't very much doubt. The argument that we're "due" is, of course, a complete fallacy. Probability doesn't really work that way. That kind of thinking is the same law of small numbers that keeps people at the slot machines in casinos. On the other hand, the chances are vanishingly small that we (meaning the planet earth) won't be hit by a large asteroid or comet again. It's a crapshoot (actually, it's not absolutely a crapshoot, since once we know the location, size, mass, speed and direction of all the players and the appropriate, correct laws of physics governing them, it's all pretty deterministic, but we don't know all those things, so it's a crapshoot). It may or may not happen in my lifetime. Chances aren't particularly small that it will. If it does, there's still the fact that most of the Earth's surface can be considered an "isolated area" so an explosion as powerful as many nukes probably won't cause much loss of human life (if it hits in the ocean, some of the waves might be pretty bad, and it might set off secondary cataclysmic events like massive underwater landslides, which have been known to create half kilometer high waves themselves). Of course, there might be a dust cloud which could make things pretty unliveable for a few years in colder parts of the world. And, there's always the danger that the various nuclear powers might think that a huge explosion is a nuclear attack (apparantly, meteorites have set off ICBM warnings before) and follow their standard policies, which pretty much demand that they shoot first and question later. There's also the possibility that the comet or asteroid will be so big that we'll pretty much be wiped out. Of course, that's very improbable (over any given short period of time), but, if so, it begs the question: why do people buy lottery tickets anyway?
On the other hand, there's not a lot you can do about killer asteroids/comets. I suppose humans could try ridiculous plans like responsible living. You know, things like planning ahead for the possibility of disaster and working towards getting things into a stable and recoverable order rather than the mess we work with these days.
After all, it can't leave the "realm of toys" (i.e. the intel platform) without ceasing to be intel-based. What exactly is wrong with refusing to compromise with horrific kludges? After all, who can you think of that can afford systems with greater than two gigabytes of memory, but can't afford better base hardware?
New Zealand is "not so sunny"? Ok, true, this contest will be going on during the southern hemisphere's winter, but I'd hardly describe NZ as not sunny if we're talking about summer. After all, there really isn't much of an ozone layer left in that part of the world.
As I understand it, Al Gore was one of the main pushers of the Clipper Chip. In general, he's never seemed to me to be the greatest friend of free and open expression on the internet. He's the sort of guy who can be dangerous when he's championing your cause, because you just know he isn't on the same page as you.
In any case, we live in an age of gross misrepresentation of science and technology and their associated experts by the media (I tend to lump campaigning politicians in with the rest of the media). For example, have you ever seen the movie "Deep Impact"? Despite some things I read that insisted that it was well fact checked, I was hard pressed to find anything in the movie that they actually got right, aside from the fact that a large comet hitting the earth makes a big boom. The thing is, most people beleive this stuff, and I think Al Gore would probably be one of them. At the very least I'd hope that, if he were president in such a situation he'd have at least enough sense to evacuate the coastal areas before the last minute.
Anyway, that's how Gore stikes me. Like the average professional American who wants to think of himself as a Power User and thinks that it makes him an expert. The average American wants to think of him/herself as techno-savvy and living in a country that is technologically (and politically and spiritually and intellectually and militarily, but I won't get into that) superior to all other countries. At the same time, the average American doesn't want to learn anything if it can be avoided. If a device takes more than a minute to learn to use, it's too complex. Most people just don't want to deal with any of the details, but still want to celebrate the technology.
The picture might not have been completely accurate. Also, the place has its own suspension. When you add to that the fact that in a nuclear strike, the bomb goes off pretty high in the air to maximize the spread of the damage, it doesn't seem far fetched that this place could take a nuclear strike.
On the other hand, the typical nuclear weapon in the arsenals of the US and the former USSR has a yield of something like 300 kilotons. For attacking silos, they have weapons with yields well above a megaton. They also have all sorts of funky technologies to make the bombs tunnel underground and so forth. So, a nuclear strike by a well supplied government carried out with the intention of destroying this silo would probably succeed. On the other hand, if this silo were right in the center of a city and the city were bombed with the intention of destroying the city, the silo would be fine.
Could you be a little more specific on the multiple ethernet cards thing. I can't figure out what problem to do with multiple ethernet cards would force you to have to use command line options (I'm assuming you're talking about LILO here) to boot Linux. In what situation can you not just configure LILO to do it for you? Or, if you're not using LILO to boot, what are you using that doesn't let you configure it with boot up options for the OS? :)
Also, I thought a DLL was a library that's dynamically linked to a program at runtime rather than when the program is first compiled. Do I get a cookie?
But seriously, I don't see what Linux is lacking here. I've recompiled my kernel a number of times, it's easy and it only takes minutes to compile. In theory, the first time I did it was because I wanted sound support to be compiled in instead of being a module, but in reality the main reason for doing it was because I'd never done it before. I certainly didn't do it because I was forced to. The modularity available with NT is available with Linux too, it's just that you have more flexibility.
By the way, I don't think NT is quite as modular as you may think. At least, not as far as the typical end user is concerned. Just try pulling bits out and replacing them with your own and see what happens.
If we're talking about Time as the y-axis and Proficiency as the x-axis then, if you take the long view, isn't the learning curve of Unixen actually less steep than the learning curve of GUI intensive operating systems like MS Windows? The reason being that, although it takes longer to gain proficiency with a Unix-type OS, you usually end up much more proficient than you do with some GUI system. In other words, the learning curve for Unixen is steeper in the beginning, but it crosses over with the learning curve for the GUI at about the point where GUI proficiency comes almost to a halt.
On the other hand, if Proficiency is the Y-axis and Time is the X-axis... Well, anyway, "steep learning curve" is a nice metaphor, but what does it actually mean?
I mean, we're talking about people who create run on sentences that are pages long.