That's a good analogy...until your bulletproof vest explodes while you're wearing it inside the armored car.
No-name PSUs are built cheap-- lowest-bidder capacitors, heatsinks, fans, and circuitry. Even getting 100% solid voltage from a UPS, they have trouble staying within spec'd voltage ranges, especially under sudden loads.
Under any real loads, budget PSUs will fail out with a good chance of killing your system, it's only a matter of time. Even before they go up in smoke you're, likely to face a nightmare of unexplainable system freezes and data corruption.
Compare that with a high-quality PSU guaranteed to run off of AC input 100V-240V while supporting full rated load. Active power-factor correction implemented properly brings everything you get from a UPS except the battery. Mine runs happily through minor voltage problems-- lights dim for a second, my computer continues to run, roommates with weaker PSUs and an old half-dead UPS go down.
There's absolutely no reason NOT to overclock Core2s. The small investment required to avoid cut-rate bare-bones parts gives you faster clock at stock/lower voltage with lower temperatures and much higher reliability.
For goodness sake, you're using a CPU that has to perform reliably in machines cobbled together by *OEM* suppliers who have to slash their costs to the bone and use the cheapest possible components in order to not go immediately out of business. There's enough headroom in the designed ratings to massacre rated performance levels. Have you ever looked inside a Dell?
Thus, my design philosophy is twofold: Excellent performance at a reasonable price with high reliability. For these reasons, I'm already going to spend more than a bare-bones system, so overclocking potential is a freebie!
In my view, the most critical components for reliability in a system are, in order: Motherboard: Proven, tested, highly-rated enthusiast-quality mobo from a top-notch manufacturer. Abit IP35 Pro, +$80 over barebones. Power Supply: Well-reviewed supply from a top-notch manufacturer, with at least 100w headroom over expected use. Antec TruePower Trio650, $40 over barebones. RAM: Quality manufacturer, rated for where you expect to overclock to. - 4GB OCZ Platinum DDR2, say +$20, RAM is cheap. Case: Antec 900. No reason to get anything else from a performance standpoint, they're on sale regularly for sub-$100. Oh, and $15ish for a no-frills CPU fan that doesn't suck.
So, $200-ish over a barebones system for massively higher reliability. What did that get me, a YEAR ago?
Core2 E6750 OC'd 27% to 3.4GHz, 100% stable at stock voltage, running much cooler than the stock cooler did at 2.66GHz.
Quit that shit five years ago shortly after realizing that CCP had no incentive to fix the poorly designed interface and game balance... haven't looked back.
Had a lot of potential, but gawd, the implementation sucked.
I don't know if the system's broken down or is just being mis-managed but at one time, I preferred military care over civilian.
The military/VA care process is still better organized and more streamlined than the horrendous kludge of the private system, but it's also under a remarkable strain from a flood of war casualties and the rapidly-aging population of Vietnam vets. Ironically, the VA system provides better, cheaper care because it does not suffer from many of the inefficiencies of a market-based health care system-- preventive care and unified standards within a single provider make treatment much more effective and cheaper in the long run.
The official count of American soldiers seriously wounded in Afghanistan & Iraq is over 30,000, even with political pressure to keep public casualty counts as low as possible by redefinition of 'wounded' and 'injured'. As of 2006, more than 100,000 disability claims had been granted by the Veterans' Administration for service in the GWoT.
Advances in medicine, personal armor, and trauma response have enabled our soldiers to survive far more grievous wounds than imaginable at any time in the past, and our responsibility for providing appropriate and continuing care is growing with this trend. Unfortunately, it's hard to live up to our promises when the political establishment is united in their desire to sweep the consequences of war under a patriotic rug...
If by 'neatly topples over' you mean 'experiences cranial acceleration sufficient to go from 5 m/s to -2 m/s in something under a 15cm distance', perhaps. Physics doesn't lie, and the pros are going a metric fuckload faster than high school football players do.
Elastic collision or not, his brain was playing ping-pong at 50+ Gs, and that ain't no good for nobody's neural tissue.
I don't see how these categories are exclusive, for damn sure a lot of the people I know would class the entire football-watching population of my house in at least categories #1 and #3, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the trash talk implies that most of us are also in category #2.
So, either someone is spreading vicious slander, or this whole categorizing plan is bullshit.
It also says "I think I am more important than you, and that what I want is more important than what you want, and I am willing to break the law to act on my self-centered desire"
Well, that's also 100% true. In fact, I have difficulty thinking of anyone who doesn't fall into that category when confronted with excessive asshattery... Fortunately, we work within the framework of our civilization anyway most of the time, because most individuals/groups also work within the social contract. DRM typically does not, so circumventing it in those cases makes sense.
The lack of oversight responsible for our current financial system downturn isn't about who was loaned what by whom. It's about the mis-representation of the expected value of mortgage-based securities. Banks were tripping over themselves to loan to anyone with a pulse because there was a vast and incredibly hungry market for 'risk-free' investment vehicles of any kind, not because of government pressure to loan money. Mortgage-backed securities were being valued based on historical default rates from when only rational lenders were making loans, and it was assumed that housing prices could not go down, despite increases of 1000% in a decade in the hottest bubble markets.
Banks had no incentive to vet their mortgage applications, because the mortgages involved were being bundled, securitized, and sold off to investors on a timeframe that got the banks out within weeks or months. Put enough securitized, tranched, bundled, split, re-bundled, and shredded mortgages together, and it was just miraculously assumed that the resulting vehicle would be 100% as safe as the real-estate market as a whole.
Irrational Price Setting ==> Market Failure. Do not pass go, do not collect a pension -- the market system does many things very well indeed, and when it fails, the failures are even more spectacular.
So, Obama will quite likely pursue some policies I do not agree with. The Democratic Party certainly has elements that I oppose completely-- I can't stand the rabid protectionist/isolationist/anti-trade idiots, the fear-mongering shills who want to trade liberty for the illusion of security, or the corrupt unions and self-serving bureaucrats.
But the bottom line is, Obama at least appears to perceive the same universe I do, while the Republican party's positions seem to be based on a controlled-inbreeding program of talking points that completely detached itself from reality years ago. They've left most of the positive elements of conservatism to nailed to a cross of rhetoric, and bankrupted themselves in the process.
No Big Government! No Death Tax! Liberals hate America! Illegal Immigrants are destroying America! The government can only keep you safe from TERRORISTS who hate America if you do everything we say! The Government should control your Right to Life! Tax breaks for the wealthy are the only way to preserve businesses that make our way of life! Socialized Health Care is the Government taking your choices away!
So, I'm hoping Obama can keep the nutjobs from his own party in check, because at this point there are no other viable options. McCain in 2000 would have been a visionary President, McCain of today has sold out to clamber to the top of a corrupted party machine drunk on power, willful ignorance and intolerance.
The left-right paradigm is a failure. We're left with two camps drawing battle lines along issues which aren't relevant across a crazy patchwork that is no longer even remotely consistent. I want someone to stand up for rational thought, open discourse, and a complete re-evaluation of the 'givens' that both parties take for granted in their rush to take a stand on things that in the end truly do not matter.
Big Government is neither good nor bad, it simply is. Some problems can be most effectively solved by Government intervention. Some problems are best solved by markets. Our political system tries to enforce a false dichotomy simply to give identity to opposing factions, which every day forces us to make tradeoffs that we shouldn't have to.
I want to make fewer of those tradeoffs, so I voted for Obama last week.
Am I the only one getting really really annoyed by captchas that use mixed-case letters and numbers that aren't distinguishable even to an actual human?
In the cruddy sans-serif fonts most captchas use, 0lRnBC looks like O1Rnl3C looks like 0lRnBC.
It's powers of 2, people! For each O or 0 in your captcha, the odds of a real person being able to correctly identify it are halved, and that's not even counting the other possible charspace collisions.
When does technology stop being marketroid buzzwords and become art?
This is new because Trent Reznor does things himself, and does them right. It's possible to throw as many screens and lights as you can afford on a stage, but for a concert experience all that matters is how the tech is used. In this case, the artist's vision is directly responsible for the design, programming, and implementation of the effects... and that makes all the difference.
I can't imagine Toby Keith or Rascal Flatts disappearing into their basements for a week to design anything, let alone program and implement it themselves. Either way, I don't know of anyone else with Reznor's combination of technical and artistic chops, and that makes all the difference.
If a structure doesn't have to be cost-effective or inhabitable, you can build almost anything with concrete. The most prominent example of this phenomenon is the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.
Not inhabitable, certainly not cost-effective, but it is over a thousand feet of concrete structure and interesting in a creepy way.
Cue the "In Communist North Korea, concrete builds you!" jokes.
Maybe those people that I elect and pay shouldn't be on vacation while I'm looking for second job so I can pay for the gas to get to my first job!
If you really want your elected representatives to spend all of their time in DC, I'm sure some of them would be perfectly fine with that. Sure, you can call being out of session and returning to the districts they actually represent a 'vacation'... but most of the time, I wouldn't.
Actually, I think the point that the GP post was trying to make is that peace officers are obligated to uphold the law, but all too often police misconduct is hidden behind the blue curtain.
Given that obligation, and the fact that working in law enforcement is a voluntary choice, turning a blind eye toward the well-documented abuses committed on a regular basis by police, even in the US, certainly qualifies as scummy.
Though by all means, feel free to continue making sweeping generalizations and twisting the words of anyone who disagrees with you, it encourages a healthy sense of skepticism in your readers.
Unfortunately, there's a difference between the 'fucking people over' represented by pirates who don't purchase the game and wouldn't even without available pirated copies, and the 'fucking people over' demonstrated when software developers intentionally cripple their product in ways that harm legitimate, paying users.
I don't give a fuck about the pirates, they're not going to buy the game either way. If you sell me shitware with broken-ass 'copy protection', I'm going to be pissed, and I will do everything in my power to avoid purchasing your products in the future, because you have violated your implicit agreement to provide working software to paying customers.
That is the issue. Copy protection, by definition, only inconveniences legitimate users, because the copy protection on any product worth purchasing will be cracked by a skilled hacker in a country with a bad enough exchange rate that it's more worth their time just to crack it. Do you really want to try to pass on your piracy 'losses' to legitimate users after they've purchased your product?
Copy protection is no longer a deterrent to pirates, it's simply an inconvenience for your paying customers, and the entities which fail to recognize this will continue to lose ground to those which do.
While fusion is great, it shouldn't be our only goal. This is still a non-renewable fuel. Hydrogen is an important ingredient to life, use up all the hydrogen and everything will die.
I'm not sure how the parent got modded insightful, given the stunning misunderstanding of physics on display.
Hydrogen fusion is non-renewable? Don't be daft, there's enough hydrogen in the ~1.3 billion cubic kilometers of Earth's oceans to generate the power output of the frickin' sun for ~750 years, roughly 8.0 x 10^34 joules.
Conveniently enough, that's approximately 1.4 x 10^7 kJ of energy per kg of earthyness, so if you're running out of hydrogen, you're likely to have run into other more substantial air-conditioning problems along the way.
Or, to put it in terms that anyone I'm arguing with is even less likely to understand, a couple orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational potential energy of... the Earth!
If that isn't enough energy for something you have in mind, it's convenient that hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe. Short of an incredible and implausible paradigm shift along the lines of exploiting zero-point energy or direct mass-energy conversion, fusion is where it's at.
For the rest of it, radioactive waste is bad, but entirely manageable, mkay? In general, the longer the half-life, the less danger you're in standing near something radioactive, and the nastiest stuff goes away the fastest, as in years and decades. If our society reaches a point where it is unable to maintain reasonable stewardship of nuclear waste, we've already got much bigger global problems. If you're going to try to scare people, at least do your research first.
...or instead of complaining to Microsoft, you can disable ZoneAlarm and enjoy having your connection work again. Cheap firewalls failing to perform exactly how you'd like them to is an old, old story.
Given the ridiculous profusion of budget 'security' software swarming around, it hardly seems fair to lay the blame on M$ when ZoneAlarm is the only program that this patch appears to conflict with.
Of course, if ZoneAlarm wasn't proprietary, we could go see where they screwed up. Maybe you should go harass them for being closed-source instead?
Given enough computing power, a machine will always be able to calculate the exact probability of every possible hand that its opponent might have, now & into the near future, without being fooled by stuff like bluffs or feints. (It's also possible that it might be able to detecting cheating like slipping an extra card into play when a result occurs which it has calculated to be "impossible".)
The entire point of a bluff/feint is that the cards are random, and calculating the exact probability of every possible hand has nothing to do with the actual hands that your opponents have. "My hand is better than 92% of the possible hands my opponent could have" is just enough to lose all of your chips 8% of the time. As the variance in possible betting increases, the usefulness of probability in long-term play decreases. No-limit poker isn't about the cards, it's about the behavior of your opponents.
I didn't know what a railgun was at the time, but my Space Lego dudes fought entire battles with vehicle-mounted lego cannon-turrets. The little ones used a couple small rubber bands and fired muzzle-loaded 1xN blocks. The late-model big ones involved breech-loading magazine-fed stacks of ball bearings, using enough big rubber bands to run right into the limits of my draw strength.
That deadly 'sha-CLACK!' became the most feared noise in the rec room. Fortunately, legos are resilient, and few of the actual pieces broke, although it was impressive as hell when an overstressed cannon imploded around the rubber bands.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good analogy...until your bulletproof vest explodes while you're wearing it inside the armored car.
No-name PSUs are built cheap-- lowest-bidder capacitors, heatsinks, fans, and circuitry. Even getting 100% solid voltage from a UPS, they have trouble staying within spec'd voltage ranges, especially under sudden loads.
Under any real loads, budget PSUs will fail out with a good chance of killing your system, it's only a matter of time. Even before they go up in smoke you're, likely to face a nightmare of unexplainable system freezes and data corruption.
Compare that with a high-quality PSU guaranteed to run off of AC input 100V-240V while supporting full rated load. Active power-factor correction implemented properly brings everything you get from a UPS except the battery. Mine runs happily through minor voltage problems-- lights dim for a second, my computer continues to run, roommates with weaker PSUs and an old half-dead UPS go down.
There's absolutely no reason NOT to overclock Core2s. The small investment required to avoid cut-rate bare-bones parts gives you faster clock at stock/lower voltage with lower temperatures and much higher reliability.
For goodness sake, you're using a CPU that has to perform reliably in machines cobbled together by *OEM* suppliers who have to slash their costs to the bone and use the cheapest possible components in order to not go immediately out of business. There's enough headroom in the designed ratings to massacre rated performance levels. Have you ever looked inside a Dell?
Thus, my design philosophy is twofold: Excellent performance at a reasonable price with high reliability. For these reasons, I'm already going to spend more than a bare-bones system, so overclocking potential is a freebie!
In my view, the most critical components for reliability in a system are, in order:
Motherboard: Proven, tested, highly-rated enthusiast-quality mobo from a top-notch manufacturer. Abit IP35 Pro, +$80 over barebones.
Power Supply: Well-reviewed supply from a top-notch manufacturer, with at least 100w headroom over expected use. Antec TruePower Trio650, $40 over barebones.
RAM: Quality manufacturer, rated for where you expect to overclock to. - 4GB OCZ Platinum DDR2, say +$20, RAM is cheap.
Case: Antec 900. No reason to get anything else from a performance standpoint, they're on sale regularly for sub-$100.
Oh, and $15ish for a no-frills CPU fan that doesn't suck.
So, $200-ish over a barebones system for massively higher reliability. What did that get me, a YEAR ago?
Core2 E6750 OC'd 27% to 3.4GHz, 100% stable at stock voltage, running much cooler than the stock cooler did at 2.66GHz.
I'll take that any day.
Heh, you've never played EVE, have you?
Quit that shit five years ago shortly after realizing that CCP had no incentive to fix the poorly designed interface and game balance... haven't looked back.
Had a lot of potential, but gawd, the implementation sucked.
I don't know if the system's broken down or is just being mis-managed but at one time, I preferred military care over civilian.
The military/VA care process is still better organized and more streamlined than the horrendous kludge of the private system, but it's also under a remarkable strain from a flood of war casualties and the rapidly-aging population of Vietnam vets. Ironically, the VA system provides better, cheaper care because it does not suffer from many of the inefficiencies of a market-based health care system-- preventive care and unified standards within a single provider make treatment much more effective and cheaper in the long run.
The official count of American soldiers seriously wounded in Afghanistan & Iraq is over 30,000, even with political pressure to keep public casualty counts as low as possible by redefinition of 'wounded' and 'injured'. As of 2006, more than 100,000 disability claims had been granted by the Veterans' Administration for service in the GWoT.
Advances in medicine, personal armor, and trauma response have enabled our soldiers to survive far more grievous wounds than imaginable at any time in the past, and our responsibility for providing appropriate and continuing care is growing with this trend. Unfortunately, it's hard to live up to our promises when the political establishment is united in their desire to sweep the consequences of war under a patriotic rug...
If by 'neatly topples over' you mean 'experiences cranial acceleration sufficient to go from 5 m/s to -2 m/s in something under a 15cm distance', perhaps. Physics doesn't lie, and the pros are going a metric fuckload faster than high school football players do.
Elastic collision or not, his brain was playing ping-pong at 50+ Gs, and that ain't no good for nobody's neural tissue.
I don't see how these categories are exclusive, for damn sure a lot of the people I know would class the entire football-watching population of my house in at least categories #1 and #3, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the trash talk implies that most of us are also in category #2.
So, either someone is spreading vicious slander, or this whole categorizing plan is bullshit.
Different development houses. Infinity Ward (CoD 1,2&4) has a substantially different feel than Treyarch (CoD 3 & 5)
Reviews tend to agree with my opinion that Infinity Ward just does it better. Can't wait till their turn in a year or so.
It also says "I think I am more important than you, and that what I want is more important than what you want, and I am willing to break the law to act on my self-centered desire"
Well, that's also 100% true. In fact, I have difficulty thinking of anyone who doesn't fall into that category when confronted with excessive asshattery... Fortunately, we work within the framework of our civilization anyway most of the time, because most individuals/groups also work within the social contract. DRM typically does not, so circumventing it in those cases makes sense.
The lack of oversight responsible for our current financial system downturn isn't about who was loaned what by whom. It's about the mis-representation of the expected value of mortgage-based securities. Banks were tripping over themselves to loan to anyone with a pulse because there was a vast and incredibly hungry market for 'risk-free' investment vehicles of any kind, not because of government pressure to loan money. Mortgage-backed securities were being valued based on historical default rates from when only rational lenders were making loans, and it was assumed that housing prices could not go down, despite increases of 1000% in a decade in the hottest bubble markets.
Banks had no incentive to vet their mortgage applications, because the mortgages involved were being bundled, securitized, and sold off to investors on a timeframe that got the banks out within weeks or months. Put enough securitized, tranched, bundled, split, re-bundled, and shredded mortgages together, and it was just miraculously assumed that the resulting vehicle would be 100% as safe as the real-estate market as a whole.
Irrational Price Setting ==> Market Failure. Do not pass go, do not collect a pension -- the market system does many things very well indeed, and when it fails, the failures are even more spectacular.
So, Obama will quite likely pursue some policies I do not agree with. The Democratic Party certainly has elements that I oppose completely-- I can't stand the rabid protectionist/isolationist/anti-trade idiots, the fear-mongering shills who want to trade liberty for the illusion of security, or the corrupt unions and self-serving bureaucrats.
But the bottom line is, Obama at least appears to perceive the same universe I do, while the Republican party's positions seem to be based on a controlled-inbreeding program of talking points that completely detached itself from reality years ago. They've left most of the positive elements of conservatism to nailed to a cross of rhetoric, and bankrupted themselves in the process.
No Big Government! No Death Tax! Liberals hate America! Illegal Immigrants are destroying America! The government can only keep you safe from TERRORISTS who hate America if you do everything we say! The Government should control your Right to Life! Tax breaks for the wealthy are the only way to preserve businesses that make our way of life! Socialized Health Care is the Government taking your choices away!
So, I'm hoping Obama can keep the nutjobs from his own party in check, because at this point there are no other viable options. McCain in 2000 would have been a visionary President, McCain of today has sold out to clamber to the top of a corrupted party machine drunk on power, willful ignorance and intolerance.
The left-right paradigm is a failure. We're left with two camps drawing battle lines along issues which aren't relevant across a crazy patchwork that is no longer even remotely consistent. I want someone to stand up for rational thought, open discourse, and a complete re-evaluation of the 'givens' that both parties take for granted in their rush to take a stand on things that in the end truly do not matter.
Big Government is neither good nor bad, it simply is. Some problems can be most effectively solved by Government intervention. Some problems are best solved by markets. Our political system tries to enforce a false dichotomy simply to give identity to opposing factions, which every day forces us to make tradeoffs that we shouldn't have to.
I want to make fewer of those tradeoffs, so I voted for Obama last week.
What effect does this have on the bacteria?
"Think of the bacteria! Oh, won't somebody please think of the bacteria!"
Am I the only one getting really really annoyed by captchas that use mixed-case letters and numbers that aren't distinguishable even to an actual human?
In the cruddy sans-serif fonts most captchas use, 0lRnBC looks like O1Rnl3C looks like 0lRnBC.
It's powers of 2, people! For each O or 0 in your captcha, the odds of a real person being able to correctly identify it are halved, and that's not even counting the other possible charspace collisions.
When does technology stop being marketroid buzzwords and become art?
This is new because Trent Reznor does things himself, and does them right. It's possible to throw as many screens and lights as you can afford on a stage, but for a concert experience all that matters is how the tech is used. In this case, the artist's vision is directly responsible for the design, programming, and implementation of the effects... and that makes all the difference.
I can't imagine Toby Keith or Rascal Flatts disappearing into their basements for a week to design anything, let alone program and implement it themselves. Either way, I don't know of anyone else with Reznor's combination of technical and artistic chops, and that makes all the difference.
If a structure doesn't have to be cost-effective or inhabitable, you can build almost anything with concrete. The most prominent example of this phenomenon is the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.
Not inhabitable, certainly not cost-effective, but it is over a thousand feet of concrete structure and interesting in a creepy way.
Cue the "In Communist North Korea, concrete builds you!" jokes.
...I didn't know managers got mod points, that explains everything. Crap.
"I am the king of no-pants!"
Maybe those people that I elect and pay shouldn't be on vacation while I'm looking for second job so I can pay for the gas to get to my first job!
If you really want your elected representatives to spend all of their time in DC, I'm sure some of them would be perfectly fine with that. Sure, you can call being out of session and returning to the districts they actually represent a 'vacation'... but most of the time, I wouldn't.
It is dark here. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The grue eats your nuclear warhead.
It has become very bright here. You are likely to be coated by atomized grue.
The sword of 1000 truths is mine!
I'd rather have the sword of 1000 dares, based on my teenage experiences.
Actually, I think the point that the GP post was trying to make is that peace officers are obligated to uphold the law, but all too often police misconduct is hidden behind the blue curtain.
Given that obligation, and the fact that working in law enforcement is a voluntary choice, turning a blind eye toward the well-documented abuses committed on a regular basis by police, even in the US, certainly qualifies as scummy.
Though by all means, feel free to continue making sweeping generalizations and twisting the words of anyone who disagrees with you, it encourages a healthy sense of skepticism in your readers.
You seem to be a proponent of security through obscurity; please hand over your /. gun and turn in you nerd badge.
But if he puts his hand over his slashdot gun in the presence of mobile photos, it's likely to go off! You're putting the whole community in danger!
Unfortunately, there's a difference between the 'fucking people over' represented by pirates who don't purchase the game and wouldn't even without available pirated copies, and the 'fucking people over' demonstrated when software developers intentionally cripple their product in ways that harm legitimate, paying users.
I don't give a fuck about the pirates, they're not going to buy the game either way. If you sell me shitware with broken-ass 'copy protection', I'm going to be pissed, and I will do everything in my power to avoid purchasing your products in the future, because you have violated your implicit agreement to provide working software to paying customers.
That is the issue. Copy protection, by definition, only inconveniences legitimate users, because the copy protection on any product worth purchasing will be cracked by a skilled hacker in a country with a bad enough exchange rate that it's more worth their time just to crack it. Do you really want to try to pass on your piracy 'losses' to legitimate users after they've purchased your product?
Copy protection is no longer a deterrent to pirates, it's simply an inconvenience for your paying customers, and the entities which fail to recognize this will continue to lose ground to those which do.
While fusion is great, it shouldn't be our only goal. This is still a non-renewable fuel. Hydrogen is an important ingredient to life, use up all the hydrogen and everything will die.
I'm not sure how the parent got modded insightful, given the stunning misunderstanding of physics on display.
Hydrogen fusion is non-renewable? Don't be daft, there's enough hydrogen in the ~1.3 billion cubic kilometers of Earth's oceans to generate the power output of the frickin' sun for ~750 years, roughly 8.0 x 10^34 joules.
Conveniently enough, that's approximately 1.4 x 10^7 kJ of energy per kg of earthyness, so if you're running out of hydrogen, you're likely to have run into other more substantial air-conditioning problems along the way.
Or, to put it in terms that anyone I'm arguing with is even less likely to understand, a couple orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational potential energy of... the Earth!
If that isn't enough energy for something you have in mind, it's convenient that hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe. Short of an incredible and implausible paradigm shift along the lines of exploiting zero-point energy or direct mass-energy conversion, fusion is where it's at.
For the rest of it, radioactive waste is bad, but entirely manageable, mkay? In general, the longer the half-life, the less danger you're in standing near something radioactive, and the nastiest stuff goes away the fastest, as in years and decades. If our society reaches a point where it is unable to maintain reasonable stewardship of nuclear waste, we've already got much bigger global problems. If you're going to try to scare people, at least do your research first.
...or instead of complaining to Microsoft, you can disable ZoneAlarm and enjoy having your connection work again. Cheap firewalls failing to perform exactly how you'd like them to is an old, old story.
Given the ridiculous profusion of budget 'security' software swarming around, it hardly seems fair to lay the blame on M$ when ZoneAlarm is the only program that this patch appears to conflict with.
Of course, if ZoneAlarm wasn't proprietary, we could go see where they screwed up. Maybe you should go harass them for being closed-source instead?
Given enough computing power, a machine will always be able to calculate the exact probability of every possible hand that its opponent might have, now & into the near future, without being fooled by stuff like bluffs or feints. (It's also possible that it might be able to detecting cheating like slipping an extra card into play when a result occurs which it has calculated to be "impossible".)
The entire point of a bluff/feint is that the cards are random, and calculating the exact probability of every possible hand has nothing to do with the actual hands that your opponents have. "My hand is better than 92% of the possible hands my opponent could have" is just enough to lose all of your chips 8% of the time. As the variance in possible betting increases, the usefulness of probability in long-term play decreases. No-limit poker isn't about the cards, it's about the behavior of your opponents.
I didn't know what a railgun was at the time, but my Space Lego dudes fought entire battles with vehicle-mounted lego cannon-turrets.
The little ones used a couple small rubber bands and fired muzzle-loaded 1xN blocks. The late-model big ones involved breech-loading magazine-fed stacks of ball bearings, using enough big rubber bands to run right into the limits of my draw strength.
That deadly 'sha-CLACK!' became the most feared noise in the rec room. Fortunately, legos are resilient, and few of the actual pieces broke, although it was impressive as hell when an overstressed cannon imploded around the rubber bands.