No, IIRC, I read somewhere that even allowing for 57 million deaths in WWII, at the end of the war there were 20 million more people than when it started. Of course, without the war you'd have about 70 million more people...
> A Semi trailer (or 10) packed with high level
> nuclear waste and explosives detonated at rush
> hour in a major city sure would make a big and
> nasty mess.
IIRC, that kind of thing was exactly thought of as the real danger of all the misplaced uranium and plutonium. Bombs are too hard, so just use your stolen stuff and pack it around a large amount of high explosives and have a dirty nuclear bomb without the explosion. Sort of like the ultimate neutron bomb (for those who remember the Carter years.)
Although I support SDI, I would like to point out that "the scientists" opposed to it didn't mean that you couldn't shoot down one missle. Of course you can build stuff to shoot down one missle, or even many or most missles. That wasn't the reason they thought it wouldn't work.
They meant that in an all-out exchange of thousands (or tens of thousands) of missles, some would always get through no matter how good your shield. If 99 of 100 are destroyed, a very good job from an engineering standpoint, you've still got 10 up to 600 (1% of height of cold war totals) that would get through, and that would still lead to millions or even billions of deaths.
People who are in power in religion realize religion is about controlling the masses by focusing their rage on some other group, Not Your Religion. Religion has now been reduced in "modern" countries to a quaint anachronism of harmless belief, being replaced by politics (which religion was all along) which replaces God with The People, and Not Your Religion with Those Evil Businessmen. Oh, also in history, those Not Of Your Race.
> More people will take public transit, because
> it's cheaper than driving.
I lived in the Netherlands a year and a half, where public transport is king. (Note: it only seems cheaper. When you take taxes into account...) Anyway, any teenager who could afford a car would get one. Even if public transport is cheaper, it's nerdier, and not in the slashdot way. I suppose you'd best get writing public ads promoting the coolness of riding on a trolly with other people...
I would imagine the plasma would fall below reaction temperature * pressure long before it got anywhere near the physical wall of the chamber, and that it wouldn't have enough mass to do any real damage to it at all. A sudden failure of the magnets wouldn't even require any real repair.
Not to defend war, but at the end of WWII, there were 20 million more people on the planet than at the beginning.
Anyway, war advances technology, and small technological advances have tremendous multiples on the advancement of future generations. One could argue that the technology of war yields many more people being alive than without.
Energy is far cheaper now, and continues to drop in price, than ever before, and is far, far cheaper than in countries with massive control over the "cartels", or worse, the government is the cartel (real socialist, communist.)
> This means that monsters attack and kill from
> OUTSIDE, and YOU CAN'T FIGHT BACK.
The deeper reaches of the Minotaur mines in Steamfont (best newbie zone in the entire game) are basically terminally busted because Meldrath casts at you through walls. Only high levels go down there to slaughter him because that doesn't matter.
I wonder if ever, on any EverQuest server, a group of high 20's ever invaded there with the intent of killing Meldrath. Ever.
> Linux is not a good platform for gaming because
> of open-source systems' variability.
Even PC's took awhile to get on the bandwagon.
My company ordered a, WOW, 486! from Gateway. It wouldn't play Doom 2. Gateway said "So what?" Doom 2 wasn't a program that they made sure their systems could play.
Back went the computer.
They changed their tune regarding games, as did all PC companies. By the time Duke Nukem came out (Pentium Pro 200! WOW!) life was much better.
Evidently the flashy handwaving and flashes of light flying around aren't magic spells. They're nanobots...nanobots.
Why some idiotic classes would be "afraid" of them instead of integrating them into their armor is beyond me.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a monk class that, presumably, can stand toe-to-toe with someone wearing powered armor, ehehehe. Have fun kids! More of EQ's human monks punching for more than a 10-foot tall, 4000lb ogre can strike for with a giant 2-hander pulled sideways out the ass of a god. Caster NPC punches, too...
I got the free month from EQ, too. It was for anyone who bought the game in the first two weeks (I was at the end of week 1 because that's when it showed up in stores.) Free month if you managed to register during that time, of course.
Little did I know it put you in the roll of one of the minions of Diablo II and that all the monsters were loaded barbarians with cheat hacks in place...
Yes, "all they did" was slap a 3d GUI on a standard MUD, but the spell effects were something new and, gosh, it was neat. (This was when a 20-something guy wearing bronze armor was a decked-out, high level dude.)
No, no large amounts of home users have upgraded since the 3.1 -> 95 change (or NT 3.5 -> 4.0), which were noticeably better.
MS's sales of post-95/NT 4.0 OS's rely on manufacturer installation. The few home users who upgraded beyond 95 are co-developers who installed upgrades using those supplied by their MSDN liscenses at home, and to a man offered horror stories. Not only did the installs not function correctly, requiring their programming skills to fix, in one case it couldn't even be fixed and the automatic rollback function didn't work right, either.
> Word? Wordperfect running in a gui interface
> with a slew of marketing features.
You are wrong on this. I was a Mac-ophile back then, and MS-Word on the Mac was a full-featured, Mac-user interface-friendly program that was actually starting to be better than MacWrite. That was in college in the mid-late 80's.
I went to industry and was handed a PC with Word Perfect, and almost puked. This was the old, text-based one.
Then we upgraded to an early version of Windows, and Word Perfect's GUI was just a half-assed wrapper around their clunky interface. The Word version was amlost a perfect port of the clean Mac version.
If there is a kernel of truth to Microsoft's statements about providing superior products to customers, it was their port of Word to the PC new Windows environment in the context of the hideous, market-dominating WordPerfect.
> it is impossible to sleep without ear plugs. I
> can imagine that alone making it quite a hell.
And earplugs aren't just an acceptable alternative. You want to be able to hear alarms and such (not to mention when that 10-minute "knock" of the air purifier stops knocking...)
My mommy spilled coke on the floor of the garage when a child and it cleaned the oil off. I tried it, but that didn't work. Maybe it wasn't hot enough...
Well, the nature of the Internet is that you surf to sites. If it costs more for a given ISP, you get another. If a site charges and people can't get there because their ISP doesn't pay, people will go to another site that is similar. The pay site falters, and scraps the idea.
A site like Disney might be able to get it, but I never paid for Disney as a premium channel. Eventually, my cable offered it as part of the extended package, which I got anyway for other reasons. There is no such thing as the "extended package" in Internet (yet.) This could be a forerunner, but it would only work for things like Disney that were popular and had unique content.
Slashdot Mirror
No, IIRC, I read somewhere that even allowing for 57 million deaths in WWII, at the end of the war there were 20 million more people than when it started. Of course, without the war you'd have about 70 million more people...
> If gasoline cost $30 a gallon, there'll be a lot > less driving no matter how dorky public transit > seems at first.
There are very good reasons to believe that won't ever happen.
> A Semi trailer (or 10) packed with high level
> nuclear waste and explosives detonated at rush
> hour in a major city sure would make a big and
> nasty mess.
IIRC, that kind of thing was exactly thought of as the real danger of all the misplaced uranium and plutonium. Bombs are too hard, so just use your stolen stuff and pack it around a large amount of high explosives and have a dirty nuclear bomb without the explosion. Sort of like the ultimate neutron bomb (for those who remember the Carter years.)
Although I support SDI, I would like to point out that "the scientists" opposed to it didn't mean that you couldn't shoot down one missle. Of course you can build stuff to shoot down one missle, or even many or most missles. That wasn't the reason they thought it wouldn't work.
They meant that in an all-out exchange of thousands (or tens of thousands) of missles, some would always get through no matter how good your shield. If 99 of 100 are destroyed, a very good job from an engineering standpoint, you've still got 10 up to 600 (1% of height of cold war totals) that would get through, and that would still lead to millions or even billions of deaths.
People who are in power in religion realize religion is about controlling the masses by focusing their rage on some other group, Not Your Religion. Religion has now been reduced in "modern" countries to a quaint anachronism of harmless belief, being replaced by politics (which religion was all along) which replaces God with The People, and Not Your Religion with Those Evil Businessmen. Oh, also in history, those Not Of Your Race.
I wouldn't underestimate the ability to trace stuff, much less the ability to twist the arms of the IRA people who might have sold the stuff.
> More people will take public transit, because
> it's cheaper than driving.
I lived in the Netherlands a year and a half, where public transport is king. (Note: it only seems cheaper. When you take taxes into account...) Anyway, any teenager who could afford a car would get one. Even if public transport is cheaper, it's nerdier, and not in the slashdot way. I suppose you'd best get writing public ads promoting the coolness of riding on a trolly with other people...
> Either way, barring a *huge* population
> expansion, we won't run out of power - ever.
Julian Simon would argue that a huge population would generate solutions to the problems even faster, thus benefitting people even more.
I would imagine the plasma would fall below reaction temperature * pressure long before it got anywhere near the physical wall of the chamber, and that it wouldn't have enough mass to do any real damage to it at all. A sudden failure of the magnets wouldn't even require any real repair.
> And as long as something IS not 100% safe I
> don't want it near my children.
>
> You've got a problem with that, technocrat?
Yes. Much stuff you are worried about is less dangerous than stuff you accept.
Besides, your children's worst enemy is themselves, not the environment.
Not to defend war, but at the end of WWII, there were 20 million more people on the planet than at the beginning.
Anyway, war advances technology, and small technological advances have tremendous multiples on the advancement of future generations. One could argue that the technology of war yields many more people being alive than without.
Current state of energy cartels?
Energy is far cheaper now, and continues to drop in price, than ever before, and is far, far cheaper than in countries with massive control over the "cartels", or worse, the government is the cartel (real socialist, communist.)
> This means that monsters attack and kill from
> OUTSIDE, and YOU CAN'T FIGHT BACK.
The deeper reaches of the Minotaur mines in Steamfont (best newbie zone in the entire game) are basically terminally busted because Meldrath casts at you through walls. Only high levels go down there to slaughter him because that doesn't matter.
I wonder if ever, on any EverQuest server, a group of high 20's ever invaded there with the intent of killing Meldrath. Ever.
> Linux is not a good platform for gaming because
> of open-source systems' variability.
Even PC's took awhile to get on the bandwagon.
My company ordered a, WOW, 486! from Gateway. It wouldn't play Doom 2. Gateway said "So what?" Doom 2 wasn't a program that they made sure their systems could play.
Back went the computer.
They changed their tune regarding games, as did all PC companies. By the time Duke Nukem came out (Pentium Pro 200! WOW!) life was much better.
Evidently the flashy handwaving and flashes of light flying around aren't magic spells. They're nanobots...nanobots.
Why some idiotic classes would be "afraid" of them instead of integrating them into their armor is beyond me.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a monk class that, presumably, can stand toe-to-toe with someone wearing powered armor, ehehehe. Have fun kids! More of EQ's human monks punching for more than a 10-foot tall, 4000lb ogre can strike for with a giant 2-hander pulled sideways out the ass of a god. Caster NPC punches, too...
I got the free month from EQ, too. It was for anyone who bought the game in the first two weeks (I was at the end of week 1 because that's when it showed up in stores.) Free month if you managed to register during that time, of course.
Little did I know it put you in the roll of one of the minions of Diablo II and that all the monsters were loaded barbarians with cheat hacks in place...
Yes, "all they did" was slap a 3d GUI on a standard MUD, but the spell effects were something new and, gosh, it was neat. (This was when a 20-something guy wearing bronze armor was a decked-out, high level dude.)
No, no large amounts of home users have upgraded since the 3.1 -> 95 change (or NT 3.5 -> 4.0), which were noticeably better.
MS's sales of post-95/NT 4.0 OS's rely on manufacturer installation. The few home users who upgraded beyond 95 are co-developers who installed upgrades using those supplied by their MSDN liscenses at home, and to a man offered horror stories. Not only did the installs not function correctly, requiring their programming skills to fix, in one case it couldn't even be fixed and the automatic rollback function didn't work right, either.
> Word? Wordperfect running in a gui interface
> with a slew of marketing features.
You are wrong on this. I was a Mac-ophile back then, and MS-Word on the Mac was a full-featured, Mac-user interface-friendly program that was actually starting to be better than MacWrite. That was in college in the mid-late 80's.
I went to industry and was handed a PC with Word Perfect, and almost puked. This was the old, text-based one.
Then we upgraded to an early version of Windows, and Word Perfect's GUI was just a half-assed wrapper around their clunky interface. The Word version was amlost a perfect port of the clean Mac version.
If there is a kernel of truth to Microsoft's statements about providing superior products to customers, it was their port of Word to the PC new Windows environment in the context of the hideous, market-dominating WordPerfect.
> it is impossible to sleep without ear plugs. I
> can imagine that alone making it quite a hell.
And earplugs aren't just an acceptable alternative. You want to be able to hear alarms and such (not to mention when that 10-minute "knock" of the air purifier stops knocking...)
My mommy spilled coke on the floor of the garage when a child and it cleaned the oil off. I tried it, but that didn't work. Maybe it wasn't hot enough...
Well, the nature of the Internet is that you surf to sites. If it costs more for a given ISP, you get another. If a site charges and people can't get there because their ISP doesn't pay, people will go to another site that is similar. The pay site falters, and scraps the idea.
A site like Disney might be able to get it, but I never paid for Disney as a premium channel. Eventually, my cable offered it as part of the extended package, which I got anyway for other reasons. There is no such thing as the "extended package" in Internet (yet.) This could be a forerunner, but it would only work for things like Disney that were popular and had unique content.
Well, no one has any problems with massive amounts of pr0n causing pr0n ADD over the Internet.
Actually, highly lossy compression systems can be viewed as using millibytes...
I'd prefer using the prefix "iti" rather than "ibi", as in kitibytes, mitibytes, gigibytes, and, of course, titibytes.
Oh don't get me started!
Let's not forget game cartridges that advertise things like having "8 MEGA!"
8 Mega-BITS, of course.