If the many-universes hypothesis is correct, then life Had to happen in our universe. There are an infinite number of other universes in which there is no life, and an infinite number where life flourished, where it arose and was destroyed, etc etc etc.
On the other hand, if it's Incorrect, then it does seem likely that someone set up our universe's originating conditions to provide, eventually, for life.
Unfortunately, we don't know if it's correct or not. And even if it's not, I see no reason to believe that a god takes any active interest in me in particular or even the universe in general. He set the parameters and then left it to run, as far as I can see. That's why I'm agnostic. I can't make up my mind given the data and don't honestly see a reason why I need to.
But in any case, it sounds more to me like you're the one who has made up their mind and erected a barricade.
Murphy's Law isn't really a law, either. Nor is Sturgeon's Law. It's an honorary term for a widely accepted standard.
In this particular case, it's not the midsection of a curve. The 18-month doubling has held true from the start of the curve until the present day and likely will hold for at least a few more cycles. It will certainly break eventually, when it becomes physically impossible to make chips any more densely packed, but it's handy enough for getting an approximate answer to "how much slower were compuers in X year?".
Similarly, Bode's Law is hardly an abomination. It's an easy way to remember how far away from Sol most of the planets in our system are, and it helped find Ceres and Uranus. It's one of those big, funky coincidences that nature likes to toss at us on occasion and which lead to things like the Law of Five (or Three or Forty-Two (and there's another of those 'law's that seem to so offend you)).
I'm sure there are some people out there gullable or ill-infomred enough to think that Moore's Law is a real, scientific Law, but there are also people who fall for the Nigerian investment scam. Most of slashdot wouldn't do either, so let's just calm down, shall we?
I'd love to get random care-package gifts if I went away to live in a dorm (I moved out at 17, so never did the dorm thing). Even if the stuff is pointless, useless, or bizarre it'd still be nice to know that someone stopped and thought about me.
And the mentioned items are hardly tools for vicarious thrill-seeking. A lot of the stuff posted is, but lockpicks, a UV pen, and an LED light are just useful. Sure, you Could use any of them to get yourself in trouble, but they all have a lot of legitimate, "Hey, you might find this handy; I know I would have when I was your age" uses.
Perhaps you should just let your father's friends know that you're this ungrateful. Then when you find yourself locked out of your dorm room you can think back with vindication and be happy that you avoided becoming someone's puppet by accepting gifts.
1) Entropia is a multi-player game. The Street in Snowcrash was essentially the Internet, since Snowcrash was, in fact, written before the internet.
2) The motorcycles in the book were neither super-sonic nor racing; it was a chase scene. Though given some of Hiro's commentary, I'm sure there Were super-sonic motorcycle races
3) The mafia wasn't legalized. In those small pieces of land still ruled by the United States of America organized crime was still illegal. The rest of what was once the USA, territorially, was owned by franchies; Uncle Enzo being one of those franchisers.
4) You couldn't kill the pizza guy. You could certainly Try, but part of The Deliverator's coolness was his essential invulnerability. If the pizza was late, Uncle Enzo would arrive on your lawn and present you with a free trip to Italy.
5) Snowcrash was a device-independent viral meme, not a computer virus on the Street.
So the question would be, do You remember the novel Snowcrash?
I don't mean to be rude or ornery about it, but I honestly can't think of any. If battle.net were horribly unstable, I'd understand. If the advertisements on it were horribly intrusive, I'd understand. If it were vastly lacking in functionality or options, I'd understand. But it's none of the above. The chat interface is good enough for what it's for, creating and joining games is intuitive and straightforward, and except right around the release of a given game there aren't even many load problems with the servers.
The only legitimate use I can think of for bnetd is if Blizzard someday stops supporting their older games on battle.net. But that hasn't happened yet. You can still get on and play the battle.net edition of Warcraft I if the mood struck you.
The only reasons I can see that people would be using bnetd instead of battle.net are that they want to avoid having to have a legal registration for their games, or battle.net's servers are, at some point, temporarily down. In the case of the first reason, it's quite obvious why Blizzard wouldn't want people doing it. And as for the second, the obvious prevalence of the first would, to me, if I were part of their legal staff, Far outweigh any wish to help out their users by letting them have alternative servers.
Maybe Blizzard really wants to help their users and feels bad, as a company, for coming down on bentd. But they Do have to protect their product, and there really are no obvious legal uses for the system.
This isn't like the RIAA coming down on the existence of mp3's and computer cd players, or the MPAA cracking down on people recording Anything on their expensive tivo. Let's take it in a little perspective instead of just going with the ol' knee-jerk "Look! That company isn't letting the open-source community do whatever it feels like! EVIL!"
Re:The nature of Spiderman's webbing
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Review: Spiderman
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· Score: 3, Informative
Nope, at least not originally. Spidey was just sticky. It was explained in one of the Spiderman annuals with the hologram covers from years back (I'm sure in other places before and since, but that was during the period I actually read comics). The whole issue was Peter explaining his powers to Mary Jane (kinda a rip-off of an issue, but ah well). He said he could make any part of his body stick to anything (which sparked a query from Mary as to whether he could do it with any part, which rather surprised me considering how much less risque comics were back then) and that he made the gloves and boots of the suit extremely thin so he could stick through them. That, in turn, prompted Mrs. Parker to fret about him catching cold through the material.
Yes, I know, I have an inordinately detailed memory for absolutely useless facts. Now if only I could do the same with actually useful facts...
Y'know, I look at advertisements for new model cars, and I look at the state of the economy, and I look at Slashdot stories like this and I just have to wonder... Maybe Back to the Future II was really shot on location in 2015 afterall.
Not all of them, but my roommate knows my book-buying habits because 90% of the books he reads come off my shelves.
Regular, paper libraries, anyone?
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Sharing Doesn't Hurt
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Everyone's going on about how this can't be compared because: 1) Books are in diminished form on a computer display 2) Weber's not terribly popular 3) This study is a small sample
So how about brick-and-mortar libraries? They've been around for centuries and don't seem to be harming sales. True, you don't get to Keep the book, but you can read pretty much any book you want whenever you want (with some slight delay) by any author (popular or not) via inter-library loans. And, really, how often do you re-read a fiction novel? Once every few years, if ever again? I think I've spent more money over the years on books by authors whom I'd sampled at a library than I have on unknowns. I've even been known to go buy a book I read from a library if I liked it well enough.
Maybe that doesn't translate directly to music, since you generally want to keep a song once you've got it rather than having a 2 week loan, but the only difference between this and a public library is that you trade the convenience of a dead-tree book for the convenience of staying home rather than going all the way to the library building. Libraries have yet to kill book sales, and I don't think I've ever heard an author complain about libraries having their book, so this whole thing is a foregone conclusion.
Unique and special just like everyone else, more like.
Just because every other human wasn't born under the exact same circumstances and, thereby, isn't exactly the same as the author of the comment doesn't make them any less human. Just because every other species in the galaxy didn't evolve along the same lines as we did on a planet we could easily call home does not make them any less valid. There'll never be another me (unless I get cloned for some reason), but there are some billions of other people like me, all of 'em unique and perfect snowflakes. There will never be another homo sapiens sapiens unless we go out and create one, but there's no reason to believe there aren't a multitude of other species Completely different from us.
You do realize we're not actually expanding the nuclear power infrastructure at all, right? There hasn't been a non-private nuclear power plant built in the US since Three Mile Island back in '79. The only reason wind power could outstrip nuclear in a year is because we use a pitiful amount of nuclear.
Now, I'm not saying nuclear is the way to go, but it's hardly fair to say that we should stop exploring it and go with wind instead. The nuclear power industry barely exists and thanks to a few missteps towards its inception it never really did.
Personally, I favor solar power for large-scale power farming and hydrogen fuel cells for personal-scale use. I like solar because it's so widely applicable. A wind farm is...a wind farm. You need certain conditions to build one and it takes up a lot of land to generate a fair deal of power. Solar panels can be slapped on top of buildings and scaled down for personal use in homes where wind power wouldn't be feasable.
Of course, admittedly, my viewpoint is more based on a hopeful future than what could be achieved right this minute. Wind power is a fairly well-known technology. Further funding would get us more farms and maybe more efficient windmill designs, but there aren't going to be any huge breakthroughs in wind-power harvesting. Solar, and even the much-frowned-upon nuclear, have a great deal of room for innovation. Orbiting solar power collectors to save planet-side space or orbiting power plants to keep us all safe from the danger of core breeches and meltdowns; new, more efficient solar cells; fusion reactors or better control systems for fission systems... Increased funding and interest in either area could bring us those things, whereas wind power is little more than a stop-gap measure to shunt us off fossil fuels for the moment. But do we really want to move into a new generation of entrenched services? At least we have continuing research in fossil fuels to reduce emissions and improve fuel-use efficiency. Where can wind power ever really go?
I think it actually Was flame. If you noticed during the tunnel effect the light came flaring up, then the blue-white flames released by the dying reapers rushing after it.
Although, on a side note, if you have a sufficiently bright light it won't bend, but it will certainly bounce. If you shone a couple thousand candle power of light in the center of a room with a single tunnel exit, it'd light the way pretty dang far down the tunnel, twisty or not. Now, if you had enough turns of sharp enough angles it'd certainly stop the light, but a flare that bright would certainly shine around a corner.
Let's say for the sake of argument that all of those people are members of an a household of 3. That's 108,333,333 households, round off to 108m.
That's 108 million census forms that have to be sent out. If the form is sent with a return envelope, that's 3 paper articles each form, which effectively brings us back up to 325 million again. As I recall, I got two forms in the mail last time because I didn't send in the first one fast enough. Let's say that half of America turns in their form on the first go. That's an amazingly generous estimate, but we'll go with it.
That's 438 million sheets of paper used up so far.
Now we have the actual head-counters.
Let's say that half of the people served a second census form turn it in, leaving us with just 1/4th of the population to count. That's 81m census forms. They leave you a new one every time they come by if you're not home, and I think I got 3 before they finally caught up with me. Let's say they get half the first time. Forty million are left a second, and if half of them are home, 20 million get the third. That's a total of 141 million more sheets of paper, added to our 438 of before.
So a total of 579 million pieces of paper are used up in this venture so far. We won't bother counting the shipping materials for all those head counters to send in their finished forms.
Now we have 108 million households worth of census info. What do we do with it? Why, stick it in a computer, of course! What good is census data if the government can't poll the database for statistics? If we employ 100 data entry operators working 8 hour shifts every day and entering an average of 1 household each every 30 seconds, it'll take us a mere 35 days to enter them all.
OR
We send out 325 million sheets of paper, then send out the head counters with their palmtops. You need 500,000 because half will end up broken during use. Just like you'd likely lose another 50 million sheets of paper due to carelessness on the parts of mail personnell and head counters.
All the data collected is already on computer, so you don't need 2800 man-hours of work to key it all and there's no chance of error in the transfer from hard-copy to digital because the head of household is standing right there when you enter it.
And, best of all, those palmtops are good for more than one use. All that paper costs money to recycle, if it even gets recycled. The PDAs that don't end up broken during use are good for the next census. Sure, they'll be a few years out of date from industry-standard, but if they're good enough for the job now, they're good enough then. So even if you Do lose half to damage, that's $25 million less you're spending on the next census, on top of money saved from printing, shipping, and data entry expenses.
So yes, using electronic census forms is a complete and total waste of time and money. Why on earth would we ever want to do it when paper is so clearly more efficient? God knows computers are worthless. Aren't you glad we had the foresight to nip that internet thing in the bud and keep on getting Slashdot by carrier pigeon? It worked from great-grampa, it'll bloody well work for me, too.
I think the point was less about destroying the satellites and more about either:
1) The US deciding, "Hey, we're kind of angry at the UK, Europe doesn't really need that GPS thing anymore..."
OR
2) Some nutty terrorist/dictator type somehow getting hold of control codes for the system and, for instance, shifting all returned locations 2 miles north by north west.
In either case, having a second, redundant system would be helpful. If the US decided to try for world domination or something, everyone else having some other GPS system to use would be good for them. On the other hand, if all the returned locations from one system were out of whack one day, important military and business applications could switch to the other system. And even in the unlikely occurance of someone trying to shoot down all the GPS satellites, having a second set would mean that the EU and the US could collaborate and do a sort of satellite sharing thing (assuming support for such were built into the new satellites) until they hunted down and pummelled the person responsible.
This topic was hit-upon in Stephen Baxter's novel Manifold Time (or was it Manifold Space? The first one to come out). One of the main characters was starting an asteroid mining company in a near-future setting against heavy government opposition. I may have the details slightly incorrect due to lossy memory compression, but as I recall the FAA got onto him because the launch vehicle was going to be manned, so should have to pass FAA regulations. However, there Are no FAA regulations for extra-atmospheric vehicles, so it was a race to see if he could get off the ground before they could draw up requirements that he wouldn't be able to pass under the extremely tight budget of his operation.
Absolutely nothing to do with copyrights, but what's life without amusing little side-forays?
Does grandma have to even know she has a windows/system directory? Will joe ever need to even See a DOS prompt? Of the few things Windows has going for it is the fact that you can do pretty much anything that would come up in normal use without actually having to know anything about how the system works.
I never once called any product useless. In fact, i mentioned that i'm not only a linux supporter, i'm a linux user (call now and get this lovely free spray-on-filesystem for just 3 easy payments...)
Whatever my sympathies though, Linux is not a user friendly OS. It's getting better, yes, but it's far from there. Most of the time you can't simply pop in a cd or double click an icon and have a program install on the first try with obvious icons and easy to understand instructions for its features... but there's really no point in arguing it. If a linux user has decided linux is good enough for everyone, they'll not be swayed.
I'm not interested in starting a flamewar over whether linux is better than windows.. i have win95 on my machine because there are things i'd rather do in windows (anything involving graphics for instance, because i can't stand The Gimp) and i run linux because i like linux. All i'm saying is that slashdotters need to stop knee-jerking to the word Microsoft and actually think about the articles. This one is mainly crap, yes, but the guy Does have a point in his own twisted and deluded manner. Dreamweaver
My point is that people on slashdot have this weird, pavlovian reaction to the word Microsoft.. hence my post's title.
But on the tangential note you've brought us to about what people should do if they don't have windows as an option anymore.. just what is it that you're suggesting here? If they don't use linux they should use macOS?
Assuming MacOS X runs as well as it supposedly does and that it can be made to run on a pc, what happens when all the former windows users go out and pick up MacOS for their new computers? Sure, some would probably go for linux instead, but that still leaves you with a large majority of the computer using population using MacOS.. So I suppose that monopolies are okay, just so long as theyre based on a BSD kernel?
Jeeze.. i think MS is just as dirty as the next guy, but why is it that when someone says "Microsoft" on slashdot the apparent intelligence of the posters drops to about 7?
All up and down the thread i see "Ha! Do that and nobody will buy it!"
--okay, pay attention now, this is the important bit--
That's The Freaking Point!
The whole idea here is that breaking up MS is a bad idea because it would drive the price of MS products up, causing fewer people to buy them, hurting the tech market by alienating customers. Now, before you say, "Huh uh! They'll just use Linux!" remember Grandma May and Steve The Jock whos idea of bleeding edge technology is AOL on their iMac.
Linux isn't for everyone. Now, before you flame me to north dakota and back, i like linux. I'm using linux right now. But linux can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. Yes, you can install redhat 7 in 5 minutes without knowing much about your computer, but do you really think that Grandma wants to learn the directory structure, or that Joe will be awed by the power of the command line? No.. they want to plug the computer in (with as few wires as is possible), turn it on, and have a bright and cheery GUI with nice big buttons staring back at them.
Much as i hate it, idiots are the majority in the modern world. When you think about things like the effects of an MS breakup on the market, you have to remember that the reason MS has a monopoly is that there are enough idiots out there to have put them there. Dreamweaver
There's a very, very simple reason why wireless isn't the huge hit in the US it is in most other countries..
We don't need it.
Yes, wireless is wonderful. We all like it, it's cool, it's new, it's the wave of the future. But for companies to want to sell it, it's gotta have demand. Wireless simply isn't nearly as necessary in the US as it is in other countries. Look at saudi arabia for example. Here you have thousands of miles of desert, with no phones in sight. Which do you want to do, run miles and miles of cable through uninhabited, hostile terrain or pop up a microwave tower every here and there or a couple of satellite dishes?
In the US we have infrastructure out the wazoo for landline phones. There are dozens of reasons why, and i refuse to go into them, read a history book. But the point is that you can't turn around in probably 80% of populated areas in the US without finding a telephone, or at least a telephone line you can plug into. Wireless in the US is basically a toy. Yeah, it's nice for people to be able to get ahold of each other, but why pay for all that wireless stuff when you can just get a pager and call them back from essentially Anywhere?
The US will catch up eventually, but our wireless expansion is Bound to be slower.
Nah, apple wouldn't let you crash in the color of your choice.. it'd be the color they felt was most intuitively crash-esque and would be rigorously standardized across all apple systems to crash in the same clearly recognizable color so that idiots everywhere will know that when their screen turns orange, they need to reboot their iMac. Dreamweaver
Simple enough.. because it'd be silly to try to write a natural language OS based around modern OS architecture. When you have users referring to files as 'this', 'that', 'my shopping list', 'the tax stuff from Bob', etc. it becomes considerably easier to just write the search routines into your processing program rather than trying to get it to use tremendously complicated find and grep commands. Just think about the number and complexity of the commands you'd need to do something like "Print all the publishing info we got from marketing this week on the printer upstairs, then fax it to Steve in Detroit with the usual cover sheet."
I can't imagine how a natural language processor would work, but it certainly wouldn't be much like anything we have now. And as for translating to english first.. at least people have some ideas for how to write a natural language processor, most people serious about the field still say reliable computer translation is impossible. Dreamweaver
You have to consider the fact that it's not just some guy at eBay who thinks the person is annoying and wants to have them banned..
eBay, being a company with lots of customers, has to consider the feelings of those customers. While the actual eBay staffers may not have any problem whatsoever with 'profane abusive language', some vocal portion of their customers apparently do. I agree with you that it's stupid to get upset over the simple use of a word, but there are alot of stupid people out there and as a commercial enterprise, eBay has to worry about the idiots as well as the intelligent. Dreamweaver
I think the point here is that you're Not talking.. they're sending text messages over cellular phones, which seems counterproductive enough without having a voice-to-text input device to send a text message over a cellular instead of just talking.. Dreamweaver
Diablo II is no more the same game than the might and magic games are all the same, or any other series games that actually keep a consistent game play style (unlike, say, final fantasy).
I for one am overjoyed that diablo II is sprite based. It seems like every game that comes out anymore is 3d, and personally i think sprites look Much better. They're pre-rendered so you don't have to worry about polygon counts, you can have way more frames of animation with less hardware usage, you can have more variety since sprites are nowhere near as big as 3d meshes, and i for one think the un-antialiased, low-poly, flat textured look of 3d games is just plain ugly.
And as for linear.. yeah, diablo and diablo II are linear.. so are pretty much all games to one extent or another. I like non-linear games as much as the next guy, but i like novels too.. and a well made, linear game can be just as involving as a linear novel.
But i digress. Different strokes for different folks and all. I like sprite-based graphics, i like diablo's gameplay, i like its multi-player (though i really prefer single player most of the time), and given the sales of the games apparently alot of people agree. That doesn't make me 'right', but don't slam the game for not being your cup of tea.
I've had to do the same thing (install from cd-rw) because my 32x mitsumi died about a month ago and i don't game much. Apparently it *does* read from the cd fairly often as the game lags like mad when i move from one area to another.. though you've probably already discovered this.
As a side note, if you think the game's not running when you start it from CD, just wait about 10 minutes.
Anybody know of one of those cd emulation programs so i can just run it off my HD? Dreamweaver
Slashdot Mirror
If the many-universes hypothesis is correct, then life Had to happen in our universe. There are an infinite number of other universes in which there is no life, and an infinite number where life flourished, where it arose and was destroyed, etc etc etc.
On the other hand, if it's Incorrect, then it does seem likely that someone set up our universe's originating conditions to provide, eventually, for life.
Unfortunately, we don't know if it's correct or not. And even if it's not, I see no reason to believe that a god takes any active interest in me in particular or even the universe in general. He set the parameters and then left it to run, as far as I can see. That's why I'm agnostic. I can't make up my mind given the data and don't honestly see a reason why I need to.
But in any case, it sounds more to me like you're the one who has made up their mind and erected a barricade.
Murphy's Law isn't really a law, either. Nor is Sturgeon's Law. It's an honorary term for a widely accepted standard.
In this particular case, it's not the midsection of a curve. The 18-month doubling has held true from the start of the curve until the present day and likely will hold for at least a few more cycles. It will certainly break eventually, when it becomes physically impossible to make chips any more densely packed, but it's handy enough for getting an approximate answer to "how much slower were compuers in X year?".
Similarly, Bode's Law is hardly an abomination. It's an easy way to remember how far away from Sol most of the planets in our system are, and it helped find Ceres and Uranus. It's one of those big, funky coincidences that nature likes to toss at us on occasion and which lead to things like the Law of Five (or Three or Forty-Two (and there's another of those 'law's that seem to so offend you)).
I'm sure there are some people out there gullable or ill-infomred enough to think that Moore's Law is a real, scientific Law, but there are also people who fall for the Nigerian investment scam. Most of slashdot wouldn't do either, so let's just calm down, shall we?
I'd love to get random care-package gifts if I went away to live in a dorm (I moved out at 17, so never did the dorm thing). Even if the stuff is pointless, useless, or bizarre it'd still be nice to know that someone stopped and thought about me.
And the mentioned items are hardly tools for vicarious thrill-seeking. A lot of the stuff posted is, but lockpicks, a UV pen, and an LED light are just useful. Sure, you Could use any of them to get yourself in trouble, but they all have a lot of legitimate, "Hey, you might find this handy; I know I would have when I was your age" uses.
Perhaps you should just let your father's friends know that you're this ungrateful. Then when you find yourself locked out of your dorm room you can think back with vindication and be happy that you avoided becoming someone's puppet by accepting gifts.
1) Entropia is a multi-player game. The Street in Snowcrash was essentially the Internet, since Snowcrash was, in fact, written before the internet.
2) The motorcycles in the book were neither super-sonic nor racing; it was a chase scene. Though given some of Hiro's commentary, I'm sure there Were super-sonic motorcycle races
3) The mafia wasn't legalized. In those small pieces of land still ruled by the United States of America organized crime was still illegal. The rest of what was once the USA, territorially, was owned by franchies; Uncle Enzo being one of those franchisers.
4) You couldn't kill the pizza guy. You could certainly Try, but part of The Deliverator's coolness was his essential invulnerability. If the pizza was late, Uncle Enzo would arrive on your lawn and present you with a free trip to Italy.
5) Snowcrash was a device-independent viral meme, not a computer virus on the Street.
So the question would be, do You remember the novel Snowcrash?
Legitimate uses like what?
I don't mean to be rude or ornery about it, but I honestly can't think of any. If battle.net were horribly unstable, I'd understand. If the advertisements on it were horribly intrusive, I'd understand. If it were vastly lacking in functionality or options, I'd understand. But it's none of the above. The chat interface is good enough for what it's for, creating and joining games is intuitive and straightforward, and except right around the release of a given game there aren't even many load problems with the servers.
The only legitimate use I can think of for bnetd is if Blizzard someday stops supporting their older games on battle.net. But that hasn't happened yet. You can still get on and play the battle.net edition of Warcraft I if the mood struck you.
The only reasons I can see that people would be using bnetd instead of battle.net are that they want to avoid having to have a legal registration for their games, or battle.net's servers are, at some point, temporarily down.
In the case of the first reason, it's quite obvious why Blizzard wouldn't want people doing it. And as for the second, the obvious prevalence of the first would, to me, if I were part of their legal staff, Far outweigh any wish to help out their users by letting them have alternative servers.
Maybe Blizzard really wants to help their users and feels bad, as a company, for coming down on bentd. But they Do have to protect their product, and there really are no obvious legal uses for the system.
This isn't like the RIAA coming down on the existence of mp3's and computer cd players, or the MPAA cracking down on people recording Anything on their expensive tivo. Let's take it in a little perspective instead of just going with the ol' knee-jerk "Look! That company isn't letting the open-source community do whatever it feels like! EVIL!"
Nope, at least not originally. Spidey was just sticky. It was explained in one of the Spiderman annuals with the hologram covers from years back (I'm sure in other places before and since, but that was during the period I actually read comics). The whole issue was Peter explaining his powers to Mary Jane (kinda a rip-off of an issue, but ah well). He said he could make any part of his body stick to anything (which sparked a query from Mary as to whether he could do it with any part, which rather surprised me considering how much less risque comics were back then) and that he made the gloves and boots of the suit extremely thin so he could stick through them. That, in turn, prompted Mrs. Parker to fret about him catching cold through the material.
Yes, I know, I have an inordinately detailed memory for absolutely useless facts. Now if only I could do the same with actually useful facts...
Y'know, I look at advertisements for new model cars, and I look at the state of the economy, and I look at Slashdot stories like this and I just have to wonder... Maybe Back to the Future II was really shot on location in 2015 afterall.
Not all of them, but my roommate knows my book-buying habits because 90% of the books he reads come off my shelves.
Everyone's going on about how this can't be compared because:
1) Books are in diminished form on a computer display
2) Weber's not terribly popular
3) This study is a small sample
So how about brick-and-mortar libraries? They've been around for centuries and don't seem to be harming sales. True, you don't get to Keep the book, but you can read pretty much any book you want whenever you want (with some slight delay) by any author (popular or not) via inter-library loans. And, really, how often do you re-read a fiction novel? Once every few years, if ever again?
I think I've spent more money over the years on books by authors whom I'd sampled at a library than I have on unknowns. I've even been known to go buy a book I read from a library if I liked it well enough.
Maybe that doesn't translate directly to music, since you generally want to keep a song once you've got it rather than having a 2 week loan, but the only difference between this and a public library is that you trade the convenience of a dead-tree book for the convenience of staying home rather than going all the way to the library building. Libraries have yet to kill book sales, and I don't think I've ever heard an author complain about libraries having their book, so this whole thing is a foregone conclusion.
Unique and special just like everyone else, more like.
Just because every other human wasn't born under the exact same circumstances and, thereby, isn't exactly the same as the author of the comment doesn't make them any less human. Just because every other species in the galaxy didn't evolve along the same lines as we did on a planet we could easily call home does not make them any less valid. There'll never be another me (unless I get cloned for some reason), but there are some billions of other people like me, all of 'em unique and perfect snowflakes. There will never be another homo sapiens sapiens unless we go out and create one, but there's no reason to believe there aren't a multitude of other species Completely different from us.
You do realize we're not actually expanding the nuclear power infrastructure at all, right? There hasn't been a non-private nuclear power plant built in the US since Three Mile Island back in '79. The only reason wind power could outstrip nuclear in a year is because we use a pitiful amount of nuclear.
Now, I'm not saying nuclear is the way to go, but it's hardly fair to say that we should stop exploring it and go with wind instead. The nuclear power industry barely exists and thanks to a few missteps towards its inception it never really did.
Personally, I favor solar power for large-scale power farming and hydrogen fuel cells for personal-scale use. I like solar because it's so widely applicable. A wind farm is...a wind farm. You need certain conditions to build one and it takes up a lot of land to generate a fair deal of power. Solar panels can be slapped on top of buildings and scaled down for personal use in homes where wind power wouldn't be feasable.
Of course, admittedly, my viewpoint is more based on a hopeful future than what could be achieved right this minute. Wind power is a fairly well-known technology. Further funding would get us more farms and maybe more efficient windmill designs, but there aren't going to be any huge breakthroughs in wind-power harvesting. Solar, and even the much-frowned-upon nuclear, have a great deal of room for innovation. Orbiting solar power collectors to save planet-side space or orbiting power plants to keep us all safe from the danger of core breeches and meltdowns; new, more efficient solar cells; fusion reactors or better control systems for fission systems... Increased funding and interest in either area could bring us those things, whereas wind power is little more than a stop-gap measure to shunt us off fossil fuels for the moment. But do we really want to move into a new generation of entrenched services? At least we have continuing research in fossil fuels to reduce emissions and improve fuel-use efficiency. Where can wind power ever really go?
I think it actually Was flame. If you noticed during the tunnel effect the light came flaring up, then the blue-white flames released by the dying reapers rushing after it.
Although, on a side note, if you have a sufficiently bright light it won't bend, but it will certainly bounce. If you shone a couple thousand candle power of light in the center of a room with a single tunnel exit, it'd light the way pretty dang far down the tunnel, twisty or not. Now, if you had enough turns of sharp enough angles it'd certainly stop the light, but a flare that bright would certainly shine around a corner.
Why would they need any? Well, let's see...
You start with 325 million people.
Let's say for the sake of argument that all of those people are members of an a household of 3. That's 108,333,333 households, round off to 108m.
That's 108 million census forms that have to be sent out. If the form is sent with a return envelope, that's 3 paper articles each form, which effectively brings us back up to 325 million again. As I recall, I got two forms in the mail last time because I didn't send in the first one fast enough. Let's say that half of America turns in their form on the first go. That's an amazingly generous estimate, but we'll go with it.
That's 438 million sheets of paper used up so far.
Now we have the actual head-counters.
Let's say that half of the people served a second census form turn it in, leaving us with just 1/4th of the population to count. That's 81m census forms. They leave you a new one every time they come by if you're not home, and I think I got 3 before they finally caught up with me. Let's say they get half the first time. Forty million are left a second, and if half of them are home, 20 million get the third. That's a total of 141 million more sheets of paper, added to our 438 of before.
So a total of 579 million pieces of paper are used up in this venture so far. We won't bother counting the shipping materials for all those head counters to send in their finished forms.
Now we have 108 million households worth of census info. What do we do with it? Why, stick it in a computer, of course! What good is census data if the government can't poll the database for statistics? If we employ 100 data entry operators working 8 hour shifts every day and entering an average of 1 household each every 30 seconds, it'll take us a mere 35 days to enter them all.
OR
We send out 325 million sheets of paper, then send out the head counters with their palmtops. You need 500,000 because half will end up broken during use. Just like you'd likely lose another 50 million sheets of paper due to carelessness on the parts of mail personnell and head counters.
All the data collected is already on computer, so you don't need 2800 man-hours of work to key it all and there's no chance of error in the transfer from hard-copy to digital because the head of household is standing right there when you enter it.
And, best of all, those palmtops are good for more than one use. All that paper costs money to recycle, if it even gets recycled. The PDAs that don't end up broken during use are good for the next census. Sure, they'll be a few years out of date from industry-standard, but if they're good enough for the job now, they're good enough then. So even if you Do lose half to damage, that's $25 million less you're spending on the next census, on top of money saved from printing, shipping, and data entry expenses.
So yes, using electronic census forms is a complete and total waste of time and money. Why on earth would we ever want to do it when paper is so clearly more efficient? God knows computers are worthless. Aren't you glad we had the foresight to nip that internet thing in the bud and keep on getting Slashdot by carrier pigeon? It worked from great-grampa, it'll bloody well work for me, too.
I think the point was less about destroying the satellites and more about either:
1) The US deciding, "Hey, we're kind of angry at the UK, Europe doesn't really need that GPS thing anymore..."
OR
2) Some nutty terrorist/dictator type somehow getting hold of control codes for the system and, for instance, shifting all returned locations 2 miles north by north west.
In either case, having a second, redundant system would be helpful. If the US decided to try for world domination or something, everyone else having some other GPS system to use would be good for them. On the other hand, if all the returned locations from one system were out of whack one day, important military and business applications could switch to the other system. And even in the unlikely occurance of someone trying to shoot down all the GPS satellites, having a second set would mean that the EU and the US could collaborate and do a sort of satellite sharing thing (assuming support for such were built into the new satellites) until they hunted down and pummelled the person responsible.
This topic was hit-upon in Stephen Baxter's novel Manifold Time (or was it Manifold Space? The first one to come out). One of the main characters was starting an asteroid mining company in a near-future setting against heavy government opposition. I may have the details slightly incorrect due to lossy memory compression, but as I recall the FAA got onto him because the launch vehicle was going to be manned, so should have to pass FAA regulations. However, there Are no FAA regulations for extra-atmospheric vehicles, so it was a race to see if he could get off the ground before they could draw up requirements that he wouldn't be able to pass under the extremely tight budget of his operation.
Absolutely nothing to do with copyrights, but what's life without amusing little side-forays?
Does grandma have to even know she has a windows/system directory? Will joe ever need to even See a DOS prompt? Of the few things Windows has going for it is the fact that you can do pretty much anything that would come up in normal use without actually having to know anything about how the system works.
I never once called any product useless. In fact, i mentioned that i'm not only a linux supporter, i'm a linux user (call now and get this lovely free spray-on-filesystem for just 3 easy payments...)
Whatever my sympathies though, Linux is not a user friendly OS. It's getting better, yes, but it's far from there. Most of the time you can't simply pop in a cd or double click an icon and have a program install on the first try with obvious icons and easy to understand instructions for its features... but there's really no point in arguing it. If a linux user has decided linux is good enough for everyone, they'll not be swayed.
I'm not interested in starting a flamewar over whether linux is better than windows.. i have win95 on my machine because there are things i'd rather do in windows (anything involving graphics for instance, because i can't stand The Gimp) and i run linux because i like linux. All i'm saying is that slashdotters need to stop knee-jerking to the word Microsoft and actually think about the articles. This one is mainly crap, yes, but the guy Does have a point in his own twisted and deluded manner.
Dreamweaver
My point is that people on slashdot have this weird, pavlovian reaction to the word Microsoft.. hence my post's title.
But on the tangential note you've brought us to about what people should do if they don't have windows as an option anymore.. just what is it that you're suggesting here? If they don't use linux they should use macOS?
Assuming MacOS X runs as well as it supposedly does and that it can be made to run on a pc, what happens when all the former windows users go out and pick up MacOS for their new computers? Sure, some would probably go for linux instead, but that still leaves you with a large majority of the computer using population using MacOS.. So I suppose that monopolies are okay, just so long as theyre based on a BSD kernel?
Dreamweaver
Jeeze.. i think MS is just as dirty as the next guy, but why is it that when someone says "Microsoft" on slashdot the apparent intelligence of the posters drops to about 7?
All up and down the thread i see "Ha! Do that and nobody will buy it!"
--okay, pay attention now, this is the important bit--
That's The Freaking Point!
The whole idea here is that breaking up MS is a bad idea because it would drive the price of MS products up, causing fewer people to buy them, hurting the tech market by alienating customers. Now, before you say, "Huh uh! They'll just use Linux!" remember Grandma May and Steve The Jock whos idea of bleeding edge technology is AOL on their iMac.
Linux isn't for everyone. Now, before you flame me to north dakota and back, i like linux. I'm using linux right now. But linux can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. Yes, you can install redhat 7 in 5 minutes without knowing much about your computer, but do you really think that Grandma wants to learn the directory structure, or that Joe will be awed by the power of the command line? No.. they want to plug the computer in (with as few wires as is possible), turn it on, and have a bright and cheery GUI with nice big buttons staring back at them.
Much as i hate it, idiots are the majority in the modern world. When you think about things like the effects of an MS breakup on the market, you have to remember that the reason MS has a monopoly is that there are enough idiots out there to have put them there.
Dreamweaver
There's a very, very simple reason why wireless isn't the huge hit in the US it is in most other countries..
We don't need it.
Yes, wireless is wonderful. We all like it, it's cool, it's new, it's the wave of the future. But for companies to want to sell it, it's gotta have demand. Wireless simply isn't nearly as necessary in the US as it is in other countries. Look at saudi arabia for example. Here you have thousands of miles of desert, with no phones in sight. Which do you want to do, run miles and miles of cable through uninhabited, hostile terrain or pop up a microwave tower every here and there or a couple of satellite dishes?
In the US we have infrastructure out the wazoo for landline phones. There are dozens of reasons why, and i refuse to go into them, read a history book. But the point is that you can't turn around in probably 80% of populated areas in the US without finding a telephone, or at least a telephone line you can plug into. Wireless in the US is basically a toy. Yeah, it's nice for people to be able to get ahold of each other, but why pay for all that wireless stuff when you can just get a pager and call them back from essentially Anywhere?
The US will catch up eventually, but our wireless expansion is Bound to be slower.
Dreamweaver
Nah, apple wouldn't let you crash in the color of your choice.. it'd be the color they felt was most intuitively crash-esque and would be rigorously standardized across all apple systems to crash in the same clearly recognizable color so that idiots everywhere will know that when their screen turns orange, they need to reboot their iMac.
Dreamweaver
Why re-invent /bin/sh ?
Simple enough.. because it'd be silly to try to write a natural language OS based around modern OS architecture.
When you have users referring to files as 'this', 'that', 'my shopping list', 'the tax stuff from Bob', etc. it becomes considerably easier to just write the search routines into your processing program rather than trying to get it to use tremendously complicated find and grep commands. Just think about the number and complexity of the commands you'd need to do something like "Print all the publishing info we got from marketing this week on the printer upstairs, then fax it to Steve in Detroit with the usual cover sheet."
I can't imagine how a natural language processor would work, but it certainly wouldn't be much like anything we have now.
And as for translating to english first.. at least people have some ideas for how to write a natural language processor, most people serious about the field still say reliable computer translation is impossible.
Dreamweaver
You have to consider the fact that it's not just some guy at eBay who thinks the person is annoying and wants to have them banned..
eBay, being a company with lots of customers, has to consider the feelings of those customers. While the actual eBay staffers may not have any problem whatsoever with 'profane abusive language', some vocal portion of their customers apparently do. I agree with you that it's stupid to get upset over the simple use of a word, but there are alot of stupid people out there and as a commercial enterprise, eBay has to worry about the idiots as well as the intelligent.
Dreamweaver
I think the point here is that you're Not talking.. they're sending text messages over cellular phones, which seems counterproductive enough without having a voice-to-text input device to send a text message over a cellular instead of just talking..
Dreamweaver
Diablo II is no more the same game than the might and magic games are all the same, or any other series games that actually keep a consistent game play style (unlike, say, final fantasy).
I for one am overjoyed that diablo II is sprite based. It seems like every game that comes out anymore is 3d, and personally i think sprites look Much better. They're pre-rendered so you don't have to worry about polygon counts, you can have way more frames of animation with less hardware usage, you can have more variety since sprites are nowhere near as big as 3d meshes, and i for one think the un-antialiased, low-poly, flat textured look of 3d games is just plain ugly.
And as for linear.. yeah, diablo and diablo II are linear.. so are pretty much all games to one extent or another. I like non-linear games as much as the next guy, but i like novels too.. and a well made, linear game can be just as involving as a linear novel.
But i digress. Different strokes for different folks and all. I like sprite-based graphics, i like diablo's gameplay, i like its multi-player (though i really prefer single player most of the time), and given the sales of the games apparently alot of people agree. That doesn't make me 'right', but don't slam the game for not being your cup of tea.
Dreamweaver
I've had to do the same thing (install from cd-rw) because my 32x mitsumi died about a month ago and i don't game much. Apparently it *does* read from the cd fairly often as the game lags like mad when i move from one area to another.. though you've probably already discovered this.
As a side note, if you think the game's not running when you start it from CD, just wait about 10 minutes.
Anybody know of one of those cd emulation programs so i can just run it off my HD?
Dreamweaver