We would probably compare it to megatons of TNT. The Tunguska event corresponded roughly to a 15-30 megaton explosion. By comparison, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere by the United States was the Castle Bravo test in 1954, at 15 megatons.
Michael used this article to exploit paranoia of large companies who exploit paranoia. Clever. Would he prefer that McAffee, having found a vulnerability, would inform only the manufacturers of JPEG readers of the problem, and not release information to the public (as a certain OS manufacturer suggests of those who find security flaws in its product)? Would he prefer that people ignore security holes that are only "theoretical vulnerabilities"?
There's a small library near my office where there are four public access terminals. Historically they all ran Windows, but just for a laugh the sysadmin put Linux on one of them; and the users avoided the Linux machine like it was radioactive. They didn't seem to like the "weird" web browsers that it came with (Opera and Mozilla), and they had a hard time adapting to the application launcher, however trivially it seemed to differ from the Windows "Start" button. Non-technical people prefer familiarity and ease of use above all else when using a computer.
I saw Spider-Man, and thought it was fun, fast, refreshing, well-written, and sensitive. Then I saw AOTC, and thought it was pedantic, saccharine, slow, and irritating.
Give the "kids" some credit for being able to determine which movies are the most entertaining, rather than assuming that they are all following the instincts of mass culture. Also, it should be pointed out that the Spider-Man franchise is older than Star Wars by several decades.
The PM fired the Defense Minister
today for giving an untendered contract for CDN$30K to an ex-girlfriend
Eggleton was only fired because he embarrassed the PM over the army taking Taliban prisoners. Gagliano is still the ambassador to Denmark after hiring all his friends with government money; Boudria is still in cabinet after staying over at a contractor's private chalet; Manley didn't even get a reprimand after a supporter solicited illegal donations for his campaign; and the PM's Auberge affair is still unresolved. I'm not saying that the Canadian government is corrupt -- compared to some nations it's squeaky clean -- but the firing of the defence minister gives me little comfort that problems are being fixed.
Reading the Linux versus GNU/Linux arguments reminds me of the old adage about politics within university departments: it's vicious, only because the stakes are so terribly small.
In 1917 collision between two ships in Halifax harbor -- one carrying close to 3000 tons of high explosive -- resulted in an explosion which levelled much of the city and killed 2000 people, in what was one of the largest non-nuclear manmade explosions in history.
Yes, but could thousands of amateurs, many with college degrees, work on a distributed project to design microprocessor that improves on existing commercial models, a la Linux? (Maybe the article talks about this, but it's slashdotted.)
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the
utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford is a sense of proportion.
-- from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
Not nearly paranoid enough. Consider: Gateway, in conjunction with the RIAA, the Rand Corporation, and the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires, are forcing artists to give their music away for free in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner!
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are
confirmed.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but still. Suppose the research was suppressed due to lack of supporting evidence. The conspiracy theorists would have a field day with "the government" keeping news of "Martian chlorophyll" under wraps -- which means of course that there are secret Martian farms feeding an intelligent super-race, who built the Mars face, and so on. (Just imagine the Fox specials.) The point is that the scientists can't win, so they might as well disclose everything, even their screwups.
He has a point. Much as I hate to say it, humans are ill-suited for space exploration and should stay here.
Anyone attempting to justify human spaceflight on economic or scientific grounds will run against the inevitable conclusion: robots can do it much better and much more cheaply than we can.
But that's basically irrelevant. Regardless of the economic arguments, as long as there is an opportunity to go, there will be people who want to do it. It is a significant part of human nature to explore the unknown and push the frontiers -- there's no economic or scientific reason to climb mountains, cross the Antarctic, or anything similar. Exploration of all kinds -- and space exploration in particular -- galvanize the entire human imagination in ways that very little else on Earth does. Why else would people be lining up to follow Dennis Tito's example in blowing a large fraction of their personal wealth -- not to mention putting their lives at significant risk -- just to see what Earth looks like from orbit?
Personally, I think that if launch costs could be reduced by a factor of 10, we would see nonprofit, private organizations conducting space exploration with corporate sponsorship, in the same way that other contemporary exploration activities occur today...
According to item #15 of The Crackpot Index, I score your post as +5 (-5 point starting credit + 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it). Or were you trying to be funny?
There's actually proposed legislation in Toronto to ban postering on utility poles. I think this legislation, along with the sentiment in the parent post, is misplaced... these people have a right to express themselves, and postering is a reasonable and non-destructive activity. It might be unsightly, but so are SUVs, and nobody's banning those, much as they richly deserve it.
I don't fear any counrty that developes it's own nuclear bomb - a cretain amount of civilisation is required in order to achieve such a feat.
Specifically, you need Nuclear Power and Rocketry, plus you need to build the Manhattan Project. Except the damn Mongols keep put SDI Defense everywhere.
Proof: By induction. First consider the case of one horse. Clearly, one horse is the same color as itself. Now suppose any set of k horses is the same color. If we take a set of k+1 horses, there are k ways to create sets of k horses, all of which must be the same color under the inductive hypothesis, and all of which contain common horses. Therefore any set of k+1 horses are the same color. Therefore all horses are the same color, by induction.
They gotta learn somehow. Come to think of it, maybe we should have some elaborate initiation ritual for newbies... where they have to endure the trials of goatse.cx and JonKatz before earning their Slashdot membership.
Slashdot Mirror
So we slashdotted them with a link. How ironic. Can I rat out Taco for a reduced sentence?
It's Djibouti, a tiny African country on the Red Sea, bordered by Ethiopia and Somalia.
We would probably compare it to megatons of TNT. The Tunguska event corresponded roughly to a 15-30 megaton explosion. By comparison, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere by the United States was the Castle Bravo test in 1954, at 15 megatons.
Michael used this article to exploit paranoia of large companies who exploit paranoia. Clever. Would he prefer that McAffee, having found a vulnerability, would inform only the manufacturers of JPEG readers of the problem, and not release information to the public (as a certain OS manufacturer suggests of those who find security flaws in its product)? Would he prefer that people ignore security holes that are only "theoretical vulnerabilities"?
Fire Michael. Fire Katz too.
There's a small library near my office where there are four public access terminals. Historically they all ran Windows, but just for a laugh the sysadmin put Linux on one of them; and the users avoided the Linux machine like it was radioactive. They didn't seem to like the "weird" web browsers that it came with (Opera and Mozilla), and they had a hard time adapting to the application launcher, however trivially it seemed to differ from the Windows "Start" button. Non-technical people prefer familiarity and ease of use above all else when using a computer.
I saw Spider-Man, and thought it was fun, fast, refreshing, well-written, and sensitive. Then I saw AOTC, and thought it was pedantic, saccharine, slow, and irritating.
Give the "kids" some credit for being able to determine which movies are the most entertaining, rather than assuming that they are all following the instincts of mass culture. Also, it should be pointed out that the Spider-Man franchise is older than Star Wars by several decades.
The PM fired the Defense Minister today for giving an untendered contract for CDN$30K to an ex-girlfriend
Eggleton was only fired because he embarrassed the PM over the army taking Taliban prisoners. Gagliano is still the ambassador to Denmark after hiring all his friends with government money; Boudria is still in cabinet after staying over at a contractor's private chalet; Manley didn't even get a reprimand after a supporter solicited illegal donations for his campaign; and the PM's Auberge affair is still unresolved. I'm not saying that the Canadian government is corrupt -- compared to some nations it's squeaky clean -- but the firing of the defence minister gives me little comfort that problems are being fixed.
Reading the Linux versus GNU/Linux arguments reminds me of the old adage about politics within university departments: it's vicious, only because the stakes are so terribly small.
In 1917 collision between two ships in Halifax harbor -- one carrying close to 3000 tons of high explosive -- resulted in an explosion which levelled much of the city and killed 2000 people, in what was one of the largest non-nuclear manmade explosions in history.
Yes, but could thousands of amateurs, many with college degrees, work on a distributed project to design microprocessor that improves on existing commercial models, a la Linux? (Maybe the article talks about this, but it's slashdotted.)
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford is a sense of proportion.
-- from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
BBC has it too, with pictures.
Not nearly paranoid enough. Consider: Gateway, in conjunction with the RIAA, the Rand Corporation, and the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires, are forcing artists to give their music away for free in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner!
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are confirmed.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but still. Suppose the research was suppressed due to lack of supporting evidence. The conspiracy theorists would have a field day with "the government" keeping news of "Martian chlorophyll" under wraps -- which means of course that there are secret Martian farms feeding an intelligent super-race, who built the Mars face, and so on. (Just imagine the Fox specials.) The point is that the scientists can't win, so they might as well disclose everything, even their screwups.
He has a point. Much as I hate to say it, humans are ill-suited for space exploration and should stay here.
Anyone attempting to justify human spaceflight on economic or scientific grounds will run against the inevitable conclusion: robots can do it much better and much more cheaply than we can.
But that's basically irrelevant. Regardless of the economic arguments, as long as there is an opportunity to go, there will be people who want to do it. It is a significant part of human nature to explore the unknown and push the frontiers -- there's no economic or scientific reason to climb mountains, cross the Antarctic, or anything similar. Exploration of all kinds -- and space exploration in particular -- galvanize the entire human imagination in ways that very little else on Earth does. Why else would people be lining up to follow Dennis Tito's example in blowing a large fraction of their personal wealth -- not to mention putting their lives at significant risk -- just to see what Earth looks like from orbit?
Personally, I think that if launch costs could be reduced by a factor of 10, we would see nonprofit, private organizations conducting space exploration with corporate sponsorship, in the same way that other contemporary exploration activities occur today ...
According to item #15 of The Crackpot Index, I score your post as +5 (-5 point starting credit + 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it). Or were you trying to be funny?
How long will it take them to 0wnz the machine?
There should be a new slashbox to help us keep track of the "good" companies versus the "bad" companies. Maybe JonKatz could run it.
There's actually proposed legislation in Toronto to ban postering on utility poles. I think this legislation, along with the sentiment in the parent post, is misplaced ... these people have a right to express themselves, and postering is a reasonable and non-destructive activity. It might be unsightly, but so are SUVs, and nobody's banning those, much as they richly deserve it.
I don't fear any counrty that developes it's own nuclear bomb - a cretain amount of civilisation is required in order to achieve such a feat.
Specifically, you need Nuclear Power and Rocketry, plus you need to build the Manhattan Project. Except the damn Mongols keep put SDI Defense everywhere.
start blackmailing governments the world over by claiming to "0wn j00r 1nt4rw3b!"
Or, in the immortal words of Jeff K., "HAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAH HOW DO YUO LIEK THEM APPALS FELLOWS?!? GRABUALsA!!!!"
Theorem: All horses are the same color.
Proof: By induction. First consider the case of one horse. Clearly, one horse is the same color as itself. Now suppose any set of k horses is the same color. If we take a set of k+1 horses, there are k ways to create sets of k horses, all of which must be the same color under the inductive hypothesis, and all of which contain common horses. Therefore any set of k+1 horses are the same color. Therefore all horses are the same color, by induction.
The new karma math: 50+5-1=49.
It's Friday afternoon and I'm bored ...
They gotta learn somehow. Come to think of it, maybe we should have some elaborate initiation ritual for newbies ... where they have to endure the trials of goatse.cx and JonKatz before earning their Slashdot membership.
The National Post is not a reliable source of information.
Good thing Slashdot is here to give us unbiased journalism.