> I thought we've always had beaten into our heads that hydrocarbons, and oil and gas in particular were the result of decaying biomass from dinosaurs. So, where did these hydrocarbons come from? Was Titan an outpost for some spacefaring dino species, that got wiped out in a strange intergalactic plague? Or is there a much more sane, reasonable answer that I just haven't seen yet?
Q: Ethane on Titan comes from:
A. The decayed, compressed remains of Titanic Dinosaurs. A: Xenu dropped his dinosauroid enemies into volcanos on Titan. B: The devil planted it there to trick us C: Solar radiation hits Methane (CH4), splitting it into (CH3+H), which quickly recombines into Ethane (C2H6)
"Boopai, the white men are coming. Remind the six Kaaxai sisters that it is forbidden to utter our sacred number words in front of the outsiders." "Yes, Pibaoi, I shall tell them. I will return in 36 minutes, approximately 5 minutes before the outsiders reach the village." "Good man, Boopai."
"Oh, and Boopai, while you are there, get the 113 exchange-beads the sisters owe me from 3 months ago." "Yes, Pibaoi, I will."
I'm even prouder to say I called both of my representatives and wrote a letter to both of them telling them how strongly I felt that they vote NAY. And they did vote NAY. I will choose to believe that they read my letter and were influenced by it. And unicorns. I will believe in them too.
While watching that entertaining but mindless episode I thought to myself, "I'll bet there are people watching this right now that believe they are being educated by Dr. Who." You didn't really watch someone go back in time. The word volcano was coined from the island 'Vulcano' north of Sicily, not from someone rescued by Dr. Who at Pompei. Yes, it was named after the god Vulcan; They though Vulcano island was the chimney for Vulcan's forges. People certainly did know what a volcano was in AD 76. They just didn't know Vesuvius was quite so active.
I cringed during that sequence when all the actors made 'wow thats where the word came from' faces. Yes our home, village, friends and relative, entire life has just been destroyed but hey aint it cool that we just coined a new word!
That completely misses the point. Of course I can back up the entire drive by making an image.
I want to REINSTALL WINDOWS. To clean it the cruft that has collected and slowed it down, or to remove a virus or root-kit. Then I want to restore my important applications.
That cannot be done. I have to reinstall each application by using it's original install disks or exes, one at a time, probably rebooting after each one. Several hours of work instead of several minutes.
> Encourage the application writers to make their applications EASY TO BACKUP. > The problem I keep seeing is that TELLING someone to back up their data is easy to do. FINDING ALL of the data is just about impossible.
It drives me crazy that it is nearly impossible to back up applications under Windows. I want to back up a directory tree and know that I can reinstall that appliction by restoring that backup. But under Windows, the application consists of files in the applications 'Program Files' directory, plus entries scattered around the registry, plus files dropped into the 'Windows' directory or 'Windows/System32' or other Windows directories, plus files in 'Documents and Settings/User/Application Data' and/or 'Documents and Settings/User/Local Settings'.
Do I just not know some Windows Admin secret magic, or is it true that I really can't back up my applications. I'd like to be able to reinstall Windows and then restore all of my applications.
There are strong arguments why we are not living in a computer simulation.
However it is possible that our universe with all of it's complexity is a "simulation" running on a much more complex reality, a 4 dimensional reality inside a reality with much higher dimensions, where our limitations of information propogation are actually imposed by the nature of the simulation.
We couldn't know the difference, as a matter of fact there IS no difference if that simulation incorporates ALL of our laws of physics to the quantum level.
Thanks! I just rolled on the floor and laughed, then drank milk and forced it out my nose onto my brand new keyboard. In my parent's basement. With a real-doll named covered in hot grits.
Sure it does. And our society rewards each contribution appropriately. We reward good abstract thinking with a hefty dose of abstract appreciation. We reward money generating effort with money.
Are you complaining that you choose to value abstract thought and are unhappy that those who choose to value money don't reward your abstract thought with their money?
Yes. That is my point. A TrueCrypt volume is filled with random high-entropy data in the empty spaces. A normal volume is filled with zeros, fragments of text, filenames, etc. That is how you tell the difference.
The reply given above, to claim you wiped the drive with random data long ago prior to formatting it with the current system is a good answer. Nothing can be proven beyond that.
> Truecrypt can even store an encrypted volume on an unformatted unpartitioned chunk of hard drive. There's little way they can prove that that's anything other than some space you haven't allocated yet.
sorta. Unallocated space wouldn't be filled with high-entropy random bytes. That's a tip-off that it has encrypted data. Of course, you certainly have deniable plausibility there.
> Or conversely, alligators as a species have always had these antibiotics. Why is it that every interesting or perplexing feature about a species must be somehow attributed to, or be a product of, evolution? > I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution.
Because every interesting, perlexing, or boring feature of a species is of course a product of evolution. The first single cell didn't have a powerful immune system. Alligators do. Somewhere along the way the branch of life leading to alligators, they evolved a powerful immune system. Why does that characterisation bother you?
Perhaps I misunderstood you, and you were reacting to the common tendency for the news to report some simplistic off-the-cuff guess as to what environmental pressure led to a certain feature evolving. In this case, territorial fights=super immunity. I heard a story on the news this morning about how less sleep leads to increased feelings of hunger and the reporter added, 'this makes sense in evolutionary terms because clubbing rhinos for food all day takes a lot of energy and increased hunger will help replenish that energy' huh? wtf?
This reminds me of a story I read long ago (cant remember the name - Ill leave this as an exercise for the reader) where a man wanted to commit murder, but the police had scanners all over the place that could read your mind.
He paid a commercial jingle musician to write the most annoying intrusive "sticky" jingle he could come up with, and listened to the jingle for 48 hours straight. Then went to the victim, shot him, and walked away. Through it all his head was filled with the annoying jingle playing over and over in his mind.
> you can literally stare at the source code and audit it.
What good does that do if the gcc binary has been modified to insert nasty code when it compiles. All of the source code could be clean, including the source code of gcc. Then anything that gets compiled has backdoors inserted.
Slashdot Mirror
Pics or it didn't happen.
I never said (C) was the right answer. Personally, I suspect this is the correct answer
> I thought we've always had beaten into our heads that hydrocarbons, and oil and gas in particular were the result of decaying biomass from dinosaurs. So, where did these hydrocarbons come from? Was Titan an outpost for some spacefaring dino species, that got wiped out in a strange intergalactic plague? Or is there a much more sane, reasonable answer that I just haven't seen yet?
Q: Ethane on Titan comes from:
A. The decayed, compressed remains of Titanic Dinosaurs.
A: Xenu dropped his dinosauroid enemies into volcanos on Titan.
B: The devil planted it there to trick us
C: Solar radiation hits Methane (CH4), splitting it into (CH3+H), which quickly recombines into Ethane (C2H6)
Some dope modded me 'redundant' when my post was 12 HOURS earlier than the other similar post.
Just being a bit anal...
> that makes your product look bad when compared side-by-side, since theirs has more signal bars.
My phone has 11 bars.
Just saying...
"Boopai, the white men are coming. Remind the six Kaaxai sisters that it is forbidden to utter our sacred number words in front of the outsiders."
"Yes, Pibaoi, I shall tell them. I will return in 36 minutes, approximately 5 minutes before the outsiders reach the village."
"Good man, Boopai."
"Oh, and Boopai, while you are there, get the 113 exchange-beads the sisters owe me from 3 months ago."
"Yes, Pibaoi, I will."
I'm even prouder to say I called both of my representatives and wrote a letter to both of them telling them how strongly I felt that they vote NAY. And they did vote NAY. I will choose to believe that they read my letter and were influenced by it. And unicorns. I will believe in them too.
While watching that entertaining but mindless episode I thought to myself, "I'll bet there are people watching this right now that believe they are being educated by Dr. Who."
You didn't really watch someone go back in time.
The word volcano was coined from the island 'Vulcano' north of Sicily, not from someone rescued by Dr. Who at Pompei.
Yes, it was named after the god Vulcan; They though Vulcano island was the chimney for Vulcan's forges.
People certainly did know what a volcano was in AD 76. They just didn't know Vesuvius was quite so active.
I cringed during that sequence when all the actors made 'wow thats where the word came from' faces. Yes our home, village, friends and relative, entire life has just been destroyed but hey aint it cool that we just coined a new word!
That completely misses the point.
Of course I can back up the entire drive by making an image.
I want to REINSTALL WINDOWS. To clean it the cruft that has collected and slowed it down, or to remove a virus or root-kit.
Then I want to restore my important applications.
That cannot be done. I have to reinstall each application by using it's original install disks or exes, one at a time, probably rebooting after each one. Several hours of work instead of several minutes.
> Encourage the application writers to make their applications EASY TO BACKUP.
> The problem I keep seeing is that TELLING someone to back up their data is easy to do. FINDING ALL of the data is just about impossible.
It drives me crazy that it is nearly impossible to back up applications under Windows.
I want to back up a directory tree and know that I can reinstall that appliction by restoring that backup.
But under Windows, the application consists of files in the applications 'Program Files' directory, plus entries scattered around the registry, plus files dropped into the 'Windows' directory or 'Windows/System32' or other Windows directories, plus files in 'Documents and Settings/User/Application Data' and/or 'Documents and Settings/User/Local Settings'.
Do I just not know some Windows Admin secret magic, or is it true that I really can't back up my applications. I'd like to be able to reinstall Windows and then restore all of my applications.
> I think I'll go home and play some.
Spoiler alert:
The only way to win is to not play the game.
There are strong arguments why we are not living in a computer simulation.
However it is possible that our universe with all of it's complexity is a "simulation" running on a much more complex reality, a 4 dimensional reality inside a reality with much higher dimensions, where our limitations of information propogation are actually imposed by the nature of the simulation.
We couldn't know the difference, as a matter of fact there IS no difference if that simulation incorporates ALL of our laws of physics to the quantum level.
Thanks! I just rolled on the floor and laughed, then drank milk and forced it out my nose onto my brand new keyboard. In my parent's basement. With a real-doll named covered in hot grits.
> our society doesn't appreciate thinking
Sure it does. And our society rewards each contribution appropriately.
We reward good abstract thinking with a hefty dose of abstract appreciation.
We reward money generating effort with money.
Are you complaining that you choose to value abstract thought and are unhappy that those who choose to value money don't reward your abstract thought with their money?
> Misbehaving children seems to be a western phenomenon
That's because Western adults value people who can think for themselves and challenge authority.
Yes. That is my point.
A TrueCrypt volume is filled with random high-entropy data in the empty spaces. A normal volume is filled with zeros, fragments of text, filenames, etc.
That is how you tell the difference.
The reply given above, to claim you wiped the drive with random data long ago prior to formatting it with the current system is a good answer. Nothing can be proven beyond that.
> Truecrypt can even store an encrypted volume on an unformatted unpartitioned chunk of hard drive. There's little way they can prove that that's anything other than some space you haven't allocated yet.
sorta.
Unallocated space wouldn't be filled with high-entropy random bytes. That's a tip-off that it has encrypted data.
Of course, you certainly have deniable plausibility there.
>> There are people who enjoy getting their nuts stepped on too. To each his own I guess.
> Really? Show me one.
You must be new around here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68O1nMzD4No
> Here in the U.S., our restrictions aren't that onerous. "Historically significant" buildings are relatively rare
Your whole bloody country is less than 250 years old. Of course historically buildings are rare.
> Just borrow your mom's car and ditch the bitch in the hills somewhere. :o)
> And don't forget to write a neat FS while you're at it
And store all of the evidence on an obscure filesystem that the police forensic examiner doesn't know how to search.
> If it crashes into a graveyard, my patented algorithm will determine where to bury the survivors.
I don't think the survivors would appreciate being buried.
> Or conversely, alligators as a species have always had these antibiotics. Why is it that every interesting or perplexing feature about a species must be somehow attributed to, or be a product of, evolution?
> I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution.
Because every interesting, perlexing, or boring feature of a species is of course a product of evolution.
The first single cell didn't have a powerful immune system. Alligators do. Somewhere along the way the branch of life leading to alligators, they evolved a powerful immune system. Why does that characterisation bother you?
Perhaps I misunderstood you, and you were reacting to the common tendency for the news to report some simplistic off-the-cuff guess as to what environmental pressure led to a certain feature evolving. In this case, territorial fights=super immunity. I heard a story on the news this morning about how less sleep leads to increased feelings of hunger and the reporter added, 'this makes sense in evolutionary terms because clubbing rhinos for food all day takes a lot of energy and increased hunger will help replenish that energy' huh? wtf?
This reminds me of a story I read long ago (cant remember the name - Ill leave this as an exercise for the reader) where a man wanted to commit murder, but the police had scanners all over the place that could read your mind.
He paid a commercial jingle musician to write the most annoying intrusive "sticky" jingle he could come up with, and listened to the jingle for 48 hours straight. Then went to the victim, shot him, and walked away. Through it all his head was filled with the annoying jingle playing over and over in his mind.
> you can literally stare at the source code and audit it.
What good does that do if the gcc binary has been modified to insert nasty code when it compiles. All of the source code could be clean, including the source code of gcc. Then anything that gets compiled has backdoors inserted.
> It's not illegal here,
It's still a bad idea.
> and it was sealed. You know how long it takes for plastic to degrade?
Unless it's "forever" that means Mercury will be leaking into our soil and water, eventually.