They WILL shut you down if you're unintentionally/unknowingly also broadcasting noise on other spectrums, especially air traffic related bands, regardless of whether you picked a frequency not currently occupied by any other radio station. Unless you've got a radio spectrum analyzer and thoroughly tested all the surrounding frequencies for differences between when your equipment is on or off, you'd probably never know that you were interfering with some other range until they came to pay you a visit...
You mean besides an Earth-smashing asteroid, which was the topic of this article??
OK, how bout a viral or bacterial plague spreading rapidly across the planet? The possibility of such a plague infecting the entire planet is dramatically higher than any point previously in our history due to the abundance of high-speed transportation systems. Rural areas of Europe were sometimes spared from the Black Death in the 14th century because their distance from the cities and lack of visitors meant that infected people couldn't get there before they died from their infection. Today a similar plague being released in a major airport could spread across the globe in a matter of days...
It wouldn't even have to be a plague that killed humans directly, a plague that killed our major food crops would be just as devastating. Especially considering what a tiny percentage of today's population are farmers. In the 1300s pretty much everyone knew how to continue growing their own food, even as all their neighbors were dying. You wipe out the couple thousands of farmers that produce most of the world's food supplies today, and most of the population would be shit-outta-luck.
Or how about an act of terrorism (or actual aggression) designed to make it look like Russia or China had launched an all-out nuclear attack on the United States?? The 'appropriate military response' is Nukes flying everywhere annihilating everybody. A short flaring of tempers causes all life on Earth to end, and with it the whole human race... It's not really possible for that to happen if humans are living on a half-dozen or more different worlds. Even assuming an Earth nation had built (as yet non-existent) rockets capable of delivering nukes to another planet in sufficient quantity to destroy them as well, it'd take days of planning and then months to years of travel time before they actually reached their destination, giving plenty of time to devise some kind of counter-measure.
But most likely, it would be a combination of such events, none of which would totally destroy humanity in and of themselves, but when stacked together, finish us off. Say an asteroid hits the Earth, wiping out a large chunk of the population and causing serious environmental changes. Which causes most of the food crops to be lost as well as kicking up microbes and pollutants into the air and water, killing lots of people thru starvation or poor living conditions. The surviving peoples crowd together in the areas of Earth that are still habitable, which leads to constant fighting over scarce resources. With the old political structures clearly collapsed, you're left with hundreds of ex-army officers in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which inevitably start getting used in the gang warfare that arises out of the immediate ashes. The chaos of this situation and breakdown of existing public-health systems would allow other factors that are currently not much of a threat to be major sources of fatality again. (ie. death during childbirth, or from the flu, etc.) Slowly the environment becomes so inhospitable that people die off altogether.
Such a scenario could easily lead to the complete and utter end of tens of thousands of years of human civilization. (It wouldn't have to start with an asteroid impact either, there's plenty of other events that could start the wheels turning.) But if we have already expanded to other worlds, and even to the stars, such a series of a events would surely be considered a major tragedy, but hardly the end of our existence.
Well there ain't any oil in outer space, so the colonization of other worlds REQUIRES the development of an alternative energy source.
And there have ALWAYS been lots of starving people in the world, and for one reason or another, there will most likely always be poverty in the future. However, a new frontier gives those in poverty a chance to take a risk and start a new life somewhere else. There's greater risk of death in whatever strange new lands they're venturing to than if they stayed at home, but also a great chance of having a much better life too for them and their descendents.
If Europeans had put off the colonization of the Americas until poverty was eliminated in their home country, it never would have happened... because there's STILL poor people in Europe. Obviously there'll be a significant difference of opinion about how much of a "good thing" the colonization of the Americas was from the Native American point of view, but for tens of millions of (almost entirely) poor people throughout the rest of the world, it was a chance to have a new, better life, exploiting new undeveloped resources.
The same could be true today with the colonization of other worlds. Sure it's more difficult and will cost more to accomplish, but on the other hand we have a lot more extra people sitting around on our planet, and there's no other indigenous people elsewhere in our solar system that need oppressing and killing off first...
Many people are against the "militarization of space" in theory, but in reality people will feel the need to arm/protect themselves no matter where they go. As soon as there's multiple competing groups of people scattering through-out the solar system capable of visiting each others' settlements, they will be carrying weapons of some kind with them. This is a simple fact, and you're never going to escape it. It's not an American/European issue either, there's no major society on this planet that has ever been able to adopt and maintain the ideals you want long term, at least not long enough to exist to this day or to be remembered by history.
Life on our world has evolved thru billions of years of fierce competition with each other, and with our amazing cognitive and imaginative abilities, the tools we use for armed competition have become ruthlessly efficient. You're not going to change this aspect of human nature with a couple decades of happy thoughts, it's going to take a significant change in our environment (ie. maybe expanding into distant colonies that have little direct contact?), and at least hundreds of generations for our genes to adapt.
But if you start creating human societies on other worlds, being spaced out over tens of millions of miles away from each other, war becomes exponentially more costly to even attempt, much less succeed. I don't believe humans will ever be able to form a utopian society of completely peaceful people in any group larger than a couple dozen individuals. But if you wanted to attempt such a thing, I think you'd have a much better chance of success if you could isolate your colony on some moon of Saturn or something, where it really wouldn't be worth anyone's while to build a fleet of space ships just to come out and fuck with you...
Besides, struggling colonies of people on far away lands who depend on each other daily to survive automatically fosters a priority on knowing/learning useful skills, maintaining a sense of community, and constantly thinking about the needs of the group over one's own wants.
The misplaced values you seem to despise are the results of excess and luxury. The ideals you favor are not widespread because they are not currently necessary to survive. You'll have a much easier job of encouraging the ideals you mentioned in an environment of adventure on a new frontier, than you will in the mall-shopping, sports-watching, pop-culture-consuming environment that exists right now...
OK, then explain Dinosaurs. There's millions of dinosaur fossils in the ground, and not a single mention of them in the bible. Surely the existence of giant lizards four stories tall walking across the earth might have earned even a passing reference in the bible...
Especially in chapters specifically dealing with animals. When Noah was supposedly saving every species of animal in the world on his little Love Boat, they could have at least had God say something like "Bring a mated pair of every kind of bird and animal onto the ark, except for those bastard dinosaurs. They are evil and I shall smite them along with the rest of the evil humans."
But they didn't. Because they never knew the dinosaurs had ever existed. They made up the story a couple thousand years ago based on only the limited knowledge they had at the time and their own imagination. Which is fine if you're creating a warning tale to scare the uneducated masses to keep them in line. But not too useful if you want to know what REALLY happened before recorded history...
Heck, I *never* believe 100% what I'm told at church. In fact, half the time I find myself saying, "WTF? That's not true?"
So WHY do you keep going back?? Cause you know, when I hear somebody talking, and say to myself, "Wow, that guy's completely full of shit!", my next thought is always "Let's go visit him next week and see what else he has to say!"
But...it gives me something to think about.
Do you really need a regular dogmatic guilt trip session to spark creative thoughts for you? Here's something to think about: Imagine there's no God, and no heaven or hell. Imagine that this life is all there is. Assuming these things are true, how would you live your life differently?
This sounds like what AMD did with its single (XP) and SMP (MP) Athlon processors. For a long while the XP and MP chips were the same except MPs were tested for SMP performance. A certain bridge on the surface of the board was cut to make a processor into an XP (though some weren't), so connecting this bridge turned your XP into an MP chip, which was a lot more expensive. The process was simple, and you could end up with a $121 MP2000 (according to pricewatch.com) for the price of a $48 XP2000.
This sounds like something Patik posted higher up on this same thread. Identical in fact. I guess some posters decided it was cheaper to write one comment and post it multiple times than it is to write a whole new comment each time.
Actually they DID call up Douglas Adams and ask him for a name to give their new form of matter, but the only reply he would give is "I'm fucking dead!"
I think they picked the lesser of two evils when went with "Bose-Einstein condensate"...
Of course the native americans had been there. But they were not represented by the US government, and thus the government did not consider those lands to be claimed/occupied.
(Additionally, no, the native americans did NOT have the same notion that particular sections of land had value and could/should be claimed by individuals or groups. ALL land was sacred and had 'value', but they did not understand territoriality or stationary land claims the same as white man did.)
People who view the expansion of Europeans into native American territory as horrific should see our expansion into Mars as a step forward. Since, although there might be microbial life in the rocks, there aren't any Little Green Men on Mars to conquer/kill/convert. True unclaimed land.
China already has population control measures in effect to keep their population from filling up beyond their means to support themselves. As the population grows exponentially (as it has been), you eventually run out of land area. Not just in the actual space that all the people take up, but all the buildings they need to live in, farm fields for growing all the food you need, hospitals/restaurants/roads/etc. Instead of strictly limiting families to having a single child (and [only slightly indirectly] encouraging the killing of infant girls by their parents), you could ship those extra people off to Mars. Once it's terraformed enough to be farm-able you could fill it up with billions more people that would have been killed/(never allowed to be born) on Earth. And once Mars inevitably fills up, you can start colonizing some other world. Some moons of Jupiter/Saturn, build a small planet by accumulating asteroids together, giant orbiting space stations, etc.
People who hold religious or moral views that murder, widespread/constant warfare, birth control, and abortion are inherently wrong SHOULD be supporting technological advances that allow all these new people to have somewhere to live. If you don't, then you're holding self-contradictory views and you'll eventually end up with a huge overcrowding problem, and it's going to solve itself one way or another. If we don't make a conscious logical choice on how to handle these situations, one (probably much less desirable) will be made for us...
Well I'm not a professional critic, but I just saw it and feel ripped off. So do the other 5 people who saw it with me.
Its depth and philosophical richness comes in the strength of its visual metaphors and an intriguing storyline pulling on everything from the Bible to The Wizard of Oz, grounding the story in cultural identification and modern mythmaking.
Bullshit. The first two introduced a new world and laid the foundation of a deeper philosophical understanding of reality. Compared to them, the 3rd Matrix movie should have starred Jean-Claude Van Damme Gary Busey and gone straight to USA Network.
The 2nd movie was kind of annoying in that it gave you a lot of questions, but didn't deliver any answers. This was tolerable though, because you assume that its a set up for the revelations coming in the 3rd movie....
They never come though. The answers to the big questions that you're left with after the 2nd movie are glossed over in literally one or two sentences. "oh ummm there's some magic mumbo jumbo 802.11b wireless brain chip or something, and the French guy has some magic subway train. There's your explanation, on to the hour-long action sequence!!"
There were a million different fan theories about what the Matrix really was and what the ending was going to be. And unfortunately, every single one of them was wrong. The real ending was far lamer than anyone could have imagined.
Take this quote from the bottom of the post, for instance... "Of course I have gotten to the point where the potential risk in my life is such that I don't even bother to get out of bed in the morning. You probably shouldn't either."
Sign up for spam with the following addresses: webmaster@verrisign.com...
That might work, IF the sitefinder server actually accepted mail for any of those domains. However (as of the last time I checked), it doesn't accept mail for ANY addresses at all, not even the correctly spelled versions of their names. So all it would result in is some attempted connections to their mail server which never actually delivered any mail.
Hey, here's a thought.... maybe the separate individuals of the quarter-million slashdot readers have coherent opinions within themselves, but the contradictory opinions are being posted by *gasp* different people.
Shocking thought... pure madness, I know. Who could even suggest that a couple hundred thousand people who happen to read the same news site could possibly form separate, differing views about world events? (Answer: Me, sarcastically.)
But no, I like your thinking better. Every single reader of slashdot is part of a single unified Borg-collective consciousness. Unfortunately, that single consciousness is schizophrenic and can't agree with itself on any significant issue, and the resulting logic error will cause a catastrophic system failure.
I might have modded your nonsense up as "Funny", but nobody did that. It's 100% "Insightful" so far. How can this be?? Unless... you were actually trying to be serious with that post. (!) How disturbing...
Please stop looking at mere biochemistry with such anthropocentric attitude. Embryo/stem cells are just cells. Yes, they are marvellous in their capability to transform into almost any other cell but they are still cells, biochemical machines that can and should be studied and applied to the good of the human race. The whole stemcell/gene technology discussion is really a throwback to the times when myths and religious/magical thinking ruled.
Potential means nothing. We already exist - the creature which is potentially stored in the DNA of those cells does not.
Ummm excuse me?? Your arm, brain, and any other part of your body are "just cells" also. I never said that this type of research shouldn't be done. I was rebutting you statement that they were not 'creating an actual animal, just cells'.
Show me how to create a human, or rabbit, without using any embryo cells. Then you can make arguments about about these researchers not attemting to create actual hybrid animals. There is no 'mystical' thinking involved here; if they were working with liver cells or skin cells or anything else, there would be no chance that they could create something that would develop into a whole new animal. But they're not, are they.
Potential means nothing? You only exist because of the DNA in your cells. That creature in the cells is YOU. And these guys are working to take control over what that creature becomes.
I thought China needed to control the exponential growth of their population, do they really need that? They should sell the technology to the state of Florida instead...
I don't get it... why does Florida need population growth? It's full of all the nearly dead retirees who migrate downwards from every other state. Please tell me you're not suggesting we need more breeding from that population?
And before all the luddites, technophobes and "every sperm is sacred" nutjobs hop in: no human/animal life was created here - the experiment experiment was with mere cells.
Uhhhh yeah... "embryo cells"... you know, the ones that eventually become full humans/animals.
Every sperm is not sacred, but if they did manage to create a half-human half-rabbit person... I think they might be among the very few deserving of the title "special"...
The building of the Hoover dam itself, does not really cause the lose of water. It is the useage that does. The colorado river gets used mostly by California that is sucking it dry before it hits the ocean.
Right, but the original parent's post implied that, at the mouth of the river, what was previously a huge flowing river has been turned into a small stream because lots of irresponsible irrigation projects are sucking the water away.
My point is: the river is hugely diminished because they built the Hoover Damn to stop up the river, and they only release as much water as is needed downstream. If they managed to perfectly estimate the water demand needed (and adjust for the natural evaporation of water), and release the exact amount, there would be NO water flowing into the ocean at all.
The lack of water at the river's end does not indicate an irresponsible mismanagement of water resources. The Hoover Dam controls flooding of the river, guarantees a water supply, and generates tons of emission-free electricity for the surrounding areas. This project was one of the best examples in the entire world of properly managed natural resources yielding great benefits to the surrounding peoples without depleting said resources. MY point was, that the parent picked the worst possible example to illustrate his point.
Have you ever seen the mouth of the Colorado river near Baja California?
In case you haven't, it's a small stream in a salt-flat. Irrigation projects siphon all of the water out.
Ummmmmm.... aren't you being a little 'generous' there with your euphemisms? You know, calling the Hoover Dam an "irrigation project"?
Yes, large-scale irrigation DOES have effects on the surrounding environment. Building a gigantic fucking wall across a river bed does too.
If you wanted to give an example of out-of-control irrigation drying up a river, why didn't you pick one that didn't have a $175 million dollar government project designed to accomplish that very task??
Dammit smacktard! Could you resize the pages down so that we can look at more than 1/16th of the page at once??
I.... love.... reading... only... one or.... two... words... at a... time.
The fact that you're posting a link to 9 images, each roughly 1MB in size on slashdot, means that you are either masochistic, or completely else oblivious to what you're doing. Just because IE6 scales down images to fit in your browser window, doesn't mean that your router won't be screaming in pain if 100,000 people all hit your page at once...
Slashdot Mirror
They WILL shut you down if you're unintentionally/unknowingly also broadcasting noise on other spectrums, especially air traffic related bands, regardless of whether you picked a frequency not currently occupied by any other radio station. Unless you've got a radio spectrum analyzer and thoroughly tested all the surrounding frequencies for differences between when your equipment is on or off, you'd probably never know that you were interfering with some other range until they came to pay you a visit...
5 A1.html
http://www.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/2003/DOC-23774
You mean besides an Earth-smashing asteroid, which was the topic of this article??
OK, how bout a viral or bacterial plague spreading rapidly across the planet? The possibility of such a plague infecting the entire planet is dramatically higher than any point previously in our history due to the abundance of high-speed transportation systems. Rural areas of Europe were sometimes spared from the Black Death in the 14th century because their distance from the cities and lack of visitors meant that infected people couldn't get there before they died from their infection. Today a similar plague being released in a major airport could spread across the globe in a matter of days...
It wouldn't even have to be a plague that killed humans directly, a plague that killed our major food crops would be just as devastating. Especially considering what a tiny percentage of today's population are farmers. In the 1300s pretty much everyone knew how to continue growing their own food, even as all their neighbors were dying. You wipe out the couple thousands of farmers that produce most of the world's food supplies today, and most of the population would be shit-outta-luck.
Or how about an act of terrorism (or actual aggression) designed to make it look like Russia or China had launched an all-out nuclear attack on the United States?? The 'appropriate military response' is Nukes flying everywhere annihilating everybody. A short flaring of tempers causes all life on Earth to end, and with it the whole human race... It's not really possible for that to happen if humans are living on a half-dozen or more different worlds. Even assuming an Earth nation had built (as yet non-existent) rockets capable of delivering nukes to another planet in sufficient quantity to destroy them as well, it'd take days of planning and then months to years of travel time before they actually reached their destination, giving plenty of time to devise some kind of counter-measure.
But most likely, it would be a combination of such events, none of which would totally destroy humanity in and of themselves, but when stacked together, finish us off. Say an asteroid hits the Earth, wiping out a large chunk of the population and causing serious environmental changes. Which causes most of the food crops to be lost as well as kicking up microbes and pollutants into the air and water, killing lots of people thru starvation or poor living conditions. The surviving peoples crowd together in the areas of Earth that are still habitable, which leads to constant fighting over scarce resources. With the old political structures clearly collapsed, you're left with hundreds of ex-army officers in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which inevitably start getting used in the gang warfare that arises out of the immediate ashes. The chaos of this situation and breakdown of existing public-health systems would allow other factors that are currently not much of a threat to be major sources of fatality again. (ie. death during childbirth, or from the flu, etc.) Slowly the environment becomes so inhospitable that people die off altogether.
Such a scenario could easily lead to the complete and utter end of tens of thousands of years of human civilization. (It wouldn't have to start with an asteroid impact either, there's plenty of other events that could start the wheels turning.) But if we have already expanded to other worlds, and even to the stars, such a series of a events would surely be considered a major tragedy, but hardly the end of our existence.
Well there ain't any oil in outer space, so the colonization of other worlds REQUIRES the development of an alternative energy source.
And there have ALWAYS been lots of starving people in the world, and for one reason or another, there will most likely always be poverty in the future. However, a new frontier gives those in poverty a chance to take a risk and start a new life somewhere else. There's greater risk of death in whatever strange new lands they're venturing to than if they stayed at home, but also a great chance of having a much better life too for them and their descendents.
If Europeans had put off the colonization of the Americas until poverty was eliminated in their home country, it never would have happened... because there's STILL poor people in Europe. Obviously there'll be a significant difference of opinion about how much of a "good thing" the colonization of the Americas was from the Native American point of view, but for tens of millions of (almost entirely) poor people throughout the rest of the world, it was a chance to have a new, better life, exploiting new undeveloped resources.
The same could be true today with the colonization of other worlds. Sure it's more difficult and will cost more to accomplish, but on the other hand we have a lot more extra people sitting around on our planet, and there's no other indigenous people elsewhere in our solar system that need oppressing and killing off first...
Many people are against the "militarization of space" in theory, but in reality people will feel the need to arm/protect themselves no matter where they go. As soon as there's multiple competing groups of people scattering through-out the solar system capable of visiting each others' settlements, they will be carrying weapons of some kind with them. This is a simple fact, and you're never going to escape it. It's not an American/European issue either, there's no major society on this planet that has ever been able to adopt and maintain the ideals you want long term, at least not long enough to exist to this day or to be remembered by history.
Life on our world has evolved thru billions of years of fierce competition with each other, and with our amazing cognitive and imaginative abilities, the tools we use for armed competition have become ruthlessly efficient. You're not going to change this aspect of human nature with a couple decades of happy thoughts, it's going to take a significant change in our environment (ie. maybe expanding into distant colonies that have little direct contact?), and at least hundreds of generations for our genes to adapt.
But if you start creating human societies on other worlds, being spaced out over tens of millions of miles away from each other, war becomes exponentially more costly to even attempt, much less succeed. I don't believe humans will ever be able to form a utopian society of completely peaceful people in any group larger than a couple dozen individuals. But if you wanted to attempt such a thing, I think you'd have a much better chance of success if you could isolate your colony on some moon of Saturn or something, where it really wouldn't be worth anyone's while to build a fleet of space ships just to come out and fuck with you...
Besides, struggling colonies of people on far away lands who depend on each other daily to survive automatically fosters a priority on knowing/learning useful skills, maintaining a sense of community, and constantly thinking about the needs of the group over one's own wants.
The misplaced values you seem to despise are the results of excess and luxury. The ideals you favor are not widespread because they are not currently necessary to survive. You'll have a much easier job of encouraging the ideals you mentioned in an environment of adventure on a new frontier, than you will in the mall-shopping, sports-watching, pop-culture-consuming environment that exists right now...
Yeah because everyone assumes you're talking about "pesos" or "lira" when quoting costs for spacecraft launches... dumbass.
He's right though. If atheism is a religion, then "not collecting stamps" is a hobby...
However, his rule of not critizing ideas for fear of being modded down is just stupid.
OK, then explain Dinosaurs. There's millions of dinosaur fossils in the ground, and not a single mention of them in the bible. Surely the existence of giant lizards four stories tall walking across the earth might have earned even a passing reference in the bible...
Especially in chapters specifically dealing with animals. When Noah was supposedly saving every species of animal in the world on his little Love Boat, they could have at least had God say something like "Bring a mated pair of every kind of bird and animal onto the ark, except for those bastard dinosaurs. They are evil and I shall smite them along with the rest of the evil humans."
But they didn't. Because they never knew the dinosaurs had ever existed. They made up the story a couple thousand years ago based on only the limited knowledge they had at the time and their own imagination. Which is fine if you're creating a warning tale to scare the uneducated masses to keep them in line. But not too useful if you want to know what REALLY happened before recorded history...
So WHY do you keep going back?? Cause you know, when I hear somebody talking, and say to myself, "Wow, that guy's completely full of shit!", my next thought is always "Let's go visit him next week and see what else he has to say!"
Do you really need a regular dogmatic guilt trip session to spark creative thoughts for you? Here's something to think about: Imagine there's no God, and no heaven or hell. Imagine that this life is all there is. Assuming these things are true, how would you live your life differently?
"both" threads?? You mean the first thread titled "Recovering Secret HD Space" and the second thread titled "Recovering Secret HD Space"?
It was the same thread. Twice. Double the Patik. Double the fun. Put down that Doublemint gum!
This sounds like something Patik posted higher up on this same thread. Identical in fact. I guess some posters decided it was cheaper to write one comment and post it multiple times than it is to write a whole new comment each time.
Didn't your mom, teach you not to laugh at, retarded people? It's not nice to make, fun of someone who's suffering, from Shatner Syndrome.
Actually they DID call up Douglas Adams and ask him for a name to give their new form of matter, but the only reply he would give is "I'm fucking dead!"
I think they picked the lesser of two evils when went with "Bose-Einstein condensate"...
Of course the native americans had been there. But they were not represented by the US government, and thus the government did not consider those lands to be claimed/occupied.
(Additionally, no, the native americans did NOT have the same notion that particular sections of land had value and could/should be claimed by individuals or groups. ALL land was sacred and had 'value', but they did not understand territoriality or stationary land claims the same as white man did.)
People who view the expansion of Europeans into native American territory as horrific should see our expansion into Mars as a step forward. Since, although there might be microbial life in the rocks, there aren't any Little Green Men on Mars to conquer/kill/convert. True unclaimed land.
China already has population control measures in effect to keep their population from filling up beyond their means to support themselves. As the population grows exponentially (as it has been), you eventually run out of land area. Not just in the actual space that all the people take up, but all the buildings they need to live in, farm fields for growing all the food you need, hospitals/restaurants/roads/etc. Instead of strictly limiting families to having a single child (and [only slightly indirectly] encouraging the killing of infant girls by their parents), you could ship those extra people off to Mars. Once it's terraformed enough to be farm-able you could fill it up with billions more people that would have been killed/(never allowed to be born) on Earth. And once Mars inevitably fills up, you can start colonizing some other world. Some moons of Jupiter/Saturn, build a small planet by accumulating asteroids together, giant orbiting space stations, etc.
People who hold religious or moral views that murder, widespread/constant warfare, birth control, and abortion are inherently wrong SHOULD be supporting technological advances that allow all these new people to have somewhere to live. If you don't, then you're holding self-contradictory views and you'll eventually end up with a huge overcrowding problem, and it's going to solve itself one way or another. If we don't make a conscious logical choice on how to handle these situations, one (probably much less desirable) will be made for us...
Bullshit. The first two introduced a new world and laid the foundation of a deeper philosophical understanding of reality. Compared to them, the 3rd Matrix movie should have starred Jean-Claude Van Damme Gary Busey and gone straight to USA Network.
The 2nd movie was kind of annoying in that it gave you a lot of questions, but didn't deliver any answers. This was tolerable though, because you assume that its a set up for the revelations coming in the 3rd movie....
They never come though. The answers to the big questions that you're left with after the 2nd movie are glossed over in literally one or two sentences. "oh ummm there's some magic mumbo jumbo 802.11b wireless brain chip or something, and the French guy has some magic subway train. There's your explanation, on to the hour-long action sequence!!"
There were a million different fan theories about what the Matrix really was and what the ending was going to be. And unfortunately, every single one of them was wrong. The real ending was far lamer than anyone could have imagined.
No, I think POINT MISSED YOU!
Take this quote from the bottom of the post, for instance...
"Of course I have gotten to the point where the potential risk in my life is such that I don't even bother to get out of bed in the morning. You probably shouldn't either."
That might work, IF the sitefinder server actually accepted mail for any of those domains. However (as of the last time I checked), it doesn't accept mail for ANY addresses at all, not even the correctly spelled versions of their names. So all it would result in is some attempted connections to their mail server which never actually delivered any mail.
So? It's not like that's going to stop us from posting or anything...
You mean that asshole that keeps trying to get me to renew my "TopSites.us listing"?? Fuck that guy!
Hey, here's a thought.... maybe the separate individuals of the quarter-million slashdot readers have coherent opinions within themselves, but the contradictory opinions are being posted by *gasp* different people.
Shocking thought... pure madness, I know. Who could even suggest that a couple hundred thousand people who happen to read the same news site could possibly form separate, differing views about world events? (Answer: Me, sarcastically.)
But no, I like your thinking better. Every single reader of slashdot is part of a single unified Borg-collective consciousness. Unfortunately, that single consciousness is schizophrenic and can't agree with itself on any significant issue, and the resulting logic error will cause a catastrophic system failure.
I might have modded your nonsense up as "Funny", but nobody did that. It's 100% "Insightful" so far. How can this be?? Unless... you were actually trying to be serious with that post. (!) How disturbing...
Ummm excuse me?? Your arm, brain, and any other part of your body are "just cells" also. I never said that this type of research shouldn't be done. I was rebutting you statement that they were not 'creating an actual animal, just cells'.
Show me how to create a human, or rabbit, without using any embryo cells. Then you can make arguments about about these researchers not attemting to create actual hybrid animals. There is no 'mystical' thinking involved here; if they were working with liver cells or skin cells or anything else, there would be no chance that they could create something that would develop into a whole new animal. But they're not, are they.
Potential means nothing? You only exist because of the DNA in your cells. That creature in the cells is YOU. And these guys are working to take control over what that creature becomes.
("Mere biochemistry"... WTF is this guy smoking?)
I don't get it... why does Florida need population growth? It's full of all the nearly dead retirees who migrate downwards from every other state. Please tell me you're not suggesting we need more breeding from that population?
Uhhhh yeah... "embryo cells"... you know, the ones that eventually become full humans/animals.
Every sperm is not sacred, but if they did manage to create a half-human half-rabbit person... I think they might be among the very few deserving of the title "special"...
Right, but the original parent's post implied that, at the mouth of the river, what was previously a huge flowing river has been turned into a small stream because lots of irresponsible irrigation projects are sucking the water away.
My point is: the river is hugely diminished because they built the Hoover Damn to stop up the river, and they only release as much water as is needed downstream. If they managed to perfectly estimate the water demand needed (and adjust for the natural evaporation of water), and release the exact amount, there would be NO water flowing into the ocean at all.
The lack of water at the river's end does not indicate an irresponsible mismanagement of water resources. The Hoover Dam controls flooding of the river, guarantees a water supply, and generates tons of emission-free electricity for the surrounding areas. This project was one of the best examples in the entire world of properly managed natural resources yielding great benefits to the surrounding peoples without depleting said resources. MY point was, that the parent picked the worst possible example to illustrate his point.
Ummmmmm.... aren't you being a little 'generous' there with your euphemisms? You know, calling the Hoover Dam an "irrigation project"?
Yes, large-scale irrigation DOES have effects on the surrounding environment. Building a gigantic fucking wall across a river bed does too.
If you wanted to give an example of out-of-control irrigation drying up a river, why didn't you pick one that didn't have a $175 million dollar government project designed to accomplish that very task??
(remove the space that /. adds)
Well how 'bout you make it a link for us instead, so the space that slashdot adds is no longer relevant?
Dammit smacktard! Could you resize the pages down so that we can look at more than 1/16th of the page at once??
I.... love.... reading... only... one or.... two... words... at a... time.
The fact that you're posting a link to 9 images, each roughly 1MB in size on slashdot, means that you are either masochistic, or completely else oblivious to what you're doing. Just because IE6 scales down images to fit in your browser window, doesn't mean that your router won't be screaming in pain if 100,000 people all hit your page at once...