You're missing the point. The world does not need America to enforce stricter security measures on its citizens, nor does it need America to lobby our countries to similarly opress its citizens. What the world does need from America is a less agressive stance. If everybody loved you, then you would have nothing to fear.
I used to run Windows 95 on my 486 10-11 years ago. A 486 with 32 megs of RAM could run Windows 95 just fine. A 486 with 8 megs of RAM, however... would take literally three minutes to boot basic stuff like IE2.
Congratulations, you have just described what companies are doing with Second Life. It's a holodeck. You can do anything with it, including meetings, classes, roleplay, whatever.
Because the world has always been made up of 90% blingtards who make decisions based on aesthetics, "me too" and commercials? And your average corporate decision-maker is hardly ever more informed about technological issues than the average blingtard?
I think you're missing the most obvious one, which is Ultima and related medieval games with their somewhat faked middle english:) I'm not even a native english speaker but I can read all of that very clearly, which I am sure can be largely ascribed to my misspent youth;)
Four words: Double Income No Kids:) Sorry man, I respect your right to breed as much as you like, but for me kids are too noisy, expensive, and above all, they take away my freedom.
A decent bike will set you back a month or two worth of gas, and last 10-20 years (Mine cost $400 13 years ago, though I replaced the tires once for $25 or so...). I'm not a hardcore mountain biker with fancy shocks and camelbaks or whatever. I like riding through the countryside at a leisurely pace, exploring random villages, and enjoying nature. Obviously, it's not all free, and I never said I got by with zero expenditure. I am a *relatively* frugal person, I use fluxbox instead of KDE, I live happily with reduced spending. If you google around a bit there's lots of websites on how to live frugally. Some a bit more extreme than others, of course, pay no attention to the "zomg I can survive on $1/day" freaks. Make vs. Buy refers to stuff like keeping yourself entertained through coding, drawing up 3D renderings, or assembling unlimited sculptures out of the same set of legos, or enjoying more open-ended/freeform games that give you great value for your money, instead of buying 300 CDs, DVDs and console games to keep yourself entertained.
Getting a bit off-topic here, but my gf is a food engineer, with an MSc in "Food toxicology and Quality Control". Her thesis is about the various ways that processing food affects its chemical makeup, and how to minimally process food so it will still have an acceptable shelf-life while not introducing chemically active preservatives. I am obviously not an expert, and have only picked up a little here and there, but... as I understand it, complex-molecule nutrients, like proteins and fats, are denatured by excessive heating. This denaturing creates new, potentially harmful chemicals (like free radicals, trans-fats etc.) Additionally, some popular industrial ingredients are believed to be, by their very nature, more harmful than what you would normally find in food. High Fructose Corn Syrup? On top of that, the crap you find in supermarkets contains extreme, unnatural concentrations of things that would normally not harm you in more diluted form. For instance, it's fairly obvious that any kind of candy bar will contain high levels of fat and/or sugar, plus an absence of indigestible (but filling) fibrous material that is normally found in nature and would prevent you from having too much of the former in one go. Even the mere microwaving of a plastic-wrapped meal can ionize and move molecules from the wrapper to the food. You can make a killer sauce just by dumping tomatoes and onions into a pot and mildly heating them for a while. It's not strictly necessary to add anything else, but I throw in a pinch of salt, cold-pressed olive oil, and spices. The tomatoes (being 95% water), will sort of boil in their own juice, softening up without human intervention, and leaking enough water to boil the onions or whatever else you want to add. It costs a lot less than the premade sauces, has no preservatives, has not undergone high-temperature pasteurization, and tastes one hell of a lot better. It's not terribly hard to mix flour with water to make your own pasta, either. Just try it:)
Like what, dry ice? That's 100% solid CO2, and it's pretty harmless, people put it into drinks to make them smoke and appear to be boiling. Try doing that with radioactive waste:)
I'm pretty happy with my salary. I never really understood why people cared so much about money. It just sits there, piling up. What on earth would I do with more money? I don't smoke, I don't drink. I don't own a car (gotta love europe), neither do I want or need one. My monthly utility bills amount to 15% of my paycheck, and food perhaps another 15% - I eat lots of fruit and veggies, and enjoy cooking stuff from scratch. Processed food is harmful and expensive. Most of my entertainment is found online. Building stuff in Second Life, IMing friends, reading web pages and playing the odd flash game. I also enjoy cycling on weekends, and getting together with my RL friends for a chat over a 60-cent cup of coffee. I do not own any consoles, CDs, DVDs, and buy maybe 1 or 2 books a year. I end up taking my girlfriend to the fanciest restaurants in town for lack of a better idea of what to do with my money. I realize that some people are addicted to the status symbol treadmill, but I find that an exceedingly frivolous way of life, and I do not personally know anyone like that. I guess engineers lean strongly towards Make rather than Buy. We keep ourselves entertained through things that other people would consider "zomg too much work".
Shifting pollution away from people's lungs is a good thing. Frankly, call me a selfish heretic, but I don't care as much about the environment as my standard of living, and clean air would be a godsend where I live. Plus, one single centralized chimney filter sounds like a lot better than a million catalysts distributed over a million exhaust pipes. Consider, also, that you won't have to transport fuel by truck to every gas station... the electrical grid already distributes energy. We don't need to lug around actual mass around to distribute energy. It doesn't make sense in a world where everything is electronic and virtual. When I'm out cycling through the country side all day long, I don't haul around a day's worth of food and water. I plan ahead and make stops on nearby cities. I don't haul around a bunch of physical maps or encyclopedias or an entire band or a troop of actors. I have my cell phone with google maps and wikipedia and mp3s and videos...
I would like to add that Software Development, or "Coding", should also be considered a separate issue. An engineer, in most engineering fields, is always seen as a leader, an abstract planner, a project manager. The actual execution stage is grunt work that can be performed by unskilled labor. There are three separate tiers here. You don't ask a construction worker to plan out a bridge, and you do not ask an architect to research new materials. You shouldn't expect a "code typist" to come up with cool new algorithms. I hate coding - i see it as a mechanical translation of an expertly made plan that integrates well-known methods and algorithms that have been in common use. As for why this is not obvious for 99% of IT folks, I can only blame it on the field's relative immaturity.
Warning, Devil's advocate, do not read if you're quick on the "Troll" or "Flamebait" triggers:) Good software can also take thousands or millions of dollars and 10 years to develop. Not everything can be reduced to a simple micro-prototype that "anyone" can code "in their spare time". Barriers to entry in a market exist for a reason. Where none exist, it can be beneficial to impose some. Being from Europe, where our socialist governments tightly control everything, there are even limits on how many companies you can have in some fields (such as telecoms and tv stations), and you have to deposit at least 5000 euros as "social capital" before starting ANY company, as a guarantee that your creditors and employees will have some money left over if/when you go bankrupt. The world does not need more crappy little things made by minuscule teams of amateurs. It is harmful to the consumers when they are lured into buying crap from a tiny "here today gone tomorrow" type of company, that cannot benefit from economies of scale or loss-leader tactics, and so has to impose a higher margin, or has to have a higher turnaround time due to being small, etc. When you're dealing with public contests (not sure if this is the right term in english), at a national or EU-level, you have to deposit an insane amount of money before even applying, to prove that you have the financial stability required to complete the project in a useful amount of time, absorbing unexpected cost overruns, etc.
You may have been joking, but wearing a mask in public is illegal in many jurisdictions. There is no escape, Big Brother demands that you be easily identifiable and carry your papers with you at all times:)
Because paperbacks fall apart after... one read?;) And if you're a hardcore book reader, or at least a hardcore fan of a specific book series, you will re-read them many times and flip through them occasionally for your favorite bits, or for reference in a book discussion... so you need something that lasts.
Rather than aiming for a "gold standard", perhaps we should aim for a "manure standard". It's not about selecting the top 1% of "perfect" people and cloning them to make a super-productive Master Race:P It's about selecting the bottom 1% of "defective" people and preventing them from leading a life that will unambiguously be burdened with pain and suffering, or unduly burden the lives of others. I am all for aborting fetuses with serious genetic conditions that will prevent them from living a normal and happy life. This is already being legally done in many countries, as there are specific non-DNA tests for some conditions.
Then you give your Perl monkey advanced training in statistics. It's always been my stance in life that anyone with half a brain could eventually learn anything, and someone with a whole brain, who has attained a superb mastery in his or her field, will have the mental flexibility to get into some other area of knowledge. Fields are hardly self-contained. They have common thought patterns and concepts. There are many things in any given field that are just like other things in other fields, because reality, and knowledge, have an underlying structure that you must learn regardless of the peculiarities of your chosen major. That's why we have these things called Math and Physics in every science degree.
My name is Eggy Lippmann. At least in Second Life. I don't get Slashdot these days. It's full of idiots. College kids. I'm sure many people will agree with me on this. Having joined during Beta testing, I was one of the first 300 paying SL users, certainly the first in my country, as far as I know even the first one in Europe. My virtual face is on 20 pages of the SL official guide, and I am described as the historian, for I run the http://slhistory.org/ wiki. This is so you know that my vision is skewed, but I will share it with you nonetheless. In April 2003, having seen an article about SL on Slashdot (of all places), I joined something that I believed to be sort of like a game, but slightly more open-ended. In the beginning, the crowd was almost exclusively made up of very smart and interesting people. It was mostly about the graphical creation aspect. Not being able to build anything made you a second-class citizen of sorts, buying and selling things was almost bourgeois. Taboo. I didn't really get it at first, expecting more of an RPG, afraid that enemies were lurking in some hidden corner of the world, behind a building, waiting for me. It was hard to learn, but I made some friends, and the early crowd there was all very friendly and encouraging. I liked showing off what I could do with the tools. There's even a sound clip in SL that goes "Look what I made!". I liked flying around and seeing what other people had made, wondering who lived there, what purpose those buildings served, what had motivated people to do them in their own particular artistic style. I am still friends with many of the people I met in the early days, but I have met a lot more. I like saying that Second Life is all about the people, and I understand that not everyone is terribly social, or that some people might see online socializing as mutually exclusive or detrimental to "real" socializing, but I am not a typical geek. I like my "real" friends, and I like my online friends. Not being American, I enjoy meeting people from other countries and learning about their culture. Learning about themselves. It is certainly an enriching experience to engage in online socializing, and content consumption. I like playing Flash games, watching Flash animations, and reading pages on Wikipedia. Second Life is much like the web, or the internet at large, but in glorious 3D graphics. It's a platform. I have since made it my job. I run a relatively large and successful business called Beta Technologies - http://betatechnologies.info/ What we do is the same thing we have always done. Produce content. We could be doing HTML and Flash, I suppose, but where's the glory in that? You should join Second Life if only because it's new. If only because it's cool. Or if only because other people find it cool. No matter how much you abhor these newfangled techie virtual world thingamabobs, the thing about change is that you either cause it or get hit on the head with it. IBM has a Five... Million... Dollar investment in this. Not in the company that runs it, but rather in people who use this to produce tools and content for it. Second Life is a little like Youtube in that it relies on User-Created Content. This means that "zomg the graphics suck lololo". You can do better. Right? I'm not going to say that Second Life will be the next big thing, or that it will change the world. But I will say that a rather large and quickly growing train of people believe in this, and you already missed that train some time last year. Whatever you can do on the web, you can do better in Second Life. Why watch videos on Youtube alone, and send links to your friends, if you can simply invite your friends and watch them together inside Second Life, thanks to the streaming video features? Why read a long, boring article on Nasa's website, or play with their crudely-drawn 2D animations, when you can read an equally long and boring artic
Pssst... some of us unamerican folks actually cycle on a daily basis. Imagine that! Could you believe that in many european cities cycling is the default means of transportation, and there are ZERO gigantic SUVs? The shock, the horror!
Sorry, that just means you eliminated the data on those three specific places. The rest of the platters can still be read, and whole files retrieved. The way data densities are today, even if you shatter a disk into a thousand pieces, a single, 1/1,000th piece of a 300 GB hard drive is still 300 MB... and breaking shit does not demagnetize it.
Ok I am not a physicist or civil engineer or anything... but it seems to me that you can't make a building out of rope;) Some materials are engineered for compression, such as the hollow bricks you so often see, and other materials are engineered for tension... a rope can't hold itself upright, it will fall down and fold, and if you try stretching a brick you will simply break a piece off of its edge. Go play some Pontifex or Armadillo Run... it makes this sort of physics a tad more intuitive:)
Screw entertainment, Second Life makes it exceedingly easy to create elaborate 3D online multimedia projects, machinima, games, you name it. I've been developing large projects on it since the damn thing opened, and I now run a 12-person company that focuses exclusively on Second Life development. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people living off Second Life already. How's that for utility? Check out a list of all the profitable businesses developing stuff for SL: http://secondlife.com/developers/ Now, I know just about everyone there on that list, and I can assure you that we are all pretty busy. Heck, I'm not even *ON* that list and I have about 8 projects going and I'm hiring all the time. (know LSL? know PHP? send me your resume! we may need up to 40 mini-games done in three months, among other things) SL includes a firefox-based web browser, and can fully integrate with web servers as it contains a scripting language that allows programmatic communications with the "outside world" through email, XMLRPC or even HTTP. Think of it as an easy way to make web applications, except with fancifully interactive 3D graphics. If you think there are no practical applications for SL then surely you must think the same thing about the web. E-commerce, banking, casinos and puzzle games, or even full-scale commercial quality games. Those little flash games everyone plays now and then? You can now do the same in 3D, and people are loving it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. The world does not need America to enforce stricter security measures on its citizens, nor does it need America to lobby our countries to similarly opress its citizens.
What the world does need from America is a less agressive stance. If everybody loved you, then you would have nothing to fear.
I used to run Windows 95 on my 486 10-11 years ago.
A 486 with 32 megs of RAM could run Windows 95 just fine. A 486 with 8 megs of RAM, however... would take literally three minutes to boot basic stuff like IE2.
Congratulations, you have just described what companies are doing with Second Life.
It's a holodeck. You can do anything with it, including meetings, classes, roleplay, whatever.
Because the world has always been made up of 90% blingtards who make decisions based on aesthetics, "me too" and commercials?
And your average corporate decision-maker is hardly ever more informed about technological issues than the average blingtard?
I think you're missing the most obvious one, which is Ultima and related medieval games with their somewhat faked middle english :) ;)
I'm not even a native english speaker but I can read all of that very clearly, which I am sure can be largely ascribed to my misspent youth
Four words: Double Income No Kids :)
Sorry man, I respect your right to breed as much as you like, but for me kids are too noisy, expensive, and above all, they take away my freedom.
A decent bike will set you back a month or two worth of gas, and last 10-20 years (Mine cost $400 13 years ago, though I replaced the tires once for $25 or so...). I'm not a hardcore mountain biker with fancy shocks and camelbaks or whatever. I like riding through the countryside at a leisurely pace, exploring random villages, and enjoying nature.
Obviously, it's not all free, and I never said I got by with zero expenditure. I am a *relatively* frugal person, I use fluxbox instead of KDE, I live happily with reduced spending. If you google around a bit there's lots of websites on how to live frugally. Some a bit more extreme than others, of course, pay no attention to the "zomg I can survive on $1/day" freaks.
Make vs. Buy refers to stuff like keeping yourself entertained through coding, drawing up 3D renderings, or assembling unlimited sculptures out of the same set of legos, or enjoying more open-ended/freeform games that give you great value for your money, instead of buying 300 CDs, DVDs and console games to keep yourself entertained.
Getting a bit off-topic here, but my gf is a food engineer, with an MSc in "Food toxicology and Quality Control". Her thesis is about the various ways that processing food affects its chemical makeup, and how to minimally process food so it will still have an acceptable shelf-life while not introducing chemically active preservatives. :)
I am obviously not an expert, and have only picked up a little here and there, but... as I understand it, complex-molecule nutrients, like proteins and fats, are denatured by excessive heating. This denaturing creates new, potentially harmful chemicals (like free radicals, trans-fats etc.)
Additionally, some popular industrial ingredients are believed to be, by their very nature, more harmful than what you would normally find in food. High Fructose Corn Syrup?
On top of that, the crap you find in supermarkets contains extreme, unnatural concentrations of things that would normally not harm you in more diluted form. For instance, it's fairly obvious that any kind of candy bar will contain high levels of fat and/or sugar, plus an absence of indigestible (but filling) fibrous material that is normally found in nature and would prevent you from having too much of the former in one go.
Even the mere microwaving of a plastic-wrapped meal can ionize and move molecules from the wrapper to the food.
You can make a killer sauce just by dumping tomatoes and onions into a pot and mildly heating them for a while. It's not strictly necessary to add anything else, but I throw in a pinch of salt, cold-pressed olive oil, and spices. The tomatoes (being 95% water), will sort of boil in their own juice, softening up without human intervention, and leaking enough water to boil the onions or whatever else you want to add. It costs a lot less than the premade sauces, has no preservatives, has not undergone high-temperature pasteurization, and tastes one hell of a lot better.
It's not terribly hard to mix flour with water to make your own pasta, either. Just try it
Like what, dry ice? That's 100% solid CO2, and it's pretty harmless, people put it into drinks to make them smoke and appear to be boiling. :)
Try doing that with radioactive waste
I'm pretty happy with my salary. I never really understood why people cared so much about money. It just sits there, piling up. What on earth would I do with more money?
I don't smoke, I don't drink. I don't own a car (gotta love europe), neither do I want or need one.
My monthly utility bills amount to 15% of my paycheck, and food perhaps another 15% - I eat lots of fruit and veggies, and enjoy cooking stuff from scratch. Processed food is harmful and expensive.
Most of my entertainment is found online. Building stuff in Second Life, IMing friends, reading web pages and playing the odd flash game. I also enjoy cycling on weekends, and getting together with my RL friends for a chat over a 60-cent cup of coffee.
I do not own any consoles, CDs, DVDs, and buy maybe 1 or 2 books a year.
I end up taking my girlfriend to the fanciest restaurants in town for lack of a better idea of what to do with my money.
I realize that some people are addicted to the status symbol treadmill, but I find that an exceedingly frivolous way of life, and I do not personally know anyone like that.
I guess engineers lean strongly towards Make rather than Buy. We keep ourselves entertained through things that other people would consider "zomg too much work".
Shifting pollution away from people's lungs is a good thing.
Frankly, call me a selfish heretic, but I don't care as much about the environment as my standard of living, and clean air would be a godsend where I live.
Plus, one single centralized chimney filter sounds like a lot better than a million catalysts distributed over a million exhaust pipes.
Consider, also, that you won't have to transport fuel by truck to every gas station... the electrical grid already distributes energy. We don't need to lug around actual mass around to distribute energy. It doesn't make sense in a world where everything is electronic and virtual.
When I'm out cycling through the country side all day long, I don't haul around a day's worth of food and water. I plan ahead and make stops on nearby cities. I don't haul around a bunch of physical maps or encyclopedias or an entire band or a troop of actors. I have my cell phone with google maps and wikipedia and mp3s and videos...
I would like to add that Software Development, or "Coding", should also be considered a separate issue.
An engineer, in most engineering fields, is always seen as a leader, an abstract planner, a project manager. The actual execution stage is grunt work that can be performed by unskilled labor.
There are three separate tiers here. You don't ask a construction worker to plan out a bridge, and you do not ask an architect to research new materials. You shouldn't expect a "code typist" to come up with cool new algorithms. I hate coding - i see it as a mechanical translation of an expertly made plan that integrates well-known methods and algorithms that have been in common use.
As for why this is not obvious for 99% of IT folks, I can only blame it on the field's relative immaturity.
Warning, Devil's advocate, do not read if you're quick on the "Troll" or "Flamebait" triggers :)
Good software can also take thousands or millions of dollars and 10 years to develop.
Not everything can be reduced to a simple micro-prototype that "anyone" can code "in their spare time".
Barriers to entry in a market exist for a reason. Where none exist, it can be beneficial to impose some.
Being from Europe, where our socialist governments tightly control everything, there are even limits on how many companies you can have in some fields (such as telecoms and tv stations), and you have to deposit at least 5000 euros as "social capital" before starting ANY company, as a guarantee that your creditors and employees will have some money left over if/when you go bankrupt.
The world does not need more crappy little things made by minuscule teams of amateurs.
It is harmful to the consumers when they are lured into buying crap from a tiny "here today gone tomorrow" type of company, that cannot benefit from economies of scale or loss-leader tactics, and so has to impose a higher margin, or has to have a higher turnaround time due to being small, etc.
When you're dealing with public contests (not sure if this is the right term in english), at a national or EU-level, you have to deposit an insane amount of money before even applying, to prove that you have the financial stability required to complete the project in a useful amount of time, absorbing unexpected cost overruns, etc.
You may have been joking, but wearing a mask in public is illegal in many jurisdictions. There is no escape, Big Brother demands that you be easily identifiable and carry your papers with you at all times :)
Fast wind blows shit around, slow wind not strong enough to do so. Did I miss anything? :|
Because paperbacks fall apart after... one read? ;)
And if you're a hardcore book reader, or at least a hardcore fan of a specific book series, you will re-read them many times and flip through them occasionally for your favorite bits, or for reference in a book discussion... so you need something that lasts.
I'm an international user, and thanks to the magic of gaim i am always on icq.
Nothing wrong with my account, so far.
Rather than aiming for a "gold standard", perhaps we should aim for a "manure standard". :P
It's not about selecting the top 1% of "perfect" people and cloning them to make a super-productive Master Race
It's about selecting the bottom 1% of "defective" people and preventing them from leading a life that will unambiguously be burdened with pain and suffering, or unduly burden the lives of others.
I am all for aborting fetuses with serious genetic conditions that will prevent them from living a normal and happy life. This is already being legally done in many countries, as there are specific non-DNA tests for some conditions.
Then you give your Perl monkey advanced training in statistics.
It's always been my stance in life that anyone with half a brain could eventually learn anything, and someone with a whole brain, who has attained a superb mastery in his or her field, will have the mental flexibility to get into some other area of knowledge.
Fields are hardly self-contained. They have common thought patterns and concepts. There are many things in any given field that are just like other things in other fields, because reality, and knowledge, have an underlying structure that you must learn regardless of the peculiarities of your chosen major. That's why we have these things called Math and Physics in every science degree.
My name is Eggy Lippmann. At least in Second Life.
I don't get Slashdot these days. It's full of idiots. College kids.
I'm sure many people will agree with me on this.
Having joined during Beta testing, I was one of the first 300 paying SL users, certainly the first in my country, as far as I know even the first one in Europe.
My virtual face is on 20 pages of the SL official guide, and I am described as the historian, for I run the http://slhistory.org/ wiki.
This is so you know that my vision is skewed, but I will share it with you nonetheless.
In April 2003, having seen an article about SL on Slashdot (of all places), I joined something that I believed to be sort of like a game, but slightly more open-ended.
In the beginning, the crowd was almost exclusively made up of very smart and interesting people. It was mostly about the graphical creation aspect. Not being able to build anything made you a second-class citizen of sorts, buying and selling things was almost bourgeois. Taboo.
I didn't really get it at first, expecting more of an RPG, afraid that enemies were lurking in some hidden corner of the world, behind a building, waiting for me.
It was hard to learn, but I made some friends, and the early crowd there was all very friendly and encouraging.
I liked showing off what I could do with the tools. There's even a sound clip in SL that goes "Look what I made!".
I liked flying around and seeing what other people had made, wondering who lived there, what purpose those buildings served, what had motivated people to do them in their own particular artistic style.
I am still friends with many of the people I met in the early days, but I have met a lot more. I like saying that Second Life is all about the people, and I understand that not everyone is terribly social, or that some people might see online socializing as mutually exclusive or detrimental to "real" socializing, but I am not a typical geek.
I like my "real" friends, and I like my online friends. Not being American, I enjoy meeting people from other countries and learning about their culture. Learning about themselves.
It is certainly an enriching experience to engage in online socializing, and content consumption.
I like playing Flash games, watching Flash animations, and reading pages on Wikipedia.
Second Life is much like the web, or the internet at large, but in glorious 3D graphics.
It's a platform. I have since made it my job. I run a relatively large and successful business called Beta Technologies - http://betatechnologies.info/
What we do is the same thing we have always done. Produce content. We could be doing HTML and Flash, I suppose, but where's the glory in that?
You should join Second Life if only because it's new. If only because it's cool. Or if only because other people find it cool.
No matter how much you abhor these newfangled techie virtual world thingamabobs, the thing about change is that you either cause it or get hit on the head with it.
IBM has a Five... Million... Dollar investment in this. Not in the company that runs it, but rather in people who use this to produce tools and content for it.
Second Life is a little like Youtube in that it relies on User-Created Content. This means that "zomg the graphics suck lololo". You can do better. Right?
I'm not going to say that Second Life will be the next big thing, or that it will change the world.
But I will say that a rather large and quickly growing train of people believe in this, and you already missed that train some time last year.
Whatever you can do on the web, you can do better in Second Life. Why watch videos on Youtube alone, and send links to your friends, if you can simply invite your friends and watch them together inside Second Life, thanks to the streaming video features?
Why read a long, boring article on Nasa's website, or play with their crudely-drawn 2D animations, when you can read an equally long and boring artic
Pssst... some of us unamerican folks actually cycle on a daily basis. Imagine that! Could you believe that in many european cities cycling is the default means of transportation, and there are ZERO gigantic SUVs?
The shock, the horror!
Sorry, that just means you eliminated the data on those three specific places. The rest of the platters can still be read, and whole files retrieved. The way data densities are today, even if you shatter a disk into a thousand pieces, a single, 1/1,000th piece of a 300 GB hard drive is still 300 MB... and breaking shit does not demagnetize it.
Ok I am not a physicist or civil engineer or anything... but it seems to me that you can't make a building out of rope ;) :)
Some materials are engineered for compression, such as the hollow bricks you so often see, and other materials are engineered for tension... a rope can't hold itself upright, it will fall down and fold, and if you try stretching a brick you will simply break a piece off of its edge.
Go play some Pontifex or Armadillo Run... it makes this sort of physics a tad more intuitive
Screw entertainment, Second Life makes it exceedingly easy to create elaborate 3D online multimedia projects, machinima, games, you name it. I've been developing large projects on it since the damn thing opened, and I now run a 12-person company that focuses exclusively on Second Life development. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people living off Second Life already. How's that for utility?
Check out a list of all the profitable businesses developing stuff for SL:
http://secondlife.com/developers/
Now, I know just about everyone there on that list, and I can assure you that we are all pretty busy. Heck, I'm not even *ON* that list and I have about 8 projects going and I'm hiring all the time. (know LSL? know PHP? send me your resume! we may need up to 40 mini-games done in three months, among other things)
SL includes a firefox-based web browser, and can fully integrate with web servers as it contains a scripting language that allows programmatic communications with the "outside world" through email, XMLRPC or even HTTP.
Think of it as an easy way to make web applications, except with fancifully interactive 3D graphics. If you think there are no practical applications for SL then surely you must think the same thing about the web. E-commerce, banking, casinos and puzzle games, or even full-scale commercial quality games. Those little flash games everyone plays now and then? You can now do the same in 3D, and people are loving it.
Bush is teh stupid!
Can I get my mod points now?