I'm not disputing what the article says, but if this was such a large impact that it caused all of these civilisations to go into decline, how did we manage to uncover enough stuff to realise that they were prosperous civilisations in the first place?
Isn't it also odd that there is only one legend which tells of this event (Gilgamesh)? I would have thought there would be scriptures and whatnot all over the place.
Any information on what effect this impact had on other wordly civilisations, or indeed the environment? I for one would find it interesting.
Osama bin Laden did not construct those jets in Afghanistan. They were already present in the USA, and being used by many people.
Nano-technology is not taken for granted or used daily. Airliners are. Most people know what an airplane is and what it does; most people who use them don't give it a second thought. The same is not at all true of nanotech.
The article states that "There's no question that if Osama bin Laden had access to nanoweapons that he'd use them."
I thought the point that Americans are meant to be noticing is that it is low-tech which is a real danger, not high-tech. Osama bin Laden took out the WTC with fanatics, box-cutters and commercial airliners, not cruise missiles or stealth operations, or even a bomb.
Assuming the anthrax is even down to him (which is far from certain), it is not being distributed with cluster bombs, overhead sprays or even by infecting the water supply. It is simply put in some powder in the mail.
The point is, high-tech can be defended against. Computer systems can be secured, fighter jets can be shot down and bombs can be defused. The real danger occurs when something that is taken for granted, something that is very low-tech and forms a basic part of society, is used for ill means.
No doubt that nanotechnology could be used for war purposes. But I consider it far more likely that a Western power would do this than Osama bin Laden.
1) Not be able to prosecute due to lack of evidence (as alwmost always happens in such cases).
2) Realise that few people would be dumb enough to tell about a hack, and then go and use it themselves.
Although you can never tell. Heh.
Hopefully you could prove your innocence yourself by having your HD searched (if it came to that) to prove that you had no programs, knowledge, etc. to exploit the hack; alternatively, bank records would show that you had not come into large sums of money recently.
Bad luck if you were an experienced Unix user who had recently won the lottery though. Ergh.
Fair enough, but IMHO it would still be misleading to a layman. Say anything 'nuclear' to your average Joe and all he will be able to think about is Hiroshima, or maybe the Sun if you're lucky.
This Big Bang Nucleosynthesis determined how much normal matter would ever exist.
It is generally accepted that the Big Bang created almost exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter... it is only the chance that slightly more matter than anti-matter was created that lets us all sit here and ponder about it. So in a way what they are saying is true, but it's a stupid way of saying it; it's a matter of meaning, not fact. It makes you go "ooh" but it tells you nothing.
Imagine if they had said "The creation of the Universe did not determine how much matter would be in the Universe" (i.e. the opposite of what they said). It wouldn't make any sense!
And as other people have mentioned, they rave on about a 'nuclear' explosion... and they say the first step in the Universe took three minutes? Have they never heard of Planck Time?
Now, 90 percent of everything is known to be virtually nothing.
Ha, what a wonderful way to end an essay. Gosh, I wonder if they were appealing to science or sensationalism there? I sure can't tell.
Suddenly space.com is not a reliable resource for me.
Does AMD have a disclaimer promising fair test conditions, the same as those done by T.H.? No? Hmm, I wonder if they underclocked their processor just a tad...
Come on, surely this is an open-and-shut case of corporate rebuttal of bad PR. Not that anyone expects their proessor to tick nicely along without any kind of cooling aid, surely?
I still maintain that *nix and Windows are pretty much non-comparable for many reasons.
Firstly, while the *nix users will maintain that they have higher quality and more efficient OSes, I would say that this is only partly due to it being *nix (with all the efficiency and miscellaneous bonuses that entails). The other part is that those people who choose to use *nix will already have knowledge and interest in computers, and will thus be more likely to know what they are doing and less prone to mistakes. The OS can be less forgiving and expectant of mistakes and can get on with doing its job, because fewer people will be completely in over their heads.
You just compare how the average Mom would do on *nix compared to Windows. Hehe.
*nix and Windows clearly cater for different markets. Windows happens to satisfy the needs of the vast majority of computer users; it is simple, it will allow mistakes (and ask if you are 'sure' about things) and it has high compatibility. (All of this in theory, of course...) *nix, on the other hand, is for people who want to end the BSODs, the resource-munching and other general evils of Windows and sodding well do some work. Compatibility may be lower, but emulators exist if needs must. *nix is far more user-customisable; it works for you, whereas Windows can only ever work with you (and that only on the best of days).
I guarantee the if the majority of Windows users began using *nix, the number of poorly-written apps, drivers and etceterae would increase a thousandfold. Dumb questions would get asked, lack of customer support would be complained about, and many many people would have no idea what the hell they were doing. And as a I ramble along with my long-winded sentences, my eventual point is that *nix-Windows comparisons are apples-to-oranges not only because of the innate differences in the OSes but because of the differences in the users themselves (and their rewuirements in an OS. Most people need one that helps them out an awful lot.)
Endnote: I use Windows. I consider myself at least moderately computer-literate; why do I not switch to *nix? It isn't really worth my time. If Windows performance degrades more and *nix compatibility improves, I mit be tempted to give it a whirl.
I would only say that misuse of patents is evil (and stupid). Wasn't there a small story recently (possibly an urban myth) about someone in Australia patenting the wheel? Heh.
Of course, we all know that the patent owner is required to police their own patents... I imagine that suing everyone who used HTML would be an interesting job for someone.
True. But in the end, it is your house and your life, and they did call you. It may be their job, but chances are that by the time you get around to doing this you've already tried to get rid of them nicely quite a bit.
It would be better to get to the head of the telemarketing department; are they obliged to put them on the phone if you request it? Probably not, but worth a try...
Maybe the Stephen King example was a bad one; the diference with music is that the product would already be finished and completed. Users who pre-order would possibly just get a little extra as encouragement.
Perhaps it would be more difficult than I thought to eliminate the middle man, but with deals over the Internet and the acceptance of MP3 trading, there must be a way around it...
To me, telemarketer = stress relief. Had a bad day? Telemarketer rings up? It's crazy time! Unwind your brain! Just take off all the everyday filters and let the mashed up gook inside pour out!
Examples: while the 'marketer gives you his babble, just butt in with random animal noises. Or why not tell him your life story over the top of his sales pitch? Pretend to be psychotic! Slurp soup loudly, fart into the phone, try to talk backwards. Let them finish their pitch (or even better, interrupt them with enthusiasm) and haggle with them mercilessly; make THEM give up on the sale! It seems to me that an absolutely mindless release like this must be extremely good for stress. Especially when you get to hear the reaction of the guy/gal at the other end.
So come on people; don't worry about how to rid yourself of that annoying teleperson! Use them to lower your blood pressure, and get a geat laugh besides! Hooray for telemarketing!
To me, telemarketer = stress relief. Had a bad day? Telemarketer rings up? It's crazy time! Unwind your brain! Just take off all the everyday filters and let the mashed up gook inside pour out!
Examples: while the 'marketer gives you his babble, just butt in with random animal noises. Or why not tell him your life story over the top of his sales pitch? Pretend to be psychotic! Slurp soup loudly, fart into the phone, try to talk backwards. Let them finish their pitch (or even better, interrupt them with enthusiasm) and haggle with them mercilessly; make THEM give up on the sale! It seems to me that an absolutely mindless release like this must be extremely good for stress. Especially when you get to hear the reaction of the guy/gal at the other end.
So come on people; don't worry about how to rid yourself of that annoying teleperson! Use them to lower your blood pressure, and get a geat laugh besides! Hooray for telemarketing!
This method has already been used: Band X makes a new album. However, they do not release any copies until Y number have been pre-ordered and paid for (number Y chosen by the band). When Y is reached, the album goes out, and although new copies can be bought, it is assumed that everyone can get it for free via iMesh etc. (Of course, pre-ordered copies could include promotional posters, discounts off further purcahses or someting non-copyable like that to encourage pre-ordering)
The great part of this is that it cuts out the middle man for the band, they get to decide how much money to make (within reason), and everyone wins, really. (Stephen King already did this with his e-book (so they never worked, but anyway...); he would not relesae the next chapter until Y amount of people had donated a dollar.)
Someone, anyone, please tell me one single flaw in this system. I can't seem to find one.
The towers of the WTC were not constructed with many internal supporting pillars; most of the load is borne by the outer shell. So although internal bomb-blasts (or theoretically, earthquakes) could have been withstood, when the planes smashed throught the outside and mushed the inside...
Boom.
And also...
"In the City of God there will be a great thunder, two brothers torn apart by chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb.", "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning." - Nostradamus
I am in England, and watching a late-night news program I can tell you for certain that that picture features on the front page of The Sun... not exactly the most substantial newspaper, but still...
Also, another (more reliable) newspaper has a picture of a man leaping from one of the towers... very poinaint.
The towers of the WTC were not constructed with many internal supporting pillars; most of the load is borne by the outer shell. So although internal bomb-blasts (or theoretically, earthquakes) could have been withstood, when the plans smashed throught the outside and mushed the inside...
A while ago, I read an article in New Scientist. It detailed how experiments on mice showed that injections of caffeine made them far more resilient to the effects of radiation; they were able to survive well above what would usually be a lethal dose.
There's no point in worrying about things harming you. If you listen to stuff like this, you will soon find that you cannot eat or drink anything, or go anywhere. Life is dangerous, we have to accept that.
(Of course, for the same caffeine effect on people, you would need to drink 40 cups of coffee. Get crackin'.)
Thank you all for educating me in matters Linux.:-) (And for further increasing my respect for you chaps). Who knows, perhaps some weekend I will send my poor 56k modem on the week-long excursion of a download. (About 600Mb, am I wrong?)
Although I still have this feeling that a lot of my programs (and games) won't work under it, I've heard phrases such as 'programming your own drivers' which frankly give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. What's this about?
Anyway, since ATM Apache, GNU, and so forth are just words to me I will have to do some private research before I embark on anything.
Cue Internet. All it takes is one genius to figure out the decryption code, post it somewhere, and this time tomorrow everyone and his agony aunt will have it.:-)
As for preventing people from knowing that they have these rights... well, again the Internet will tell them. And if they don't feel the urge to go look, then obviously they're not using these rights, and so it doesn't matter whether they know about them or not. A shame, but then they probably used AOL anyway. The savages.
There is one that has already been used. Advance orders and donations.
On the upside, it cuts out the middleman and means that author of the work (whatever it may be) gets to decide how much profit he wants (or can expect). E.g. - Pop Band Alpha release a new album. Rather, they agree to release it once X number of copies have been pre-ordered an paid for. (Insert promotional tactics such as pre-ordered copies get signed or something). It can be assumed thanks to Napster, iMesh and the like that once the album is released, all people who want it will (or will be able to) have it. (Few will buy after its release)
Cons? Well, it means all authors have to have marketing know-how (as well as a reputation and enough followers willing to pay up front). It means first sales might be tough or non-existant (i.e. freebie demos), and if X copies are not pre-ordered then none can be sold. (Well, they could, but this weakness would reinforce the non-buyers into thinking that they didn't actually need to buy it at all).
Hopefully, it would become frowned upon to follow an author of a medium without ever actually buying CD or whatever, and the market would flourish.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said, I wasn't disputing the article. But then, wouldn't most civilisations have declined at that time, not just those in the immediate area?
We would be better at recording history because...?
Isn't it also odd that there is only one legend which tells of this event (Gilgamesh)? I would have thought there would be scriptures and whatnot all over the place.
Any information on what effect this impact had on other wordly civilisations, or indeed the environment? I for one would find it interesting.
Lucky for us it wasn't PDF... ;-)
Nano-technology is not taken for granted or used daily. Airliners are. Most people know what an airplane is and what it does; most people who use them don't give it a second thought. The same is not at all true of nanotech.
I thought the point that Americans are meant to be noticing is that it is low-tech which is a real danger, not high-tech. Osama bin Laden took out the WTC with fanatics, box-cutters and commercial airliners, not cruise missiles or stealth operations, or even a bomb.
Assuming the anthrax is even down to him (which is far from certain), it is not being distributed with cluster bombs, overhead sprays or even by infecting the water supply. It is simply put in some powder in the mail.
The point is, high-tech can be defended against. Computer systems can be secured, fighter jets can be shot down and bombs can be defused. The real danger occurs when something that is taken for granted, something that is very low-tech and forms a basic part of society, is used for ill means.
No doubt that nanotechnology could be used for war purposes. But I consider it far more likely that a Western power would do this than Osama bin Laden.
1) Not be able to prosecute due to lack of evidence (as alwmost always happens in such cases).
2) Realise that few people would be dumb enough to tell about a hack, and then go and use it themselves.
Although you can never tell. Heh.
Hopefully you could prove your innocence yourself by having your HD searched (if it came to that) to prove that you had no programs, knowledge, etc. to exploit the hack; alternatively, bank records would show that you had not come into large sums of money recently.
Bad luck if you were an experienced Unix user who had recently won the lottery though. Ergh.
Fair enough, but IMHO it would still be misleading to a layman. Say anything 'nuclear' to your average Joe and all he will be able to think about is Hiroshima, or maybe the Sun if you're lucky.
It is generally accepted that the Big Bang created almost exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter... it is only the chance that slightly more matter than anti-matter was created that lets us all sit here and ponder about it. So in a way what they are saying is true, but it's a stupid way of saying it; it's a matter of meaning, not fact. It makes you go "ooh" but it tells you nothing.
Imagine if they had said "The creation of the Universe did not determine how much matter would be in the Universe" (i.e. the opposite of what they said). It wouldn't make any sense!
And as other people have mentioned, they rave on about a 'nuclear' explosion... and they say the first step in the Universe took three minutes? Have they never heard of Planck Time?
Now, 90 percent of everything is known to be virtually nothing.
Ha, what a wonderful way to end an essay. Gosh, I wonder if they were appealing to science or sensationalism there? I sure can't tell.
Suddenly space.com is not a reliable resource for me.
Come on, surely this is an open-and-shut case of corporate rebuttal of bad PR. Not that anyone expects their proessor to tick nicely along without any kind of cooling aid, surely?
Must have been a slow news day at /. :)
Firstly, while the *nix users will maintain that they have higher quality and more efficient OSes, I would say that this is only partly due to it being *nix (with all the efficiency and miscellaneous bonuses that entails). The other part is that those people who choose to use *nix will already have knowledge and interest in computers, and will thus be more likely to know what they are doing and less prone to mistakes. The OS can be less forgiving and expectant of mistakes and can get on with doing its job, because fewer people will be completely in over their heads.
You just compare how the average Mom would do on *nix compared to Windows. Hehe.
*nix and Windows clearly cater for different markets. Windows happens to satisfy the needs of the vast majority of computer users; it is simple, it will allow mistakes (and ask if you are 'sure' about things) and it has high compatibility. (All of this in theory, of course...) *nix, on the other hand, is for people who want to end the BSODs, the resource-munching and other general evils of Windows and sodding well do some work. Compatibility may be lower, but emulators exist if needs must. *nix is far more user-customisable; it works for you, whereas Windows can only ever work with you (and that only on the best of days).
I guarantee the if the majority of Windows users began using *nix, the number of poorly-written apps, drivers and etceterae would increase a thousandfold. Dumb questions would get asked, lack of customer support would be complained about, and many many people would have no idea what the hell they were doing. And as a I ramble along with my long-winded sentences, my eventual point is that *nix-Windows comparisons are apples-to-oranges not only because of the innate differences in the OSes but because of the differences in the users themselves (and their rewuirements in an OS. Most people need one that helps them out an awful lot.)
Endnote: I use Windows. I consider myself at least moderately computer-literate; why do I not switch to *nix? It isn't really worth my time. If Windows performance degrades more and *nix compatibility improves, I mit be tempted to give it a whirl.
Of course, we all know that the patent owner is required to police their own patents... I imagine that suing everyone who used HTML would be an interesting job for someone.
It would be better to get to the head of the telemarketing department; are they obliged to put them on the phone if you request it? Probably not, but worth a try...
Perhaps it would be more difficult than I thought to eliminate the middle man, but with deals over the Internet and the acceptance of MP3 trading, there must be a way around it...
To me, telemarketer = stress relief. Had a bad day? Telemarketer rings up? It's crazy time! Unwind your brain! Just take off all the everyday filters and let the mashed up gook inside pour out! Examples: while the 'marketer gives you his babble, just butt in with random animal noises. Or why not tell him your life story over the top of his sales pitch? Pretend to be psychotic! Slurp soup loudly, fart into the phone, try to talk backwards. Let them finish their pitch (or even better, interrupt them with enthusiasm) and haggle with them mercilessly; make THEM give up on the sale! It seems to me that an absolutely mindless release like this must be extremely good for stress. Especially when you get to hear the reaction of the guy/gal at the other end. So come on people; don't worry about how to rid yourself of that annoying teleperson! Use them to lower your blood pressure, and get a geat laugh besides! Hooray for telemarketing!
Examples: while the 'marketer gives you his babble, just butt in with random animal noises. Or why not tell him your life story over the top of his sales pitch? Pretend to be psychotic! Slurp soup loudly, fart into the phone, try to talk backwards. Let them finish their pitch (or even better, interrupt them with enthusiasm) and haggle with them mercilessly; make THEM give up on the sale! It seems to me that an absolutely mindless release like this must be extremely good for stress. Especially when you get to hear the reaction of the guy/gal at the other end.
So come on people; don't worry about how to rid yourself of that annoying teleperson! Use them to lower your blood pressure, and get a geat laugh besides! Hooray for telemarketing!
The great part of this is that it cuts out the middle man for the band, they get to decide how much money to make (within reason), and everyone wins, really. (Stephen King already did this with his e-book (so they never worked, but anyway...); he would not relesae the next chapter until Y amount of people had donated a dollar.)
Someone, anyone, please tell me one single flaw in this system. I can't seem to find one.
After hearing more information, I agree that you are correct.
Boom.
And also...
"In the City of God there will be a great thunder, two brothers torn apart by chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb.", "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning." - Nostradamus
Also, another (more reliable) newspaper has a picture of a man leaping from one of the towers... very poinaint.
Boom.
There's no point in worrying about things harming you. If you listen to stuff like this, you will soon find that you cannot eat or drink anything, or go anywhere. Life is dangerous, we have to accept that.
(Of course, for the same caffeine effect on people, you would need to drink 40 cups of coffee. Get crackin'.)
Although I still have this feeling that a lot of my programs (and games) won't work under it, I've heard phrases such as 'programming your own drivers' which frankly give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. What's this about?
Anyway, since ATM Apache, GNU, and so forth are just words to me I will have to do some private research before I embark on anything.
As for preventing people from knowing that they have these rights... well, again the Internet will tell them. And if they don't feel the urge to go look, then obviously they're not using these rights, and so it doesn't matter whether they know about them or not. A shame, but then they probably used AOL anyway. The savages.
On the upside, it cuts out the middleman and means that author of the work (whatever it may be) gets to decide how much profit he wants (or can expect). E.g. - Pop Band Alpha release a new album. Rather, they agree to release it once X number of copies have been pre-ordered an paid for. (Insert promotional tactics such as pre-ordered copies get signed or something). It can be assumed thanks to Napster, iMesh and the like that once the album is released, all people who want it will (or will be able to) have it. (Few will buy after its release)
Cons? Well, it means all authors have to have marketing know-how (as well as a reputation and enough followers willing to pay up front). It means first sales might be tough or non-existant (i.e. freebie demos), and if X copies are not pre-ordered then none can be sold. (Well, they could, but this weakness would reinforce the non-buyers into thinking that they didn't actually need to buy it at all).
Hopefully, it would become frowned upon to follow an author of a medium without ever actually buying CD or whatever, and the market would flourish.