Disease doesn't feel right, but at least it is plausible. Not that I can explain their extinction without either that, or the "overkill" theory... but if I had to choose one over the other. *shrug*
What you just described, is a very valid argument, and a good one,of why prehistoric humanity probably feasted on mammoth steak, from time to time. As for how plausible it is that they managed to wipe them all out, doing all this... do I really need to say it again?
Read up on Carthage, and the other ancient civilizations that used elephants for war. Not an exact analogy, but it will give you some idea what these things could have been like, if they did anything more than share shape and form with modern elephants.
Yeh, I've been daydreaming about quantum transcievers.
I even have an idea how you'd go about exchanging them in such a way, that you'd have no idea who was even connected to you! An anonymous exchange, picking your transciever out of a garbage can in Central Park, making sure you weren't watched...
Heh, that could be fun.
Still, there is enough technology now, that we don't have to wait for scifi.
It's not theft though. If I choose to arrange some bits magnetically on a disk I own, are they claiming I stole electrons? Or maybe the hard disk?
No, I am downloading restricted data. That data used to be restricted to encourage the creation of more data... now those restrictions serve only to create fatcat monopolies who will milk the data for centuries if not longer, to serve only themselves. They aren't even the creators of that data. And they're already rich beyond reason. So, when they start claiming they're losing so much money, due to those who sidestep the copy restrictions, yes, the fact that they made large fractions of a billion dollars on a single movie does say something about how sick they are.
The punishment for copyright infringement should be inversely proportional to how long copyright lasts.
One where the authorities are powerless to stop those things that they hate, and where they couldn't identify those using it?
I've been thinking about something like this, ever since reading William's Otherland. In it, there is a virtual reality network only accessible to the hackers of the world, by invitation only. Completely non-technical, not to mention VR, but it started me thinking about how you could go about something like this.
If you care to hear more about this, read my work in progress page about it...
WARNING: I do tend to rant a bit, so it's not exactly prim and proper.
Yeh. Which means the only way those meterites in Antartica that were originally on mars were...
Sent here by little green men!
Do us a favor, and pull your head out of your ass. This sort of stuff happens all the time on a geologic time scale. It's improbable, but possible, that there are some pieces of manmade material, pre-space age, floating around out there. I'm just not bright enough to be able to figure out if it would all stay in a solar orbit pretty close to Earth's or not.
What you are saying, is that early man ate wooly mammoths. This is pretty much beyond debate, it's a given.
Now, that in no way means they hunted or killed mammoths. And the vast majority of the "spear points" are made in a way that suggests they were more likely some post-death butchering implement. A meat cleaver, or hunting knife.
Sure, I think that driven by desperation, some even managed to stalk and kill mammoths, but this was an exception, not a rule. More often, though, when they fed on mammoths, it was due to oppportunistic scavenging, not some neolithic man triumphing over an animal that weighed how many tons? I have an idea, you take a spear, and stick it in the asscheek of a full grown bull elephant. After the zookeeper cleans and bandages the superficial wound, they'll mop up what's left of you.
And don't give me that atl-atl bullshit, either. Do you have any idea what type of bullet it requires, to do any significant damage to one of these things?
No, in the end, I'll buy the disease theory much more readily than extinction by hunting.
Even without believing tinfoilhat stuff, isn't it more accurate to call this the farthest known manmade object?
How impossible is it that a pottery shard was included in some ejectile material 25,000 years ago... and given the likely orbits of something like that, how far could it have gone?
I'm not saying they never once ate mammoth. I will concede it happened a few times.
This though, is such a far cry from managing to wipe out an entire species, that I would think you were trolling me.
Stampeding them over a cliff works nice, if they are a super villain, you are James Bond, and you have a helicopter waiting to pull you safely away on a rope ladder. Unfortunately, mammoths have neither sinister mustaches nor an enviroment with a surplus of convenient cliffs. It doesn't work.
I don't claim to know what killed them, and I certainly won't defend humanity when it's perfectly clear we're willing to cause extinction, but your theory smacks of some kind of arrogance, almost hubris. I mean, we're so nifty, only we can wipe out species? You'll have to do better than that.
Ever try to hunt elephants with rifles and jeeps? You're still likely, to this day to end up as elephant toe jam, rather than proud hunter who has slain the mighty land mammal.
So, caveman joe and his buddies, armed with stone tipped spears and no mounts somehow manages to extinct them? Give me a fucking break. Is there a single thing that stone age humans could have done to mammoths, other than pissing off an intelligent, incredibly huge mammal that often has 4 ft long ivory sabres attached to its skull?
Yeh. Supposing that happened very often, it's the wrong species that got wiped out.
At one time, being a scientist meant either being arab, or at least reading arabic. The single handedly rescued it, when christianity waas trying to burn it to the ground.
There was a period of 100 years or so, when the most complete astronomical charts, the best observatory, and the most knowledgable astronomers were all in... Afghanistan.
My goverment has informed me, a patriotic citizen, that I should be especially aware of anything arabic sounding around me. They like to sneak things in to try and destroy our beautiful country, and this could be one of the very plots that brings about 9-11 the sequel!
Why, filling our kids heads with islamic math propaganda is the last thing we need right now. Will it help us build bigger bombs? No, I don't think so. Counting to 10 is enough, and if you forget a few numbers in between, that's alright by me. President Bush himself can't count to 10 without his advisors helping, and I bet none of them know al-jebrah either.
Al jebrah is a tool of the devil! It might help when you're trying to decide how many camels to give away to marry off your daughters, and it might even help to figure out how to build those crazy pointy towered mosque thingies. But as americans, what good does that do us?
Besides, they come right out and say it. It leads to godless science, teaching us that we're the grandchildren of monkeys. Yes, cousin Cletis kinda looks like a chimp, but by god he's a good 85% human. Keep your godless atheist algebraic satanic brainwashings out of my kids skulls!
(stupid lameness filter won't even let you do a *** seperator bar) Dammit. Spent 20 minutes writing one of my best trolls ever, and I can't bring myself to click 'submit'. It wouldn't be a big deal, but I know people like this... ugh. I'm wimping out.
He speaks as if a final verdict in your favor means you win completely.
For many of the people affected by this, the threat of a lawsuit is a great financial burden in its own right, and anything that gives big corporations an excuse to sue, good excuse or bad, hurts us all.
Well, the fact that it's limited to integers, and that the possibility of a string of n decimal digits matching such a pattern, when n grows with each iteration like it does.
Sort of like the chance of finding the string "333" in decimal Pi, versus finding "3333333333333333333333333". Both are in there, multiple times even, but its obvious one is much more likely than the other. 50 was arbitrary though, it might be 20 or 100. You get the idea.
It's obvious to me anyway, on an intuitive level, that if an iteration goes beyond a few digits in size, the likelyhood of it palindroming plummets. I bet number of non-Lychrels that require 50+ iterations is unbelievably low, or even zero.
Of course, I too wonder what in the hell this is good for.
And this encrypted handshake is what? A hash of the time of day, or some other known value, so that things can be checked? Or maybe something that is also beam across wireless?
There are suprisingly few secure handshake procedures, and it doesn't help them when you broadcast the damn thing in a 40ft radius all around you.
Slashdot Mirror
Disease doesn't feel right, but at least it is plausible. Not that I can explain their extinction without either that, or the "overkill" theory... but if I had to choose one over the other. *shrug*
What you just described, is a very valid argument, and a good one,of why prehistoric humanity probably feasted on mammoth steak, from time to time. As for how plausible it is that they managed to wipe them all out, doing all this... do I really need to say it again?
Read up on Carthage, and the other ancient civilizations that used elephants for war. Not an exact analogy, but it will give you some idea what these things could have been like, if they did anything more than share shape and form with modern elephants.
The year that that happens, half the US population will starve to death.
Credit to MrHat, though I'm sure I screwed up the quote.
Yeh, I've been daydreaming about quantum transcievers.
I even have an idea how you'd go about exchanging them in such a way, that you'd have no idea who was even connected to you! An anonymous exchange, picking your transciever out of a garbage can in Central Park, making sure you weren't watched...
Heh, that could be fun.
Still, there is enough technology now, that we don't have to wait for scifi.
It's not theft though. If I choose to arrange some bits magnetically on a disk I own, are they claiming I stole electrons? Or maybe the hard disk?
No, I am downloading restricted data. That data used to be restricted to encourage the creation of more data... now those restrictions serve only to create fatcat monopolies who will milk the data for centuries if not longer, to serve only themselves. They aren't even the creators of that data. And they're already rich beyond reason. So, when they start claiming they're losing so much money, due to those who sidestep the copy restrictions, yes, the fact that they made large fractions of a billion dollars on a single movie does say something about how sick they are.
The punishment for copyright infringement should be inversely proportional to how long copyright lasts.
One where the authorities are powerless to stop those things that they hate, and where they couldn't identify those using it?
I've been thinking about something like this, ever since reading William's Otherland. In it, there is a virtual reality network only accessible to the hackers of the world, by invitation only. Completely non-technical, not to mention VR, but it started me thinking about how you could go about something like this.
If you care to hear more about this, read my work in progress page about it...
WARNING: I do tend to rant a bit, so it's not exactly prim and proper.
Yeh. Which means the only way those meterites in Antartica that were originally on mars were...
Sent here by little green men!
Do us a favor, and pull your head out of your ass. This sort of stuff happens all the time on a geologic time scale. It's improbable, but possible, that there are some pieces of manmade material, pre-space age, floating around out there. I'm just not bright enough to be able to figure out if it would all stay in a solar orbit pretty close to Earth's or not.
Ugh.
What you are saying, is that early man ate wooly mammoths. This is pretty much beyond debate, it's a given.
Now, that in no way means they hunted or killed mammoths. And the vast majority of the "spear points" are made in a way that suggests they were more likely some post-death butchering implement. A meat cleaver, or hunting knife.
Sure, I think that driven by desperation, some even managed to stalk and kill mammoths, but this was an exception, not a rule. More often, though, when they fed on mammoths, it was due to oppportunistic scavenging, not some neolithic man triumphing over an animal that weighed how many tons? I have an idea, you take a spear, and stick it in the asscheek of a full grown bull elephant. After the zookeeper cleans and bandages the superficial wound, they'll mop up what's left of you.
And don't give me that atl-atl bullshit, either. Do you have any idea what type of bullet it requires, to do any significant damage to one of these things?
No, in the end, I'll buy the disease theory much more readily than extinction by hunting.
Even without believing tinfoilhat stuff, isn't it more accurate to call this the farthest known manmade object?
How impossible is it that a pottery shard was included in some ejectile material 25,000 years ago... and given the likely orbits of something like that, how far could it have gone?
I'm not saying they never once ate mammoth. I will concede it happened a few times.
This though, is such a far cry from managing to wipe out an entire species, that I would think you were trolling me.
Stampeding them over a cliff works nice, if they are a super villain, you are James Bond, and you have a helicopter waiting to pull you safely away on a rope ladder. Unfortunately, mammoths have neither sinister mustaches nor an enviroment with a surplus of convenient cliffs. It doesn't work.
I don't claim to know what killed them, and I certainly won't defend humanity when it's perfectly clear we're willing to cause extinction, but your theory smacks of some kind of arrogance, almost hubris. I mean, we're so nifty, only we can wipe out species? You'll have to do better than that.
88% mammoth DNA, 12% elephant.
Elephant DNA is probably already within 95% mammoth anyway (or more, it's just a guess)... meaning that 88% is very close.
If it doesn't make sense after thinking about it for a few minutes, please voluntarily banish yourself from posting to science arrticles on slashdot.
Yeh, right.
Ever try to hunt elephants with rifles and jeeps? You're still likely, to this day to end up as elephant toe jam, rather than proud hunter who has slain the mighty land mammal.
So, caveman joe and his buddies, armed with stone tipped spears and no mounts somehow manages to extinct them? Give me a fucking break. Is there a single thing that stone age humans could have done to mammoths, other than pissing off an intelligent, incredibly huge mammal that often has 4 ft long ivory sabres attached to its skull?
Yeh. Supposing that happened very often, it's the wrong species that got wiped out.
At one time, being a scientist meant either being arab, or at least reading arabic. The single handedly rescued it, when christianity waas trying to burn it to the ground.
There was a period of 100 years or so, when the most complete astronomical charts, the best observatory, and the most knowledgable astronomers were all in... Afghanistan.
I may be a troll, but I'm not stupid.
My goverment has informed me, a patriotic citizen, that I should be especially aware of anything arabic sounding around me. They like to sneak things in to try and destroy our beautiful country, and this could be one of the very plots that brings about 9-11 the sequel!
Why, filling our kids heads with islamic math propaganda is the last thing we need right now. Will it help us build bigger bombs? No, I don't think so. Counting to 10 is enough, and if you forget a few numbers in between, that's alright by me. President Bush himself can't count to 10 without his advisors helping, and I bet none of them know al-jebrah either.
Al jebrah is a tool of the devil! It might help when you're trying to decide how many camels to give away to marry off your daughters, and it might even help to figure out how to build those crazy pointy towered mosque thingies. But as americans, what good does that do us?
Besides, they come right out and say it. It leads to godless science, teaching us that we're the grandchildren of monkeys. Yes, cousin Cletis kinda looks like a chimp, but by god he's a good 85% human. Keep your godless atheist algebraic satanic brainwashings out of my kids skulls!
(stupid lameness filter won't even let you do a *** seperator bar)
Dammit. Spent 20 minutes writing one of my best trolls ever, and I can't bring myself to click 'submit'. It wouldn't be a big deal, but I know people like this... ugh. I'm wimping out.
He speaks as if a final verdict in your favor means you win completely.
For many of the people affected by this, the threat of a lawsuit is a great financial burden in its own right, and anything that gives big corporations an excuse to sue, good excuse or bad, hurts us all.
Oh well.
This is what I'm talking about. Damn, now I need to start saving for a quantum computer...
Don't suppose there is any chance of one of these things opening a doorway to a parallel universe where women find me irresistible?
Will this significantly improve my porn viewing experience?
Karma: Somewhere between -20 and 50.
Gotta love that...
Fuck you. No, really. Fuck yourself and drop dead. Am I supposed to be rainman or something?
I must have forgot how Pi devolves into a string of 20 "3" digits right after 3.14...
I troll on usenet, breaks up the monotony. Also, it lets me see how the old-timer trolls used to do it back in the day...
Damn, kinda makes me wish it were 1986 again.
Go to hell, worthless slashdot troll.
Well, the fact that it's limited to integers, and that the possibility of a string of n decimal digits matching such a pattern, when n grows with each iteration like it does.
Sort of like the chance of finding the string "333" in decimal Pi, versus finding "3333333333333333333333333". Both are in there, multiple times even, but its obvious one is much more likely than the other. 50 was arbitrary though, it might be 20 or 100. You get the idea.
Did he ever bother to check if they're the palindromic result of a smaller non-Lychrel number?
It's obvious to me anyway, on an intuitive level, that if an iteration goes beyond a few digits in size, the likelyhood of it palindroming plummets. I bet number of non-Lychrels that require 50+ iterations is unbelievably low, or even zero.
Of course, I too wonder what in the hell this is good for.
Heh.
I'm sorry, but this sounds too much like the argument about why "Micro$oft will never endorse DRM".
Now we have Palladium.
And this encrypted handshake is what? A hash of the time of day, or some other known value, so that things can be checked? Or maybe something that is also beam across wireless?
There are suprisingly few secure handshake procedures, and it doesn't help them when you broadcast the damn thing in a 40ft radius all around you.