I built myself a new system last year to replace my ancient Micron 486. It was so old that the CPU didn't even use a fan (had plenty of dust in the heatsink though), the VLB graphics board had 2 MB vram, 48 MB RAM, the monitor was a 14" CRT that had ghosting probs, and the hard drive space was less than most high-end MP3 players. Even the mouse and keyboard barely worked anymore. I pretty much milked it for every penny I paid.
I did a 100% rebuild. Now I've got a AMD 64 X2 3800+, Lian-Li case, UPS, 19" LCD, 2 GB RAM, 500 GB total SATA HD space, NVidia 7800GT, etc. I have no idea how many generations I must've jumped. I felt like a hermit walking out of his cave and blinking at the sun. I've even gone from dial-in to high-end DSL. I'll replace the CPU/MB when apps start grinding on it. 5 years prob?
I was talking to folks from England while I was on vacation in Wyoming and they said that there were no places in all of England that came close to the open spaces they could find in the US. I'm afraid we're on our way to losing that escape we have from crowds and boundaries as the population grows.
Why is it ok to bombard the public with scratch tickets, numbers games, and casinos yet for some reason doing it on the web is bad? Either they are all bad or none of them are.
I agree. I think the biggest trick the parties have played is that the nations divide is socially liberal vs socially conservative (and the right-wing bears the biggest responsibility for this). The real divide is economic class. Talk about it at the risk of having some dolt scream "commie!" but the facts speak for themselves. Of course the Democratic party also panders to the economic elite in their own way though they at least throw the majority of folks a bone every now and then. Eventually the extremists become the only ones offering a real alternative, right or wrong (i.e. Nazis, Bolsheveks, Jacobites, Facists).
When normally apolitcal middle aged men and woman with no recourse left start turning out for protests that's when you'd better start worrying.
You just don't get it do you? The way it'll work is that the top 3% will take their loot and all buy homes on the ocean or in mountain retreats. Then they hire you to install their marble bathrooms, massive picture windows, and trim the golf course sized lawn. See? One elite man or woman has just created a number of jobs that will allow you to live in a trailer about 30 miles away. You also won't have health insurance or be able to afford it out-of-pocket so you'll die instead of having to deal with decades of chronic illness. And with the skyrocketing cost of college and the cuts in financial aid you won't have to worry about school costs.
You could always work for the government in IT like I did for a while. The government requires that you be a US citizen for any IT job that has even the slightest security risk so they'll never be exported. The problem with those jobs is that unless you live in a area with a low cost of living or it is very high level it is hard to make ends meet and you have to leave for the private sector (which I did).
If you can't sue gun companies for shootings (as per the new federal act) then you sure as hell shouldn't be allowed to sue anyone else on the claim that it made you shoot someone.
The open use of space is set at part of an international space treaty (1967 treaty). It allows for shared use short of space based weapons and requires international cooperation on orbits, debris control, etc.
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not
subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of
use or occupation, or by any other means.
"That $500 billion...goes out and employees a LOT of US citizens"
Why not just hand out wads of cash then? You're robbing Peter to pay Paul. I agree you need a good defense, no arguement there. I disagree that a good defense against 3rd world countries requires multiple nuke carrier fleets, bases every two feet around the world, etc. It is on scale and allocation that I have an issue. Defense has become a teat that districts around the country have become addicted to at the expense of other very legit needs. Even Eisenhower warned us against our current situation. At $2 billion a week to screw around in Iraq think of how fast we could have fixed the mess in New Orleans.
It is not a lie if you believe it to be true. King George believes in an alternate universe from ours where invading a country without reasonable justification isn't a war crime (even though some Axis leaders were hung at Nuremburg and Japan for the exact same crime) and spending $500 billion on the DOD after the Cold War is over isn't pissing away the taxpayer's money, corporate welfare, or encouraging arms races. Hope your kids and their kids are ready to foot the bill for our national debt.
So if I have a grudge against someone I can make up some bs story and drop a dime (or 50 cents nowadays) on them? Great! Even if they aren't held in prison for years they'd be at the very least heavily hassled and scared, they might be detained for months, lose their job (can't show up, management doesn't trust them anymore), home (not there to send in the mortgage check), and maybe even financially impovershed by having to hire a lawyer. I'm glad to see that the US is starting to resemble Stalin's USSR.
Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).
Genius - Used to be someone who was consistantly and spectacularly intelligent (Einstein, Fermi, etc). Now it is anyone who happens to figure something out or is relatively smart. "My 3 year old can hum the national anthem, isn't he a genius?"
Star - Anyone who is appearing on your show or in your movie. "We have a star on our show tonight, Zsa Zsa Gabor!"
Plate tectonics - How do they affect climate globaly? The releasing of gasses and particulates via volcanism! Gases such as CO2 would raise it while particulates can drop it.
Solar variations - Would show up as periodic changes (I would assume). I haven't seen any evidence of this outside of the sunspot cycle which is far shorter than the changes in the geological record.
Orbital variations - No solid signs of periodic events over the full geological record. There are gaps in this theory.
Volcanism - See plate tectonics
The Milankovitch Cycle is still just a theory whereas the physical chemistry of gasses is much better understood. Even if his theory was true do the current orbital parameters of the earth match those predicted for a temp rise? I haven't heard anyone say such a thing.
I agree that we may be in a natural cycle but our effect on global warming may be an additional driving force that pushes the climate beyond any critical point that has occured naturally in the current period. Even if natural forces are at work denying they are occuring is avoiding the issue and billions of lives are at stake (most people live on the coasts, desertification, shifting and loss of ariable land, etc).
The melting of the Greenland ice cap could have the counterintuitive result of starting an ice age (or a mini one) by shutting down the North Atlantic current. Fresh water from melting ice would keep salty warm water from the south from rising causing the flow to stop. Cold air building up over the north latitudes could cause annual winter snows to build up on the Canadian shield until an ice cap forms. Europe would get the brunt of the cold.
The melting ice may be buffering the true scale of the temp change. Once it has melted significantly there could be a dramatic unswing in the global temp average. Melting ice also creates a self-reenforcing process where the albedo of the surface decreases as melting snow and ice expose darker soil and seawater further raising temps.
High surface temps over the sea surface can shut down mixing and form thermoclines where temp layers form in the sea. The sea becomes starved for oxygen from the lack of mixing (i.e the Black Sea), sea life dies off heavily, and sulfur loving bacteria take over the sea depths turning it into a foul hydrogen sulfide laced brew. The earth's oceans could end up resembling the ones during the Permian when most of the earth's life forms went extinct.
Sorry but President Bush says global warming is libahral propaganda, tax cuts for the rich are good for the middle class, and the occupation of Iraq has not increased terrorism.
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I built myself a new system last year to replace my ancient Micron 486. It was so old that the CPU didn't even use a fan (had plenty of dust in the heatsink though), the VLB graphics board had 2 MB vram, 48 MB RAM, the monitor was a 14" CRT that had ghosting probs, and the hard drive space was less than most high-end MP3 players. Even the mouse and keyboard barely worked anymore. I pretty much milked it for every penny I paid.
I did a 100% rebuild. Now I've got a AMD 64 X2 3800+, Lian-Li case, UPS, 19" LCD, 2 GB RAM, 500 GB total SATA HD space, NVidia 7800GT, etc. I have no idea how many generations I must've jumped. I felt like a hermit walking out of his cave and blinking at the sun. I've even gone from dial-in to high-end DSL. I'll replace the CPU/MB when apps start grinding on it. 5 years prob?
I was talking to folks from England while I was on vacation in Wyoming and they said that there were no places in all of England that came close to the open spaces they could find in the US. I'm afraid we're on our way to losing that escape we have from crowds and boundaries as the population grows.
It is impressive that even with the feeble solar energy it receives there is still enough to power massive cyclones.
Must...not...make...obvious...jokes...about...Uran us!
I can't resist...
"Today thousands of Slashdot readers injured their backs trying to see the dark spot on Uranus they were told existed"
Someday we'll wipe away all of these blemishes on Uranus.
Plus you can bury it and you don't need an expensive rocket program. A great anti-satellite weapon for other countries.
Why is it ok to bombard the public with scratch tickets, numbers games, and casinos yet for some reason doing it on the web is bad? Either they are all bad or none of them are.
I agree. I think the biggest trick the parties have played is that the nations divide is socially liberal vs socially conservative (and the right-wing bears the biggest responsibility for this). The real divide is economic class. Talk about it at the risk of having some dolt scream "commie!" but the facts speak for themselves. Of course the Democratic party also panders to the economic elite in their own way though they at least throw the majority of folks a bone every now and then. Eventually the extremists become the only ones offering a real alternative, right or wrong (i.e. Nazis, Bolsheveks, Jacobites, Facists).
When normally apolitcal middle aged men and woman with no recourse left start turning out for protests that's when you'd better start worrying.
You just don't get it do you? The way it'll work is that the top 3% will take their loot and all buy homes on the ocean or in mountain retreats. Then they hire you to install their marble bathrooms, massive picture windows, and trim the golf course sized lawn. See? One elite man or woman has just created a number of jobs that will allow you to live in a trailer about 30 miles away. You also won't have health insurance or be able to afford it out-of-pocket so you'll die instead of having to deal with decades of chronic illness. And with the skyrocketing cost of college and the cuts in financial aid you won't have to worry about school costs.
Support our troops!
You could always work for the government in IT like I did for a while. The government requires that you be a US citizen for any IT job that has even the slightest security risk so they'll never be exported. The problem with those jobs is that unless you live in a area with a low cost of living or it is very high level it is hard to make ends meet and you have to leave for the private sector (which I did).
I'm convinced now that if I go on a shooting spree and get killed I'll just respawn at home.
If you can't sue gun companies for shootings (as per the new federal act) then you sure as hell shouldn't be allowed to sue anyone else on the claim that it made you shoot someone.
I think it still has a lot of life left in it as long as PBS and the Discovery Channel have money left for flashy documentaries on it.
This finally answers that old question, "What happens when everyone in China jumps onto the same pair of hydrogen atoms simultaneously?"
I think part of the problem is even though there is a net gain the energy being released needs to be contained within the fuel instead of escaping.
The open use of space is set at part of an international space treaty (1967 treaty). It allows for shared use short of space based weapons and requires international cooperation on orbits, debris control, etc.
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
Currently being played at the NRO's offices: "She blinded me with science!"
"That $500 billion...goes out and employees a LOT of US citizens"
Why not just hand out wads of cash then? You're robbing Peter to pay Paul. I agree you need a good defense, no arguement there. I disagree that a good defense against 3rd world countries requires multiple nuke carrier fleets, bases every two feet around the world, etc. It is on scale and allocation that I have an issue. Defense has become a teat that districts around the country have become addicted to at the expense of other very legit needs. Even Eisenhower warned us against our current situation. At $2 billion a week to screw around in Iraq think of how fast we could have fixed the mess in New Orleans.
"his blatant lying to the American public"
It is not a lie if you believe it to be true. King George believes in an alternate universe from ours where invading a country without reasonable justification isn't a war crime (even though some Axis leaders were hung at Nuremburg and Japan for the exact same crime) and spending $500 billion on the DOD after the Cold War is over isn't pissing away the taxpayer's money, corporate welfare, or encouraging arms races. Hope your kids and their kids are ready to foot the bill for our national debt.
So if I have a grudge against someone I can make up some bs story and drop a dime (or 50 cents nowadays) on them? Great! Even if they aren't held in prison for years they'd be at the very least heavily hassled and scared, they might be detained for months, lose their job (can't show up, management doesn't trust them anymore), home (not there to send in the mortgage check), and maybe even financially impovershed by having to hire a lawyer. I'm glad to see that the US is starting to resemble Stalin's USSR.
Lots of words have been pounded into dust:
Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).
Genius - Used to be someone who was consistantly and spectacularly intelligent (Einstein, Fermi, etc). Now it is anyone who happens to figure something out or is relatively smart. "My 3 year old can hum the national anthem, isn't he a genius?"
Star - Anyone who is appearing on your show or in your movie. "We have a star on our show tonight, Zsa Zsa Gabor!"
Plate tectonics - How do they affect climate globaly? The releasing of gasses and particulates via volcanism! Gases such as CO2 would raise it while particulates can drop it.
Solar variations - Would show up as periodic changes (I would assume). I haven't seen any evidence of this outside of the sunspot cycle which is far shorter than the changes in the geological record.
Orbital variations - No solid signs of periodic events over the full geological record. There are gaps in this theory.
Volcanism - See plate tectonics
The Milankovitch Cycle is still just a theory whereas the physical chemistry of gasses is much better understood. Even if his theory was true do the current orbital parameters of the earth match those predicted for a temp rise? I haven't heard anyone say such a thing.
I agree that we may be in a natural cycle but our effect on global warming may be an additional driving force that pushes the climate beyond any critical point that has occured naturally in the current period. Even if natural forces are at work denying they are occuring is avoiding the issue and billions of lives are at stake (most people live on the coasts, desertification, shifting and loss of ariable land, etc).
I can't wait to overclock one of these! I plan on cooling it with liquid sodium.
Very good point.
The melting of the Greenland ice cap could have the counterintuitive result of starting an ice age (or a mini one) by shutting down the North Atlantic current. Fresh water from melting ice would keep salty warm water from the south from rising causing the flow to stop. Cold air building up over the north latitudes could cause annual winter snows to build up on the Canadian shield until an ice cap forms. Europe would get the brunt of the cold.
The melting ice may be buffering the true scale of the temp change. Once it has melted significantly there could be a dramatic unswing in the global temp average. Melting ice also creates a self-reenforcing process where the albedo of the surface decreases as melting snow and ice expose darker soil and seawater further raising temps.
High surface temps over the sea surface can shut down mixing and form thermoclines where temp layers form in the sea. The sea becomes starved for oxygen from the lack of mixing (i.e the Black Sea), sea life dies off heavily, and sulfur loving bacteria take over the sea depths turning it into a foul hydrogen sulfide laced brew. The earth's oceans could end up resembling the ones during the Permian when most of the earth's life forms went extinct.
Sorry but President Bush says global warming is libahral propaganda, tax cuts for the rich are good for the middle class, and the occupation of Iraq has not increased terrorism.
God bless America! (tm 20th Century Fox Corp)