My dad's old 10GB hard drive blew a gasket, so I had it in here a few days last month. Upgraded the machine, stuck in a 40GB drive, 512mb, semi-decent video card, and XP SP2 (because he would've clicked the AutoUpdate thing himself within a day or two, no doubt - I'd rather do it myself and make sure things work). Tossed in Norton AV 2005, PestPatrol, and Outpost 2.5, followed by MS Office (he uses Access quite a bit) and Firefox. Got rid of the IE button.
A few days ago he calls me up complaining about popup windows and the machine's slow and he keeps getting weird messages from Norton and I'm sitting here going "What? How..? But I..? Dammit." He drops his machine off, I turn it on, and Lo And Behold, 4 IE icons on the desktop. Sonuva.... Guess I should have explained a bit more, rather than just saying "Use Firefox to browse the Internet instead of IE."
So a quick rebuild (plus, at his request, installing another 40GB drive as a mirror), drove it back to his place, sat me parents down for 20 minutes and told them in no uncertain terms that if they use IE (and especially if they click 'OK' to get rid of popup windows instead of 'Cancel' or hitting the little 'X') I was going to start charging them $25/hour to fix the machine.
Reading the actual NG survey stats, it's clear that the guy they interviewed was unable to read properly (or whoever wrote his comments couldn't, either way). The proper numbers from the survey are that American youths (18-24), which is the age range of the survey group from all the countried polled, only got 23 of 56 questions right on average. In actuality (or at least as far as you can trust a survey), only 30% of Americans don't know where the Pacific Ocean.
But guess what. Only 29% of the Mexican youths surveyed DID know what direction West is. Only 90% of Americans can identify their own country on a map. And only 44% of the Americans surveyed know what a Euro is.
Take a look at the actual survey. 10% of the Americans surveyed (all between 18 and 24 years old) DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHERE THE USA IS!!! My bet is that they chose Canada since the US *must* be the big one there;)
LOL I just realized that after reading through some of the posts here I completely forgot that the article was actually about Word 5.1, not WordPerfect 5.1:) Oops!
But I still stand by what I said - WP5.1 for DOS was far superior to to any version of Word for DOS, and most of the Word for Windows versions too. I really wish it hadn't gotten so screwed up since Borland took it over *sigh*
There seems to be a lot of confusion here between WordPerfect (WP) and Microsoft Word. I never thought I'd see the day when a good product was so often mistaken for a bad one. So here's the breakdown:
WordPerfect is a word processor made (at the time) by the WordPerfect Corporation (it's currently owned by Corel if memory serves, previously owned by Borland too). WP v5.1 For DOS is widely considered to be the best version ever made, and for good reason - it is simply impossible to find a more stable, more functional, or more useful word processor, even today (excluding, of course, newer version file compatibility and support for graphics formats like PNG). WP offered total and complete control over formatting, and when you pressed F11 to show the Reveal Codes window, It Was Good (TM). I would never have learned HTML as quickly as I did back in the day if I hadn't been a longtime user of WP already! 9 out of 10! Woohoo!!!
Word is a word processor by Microsoft. The sole reason it's popular is.... actually, I don't know. It's HUGE for one thing. Bloated, slow on my 2GHz/1GB box, and loaded with crap that shouldn't be in a word processor. If you mess up your formatting, you can literally spend an hour trying to find out where (by comparison, WP would let you fix things like that in a matter of seconds or minutes). The Office Assistant was a good idea, but anyone over the age of 6 finds it condescending and annoying - and this would (I assume) translate into at least 99% of Word's market, so I'm not sure how that lippy little bastard even made it out the door...
Anyhow, please don't confuse WP with Word. They are very seperate products (well, less so these days, since all the WPs since v6 have been trying to compete with Word on Microsoft's terms instead of growing a ball and setting it's own terms) from very different companies. The WP Corporation is now defunct, so there's no way to tell, but I'd love to see what v10 would've looked like if they had written it instead of Corel or Borland:)
All they say is that users MAY need to spend money on an email client. The inference is that that email client should be the equivalent to Outlook, not Outlook Express.
Actually, MS Office has been around a LOT longer than that. Office 95 was version 7.0 I think. Before that, you could get Word 6.0, Word for DOS was still around, Word for Mac was still around, Access 1.0 (and then 2.0) were in the stores.... All told, the first bundled version of MS Office was probably back in about 91 or 92, but Word and Excel have been around since Windows 3.0 came out. I can still remember the competition between WordPerfect 4 and 5 and Word 5 (at least, I think it was v5). So Office has been around for close to 15 years, with Word, at least, being closer to 20.
All years in this post should be taken with a grain of salt. I smoked a whole lotta drugs in high school...
...I've been handed employee agreements with that "we 0wn all" clause. The first time I pulled the old "Sorry, what paper? I must have lost it" for the entire 9 months I was there. The second time I just crossed out that part and told them if they initialled that change, I'd sign it. They said they'd reprint it for me and never did. Problem solved:) YMMV
just attach/tape/staple/weld/whatever all the lasers to the undercarriage of your car, pointed downwards so no one lying in the road pretending to be a speed bump gets blinded. course, you'd need to wire up a road-worthy electrical harness for them to run off your car battery, and have a remote switch inside so you can turn them on and off. or have a little micro-controller to turn the lasers on and off in patterns:)
now i want to do it....
LOL. There's an engineer in my town here who has some reel-to-reel tapes of Metallica (the black album I believe) at his studio. He said the same thing about Lars - got no rhythm, man.
FWIW, adding reverb to a sound is a lot different than using an autotuner to correct that sound. Reverb doesn't substantially modify the sound of an intrument - or it's pitch, timbre, or tone. It's an additive effect, and 99.9% of the population would not be able to tell the difference between a natural reverb and a well designed electronic one. However, autotuning DOES substantially modify the original signal, specifically pitch, though it also changes to timbre to some degree. 99.9% of the population would be able to tell the difference between a singer hitting the note, and a singer being helped to hit the note - given a side-by-side comparison on good equipment. But when autotuning is used as an effect - to correct small variations here and there, or to provide a distinct sound that fits the music (trance, anyone?) - it is nearly invisible to most people - they wouldn't know it was being used. And that's the way it should be.
Just throwing a note in here: electronic pitch correction has been around for years and years. Not as many years as tube distortion, no, but longer than that fake jet flyby on "White America" (Eminem) - which, by the way, is done by an Evantide Harmonizer (probably the 3000, but might be a higher model), a rackmount that also does pitch correction/shifting/multiplying. In any case, just in case anyone here (including the/. editors) didn't realize it, pitch correction has been heard on albums since the 60's. Back then it was usually done manually by recording a slightly speed-modified track off one tape machine to another, so it wasn't very common due to it's difficulty - and the necessity of having 2 tape machines. The last 2 decades have seen the technology mature into something usefull. Unfortunately, it's ease of use also lends itself to abuse.
Anyways, my $0.02: pitch correction/shifting/multiplying is an effect and should be used as such. Don't blame Kid Rock for being the first abuser. If anyone, blame Cher and her production team. Under time constraints, it can be a shortcut to touch up occasional errors (the same way reverb can be used to soften harsh notes, or distortion modified to cover problems), but under normal circumstances, I wouldn't use it as a primary sound (like Cher or Kid Rock) without a damn good reason - and a bad singer is NOT a damn good reason.
foolish person. just because you have never heard of these things means nothing. to people who have heard of them and do listen to them, this is important. to some of us who have not, we are prepared to admit that we do not know everything, and that Neal Morse is probably good, Numavoc Records probably has many fans and supporters, and that Burning Annie was likely a pretty cool indie flick. people like you obviously believe that just because YOU haven't heard of something that someone else is making a big deal out of, they must be overreacting and they can't possibly be thinking rationally about the effects of piracy on this artist's/record label's income. grow up, open your mind, and let the shit spill out the back way, not the front.
Actually, I Am Canadian. Obviously you're an american since you don't give a shit about down under and you spell "you're" as "your".
FWIW, I do spell them "flavour" and "colour" and "cheque". And when I'm at a restaurant, I know that when I ask for the bill, I do not sound like an idiot (that's "idjit" to the americans out there). I don't know who started this asking for the "check" at a restaurant, but they obviously had too much wine with their steak that night.
by "proper" i was more referring it to be in the sense "proper queen's english" utilized by most of the commonwealth and associated nations. generally only america (and a couple other western-influenced nations, notably japan) use these alternate spelling without the "u". i'm not insinuating that the american way is wrong (although it obviously is - if my knowledge is correct, Mr. Webster chose to drop those silent "u"s more or less arbitrarily, for no other reason than to show Britain that the states weren't part of it), but (and returning to the point) the spelling in source code should be consistent. if the majority of the developers are located in Europe, why shouldn't it be spelled "flavour" or "honour"? even if it's only a few of the developers who live there, isn't one of them the guy who started this whole Linux thing? changing the spelling to remove the "u" only saves bytes in the source code, it makes absolutely no difference in the final compiled code.
but i digress.
even though i didn't use "proper" the way you think i did, it certainly could be applied to this situation. it is "proper" that a man hold the door open for a woman, but most men don't (sadly). it is proper to spell "flavour" with a "u", but most people don't. just because most people do something doesn't make it proper:)
Re:I don't want to start a flamewar...
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Flavor vs. Flavour
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· Score: 1
actually yes, it is:) i guess we all know what country michael is probably from...
Yes, as pointed out, I was incorrect in using "centre" as an example, since "centre" and "center" are indeed seperate words with different meanings. My bad.
BTW, does anyone actually know the reason why American English drops those "u"s from the words?
If I'm not mistaken (and I'm drawing on Grade 2 or 3 here), "flavour" is the proper English spelling (UK and Canada and Australia), whereas "flavor" is the common spelling (US). There are lots of words like that, including colour (color), centre (center), and idiot (ijit).
i have the right to protect my rights. i have the right to do what is in my power to do to prevent being taken financially advantage of. i have the right to help others prevent themselves from being financially taken advantage of. so that's what i do. my entire album collection (vinyl, tape, and cd) has been ripped to 192k and 256k MP3s. i downloaded some albums. i started a server (not a P2P node). now people upload albums. everything is free for everyone. you will have an opportunity to actually listen to the tracks on an album before deciding to purchase it. even then, i encourage my users to buy merchandise and concert tickets and whatnot *instead* of actually purchasing the album. obviously, not all of them do that (probably not even most of them), but some of them do. it's a start.
i can find no excuse to support the RIAA in any way at this point. i didn't start doing this until they started treating me like a criminal. i wouldn't have started doing it if i knew that the artists i like were getting more than a 5 to 10% cut of their own creations. i wouldn't have started doing it if 12 song albums from the major labels tended to have more than 1 or 2 good songs on them, with the rest being obvious filler.
so i, like many, have rebelled. our aim is twofold: first, to help others prevent their own destitution due to music addiction, and secondly to hit the RIAA where it's most likely to make them notice - their wallet.
i would be more than happy to give every artist $1.00 US for each album i have on my server, but i will not pay the RIAA/labels the $15.00 US per album that they want. hell, i'll even pay the $0.35 US it costs to actually manufacture each album:)
oh, and they're called "DocLinks" in Notes (or used to be), not hyperlinks:) if you really want to argue this, i could probably find that sort of hypertext linking in use earlier than Notes.
ok, IIRC, HTTP was accepted as an actual RFC in 1990 or 1991. knowing how long it takes for a popular protocol to get standardized sometimes, it was probably realistically in use (or active development at least) since 1987 or 1988. perhaps even longer, although i could not find documentation to support or disprove that assumption (though it seems reasonable).
source: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.htm l
on the other hand, Lotus Notes 1.0 was released in 1989, after being in active development for close to 4 years.
consequently, it's difficult to say which came first, since the argument could go either way (assuming, of course, that my previous assumption about the length of time it takes the W3C to ratify a protocol with an RFC). but in your case, Lotus Notes was based originally on Plato Notes, which dates back to 1976 or thereabouts.
i'm going to bite my tongue about "leeches" and actually help a bit here.
reading the docs, it becomes apparent that in order to connect to other people, you need to know their public key, and vice versa. i'm paraphrasing, but that's essentially it:) good luck!
Re:Apollo 8... (LONG)
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ScavHunt211
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
who says the atheistic view eliminates god as the source of all things? why is it impossible that your god created the all those basic building blocks in the first place? so your god creates the atom, dark matter, nuclei(sp?), proton, and enzyme, then gives a little blow on the pile to see what happens. does natural evolution preclude the existence of a higher force?
Slashdot Mirror
My dad's old 10GB hard drive blew a gasket, so I had it in here a few days last month. Upgraded the machine, stuck in a 40GB drive, 512mb, semi-decent video card, and XP SP2 (because he would've clicked the AutoUpdate thing himself within a day or two, no doubt - I'd rather do it myself and make sure things work). Tossed in Norton AV 2005, PestPatrol, and Outpost 2.5, followed by MS Office (he uses Access quite a bit) and Firefox. Got rid of the IE button.
:)
A few days ago he calls me up complaining about popup windows and the machine's slow and he keeps getting weird messages from Norton and I'm sitting here going "What? How..? But I..? Dammit." He drops his machine off, I turn it on, and Lo And Behold, 4 IE icons on the desktop. Sonuva.... Guess I should have explained a bit more, rather than just saying "Use Firefox to browse the Internet instead of IE."
So a quick rebuild (plus, at his request, installing another 40GB drive as a mirror), drove it back to his place, sat me parents down for 20 minutes and told them in no uncertain terms that if they use IE (and especially if they click 'OK' to get rid of popup windows instead of 'Cancel' or hitting the little 'X') I was going to start charging them $25/hour to fix the machine.
So far so good
Reading the actual NG survey stats, it's clear that the guy they interviewed was unable to read properly (or whoever wrote his comments couldn't, either way). The proper numbers from the survey are that American youths (18-24), which is the age range of the survey group from all the countried polled, only got 23 of 56 questions right on average. In actuality (or at least as far as you can trust a survey), only 30% of Americans don't know where the Pacific Ocean.
But guess what. Only 29% of the Mexican youths surveyed DID know what direction West is. Only 90% of Americans can identify their own country on a map. And only 44% of the Americans surveyed know what a Euro is.
Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.
Take a look at the actual survey. 10% of the Americans surveyed (all between 18 and 24 years old) DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHERE THE USA IS!!! My bet is that they chose Canada since the US *must* be the big one there ;)
LOL I just realized that after reading through some of the posts here I completely forgot that the article was actually about Word 5.1, not WordPerfect 5.1 :) Oops!
But I still stand by what I said - WP5.1 for DOS was far superior to to any version of Word for DOS, and most of the Word for Windows versions too. I really wish it hadn't gotten so screwed up since Borland took it over *sigh*
There seems to be a lot of confusion here between WordPerfect (WP) and Microsoft Word. I never thought I'd see the day when a good product was so often mistaken for a bad one. So here's the breakdown:
:)
WordPerfect is a word processor made (at the time) by the WordPerfect Corporation (it's currently owned by Corel if memory serves, previously owned by Borland too). WP v5.1 For DOS is widely considered to be the best version ever made, and for good reason - it is simply impossible to find a more stable, more functional, or more useful word processor, even today (excluding, of course, newer version file compatibility and support for graphics formats like PNG). WP offered total and complete control over formatting, and when you pressed F11 to show the Reveal Codes window, It Was Good (TM). I would never have learned HTML as quickly as I did back in the day if I hadn't been a longtime user of WP already! 9 out of 10! Woohoo!!!
Word is a word processor by Microsoft. The sole reason it's popular is.... actually, I don't know. It's HUGE for one thing. Bloated, slow on my 2GHz/1GB box, and loaded with crap that shouldn't be in a word processor. If you mess up your formatting, you can literally spend an hour trying to find out where (by comparison, WP would let you fix things like that in a matter of seconds or minutes). The Office Assistant was a good idea, but anyone over the age of 6 finds it condescending and annoying - and this would (I assume) translate into at least 99% of Word's market, so I'm not sure how that lippy little bastard even made it out the door...
Anyhow, please don't confuse WP with Word. They are very seperate products (well, less so these days, since all the WPs since v6 have been trying to compete with Word on Microsoft's terms instead of growing a ball and setting it's own terms) from very different companies. The WP Corporation is now defunct, so there's no way to tell, but I'd love to see what v10 would've looked like if they had written it instead of Corel or Borland
All they say is that users MAY need to spend money on an email client. The inference is that that email client should be the equivalent to Outlook, not Outlook Express.
Actually, MS Office has been around a LOT longer than that. Office 95 was version 7.0 I think. Before that, you could get Word 6.0, Word for DOS was still around, Word for Mac was still around, Access 1.0 (and then 2.0) were in the stores.... All told, the first bundled version of MS Office was probably back in about 91 or 92, but Word and Excel have been around since Windows 3.0 came out. I can still remember the competition between WordPerfect 4 and 5 and Word 5 (at least, I think it was v5). So Office has been around for close to 15 years, with Word, at least, being closer to 20.
All years in this post should be taken with a grain of salt. I smoked a whole lotta drugs in high school...
...I've been handed employee agreements with that "we 0wn all" clause. The first time I pulled the old "Sorry, what paper? I must have lost it" for the entire 9 months I was there. The second time I just crossed out that part and told them if they initialled that change, I'd sign it. They said they'd reprint it for me and never did. Problem solved :) YMMV
just attach/tape/staple/weld/whatever all the lasers to the undercarriage of your car, pointed downwards so no one lying in the road pretending to be a speed bump gets blinded. course, you'd need to wire up a road-worthy electrical harness for them to run off your car battery, and have a remote switch inside so you can turn them on and off. or have a little micro-controller to turn the lasers on and off in patterns :)
now i want to do it....
LOL. There's an engineer in my town here who has some reel-to-reel tapes of Metallica (the black album I believe) at his studio. He said the same thing about Lars - got no rhythm, man.
FWIW, adding reverb to a sound is a lot different than using an autotuner to correct that sound. Reverb doesn't substantially modify the sound of an intrument - or it's pitch, timbre, or tone. It's an additive effect, and 99.9% of the population would not be able to tell the difference between a natural reverb and a well designed electronic one. However, autotuning DOES substantially modify the original signal, specifically pitch, though it also changes to timbre to some degree. 99.9% of the population would be able to tell the difference between a singer hitting the note, and a singer being helped to hit the note - given a side-by-side comparison on good equipment. But when autotuning is used as an effect - to correct small variations here and there, or to provide a distinct sound that fits the music (trance, anyone?) - it is nearly invisible to most people - they wouldn't know it was being used. And that's the way it should be.
Just throwing a note in here: electronic pitch correction has been around for years and years. Not as many years as tube distortion, no, but longer than that fake jet flyby on "White America" (Eminem) - which, by the way, is done by an Evantide Harmonizer (probably the 3000, but might be a higher model), a rackmount that also does pitch correction/shifting/multiplying. In any case, just in case anyone here (including the /. editors) didn't realize it, pitch correction has been heard on albums since the 60's. Back then it was usually done manually by recording a slightly speed-modified track off one tape machine to another, so it wasn't very common due to it's difficulty - and the necessity of having 2 tape machines. The last 2 decades have seen the technology mature into something usefull. Unfortunately, it's ease of use also lends itself to abuse.
Anyways, my $0.02: pitch correction/shifting/multiplying is an effect and should be used as such. Don't blame Kid Rock for being the first abuser. If anyone, blame Cher and her production team. Under time constraints, it can be a shortcut to touch up occasional errors (the same way reverb can be used to soften harsh notes, or distortion modified to cover problems), but under normal circumstances, I wouldn't use it as a primary sound (like Cher or Kid Rock) without a damn good reason - and a bad singer is NOT a damn good reason.
foolish person. just because you have never heard of these things means nothing. to people who have heard of them and do listen to them, this is important. to some of us who have not, we are prepared to admit that we do not know everything, and that Neal Morse is probably good, Numavoc Records probably has many fans and supporters, and that Burning Annie was likely a pretty cool indie flick. people like you obviously believe that just because YOU haven't heard of something that someone else is making a big deal out of, they must be overreacting and they can't possibly be thinking rationally about the effects of piracy on this artist's/record label's income. grow up, open your mind, and let the shit spill out the back way, not the front.
Actually, I Am Canadian. Obviously you're an american since you don't give a shit about down under and you spell "you're" as "your". FWIW, I do spell them "flavour" and "colour" and "cheque". And when I'm at a restaurant, I know that when I ask for the bill, I do not sound like an idiot (that's "idjit" to the americans out there). I don't know who started this asking for the "check" at a restaurant, but they obviously had too much wine with their steak that night.
by "proper" i was more referring it to be in the sense "proper queen's english" utilized by most of the commonwealth and associated nations. generally only america (and a couple other western-influenced nations, notably japan) use these alternate spelling without the "u". i'm not insinuating that the american way is wrong (although it obviously is - if my knowledge is correct, Mr. Webster chose to drop those silent "u"s more or less arbitrarily, for no other reason than to show Britain that the states weren't part of it), but (and returning to the point) the spelling in source code should be consistent. if the majority of the developers are located in Europe, why shouldn't it be spelled "flavour" or "honour"? even if it's only a few of the developers who live there, isn't one of them the guy who started this whole Linux thing? changing the spelling to remove the "u" only saves bytes in the source code, it makes absolutely no difference in the final compiled code. but i digress. even though i didn't use "proper" the way you think i did, it certainly could be applied to this situation. it is "proper" that a man hold the door open for a woman, but most men don't (sadly). it is proper to spell "flavour" with a "u", but most people don't. just because most people do something doesn't make it proper :)
actually yes, it is :) i guess we all know what country michael is probably from...
Yes, as pointed out, I was incorrect in using "centre" as an example, since "centre" and "center" are indeed seperate words with different meanings. My bad. BTW, does anyone actually know the reason why American English drops those "u"s from the words?
DAMN that american spelling!!!
If I'm not mistaken (and I'm drawing on Grade 2 or 3 here), "flavour" is the proper English spelling (UK and Canada and Australia), whereas "flavor" is the common spelling (US). There are lots of words like that, including colour (color), centre (center), and idiot (ijit).
i have the right to protect my rights. i have the right to do what is in my power to do to prevent being taken financially advantage of. i have the right to help others prevent themselves from being financially taken advantage of. so that's what i do. my entire album collection (vinyl, tape, and cd) has been ripped to 192k and 256k MP3s. i downloaded some albums. i started a server (not a P2P node). now people upload albums. everything is free for everyone. you will have an opportunity to actually listen to the tracks on an album before deciding to purchase it. even then, i encourage my users to buy merchandise and concert tickets and whatnot *instead* of actually purchasing the album. obviously, not all of them do that (probably not even most of them), but some of them do. it's a start.
:)
i can find no excuse to support the RIAA in any way at this point. i didn't start doing this until they started treating me like a criminal. i wouldn't have started doing it if i knew that the artists i like were getting more than a 5 to 10% cut of their own creations. i wouldn't have started doing it if 12 song albums from the major labels tended to have more than 1 or 2 good songs on them, with the rest being obvious filler.
so i, like many, have rebelled. our aim is twofold: first, to help others prevent their own destitution due to music addiction, and secondly to hit the RIAA where it's most likely to make them notice - their wallet.
i would be more than happy to give every artist $1.00 US for each album i have on my server, but i will not pay the RIAA/labels the $15.00 US per album that they want. hell, i'll even pay the $0.35 US it costs to actually manufacture each album
oh, and they're called "DocLinks" in Notes (or used to be), not hyperlinks :) if you really want to argue this, i could probably find that sort of hypertext linking in use earlier than Notes.
ok, IIRC, HTTP was accepted as an actual RFC in 1990 or 1991. knowing how long it takes for a popular protocol to get standardized sometimes, it was probably realistically in use (or active development at least) since 1987 or 1988. perhaps even longer, although i could not find documentation to support or disprove that assumption (though it seems reasonable).
m l
source: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.ht
on the other hand, Lotus Notes 1.0 was released in 1989, after being in active development for close to 4 years.
consequently, it's difficult to say which came first, since the argument could go either way (assuming, of course, that my previous assumption about the length of time it takes the W3C to ratify a protocol with an RFC). but in your case, Lotus Notes was based originally on Plato Notes, which dates back to 1976 or thereabouts.
that's because most people know that the HTTP protocol (and, for that matter, most other common Internet protocols) predate Notes by a few years.
i'm going to bite my tongue about "leeches" and actually help a bit here.
:) good luck!
reading the docs, it becomes apparent that in order to connect to other people, you need to know their public key, and vice versa. i'm paraphrasing, but that's essentially it
who says the atheistic view eliminates god as the source of all things? why is it impossible that your god created the all those basic building blocks in the first place? so your god creates the atom, dark matter, nuclei(sp?), proton, and enzyme, then gives a little blow on the pile to see what happens. does natural evolution preclude the existence of a higher force?