You need at least 35k to survive, and thats to survive on the edge of poverty.
Yeah, that's what sucks about living in places like Seattle or the Bay Area.
Where I live (Yakima, WA), it is such an economic shithole that 35 K would make you mid to upper middle class. 45 K makes you upper-middle class to lower-upper class. The average income is around 20-25 K. We are fscking poor. The only thing that yakima has are the apples. And those aren't doing too well right now.
Rent, of course, is cheap. You can get a nice 2 bedroom apt. for $500.
I'm a Junior in HS right now. I will probably go to UC Berkeley in a few years. I don't know how the hell I will be able to afford that, especialy if I don't live in the dorms.
Yes, I will buy a fuel cell car when they are available.
But where are you going to get the energy to make the hydrogen?? You need electricity to make hydrogen. Since solar and wind are too expensive for the forseeable future, we need to build nuclear plants. Nuke plants make enough hydrogen to power cars.
Actually, the radiation is not bad at all in this site. Much less radiation comes from the spent bombs than Bambi gets from the sun. Just look at the facts with nuclear power. It has an excellent safety record.
Hanford, in WA, is another great wildlife area in a nuclear waste storage area.
"It's kind of like the issue of gun control. If you know that somewhere, someone in society is going to own a gun and they cannot be trusted with it, you better damn sure have one yourself."
With the mentality like this one, no wonder the society in the US looks like it does.
The world is a violent place, it is like a society where you do have to carry a gun to be safe.
In response to the second poster, the Soviets would have still developed the bomb if we never did. They would have been much more willing to drop the bomb if they knew we couldn't strike back.
Have you ever heard of MAD (mutaully assured destruction), in which if one nuclear power strikes another nuclear power, it is assured that both countries would be destroyed. This was the main detterent during the cold war.
If we didn't have nukes, somebody would set us up the bomb.
Damn good thing we used the bomb in WW2 also. We saved many lives by dropping the bombs. While there were some moderates, the vast majority of the Japanese gov't was planning to fight to the last man. They were training women and children to kill our soldiers with homemade spears.
We would have had to invade if we didn't drop the bombs. We would have firebombed the shit out of everything in Japan to soften it up for our troops. That would have killed a couple million right there.
Then, hundreds of thousands of our troops would have been killed. Since the Japanese civilians would have been very hostile, our troops would be forced to kill millions of Japanese citizens. Also, many, many more Japanese would have commited suicide as our troops advanced, as we saw in Okinawa.
When you look at it, the bombings killed several hundred thousand people but prevented the loss of millions of lives.
Anyway, remember how fiercely we fought at Okinawa? That isn't even the Japanese homeland. Imagine how bad it would have been in mainland Japan.
People always say we are the most fit. We are not even close to being the most sucessful species on the planet. The best we can claim is that we are the most sucessful large animal.
Mice, insects, bacteria, and many others all have vastly greater numbers than us human.
We will likely not last long either. Most species last around 5 million years or so. We have been around 100,000 years. We will not last for another 200 years. This is because there probably will be no more biological humans. Only stronger, smarter and less neurotic sentient robots. So, H. Sapiens would become extinct.
On the subject of robots: I don't think they will take over. I believe there will be two classes of robots in the future:
1. Non-sentient service bots
2. Sentient robots with full human rights
The non-sentients may just serve humans and sentient robots.
The sentient robots would probably just peacefully live along side us. Of course, these robots will have vastly greater strengh, be many times more intelligent, and probably be kinder than biological humans. These robots would probably take over for humans in many areas (IE, politics). Eventualy, I believe only these robots will exist. Most parents would probably choose to have a robot child over a human child. I know I certainly would.
Think of this scenario with soccer-moms of a biological child and a robot, respectively: "My little Timmy has an IQ of 140. He also plays soccer very well."
"Well, Mond has an IQ of 500,000 and he can lift 5,000 pounds."
Which do you think most parents would choose? Robots will eventualy supercede humans.
Of course, humans could also get cybernetic implants. Nanobots could provide us with much greater intelligence, and also extend our lifespan. I don't think a cyborg human would ever measure up to the standards of a robot, however.
Eventually, I don't really think our decendants will even have bodies as we know it. Probably more likely a grouping of nanobots in space. Vastly intelligent and immortal.
This Segway, if it becomes popular, will eliminate the last little bit of exercise people get: Pedestrian travel. Boy, we're gonna get even fatter!!:-P
It might be a little easier to control than a bike, but not by much. Going very slow (ie. the 12 miles an hour that the Segway advertises) I can turn pretty damn sharp on a bike.
Anyway, these things will be probably banned from sidewalks soon anyway. It is hard to manuever a crowded sidewalk without hitting people when you are walking. Imagine trying to do so on a Segway travelling at jogging speed. It would be very difficult.
The good old bicycle is faster, cheaper, healthier, and almost as maneuverable.
Good point. But I just try to put every day mortal dangers like this carcinogen out of my head.
Also, I rarely eat fries anyway. I never eat chips. People need to cut down on their fast food anyway.
It's not like this article gives us some new revelation that fries and chips are bad for you. Everyone has always known that. This carcinogen is yet another reason to avoid chips and fries.
foregone publishing in favor of taking this public immediately.
Of course still by far the biggest danger of eating crap like fries is the cholesterol and fat. Everyone knows that fries aren't the greatest for your health. It shouldn't take a carcinogen scare story like this one keep people from eating too much unhealthy food.
I also would like to point out that we eat all sorts of carcinogens. There are so many carcinogens out there that I don't worry about it when they discover a new one.
Here are a few: 1. Comfrey 2. Sassafras (in higher-quality root beer) 3. Some meat preservative. Forgot what it's called. 4. The sun. Probably the biggest carcinogen of all. 5. Numerous body compounds 6. Burned meat 7. Benzene 8. Cadmium 9. Carbon Black 10. Formaldehyde 11. Gasoline 12. Nickel 13. Quartz 14. Radon 15. Mineral Oil 16. Urethane 17. Wood Dust.
Just about everything is carcinogenic. I, personally, don't worry about it. I can't isolate myself from all of these carcinogens anyway. A more complete list is available here.
I just hope this doesn't lead to tobacco-industry style class action lawsuits.
I hate people like that. For example, I am no fan of big tobacco, but if you smoke, it is your fault! Everyone has known for years that tobacco is harmful and addictive. The tobacco companies shouldn't be sued for your idiotic actions. I just think tobacco should be taxed even more heavily. Anyway, im drifting offtopic.
I'm sorry, I should have had a better choice of words. I don't think they were worthless, just not as usefull. Vacuum tube computers did a lot of important work.
It would have sucked to live back then: millions of dollars for a computer you couldn't even play Wolfenstein on, for Chrissake!!:-)
But yeah, the ENIAC was the first completely digital computer. I really don't think it was the first computer. There were many computers before that, but they incorporated things such as mechanical relays.
The Collosus, for ex., was built early in WW2 to crack codes. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that it was a combination of relays and vacuum tubes.
It's really hard to draw the line on what we would consider as a computer. Personally, I consider the definition of a computer to be any device that accepts programs. If a computer had to be digital, which would make the ENIAC the first one, then things like optical computers and quantum computers wouldn't fit the definition of computers.
Anyway, if you consider a computer to be any calculating device that is fully programmable, the German Z3 Computer fits the bill.
I have always thought computers such as the ENIAC were worthless because their vacuum tubes burned out all the time and they had no video display. Only printed output. That is kind of a hinderence for speedy work.
At least I don't think the ENIAC had a digital display. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Another disadvantage of these early computers is that vacuum tubes are slow. Computers really didn't start to become practical until the late 50's and early 60's, when transistor computers came into use. Transistors made computers cheaper, faster, smaller, and more reliable.
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are confirmed.
Remember when they said the mile-wide asteriod had a 1% chance of hitting in 2021? That got everybody all worked up. When I watched the news, the media spun it that the asteriod was definitely going to hit, just to sensationalize it. Then a few weeks later, the astronomers admitted they fucked up.
I guess scientists get their research bucks by having stories like these, though.
What about chain reaction? You blow a missile, some satellites get hit, get into tiny bits, blow up some others...
The chances appears slim, but when you have thousands of fragments going tens of thousand km/h around, shit can happen quite fast.
However, whenever somthing collides, it loses speed. Things in LEO are always moving the exact speed required for their altitude. Any deacrease in speed will cause altitude reduction. If you reduce speed enough, the fast-moving little bits will reenter.
You don't have to worry about these horrible chain-reaction scenarios because collisions often mean the particles will go into reentry.
Also, space is a goddam big place. If a misslile blows up, chances of a fragment large enough to do damage to a sattelite hitting somthing is very low. Remember, LEO encompasses a huge volume of space.
Most space debris are tiny little things that weigh less than a milligram that don't do too much damage anyway. Large chunks are few and far between. I'd just say don't believe these disaster scenarios. They don't jive with the facts.
May I just remind everybody that LEO is a HUGE place. Way bigger than the earth.
If you blow up a missile, the chance of a random space craft getting hit by a particle from the missile is very, very,very slim.
It's not going to be a scenario where a missile gets blown up, then the particles from the missile damage all these other spacecraft, causing more particles to go flying, and LEO is turned into a wasteland.
Also, the vast majority of debris are small particles. These can cause damage, but they are unlikely to smash a spacecraft into tiny bits.
This article's forecast is a little too grim. Don't worry about it.
Re:Doesn't the earth receive more?
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
This does not make too much sense to me. All proposals that I have seen are for orbital power stations are for ones in Geosync orbit. Putting these power stations on the moon costs more. It costs 40,000 dollars a pound from what I've heard. Geosync orbit costs 15,000 dollars a pound.
Also, if you were at the moon, it would be hard to aim the microwaves correctly. The angle of the antenna would constanly be changing as the moon moves across the sky. Geosync orbit would not require any tracking.
Also, a misaimed microwave would be bad. It could fry airplane electronics, among other things. Unless you aimed the beam across a huge rectenna many, many miles wide.
Looks like the info on that new Jesux OS is unavailable. Because Geocities is heathenly blocking the Jesux site, Geocities will burn in Microhell once "The Coming of Jesux 2.0" is complete!!
Slashdot Mirror
You need at least 35k to survive, and thats to survive on the edge of poverty.
Yeah, that's what sucks about living in places like Seattle or the Bay Area.
Where I live (Yakima, WA), it is such an economic shithole that 35 K would make you mid to upper middle class. 45 K makes you upper-middle class to lower-upper class. The average income is around 20-25 K. We are fscking poor. The only thing that yakima has are the apples. And those aren't doing too well right now.
Rent, of course, is cheap. You can get a nice 2 bedroom apt. for $500.
I'm a Junior in HS right now. I will probably go to UC Berkeley in a few years. I don't know how the hell I will be able to afford that, especialy if I don't live in the dorms.
I've heard of 0ral Bill of Bloom County fame, but not Oral Roberts.
Yes, I will buy a fuel cell car when they are available.
But where are you going to get the energy to make the hydrogen?? You need electricity to make hydrogen. Since solar and wind are too expensive for the forseeable future, we need to build nuclear plants. Nuke plants make enough hydrogen to power cars.
actually it is the photons. Photons can provide momentum. Have you ever heard of laser sails?
Unfortunately, it will take quite awhile to go anywhere significant.
Actually these will travel many times faster that current probes.
good point. I have never been able to understand why people think that dropping the bomb was a bad idea.
Actually, the radiation is not bad at all in this site. Much less radiation comes from the spent bombs than Bambi gets from the sun. Just look at the facts with nuclear power. It has an excellent safety record.
Hanford, in WA, is another great wildlife area in a nuclear waste storage area.
The world is a violent place, it is like a society where you do have to carry a gun to be safe.
In response to the second poster, the Soviets would have still developed the bomb if we never did. They would have been much more willing to drop the bomb if they knew we couldn't strike back.
Have you ever heard of MAD (mutaully assured destruction), in which if one nuclear power strikes another nuclear power, it is assured that both countries would be destroyed. This was the main detterent during the cold war.
If we didn't have nukes, somebody would set us up the bomb.
Damn good thing we used the bomb in WW2 also. We saved many lives by dropping the bombs. While there were some moderates, the vast majority of the Japanese gov't was planning to fight to the last man. They were training women and children to kill our soldiers with homemade spears.
We would have had to invade if we didn't drop the bombs. We would have firebombed the shit out of everything in Japan to soften it up for our troops. That would have killed a couple million right there.
Then, hundreds of thousands of our troops would have been killed. Since the Japanese civilians would have been very hostile, our troops would be forced to kill millions of Japanese citizens. Also, many, many more Japanese would have commited suicide as our troops advanced, as we saw in Okinawa.
When you look at it, the bombings killed several hundred thousand people but prevented the loss of millions of lives.
Anyway, remember how fiercely we fought at Okinawa? That isn't even the Japanese homeland. Imagine how bad it would have been in mainland Japan.
People always say we are the most fit. We are not even close to being the most sucessful species on the planet. The best we can claim is that we are the most sucessful large animal.
Mice, insects, bacteria, and many others all have vastly greater numbers than us human.
We will likely not last long either. Most species last around 5 million years or so. We have been around 100,000 years. We will not last for another 200 years. This is because there probably will be no more biological humans. Only stronger, smarter and less neurotic sentient robots. So, H. Sapiens would become extinct.
On the subject of robots: I don't think they will take over. I believe there will be two classes of robots in the future:
1. Non-sentient service bots
2. Sentient robots with full human rights
The non-sentients may just serve humans and sentient robots.
The sentient robots would probably just peacefully live along side us. Of course, these robots will have vastly greater strengh, be many times more intelligent, and probably be kinder than biological humans. These robots would probably take over for humans in many areas (IE, politics). Eventualy, I believe only these robots will exist. Most parents would probably choose to have a robot child over a human child. I know I certainly would.
Think of this scenario with soccer-moms of a biological child and a robot, respectively: "My little Timmy has an IQ of 140. He also plays soccer very well."
"Well, Mond has an IQ of 500,000 and he can lift 5,000 pounds."
Which do you think most parents would choose? Robots will eventualy supercede humans.
Of course, humans could also get cybernetic implants. Nanobots could provide us with much greater intelligence, and also extend our lifespan. I don't think a cyborg human would ever measure up to the standards of a robot, however.
Eventually, I don't really think our decendants will even have bodies as we know it. Probably more likely a grouping of nanobots in space. Vastly intelligent and immortal.
The purpose of life is to have kids. Not get laid. Getting laid is a means to an end. Everything you do is to have kids
This Segway, if it becomes popular, will eliminate the last little bit of exercise people get: Pedestrian travel. Boy, we're gonna get even fatter!! :-P
It might be a little easier to control than a bike, but not by much. Going very slow (ie. the 12 miles an hour that the Segway advertises) I can turn pretty damn sharp on a bike.
Anyway, these things will be probably banned from sidewalks soon anyway. It is hard to manuever a crowded sidewalk without hitting people when you are walking. Imagine trying to do so on a Segway travelling at jogging speed. It would be very difficult.
The good old bicycle is faster, cheaper, healthier, and almost as maneuverable.
Besides, what's wrong with a bicycle? Cheaper, faster, and good exercise.
Good point. Most of us geeks could stand to lose a few pounds by taking a bike to work anyway.
Or, China could just launch a massive denial-of-service attack by sending billions of "GET HERBAL VIAGRA" e-mails from the .cn TLD.
You mean, that DoS attack is not already underway???
Good point. But I just try to put every day mortal dangers like this carcinogen out of my head.
Also, I rarely eat fries anyway. I never eat chips. People need to cut down on their fast food anyway.
It's not like this article gives us some new revelation that fries and chips are bad for you. Everyone has always known that. This carcinogen is yet another reason to avoid chips and fries.
foregone publishing in favor of taking this public immediately.
Of course still by far the biggest danger of eating crap like fries is the cholesterol and fat. Everyone knows that fries aren't the greatest for your health. It shouldn't take a carcinogen scare story like this one keep people from eating too much unhealthy food.
I also would like to point out that we eat all sorts of carcinogens. There are so many carcinogens out there that I don't worry about it when they discover a new one.
Here are a few:
1. Comfrey
2. Sassafras (in higher-quality root beer)
3. Some meat preservative. Forgot what it's called.
4. The sun. Probably the biggest carcinogen of all.
5. Numerous body compounds
6. Burned meat
7. Benzene
8. Cadmium
9. Carbon Black
10. Formaldehyde
11. Gasoline
12. Nickel
13. Quartz
14. Radon
15. Mineral Oil
16. Urethane
17. Wood Dust.
Just about everything is carcinogenic. I, personally, don't worry about it. I can't isolate myself from all of these carcinogens anyway. A more complete list is available here.
I just hope this doesn't lead to tobacco-industry style class action lawsuits.
I hate people like that. For example, I am no fan of big tobacco, but if you smoke, it is your fault! Everyone has known for years that tobacco is harmful and addictive. The tobacco companies shouldn't be sued for your idiotic actions. I just think tobacco should be taxed even more heavily. Anyway, im drifting offtopic.
I'm sorry, I should have had a better choice of words. I don't think they were worthless, just not as usefull. Vacuum tube computers did a lot of important work.
Vacuum tubes are digital, dude. They are just slow and burn out fast. Transistors are a big improvement.
It would have sucked to live back then: millions of dollars for a computer you couldn't even play Wolfenstein on, for Chrissake!! :-)
But yeah, the ENIAC was the first completely digital computer. I really don't think it was the first computer. There were many computers before that, but they incorporated things such as mechanical relays.
The Collosus, for ex., was built early in WW2 to crack codes. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that it was a combination of relays and vacuum tubes.
It's really hard to draw the line on what we would consider as a computer. Personally, I consider the definition of a computer to be any device that accepts programs. If a computer had to be digital, which would make the ENIAC the first one, then things like optical computers and quantum computers wouldn't fit the definition of computers.
Anyway, if you consider a computer to be any calculating device that is fully programmable, the German Z3 Computer fits the bill.
I have always thought computers such as the ENIAC were worthless because their vacuum tubes burned out all the time and they had no video display. Only printed output. That is kind of a hinderence for speedy work.
At least I don't think the ENIAC had a digital display. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Another disadvantage of these early computers is that vacuum tubes are slow. Computers really didn't start to become practical until the late 50's and early 60's, when transistor computers came into use. Transistors made computers cheaper, faster, smaller, and more reliable.
Easy! Set up a national firewall! Just like China! Just put it in the SSSCA!
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are confirmed.
Remember when they said the mile-wide asteriod had a 1% chance of hitting in 2021? That got everybody all worked up. When I watched the news, the media spun it that the asteriod was definitely going to hit, just to sensationalize it. Then a few weeks later, the astronomers admitted they fucked up.
I guess scientists get their research bucks by having stories like these, though.
However, whenever somthing collides, it loses speed. Things in LEO are always moving the exact speed required for their altitude. Any deacrease in speed will cause altitude reduction. If you reduce speed enough, the fast-moving little bits will reenter.
You don't have to worry about these horrible chain-reaction scenarios because collisions often mean the particles will go into reentry.
Also, space is a goddam big place. If a misslile blows up, chances of a fragment large enough to do damage to a sattelite hitting somthing is very low. Remember, LEO encompasses a huge volume of space.
Most space debris are tiny little things that weigh less than a milligram that don't do too much damage anyway. Large chunks are few and far between. I'd just say don't believe these disaster scenarios. They don't jive with the facts.
May I just remind everybody that LEO is a HUGE place. Way bigger than the earth.
,very slim.
If you blow up a missile, the chance of a random space craft getting hit by a particle from the missile is very, very
It's not going to be a scenario where a missile gets blown up, then the particles from the missile damage all these other spacecraft, causing more particles to go flying, and LEO is turned into a wasteland.
Also, the vast majority of debris are small particles. These can cause damage, but they are unlikely to smash a spacecraft into tiny bits.
This article's forecast is a little too grim. Don't worry about it.
This does not make too much sense to me. All proposals that I have seen are for orbital power stations are for ones in Geosync orbit. Putting these power stations on the moon costs more. It costs 40,000 dollars a pound from what I've heard. Geosync orbit costs 15,000 dollars a pound.
Also, if you were at the moon, it would be hard to aim the microwaves correctly. The angle of the antenna would constanly be changing as the moon moves across the sky. Geosync orbit would not require any tracking.
Also, a misaimed microwave would be bad. It could fry airplane electronics, among other things. Unless you aimed the beam across a huge rectenna many, many miles wide.
Soon I will realease my competing OS: Hellix!
(Diabolical Laugh) HA HA HA HA! All competing operating systems will perish under the diabolical stability of HELLIX!!
Looks like the info on that new Jesux OS is unavailable. Because Geocities is heathenly blocking the Jesux site, Geocities will burn in Microhell once "The Coming of Jesux 2.0" is complete!!
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