> > What do you mean "101 ways to save the Internet from spammers, crackers and smothering regulation"? I can list off twice as many as that without even taking off my socks. > >
Oh my. For the love of humanity, please do not take off your socks. Or your shoes. > Thank you.
Ahem? Aren't we forgetting something?
#45: VeriSign must die.
Maybe the poster had planned on visiting VeriSign's head office before the sock removal.
> The only reason that coal plants spew acid rain is because your precious liberal idiot farms like the EPA, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club have consistently prevented old plants from upgrading to cleaner equipment and from building new coal plants that are just as clean as
NatGas plants. Look at the 10-k of any major energy company to find pages of litigatory idiocy. Thanks a lot, hippies. I hope you all die.
I don't care if the hippies die or not. I just hope they don't kill us all with them.
Quoth the original poster:
> > Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?
Our article poster is missing an option.
"How many birds would die from the acid rain that a nuclear power plant would produce?" Oh, right. No acid rain comes out of nuke plants.
"OK, so how many birds would die from the radioactivity emitted by a nuclear plant?" Oh, right. The poster was considering coal as an alternative, but a coal plant spews out more radioactive waste in the form of ash than the nuke ever does.
"Umm, OK, [Disclaimer: I don't believe in global warming, but I'll assume the article poster does] so how many birds would die from coastal wetlands being swamped by rising sea levels caused by the global warming caused by the release of CO2 from the nuclear plant?" Oh, right. No CO2 either.
"Look, can we just BANANA? Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything?"
In a word, no. Energy is a means to produce wealth. Wealth is good.
Wind: Nonviable (kills birds, not cost efficient.)
Solar: Nonviable (cost of production exceeds energy consumed, massive chemical waste byproducts)
Coal and gas: Viable (unless you believe in global warming, which most "greens" do)
Hydroelectric: Nonscalable (there are only so many rivers to dam, plus think of the environmental and economic damage associated with damming something like the Mississippi a'la Three Gorges).
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
Conservation: Nonscalable. Cut your energy consumption by 50%? Sure. But 50% of O(N^x, where x > 1) is still going to present you with unacceptable constraints on growth.
Nuclear: Zero CO2. Zero emissions while running. Waste products are compact and easily-localized/transported substance that may be a useful resource in the future. Most kilowatt-hours per kilogram of fuel (and waste) by orders of magnitude over every other option.
Even if you don't think nuclear is a good option, it's almost certainly left as the Least Sucky Option.
Simple. Replace "SCO" with "Whorehouse Piano Player".
When your interviewer asks you what on earth a whorehouse was doing repackaging and integrating AT&T SYSV code, tell him it you were actually working at SCO back when SCO was a software company with a mediocre UNIX distribution, and that you left when you saw the writing on the wall when its then-CEO said Linux would never amount to anything.
Then say "But there's still less stigma that comes with saying you were a whorehouse piano player."
> I wouldn't risk moving a chip into a motherboard that is already up and running. I'd be worried about damaging that motherboard and ending up with two dead systems.
If the OS isn't using BIOS, this is actually safe, with two caveats:
1) The OS shouldn't be making BIOS calls. Last thing you want is to be in the middle of a hard drive write operation when you yank the chip. (This risk is negligible for modern OSes)
2) Use a proper PLCC extractor for the chip. Shorting out contacts or breaking the socket with a screwdriver is bad. Pulling the chip properly is safe. You're just cutting/restoring power to the voltage, ground, and signal leads of the chip within milliseconds of each other -- the same way you are every time you power the machine up or down.
For the record, yes, YMMV, but yes, I've done this, and yes, it worked. (I was an I-Opener h4x0r; this was an PC masquerading as an embedded system that lacked a floppy, and for which later versions of the BIOS wouldn't boot from a hard drive. The "hot flash" was needed under those circumstances - boot a machine with a hard drive and a "good" BIOS, remove "good" chip while system powered up. Insert "bad" BIOS chip extracted from a nonbootable unit into empty socket of powered-up "good" machine. Reflash "bad" BIOS chip with data extracted from "good" BIOS chip. Power down. Insert "good" chip into your machine. Insert reflashed chip into formerly-nonbootable machine.)
I wouldn't recommend it as standard procedure, but if you don't have an EPROM/EEPROM burner, hot-swapping BIOS chips between live machines is a viable field expedient.
> > Its not like we're married. Don't you like to drive fast and have sex in your back seat? > >Claiming to have sex in the back seat of a '68 Camaro makes me doubt you've ever seen one, much less own one...
'Vette or Camaro, at least it's possible to have sex in the back seat while driving fast.
Now driving quickly while having sex in the backseat of a '65 Cadillac, that's a challenge.
> For example, searching on Paris Hilton after her little slip-up returned hundreds upon hundreds
of affiliates all spamming the same site which, in the end, did not actually have the infamous video. Today, there are much fewer such links.
And while we're at it, how the hell is any poor bastard trying to rent a room at a Hilton-operated hotel in capital of France ever going to find out whether such a hotel exists or not. (Then again, who cares?:)
> Despite the scare caused by Silent Spring I don't think it was ever proved that DDT caused the
thinning of bird's eggs.
Yeah, but look on the bright side. Thanks to Ms. Carson, we've had an additional three decades to prove that
malaria thins out third-world populations pretty damn well.
As responsible stewards of Gaia's gift, we must abide by the precautionary principle, you know. But if another 30 million human corpses is what it takes to be absolutely sure that the next generation of pesticides won't harm the indigenous population of amopheles gambiae and plasmodium falciparum, then so be it!
> Besides, have you ever been given a mug of tea by someone who assumed that they need not rinse the mug of any detergent? It's undrinkable! Yuk!
WTF d00d? People do this?
IMO, detergents are safe to ingest in small quantities as would be left on an unrinsed glass, but like you said, who the hell wants to taste detergent with their food? Rinse that stuff away!
(From the other side, I've had people look weird at me when I rinse out my freshly-drained mug or glass without detergent. I don't know what they're drinking, but the last time I checked, there were no lipids in wine, beer, or soda. It's all water-soluble, so what the hell does it need detergent for?)
> Except for the fact that our water is now laden with all sort of pharmaceutical enhancements, which often makes its way through wastewater treatment systems. If enough people keep taking Viagra and Prozac, we'll all be walking around with smiles on our faces and woodies down below...
> What is the point of trying to make less deadly versions of TB? Are they trying to make a version that will stimulate the production of the same antibodies, but not harm someone, so they can make a live vacine? The article doesn't seem to worry about details like that, i guess the interesting bit is them making a harmless mistake, rather than the useful work they are trying to do...
That's possibly it. The other alternative is to let everyone catch it.
The biggest (IMO overblown) worry about GMO in the food chain is that the UberFish or the MegaTomato will leak into the wild, and outcompete the NatureFish or the RegularTomato due to propensity for high growth rates, etc.
Turn that around. TB is endemic in certain populations (the homeless, the dirt-poor, prisons). There's a treatment for most strains, but not all. But the treatment is nontrivial in terms of cost, and in terms of the discipline required on the part of the person taking it. Many of the people in the TB-carrying segments of the population lack both the cash for the treatment, and the brains to keep taking the pills for months after they feel better.
But just spray a low-virulence strain of TB into the lungs of every prisoner you take in, and you've just prevented most of your prison population from spreading antibiotic-resistant strains to their contacts on the outside when they get out in 5-10 years. Cost is nothing, and the prisoner benefits too - better to have the less-virulent strain under medical supervision than to get the regular (or worse, antibiotic-resistant) strain anyways as part of his prison experience.
> # "So it just becomes like smoking a cigarette that has no nicotine in it," Hatsukami said.
Yeah. Something puzzles me about this. Your analogy of "Smoke a pencil! It's unpleasant!" hits it on the head. Smokers, riddle me this. (I'm a nonsmoker.)
An alcoholic who likes the taste of beer can drink non-alcoholic beer. (OK, obviously he doesn't like the taste of beer that much, but you get my drift:) He's doing himself no harm. I don't think I'd even call him a "drinker".
A reformed caffeine freak who likes a warm cuppa can drink decaf. (He's a sick person who needs psychological help and some real coffee), but he's no longer a caffeine freak.
A nicotine addict who enjoys the smell of cigarettes and/or the habit of having something in his hands to smoke can get himself "vaccinated" and light 'em up. He's getting no nicotine from his smokes, but damn it all, he's still a smoker. Still stinks up the closet whenever he hangs up his coat, and so on.
And yet, aren't most of the negative health effects (lung and other cancers) associated with smoking the result of the actual act of smoking (inhaling smoke), rather than nicotine addiction?
The act of smoking is certainly the only negative quality-of-life (read: "smells bad") factor here.
What I'm trying to say is: What would be wrong with going to the drugstore (and it's be a drugstore!), picking up a pack of nonprescription nicotine patches/gums labeled "Joe Camel Hides", or "Camel Chews", slapping one on, and enjoying your drug fix without bugging the rest of us.
We nonsmokers would win - we don't even know you're using. And because you're not smoking up our air while you get your fix, it's none of our business that you're using.
You'd win - you'd get your fix any time you wanted, and you'd cut your lung, throat, and other cancer risk to that of a nonsmoker. (Might cut your heart disease risk too, at least you're not inhaling CO. Not sure by how much, since nicotine's still a stimulant.)
Heck, even the tobacco companies might win. It's gotta be cheaper to produce the nicotine in a patch than it is to pay people to grow, haul, dry, and process all those tons of tobacco into cigarettes. And with nicotine-by-patch being widely available and destigmatized, overall usage might go back up.
My drugs of choice are alcohol and caffiene, for which liquids are ideal delivery devices. Gaseous or solid delivery of alcohol doesn't sound like fun. Solid caffeine, however, is available in the form of Penguin Mints, which are a cool, refeshing twist on summer days when I don't feel like getting my fix via coffee:)
Smokers, as a user of alcohol and caffeine, I've nothing against your drug of choice. I just don't understand why the "cigarette" has to be the only delivery device for it. Why hasn't the market responded to what seems to be a pretty big pent-up demand for a more discreet nicotine delivery device?
> 1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance > >I believe the Beagle team is firmly in stage 1 but after this quote, "At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned." some are already drifting into stage 2.
3. "Look. Suppose we built this large Martian badger."
4. "And then the solar panels, they, they pop out of the airbags, and... and... [voice trailing off as you realize everyone's looking at you strangely]
5. "No, on second thought, let's not go to Mars. It is a silly place."
> Didn't your Momma tell you not to click on strange sigs?! > > Long ago I quit clicking on slashdot sig links. *Especially* when it has goat in the link text:P
This is a SCO thread. Pictures of Darl McBride may be repulsive, but they're definitely on topic.
> For some reason, most people do not remove the unnecessary cruft in previous emails, just moving to the bottom and adding their own information.
It makes top-posting just as bad.
If the UI designer of Outleak had put the cursor where it belonged (at the bottom), users might have cleaned up the cruft themselves. (Because they, too, would see all the cruft above them, and might decide it's a good idea to snip out the irrelevant bits.)
"Top-posting! What the fuck? You think John the Baptist just quoted the entire Gospel of Luke and wrote 'Me Too' in Verse One?"
The other big UI bug is horizontally-wide, vertically-short panes as a default. I can't tell you how many people have their GUIs set up to resemble an 80x10 (or worse, a 120x10) character-based terminal, even when those windows could be in "portrait" mode to minimize scrolling on a 1024x768, to say nothing of a 1600x1280 pixel screen.
Personally, I feel the same way about top-posting as a notable Monk felt about HTML posting:
"The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a
hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his
computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism."
Fuck top-posters and the cubemail clients they rode in on.
> The new WTC is going to cost about $1.5 billion yet you can construct a livable environment in a hollowed-out asteroid for $850 million. Amazing!
After, not before, the development of a functioning space-based manufacturing sector. The necessary precondition for such a sector to develop is cheap heavy lift vehicles.
Given cheap heavy lift vehicles, you get asteroid and lunar mining. Given mining, you don't need anywhere near as much heavy lift to hollow out a half-mile asteroid. For all we know, maybe the best mining technique will involve building a small underground space in a nickel-iron "rock" and eating away at the asteroid from the inside out, producing hollow shells as a byproduct.
And a half-mile asteroid isn't that much bigger than the WTC Mk. II.
Perhaps ships would be a better analogy. Compare the cost and size of a modern cruise ship with the inflation-adjusted cost of a WW-I era ship such as the Lusitania.
> What I don't find fair (to the public) is the indignant way Mr. Ridge handles the press. His responses serve to propagandise and/or scare the public, IMO. To wit:
And this makes Ridge different from anyone else in government... how?:)
Seriously, for educated people, a HomeSec press release reads like hysterical exaggeration and propagandizing.
That's by design. There's nothing wrong with having a week's worth of food and water, a few canteens, some water purification pills, a mechanical can opener, some duct tape and plastic wrap in your house even if you're not near a target for a radiological dispersion device. Think "flood", "earthquake", "tornado", "hurricane", or even "really friggin' big snowstorm".
Your typical uneducated Britney/CelineDion fan isn't capable of thinking that far ahead. Like most sheep, it's capable of thinking only about getting to where it's going and consuming.
If it takes hysterical press releases about The End Of The World to get the sheep to make the preparations they should have been making anyway, then that's what it takes. Ridge's job is to protect the flock - both the older ones who give $10 worth of wool for every $1 worth of grass they eat, and the marginal ones who never produce more than $0.75 worth of wool for every $1 of grain they eat, but whose presence in the flock keeps the flock in line. Why shear them when they cost the farmer nothing, and can be used for their meat?)
And from that perspective, Ridge is doing a decent job, considering his actual power to protect the flock is almost nil. All he can do is keep the flock aware of the threat and hope that a few more sheep escape with their wool intact than would otherwise have survived when the wolves eventually come.
Uh-oh, it's almost April, here comes the guy with the shears again. *munch munch*
> Both seem to use a system of specilization for data, so that a specific node carries a series of data is one specific area, more than others. This is VERY useful, in that nodes can learn about what each one carries.
"Yes, we can see how that would be VERY useful."
- Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti, sitting behind the keyboard that controls a $1M (Beowulf!) cluster connected to the network by means of half a dozen T-1s and several gigabit ethernet switches in promiscuous mode happily sniffing away.
> I wouldn't call Bill Gates bad at spending his money for a good cause. He's well known for
donating significant sums for charity which, I might add, is much more moral than contributing to an X-prize attempt.
Umm, "much more moral"? WTF d00d?
You have $10B. You wanna make the world a better place.
Scenario 1:: Give $10000 to 1,000,000 third-worlders. If you want that to last for 25-30 years, your million people will have $300-400 per year. They will have running water, but the vast majority of those million people will be living in mud huts and abject squalor. At the end of your 25 years, most will have reproduced at least once, leaving you with 2,000,000 people still living in squalor.
Number of lives improved: 1,000,000 for 25 years.
Funds remaining: $0.00
Choice 2: Drop $9B on a development programme to reduce lift costs to orbit from $10000/pound to $100/pound. Invest $1B in companies that have neat ideas, like doing science (which leads to more technology), strip-mining the moon or asteroids (reducing environmental loads on earth) for metals and silicon for solar cells.
25 years later, you've doubled your money (and can feed the 2,000,000 third-worlders that Mister Morality left behind if you so choose), and six billion people now have practically free electrical power and consequently, pure water as extracted from seawater through desalination plant, also becomes too cheap to meter.
Number of lives improved: 6,000,000,000 permanently improved.
Funds Remaining: Very probably more funds than you started with. So you can fund the next big thing, whatever that might be.
And as an added bonus: If you still wanna help 10000 third-worlders because they're somehow a very special bunch of third-worlders (as opposed to the other 2-3 billion of them), just build them their very own hollowed-out asteroid for $850M, and use $150M (10000 people * 150 pounds * $100/pound) to fly them to it.
Some of Gates' "charitable" actions are Good Things, such as his funding of medical research. Others are props for the monopoly, such as giving away free-as-in-beer Microsoft licenses to schools so that the kids never hear about penguins.
But to pretend that "charity" is somehow intrinsically more moral than funding the development of cool technology for private gain is utter and complete bunk.
Damn near every improvement in your quality of life over the past 100 years has come from people just trying to make a buck by building a better mousetrap.
You go, Paul Allen. And don't let the whining moralists get you down. Investing in private space development is one of the most moral acts a human being can perform.
> > [ This woman spilt hot coffee on her 'nads? ('nads == gonads == ovaries) I never heard that part of the story! ] I'm not sure I want to know/what/ she was doing with the coffee cup.
> >Driving away from the drive-through window.
...with the cup-holder balanced directly on top of the stick shift.
Which still doesn't explain how she was able to drive in that position. Can't drive a stick shift with only your left foot on the pedals.
> Hopefully a channel like this can stick to what it was meant to show. Remember TLC? Didn't that used to stand for The Learning Channel? When did it become The Trading Spaces And Other Non Educational Crud Channel?
With Ann Druyan on board, it might work.
But I feel your pain. I gave up on "science" channels when they started airing stuff like "Mysteries of the Paranormal". I mean, come on, some of the material on TLC and Discovery is one step away from John "World's Biggest Douche" Edwards' Crossing Over. What the fuck?
CKW wrote: > The key to wiping out hundreds of ants is a)
persistence, and b) persistence. How many seconds are there in 10 minutes? 600. Guess how many ants I can kill in 10 minutes? [... ] come back tomorrow and do it again, and do it for 4 days in A row [... ] Come back once a week all summer [... ] Persistence and the willingness to do the job, that's all it takes.
PROPOSAL FOR ALTERATION OF SLASHDOT PLAN FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE:
When Phase Three of the Plan goes into effect - electronic voting being the technology that will enable Slashdotters to 0wn t3h wh1t3 h0uz3 - CKW is to be appointed to the dual position of Attorney General and head of the FTC, with all powers pursuant thereto.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> Oh my. For the love of humanity, please do not take off your socks. Or your shoes.
> Thank you.
Ahem? Aren't we forgetting something?
Maybe the poster had planned on visiting VeriSign's head office before the sock removal.
>
>
Hardly.
I mean, some poor mass murderer is actually going to have to fuck Alan Ralsky!
Where's the justice in that? The guy's already serving life in prison for mass murder, shouldn't that be punishment enough?
>
>Galactic Positioning System?
Galactic Positioning System is borked. They failed to fully compensate for the relativistic effects due to the rotation of the central black hole.
And do you have any idea how freakin' long it takes for the next satellite to pass into view if you can't get a good signal?
I don't care if the hippies die or not. I just hope they don't kill us all with them.
Quoth the original poster:
> > Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?
Our article poster is missing an option.
"How many birds would die from the acid rain that a nuclear power plant would produce?" Oh, right. No acid rain comes out of nuke plants.
"OK, so how many birds would die from the radioactivity emitted by a nuclear plant?" Oh, right. The poster was considering coal as an alternative, but a coal plant spews out more radioactive waste in the form of ash than the nuke ever does.
"Umm, OK, [Disclaimer: I don't believe in global warming, but I'll assume the article poster does] so how many birds would die from coastal wetlands being swamped by rising sea levels caused by the global warming caused by the release of CO2 from the nuclear plant?" Oh, right. No CO2 either.
"Look, can we just BANANA? Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything?"
In a word, no. Energy is a means to produce wealth. Wealth is good.
Wind: Nonviable (kills birds, not cost efficient.)
Solar: Nonviable (cost of production exceeds energy consumed, massive chemical waste byproducts)
Coal and gas: Viable (unless you believe in global warming, which most "greens" do)
Hydroelectric: Nonscalable (there are only so many rivers to dam, plus think of the environmental and economic damage associated with damming something like the Mississippi a'la Three Gorges).
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
Conservation: Nonscalable. Cut your energy consumption by 50%? Sure. But 50% of O(N^x, where x > 1) is still going to present you with unacceptable constraints on growth.
Nuclear: Zero CO2. Zero emissions while running. Waste products are compact and easily-localized/transported substance that may be a useful resource in the future. Most kilowatt-hours per kilogram of fuel (and waste) by orders of magnitude over every other option.
Even if you don't think nuclear is a good option, it's almost certainly left as the Least Sucky Option.
When your interviewer asks you what on earth a whorehouse was doing repackaging and integrating AT&T SYSV code, tell him it you were actually working at SCO back when SCO was a software company with a mediocre UNIX distribution, and that you left when you saw the writing on the wall when its then-CEO said Linux would never amount to anything.
Then say "But there's still less stigma that comes with saying you were a whorehouse piano player."
If the OS isn't using BIOS, this is actually safe, with two caveats:
1) The OS shouldn't be making BIOS calls. Last thing you want is to be in the middle of a hard drive write operation when you yank the chip. (This risk is negligible for modern OSes)
2) Use a proper PLCC extractor for the chip. Shorting out contacts or breaking the socket with a screwdriver is bad. Pulling the chip properly is safe. You're just cutting/restoring power to the voltage, ground, and signal leads of the chip within milliseconds of each other -- the same way you are every time you power the machine up or down.
For the record, yes, YMMV, but yes, I've done this, and yes, it worked. (I was an I-Opener h4x0r; this was an PC masquerading as an embedded system that lacked a floppy, and for which later versions of the BIOS wouldn't boot from a hard drive. The "hot flash" was needed under those circumstances - boot a machine with a hard drive and a "good" BIOS, remove "good" chip while system powered up. Insert "bad" BIOS chip extracted from a nonbootable unit into empty socket of powered-up "good" machine. Reflash "bad" BIOS chip with data extracted from "good" BIOS chip. Power down. Insert "good" chip into your machine. Insert reflashed chip into formerly-nonbootable machine.)
I wouldn't recommend it as standard procedure, but if you don't have an EPROM/EEPROM burner, hot-swapping BIOS chips between live machines is a viable field expedient.
>
>Claiming to have sex in the back seat of a '68 Camaro makes me doubt you've ever seen one, much less own one...
'Vette or Camaro, at least it's possible to have sex in the back seat while driving fast.
Now driving quickly while having sex in the backseat of a '65 Cadillac, that's a challenge.
Of course I can see the ! Why can't the other guy?
No, it will land on a crater. *tadabump*.
And while we're at it, how the hell is any poor bastard trying to rent a room at a Hilton-operated hotel in capital of France ever going to find out whether such a hotel exists or not. (Then again, who cares? :)
Yeah, but look on the bright side. Thanks to Ms. Carson, we've had an additional three decades to prove that malaria thins out third-world populations pretty damn well.
As responsible stewards of Gaia's gift, we must abide by the precautionary principle, you know. But if another 30 million human corpses is what it takes to be absolutely sure that the next generation of pesticides won't harm the indigenous population of amopheles gambiae and plasmodium falciparum, then so be it!
WTF d00d? People do this?
IMO, detergents are safe to ingest in small quantities as would be left on an unrinsed glass, but like you said, who the hell wants to taste detergent with their food? Rinse that stuff away!
(From the other side, I've had people look weird at me when I rinse out my freshly-drained mug or glass without detergent. I don't know what they're drinking, but the last time I checked, there were no lipids in wine, beer, or soda. It's all water-soluble, so what the hell does it need detergent for?)
And how, precisely, is this a problem?
Oh wait. The women, too, you mean. Eew.
That's possibly it. The other alternative is to let everyone catch it.
The biggest (IMO overblown) worry about GMO in the food chain is that the UberFish or the MegaTomato will leak into the wild, and outcompete the NatureFish or the RegularTomato due to propensity for high growth rates, etc.
Turn that around. TB is endemic in certain populations (the homeless, the dirt-poor, prisons). There's a treatment for most strains, but not all. But the treatment is nontrivial in terms of cost, and in terms of the discipline required on the part of the person taking it. Many of the people in the TB-carrying segments of the population lack both the cash for the treatment, and the brains to keep taking the pills for months after they feel better.
But just spray a low-virulence strain of TB into the lungs of every prisoner you take in, and you've just prevented most of your prison population from spreading antibiotic-resistant strains to their contacts on the outside when they get out in 5-10 years. Cost is nothing, and the prisoner benefits too - better to have the less-virulent strain under medical supervision than to get the regular (or worse, antibiotic-resistant) strain anyways as part of his prison experience.
Yeah. Something puzzles me about this. Your analogy of "Smoke a pencil! It's unpleasant!" hits it on the head. Smokers, riddle me this. (I'm a nonsmoker.)
An alcoholic who likes the taste of beer can drink non-alcoholic beer. (OK, obviously he doesn't like the taste of beer that much, but you get my drift :) He's doing himself no harm. I don't think I'd even call him a "drinker".
A reformed caffeine freak who likes a warm cuppa can drink decaf. (He's a sick person who needs psychological help and some real coffee), but he's no longer a caffeine freak.
A nicotine addict who enjoys the smell of cigarettes and/or the habit of having something in his hands to smoke can get himself "vaccinated" and light 'em up. He's getting no nicotine from his smokes, but damn it all, he's still a smoker. Still stinks up the closet whenever he hangs up his coat, and so on.
And yet, aren't most of the negative health effects (lung and other cancers) associated with smoking the result of the actual act of smoking (inhaling smoke), rather than nicotine addiction?
The act of smoking is certainly the only negative quality-of-life (read: "smells bad") factor here.
What I'm trying to say is: What would be wrong with going to the drugstore (and it's be a drugstore!), picking up a pack of nonprescription nicotine patches/gums labeled "Joe Camel Hides", or "Camel Chews", slapping one on, and enjoying your drug fix without bugging the rest of us.
We nonsmokers would win - we don't even know you're using. And because you're not smoking up our air while you get your fix, it's none of our business that you're using.
You'd win - you'd get your fix any time you wanted, and you'd cut your lung, throat, and other cancer risk to that of a nonsmoker. (Might cut your heart disease risk too, at least you're not inhaling CO. Not sure by how much, since nicotine's still a stimulant.)
Heck, even the tobacco companies might win. It's gotta be cheaper to produce the nicotine in a patch than it is to pay people to grow, haul, dry, and process all those tons of tobacco into cigarettes. And with nicotine-by-patch being widely available and destigmatized, overall usage might go back up.
My drugs of choice are alcohol and caffiene, for which liquids are ideal delivery devices. Gaseous or solid delivery of alcohol doesn't sound like fun. Solid caffeine, however, is available in the form of Penguin Mints, which are a cool, refeshing twist on summer days when I don't feel like getting my fix via coffee :)
Smokers, as a user of alcohol and caffeine, I've nothing against your drug of choice. I just don't understand why the "cigarette" has to be the only delivery device for it. Why hasn't the market responded to what seems to be a pretty big pent-up demand for a more discreet nicotine delivery device?
>
>I believe the Beagle team is firmly in stage 1 but after this quote, "At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned." some are already drifting into stage 2.
3. "Look. Suppose we built this large Martian badger."
4. "And then the solar panels, they, they pop out of the airbags, and... and... [voice trailing off as you realize everyone's looking at you strangely]
5. "No, on second thought, let's not go to Mars. It is a silly place."
>
> Long ago I quit clicking on slashdot sig links. *Especially* when it has goat in the link text
This is a SCO thread. Pictures of Darl McBride may be repulsive, but they're definitely on topic.
It makes top-posting just as bad.
If the UI designer of Outleak had put the cursor where it belonged (at the bottom), users might have cleaned up the cruft themselves. (Because they, too, would see all the cruft above them, and might decide it's a good idea to snip out the irrelevant bits.)
The other big UI bug is horizontally-wide, vertically-short panes as a default. I can't tell you how many people have their GUIs set up to resemble an 80x10 (or worse, a 120x10) character-based terminal, even when those windows could be in "portrait" mode to minimize scrolling on a 1024x768, to say nothing of a 1600x1280 pixel screen.
Personally, I feel the same way about top-posting as a notable Monk felt about HTML posting:
Fuck top-posters and the cubemail clients they rode in on.
After, not before, the development of a functioning space-based manufacturing sector. The necessary precondition for such a sector to develop is cheap heavy lift vehicles.
Given cheap heavy lift vehicles, you get asteroid and lunar mining. Given mining, you don't need anywhere near as much heavy lift to hollow out a half-mile asteroid. For all we know, maybe the best mining technique will involve building a small underground space in a nickel-iron "rock" and eating away at the asteroid from the inside out, producing hollow shells as a byproduct.
And a half-mile asteroid isn't that much bigger than the WTC Mk. II.
Perhaps ships would be a better analogy. Compare the cost and size of a modern cruise ship with the inflation-adjusted cost of a WW-I era ship such as the Lusitania.
And this makes Ridge different from anyone else in government... how? :)
Seriously, for educated people, a HomeSec press release reads like hysterical exaggeration and propagandizing.
That's by design. There's nothing wrong with having a week's worth of food and water, a few canteens, some water purification pills, a mechanical can opener, some duct tape and plastic wrap in your house even if you're not near a target for a radiological dispersion device. Think "flood", "earthquake", "tornado", "hurricane", or even "really friggin' big snowstorm".
Your typical uneducated Britney/CelineDion fan isn't capable of thinking that far ahead. Like most sheep, it's capable of thinking only about getting to where it's going and consuming.
If it takes hysterical press releases about The End Of The World to get the sheep to make the preparations they should have been making anyway, then that's what it takes. Ridge's job is to protect the flock - both the older ones who give $10 worth of wool for every $1 worth of grass they eat, and the marginal ones who never produce more than $0.75 worth of wool for every $1 of grain they eat, but whose presence in the flock keeps the flock in line. Why shear them when they cost the farmer nothing, and can be used for their meat?)
And from that perspective, Ridge is doing a decent job, considering his actual power to protect the flock is almost nil. All he can do is keep the flock aware of the threat and hope that a few more sheep escape with their wool intact than would otherwise have survived when the wolves eventually come.
Uh-oh, it's almost April, here comes the guy with the shears again. *munch munch*
"Yes, we can see how that would be VERY useful."
- Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti, sitting behind the keyboard that controls a $1M (Beowulf!) cluster connected to the network by means of half a dozen T-1s and several gigabit ethernet switches in promiscuous mode happily sniffing away.
Umm, "much more moral"? WTF d00d?
You have $10B. You wanna make the world a better place.
Scenario 1:: Give $10000 to 1,000,000 third-worlders. If you want that to last for 25-30 years, your million people will have $300-400 per year. They will have running water, but the vast majority of those million people will be living in mud huts and abject squalor. At the end of your 25 years, most will have reproduced at least once, leaving you with 2,000,000 people still living in squalor.
Number of lives improved: 1,000,000 for 25 years.
Funds remaining: $0.00
Choice 2: Drop $9B on a development programme to reduce lift costs to orbit from $10000/pound to $100/pound. Invest $1B in companies that have neat ideas, like doing science (which leads to more technology), strip-mining the moon or asteroids (reducing environmental loads on earth) for metals and silicon for solar cells. 25 years later, you've doubled your money (and can feed the 2,000,000 third-worlders that Mister Morality left behind if you so choose), and six billion people now have practically free electrical power and consequently, pure water as extracted from seawater through desalination plant, also becomes too cheap to meter.
Number of lives improved: 6,000,000,000 permanently improved.
Funds Remaining: Very probably more funds than you started with. So you can fund the next big thing, whatever that might be.
And as an added bonus: If you still wanna help 10000 third-worlders because they're somehow a very special bunch of third-worlders (as opposed to the other 2-3 billion of them), just build them their very own hollowed-out asteroid for $850M, and use $150M (10000 people * 150 pounds * $100/pound) to fly them to it.
Some of Gates' "charitable" actions are Good Things, such as his funding of medical research. Others are props for the monopoly, such as giving away free-as-in-beer Microsoft licenses to schools so that the kids never hear about penguins.
But to pretend that "charity" is somehow intrinsically more moral than funding the development of cool technology for private gain is utter and complete bunk.
Damn near every improvement in your quality of life over the past 100 years has come from people just trying to make a buck by building a better mousetrap.
You go, Paul Allen. And don't let the whining moralists get you down. Investing in private space development is one of the most moral acts a human being can perform.
>
>Driving away from the drive-through window.
Which still doesn't explain how she was able to drive in that position. Can't drive a stick shift with only your left foot on the pedals.
With Ann Druyan on board, it might work.
But I feel your pain. I gave up on "science" channels when they started airing stuff like "Mysteries of the Paranormal". I mean, come on, some of the material on TLC and Discovery is one step away from John "World's Biggest Douche" Edwards' Crossing Over. What the fuck?
> The key to wiping out hundreds of ants is a) persistence, and b) persistence. How many seconds are there in 10 minutes? 600. Guess how many ants I can kill in 10 minutes? [
PROPOSAL FOR ALTERATION OF SLASHDOT PLAN FOR GLOBAL DOMINANCE:
When Phase Three of the Plan goes into effect - electronic voting being the technology that will enable Slashdotters to 0wn t3h wh1t3 h0uz3 - CKW is to be appointed to the dual position of Attorney General and head of the FTC, with all powers pursuant thereto.
Spammage delenda est.