Just what is email? They might decide that taxable email has occured whenever a message has been forwarded to a recipient over the internet. Wouldn't each and every packet sent then qualify as email?
I'll take it till it stops working so I can turn it towards Earth and into unsuspecting windows. I could sell subscriptions to the Hubble peeping tom Webcam.
Basically, I watch 'Earth getting blown up' movies for one reason, and one reason only. I love seeing Earth explode with all the nifty special effects Hollywood can muster. Nothing much hit the earth in Armageddon, and that was a big dissappointment.
In the same way that the destruction wreaked by whatever bad guy really makes the Final Fantasy series games, and many an anime flick ( most of which feature the end of the world as a minor plot point ) I enjoy watching the Earth blow up in major Hollywood films. If 'Howards End' started out with a laser from the moon splitting the Earth in two, then I would probably have watched it.
The movie Meet Joe Black starts out with Brad Pit being creamed by a couple of trucks. I don't know what Meet Joe Black was about, but I must have watched him get creamed 50 times. It was cool. I will do the same when they have a nice Earth destruction scene in a big budgie Hollywould Flim.
Ppl can always claim they were not the originator of the crime but have been hacked. So anyone can hack away. You can't mandate that computers be secure because regular people have a right to use the internet ( even if their computer is broken/infected 99% of the time ) So basically anti-hacking laws are unenforceable.
This means that if you don't want to get hacked secure your frikken system. And repeal laws that jail teenagers for 20 years for a stupiud prank. Multibilliondollar corps that expose themselves to script kiddie pranks deserve to get spanked. Would you buy stock in a bank that doesn't have a vault and keeps it's money in big piles behind the counter? Why invest in companies that leave their internet fly unzipped?
No, skynet is cancelled because Arnie has 'no tyme for movies' now that he's gubnah. Arnie will be a scrawny, greyed, flatulant, geezer in a nursing home by the time he's out of office, so he won't be convincing as a robot from the future.
I read somewhere that not even a single watt of energy has ever been produced by a photovoltaic. The cost in energy to manufacture the cell is well above the expected energy production of the cell over it's entire lifetime.
Sounds like the ethanol BS a while back. Oh we'll grow corn and distill it into fuel. Well the cost in energy to grow the corn and distill it is higher than the energy value of the finished ethanol.
Until we can harness the sexual energy of chickens, we will be stuck with plain ol fossil fuels.
Using the above scale, where X50 = 0.005 W/m^2 and the earth having total surface area of 509600000000000 m^2 ( half of which faces the sun ) I get the impact on the side of the earth facing the sun to be 1.25 * 10^12 = 1,250,000,000,000 Watts. 1,250 gigawatts. I read that a hurricane puts out up to 2*10^14 watts = 200,000,000,000,000 watts = 200,000 gigawatts. So it is much less powerful than a hurricane. Though the magnetosphere is much bigger than the surface area of the earth. I don't know how big.
The earth is 6,378,100 meters radius 2 * pi * r^2 = surface area of magnetosphere facing the sun ( 6.3781 * 10^7 )^2 = 36 * 10^14 * pi * 2 = 4.52 * 10^16 watts = 45,200,000,000,000,000 = 45,200,000 gigawatts Much bigger than a hurricane, but spread out more.
If you can prioritize, then you can put these on all cars. At night, when there is next to no traffic, the light can choose to be green for the direction with a waiting car. It would be more reliable than those weight detecting ones. I hate trying to get my tires directly over it. If there were an ambulance/fire/police vehicle then it's frequency would have a higher priority than the normal car frequency. You might be able to use the same IR device to charge tolls on the turnpike.
Scientists don't act worried, they think they understand the sun and how it works, but science it just guesses. Maybe the sun is made of iron instead of hydrogen where would all the theories that say we are safe be then, if such a basic 'fact' about the sun turned out to be wrong?
As the flares grow in size and number you will all see that my theory is correct! "What is my theory?" you ask. It is that since the END OF THE WORLD makes a good movie plot point, that it must be happening NOW! These are going to be interesting times... We should all start storing canned food and porno mags in bomb shelters now before it's too late and we get cooked by the MASSIVE RADIATION STORM!
And what if the sun should stop flaring, and I should get proven wrong. WE ARE STILL DOOMED! In the same way that load from a light socket makes the generators in a power plant harder to turn, so geomagnetic storms transfer the kinetic energy of megatons of speeding charged particles directly to the magmatic dynamo at our planet's core. Small purturbations can affect this chaotic fluid flow in unpredictable ways but the most worrying is that the shock from the kinetic energy of all those particles will cause avalanches at the core/mantle boundary this will cause massive vulcanism that will cover the earth with lava!
If that doesn't get us, terrorists wielding viruses will.
Get out your sandwich board and whisky! Walk the streets and warn! THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!!!!
Worse case scenario: MS buys google and uses the engine on it's msn site, or starts accepting popup ads or worse, paid for placement in the search results themselves.
What to do? Switch to Teoma.
I use Teoma interchangably with Google. Teoma results are as relevant as Google's yet slightly different, however they almost always have the best most relevant results in common.
Teoma's search site is as sparse and ad free as Google's and the search results are of as high a quality. The only Google feature I would miss if it were to dissapear tomorrow is the Google cache.
Ok, usually I know the answers to this kind of question, but I'll ask it because I have no idea:
The Earth's magnetic field is caused by the flow of mag-ma underground. Can disturbing the magnetic field in space exert a sizable force on this magma possibly causing lavos to escape and destroy the planet unless Chrono Trigger saves the day?
1)Why work harder if there are no appreciable benefits. 1a) Why not be downright lazy if it won't make an appreciable difference. The only answer to this is to employ taskmasters with bullwhips to keep the workers to the grindstone.
2)Someone has to run it. If your position gives you the power to influence the collective resources in some way ( maybe you are in charge of snow removal ) then you can use that power instead of money to trade for things you want. For instance the chief snow plower can plow the police chief's road first so that the police chief will assign more men to combat the vandals that toilet paper the snow plowman's house. All the while the rest of us are getting robbed and murdered in our sleep unable to get out the driveway because of the unplowed roads. In addition, important people can 'justify' perks like a nice mansion. ( Do we want to entertain the governor in a hovel? The mayor needs a mansion to entertain important people )
What? A poor cop's been living at his parent's waiting for a small apartment for a year, when this mansion could be converted into housing for 20 people? If he complains, he might find the police car he is allowed to drive off duty
has been 'reallocated'. He'd have to walk to the store to buy diapers for his kid and ice-cream for his pregnant wife.
In this corrupt culture of silence, Kim Jong Il, and his pals live it up with help from their 'pleasure work unit' girls while the rest of the nation starves.
Your silence buys my silence the whole damn joke of a country be damned.
As for the corprate and the governmental merging, I don't see it happening in the US. There are 2 ways government can merge: 1) Gubmint can run companies ala south american/arab oil countries or 2) Governments can contract out traditionally governmental services like jails/fire/roads/police/military.
When the government runs companies they are less efficient ( since they never go out of business for being inneficient ) and they pit the government against the labor unions. The distopia at the extreme is basically North Korea. When government uses the private sector to provide governmental services, the corps have power over those services to threaten chaos to get their way. The dystopia at the extreme is basically Robocop's Detroit.
Someone with a virus detection program that uses a virus definition file who is computer savvy and being monitored by the FBI ought to publish a line that you can add manually to your virus checker's virus def file to obliterate this trojan.
It might have taken a few weeks for the stuff to get down far enough into jupiter to explode and then for the spot to come to the surface. Still, it's just a spot, and probably has nothing to do with the probe.
I think it's Bogey-man not Boogie-man. Boogie-man = MC Hammer, Bogey-man = bad guy.
Yes I realise this a pedantic sounding comment of the type that typically annoys me, but the thought of 'The Boogie-Man' was funny enough that I couldn't resist.
Booger-man, Bugger-man, Red-man, SKOAL. Chug chug chug train of consiousness gurgling down the tracks and into the ocean.
For a time, I was leary of downloading stuff for windows off tucows.com because there was so much stuff labeled as Freeware that turned out to actually be take-over-your-computer-and-make-it-crash-every-fi fth-mouseclick-so-you-have-to-reinstall-your-whole -damn-os-ware They seem to have cleaned up their act and are properly labeling gator like stuff as adware nowadays.
Gator is break-your-computer-spyware. Labeling it adware is an insult to legitimate adware like LimeWire. LimeWire downloads a not-too-bothersome banner ad which you see unless you choose to register the product. That is a fair exchange in my opinion for being to download and use the software for free. I wouldn't call LimeWire freeware, because it shows ads unless you pay money, but I certainly wouldn't put it in the same class as spyware/malware like Gator ( and Morpheus for that matter which installs itself with lots of Gatoresque shitware )
Computer chips are engineered to resist the random quantum mechanical tendency for bits to flip. Chips can never be made perfectly deterministic but they can be made statistically 'deterministic enough' to pass muster.
If quantum mechanical phenomena were allowed to dictate the firing of neurons often then we would have a brain full of randomly firing neurons useless for thinking with. So the brain too is put together with an eye toward being statistically 'deterministic enough' to function. It may be that neurons are robust enough against the effects of random quantum phenomena to qualify as being 'fully deterministic' in the same way as a computer chip is considered to be fully deterministic ( unless it is running windows, or is soaked in beer or something ).
How do you know? You must be awake to be reading this, but exactly what about your psychological state makes you consious, and why is free will required to sustain that psychological state. Conversely, why couldn't a being without free will be consious?
Yeah, I agree. People who make vague appeals to 'quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo' in arguments might as well be honest and substitute 'evil spirits' unless they are physicists, in which case they should be concrete and detailed.
Having said that, there is no need to do a *real time* simulation to introspect. We don't know to what extent the brain has the capacity to log it's own thought process and then examine the results. A pentium processor can completely accurately simulate it's own functioning on a non real time basis.
Perhaps free will does have something to do with chaos and quantum mechanics after all. Maybe it is not that the brain is random or infested by 'spirits of Shroedinger' but that the universe is, so there is no way for even 'a far greater intelligence' to determine ahead of time exactly what inputs will be put to a possibly deteministic and predictable brain in order to simulate it. Even if a being capable of simulating a human brain could tap into a brains sensory neurons and feed the signals into it's 100% accurate simulation, the predictive power of the simulation would be limited to the time for which the inputs could also be predicted.
If someone gets depressed when it rains, the greater intelligence's ability to predict the mood of a person 27 days from now would be limited by their ability to predict the weather 27 days in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Just what is email? They might decide that taxable email has occured whenever a message has been forwarded to a recipient over the internet. Wouldn't each and every packet sent then qualify as email?
That's actually a good idea...
I'll take it till it stops working so I can turn it towards Earth and into unsuspecting windows. I could sell subscriptions to the Hubble peeping tom Webcam.
In the same way that the destruction wreaked by whatever bad guy really makes the Final Fantasy series games, and many an anime flick ( most of which feature the end of the world as a minor plot point ) I enjoy watching the Earth blow up in major Hollywood films. If 'Howards End' started out with a laser from the moon splitting the Earth in two, then I would probably have watched it.
The movie Meet Joe Black starts out with Brad Pit being creamed by a couple of trucks. I don't know what Meet Joe Black was about, but I must have watched him get creamed 50 times. It was cool. I will do the same when they have a nice Earth destruction scene in a big budgie Hollywould Flim.
This means that if you don't want to get hacked secure your frikken system. And repeal laws that jail teenagers for 20 years for a stupiud prank. Multibilliondollar corps that expose themselves to script kiddie pranks deserve to get spanked. Would you buy stock in a bank that doesn't have a vault and keeps it's money in big piles behind the counter? Why invest in companies that leave their internet fly unzipped?
Linus doesn't have to comply with a US subpoena does he? Can't he just stay in Europe and give them a raspberry?
No, skynet is cancelled because Arnie has 'no tyme for movies' now that he's gubnah. Arnie will be a scrawny, greyed, flatulant, geezer in a nursing home by the time he's out of office, so he won't be convincing as a robot from the future.
Sounds like the ethanol BS a while back. Oh we'll grow corn and distill it into fuel. Well the cost in energy to grow the corn and distill it is higher than the energy value of the finished ethanol.
Until we can harness the sexual energy of chickens, we will be stuck with plain ol fossil fuels.
Mod my last post down as stoned.
The earth is 6,378,100 meters radius 2 * pi * r^2 = surface area of magnetosphere facing the sun ( 6.3781 * 10^7 )^2 = 36 * 10^14 * pi * 2 = 4.52 * 10^16 watts = 45,200,000,000,000,000 = 45,200,000 gigawatts Much bigger than a hurricane, but spread out more.
If you can prioritize, then you can put these on all cars. At night, when there is next to no traffic, the light can choose to be green for the direction with a waiting car. It would be more reliable than those weight detecting ones. I hate trying to get my tires directly over it. If there were an ambulance/fire/police vehicle then it's frequency would have a higher priority than the normal car frequency. You might be able to use the same IR device to charge tolls on the turnpike.
The numbers after the letters range from 0 to 20 so there are C5, M17, X8 etc.
My question is this: What do the numbers mean? Is it like the richter scale ( powers of 10 ) or what?
<sarcasm>
The sun is angry; we are doomed. These flares are just the beginning, they will increase in magnitude until they are so big, they penetrate the Earth's magnetic field, destroy the entire ozone layer and sanitize the surface of the Earth with UV rays - just like an autoclave. Not even bacteria will survive except underground and deep in the Ocean.
The signs are showing, this is the END OF THE WORLD! The sun has been showing more activity since 1940 than it has for the last 1000 years put together. Doom is imminent!
Scientists don't act worried, they think they understand the sun and how it works, but science it just guesses. Maybe the sun is made of iron instead of hydrogen where would all the theories that say we are safe be then, if such a basic 'fact' about the sun turned out to be wrong?
As the flares grow in size and number you will all see that my theory is correct! "What is my theory?" you ask. It is that since the END OF THE WORLD makes a good movie plot point, that it must be happening NOW! These are going to be interesting times... We should all start storing canned food and porno mags in bomb shelters now before it's too late and we get cooked by the MASSIVE RADIATION STORM!
And what if the sun should stop flaring, and I should get proven wrong. WE ARE STILL DOOMED! In the same way that load from a light socket makes the generators in a power plant harder to turn, so geomagnetic storms transfer the kinetic energy of megatons of speeding charged particles directly to the magmatic dynamo at our planet's core. Small purturbations can affect this chaotic fluid flow in unpredictable ways but the most worrying is that the shock from the kinetic energy of all those particles will cause avalanches at the core/mantle boundary this will cause massive vulcanism that will cover the earth with lava!
If that doesn't get us, terrorists wielding viruses will.
Get out your sandwich board and whisky! Walk the streets and warn! THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!!!!
<sarcasm>
What to do? Switch to Teoma.
I use Teoma interchangably with Google. Teoma results are as relevant as Google's yet slightly different, however they almost always have the best most relevant results in common.
Teoma's search site is as sparse and ad free as Google's and the search results are of as high a quality. The only Google feature I would miss if it were to dissapear tomorrow is the Google cache.
The Earth's magnetic field is caused by the flow of mag-ma underground. Can disturbing the magnetic field in space exert a sizable force on this magma possibly causing lavos to escape and destroy the planet unless Chrono Trigger saves the day?
1)Why work harder if there are no appreciable benefits. 1a) Why not be downright lazy if it won't make an appreciable difference. The only answer to this is to employ taskmasters with bullwhips to keep the workers to the grindstone.
2)Someone has to run it. If your position gives you the power to influence the collective resources in some way ( maybe you are in charge of snow removal ) then you can use that power instead of money to trade for things you want. For instance the chief snow plower can plow the police chief's road first so that the police chief will assign more men to combat the vandals that toilet paper the snow plowman's house. All the while the rest of us are getting robbed and murdered in our sleep unable to get out the driveway because of the unplowed roads. In addition, important people can 'justify' perks like a nice mansion. ( Do we want to entertain the governor in a hovel? The mayor needs a mansion to entertain important people )
What? A poor cop's been living at his parent's waiting for a small apartment for a year, when this mansion could be converted into housing for 20 people? If he complains, he might find the police car he is allowed to drive off duty has been 'reallocated'. He'd have to walk to the store to buy diapers for his kid and ice-cream for his pregnant wife.
In this corrupt culture of silence, Kim Jong Il, and his pals live it up with help from their 'pleasure work unit' girls while the rest of the nation starves.
Your silence buys my silence the whole damn joke of a country be damned.
As for the corprate and the governmental merging, I don't see it happening in the US. There are 2 ways government can merge: 1) Gubmint can run companies ala south american/arab oil countries or 2) Governments can contract out traditionally governmental services like jails/fire/roads/police/military.
When the government runs companies they are less efficient ( since they never go out of business for being inneficient ) and they pit the government against the labor unions. The distopia at the extreme is basically North Korea. When government uses the private sector to provide governmental services, the corps have power over those services to threaten chaos to get their way. The dystopia at the extreme is basically Robocop's Detroit.
Someone with a virus detection program that uses a virus definition file who is computer savvy and being monitored by the FBI ought to publish a line that you can add manually to your virus checker's virus def file to obliterate this trojan.
Someone should mod parent up. Pron dialers not only fsck up your computer, they steal money.
Someone should post how to adjust the 'internal windows settings' so that these go away.
It might have taken a few weeks for the stuff to get down far enough into jupiter to explode and then for the spot to come to the surface. Still, it's just a spot, and probably has nothing to do with the probe.
Yes I realise this a pedantic sounding comment of the type that typically annoys me, but the thought of 'The Boogie-Man' was funny enough that I couldn't resist.
Booger-man, Bugger-man, Red-man, SKOAL. Chug chug chug train of consiousness gurgling down the tracks and into the ocean.
All your base are belong to us.
Gator is break-your-computer-spyware. Labeling it adware is an insult to legitimate adware like LimeWire. LimeWire downloads a not-too-bothersome banner ad which you see unless you choose to register the product. That is a fair exchange in my opinion for being to download and use the software for free. I wouldn't call LimeWire freeware, because it shows ads unless you pay money, but I certainly wouldn't put it in the same class as spyware/malware like Gator ( and Morpheus for that matter which installs itself with lots of Gatoresque shitware )
If quantum mechanical phenomena were allowed to dictate the firing of neurons often then we would have a brain full of randomly firing neurons useless for thinking with. So the brain too is put together with an eye toward being statistically 'deterministic enough' to function. It may be that neurons are robust enough against the effects of random quantum phenomena to qualify as being 'fully deterministic' in the same way as a computer chip is considered to be fully deterministic ( unless it is running windows, or is soaked in beer or something ).
How do you know? You must be awake to be reading this, but exactly what about your psychological state makes you consious, and why is free will required to sustain that psychological state. Conversely, why couldn't a being without free will be consious?
Having said that, there is no need to do a *real time* simulation to introspect. We don't know to what extent the brain has the capacity to log it's own thought process and then examine the results. A pentium processor can completely accurately simulate it's own functioning on a non real time basis.
Perhaps free will does have something to do with chaos and quantum mechanics after all. Maybe it is not that the brain is random or infested by 'spirits of Shroedinger' but that the universe is, so there is no way for even 'a far greater intelligence' to determine ahead of time exactly what inputs will be put to a possibly deteministic and predictable brain in order to simulate it. Even if a being capable of simulating a human brain could tap into a brains sensory neurons and feed the signals into it's 100% accurate simulation, the predictive power of
the simulation would be limited to the time for which the inputs could also be predicted.
If someone gets depressed when it rains, the greater intelligence's ability to predict the mood of a person 27 days from now would be limited by their ability to predict the weather 27 days in the future.