When you travel near the speed of light just think of how many more cosmic rays you collide with since you are going so fast.
The speed at which electromagnetic radiation propagates is constant, regardless of your velocity. If you are 'standing still' relative to the universe, light travels at 300,000 km/sec. If you accelerate at 1 km/sec for 300,000 seconds and measure the speed of light, it will be traveling at 300,000 km/sec (and just to be clear, you will not be traveling at 300,000 km/sec at that point, as relativistic speeds can't be added linearly). Going faster will not cause you to 'collide' with more cosmic rays.
Asp.net is less code and is faster if you do a few select things: Grab a complex dataset and do a lot of fance processing on the client. For 90% of the stuff an average person would do, it is a complete wash. Saving the current viewstate is kind of handy, I guess, but that only took a line of code to do in classic asp anyway, so who cares? Most of the time I have 'saved' is usually wasted looking up some esoteric class member that you now have to use becuase you are using asp.net objects.
God have mercy on your soul if you try to do anything non-standard with a Datagrid, because asp.net won't...
Manager: "All right team, looks like Joe has finally come up with a fast and fairly accurate algorithim to spot those dirty old pornographic images. We will need to test it a bit first, to see what the signal to noise ratio is. We will need some test groups, though."
"Yeah, sure bob, you can run the 'barely legal college girls' tests. Janet and Simone, you check the 'hot lesbian' batches. What? Sure Ramone, you can check the 'young gay studs' test. Now, who is going to run the 'goatse.cx' tests?"
Is it playing God or using our natural faculties for the betterment of mankind? Where do you draw the line? Is it ok to make glow-in-the-dark mice, but not mice with 6 legs? What about glow-in-the-dark mice versus glow-in-the-dark E-choli (I did the latter back in high school)? Or glow-in-the-dark people?
Is inflicting some minor medical condition on a GM mouse any LESS cruel than raising chickens in wire cages, killing and eating them? What about cutting down a tree? Killing a small spider because they make you nervous?
All of the things I mentioned involve people killing things for their own ends. Pretty much every animal in nature, including humans, is willing to kill something weaker or powerless to sustain itself. Humans are the only creature that stop to think about it. (Note that we generally still do it, but just moralize over the decision on occasion.)
It seems to me that it is pretty moot debating about using mice to find cures for diseases, when you might be wearing wool, leather, silk, and eating a ham sandwich. I suppose that you could argue about the degree of suffering that is being infliced upon animals by the various fashions that we use them, but I think I'd much rather be a lab mouse that is bread to have cancer than be a pig in a stockyard. At least I'd have people pumping me full of drugs in an effor to cure me.
Interestingly, because of the central point of my poasting, that it seems a universal law that the more powerful species will prey on weaker species, I have to say that I am *glad* we have not encountered alien lifeforms. There is a good chance that when we meet them, we will size them up as dinner, they will do the same, and someone will get eaten.
...wait a second, I thought that you could fix prices all you wanted to on non-essential products. Wasn't The Sherman Anti-Trust act addressing critical comodities, such as food, fuel and similar vital products that are important to the economy?
I think the RIAA is inhuman scum as much as the next slashdot basement troll, but who really cares if they collude to set the price for old Tiffany songs at $8 or $16? I don't need them to live, so they can form a big evil cartel and charge ONE HUDRED BILLUN DOLLARS if they want to.
or you have to do so anonymously (so that the politicians don't know who's doing it).
Good suggestion, but unworkable. If you make anonymous contributions happen, by say some sort of doubl-blind administration of the funds, I can still tell a congressman to 'expect a large $55,428.71 bump to their campaign funds on tuesday, and they will know exactly where it came from. Nobody else will, though.
The only method is to make everything completely open to scrutiny. Make the process as trasnparent as possible. You can't stop people from comming up with new methods of gaming the system, and peddling influence, but you can make it so that it is easier to see who is doing it.
In other words, the manufacturers/integrators are the ones who will be making the "which version" decision. Only people like us who build our own machines are going to care.
...quite correct, but they will be deciding what to put on their machines based on price points, and whatever deals are being offereed by the MS OEM sales department. So the flavor of OS on your parent's new computer next year will be the result of a decision of some sales and marketing people at DELL trying to maximize their profits.
It is interesting that you shoud mention OPEC, as a world oil crash could mean some dire things for the entire middle east. Countries in the middle east have made vast fortunes in the last century as a result of these deposits. What is to prevent them from returning to the previous ecenomic status once the oil runs out? Once western oil money drys up, there will be severe shakeups in some economies in the middle east.
While Iran is acting very shifty for a country that claims to only have an interest in nuclear power for peaceful purposes, it could very well be a strategic shift to prepare for the day when it's wells run dry.
I've often wondered if the vast influx of money to gulf oil states from first world countries has increased the instability of the reigon. if there had been no oil, the middle east would have probably not be much of a strategic concern, and the international community would have been content to largely ignore the reigon.
I thought, "Ooooo" these guys are going to do something different and possibly something that has a deeper meaning than, blam-blam-blam-blamblam-blam". But noooo, that's not how it turned out.
Yeah, so true. The whole concept of the matrix was based on Plato's allegory of the 'man in the cave', so you think that they are going to do something deep and cool for the sequals. The action was cool in the second movie, but the plot let you scratching your head. Not because it was deep, or complicated, but just because you ended up saying 'why'?
The first movie had sort of an interesting message, that you can master yourself and your surroundings if you realize their nature. I can only guess at what sort of message you might get from the second and third movies. Perhaps the second was trying to make some sort of comment on free will being an illusion when making sequals to blockbuster films, and the third was saying that Jesus probably fought thousands of cloned kung-fu Romans.
I think Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" is one of the greatest works of storytelling art in the past 50 years, but anybody who calls it a "graphic novel" around me risks a punch in the throat.
While 'graphic novel' sounds to me like it was dreamed up by some comic books writers make their medium more legitimate by making it sound 'artsy', the watchmen is in it's current format a graphic novel. here is why:
A comic books tend to be serial in nature, while novels tend to be self-contained stories. While you can probably name dozens of counter examples, I think this is probably a good generalization. The watchment is pretty much a self contained story, and since it is told with small colored drawings, I think it could be called a graphic novel.
As for punching people in the throat, you seem to have quite a bit of fanboy rage built up over this issue. Relax dude, it's just a comic book.:-P
This sort of reminds me of people that read things like A Brief History of Time, a perfectly excellent book, and then try to tell me that the physics is really great and it would be so much better unencumbered by the mathematics.
That is funny, becuase I read 'A Brief History of Time' and thought it would have been better if it had been encumbered with (a lot) more math....
As for time travel (backward) being possible, your credentials in physics far outweigh mine, but I will say this: I think humans need to know a vastly greater ammount of math and physics before we can even make a valid conclusion either way. The forward case is probably just an engineering problem at this point...
I get the point that you are trying to make, but I can't help but notice in almost all of the examples you cite, it is GOD who is doing all the smiting and death dealing, not hebrews and cristians. In the examples cited above in the Koran, all the examples involve the reader taking action and killing enemies of the faith.
If these are really accurate samplings of the respective texts, it would seem pretty clear why the Islamic faith seems to have such a violent face to it. There is a big difference in reading about how your god is going to punish the faithless, and being told it is your duty.
(Intelligent musings aside, and straight into offensive blasphmey)
Perhaps Allah isn't powerful enough to smite the unbelievers himself. Has to recrute people to do it for him. If he were all badass like the cristian god in the old testament, he would just zap people with bolts from the blue.
From the Aricles of Slashdot, section 4, paragraph 3, I quote: "A quasi-humorous meme will be run into the ground until nobody remaining alive recalls the original humor behind the meme. If at any point during this process, somebody realizes that the meme isn't actually funny and states the fact in a post, they will be flagged as a troll by moderators."
....so, in answer to your question, no. If you are looking for insightful, intelligent discussion here you are about nine years to late.
Similarly there's no law that says that a company has to charge the same price to everyone. They can charge twice as much to woman than to men. It's legal. It would be commercial suicide
Actually, there are a whole bunch of businuess that use gender based pricing. Many bars have 'ladies nights' where cover charges are waved for women. Of course their motivation isn't to descriminate against men, it is to get more woment to come to their establishment.
I wanna don my armour and wreak havoc on the Murlock population without wondering what kind of socio/economic/racial overtones may be interpreted in the aftermath.
You insensitive genocidial monster! Merlocks are fish-people too! Have you ever though about their feelings? Have you ever tried to talk to them, rather than just wipe out their villages and roll to see who gets the chest loot? Of course not. Why, it just makes me seeth, I-RRRRRRRAALLLAARALALLALALALALALLALALA!
Define evil such that Bush does not fit the definition.
You are not asking for a actual definition, as you aren't really asking a question, but I'll bite.
Evil has a deliberate intent to cause pain and suffering to others, or a selfish desire combined with a brutal indifference as to the effects this causes on others.
There is a big differnce in say, Saddam Hussain murdering people who get in his way, and president Jr. using illicit wiretapping to chase terrorists. While he is stupid to think that bypassing wiretapping laws will help the country in the long run, can you really compare the two? If Saddam suspected a terrorist cell opperating, he would simply round up the suspects and anyone remotely connected with them, and have them tortured to death. No, president Jr. is simply a short sighted fool.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he doesn't exist.
Pfffft. There is no devil, because he couldn't even beging to compete with what humans inflict on each other on a regular basis. He would be out of a job as evil incarnate before he even got to work in the morning. Our very nature is our worst torment, not some silly guy in a red suit.
Slashdot Mirror
When you travel near the speed of light just think of how many more cosmic rays you collide with since you are going so fast.
The speed at which electromagnetic radiation propagates is constant, regardless of your velocity. If you are 'standing still' relative to the universe, light travels at 300,000 km/sec. If you accelerate at 1 km/sec for 300,000 seconds and measure the speed of light, it will be traveling at 300,000 km/sec (and just to be clear, you will not be traveling at 300,000 km/sec at that point, as relativistic speeds can't be added linearly). Going faster will not cause you to 'collide' with more cosmic rays.
Asp.net is less code and is faster if you do a few select things: Grab a complex dataset and do a lot of fance processing on the client. For 90% of the stuff an average person would do, it is a complete wash. Saving the current viewstate is kind of handy, I guess, but that only took a line of code to do in classic asp anyway, so who cares? Most of the time I have 'saved' is usually wasted looking up some esoteric class member that you now have to use becuase you are using asp.net objects.
God have mercy on your soul if you try to do anything non-standard with a Datagrid, because asp.net won't...
Manager: "All right team, looks like Joe has finally come up with a fast and fairly accurate algorithim to spot those dirty old pornographic images. We will need to test it a bit first, to see what the signal to noise ratio is. We will need some test groups, though."
"Yeah, sure bob, you can run the 'barely legal college girls' tests. Janet and Simone, you check the 'hot lesbian' batches. What? Sure Ramone, you can check the 'young gay studs' test. Now, who is going to run the 'goatse.cx' tests?"
"Guys....? Anyone?"
Is it playing God or using our natural faculties for the betterment of mankind? Where do you draw the line? Is it ok to make glow-in-the-dark mice, but not mice with 6 legs? What about glow-in-the-dark mice versus glow-in-the-dark E-choli (I did the latter back in high school)? Or glow-in-the-dark people?
Is inflicting some minor medical condition on a GM mouse any LESS cruel than raising chickens in wire cages, killing and eating them? What about cutting down a tree? Killing a small spider because they make you nervous?
All of the things I mentioned involve people killing things for their own ends. Pretty much every animal in nature, including humans, is willing to kill something weaker or powerless to sustain itself. Humans are the only creature that stop to think about it. (Note that we generally still do it, but just moralize over the decision on occasion.)
It seems to me that it is pretty moot debating about using mice to find cures for diseases, when you might be wearing wool, leather, silk, and eating a ham sandwich. I suppose that you could argue about the degree of suffering that is being infliced upon animals by the various fashions that we use them, but I think I'd much rather be a lab mouse that is bread to have cancer than be a pig in a stockyard. At least I'd have people pumping me full of drugs in an effor to cure me.
Interestingly, because of the central point of my poasting, that it seems a universal law that the more powerful species will prey on weaker species, I have to say that I am *glad* we have not encountered alien lifeforms. There is a good chance that when we meet them, we will size them up as dinner, they will do the same, and someone will get eaten.
...wait a second, I thought that you could fix prices all you wanted to on non-essential products. Wasn't The Sherman Anti-Trust act addressing critical comodities, such as food, fuel and similar vital products that are important to the economy?
I think the RIAA is inhuman scum as much as the next slashdot basement troll, but who really cares if they collude to set the price for old Tiffany songs at $8 or $16? I don't need them to live, so they can form a big evil cartel and charge ONE HUDRED BILLUN DOLLARS if they want to.
or you have to do so anonymously (so that the politicians don't know who's doing it).
Good suggestion, but unworkable. If you make anonymous contributions happen, by say some sort of doubl-blind administration of the funds, I can still tell a congressman to 'expect a large $55,428.71 bump to their campaign funds on tuesday, and they will know exactly where it came from. Nobody else will, though.
The only method is to make everything completely open to scrutiny. Make the process as trasnparent as possible. You can't stop people from comming up with new methods of gaming the system, and peddling influence, but you can make it so that it is easier to see who is doing it.
In other words, the manufacturers/integrators are the ones who will be making the "which version" decision. Only people like us who build our own machines are going to care.
...quite correct, but they will be deciding what to put on their machines based on price points, and whatever deals are being offereed by the MS OEM sales department. So the flavor of OS on your parent's new computer next year will be the result of a decision of some sales and marketing people at DELL trying to maximize their profits.
Cazart.
Even if this research proved to be accurate, Slashdot readers have nothing to worry about.
I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Don't be silly, dude. Everyony knows that Duke Nukem Forever is a Myth...
It is interesting that you shoud mention OPEC, as a world oil crash could mean some dire things for the entire middle east. Countries in the middle east have made vast fortunes in the last century as a result of these deposits. What is to prevent them from returning to the previous ecenomic status once the oil runs out? Once western oil money drys up, there will be severe shakeups in some economies in the middle east.
While Iran is acting very shifty for a country that claims to only have an interest in nuclear power for peaceful purposes, it could very well be a strategic shift to prepare for the day when it's wells run dry.
I've often wondered if the vast influx of money to gulf oil states from first world countries has increased the instability of the reigon. if there had been no oil, the middle east would have probably not be much of a strategic concern, and the international community would have been content to largely ignore the reigon.
Won't someone please think of the prostitutes!
You know what the secret code for the backdoor to encrypted data on a harddrive running Vista is gonna be, don't you?
If president Jr. get to pick it, I'll bet it is 1-2-3-4-5.
Once you start on that yummy oxygen, you can't really stop!
I started out huffing it like everyone else, but it nearly killed me when I started shooting it like smack. Oxygen, a danergous drug, indeed....
I thought, "Ooooo" these guys are going to do something different and possibly something that has a deeper meaning than, blam-blam-blam-blamblam-blam". But noooo, that's not how it turned out.
Yeah, so true. The whole concept of the matrix was based on Plato's allegory of the 'man in the cave', so you think that they are going to do something deep and cool for the sequals. The action was cool in the second movie, but the plot let you scratching your head. Not because it was deep, or complicated, but just because you ended up saying 'why'?
The first movie had sort of an interesting message, that you can master yourself and your surroundings if you realize their nature. I can only guess at what sort of message you might get from the second and third movies. Perhaps the second was trying to make some sort of comment on free will being an illusion when making sequals to blockbuster films, and the third was saying that Jesus probably fought thousands of cloned kung-fu Romans.
They forgot one: Neuromancer by William Gibson.
No they didn't. You REALLY need to see Johnny Neumonic. It has some of Keanu's best 'Whoas' that he ever commited to film...
I think Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" is one of the greatest works of storytelling art in the past 50 years, but anybody who calls it a "graphic novel" around me risks a punch in the throat.
:-P
While 'graphic novel' sounds to me like it was dreamed up by some comic books writers make their medium more legitimate by making it sound 'artsy', the watchmen is in it's current format a graphic novel. here is why:
A comic books tend to be serial in nature, while novels tend to be self-contained stories. While you can probably name dozens of counter examples, I think this is probably a good generalization. The watchment is pretty much a self contained story, and since it is told with small colored drawings, I think it could be called a graphic novel.
As for punching people in the throat, you seem to have quite a bit of fanboy rage built up over this issue. Relax dude, it's just a comic book.
Heres a hint : If you want to by pass laws and help people, don't scream and shout abut it. The more news you make the easier it is to get heard..
...because, the mean faced, souless communist thugs that moniter internal subversive communications surf slashdot for leads in their free time...
This sort of reminds me of people that read things like A Brief History of Time, a perfectly excellent book, and then try to tell me that the physics is really great and it would be so much better unencumbered by the mathematics.
That is funny, becuase I read 'A Brief History of Time' and thought it would have been better if it had been encumbered with (a lot) more math....
As for time travel (backward) being possible, your credentials in physics far outweigh mine, but I will say this: I think humans need to know a vastly greater ammount of math and physics before we can even make a valid conclusion either way. The forward case is probably just an engineering problem at this point...
I get the point that you are trying to make, but I can't help but notice in almost all of the examples you cite, it is GOD who is doing all the smiting and death dealing, not hebrews and cristians. In the examples cited above in the Koran, all the examples involve the reader taking action and killing enemies of the faith.
If these are really accurate samplings of the respective texts, it would seem pretty clear why the Islamic faith seems to have such a violent face to it. There is a big difference in reading about how your god is going to punish the faithless, and being told it is your duty.
(Intelligent musings aside, and straight into offensive blasphmey) Perhaps Allah isn't powerful enough to smite the unbelievers himself. Has to recrute people to do it for him. If he were all badass like the cristian god in the old testament, he would just zap people with bolts from the blue.
Can we NOT put this to rest?
....so, in answer to your question, no. If you are looking for insightful, intelligent discussion here you are about nine years to late.
Uh, you know this IS slashdot, right?
From the Aricles of Slashdot, section 4, paragraph 3, I quote: "A quasi-humorous meme will be run into the ground until nobody remaining alive recalls the original humor behind the meme. If at any point during this process, somebody realizes that the meme isn't actually funny and states the fact in a post, they will be flagged as a troll by moderators."
So anyone taking bets on how long it will take before these 'hunted to near extinction' mammals will really be extinct?
Don't be silly. We NEED to go shoot and stuff them, to preserve them for future generations.
And yet neither you nor the original poster can spell the name of the beloved little xenophobic beastie correctly...
:-P
That's OK, you can't post a working link properly, but we aren't holding that aginst you...
RRRRRRRRRRRRLLLALALALALALLALLALALLALLAL!
Similarly there's no law that says that a company has to charge the same price to everyone. They can charge twice as much to woman than to men. It's legal. It would be commercial suicide
Actually, there are a whole bunch of businuess that use gender based pricing. Many bars have 'ladies nights' where cover charges are waved for women. Of course their motivation isn't to descriminate against men, it is to get more woment to come to their establishment.
I wanna don my armour and wreak havoc on the Murlock population without wondering what kind of socio/economic/racial overtones may be interpreted in the aftermath.
You insensitive genocidial monster! Merlocks are fish-people too! Have you ever though about their feelings? Have you ever tried to talk to them, rather than just wipe out their villages and roll to see who gets the chest loot? Of course not. Why, it just makes me seeth, I-RRRRRRRAALLLAARALALLALALALALALLALALA!
Define evil such that Bush does not fit the definition.
You are not asking for a actual definition, as you aren't really asking a question, but I'll bite.
Evil has a deliberate intent to cause pain and suffering to others, or a selfish desire combined with a brutal indifference as to the effects this causes on others.
There is a big differnce in say, Saddam Hussain murdering people who get in his way, and president Jr. using illicit wiretapping to chase terrorists. While he is stupid to think that bypassing wiretapping laws will help the country in the long run, can you really compare the two? If Saddam suspected a terrorist cell opperating, he would simply round up the suspects and anyone remotely connected with them, and have them tortured to death. No, president Jr. is simply a short sighted fool.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he doesn't exist.
Pfffft. There is no devil, because he couldn't even beging to compete with what humans inflict on each other on a regular basis. He would be out of a job as evil incarnate before he even got to work in the morning. Our very nature is our worst torment, not some silly guy in a red suit.