FORTRAN was part of the engineering curriculum at Virginia Tech in '96. Unfortunately that was the last year it was taught, and everyone who actually learned FORTRAN before the class was taken off thought it was a huge mistake.
Of course, don't tell that to the latest bunch of basement denizens who, just because they don't UNDERSTAND FORTRAN, they think it's automatically obsolete. In '97, Tech started teaching C++ instead of FORTRAN, and guess what, the class of 2001 engineering student all sneer at FORTRAN, but lo and behold, when they get out into the real world, they can't get jobs as easily as the class of 2000. Why, you ask? Because FORTRAN is still used for a sh!tload of applications!
I now work for the school, and i'll give you a perfect example why FORTRAN is still used. At my job, we have to sort every students' name and ID in this huge file. We use FORTRAN to do it, but we thought it would be interesting to see what other languages could do in terms of efficiency. We wrote a C++ shell sort (reasonably efficient) routine to sort the 30k names. It took several seconds...not bad. Our old FORTRAN code is a bubble sort routine (least efficient) and it does the same job in less than ONE SECOND. That is why FORTRAN is still used and screw all you idiots who think FORTRAN is dead!
Forgive me, I'm just sick and tired of other people's stupidity.
It doesn't matter who owns it right now...because with current mining and salvage technology, that deposit of hydrates is a liability and nothing more. Right now, there's no way of safely and efficiently getting all that gas from the bottom of the ocean. If you went down there and hit a big chunk of that stuff with a pick axe, you'd risk setting off a chain reaction that could lead to a catastrophic explosion (no kidding...I wrote a research paper on methane hydrates for my degree) that could spell disaster for the whole world...(methane is about 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2)...or at the very least kill everyone at the site either by suffocation or fireball. Even if you gently try to scoop the stuff up and bring it to the surface, it will decompose on the way up and either suffocate everyone at the site or ignite and burn everyone to death. There's been several times already where an oil derrick was engulfed in flames because the hydrates around the site became unstable, bubbled to the surface and met up with a happy spark.
The point of all this informative rant: hydrates hold the world's most ginourmous amount of natural gas--but if you mess with it with current technology, you can release it all at once and really screw the earth up.
I wrote a 22 page research paper on methane hydrates for my chem BS. Yes, there are hydrate deposits on the sea floor beneath the Bermuda Triangle. Yes, hydrates deposits in the past have become unstable, exploding at times, other times causing huge undersea landslides...either way, leading to enourmous tsunamis. It's true that hydrates cause some serious problems. But I am sick and tired of people talking about the Bermuda Triangle like it's some sort of death trap. The Bermuda Triangle has several very heavily travelled trade routes going right through it. The number of ships that go through (and planes) every day will flip your wig. Then, when ONE ship or plane goes down, everybody raises a stink and blames it on Atlantis or aliens, or even methane hydrates. true, hydrates can bring a ship and maybe even a plane down if the conditions are right, but WHO CARES? Planes go down and ships sink for OTHER reasons, known and unknown, the world over. But you never hear about those tragedies...unless it happened in some other "Magic Evil Triangle"...Ooooo!.
Forgive my little rant. I just hate the Bermuda Triangle myth because it's full of crap.
Quoting the second sentance in the first paragraph:
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
This sounds an awful lot like every linux freak I know--absolutely convinced that linux is the beginning of the revolution, no matter how poorly developed it might be. Don't get me wrong, I love linux, but there are plenty of things that just can't be done in linux, but don't tell that to the hordes of enormous-ass linux elitists who will undoubtedly track my IP from this message and ping flood me back to the stone age--or worse, use some other outdated attack that isn't exactly potent anymore, but the sheer numbers involved would be crippling to the most advanced megaservers. Thanks for everything, but especially thanks for the insecurities of the masses.
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Of course, don't tell that to the latest bunch of basement denizens who, just because they don't UNDERSTAND FORTRAN, they think it's automatically obsolete. In '97, Tech started teaching C++ instead of FORTRAN, and guess what, the class of 2001 engineering student all sneer at FORTRAN, but lo and behold, when they get out into the real world, they can't get jobs as easily as the class of 2000. Why, you ask? Because FORTRAN is still used for a sh!tload of applications!
I now work for the school, and i'll give you a perfect example why FORTRAN is still used. At my job, we have to sort every students' name and ID in this huge file. We use FORTRAN to do it, but we thought it would be interesting to see what other languages could do in terms of efficiency. We wrote a C++ shell sort (reasonably efficient) routine to sort the 30k names. It took several seconds...not bad. Our old FORTRAN code is a bubble sort routine (least efficient) and it does the same job in less than ONE SECOND. That is why FORTRAN is still used and screw all you idiots who think FORTRAN is dead!
Forgive me, I'm just sick and tired of other people's stupidity.
It doesn't matter who owns it right now...because with current mining and salvage technology, that deposit of hydrates is a liability and nothing more. Right now, there's no way of safely and efficiently getting all that gas from the bottom of the ocean. If you went down there and hit a big chunk of that stuff with a pick axe, you'd risk setting off a chain reaction that could lead to a catastrophic explosion (no kidding...I wrote a research paper on methane hydrates for my degree) that could spell disaster for the whole world...(methane is about 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2)...or at the very least kill everyone at the site either by suffocation or fireball. Even if you gently try to scoop the stuff up and bring it to the surface, it will decompose on the way up and either suffocate everyone at the site or ignite and burn everyone to death. There's been several times already where an oil derrick was engulfed in flames because the hydrates around the site became unstable, bubbled to the surface and met up with a happy spark.
The point of all this informative rant: hydrates hold the world's most ginourmous amount of natural gas--but if you mess with it with current technology, you can release it all at once and really screw the earth up.
I wrote a 22 page research paper on methane hydrates for my chem BS. Yes, there are hydrate deposits on the sea floor beneath the Bermuda Triangle. Yes, hydrates deposits in the past have become unstable, exploding at times, other times causing huge undersea landslides...either way, leading to enourmous tsunamis. It's true that hydrates cause some serious problems.
But I am sick and tired of people talking about the Bermuda Triangle like it's some sort of death trap. The Bermuda Triangle has several very heavily travelled trade routes going right through it. The number of ships that go through (and planes) every day will flip your wig. Then, when ONE ship or plane goes down, everybody raises a stink and blames it on Atlantis or aliens, or even methane hydrates. true, hydrates can bring a ship and maybe even a plane down if the conditions are right, but WHO CARES? Planes go down and ships sink for OTHER reasons, known and unknown, the world over. But you never hear about those tragedies...unless it happened in some other "Magic Evil Triangle"...Ooooo!.
Forgive my little rant. I just hate the Bermuda Triangle myth because it's full of crap.
Quoting the second sentance in the first paragraph:
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
This sounds an awful lot like every linux freak I know--absolutely convinced that linux is the beginning of the revolution, no matter how poorly developed it might be. Don't get me wrong, I love linux, but there are plenty of things that just can't be done in linux, but don't tell that to the hordes of enormous-ass linux elitists who will undoubtedly track my IP from this message and ping flood me back to the stone age--or worse, use some other outdated attack that isn't exactly potent anymore, but the sheer numbers involved would be crippling to the most advanced megaservers. Thanks for everything, but especially thanks for the insecurities of the masses.
Shab264