Input diameter 580m, density Dense Rock (3000 kg/m^3), impact velocity 21.36 km/s, and pick your own impact angle, impact site and observer's distance from ground zero.
It doesn't really look all that bad. The nuclear war comparison is misleading: sure, it may be energetically equivalent, but a nuclear war would spread that destruction worldwide and target cities deliberately, quite aside from the fallout. It'd wreck a city and severely damage a smallish country, but a subcontinent? Not convinced.
And taking into account the low probability that this will happen at all, I wouldn't call this 'Earth's Biggest Threat'. That would still be either the United States or Russia, as I'd reckon that the chances of one of those two going nuclear on somebody over the same timescale is rather greater than the chances of this rock hitting us.
It only comes in white. If I can't express my individuality by purchasing one of five uniquely-colored handhelds, by god I'm not buying it.
Good God. Are you a geek or not? PAINT IT. I know a guy who repainted his N64 controller in camo colours, very stylish. Or plaster it with stickers. Or transfers. Or carve your tribe's traditional markings into the case with a knife.
You don't have to keep the thing exactly as it was when it left the factory, you know.
Case in point...the word "Numbski" isn't a terribly popular term. If you google it, it's pretty safe that you'll find me, and my website, along with a base understand of who I am and what I do. The same goes for George W. Bush, or "Wall Street Journal".
Quite right: Google has a very good understanding of what search terms should link to George W. Bush.
Actually, I would say that search engines might well be effecting the content of the web. Had there been no Yahoo! back in the day, would the Web have taken off the way it did? Without search engines would we still be all on USENET and gopherspace?
1. Invest large amounts of $$$ into dark fiber to create independent network.
2. Advertise your service as: the last truly free (as in speech) Internet. (no DRM, no censorship, no [bittorrent|skype|other] filtering, no stupid ideas... EVER!)
3. ???
4. Profit!
I believe step 3 has something to do with advertising on Slashdot, but I am not sure.
* ring ring. ring ring. *
Hey, Sergey? Yeah, hi. It's me, Larry. Got an idea for you. Yeah. All that dark fibre. Yeah. And that crap Bellsouth's been trying on lately. That too. And we already get plenty of free press on/. and everywhere. We could really make a killing. Right. Might have to change the slogan a bit, though. Bit of a joke now, yeah? Got a new one to try on you: 'No stupid ideas - ever!' Got quite a ring to it, no? I'm feeling lucky, I tell you...
For companies that do not want their source code plastered all over the internet, avoiding GPL'd software just makes good sense.
Ehh... sort of. You can still use open-source software: you can develop in emacs on GNU/Linux and write up all the documentation using LyX or OpenOffice or whatever. As long as your product is all your own work that's fine. It's when you start shipping, say... an Integrated Firewall Solution that happens to run on a modified Linux kernel that you might run into GPL issues.
That's the quarrel we generally have with this kind of article: it can confuse the issue between use of GPL software - which you can do freely, even if you don't accept the terms of the GPL itself - and redistribution of GPL software or derived works, which is just plain illegal under standard copyright law unless you do so under the terms of the GPL.
Anyway, back to my point, good old darwinism will take care of all this: the best "theory" will win in the long run and people will stop petty arguments about it.
Note, however, that the meme that succeeds in this Darwinian struggle need not be the better meme in the scientific sense. Success for a meme consists of infecting as many minds as possible, not in accurately describing the real world.
That's the reason that scientific education is so important. It's not really about cramming kids' heads with facts, about propagating memes at them, but about implanting the underlying meta-meme: the notion that all ideas should be tested to compare them against the real world. Science is a colossal selective-breeding programme conducted upon memes, to artificially select the memes that best describe the real world. Left to themselves, humans will believe all kinds of rubbish, and will tend to believe whatever makes them feel good about themselves.
"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true, rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible, has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist."
-- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit", on the subject of Intellectual Integrity
I recall playing 'Stronghold', an RTS based on medieval castle defense. If you play for a certain (long) period of time the narrator starts making suggestions such as "How about a snack, mylord?"
One of the messages that would come up on the load screens between areas in Baldur's Gate II said "Although your character does not need to eat, remember that YOU do. We don't want to lose any dedicated players."
... there is only one true Grail conspiracy theory, and we have Ennis and Dillon to thank. With extreme violence, frequent severe head wounds, sexual perversion, gluttony, vampirism, alcoholism, large-calibre firearms, heroin, an invincible undead cowboy, Bill Hicks, a nuclear detonation, Kurt Cobain's spiritual heir, a serial killer, a Nazi fetishist, an actual Nazi, multiple unthinkably horrible rednecks, a sadistic eunuch, a multiply mutilated German ex-commando with revolting personal habits, a very carnivorous dog, an appalling retarded genetic throwback, a failed astronaut, John Wayne, some Klansmen, a couple of fallen angels with a spectacular coke habit, the bastard offspring of heaven and hell, and God.
Plus, that $10 usually ends up giving you more than $10 worth of music.
It had bloody well better. Whenever I buy something, I do so because the product or service is worth more (at least to me) than the money I paid for it. If the product or service was worth less to me than the price asked for it, why, then I won't buy it.
In buying something, I am effectively declaring that I would rather have this product or service than the money, or any of the vast range of other things I could have had for that money.
but our brain (our sight) looks ahead, meaning that if a car is driving by and we want to trace it with our eyes, we do not look at where it was a second ago, we look at where it will be at the time when the light will hit the retina and our brain will process the information - sort of looking ahead, based on the pattern/speed/direction of its movement.
You're not dealing with the lightspeed delay there, though; the time taken for the light to travel from car to retina is totally insignificant. You're compensating for the glacially slow pace at which your brain processes the information.
Think of it this way - life appeared about a billion years ago, so that was twice as long ago as when this event happened. We're seeing an event that happenned a little before the dinosaurs appeared.
I think you're a bit off. Life appeared very soon after the Earth formed - a bit over four billion years ago. IIRC, multicellular life got going at about a billion years ago, and vertebrates invaded the land about half a billion years ago.
Of course if you happen to live in Kansas then YMMV.
Does this mean the event happened 440 million years ago and we're just now detecting it because information about it has finally arrived?
Assuming the explosion site is moving only slowly relative to us, which it almost certainly is - then yep, that's exactly what it means. If we're in rapid motion relative to each other then things get a little more complicated, because the meaning of the word 'ago' gets rather blurred...
2,586,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away is 'nearby' ?!
Hell yeah. It's VERY close. Compared to the distances at which gamma-ray bursts are typically observed, this is right in front of our metaphorical nose.
I had a big jump in brain activity when I saw that, but it's because I was thinking, "Dinosaurs and humans lived millions of years apart, you idiots. >:("
[KANSAS MODE ON]
Of course dinosaurs and humans lived contemporaneously. The dinosaurs all got wiped out in the Flood, though. We've got rocks which have both human and dinosaur footprints in them, and they aren't fake at all, and they proove it! Why do you liberal atheists hate America so much?
Back when I was bratty and beat my controllers when I died in a game. My NES Advantage took it all.
Hell yeah. Awesome controller. Even better when combined with a bangin' sound system, several thousand gallons of mood slime, and a major national monument.
There's a bargain bin in the Gamestation store in Birmingham city centre, which contains about half a dozen of those things, for a quid each. I'm rather tempted to take the lot. If I can get my hands on a Four Score, I'll finally be able to play Nintendo World Cup and Dynablaster the way they were truly intended...
The Laserscope is compatible only with Zapper-enabled games, so you could also play games like Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley.
All very well, but I wouldn't want to try playing To The Earth with that thing.
The kind of rapid fire you needed playing that damn game... you'd lose your voice permanently. Possibly the most physically stressful game I've ever played, I'd always finish it with the Zapper handle slick with sweat and my trigger finger totally numb.
Digg had yesterday. Folks, you really need to sharpen up a bit.
Slashdot is not about, and as long as I've been here never has been about, having the news first. Every story is a link to somewhere else - frequently the NYT, the Guardian, the BBC, Groklaw, the New Scientist or some guy's blog. Usually we've heard the news somewhere else before it hits Slashdot. Hell, most of us don't even bother reading the article; we read the summary and go 'Oh yeah, that - I heard that on [Site X]'.
What keeps us coming here is the discussion. Plagued though it is with trolls, and clueless though the typical moderators are,/.'s system nevertheless manages to disappear the most egregious flamers and pick out the worthwhile posts. And in any long/. discussion there are going to be a dozen or so clueful posters, and one or two experts in the field, giving much more in-depth analysis of the issue than you'll get from mainstream journalism.
If I read a story about something interesting on, say, the BBC's technology pages, I know it'll probably hit/. in a few hours, or at worst a couple of days, and once it does there'll be Interesting Discussion.
Balthasar has been awarded a patent on "Methods, systems, and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the internet"
The other two Wise Men, Caspar and Melchior, where unavaliable to comment.
Meanwhile, Akagi Ritsuko is busy doing repair work inside Balthasar, to correct for the damage done by the recent virus infestation which is causing the MAGI unit to malfunction and issue stupid patents.
(btw, anyone remember which aspect of Ritsuko's mother Balthasar was supposed to represent?)
1) Run an OS in which that perl code will actually work
2) Read/.
And yet who
3) Will blithely paste and execute code of unknown purpose, copied from the.sig of someone they don't know
To be quite honest, if they run *nix, and read/., they should know better. We've all gloated enough over the dumb 'doze lusers who click 'OK' to every stupid email worm that comes their way. I tend towards the opinion that if you get nailed by something like that Perl string, you deserve it.
Slashdot Mirror
Input diameter 580m, density Dense Rock (3000 kg/m^3), impact velocity 21.36 km/s, and pick your own impact angle, impact site and observer's distance from ground zero.
It doesn't really look all that bad. The nuclear war comparison is misleading: sure, it may be energetically equivalent, but a nuclear war would spread that destruction worldwide and target cities deliberately, quite aside from the fallout. It'd wreck a city and severely damage a smallish country, but a subcontinent? Not convinced.
And taking into account the low probability that this will happen at all, I wouldn't call this 'Earth's Biggest Threat'. That would still be either the United States or Russia, as I'd reckon that the chances of one of those two going nuclear on somebody over the same timescale is rather greater than the chances of this rock hitting us.
Oh hell yeah. Annah and Fall-from-Grace... t3h h4wt.
Good God. Are you a geek or not? PAINT IT. I know a guy who repainted his N64 controller in camo colours, very stylish. Or plaster it with stickers. Or transfers. Or carve your tribe's traditional markings into the case with a knife.
You don't have to keep the thing exactly as it was when it left the factory, you know.
Quite right: Google has a very good understanding of what search terms should link to George W. Bush.
Actually, I would say that search engines might well be effecting the content of the web. Had there been no Yahoo! back in the day, would the Web have taken off the way it did? Without search engines would we still be all on USENET and gopherspace?
2. Advertise your service as: the last truly free (as in speech) Internet. (no DRM, no censorship, no [bittorrent|skype|other] filtering, no stupid ideas... EVER!)
3. ???
4. Profit!
I believe step 3 has something to do with advertising on Slashdot, but I am not sure.
* ring ring. ring ring. *
Hey, Sergey? Yeah, hi. It's me, Larry. Got an idea for you. Yeah. All that dark fibre. Yeah. And that crap Bellsouth's been trying on lately. That too. And we already get plenty of free press on /. and everywhere. We could really make a killing. Right. Might have to change the slogan a bit, though. Bit of a joke now, yeah? Got a new one to try on you: 'No stupid ideas - ever!' Got quite a ring to it, no? I'm feeling lucky, I tell you...
Ehh... sort of. You can still use open-source software: you can develop in emacs on GNU/Linux and write up all the documentation using LyX or OpenOffice or whatever. As long as your product is all your own work that's fine. It's when you start shipping, say... an Integrated Firewall Solution that happens to run on a modified Linux kernel that you might run into GPL issues.
That's the quarrel we generally have with this kind of article: it can confuse the issue between use of GPL software - which you can do freely, even if you don't accept the terms of the GPL itself - and redistribution of GPL software or derived works, which is just plain illegal under standard copyright law unless you do so under the terms of the GPL.
Note, however, that the meme that succeeds in this Darwinian struggle need not be the better meme in the scientific sense. Success for a meme consists of infecting as many minds as possible, not in accurately describing the real world.
That's the reason that scientific education is so important. It's not really about cramming kids' heads with facts, about propagating memes at them, but about implanting the underlying meta-meme: the notion that all ideas should be tested to compare them against the real world. Science is a colossal selective-breeding programme conducted upon memes, to artificially select the memes that best describe the real world. Left to themselves, humans will believe all kinds of rubbish, and will tend to believe whatever makes them feel good about themselves.
"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true, rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible, has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist."
-- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit", on the subject of Intellectual Integrity
One of the messages that would come up on the load screens between areas in Baldur's Gate II said "Although your character does not need to eat, remember that YOU do. We don't want to lose any dedicated players."
So, we may hope, is its eventual destination.
You have your priorities terribly wrong.
"Give me liberty or give me death."
Such fun.
It had bloody well better. Whenever I buy something, I do so because the product or service is worth more (at least to me) than the money I paid for it. If the product or service was worth less to me than the price asked for it, why, then I won't buy it.
In buying something, I am effectively declaring that I would rather have this product or service than the money, or any of the vast range of other things I could have had for that money.
You're not dealing with the lightspeed delay there, though; the time taken for the light to travel from car to retina is totally insignificant. You're compensating for the glacially slow pace at which your brain processes the information.
I think you're a bit off. Life appeared very soon after the Earth formed - a bit over four billion years ago. IIRC, multicellular life got going at about a billion years ago, and vertebrates invaded the land about half a billion years ago.
Of course if you happen to live in Kansas then YMMV.
Certainly not, but how long ago was the explosion if we're in motion relative to the object exploding? Whose clock is it appropriate to use?
Assuming the explosion site is moving only slowly relative to us, which it almost certainly is - then yep, that's exactly what it means. If we're in rapid motion relative to each other then things get a little more complicated, because the meaning of the word 'ago' gets rather blurred...
Hell yeah. It's VERY close. Compared to the distances at which gamma-ray bursts are typically observed, this is right in front of our metaphorical nose.
[KANSAS MODE ON]
Of course dinosaurs and humans lived contemporaneously. The dinosaurs all got wiped out in the Flood, though. We've got rocks which have both human and dinosaur footprints in them, and they aren't fake at all, and they proove it! Why do you liberal atheists hate America so much?
[KANSAS MODE OFF]
Hell yeah. Awesome controller. Even better when combined with a bangin' sound system, several thousand gallons of mood slime, and a major national monument.
There's a bargain bin in the Gamestation store in Birmingham city centre, which contains about half a dozen of those things, for a quid each. I'm rather tempted to take the lot. If I can get my hands on a Four Score, I'll finally be able to play Nintendo World Cup and Dynablaster the way they were truly intended...
All very well, but I wouldn't want to try playing To The Earth with that thing.
The kind of rapid fire you needed playing that damn game... you'd lose your voice permanently. Possibly the most physically stressful game I've ever played, I'd always finish it with the Zapper handle slick with sweat and my trigger finger totally numb.
Slashdot is not about, and as long as I've been here never has been about, having the news first. Every story is a link to somewhere else - frequently the NYT, the Guardian, the BBC, Groklaw, the New Scientist or some guy's blog. Usually we've heard the news somewhere else before it hits Slashdot. Hell, most of us don't even bother reading the article; we read the summary and go 'Oh yeah, that - I heard that on [Site X]'.
What keeps us coming here is the discussion. Plagued though it is with trolls, and clueless though the typical moderators are, /.'s system nevertheless manages to disappear the most egregious flamers and pick out the worthwhile posts. And in any long /. discussion there are going to be a dozen or so clueful posters, and one or two experts in the field, giving much more in-depth analysis of the issue than you'll get from mainstream journalism.
If I read a story about something interesting on, say, the BBC's technology pages, I know it'll probably hit /. in a few hours, or at worst a couple of days, and once it does there'll be Interesting Discussion.
The other two Wise Men, Caspar and Melchior, where unavaliable to comment.
Meanwhile, Akagi Ritsuko is busy doing repair work inside Balthasar, to correct for the damage done by the recent virus infestation which is causing the MAGI unit to malfunction and issue stupid patents.
(btw, anyone remember which aspect of Ritsuko's mother Balthasar was supposed to represent?)
1) Run an OS in which that perl code will actually work /.
2) Read
And yet who
3) Will blithely paste and execute code of unknown purpose, copied from the .sig of someone they don't know
To be quite honest, if they run *nix, and read /., they should know better. We've all gloated enough over the dumb 'doze lusers who click 'OK' to every stupid email worm that comes their way. I tend towards the opinion that if you get nailed by something like that Perl string, you deserve it.
What, IBM only have eight R&D engineers?