> Science is always changing. A few thousand years ago, Science taught that the world was flat and > that the earth was the center of the universe.
A few thousand years ago, _Science_ did not exist. Science as we know it today, that is, the application of the Scientific Method as formulated by Isaac Newton is less than 300 years old. The formulation of the scientific method led to a huge increase in accuracy of theories, which is why it's been such a terriffic tool to tell good theories from bad. There were, obviously, quite a few theories overthrown once we started doing actual _Science_. Show me how many complete reversals there have been from one hundred years after the Scientific Method was formulated. I'm sure you'll find some, but the number will, as the original poster said, be "very few". Within the last 100 years, even fewer. Science does progress and theories do change, but at this point it is generally through refinement, rather than reversal.
Well, I _personally_ think it's a planet, and that Pluto is too, and that the whole discussion about "revoking" Pluto's status as a planet is ludicrous. However, the problem is that there is no current "hard" definition of what constitutes a "planet". Pluto "is" a planet because it was, at some point, defined as such by the international astronomical community. This has not occurred with 2003 UB313, and until it does (which I hope it will), it remains a "KBO", Kuiper Belt Object, or "TNO", Trans Neptunian Object, whichever silly placeholder term you prefer. If you don't believe me, read the discussions over at bautforums, where such matters are discusssed by genuine, bona-fide astronomers, NASA folks, and others.
Pluto _is_ the last planet, since the new large KBOs like 2003 UB313 are still pending both official names and official classification as planets. And as you pointed out, Pluto might in fact lose its status as a planet, rather than 2003 UB313 and the others gaining that status.
And New Horizons won't be able to swing by it. If I remmeber right, the distance between 2003 UB313 and Pluto is significantly greater than the distance between Earth and Pluto. 2003 UB313 is really f*cking far away, and its orbit is also strangely tilted. By the time New Horizons is closing on Pluto, we'll have a number of really huge new telescopes in operations, and we may have discovered other KBO's that _will_ be possible for New Horizons to visit in its post-Pluto life.
What kernel are you running, and are you using any non-mainline patches? I've noticed fairly massive differences in NFS performance lately when comparing 2.6.14/2.6.15 & the -ck patchset. In summary, 2.6.14 had crappy NFS performance for me in every incarnation. 2.6.15 mainline is much better, although some small decrease occurred beteen -rc5 and the release version. The -ck patched kernels have _atrocious_ NFS performance. With 2.6.15-ck1, I can't get more than 60Mbit over my gigabit network, whereas 2.6.15-rc5 (which had the highest NFS performance of the kernels I've tested recently) gave me over 500Mbit.
The other replies to your post, with tuning tips, are more likely to fix your problem, though, but I figured this might nonetheless be interesting as a data point, especially if the standard Ubuntu kernel uses any of Con Kolivas's interactivity patches from the -ck kernel patchset.
As an old OS/2 user and consultant with a customer that still runs it, and who I got called in to solve a problem for as late as 2004, I'll take Linux over OS/2 for reliability any day. OS/2 was/is generally a fine OS, but I've seen more flaws and strange hangs and crashes with it than I ever have with Linus. Moreover, several of the OS/2 flaws I've seen turned out to remain unfixable no matter how high up into IBM support they were kicked. I contrast, I've never personally encountered a Linux problem that couldn't get fixed, and fixed quickly. No Linux server I've set up for this particular customer has ever had unplanned downtime. No argument when it comes to VMS, though - they run that too, on their REALLY mission critical back end servers. I don't have a lot of familiarity with VMS myself, but everything I hear about it points to it being an absolutely _astoundingly_ roboust and reliable OS. Somewhat likewise with Solaris. I've never been overly impressed with Solaris, but lack of reliability certainly isn't one of its flaws.
No, neither of those would work. They wouldn't even leave a particularly impressive string of craters. No nuke we can build is going to do anything impressive against an object the size of the moon. Just deal with it. On astronomical scales, our biggest nukes like mosquitos trying to kamikaze an aircraft carrier.
Not even remotely doable, fortunately. The largest craters on the moon represent impacts that released energies several orders of magnitude greater than the world's combined nuclear arsenal, and even that literally just "scratched the surface". We might at best be able to blow up a VERY minor asteroid. People vastly overestimate the power of nukes.
News flash: At this time and for the near future, "nuclear energy" means uranium fission, not deuterium fusion. That's what's being discussed when people debate "nuclear energy". The amount of deuterium for fusion is encouraging for the future, but we haven't mastered more-energy-out-than-put-in for fusion reactors yet.
Note the "only". If the new kernel hangs at boot, or spontano-reboots, the next reboot after that will be with the old and safe kernel. Great for remote or headless/keyboardless machines. Grub has no equivalent to this, and its a reason I sometimes still use lilo.
I've never looked at mplayer's source code, but the fact that last I looked, the default makefiles still use -O4 (a non-existing optimization level) have always made me wonder a bit about the devs. Still, ugly code and Gentoo-noob style compiler opts notwithsdanding, mplayer remains the best media player/encoder around, as far as I'm concerned. Interesting paradox.
C'mon, you pizza-munching, jolt-guzzling lardass geeks, you know it's true. Trading 8 Kgs of useless fat for 8 Kgs of uberleet dual-core portable for your daily lugging-around weight can be nothing but good!
Let me first say that I completely agree that nuclear rockets are the way to go, and that putting them in use is long overdue. I also wanted to personally bitch-slap each and every one of the moronic "stop Cassini" protesters.
Concern over the use of nuclear energy isn't inherently stupid, though. I have to object every time I hear someone call it "clean". The waste is extremely nasty, but can contain it rather than (barring accidents) spewing it out into the environment. I still haven't seen any convincing solution dealing with nuclear waste in the long term. I'd say nuclear engergy as a solution to energy production here on earth is problematic, but still better than most of the currently available alternatives. The problem is that people tend to declare themselves either "pro nuclear" or "anti nuclear" without being very rational about it. They pick one standpoint and "believe" in it like it was a religion.
Storage of waste products is not, however, an issue when using nuclear energy for spaceflight. Chucking the waste into space seems to be pretty much the best way I can think of for getting rid of it.
> The only issue with these engines when they _were running_ back in the 70's > were material issues.
Those weren't gas core nuclear engines, though, but solid-core, which really aren't all that interesting. Gas core looks the way to go, but they're still only drawing-board designs. To my knowledge, no gas core nuclear engine has ever been actually constructed, even for experimental use.
> I do agree computing power isn't the only factor, but it helps greatly.
Re-reading my sentence i notice that I'd dropped a word in it. It was supposed to be "not one of the primary factors", not "not one of the factors". Of course it matters, but it matters comparatively little. Nontheless, for actual onboard computer systems, in particular life support and the like, roboustness outweighs performance completely. You'd be surprised how "puny" the CPUs of even the latest spacecraft are, compared to mainstream CPU. Radiation hardening comes at a big cost.
As for the second remark about space-based launches via the ISS, sadly, that's not an option. The ISS is useless for that purpose, due to its orbit. Which is one of the many reasons space enthusiasts despise the ISS; it's extremely costly, yet so many compromises have been made to its design that it's useless for most of the things it should have been useful for.
Nonetheless, the new CEV/CLV design looks pretty good. Unlike the shuttle, it actually scales up for more interesting things. The CLV could put as much mass as the entire ISS to date into orbit in just two launches.
Still, what would make things really interesting would be some nuclear propulsion methods. While the capabilities of an Orion-type launcher is drool-inducing (8 _million_ tons ground launch, and top speeds up to.1 C!), it's environmentally rephensible and politically impossible. Some of the gas-core thermal nuclear propulsion concepts look extremely promising, though. Once we get these things working and safe, Mars will be a breeze and I'll start looking forward to manned exploration of Titan. *grin*
No problems with my 4-button wireless trackball here. Multiple resolutions/refreshates in X, fixed with xrandr, and available through Preferences->Screen resolution in Gnome. Works better than in Windows as far as I'm concerned, since unlike Windows, Linux/X doesn't forget my f*ing choices and customizations every time I upgrade the display driver. Binary programs that can run on different distros doesn't seem to be a problem. Just look at the linux versions for ported games, such as UT, quake3/4, DoomIII, etc. Building an LSB-compliant rpm should also do the trick, although admittedly, the LSB isn't enough for desktop apps. As a last resort, you could always build a statically linked binary. Copy paste of mixed data... grant you that one. It's not something I can remember even trying to do, but I would assume it won't work with the current clipboard implementation in gnome, at least.
Further:
* Using Konqueror (file browser), double clicking on a text file opened it in read-only preview mode, to actually edit a file, you had to right-click then open with.
I don't use KDE, but in Gnome/Nautilus, this behavior is easily configurable, and I would assume the same is true for KDE. Default behavior in gnome is to open in an editor.
* Also, I couldn't figure out how to create a desktop shortcut to an app (that might have been me).
Again, gnome user here, not kde. If it's in the app menu, just left-click and drag to desktop. Otherwise, right click desktop and "Create Launcher". Pretty intuitive if you ask me.
* If you select copy and then close the app you copied from, the selection disappears.
Yes, this IS an annoyance, and still there by default in FC4's version of gnome. If I remember right, it's finally fixed in Gnome 2.12, though. There used to a little util named "gnome-clipboard-demon" you could install to fix it, but really... that ought to have been fixed by default long ago.
> The first manned mission to the Moon used a computer with the power of a typical modrn graphing > calculator.
Indeed, but computing power is not exactly one of the factors in manned space travel. Unmanned, robotic space exploration benefits far more from newer computers and comms tech.
> The Saturn V rocket that took them there was in essence a giant Estes model rocket (black > powder)
Umm... _what_? This could _possibly_ be said about the SRBs on the shuttle stack, but not the Saturn V. I suggest you read up on the Sat V just to see what an incredble fucking marvel of engineering it was.
That said, I do agree we damn well should have had people on Mars by now. There IS a _massive_ difference in difficulty between going to the moon and going to mars, but fuck it, we've had over 30 years from the moon landings to now. It could certainly have been done by now if there had been a dedicated effort.
Context, my friend, context. The OP should have used fluid erosion and avoided the trap, but nonetheless, on _Mars_, water is the only likely liquid. That said, I can think of other and more likely options, really. Fine dust can act surprisingly similar to a liquid in certain circumstances. I agree that the images there are quite eyecatching, and, but dust sinking into cracks between larger slabs of bedrock could be another explanation. The question, of course, is what's making those slabs move apart, if that's the case? Melting of subsurface ice could be one such reason, in which case the above feature would still be an indicator of present day water related geology, just not in the way the OP guessed. I have to say that the apparent lack of "blueberries" in the dust at the bottom of the "channels" is _quite_ interesting. Now I need to check unmannedspaceflight and bautforums to see what the more knowledgeable bullshit-busters over there have had to say about this intriguing little feature.
Perhaps because death and worldy suffering is irrellevant in the "big picture"? If you believe in god/heaven, then the material world is really just a "testing ground". Whether you live for 110 happy years or 20 in utter misery, it's still an infinitisimmal period of your _existence_, since most of it will be spent in the afterlife. Hence, if serving god first and living up to his commandments is what ensures you you'll be spending your time in paradise after you die, it all makes sense. Incidentally, I'm not religious myself, so these is most certainly not MY beliefs.
Not to mention the fact that whatever exploit any aliens would send would be in seriously outdated code by the time we recieve it. Even if aliens on Alpha Centauri, the closest star, would be nearly 9 years out of date. Any information they could get about our systems would be over 4 years old as it reached them, and another 4+ years to get here. This story is really one of the most ridiculous things I've read in some time.
Heh. I have a PS/2 Model 80 sitting in my basement. It's a 20 Mhz version with 16 Megs of RAM and an XGA card (yes, the genuine thing). Sadly, only 350 Megs of HD, and I've got no SCSI card for it so I can't add any more. ESDI drives aren't easy to come by... Anyway, it also has OS/2 Warp installed on it. Installed from floppies... yikes I still remember what a chore that was. No network card, and a 2400 Baud internal modem. It ran fine last I powered it on.
Speaking of OS/2, though... I remember back in 97 when I worked at IBM, we had a customer with a standardized OS/2 Server/Client setup for their offices. Each server was a P/90 with 16 Megs of ram. It ran: DB2 LAN Server Lotus Notes Server NVDM CM/2 NetView ADSM
Each had around 4-16 clients connected to it. The larger offices had a slightly more powerful server with (gasp!) 32 Megs and a P133, and a separate print server. I can't remember that we ever had any performance problems, though the Lotus Notes Server occasionally hung and become unkillable, forcing a server reboot. OS/2 was a pretty amazing os, really.
Others have already responded to your deluge of misinformed bullshit, but I still feel the need to point out the following:
Redhat _did_ write a significant percentage of the software making up their distribution. For quite a few years now, RedHat have been the chief contributor to several extremely core pieces of what makes up a working linux distro, gcc, glibc and the kernel being most noteworthy. A large number of the advances in these components have been developed by RedHat employees and hence funded by RedHat's money.
In short: A lot of the software that _other distros_ are providing for free was developed with RedHat's time and money. So whatever distribution you run, you should WANT RedHat to make lots of money, since they put that money into advancing core linux features that YOUR distro will eventually get to benefit from, for free. And finally, as many have already pointed out, RedHat is NOT charging for the software in their enterprise distros, they're charging for support, and for the brand. If you're going to compare pricing with MS, don't compare the pricing with an MS software license, compare it with actually buying a support contract with a similar coverage and SLA. All that said, I have heard SuSE's equivalent support contracts are cheaper, and that a lot of people have had better experiences with SuSE's paid support for SLES than with RedHat's. And those people have valid criticisms to level against RedHat, unlike your misinformed and highly unfair rant.
What your doctor friend said about E rings more true about alcohol. That said, things do seem to point towards some pretty scary long-term effects of MDMA use , like permanently impaired serotonin production and the like. Heroin, is brutally addictive, and although the "lifestyle" of a heroin addict will often lead to an early death, the pure drug in itself has practically no long-term detrimental health effects, strangely enough. Not too familiar with the chronic effects of coke.
Ehrm... I'm really surprised if they haven't been able to replicate this feat. There was a stage production of robin hood here in sweden some years back where the arrow-splitting trick was done live, each performance. "Point blank range" of course, and I don't remember how often it worked on first try or not, but I do remember the article saying that failing was the exception.
On a side note, I once made a dart stick in the end of another dart. Purely blind luck; I'm not even a decent thrower.
Another crazy act of blind-luck marksmanship that I've done was shooting a fly in flight with a bb-gun. The body disappeared, but both wings slowly spiralled towards the ground. My jaw got there before them, tho.
> And viruses -- !?!?!? What is he smoking? How the heck do you get a
> virus from usenet?
I remember a newsreader called WinVN that I used back in ancient times. It had an option button labeled "Execute decoded attachments". I always thought about it as the "suicide button", and wondered if the programmer put it in as a joke, or maybe as way to make sure stupid people learned their lesson the hard way as quickly as possible...
Slashdot Mirror
> Science is always changing. A few thousand years ago, Science taught that the world was flat and
> that the earth was the center of the universe.
A few thousand years ago, _Science_ did not exist. Science as we know it today, that is, the application of the Scientific Method as formulated by Isaac Newton is less than 300 years old. The formulation of the scientific method led to a huge increase in accuracy of theories, which is why it's been such a terriffic tool to tell good theories from bad. There were, obviously, quite a few theories overthrown once we started doing actual _Science_.
Show me how many complete reversals there have been from one hundred years after the Scientific Method was formulated. I'm sure you'll find some, but the number will, as the original poster said, be "very few". Within the last 100 years, even fewer. Science does progress and theories do change, but at this point it is generally through refinement, rather than reversal.
Well, I _personally_ think it's a planet, and that Pluto is too, and that the whole discussion about "revoking" Pluto's status as a planet is ludicrous.
However, the problem is that there is no current "hard" definition of what constitutes a "planet".
Pluto "is" a planet because it was, at some point, defined as such by the international astronomical community. This has not occurred with 2003 UB313, and until it does (which I hope it will), it remains a "KBO", Kuiper Belt Object, or "TNO", Trans Neptunian Object, whichever silly placeholder term you prefer.
If you don't believe me, read the discussions over at bautforums, where such matters are discusssed by genuine, bona-fide astronomers, NASA folks, and others.
Pluto _is_ the last planet, since the new large KBOs like 2003 UB313 are still pending both official names and official classification as planets. And as you pointed out, Pluto might in fact lose its status as a planet, rather than 2003 UB313 and the others gaining that status.
And New Horizons won't be able to swing by it. If I remmeber right, the distance between 2003 UB313 and Pluto is significantly greater than the distance between Earth and Pluto. 2003 UB313 is really f*cking far away, and its orbit is also strangely tilted. By the time New Horizons is closing on Pluto, we'll have a number of really huge new telescopes in operations, and we may have discovered other KBO's that _will_ be possible for New Horizons to visit in its post-Pluto life.
What kernel are you running, and are you using any non-mainline patches? I've noticed fairly massive differences in NFS performance lately when comparing 2.6.14/2.6.15 & the -ck patchset. In summary, 2.6.14 had crappy NFS performance for me in every incarnation. 2.6.15 mainline is much better, although some small decrease occurred beteen -rc5 and the release version. The -ck patched kernels have _atrocious_ NFS performance. With 2.6.15-ck1, I can't get more than 60Mbit over my gigabit network, whereas 2.6.15-rc5 (which had the highest NFS performance of the kernels I've tested recently) gave me over 500Mbit.
The other replies to your post, with tuning tips, are more likely to fix your problem, though, but I figured this might nonetheless be interesting as a data point, especially if the standard Ubuntu kernel uses any of Con Kolivas's interactivity patches from the -ck kernel patchset.
Yes. The shuttle-derived HLV will be able to put more in orbit than the Sat-V. It will be able to take 125 Metric tons to LEO.
As an old OS/2 user and consultant with a customer that still runs it, and who I got called in to solve a problem for as late as 2004, I'll take Linux over OS/2 for reliability any day. OS/2 was/is generally a fine OS, but I've seen more flaws and strange hangs and crashes with it than I ever have with Linus. Moreover, several of the OS/2 flaws I've seen turned out to remain unfixable no matter how high up into IBM support they were kicked. I contrast, I've never personally encountered a Linux problem that couldn't get fixed, and fixed quickly. No Linux server I've set up for this particular customer has ever had unplanned downtime.
No argument when it comes to VMS, though - they run that too, on their REALLY mission critical back end servers. I don't have a lot of familiarity with VMS myself, but everything I hear about it points to it being an absolutely _astoundingly_ roboust and reliable OS.
Somewhat likewise with Solaris. I've never been overly impressed with Solaris, but lack of reliability certainly isn't one of its flaws.
No, neither of those would work. They wouldn't even leave a particularly impressive string of craters. No nuke we can build is going to do anything impressive against an object the size of the moon. Just deal with it. On astronomical scales, our biggest nukes like mosquitos trying to kamikaze an aircraft carrier.
Not even remotely doable, fortunately. The largest craters on the moon represent impacts that released energies several orders of magnitude greater than the world's combined nuclear arsenal, and even that literally just "scratched the surface".
We might at best be able to blow up a VERY minor asteroid. People vastly overestimate the power of nukes.
News flash: At this time and for the near future, "nuclear energy" means uranium fission, not deuterium fusion. That's what's being discussed when people debate "nuclear energy".
The amount of deuterium for fusion is encouraging for the future, but we haven't mastered more-energy-out-than-put-in for fusion reactors yet.
You missed the point of the original post.
>for the next boot only.
Note the "only". If the new kernel hangs at boot, or spontano-reboots, the next reboot after that will be with the old and safe kernel. Great for remote or headless/keyboardless machines. Grub has no equivalent to this, and its a reason I sometimes still use lilo.
I've never looked at mplayer's source code, but the fact that last I looked, the default makefiles still use -O4 (a non-existing optimization level) have always made me wonder a bit about the devs. Still, ugly code and Gentoo-noob style compiler opts notwithsdanding, mplayer remains the best media player/encoder around, as far as I'm concerned. Interesting paradox.
C'mon, you pizza-munching, jolt-guzzling lardass geeks, you know it's true. Trading 8 Kgs of useless fat for 8 Kgs of uberleet dual-core portable for your daily lugging-around weight can be nothing but good!
:)
Oh, and Happy New Year, everyone!
Let me first say that I completely agree that nuclear rockets are the way to go, and that putting them in use is long overdue. I also wanted to personally bitch-slap each and every one of the moronic "stop Cassini" protesters.
Concern over the use of nuclear energy isn't inherently stupid, though. I have to object every time I hear someone call it "clean". The waste is extremely nasty, but can contain it rather than (barring accidents) spewing it out into the environment. I still haven't seen any convincing solution dealing with nuclear waste in the long term. I'd say nuclear engergy as a solution to energy production here on earth is problematic, but still better than most of the currently available alternatives. The problem is that people tend to declare themselves either "pro nuclear" or "anti nuclear" without being very rational about it. They pick one standpoint and "believe" in it like it was a religion.
Storage of waste products is not, however, an issue when using nuclear energy for spaceflight. Chucking the waste into space seems to be pretty much the best way I can think of for getting rid of it.
> The only issue with these engines when they _were running_ back in the 70's
> were material issues.
Those weren't gas core nuclear engines, though, but solid-core, which really aren't all that interesting. Gas core looks the way to go, but they're still only drawing-board designs. To my knowledge, no gas core nuclear engine has ever been actually constructed, even for experimental use.
> I do agree computing power isn't the only factor, but it helps greatly.
.1 C!), it's environmentally rephensible and politically impossible. Some of the gas-core thermal nuclear propulsion concepts look extremely promising, though. Once we get these things working and safe, Mars will be a breeze and I'll start looking forward to manned exploration of Titan. *grin*
Re-reading my sentence i notice that I'd dropped a word in it. It was supposed to be "not one of the primary factors", not "not one of the factors". Of course it matters, but it matters comparatively little. Nontheless, for actual onboard computer systems, in particular life support and the like, roboustness outweighs performance completely. You'd be surprised how "puny" the CPUs of even the latest spacecraft are, compared to mainstream CPU. Radiation hardening comes at a big cost.
As for the second remark about space-based launches via the ISS, sadly, that's not an option. The ISS is useless for that purpose, due to its orbit. Which is one of the many reasons space enthusiasts despise the ISS; it's extremely costly, yet so many compromises have been made to its design that it's useless for most of the things it should have been useful for.
Nonetheless, the new CEV/CLV design looks pretty good. Unlike the shuttle, it actually scales up for more interesting things. The CLV could put as much mass as the entire ISS to date into orbit in just two launches.
Still, what would make things really interesting would be some nuclear propulsion methods. While the capabilities of an Orion-type launcher is drool-inducing (8 _million_ tons ground launch, and top speeds up to
Well...
No problems with my 4-button wireless trackball here.
Multiple resolutions/refreshates in X, fixed with xrandr, and available through Preferences->Screen resolution in Gnome. Works better than in Windows as far as I'm concerned, since unlike Windows, Linux/X doesn't forget my f*ing choices and customizations every time I upgrade the display driver.
Binary programs that can run on different distros doesn't seem to be a problem. Just look at the linux versions for ported games, such as UT, quake3/4, DoomIII, etc. Building an LSB-compliant rpm should also do the trick, although admittedly, the LSB isn't enough for desktop apps. As a last resort, you could always build a statically linked binary.
Copy paste of mixed data... grant you that one. It's not something I can remember even trying to do, but I would assume it won't work with the current clipboard implementation in gnome, at least.
Further:
* Using Konqueror (file browser), double clicking on a text file opened it in read-only preview mode, to actually edit a file, you had to right-click then open with.
I don't use KDE, but in Gnome/Nautilus, this behavior is easily configurable, and I would assume the same is true for KDE. Default behavior in gnome is to open in an editor.
* Also, I couldn't figure out how to create a desktop shortcut to an app (that might have been me).
Again, gnome user here, not kde. If it's in the app menu, just left-click and drag to desktop. Otherwise, right click desktop and "Create Launcher". Pretty intuitive if you ask me.
* If you select copy and then close the app you copied from, the selection disappears.
Yes, this IS an annoyance, and still there by default in FC4's version of gnome. If I remember right, it's finally fixed in Gnome 2.12, though. There used to a little util named "gnome-clipboard-demon" you could install to fix it, but really... that ought to have been fixed by default long ago.
> The first manned mission to the Moon used a computer with the power of a typical modrn graphing > calculator.
Indeed, but computing power is not exactly one of the factors in manned space travel. Unmanned, robotic space exploration benefits far more from newer computers and comms tech.
> The Saturn V rocket that took them there was in essence a giant Estes model rocket (black
> powder)
Umm... _what_? This could _possibly_ be said about the SRBs on the shuttle stack, but not the Saturn V. I suggest you read up on the Sat V just to see what an incredble fucking marvel of engineering it was.
That said, I do agree we damn well should have had people on Mars by now. There IS a _massive_ difference in difficulty between going to the moon and going to mars, but fuck it, we've had over 30 years from the moon landings to now. It could certainly have been done by now if there had been a dedicated effort.
Context, my friend, context. The OP should have used fluid erosion and avoided the trap, but nonetheless, on _Mars_, water is the only likely liquid.
That said, I can think of other and more likely options, really. Fine dust can act surprisingly similar to a liquid in certain circumstances. I agree that the images there are quite eyecatching, and, but dust sinking into cracks between larger slabs of bedrock could be another explanation. The question, of course, is what's making those slabs move apart, if that's the case? Melting of subsurface ice could be one such reason, in which case the above feature would still be an indicator of present day water related geology, just not in the way the OP guessed.
I have to say that the apparent lack of "blueberries" in the dust at the bottom of the "channels" is _quite_ interesting. Now I need to check unmannedspaceflight and bautforums to see what the more knowledgeable bullshit-busters over there have had to say about this intriguing little feature.
Perhaps because death and worldy suffering is irrellevant in the "big picture"? If you believe in god/heaven, then the material world is really just a "testing ground". Whether you live for 110 happy years or 20 in utter misery, it's still an infinitisimmal period of your _existence_, since most of it will be spent in the afterlife. Hence, if serving god first and living up to his commandments is what ensures you you'll be spending your time in paradise after you die, it all makes sense.
Incidentally, I'm not religious myself, so these is most certainly not MY beliefs.
Not to mention the fact that whatever exploit any aliens would send would be in seriously outdated code by the time we recieve it. Even if aliens on Alpha Centauri, the closest star, would be nearly 9 years out of date. Any information they could get about our systems would be over 4 years old as it reached them, and another 4+ years to get here.
This story is really one of the most ridiculous things I've read in some time.
Heh. I have a PS/2 Model 80 sitting in my basement. It's a 20 Mhz version with 16 Megs of RAM and an XGA card (yes, the genuine thing). Sadly, only 350 Megs of HD, and I've got no SCSI card for it so I can't add any more. ESDI drives aren't easy to come by...
Anyway, it also has OS/2 Warp installed on it. Installed from floppies... yikes I still remember what a chore that was. No network card, and a 2400 Baud internal modem. It ran fine last I powered it on.
Speaking of OS/2, though... I remember back in 97 when I worked at IBM, we had a customer with a standardized OS/2 Server/Client setup for their offices. Each server was a P/90 with 16 Megs of ram.
It ran:
DB2
LAN Server
Lotus Notes Server
NVDM
CM/2
NetView
ADSM
Each had around 4-16 clients connected to it. The larger offices had a slightly more powerful server with (gasp!) 32 Megs and a P133, and a separate print server. I can't remember that we ever had any performance problems, though the Lotus Notes Server occasionally hung and become unkillable, forcing a server reboot.
OS/2 was a pretty amazing os, really.
> But a second point would be to mention that SUSE is not a server
> distribution.
SLES, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, is not a server distribution? Now, I'm a RedHat guy myself, but that's _really_ unfair.
I agree with most of the rest of what you said, though. The time it took them just to set things up raises a huge red flag in itself.
Others have already responded to your deluge of misinformed bullshit, but I still feel the need to point out the following:
Redhat _did_ write a significant percentage of the software making up their distribution. For quite a few years now, RedHat have been the chief contributor to several extremely core pieces of what makes up a working linux distro, gcc, glibc and the kernel being most noteworthy. A large number of the advances in these components have been developed by RedHat employees and hence funded by RedHat's money.
In short:
A lot of the software that _other distros_ are providing for free was developed with RedHat's time and money. So whatever distribution you run, you should WANT RedHat to make lots of money, since they put that money into advancing core linux features that YOUR distro will eventually get to benefit from, for free.
And finally, as many have already pointed out, RedHat is NOT charging for the software in their enterprise distros, they're charging for support, and for the brand. If you're going to compare pricing with MS, don't compare the pricing with an MS software license, compare it with actually buying a support contract with a similar coverage and SLA.
All that said, I have heard SuSE's equivalent support contracts are cheaper, and that a lot of people have had better experiences with SuSE's paid support for SLES than with RedHat's. And those people have valid criticisms to level against RedHat, unlike your misinformed and highly unfair rant.
What your doctor friend said about E rings more true about alcohol. That said, things do seem to point towards some pretty scary long-term effects of MDMA use , like permanently impaired serotonin production and the like.
Heroin, is brutally addictive, and although the "lifestyle" of a heroin addict will often lead to an early death, the pure drug in itself has practically no long-term detrimental health effects, strangely enough. Not too familiar with the chronic effects of coke.
Ehrm... I'm really surprised if they haven't been able to replicate this feat. There was a stage production of robin hood here in sweden some years back where the arrow-splitting trick was done live, each performance. "Point blank range" of course, and I don't remember how often it worked on first try or not, but I do remember the article saying that failing was the exception.
On a side note, I once made a dart stick in the end of another dart. Purely blind luck; I'm not even a decent thrower.
Another crazy act of blind-luck marksmanship that I've done was shooting a fly in flight with a bb-gun. The body disappeared, but both wings slowly spiralled towards the ground. My jaw got there before them, tho.
> And viruses -- !?!?!? What is he smoking? How the heck do you get a > virus from usenet? I remember a newsreader called WinVN that I used back in ancient times. It had an option button labeled "Execute decoded attachments". I always thought about it as the "suicide button", and wondered if the programmer put it in as a joke, or maybe as way to make sure stupid people learned their lesson the hard way as quickly as possible...