I'm fairly sure there have been no cases of DNA-riding diseases.
In life (or quasi-life, as viruses are), nothing is impossible. Retroviruses do exactly that---store themselves inside the host's DNA. These don't necessarily destroy the cell and may even lie dormant for a long time.
Case in point: I just wasted three days trying to make Debian work on a BRAND-NEW Dell. I gave up.
Well, if you are trying to do something with a BRAND-NEW computer, about which you know nothing (most likely, you don't know by heart what video card it has, what ethernet card (if not integrated into motherboard, and in that case, the drivers for motherboard) or what sound card it has---and these are basic things), you are going to struggle. For me, the first-time formatting my computers was always a pain (and yes, I was installing "user-friendly" Windows), because I never knew what hardware I had until then...
Actually, do you know what I do when I can't figure out what video card, etc. I have and I don't really want to open up the computer to look up the serial number? I boot up my computer with Knoppix---except for that one time when I was booting my roommate's computer with a gigabit ethernet card ("cutting edge" so to speak), it found all the hardwares correctly, and I just look at the system message (which, as it happens, is more informative than Windows system messages are) so that I can figure out what to do.
although the particle after a year will be only 46 nanometres behind a photon that left at the same time, according to the laws of special relativity from the point of view of the particle the the photon will _still_ seem to be traveling at the speed of light?!
Yes, and don't forget that although we let them go for a year in our point of view, from the point of the proton, it (and the light) has been moving for only about a fraction of second (egh---I don't want to do a detailed calculation in the middle of night; it has to do with something called "time dilation").
I know what you mean and I do take peer review seriously. The fact that this document was written by John Walker is enough for me to believe that there is truth in this. In any case, here is the Science article about it.
'Didn't RTFA, but when I saw the "fourmilab" in the domain, I thought, "that's a pun on FermiLab---that's gotta be a joke."
It would take an awful lot of energy (maybe even infinite, I forget exactly and don't want to look it up) to get up to the speed of light for a particular object. As that object speeds up it takes more and more energy to get it to go faster (E=MC^2). By the time you even get going as fast as 10% the speed of light it would take a tremendous amount of energy and, especially right now, mankind just can't produce that amount of energy.
Other posts mention how much energy it would take for acceleration to the speed of light (i.e. infinite amount), but FYI, E=mc^2 is the low-speed limit (i.e. v = 0) of the equation: E=mc^s/sqrt(1-v^2/C^2).
Well a margin of error would be caused by an inacuracy of the measurements,
In counting statistics (such as this one), margin of error is caused by "sampling error", not measurement error (since all measurements are "digital": either 1 or 0).
Margin of error is always there---even if you disregard that the sample may not be representative of what they wanted to measure (i.e. the sample had a certain bias toward a cetain group of people, etc.), there is always a random sampling error, unless you sample the whole population, and in this case, it is clear they didn't sample the whole population.
First, they chose a few websites out of so many; but let's say we just wanted to know about the visitors of those websites (as you said) not the whole Internet.
Even then, secondly, they chose only two days out of so many days to run their test. If they had chosen some other two-day period, they would have gotten a different result, most likely (and gosh, they chose a "two-day" period---that's gotta be subject to some periodic effect of which day of the week those two days happen to fall on).
All in all, I wouldn't take TFA too seriously---it looked like it was written by some high school student, or has standard of journalism fallen that low since I read mass media last time?
Are you saying that for the majority of books, if the copyright had only lasted, say, 10 years, the writers would have argued, that it is too short and that it is not worth writing the book? I doubt that.
Should I cite Tolkien who protested the pirated version of his The Lord of Rings being sold in U.S. and appealed to fans not to buy the pirated version? (O.K. Now, I don't remember how far from the original publication of TLOR it was, but the point remains valid.) I would think authors do care about their intellectual property, and some things (books, work of fiction) stay "up-to-date" for much longer than some other things (software, some new invention).
Besides, who says the purpose of copyright is to encourage creation of original work? I think you are confusing copyright with patent. So far as I know, the purpose of copyright is for the protection of the intellectual property.
Would you say (if you live in U.S.) that the first amendment is incentive to speak up and criticize the government? Of course not! But it is a protection of one's right to do so.
But it's true! Your used to be allowed to request a copy of Eton tables in math exams, and be provided with one. The last time I asked a proctor for a copy they just looked at me completely blankly as if they'd never heard of it.
Why would you want to look it up when you can just use a simple (infinite) Taylor polynomial to calculate it to any precision you want? Why settle for 5 significant figures?:) Wait.... hmm, is Taylor polynomial copyrighted/patented? Maybe that's why?
I think that a very limited term of copyright is useful to thr promotion of progress...
Strictly limted ( 5/10 years or only as long as supported ) and no patents
I'm not sure if such blanket solution will even be fair. There are some materials that 5-10 years is too short for copyright period: books, work of art, etc. Copyright covers far more than software, and, well, for software, 5-10 years will still be too long (anyone 'still use Windows 98 or Office 98?).
I think US currently has the copyright law set up so that it's effective for a few decades after the author's death---now, I think that's just absurd. Why can't we have copyrights expire along with the author's life? It seems to be that would be just the right time to release everything to the public domain.
This is not an argument against anything. Everything machine is reducible to software, and every software is reducible to machine. It is a distinction without a difference. To reuse my example above, chemical process patents are not generally considered controversial here, yet every argument against software patents can be used against them because they are the exact same kind of thing.
I guess this is one major difference that sets software apart from everything else: R&D cost. As far as I know, R&D for chemicals and proteins (i.e. medicine) is expensive, even after taking the salaries of the researchers/inventors out of the consideration, due to the infrastructure, equipment, and raw material necessary even just to build the prototype. So, for someone (and nowadays, most likely a company) to even get started on a new invention/innovation, he has to have some sort of guarantee that if he succeeds, he will be able to recover his costs and even proft, perhaps---thus, a simple solution is legalized monopoly (and the price-markup that necessarily follows).
On the other hand, software patent? What R&D cost exactly goes into it? Sure, programmers might get paid a lot (or at least there was a time when that was the case...), but if a lone-coder is making a program, other than the so-called "opportunity cost" what other cost is there? Hardware purchase cost? Perhaps---but that's negligible, compared to other expenses (i.e. "cost of living") throughout a year. Multiple hardware purchases (for testing, etc.)? But that would only be limited to programs that deal with the hardware directly, and those don't constitute a majority.
So, with software, the developer doesn't have to worry about recovering the costs because there isn't that much to begin with (now, profit motive is something else, but why should we make a law that make a few people wealthy beyond reason?)---so, there isn't that much incentive software patent gives to innovate. Rather, by creating an artificial barrier-to-entry in the market, it stifles innovation (and yes, the same argument may be used for even traditional patents, but in those cases, it can be argued that the incentive outweighs this).
Having one single standard design is more important than having best design. Moreover, open source projects have very limited resources and it is better not to spread them among projects solving the same task. If projects working in parallel join, they are usually able to achieve more than each of them separately.
'Completely agree with your point---that is, as long as the "distro" (i.e. LFS) I use becomes the standard distro. Anyone who says otherwise is a dim-wit.
It's like trying to choose a standard language---it's not going to work, just as Esperanto didn't.
PS. Gosh, we can't even choose a standard unit system (one thing that might have the most benefit from having a uniform standard)! And I'm not talking about U.S. using "feet" and "miles"---even in scientific fields, SI isn't as standard as some would have the laypeople believe. However, in different specialized fields (spectroscopy, electrodynamics, etc.) there are "dominant" unit system (because that particular way of writing things out turns out to be convenient)---in the end, the best thing to do is let things be; and may the best distro/project win!
Every time I write a program to do the simplest thing on my TI-84+ graphing calculator (such as convert celsius to fahrenheit for instance) people gape at me with awe and amazement and ask, how did you DO that?
Now, that's nothing, and it's not much of labor-saving either. If you really want to challenge yourself (egh, some would call this a challenge....), try programming your calculator so that it can do prime factorization (always useful when you have to prime factorize something like this 67896421 (in less than 5 minutes)) or if you haven't taken chemistry yet, display (well... this isn't really "calculation" since it's pure memorization) electron configuration of any given element (i.e. atomic number) and have it account for exceptions as well. Now, I did all of these (not that it's much to brag, but 'probably better than bragging about doing a little offset-adding and scale-converting) in my spare time during class in my freshman year.
And, when you are done, to make up for your machine-using-heresy in math class, you can learn how to take a square root by hand. (Mind you, the webmaster's German, so unless you are from Europe, you are going to get confused for a sec--just think reverse.)
In Quebec for example, you're graded such that under 60% is a FAIL. In Ontario though, under 50% is a fail. (Would you trust ANYONE in ANY field who only knows half of what they should know?)
Er, IDK, in the college I attend, in some departments, if you get a 50/100 on a test, you get a solid A (of course, subject to the curve conditions). And considering that nothing you learn in high school ('cept maybe the 3 R's) is going to be useful in your future (professional, skill-requiring) job, I would say most people don't know 50% of the knowledge accumulated in their field.
Well, I might not be eligible to answer, since I got out of high school a few years back. However, when I was in high school, not too many people knew about technical stuff...
There were a few people who knew how to program (basic stuffs) in C++ (er, but it was for AP Computer Science...), and I haven't heard of anyone knowing anything about robotic or electronics (especially since no one builds stereos at home anymore, as my electronics lab professor complains). Chances are, there probably aren't that many people in a given high school (assuming, of course, a non-magnet, non-private, non-anything-overly-special high school) who are even able to participate with what they know.
That said, I don't know, I probably would have been interested in building simple robots, like a moth car. I don't think the theory behind the electronics of those stuffs are too difficult to teach (I mean, unless you want to go down to fundamental level, it's just basic things about feedback and how the components work). Or, digital circuits (in my basic semiconductor lab in college) were cool, and I think those things require even less theory to be learned than some analog electronic devices.
If anything, a workshop is probably something that more people can participate in and might even be interested (I don't think too many people have breadboards, oscilloscopes, DMM's, and things like those that you need when you are doing any electronics).
But I wouldn't get my hopes up... Especially if the high schools you are targetting is anything like my school (mine was academically mediocre, which is another way to say "average"), then you will probably have at most 10-20 people (that's just about (an overestimate, probably) how many students from my high school went to a field of science in a reputable school in the year I graduated, I think) out of a campus of 1800 who will be interested in those things.
By the time you get to college, mathematics is not about arithmetic anymore, and complaining that math students' education is being stunted by using tools to grind the numbers is essentially the same thing as saying astronomy students' educations are being stunted because they aren't building their own telescopes anymore.
The main problem (at least in US) is that students are exposed to calculators too early. They shouldn't be so eager to whip out a calculator when they see 43*10 or even 25*5. It's quicker to do those calculations in head, but using calculators too early in their lives (whew...) builds that bad habit.
Use of calculators should be limited to really number-crunching-intensive tasks such as (so far as I've seen...i.e. undergraduate level) least-squares fit (btw, does anyone know a program that can do least-squares fit while taking different uncertainty of data points into account?), prime factorization of really large numbers (er, 67896421?...hmm, I think this number may be a prime... my graphing calculator (TI-83) is taking a really long time prime factorizing this....), and such.
Oh, and here's something I really don't like that some lower division physics students do: They plug numbers into variables too early, before they worked out to the answer in symbols--they would probably do that less if they didn't have a calculator.
to advance through the classes and do the tests quickly enough, you pretty much had to be able to visualize all of that upon seeing an equation for the first time.
Also, what some students seem to have trouble with is, well, they have to be able to "take derivative" of a graph. Some students really have trouble with these things because they don't understand exactly what a derivative is, beyond those nifty rules (power rules, product rules, derivative of trig functions, etc.) they learned.
Heck, it's hard to get into the library without a UC-issued ID, and even then you can't take anything out of the library.
Well, the undergraduate library (Moffit/Main Stack) does require a UC ID, but I think if you don't have one and you have a valid (i.e. "scholarly") reason for access to library you can talk to the people at the main library (Doe Library). So, I don't think it's such an unreasonable policy, especially considering what a large place the main stack is and how difficult it would be to keep that place maintained if anybody from anywhere could get in. (And most departmental libraries don't have such restrictions.)
Now, what's been bothering me more is that there are special sections of the library called "graduate library" (and I believe all of classics library is like that....) to which undergraduates are not allowed unless accompanied by a patron^H^H^H^H^H^Hgraduate student. I think you can get special permission for that, too, from your department or something if you have a reason to go there, but still.
Now, just how many out of the 15 millions of books can one student body actually use at one time?
Heh--the organization of the main stack is horrible, and the Bancroft Library--well, if it's non-circulating, couldn't it at least open longer? But, what I've found is that, well, the fewer the students who use the library as a library (not as some sort of exam-time study hall), the easier it is for me to check out books (without recalling) and hold onto them (without being recalled).:)
To my knowledge, physics doesn't designate numbers to dimensions. They don't say "This is dimension number one, this is dimension number two, etc" Time could be the fourth, then again it could be the first. You don't hear physicists saying things like "that only happens in the fourth dimension" for a reason. Which comes first or last is only a matter of perception. It doesn't matter either way.
Actually, when people write the four-vectors, usually time is the first component--the 0th component (so maybe 0th dimension?). Well, I guess I will get more into that in a semester or two. BTW, time by itself isn't... properly a dimension. it's "ct" not "t" that forms a dimension. Now you are using a unit system that has c = 1 that's a whole different matter, but...
I think something big needs to happen - massive hole in IE exposed or something - to get large companies to bother with the...
Hey, I have an idea. What if someone writes a program (a virus, if you will) that will replicate itself from computer to computer on a LAN without any user intervention, flooding the network, but only on Windows computers, not *nix or Mac?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the problem is, it only works under MacOS Classic---it wouldn't have anything to do with *nix.
In life (or quasi-life, as viruses are), nothing is impossible. Retroviruses do exactly that---store themselves inside the host's DNA. These don't necessarily destroy the cell and may even lie dormant for a long time.
Well, if you are trying to do something with a BRAND-NEW computer, about which you know nothing (most likely, you don't know by heart what video card it has, what ethernet card (if not integrated into motherboard, and in that case, the drivers for motherboard) or what sound card it has---and these are basic things), you are going to struggle. For me, the first-time formatting my computers was always a pain (and yes, I was installing "user-friendly" Windows), because I never knew what hardware I had until then...
Actually, do you know what I do when I can't figure out what video card, etc. I have and I don't really want to open up the computer to look up the serial number? I boot up my computer with Knoppix---except for that one time when I was booting my roommate's computer with a gigabit ethernet card ("cutting edge" so to speak), it found all the hardwares correctly, and I just look at the system message (which, as it happens, is more informative than Windows system messages are) so that I can figure out what to do.
GNU, seriously, is not Unix (yeah, yeah, you are saying that the name doesn't matter, but your tone says otherwise). I quote from gnu.org itself:
(GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX"; it is pronounced "guh-noo.")
Any questions?
Yes, and don't forget that although we let them go for a year in our point of view, from the point of the proton, it (and the light) has been moving for only about a fraction of second (egh---I don't want to do a detailed calculation in the middle of night; it has to do with something called "time dilation").
'Didn't RTFA, but when I saw the "fourmilab" in the domain, I thought, "that's a pun on FermiLab---that's gotta be a joke."
Other posts mention how much energy it would take for acceleration to the speed of light (i.e. infinite amount), but FYI, E=mc^2 is the low-speed limit (i.e. v = 0) of the equation: E=mc^s/sqrt(1-v^2/C^2).
In counting statistics (such as this one), margin of error is caused by "sampling error", not measurement error (since all measurements are "digital": either 1 or 0).
Margin of error is always there---even if you disregard that the sample may not be representative of what they wanted to measure (i.e. the sample had a certain bias toward a cetain group of people, etc.), there is always a random sampling error, unless you sample the whole population, and in this case, it is clear they didn't sample the whole population.
First, they chose a few websites out of so many; but let's say we just wanted to know about the visitors of those websites (as you said) not the whole Internet.
Even then, secondly, they chose only two days out of so many days to run their test. If they had chosen some other two-day period, they would have gotten a different result, most likely (and gosh, they chose a "two-day" period---that's gotta be subject to some periodic effect of which day of the week those two days happen to fall on).
All in all, I wouldn't take TFA too seriously---it looked like it was written by some high school student, or has standard of journalism fallen that low since I read mass media last time?
Where in the Constitution? I can't find a single word "copyright" or even "patent" in the whole of the Constitution and the Amendments.
Am I missing something?
Should I cite Tolkien who protested the pirated version of his The Lord of Rings being sold in U.S. and appealed to fans not to buy the pirated version? (O.K. Now, I don't remember how far from the original publication of TLOR it was, but the point remains valid.) I would think authors do care about their intellectual property, and some things (books, work of fiction) stay "up-to-date" for much longer than some other things (software, some new invention).
Besides, who says the purpose of copyright is to encourage creation of original work? I think you are confusing copyright with patent. So far as I know, the purpose of copyright is for the protection of the intellectual property.
Would you say (if you live in U.S.) that the first amendment is incentive to speak up and criticize the government? Of course not! But it is a protection of one's right to do so.
How about, "In Europe, Only Old People Patent Software"?
Why would you want to look it up when you can just use a simple (infinite) Taylor polynomial to calculate it to any precision you want? Why settle for 5 significant figures? :) Wait.... hmm, is Taylor polynomial copyrighted/patented? Maybe that's why?
Strictly limted ( 5/10 years or only as long as supported ) and no patents
I'm not sure if such blanket solution will even be fair. There are some materials that 5-10 years is too short for copyright period: books, work of art, etc. Copyright covers far more than software, and, well, for software, 5-10 years will still be too long (anyone 'still use Windows 98 or Office 98?).
I think US currently has the copyright law set up so that it's effective for a few decades after the author's death---now, I think that's just absurd. Why can't we have copyrights expire along with the author's life? It seems to be that would be just the right time to release everything to the public domain.
I guess this is one major difference that sets software apart from everything else: R&D cost. As far as I know, R&D for chemicals and proteins (i.e. medicine) is expensive, even after taking the salaries of the researchers/inventors out of the consideration, due to the infrastructure, equipment, and raw material necessary even just to build the prototype. So, for someone (and nowadays, most likely a company) to even get started on a new invention/innovation, he has to have some sort of guarantee that if he succeeds, he will be able to recover his costs and even proft, perhaps---thus, a simple solution is legalized monopoly (and the price-markup that necessarily follows).
On the other hand, software patent? What R&D cost exactly goes into it? Sure, programmers might get paid a lot (or at least there was a time when that was the case...), but if a lone-coder is making a program, other than the so-called "opportunity cost" what other cost is there? Hardware purchase cost? Perhaps---but that's negligible, compared to other expenses (i.e. "cost of living") throughout a year. Multiple hardware purchases (for testing, etc.)? But that would only be limited to programs that deal with the hardware directly, and those don't constitute a majority.
So, with software, the developer doesn't have to worry about recovering the costs because there isn't that much to begin with (now, profit motive is something else, but why should we make a law that make a few people wealthy beyond reason?)---so, there isn't that much incentive software patent gives to innovate. Rather, by creating an artificial barrier-to-entry in the market, it stifles innovation (and yes, the same argument may be used for even traditional patents, but in those cases, it can be argued that the incentive outweighs this).
'Completely agree with your point---that is, as long as the "distro" (i.e. LFS) I use becomes the standard distro. Anyone who says otherwise is a dim-wit.
It's like trying to choose a standard language---it's not going to work, just as Esperanto didn't.
PS. Gosh, we can't even choose a standard unit system (one thing that might have the most benefit from having a uniform standard)! And I'm not talking about U.S. using "feet" and "miles"---even in scientific fields, SI isn't as standard as some would have the laypeople believe. However, in different specialized fields (spectroscopy, electrodynamics, etc.) there are "dominant" unit system (because that particular way of writing things out turns out to be convenient)---in the end, the best thing to do is let things be; and may the best distro/project win!
From all evidences, not only is he an English speaker, but also a native English speaker.
A case in point (from GP):
(yes, I'm getting board of downloads pages already too)
Only a native English speaker would misspell "bored" as "board".
Of course, unless he really meant he was getting "boards" of downloads pages, but what that "boards" would mean escapes me.
I didn't know the site, and didn't RTFA either, but I would think it's a different kind of moderation. A /. moderator cannot delete your article.
Now, that's nothing, and it's not much of labor-saving either. If you really want to challenge yourself (egh, some would call this a challenge....), try programming your calculator so that it can do prime factorization (always useful when you have to prime factorize something like this 67896421 (in less than 5 minutes)) or if you haven't taken chemistry yet, display (well... this isn't really "calculation" since it's pure memorization) electron configuration of any given element (i.e. atomic number) and have it account for exceptions as well. Now, I did all of these (not that it's much to brag, but 'probably better than bragging about doing a little offset-adding and scale-converting) in my spare time during class in my freshman year.
And, when you are done, to make up for your machine-using-heresy in math class, you can learn how to take a square root by hand. (Mind you, the webmaster's German, so unless you are from Europe, you are going to get confused for a sec--just think reverse.)
Er, IDK, in the college I attend, in some departments, if you get a 50/100 on a test, you get a solid A (of course, subject to the curve conditions). And considering that nothing you learn in high school ('cept maybe the 3 R's) is going to be useful in your future (professional, skill-requiring) job, I would say most people don't know 50% of the knowledge accumulated in their field.
There were a few people who knew how to program (basic stuffs) in C++ (er, but it was for AP Computer Science...), and I haven't heard of anyone knowing anything about robotic or electronics (especially since no one builds stereos at home anymore, as my electronics lab professor complains). Chances are, there probably aren't that many people in a given high school (assuming, of course, a non-magnet, non-private, non-anything-overly-special high school) who are even able to participate with what they know.
That said, I don't know, I probably would have been interested in building simple robots, like a moth car. I don't think the theory behind the electronics of those stuffs are too difficult to teach (I mean, unless you want to go down to fundamental level, it's just basic things about feedback and how the components work). Or, digital circuits (in my basic semiconductor lab in college) were cool, and I think those things require even less theory to be learned than some analog electronic devices.
If anything, a workshop is probably something that more people can participate in and might even be interested (I don't think too many people have breadboards, oscilloscopes, DMM's, and things like those that you need when you are doing any electronics).
But I wouldn't get my hopes up... Especially if the high schools you are targetting is anything like my school (mine was academically mediocre, which is another way to say "average"), then you will probably have at most 10-20 people (that's just about (an overestimate, probably) how many students from my high school went to a field of science in a reputable school in the year I graduated, I think) out of a campus of 1800 who will be interested in those things.
The main problem (at least in US) is that students are exposed to calculators too early. They shouldn't be so eager to whip out a calculator when they see 43*10 or even 25*5. It's quicker to do those calculations in head, but using calculators too early in their lives (whew...) builds that bad habit.
Use of calculators should be limited to really number-crunching-intensive tasks such as (so far as I've seen...i.e. undergraduate level) least-squares fit (btw, does anyone know a program that can do least-squares fit while taking different uncertainty of data points into account?), prime factorization of really large numbers (er, 67896421?...hmm, I think this number may be a prime... my graphing calculator (TI-83) is taking a really long time prime factorizing this....), and such.
Oh, and here's something I really don't like that some lower division physics students do: They plug numbers into variables too early, before they worked out to the answer in symbols--they would probably do that less if they didn't have a calculator.
Also, what some students seem to have trouble with is, well, they have to be able to "take derivative" of a graph. Some students really have trouble with these things because they don't understand exactly what a derivative is, beyond those nifty rules (power rules, product rules, derivative of trig functions, etc.) they learned.
Well, the undergraduate library (Moffit/Main Stack) does require a UC ID, but I think if you don't have one and you have a valid (i.e. "scholarly") reason for access to library you can talk to the people at the main library (Doe Library). So, I don't think it's such an unreasonable policy, especially considering what a large place the main stack is and how difficult it would be to keep that place maintained if anybody from anywhere could get in. (And most departmental libraries don't have such restrictions.)
Now, what's been bothering me more is that there are special sections of the library called "graduate library" (and I believe all of classics library is like that....) to which undergraduates are not allowed unless accompanied by a patron^H^H^H^H^H^Hgraduate student. I think you can get special permission for that, too, from your department or something if you have a reason to go there, but still.
Now, just how many out of the 15 millions of books can one student body actually use at one time?
Heh--the organization of the main stack is horrible, and the Bancroft Library--well, if it's non-circulating, couldn't it at least open longer? But, what I've found is that, well, the fewer the students who use the library as a library (not as some sort of exam-time study hall), the easier it is for me to check out books (without recalling) and hold onto them (without being recalled). :)
Actually, when people write the four-vectors, usually time is the first component--the 0th component (so maybe 0th dimension?). Well, I guess I will get more into that in a semester or two. BTW, time by itself isn't... properly a dimension. it's "ct" not "t" that forms a dimension. Now you are using a unit system that has c = 1 that's a whole different matter, but...
Hey, I have an idea. What if someone writes a program (a virus, if you will) that will replicate itself from computer to computer on a LAN without any user intervention, flooding the network, but only on Windows computers, not *nix or Mac?
Wait, that's been tried already.
Some mammoths will just never move--only die and go extinct.