Specifically, he was pointing out that some Ero-Mangaka ("Hentai Artists") draw breasts as if they were morbidly huge helium filled balloons floating on top of a woman's chest.
No, that would make them have lift, again leading to non-spherical form. The only way to actually get breasts like that would be to make them completely massless, which in turn would require either making them from photons or boiling away the Higg's sea.
Bad Japanese Hentai Breast Effect: Solid light or localized cancellation of Higg's Sea ? I wonder if that would fly as a doctorate dissertation ?-)
I am seriously considering downgrading to 2.0. (Actually, with the stability issues... might be an upgrade.)
I already did. FF3 apparently has weird bug(s) which cause it to crawl to a halt in some web pages - and I do mean it takes minutes to react to anything. No Javascript, no Flash, no Java, not anything but a static list of links, and it takes minutes to bring up the right-click menu, not to mention actually opening the new tab/window - and if I accidentally activate type-ahead search, the browser gets stuck for good.
It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that FF3 went through no testing whatsoever. And no, I'm not going to report the bugs; why would I, when the most likely reaction is simply pretending the problem doesn't exist, like they did with the memory/cpu leak in FF2 ?
Even the Firefox team admit that their program is shit: why else would it load a crash monitor at start ?
On top of everything, everybody seems to think it's their job to carry the Internet on its back and figure it out somehow.
Yes. That's exactly correct. They don't like it, they shouldn't have gotten to Internet Service Provider business in the first place.
And the last mile ISP is left to fight a dog eat dog fight with other similar local ISP or with a bigger area ISP, both of which will drive it out of business eventually.
That's the risk of being a private enterprise: sometimes you actually have to compete with other private enterprises, rather than make money hand over fist doing nothing useful. No pain, no gain; no guts, no glory.
Look, these businesses aren't going to share their profit with the public, now are they ? They will keep it all to themselves. So they can bloody well keep the whining too.
Not to mention the crazy politics involved, where they are required to act as copyright cops and other idiocies.
This is true, and should be rectified, preferably by bitch-slapping the copyright holders back to their place.
But this isn't easy either, because of the fierce competition. You do hard caps, you piss of customers. If they have a choice, they'll run to that new ISP that popped up in the neighborhood a week ago. Sure, that ISP will experience the same problems a while from now, but in the meantime you're short some income.
Yes, competition has the tendency to lower prices. You speak like that was a bad thing.
Another solution is a world-wide effort to update infrastructure (better throughput, either hardware or software). But who's gonna pay for that? The last mile ISP's can't and won't and granted, it's not fair they should pay all of it.
Why not ? It's them who will benefit from it. Unless, of course, we the society pool our resources and build a publicly funded and accessible wireless network anyone can use for free; but I bet these very same ISP's would then also cry that it's not fair.
It's not just the ISP's fault, it's everybody's. The Internet has become an ecosystem, you gotta work together on all parts of it to see proper overall change.
Tell you what: the ISP's in question give me some of their shares, and I share their profits and problems alike. Until then, they're on their own.
I'm dead serious about this. Anyone who is spilling his personal info on Facebook or similar sites will not work for me in any sensitive area. If they are careless about their personal information, I will not trust them to keep any company secrets either. They just don't think of the ramifications of their actions, and I don't want anyone like that in any security job.
Seeing how you just revealed a potential vulnerability about your company's personnel - namely, that they are unlikely to have much to do with social networking, and thus could potentially be caught unaware if ever lured there - I'd say that you'd do well to pay more attention to the ramifications of your own actions:).
I'm dead serious about this. If you're so paranoid, then don't post the details of your hiring principles on Slashdot, since that makes it easier to profile your personnel and their vulnerabilities. Especially when doing so disqualifies you from working for yourself:).
Facebook has some decent "security" features about whom can see their profiles, but people tend leave the option checked "anyone in my network" can see my profile without realizing the ramifications.
What's the point of writing a profile if you don't let people see it ?
Always assume that everything you put on the Internet will be read by everyone, and mailed signed and notarized to your mother.
On aside note, assuming computing power is no problem, wouldn't it be better to distribute multiple MD5 hashes of 128kb chunks of a given file. Then through brute force reassemble the file by solving for what the MD5 represents. Not only are you drastically cutting way down on bandwidth, but arguably you are not committing copyright infringement by transferring hashes.
The chunks are (much) bigger than the hashes, so for each hash, there are multiple possible chunks which would yield that hash. So no, it won't work.
As for copyright law, I'm pretty sure you committed an infringement by even discussing a potential - although non-functional - way of circumventing it. But even if you hadn't, rest assured that Disney will have the law amended to close this loophole.
Can you please, please, please, get Alpha Centauri working! We have alternatives to Microsoft Office. But Alpha Centauri, the best game in the Civ stable evah, is unclonable.
Both Alpha Centauri and the Alien Crossfire extension have been ported to Linux. Isohunt.com, for example, has them at this very moment (search "alpha centauri linux").
When I'm driving my car and I turn the steering wheel right, I expect the car to run right, without having to think about exactly how all the rods and pinions and bearings and whatever are making the car turn right. Sure, I need to know that the more I turn the steering wheel, the tighter I turn, but that should be it. Why should a programming language force me to think about low level implementation details that are nothing to do with the algorithm I'm trying to write?
Because a programmer is a car designer, assembler or a mechanic, depending on his specific job description. The user of the program is analogous to the driver of a car.
If you want to be a car mechanic, you'd better learn how cars work. If you want to be a programmer, you'd better learn how programs work. You'd think this would be bloody obvious, but oh well...
Whenever you want to use a language, you must learn it first. That's true even of Visual Basic.
Actually, I wrote my first Python and PHP programs before I had learned the languages - just opened their homepages in a browser and began writing:). Horrible programs, of course, but they do their job (automatic downloading and archiving of binary newsgroups into a PostgreSQL database, and a Web-based viewer for said database, respectively, although the viewer has been re-implemented as a Java servlet).
Trying to write code without any idea about the underlying ideas of a language has its own perverse joy, especially the first time the program runs over a minute without crashing... IT'S ALIVE !!!! And looks the part too;).
Hydro, nuclear, solar, wind tidal and geothermal are all available today, but can THEY power our cars? No.
Actually, yes. Oil is a mixture of carbohydrates, which, as the name implies, are composed of carbon and hydrogen. Both are available in abundance on Earth - carbon in carbon dioxide in the air, and hydrogen in water. Given enough energy, it would be relatively simple to produce endless amount of any desired form of oil - gas, diesel, whatever - from these raw materials.
If you do a little research, you'll find that the already-existing oil pipelines in arctic and subarctic regions have not had a deleterious effect upon the flora and fauna of a biome (except in the case of pipeline spills, and frankly you can't stop every spill. So I consider that a non-issue.
So... what you're saying is that they do have had a negative effect ? Because if they have a negative effect in certain conditions you can't stop from happening, it logically follows that they have this effect, period.
If it's a choice between keeping our economy running while we switch to alternative energy (extra oil is a stopgap and everyone knows it), I'm entirely okay with running wildlife over.
Cheap oil has always been a temporary condition, but still people behaved like it was a permanent one. Economy will switch to alternative energy when and only when oil is no longer cheap. Don't deceive yourself: drilling Alaska won't ease the transition, it postpones the transition - which may or may not be desirable, since technology advances all the time and makes those alternatives cheaper, while continuing to burn oil makes the greenhouse effect and accompanying climate change worse all the time.
No, since we are talking about the earth at time t and then t+1, there is the possibility of a shift in mass, it's just a very tiny amount, only even vaguely determinate.
Not unless you'll break the preservation of momentum, at which point you'll have bigger problems than a black hole. As long as said law of nature stands, Earth getting converted into a black hole due to a lab mishap will have exactly zero effect on where its center of gravity is located.
As electrons converge down the wires leading to the LHC, they approximate a spherical section shaped cap over that part of the earth. Its center of mass is initially well below ground, but rises as the electrons arrive in the LHC and add their energy to boost the hadrons which form the hole.
And when these electrons are pushed down the wire, the cause an equal but opposite counterforce, which pushes the rest of the Earth in another direction.
No internal process can change the center of mass of a system, because any force exerted by any part of the system on any other part will move them both in opposite directions, with acceleration inversely related to their masses, which means that the changes in the center of gravity caused by one are cancelled by the other.
For that matter, do I need to take into account the sunlight that falls on the Earth and the dust that settles in the form of incredible numbers of micrometeorites?
Neither sunlight nor falling meteorites are internal to Earth. LHC and anything produced by it is.
We can hate Microsoft but as a libertarian, I find this development scary. Getting the federal government involved in the design and manufacture of a product is unwarranted and is akin to precrime.
Except that it isn't precrime, it is a consequence of illegal action Microsoft has been convicted not only in the US but in EU as well, thus making it postcrime, or punishment. Whether it is an appropriate punishment is another matter; however, a convicted criminal being closely monitored by officials in circumstances it committed the crimes in the first place is hardly particularly sinister from those officials part.
Surely even libertarianism allows the government to enforce the laws, and take precautions against known and convicted (in multiple courts) criminals continuing their spree ?
Everyone may say that would be too little, too late, but preemptive strikes are un-American.
Now if only you could convince your government of that, it would go a long way towards improving said country's imago and help start rebuilding its diplomatic prestige, which I fear the world will need before long with the raise of dictatorial China and continued worrying trends in Russia, not to mention the looming peak oil crisis.
JV rocks the boat even more: I've experienced transferring a sound file from one hard drive system to another and the sound changed.
*blinks in disbelief* This guy probably thinks that red smarties taste better than blue ones.
And maybe they do, having a different chemical composition. Arguing with someone's observations is pointless, and there are actually many mechanisms in which could introduce changes (such as the new drive simply being faulty).
And please understand that, even if the music itself plays exactly the same, the hard drive does also give noise to its environment, and that might affect how the music is perceived. I had one old one which made a sound like a circular saw used to cut steel... I'm still amazed I never saw sparks flying;).
I'm beginning to think that this guy can 'hear the differences' in everything, always, regardless of what equipment is used. I'd like to see him reliably tell the difference in a proper double-blind test though.
In this last case, he probably could. The computer has fans, hard drives, and other moving parts. They make sound, which can easily resonate with anything in direct contact with the computer. Having it sit on softpads is going to create a noticeable difference in ambient sound compared to having it sit on a hardwood floor, which of course affects how you perceive any other sound.
Or, to put it simpler: reducing the noise from the computer makes music sound better:).
This sounds strikingly similar to the strategy employed by the "Church" of Scientology....
Or various software vendors, or processor manufacturers - remember the 486SX ? A 486DX with an intentionally crippled FPU unit ? For that matter, I heard that NVIDIA does this too: sells the same cards under different model names, with the only difference being the modelr marking in the card's BIOS, which cues the driver to enable/disable features.
The Black Hole would be a very tiny mass at creation, so small that the difference between where the earth's center of mass was before and is after is insignificant.
Since the hole would be created from Earth's mass on Earth, the difference would not be insignificant but exactly zero.
Oops. Black holes are densely packed matter--in fact, black holes are the most densely packed matter. Thus, they are neither infinitesimal in size, nor that infinitely dense, they are just very, very dense--and relatively small (depending on their mass).
The problem with black holes having non-infinite density is as follows: forces cause interaction between particles by having them exchange virtual gauge particles. These gauge particles move at most at the speed of light, just like everything else. However, the only possible direction inside the event horizon of a black hole is down; gauge particles are no exception, they fall down like everything else. Consequently, a particle can never learn that there's any other particles beneath it (closer to the center of the hole), since it never receives the gauge particles sent by them; and consequently, there's nothing to halt it's fall. This is true for any distance from the center, so nothing stops the particle from going ever closer.
When this happens for all the particles falling into the hole, they all pack into its center. A finite amount of particles packed into a single point (infinitesimal space) means infinite density.
See, the common perceptual mistake people do is to think the event horizon of a black hole as a wall of some kind. That implies that you could view the singularity if you went inside. It's not true; what the event horizon is is the cosmic equivalent of a sign saying: "the road is one way from this point on". You pass it, you still can't view the singularity, because light can't move outward from there. Neither can anything else, for that matter. Even light that's sent outward will simply fall a bit slower, that's all. The gauge particles sent by the atoms on the tip of your nose will still reach the ones on the base of it, so your flesh doesn't disintegrate; but only because your nose is falling even faster than them, so it falls past them. But there's no way to stop the fall.
Then again, general relativity and the curvature of space mean that the distance between the event horizon and the center of a black hole is infinite, because space is infinitely curved (or rather, it's curvature approaches infinite without bound near the center), so maybe that's the solution: mass doesn't pack into infinite density at the bottom of the black hole's gravity well, because there is no bottom, just eternal fall.
happened, and the black hole would happily circle around the sun). Since the earth's mass is not that impressive, the black hole would have to be tiny, so the area around it where the gravity would significantly bend the universe would also be quite small, making our painful (but swift) deaths rather unspectacular.
For that exact same reason a black hole produced in LHC wouldn't harm us in any way: you could fire the thing straight through your brains, and the chances are not a single particle would come anywhere close enough to it to be affected in any way.
Even an Earth-mass black hole would take a while to swallow all of humanity, due to the small size of the event horizon. It would be like being nibbled to death by an ant.
On the other hand, the GPL has some very specific restrictions on how code may be modified or re-licensed. It's also got that fantastic clause that RMS may retroactively change the terms of your license at any time (Linus ignores that one).
Actually, no. If the clause is present (it may or may not be, in any particular program's GPL), RMS can effectively relicense the program under any future GPL version. However, the terms of the existing license cannot be altered - that is, the program will still stay available under GPL v2, even if RMS puts out GPL v3, but a possessor of a copy may choose to distribute it under GPL v3 instead.
So because I don't like psychopaths, that makes me a psychopath?
No, but being willing to kill them does. You can dislike, hate and curse them to your heart's contents; but as soon as you start talking about killing a large segment of population - or any segment, for that matter - because you think that getting rid of them would benefit you, you have crossed the line.
Is this truly so difficult to understand ? Ruthlessness is the defining characteristic of psychopathy, and the very reason why it is destructive. Your suggestion was extremely ruthless. Therefore, being willing to go through with it makes you either a psychopath or every bit as bad.
And your alternative is what? Letting them run free and do what they will? Or putting them in prison? The first is idiotic, the second is utterly inhumane. I think feeding people to wild animals is far more humane than putting them in prison for the rest of their lives.
"They are destructive so let's kill them." That's exactly why they are so destructive: they have no problems following cold logic, unhindered by emotions or sentiment. Just like you are doing.
I'm not going to argue with you any longer. You either get the point or not; and if not, I hope you'll never be in any position of power, ever.
Not all of us care about democracy - I'd rather have a meritocracy than a democracy.
The fact that the vote of someone who dropped out of highschool and became a bum is equal to someone who has a PhD in Biology is laughable. Even worse is the fact that the votes of the former have equal say in government policies in biology.
Who decides where the line is, and how it's drawn ? You ? I'm sure there are more competent people than you, who consider you the bum.
The problems with meritocracy is that "merit" is a very subjective thing, and it reduces everyone who doesn't have it into little more than slaves.
Just how much does a plumber really know about biology, or economics, to be part of the decision making process? Just how much does religion matter in making environmental policies that are for the good of the planet's ecosystems?
Why do you think the guy with the PhD in biology cares about the planet's ecosystems ? After all, he has the power concentrated into his hands, so he can simply make decisions which help line his pockets while fucking up the environment, then move to the still-clean areas while banishing the plumber into the disaster zone. After all, the plumber is not part of the decision process, so he has no way to stop this from happening.
Democracy as it exists today is a sham - it does nothing more than push forth mediocrity. Not everyone should be part of the decision making process, and even then, not everyone should be a part of *every* decision making process.
As soon as you start removing people from the decision making process, you set them up for abuse, with no recourse other than to go torch-and-pitchfork on you. Democracy, as it exists today, is about making sure that people aren't pushed to the point of having nothing to lose, and can remove abusive people from power in a bloodless manner.
And mediocrity isn't such a bad thing, actually. It leads to a stable society, where each individual is free to try to excel, to whatever level their ambition demands and abilities allow. A society which demands excellence from everyone is not a good place to live in; it sets the good of the nation before the good of the citizens. Things like fascism and Soviet-style communism were ultimately about pushing towards an ideal, no matter the cost; the end result was a horrible pile of corpses and two utterly ruined countries.
You don't solicit the opinions of plumbers and druggies when your child is sick, do you? Then why do you let the votes of these people matter when it comes to legislating medical policies?
How my child gets treated doesn't affect plumbers or druggies in any way, except in really far-fetched and unlikely scenarios of that kid becoming the next Hitler or M.L. King; legislation does. That's why they shouldn't have a say in the former but should have some in the latter.
People should have a say about things which affect them, but there's no reason they should have a say in things which don't. Is that really so hard to understand ?
Leftists are thugs, fascists and liars living in a fantasy land where truth, reason and facts are outlawed as heresy.
Isn't fascism a right-wing ideology ? "Liars" is a given, since we're talking about politicians; but the rest of your accusations need some support. Do you have any to give ?
Whenever leftists have the choice, they try to beat their opponents by silencing them using any and all means at their disposal. On Slashdot they downmod you, on Digg they bury you, on forums they ban you, and in the real world they enact laws that restrict freedom of speech.
Your particular comment has been modded flamebait because, frankly, it is. I don't read Digg so I can't comment on that, but on Slashdot posts advocating hands-off capitalism - such as libertarianism - seem to get modded up regularly. In real world, both left and right-leaning dictatorships have made such laws, but for example the Nordic countries - which are quite left-leaning - have quite strong protections of freedom of speech.
In Europe they even use violence, and have on one occasion attempted to assassinate people who were just a little bit too conservative for their tastes.
"One occasion" is hardly sufficient to pass judgement on a political movement. In fact, "on one occasion" kinda implies that it is not a trend within the movement.
These people call themselves anti-fascists, which is not suprising since leftists always claim to oppose fascism even when they're doing the polar opposite.
Well thankfully you resisted the temptation to call your opponents fascists. You're really showing yourself better than them there.
From the outside, it really seems that both American Republican and Democratic parties are exhibiting signs of fascism: a messianic complex and the desire for military supremacy, as well as putting the "safety of the state" above all other concerns, at least in speeches.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that would make them have lift, again leading to non-spherical form. The only way to actually get breasts like that would be to make them completely massless, which in turn would require either making them from photons or boiling away the Higg's sea.
Bad Japanese Hentai Breast Effect: Solid light or localized cancellation of Higg's Sea ? I wonder if that would fly as a doctorate dissertation ?-)
I already did. FF3 apparently has weird bug(s) which cause it to crawl to a halt in some web pages - and I do mean it takes minutes to react to anything. No Javascript, no Flash, no Java, not anything but a static list of links, and it takes minutes to bring up the right-click menu, not to mention actually opening the new tab/window - and if I accidentally activate type-ahead search, the browser gets stuck for good.
It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that FF3 went through no testing whatsoever. And no, I'm not going to report the bugs; why would I, when the most likely reaction is simply pretending the problem doesn't exist, like they did with the memory/cpu leak in FF2 ?
Even the Firefox team admit that their program is shit: why else would it load a crash monitor at start ?
Word of warning: I've seen it, and it ain't pretty.
Yes. That's exactly correct. They don't like it, they shouldn't have gotten to Internet Service Provider business in the first place.
That's the risk of being a private enterprise: sometimes you actually have to compete with other private enterprises, rather than make money hand over fist doing nothing useful. No pain, no gain; no guts, no glory.
Look, these businesses aren't going to share their profit with the public, now are they ? They will keep it all to themselves. So they can bloody well keep the whining too.
This is true, and should be rectified, preferably by bitch-slapping the copyright holders back to their place.
Yes, competition has the tendency to lower prices. You speak like that was a bad thing.
Why not ? It's them who will benefit from it. Unless, of course, we the society pool our resources and build a publicly funded and accessible wireless network anyone can use for free; but I bet these very same ISP's would then also cry that it's not fair.
Tell you what: the ISP's in question give me some of their shares, and I share their profits and problems alike. Until then, they're on their own.
Seeing how you just revealed a potential vulnerability about your company's personnel - namely, that they are unlikely to have much to do with social networking, and thus could potentially be caught unaware if ever lured there - I'd say that you'd do well to pay more attention to the ramifications of your own actions :).
I'm dead serious about this. If you're so paranoid, then don't post the details of your hiring principles on Slashdot, since that makes it easier to profile your personnel and their vulnerabilities. Especially when doing so disqualifies you from working for yourself :).
What's the point of writing a profile if you don't let people see it ?
Always assume that everything you put on the Internet will be read by everyone, and mailed signed and notarized to your mother.
He could charge the battery now and keep it charged. Ingenious, eh ?-)
The chunks are (much) bigger than the hashes, so for each hash, there are multiple possible chunks which would yield that hash. So no, it won't work.
As for copyright law, I'm pretty sure you committed an infringement by even discussing a potential - although non-functional - way of circumventing it. But even if you hadn't, rest assured that Disney will have the law amended to close this loophole.
Can you please, please, please, get Alpha Centauri working! We have alternatives to Microsoft Office. But Alpha Centauri, the best game in the Civ stable evah, is unclonable.
Both Alpha Centauri and the Alien Crossfire extension have been ported to Linux. Isohunt.com, for example, has them at this very moment (search "alpha centauri linux").
The Nazis did get trials.
Because a programmer is a car designer, assembler or a mechanic, depending on his specific job description. The user of the program is analogous to the driver of a car.
If you want to be a car mechanic, you'd better learn how cars work. If you want to be a programmer, you'd better learn how programs work. You'd think this would be bloody obvious, but oh well...
Actually, I wrote my first Python and PHP programs before I had learned the languages - just opened their homepages in a browser and began writing :). Horrible programs, of course, but they do their job (automatic downloading and archiving of binary newsgroups into a PostgreSQL database, and a Web-based viewer for said database, respectively, although the viewer has been re-implemented as a Java servlet).
Trying to write code without any idea about the underlying ideas of a language has its own perverse joy, especially the first time the program runs over a minute without crashing... IT'S ALIVE !!!! And looks the part too ;).
Actually, yes. Oil is a mixture of carbohydrates, which, as the name implies, are composed of carbon and hydrogen. Both are available in abundance on Earth - carbon in carbon dioxide in the air, and hydrogen in water. Given enough energy, it would be relatively simple to produce endless amount of any desired form of oil - gas, diesel, whatever - from these raw materials.
So... what you're saying is that they do have had a negative effect ? Because if they have a negative effect in certain conditions you can't stop from happening, it logically follows that they have this effect, period.
Cheap oil has always been a temporary condition, but still people behaved like it was a permanent one. Economy will switch to alternative energy when and only when oil is no longer cheap. Don't deceive yourself: drilling Alaska won't ease the transition, it postpones the transition - which may or may not be desirable, since technology advances all the time and makes those alternatives cheaper, while continuing to burn oil makes the greenhouse effect and accompanying climate change worse all the time.
Not unless you'll break the preservation of momentum, at which point you'll have bigger problems than a black hole. As long as said law of nature stands, Earth getting converted into a black hole due to a lab mishap will have exactly zero effect on where its center of gravity is located.
And when these electrons are pushed down the wire, the cause an equal but opposite counterforce, which pushes the rest of the Earth in another direction.
No internal process can change the center of mass of a system, because any force exerted by any part of the system on any other part will move them both in opposite directions, with acceleration inversely related to their masses, which means that the changes in the center of gravity caused by one are cancelled by the other.
Neither sunlight nor falling meteorites are internal to Earth. LHC and anything produced by it is.
Except that it isn't precrime, it is a consequence of illegal action Microsoft has been convicted not only in the US but in EU as well, thus making it postcrime, or punishment. Whether it is an appropriate punishment is another matter; however, a convicted criminal being closely monitored by officials in circumstances it committed the crimes in the first place is hardly particularly sinister from those officials part.
Surely even libertarianism allows the government to enforce the laws, and take precautions against known and convicted (in multiple courts) criminals continuing their spree ?
Now if only you could convince your government of that, it would go a long way towards improving said country's imago and help start rebuilding its diplomatic prestige, which I fear the world will need before long with the raise of dictatorial China and continued worrying trends in Russia, not to mention the looming peak oil crisis.
And maybe they do, having a different chemical composition. Arguing with someone's observations is pointless, and there are actually many mechanisms in which could introduce changes (such as the new drive simply being faulty).
And please understand that, even if the music itself plays exactly the same, the hard drive does also give noise to its environment, and that might affect how the music is perceived. I had one old one which made a sound like a circular saw used to cut steel... I'm still amazed I never saw sparks flying ;).
In this last case, he probably could. The computer has fans, hard drives, and other moving parts. They make sound, which can easily resonate with anything in direct contact with the computer. Having it sit on softpads is going to create a noticeable difference in ambient sound compared to having it sit on a hardwood floor, which of course affects how you perceive any other sound.
Or, to put it simpler: reducing the noise from the computer makes music sound better :).
Or various software vendors, or processor manufacturers - remember the 486SX ? A 486DX with an intentionally crippled FPU unit ? For that matter, I heard that NVIDIA does this too: sells the same cards under different model names, with the only difference being the modelr marking in the card's BIOS, which cues the driver to enable/disable features.
Since the hole would be created from Earth's mass on Earth, the difference would not be insignificant but exactly zero.
The problem with black holes having non-infinite density is as follows: forces cause interaction between particles by having them exchange virtual gauge particles. These gauge particles move at most at the speed of light, just like everything else. However, the only possible direction inside the event horizon of a black hole is down; gauge particles are no exception, they fall down like everything else. Consequently, a particle can never learn that there's any other particles beneath it (closer to the center of the hole), since it never receives the gauge particles sent by them; and consequently, there's nothing to halt it's fall. This is true for any distance from the center, so nothing stops the particle from going ever closer.
When this happens for all the particles falling into the hole, they all pack into its center. A finite amount of particles packed into a single point (infinitesimal space) means infinite density.
See, the common perceptual mistake people do is to think the event horizon of a black hole as a wall of some kind. That implies that you could view the singularity if you went inside. It's not true; what the event horizon is is the cosmic equivalent of a sign saying: "the road is one way from this point on". You pass it, you still can't view the singularity, because light can't move outward from there. Neither can anything else, for that matter. Even light that's sent outward will simply fall a bit slower, that's all. The gauge particles sent by the atoms on the tip of your nose will still reach the ones on the base of it, so your flesh doesn't disintegrate; but only because your nose is falling even faster than them, so it falls past them. But there's no way to stop the fall.
Then again, general relativity and the curvature of space mean that the distance between the event horizon and the center of a black hole is infinite, because space is infinitely curved (or rather, it's curvature approaches infinite without bound near the center), so maybe that's the solution: mass doesn't pack into infinite density at the bottom of the black hole's gravity well, because there is no bottom, just eternal fall.
Now I managed to spook myself :)...
For that exact same reason a black hole produced in LHC wouldn't harm us in any way: you could fire the thing straight through your brains, and the chances are not a single particle would come anywhere close enough to it to be affected in any way.
Even an Earth-mass black hole would take a while to swallow all of humanity, due to the small size of the event horizon. It would be like being nibbled to death by an ant.
Actually, no. If the clause is present (it may or may not be, in any particular program's GPL), RMS can effectively relicense the program under any future GPL version. However, the terms of the existing license cannot be altered - that is, the program will still stay available under GPL v2, even if RMS puts out GPL v3, but a possessor of a copy may choose to distribute it under GPL v3 instead.
No, but being willing to kill them does. You can dislike, hate and curse them to your heart's contents; but as soon as you start talking about killing a large segment of population - or any segment, for that matter - because you think that getting rid of them would benefit you, you have crossed the line.
Is this truly so difficult to understand ? Ruthlessness is the defining characteristic of psychopathy, and the very reason why it is destructive. Your suggestion was extremely ruthless. Therefore, being willing to go through with it makes you either a psychopath or every bit as bad.
"They are destructive so let's kill them." That's exactly why they are so destructive: they have no problems following cold logic, unhindered by emotions or sentiment. Just like you are doing.
I'm not going to argue with you any longer. You either get the point or not; and if not, I hope you'll never be in any position of power, ever.
Who decides where the line is, and how it's drawn ? You ? I'm sure there are more competent people than you, who consider you the bum.
The problems with meritocracy is that "merit" is a very subjective thing, and it reduces everyone who doesn't have it into little more than slaves.
Why do you think the guy with the PhD in biology cares about the planet's ecosystems ? After all, he has the power concentrated into his hands, so he can simply make decisions which help line his pockets while fucking up the environment, then move to the still-clean areas while banishing the plumber into the disaster zone. After all, the plumber is not part of the decision process, so he has no way to stop this from happening.
As soon as you start removing people from the decision making process, you set them up for abuse, with no recourse other than to go torch-and-pitchfork on you. Democracy, as it exists today, is about making sure that people aren't pushed to the point of having nothing to lose, and can remove abusive people from power in a bloodless manner.
And mediocrity isn't such a bad thing, actually. It leads to a stable society, where each individual is free to try to excel, to whatever level their ambition demands and abilities allow. A society which demands excellence from everyone is not a good place to live in; it sets the good of the nation before the good of the citizens. Things like fascism and Soviet-style communism were ultimately about pushing towards an ideal, no matter the cost; the end result was a horrible pile of corpses and two utterly ruined countries.
How my child gets treated doesn't affect plumbers or druggies in any way, except in really far-fetched and unlikely scenarios of that kid becoming the next Hitler or M.L. King; legislation does. That's why they shouldn't have a say in the former but should have some in the latter.
People should have a say about things which affect them, but there's no reason they should have a say in things which don't. Is that really so hard to understand ?
Isn't fascism a right-wing ideology ? "Liars" is a given, since we're talking about politicians; but the rest of your accusations need some support. Do you have any to give ?
Your particular comment has been modded flamebait because, frankly, it is. I don't read Digg so I can't comment on that, but on Slashdot posts advocating hands-off capitalism - such as libertarianism - seem to get modded up regularly. In real world, both left and right-leaning dictatorships have made such laws, but for example the Nordic countries - which are quite left-leaning - have quite strong protections of freedom of speech.
"One occasion" is hardly sufficient to pass judgement on a political movement. In fact, "on one occasion" kinda implies that it is not a trend within the movement.
Well thankfully you resisted the temptation to call your opponents fascists. You're really showing yourself better than them there.
From the outside, it really seems that both American Republican and Democratic parties are exhibiting signs of fascism: a messianic complex and the desire for military supremacy, as well as putting the "safety of the state" above all other concerns, at least in speeches.