There is evidence that there were some advanced civilizations prior to the theorized comet incident. They might have had large populations. The problem is that this topic tends to attract the type of people that like to throw around terms like "Atlantians" and "Nephilim", so its really hard to casually research. Typing in "13,000" and "comet" to Google gets you mostly websites with black backgrounds with star fields on them, purple new-age-y fonts, and a lot of talk about Noah and aliens (contributing greatly to the 95% of the internet is bullshit figure above, I'm sure).
The reason people mod funny topics Insightful or Informative is that those are both karmically positive mods. Funny is neutral. Off topic, Troll, and Flaimbait are karmically negative. I'm not sure about Overrated and Underrated, they might be karmically neutral too. So when some mod wants to give someone good karma for telling a funny joke, or if modding a joke "Insightful" increases the funniness of the joke, they tend to do so.
I seem to remember that a while back someone (as they say on Fark.com, I'm too drunk to look it up) did a comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia. Their conclusions were based on a random sampling of 500 topics, with the wiki compared to the Brit article of the same subject. The conclusion was that Britannica contained slightly less errors per entry, but significantly less data per entry as well. The study didn't address the issue of Wikipedia's comparatively massive number of entries, and it didn't address the fact that a large number of the wiki articles are about topics Britannica would be foolish to waste the paper to print.
Oh fuck off you arrogant douche-bag. Wow you know of the existence of Fire Fox and can install a plug in. That's so clever!
Slashdot is experimenting with expanding their readership via social networking sites. I doubt it will work, but they would be stupid not to try. If you find the 200 pixels devoted to the Facebook and Twitter links annoying, you really need to take a hard look in the mirror and figure out what the hell is wrong with yourself.
Electric cars are a viable alternative. They are quieter, they are cleaner, they are far more powerful. The problem is the batteries. Not only are they heavy and decrease performance, but they have limited life spans and are difficult to recycle. Hydrogen fuel cells are the way to go. Hydrogen can be significantly cheaper then gas, the electric motor it powers can be built to be so powerful that they leave even a v12 in the dust. The Tesla roadster doesn't even have a multiple gear transmission because they couldn't figure out how to build one that could stand up to the torque of the motor. Not to mention a hydrogen "gas guzzler" doesn't harm the environment at all as it produces no carbon emissions.
Now of course there is the problem of where are we going to get all this hydrogen from. While there are a few "pie in the sky" possibilities like exotic microbes that shit hydrogen, chances are we are going to do it the old fashion way, electrolysis. For that we need water and electricity. Fortunately in America we have the midwest, which has plenty of wind and is close enough to the great lakes to have plenty of water. All you need to do is set up a farm of wind mills and get a pipeline off of Lake Superior, and all of the sudden the US is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century (energy wise).
While what you're saying is certainly true regarding the hype getting out of control, as an Apple Fanboy* I'll repeat here what I said to my business partner earlier today: even if they got everything else right, the fact that you can't run real OS X on it makes the thing worthless.
The other problem is, they didn't get anything else right. No GPS, no camera on the front so no video chat, no camera on the back so no augmented reality apps, uninspired industrial design, stupid name (I know they were going for the Star Trek reference, but came out more Maxi-pad), not enough storage to be a viable video player, no video out, and its too expensive for what is essentially an iPod touch for the visually impaired.
I've had my iPhone 3G since it came out and I've never gotten around to spending the hour or so of effort to jailbreak it, so I guess don't mind the iPhone being locked down. But that's because its just a phone. With a tablet I expect more. Specifically I expect it to run a real OS. Even if they got everything else right, for a tablet, no OS X is a deal breaker.
*To establish my Apple Fanboy cred: I personally have owned 4 Mac Laptops (the only major "Pro" or "Power" revision I missed was the TI Book, but I was still in college and had to settle for the first white iBook), I spent my teens using a NeXT Station Color, I have an iPod, I have no idea how to use Microsoft Windows, I have an iPod Nano, I have a white and a rainbow Apple sticker on the bumper of my car, I have an iPhone, and I run a business that uses nothing but Macs (except the servers which are FreeBSD).
The economy of mining other planets changes with increasing technology. If you have a cheap spaceship with a cheap propulsion system, it becomes more economical. If that propulsion system happens to run on HE3 then mining the moon becomes even more economical as the moon has tons and the earth has almost none.
As far as extracting mountains of diamonds from the massive gravity well of a gas giant, you would need some very advanced technology and a damn good reason. I doubt engagement rings are going to cut it.
Maybe if you needed a light, hard impact shield for ships moving at high sub-light speeds or something. I don't really know, the only uses I know of for diamonds at the moment are cutting things and getting laid.
Is our model of PI more accurate than our measurement of a circle in reality?
There are no naturally occurring perfect circles. A circle just the concept of a perfectly symmetrical ellipse. I could be mistaken but I'm almost positive that its impossible to form a perfect circle in a universe were there are more then 2 particles interacting.
But really, if these guys were so smart, why are they extinct? Our little, dumb human brains managed to figure it out, so...?
Given that they only died off about 10,000 years ago (meaning they survived a really long time as far as the homo genus goes) , I'm guessing that it was something specific that killed them like a sudden massive climate shift caused by a random event, like a comet hitting the earth. Granted these bones are from 10,000 years ago not 13,000, but 3000 years is a pretty reasonable amount of time for a species to die off after a major catastrophe if it has a major rival such as homo sapiens.
Here's a possible scenario where intelligence wouldn't be an evolutionary advantage:
Isn't it popularly theorized now that a comet or meteor collided with the earth in the North American glacial region about 12,000 years ago, causing wide spread climate change including a dramatic rise in sea level? I believe I read that on/. a few months back.
If these guys were in fact smarter then homo sapiens it stands to reason they probably would have begun building primitive cities. Usually when you build a city you do it near a water source, a natural harbor or a large river. If the sea levels go up, most of their cities would have been destroyed, or at least completely submerged. The survivors flee to higher ground, where they would begin interbreeding or attempting to interbreed with the still nomadic homo sapiens of the period. 2000 years later they are all but completely gone except in remote regions and even then coexisting with humans, who then either outbreed them or incorporate them into their genome.
I'm not suggesting this was actually the case. Just some wild conjecture based on very shaky information. I'm just saying that if your intelligent enough to build cities and your competitors (humans) are not, and then suddenly those cities and the bulk of your species is underwater, then your intelligence is an evolutionary disadvantage.
I've always wondered this myself. Almost all meat contains tryptophan, and turkey doesn't even contain particularly high concentrations when compared to beef. Your comment is very interesting, I wish I had mod points at the moment.
They are getting pretty good at producing organs from stem cells in the lab (animal tests, see last week's rabbit penis article). So that could solve a lot of problems, such as arthritis, cancer caught early, heart disease... there is probably a pretty long list. They are making good progress with lab grown skin too, so you might even be able to look young. Autoimmune disorders are a problem, as are systemic diseases like leukemia, and as you pointed out diseases of the brain are still a huge problem.
There are plenty of reasons we shouldn't live forever (social, economic, etc), but I think we are making fairly good progress on biology not being one of them, and hopefully will continue doing so in the future.
Taking a drug is a little easier to do then changing your lifestyle. If these guys can come up with a pill that makes people stay "young" and live 120 years, why shouldn't they get rich?
That's true of course, but how long will it be until you have the air superiority fighters remote manned as well. There is a limit to how much g-force the human body can stand, and its a quite a bit less than the machine they are flying. There is no reason that unmanned remote controlled air superiority fighters couldn't be built and used. Conceivably they could out performed manned aircraft.
Yeah you have to feel bad for the pilots. Training your entire life to fly the most awesome machines ever made, and now they are phasing them out in favor of cheap un-manned drones. Hell, they might as well just quit training pilots and just release an XBox flight sim that replicates the capabilities of the drones. Then just recruit the top of the XBox Live leader board. Or they could Ender's Game it and just make the kids fly the things unknowingly... though that might get messy when they put down the controller to go take a piss.
I doubt they would bother. A few (or a few dozen) RPGs would be both cheaper and more effective.
I like the idea that the "good guys" can use expensive high tech to "stun" the bad guy's vessels, but if I were a captain of a ship being raided, I doubt I would prefer gumming up their motors to blowing them out of the water. Not only that but if you just mess with the pirates equipment they will just go on to do the same again later once they repair it. Sure the helicopter support might arrive in time and kill all the pirates, but at that point why not just kill the pirates from the boat int he first place?
It would seem like a limited lethal weapon system mounted on the transports would be the most efficient option.
I'd definitely agree with you, though I can see how someone might get that impression if they only read the first book. In EotW I don't really think Jordan had "found the voice of the series" yet, and a lot of the what goes on in the first book reflects that. By Book 2 he has, and the similarities stop there.
For that matter plenty of SNES games were $60 too. If I recall correctly, Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting was $75 when it was released, and other games weren't that much cheaper.
Games today are extremely cheap, especially when you consider preowned games. Even compared to most other hobbies, gamer's get off pretty easily expense wise.
As far as new cars go, all you really have to do is disable the air bags, unless you need it to look like an accident. Its not hard to just remove them. I'd use a Porche: rear mounted engine so there is nothing between you and whatever you hit at 200 Mph.
Ultimately I'd say drugs are the way to go. No bloody mess for someone to clean up (not much mess at all if you remember to use the bathroom first). Painless if you use the right ones: opiates and barbiturates. Easy availability, you can get heroin in pretty much any major city and its cheap too, I'd imagine $100-$500 worth would kill a non-tolerant user if injected all at once.
That begs the question, what isn't a scam? I've worked with Paypal as well as several different major Visa, AMEX, and Discover merchant providers and they all do things I don't like (I've even had to file several lawsuits). I'm not going to say that Paypal is perfect, but I don't see them as any worse then anyone else in the field.
Indeed. Using Jefferson's words is not an effective demonstration of why their system is flawed. A better way of doing it would be to enter text which is you yourself have copyrighted. Acquire a license from AP for the text they do not own (because you do), publish it under their license, then sue AP for copyright infringement.
To get into a bar. I have a friend who is a bouncer and he says its very common (he mentioned this when I was showing him my brand new RFID passport). The joke among bouncers evidently is: the guy who shows up with a passport probably lost his license for too many DUIs.
Actually, though its not clear from TFA, no one is talking about banning acetaminophen. They are considering banning its inclusion in a single pill in combination with other medications. This way instead of taking one pill containing 500 mg of acetaminophen and 5 mg of hydrocodone you would take one pill with 500 mg of acetaminophen and one pill with 5 mg of hydocodone. This will allow a doctor or patient to scale the amount of opiate vs the amount of acetaminophen per dose.
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This is a really interesting question, and as your link points out, a very difficult one to solve given that we know so little of our own history. There is a lot of evidence human civilization was thriving until a comet strike about 13,000 years ago on the North American continent wiped out most of the worlds population and potentially raised sea levels dramatically, submerging their cities.
There is evidence that there were some advanced civilizations prior to the theorized comet incident. They might have had large populations. The problem is that this topic tends to attract the type of people that like to throw around terms like "Atlantians" and "Nephilim", so its really hard to casually research. Typing in "13,000" and "comet" to Google gets you mostly websites with black backgrounds with star fields on them, purple new-age-y fonts, and a lot of talk about Noah and aliens (contributing greatly to the 95% of the internet is bullshit figure above, I'm sure).
The reason people mod funny topics Insightful or Informative is that those are both karmically positive mods. Funny is neutral. Off topic, Troll, and Flaimbait are karmically negative. I'm not sure about Overrated and Underrated, they might be karmically neutral too. So when some mod wants to give someone good karma for telling a funny joke, or if modding a joke "Insightful" increases the funniness of the joke, they tend to do so.
I seem to remember that a while back someone (as they say on Fark.com, I'm too drunk to look it up) did a comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia. Their conclusions were based on a random sampling of 500 topics, with the wiki compared to the Brit article of the same subject. The conclusion was that Britannica contained slightly less errors per entry, but significantly less data per entry as well. The study didn't address the issue of Wikipedia's comparatively massive number of entries, and it didn't address the fact that a large number of the wiki articles are about topics Britannica would be foolish to waste the paper to print.
Oh fuck off you arrogant douche-bag. Wow you know of the existence of Fire Fox and can install a plug in. That's so clever!
Slashdot is experimenting with expanding their readership via social networking sites. I doubt it will work, but they would be stupid not to try. If you find the 200 pixels devoted to the Facebook and Twitter links annoying, you really need to take a hard look in the mirror and figure out what the hell is wrong with yourself.
Electric cars are a viable alternative. They are quieter, they are cleaner, they are far more powerful. The problem is the batteries. Not only are they heavy and decrease performance, but they have limited life spans and are difficult to recycle. Hydrogen fuel cells are the way to go. Hydrogen can be significantly cheaper then gas, the electric motor it powers can be built to be so powerful that they leave even a v12 in the dust. The Tesla roadster doesn't even have a multiple gear transmission because they couldn't figure out how to build one that could stand up to the torque of the motor. Not to mention a hydrogen "gas guzzler" doesn't harm the environment at all as it produces no carbon emissions.
Now of course there is the problem of where are we going to get all this hydrogen from. While there are a few "pie in the sky" possibilities like exotic microbes that shit hydrogen, chances are we are going to do it the old fashion way, electrolysis. For that we need water and electricity. Fortunately in America we have the midwest, which has plenty of wind and is close enough to the great lakes to have plenty of water. All you need to do is set up a farm of wind mills and get a pipeline off of Lake Superior, and all of the sudden the US is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century (energy wise).
While what you're saying is certainly true regarding the hype getting out of control, as an Apple Fanboy* I'll repeat here what I said to my business partner earlier today: even if they got everything else right, the fact that you can't run real OS X on it makes the thing worthless.
The other problem is, they didn't get anything else right. No GPS, no camera on the front so no video chat, no camera on the back so no augmented reality apps, uninspired industrial design, stupid name (I know they were going for the Star Trek reference, but came out more Maxi-pad), not enough storage to be a viable video player, no video out, and its too expensive for what is essentially an iPod touch for the visually impaired.
I've had my iPhone 3G since it came out and I've never gotten around to spending the hour or so of effort to jailbreak it, so I guess don't mind the iPhone being locked down. But that's because its just a phone. With a tablet I expect more. Specifically I expect it to run a real OS. Even if they got everything else right, for a tablet, no OS X is a deal breaker.
*To establish my Apple Fanboy cred: I personally have owned 4 Mac Laptops (the only major "Pro" or "Power" revision I missed was the TI Book, but I was still in college and had to settle for the first white iBook), I spent my teens using a NeXT Station Color, I have an iPod, I have no idea how to use Microsoft Windows, I have an iPod Nano, I have a white and a rainbow Apple sticker on the bumper of my car, I have an iPhone, and I run a business that uses nothing but Macs (except the servers which are FreeBSD).
The economy of mining other planets changes with increasing technology. If you have a cheap spaceship with a cheap propulsion system, it becomes more economical. If that propulsion system happens to run on HE3 then mining the moon becomes even more economical as the moon has tons and the earth has almost none.
As far as extracting mountains of diamonds from the massive gravity well of a gas giant, you would need some very advanced technology and a damn good reason. I doubt engagement rings are going to cut it.
Maybe if you needed a light, hard impact shield for ships moving at high sub-light speeds or something. I don't really know, the only uses I know of for diamonds at the moment are cutting things and getting laid.
Is our model of PI more accurate than our measurement of a circle in reality?
There are no naturally occurring perfect circles. A circle just the concept of a perfectly symmetrical ellipse. I could be mistaken but I'm almost positive that its impossible to form a perfect circle in a universe were there are more then 2 particles interacting.
But really, if these guys were so smart, why are they extinct? Our little, dumb human brains managed to figure it out, so...?
Given that they only died off about 10,000 years ago (meaning they survived a really long time as far as the homo genus goes) , I'm guessing that it was something specific that killed them like a sudden massive climate shift caused by a random event, like a comet hitting the earth. Granted these bones are from 10,000 years ago not 13,000, but 3000 years is a pretty reasonable amount of time for a species to die off after a major catastrophe if it has a major rival such as homo sapiens.
Here's a possible scenario where intelligence wouldn't be an evolutionary advantage:
/. a few months back.
Isn't it popularly theorized now that a comet or meteor collided with the earth in the North American glacial region about 12,000 years ago, causing wide spread climate change including a dramatic rise in sea level? I believe I read that on
If these guys were in fact smarter then homo sapiens it stands to reason they probably would have begun building primitive cities. Usually when you build a city you do it near a water source, a natural harbor or a large river. If the sea levels go up, most of their cities would have been destroyed, or at least completely submerged. The survivors flee to higher ground, where they would begin interbreeding or attempting to interbreed with the still nomadic homo sapiens of the period. 2000 years later they are all but completely gone except in remote regions and even then coexisting with humans, who then either outbreed them or incorporate them into their genome.
I'm not suggesting this was actually the case. Just some wild conjecture based on very shaky information. I'm just saying that if your intelligent enough to build cities and your competitors (humans) are not, and then suddenly those cities and the bulk of your species is underwater, then your intelligence is an evolutionary disadvantage.
I've always wondered this myself. Almost all meat contains tryptophan, and turkey doesn't even contain particularly high concentrations when compared to beef. Your comment is very interesting, I wish I had mod points at the moment.
They are getting pretty good at producing organs from stem cells in the lab (animal tests, see last week's rabbit penis article). So that could solve a lot of problems, such as arthritis, cancer caught early, heart disease... there is probably a pretty long list. They are making good progress with lab grown skin too, so you might even be able to look young. Autoimmune disorders are a problem, as are systemic diseases like leukemia, and as you pointed out diseases of the brain are still a huge problem.
There are plenty of reasons we shouldn't live forever (social, economic, etc), but I think we are making fairly good progress on biology not being one of them, and hopefully will continue doing so in the future.
Taking a drug is a little easier to do then changing your lifestyle. If these guys can come up with a pill that makes people stay "young" and live 120 years, why shouldn't they get rich?
That's true of course, but how long will it be until you have the air superiority fighters remote manned as well. There is a limit to how much g-force the human body can stand, and its a quite a bit less than the machine they are flying. There is no reason that unmanned remote controlled air superiority fighters couldn't be built and used. Conceivably they could out performed manned aircraft.
Yeah you have to feel bad for the pilots. Training your entire life to fly the most awesome machines ever made, and now they are phasing them out in favor of cheap un-manned drones. Hell, they might as well just quit training pilots and just release an XBox flight sim that replicates the capabilities of the drones. Then just recruit the top of the XBox Live leader board. Or they could Ender's Game it and just make the kids fly the things unknowingly... though that might get messy when they put down the controller to go take a piss.
I like the idea that the "good guys" can use expensive high tech to "stun" the bad guy's vessels, but if I were a captain of a ship being raided, I doubt I would prefer gumming up their motors to blowing them out of the water. Not only that but if you just mess with the pirates equipment they will just go on to do the same again later once they repair it. Sure the helicopter support might arrive in time and kill all the pirates, but at that point why not just kill the pirates from the boat int he first place?
It would seem like a limited lethal weapon system mounted on the transports would be the most efficient option.
I'd definitely agree with you, though I can see how someone might get that impression if they only read the first book. In EotW I don't really think Jordan had "found the voice of the series" yet, and a lot of the what goes on in the first book reflects that. By Book 2 he has, and the similarities stop there.
For that matter plenty of SNES games were $60 too. If I recall correctly, Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting was $75 when it was released, and other games weren't that much cheaper.
Games today are extremely cheap, especially when you consider preowned games. Even compared to most other hobbies, gamer's get off pretty easily expense wise.
As far as new cars go, all you really have to do is disable the air bags, unless you need it to look like an accident. Its not hard to just remove them. I'd use a Porche: rear mounted engine so there is nothing between you and whatever you hit at 200 Mph. Ultimately I'd say drugs are the way to go. No bloody mess for someone to clean up (not much mess at all if you remember to use the bathroom first). Painless if you use the right ones: opiates and barbiturates. Easy availability, you can get heroin in pretty much any major city and its cheap too, I'd imagine $100-$500 worth would kill a non-tolerant user if injected all at once.
With whom and what are the strings?
That begs the question, what isn't a scam? I've worked with Paypal as well as several different major Visa, AMEX, and Discover merchant providers and they all do things I don't like (I've even had to file several lawsuits). I'm not going to say that Paypal is perfect, but I don't see them as any worse then anyone else in the field.
Indeed. Using Jefferson's words is not an effective demonstration of why their system is flawed. A better way of doing it would be to enter text which is you yourself have copyrighted. Acquire a license from AP for the text they do not own (because you do), publish it under their license, then sue AP for copyright infringement.
To get into a bar. I have a friend who is a bouncer and he says its very common (he mentioned this when I was showing him my brand new RFID passport). The joke among bouncers evidently is: the guy who shows up with a passport probably lost his license for too many DUIs.
Actually, though its not clear from TFA, no one is talking about banning acetaminophen. They are considering banning its inclusion in a single pill in combination with other medications. This way instead of taking one pill containing 500 mg of acetaminophen and 5 mg of hydrocodone you would take one pill with 500 mg of acetaminophen and one pill with 5 mg of hydocodone. This will allow a doctor or patient to scale the amount of opiate vs the amount of acetaminophen per dose.
I live in NYC, here you can't even see the sun.