Seriously, space elevators are nothing new at all. Science fiction has been all over this for decades. One poster referred to an Analog article about the math and materials involved. Popular Science has done similar articles.
This (building a viable space elevator) is quite feasible. No, the materials aren't there yet and it won't be easy.
Neither was Apollo, yet nearly FORTY FREAKIN YEARS AGO, 12 (18 counting the Command Module pilots who stayed in orbit) people from Earth went to the moon and back in Apollo spacecraft (11 through 17 with 13 aborting and becoming a Tom Hanks movie)
How good was the design? Well, so good that the current NASA Director has stated that they can't come up with a better one. So, the "new" CEV spacecraft slated for missions to the moon...for as long as 6 months at a time....and then Mars is basically an updated Apollo capsule.
The point is that if you go back and read popular media after JFK's speech that "...we will land a man on the moon before the end of the decade", you'll see very smart people listing all sorts of reasons it couldn't be done.
Even further back, Arthur C. Clarke proposed what was to become communication satellites. The naysayers were legion. Geez, glad DirecTV didn't listen.:o)
Basically, if a viable space elevator can be built, it will make the cost of moving people and material to LEO cheaper than flying from NYC to LA.
The economics will drive the technology and it will happen, probably in our lifetimes. I figure 20 years with 40 years as an outside figure. It just makes too much sense.
While I would agree there's an inverse function of CPU to graphic card power, it's not as bleak as that!
I have an "antique" 700Mhz Athlon machine with an AGP slot...which was "new technology" when I bought/built the machine. It originally had a VooDoo 3 AGP card, then an Nvidia 4200. Has a Radeon 9600XT now. While it's mostly used as an iTunes server these days, I still play Wolfenstein, America's Army, and a ton of other games on it. I get pretty darn good frame rates.
My main box is a "beefy" Athlon 64, 2GB of RAM, fast drives, and....a Radeon 9600XT. I got the pair for the price of one, so it was a no-brainer. With the obvious exceptions of Doom3 and Far Cry, most games play about the same on the two machines. The gating factor is the Radeon card for the most part. I should point out that I am a tuning freak, so my boxes scream and have only the bare necessities running. In other words, I don't rip DVDs while running PhotoShop and playing Call of Duty 2.
That said, I most likely will get a 7800 GS for the A64, but leave the mothball machine alone. At that point, I'm sure I would be CPU bound and wasting horsepower. Plus, the power supply in the old box won't handle much more! A new card like the 7800 would probably keep it from POSTing.
The point is that I am real happy to see an AGP part with some horsepower from Nvidia. I like the Radeons I have, but I usually have less grief with NV parts. I don't plan on building another box until some really mature dual-core parts are available from AMD. So, no PCIe slots until then. That makes a fast(er) AGP part a nice stopgap purchase.
And I think I will be seeing a buttload more than 5-6 fps.:o)
I've actually met both Gates and Jobs, although I doubt either would remember me in any detail, if at all.
However, I personally feel Gates is a weird little troll with a lot of luck early on that resulted in lots of money. I think if he weren't filthy rich, he'd have been arrested for stalking women from work or something equally creepy years ago.
Steve is a mutant, to be sure, but he has vision and intelligence and seems to be a nice guy most of the time.
That said, neither one is particularly "heroic" to me. They're geeks who got rich beyond avarice. Big deal.:o)
I bought the 61 inch WEGA LCD 2 years ago because the SXRD sets weren't shipping yet. I figured I'd "get by" with the LCD set then upgrade to the SXRD line in 2007/2008.
I've seen the SXRDs...they are the best HDTV currently available...I couldn't believe Sony was dumping them!
Of course, the WEGA LCD I have doesn't exactly suck.:o)
Well, while some Mac users ARE pretty smug, I don't feel their faith in OS/X is completely misplaced.
I've been writing code since 1971 and have made money testing security.
As an exercise, I wrote "Plan 9", a UNIX-specific viral application. I turned it loose in a lab containing SCO UNIX, IBM AIX, some Windows machines, a Mac running Finder, a Novell file server, and some NeXT machines. All the systems were on the same subnet and had NFS mounts to each other.
Without specifics (and don't ask...I won't say), the virus was designed to disable login capability...a basic, but effective denial of service attack.
The SCO and IBM machines were toasted. Everything else was unaffected. Now, the NeXT boxes are NOT identical to today's Mac OS, but similar.
I haven't dissected OS/X (yet), but I would guess it's not an easy target. Could someone write code that would rape and pillage a Mac? Absolutely...nothing is bulletproof. But, some things are easier....like Windows...so the Mac community may have some justification in feeling more secure.
Yes...and no. When I folded the company...which ironically cratered due to a bad choice of investment partner...I piecemealed the intellectual property out.
So, technically it belongs to other people.
And remember, all of our code was on the NeXT; the only "Mac stuff" we did was to hack a SCSI driver to get a Mac peripheral to run on a NeXT cube.
MUMPS was ported by Plus Five from Washington University. I don't know if they still exist...we ceased operations and business relationships in late '92.
I wrote a medical transcription front-end for the MUMPS-based expert system...that's basically what we showed at the NeXTWorld deal in '90.
That same week, we did a dog and pony at the ACEP (American College of Emergency Physicians) Conference down the street at Moscone. That nothing blew up horribly still amazes me.
About 2 days before the NeXT show, we were compiling our code on like build 1981 of NeXTStep 2.0 when we noticed that all our voice files...pre-recorded status messages as well as our demo medical transcriptions...sounded like Satanic messages. Everything was running backwards.
Avi Tevanian came over, listened and watched us freak for about a minute at most. He says, "I know what this is!" and ran off down the hall. He's back in an hour with a new OS build that fixed the glitch and we went through both shows without a hitch. We did our last compile 2 hours before the show.
Anyway, I sold the "engine" for the transcription system for cash. It was nothing special but I was real proud of it back then.
The ER expert code, which was absolutely amazing, was written primarily by John Holbrook, M.D. from Mercy Springfield Hospital in Springfield, Mass. He had a company called Medical Horizons that did "ChartChecker", the expert app on other platforms. We did a joint project on the NeXT port but they always retained ownership of the app.
I am an actual former NeXT Registered Developer. I was CEO of a software company that developed expert systems for physicians on the NeXT. We were instrumental in getting the MUMPS language ported to the NeXT.
Steve, at the time, had a real hard-on for stuff that WASN'T another spreadsheet, word processor, etc. (although everyone loved the hell out of Lotus Improv and that was definitely Steve's baby) so we were one of the companies selected to show our stuff in San Francisco in Septmember of 1990.
This was the event where the NeXT Dimension color card for the Cubes was introduced, along with the NeXTStation pizza-box, and of course, NeXTStep 2.0.
We were in the building for 3 or 4 days before the big show getting our stuff working on almost hourly new builds of the OS.
So, more than a few of us took breaks and watched Steve rehearse his presentation. Trust me, he leaves nothing to chance...nothing. His air of casualness is the result of lots or preparation and practice.
He absolutely IS a showman, but he's also unquestionably, undeniably brilliant.
People remember the Apple IIe and the first (1984) Mac, but forget the Lisa. That "girl" was one of the greased skids for showing Steve the door. Not because it failed, but because Steve wanted about 500 million to 1 billion to build a better machine like it...the NeXT. No, that wasn't its name...but the idea was already there. The board balked, he got the bum rush from his own company.
NeXTStep was/is Mac OS/X. Avi Tevanian was at NeXT, he's Chief Scientist or something at Apple now. Testified at the Microsoft anti-trust trial, etc.
Steve didn't write the MACH kernel or bolt on BSD primitives and Display PostScript to NeXTStep, but damn sure knew what people to recruit and hire to get it done. And then took them back to Apple.
Considering that the Lisa and the seminal ideas for NeXTStep came about around 1985-86...about the time OS/2 and Windows were being created, I'd say the current state of the Mac OS and Windows shows the man ain't too stupid.
No, I am not a Mac fanatic. I have more PC hardware than NeXT and Mac hardware. I'm pretty much agnostic on this stuff...been doing it too long to be religious about any of it these days.
The point is that there's a whole lot to the guy doing the keynotes at MacWorld.
I don't think it would "remote destroy" so much as void the warranty, put you on a Homeland Security watchlist, and generate an IRS audit of your entire life.
Work is indeed a different animal. Our shop is Locust Notes with Sametime IM. We've had it for quite a while and ironically, I did the network impact testing and analysis before we deployed.
About a year ago, I finally enabled the ST client for Notes and I do use it.
About once or twice a month.:o)
I prefer writing to chatting and my analysis work often involves big attachments that won't fly with IM. (we have throttles in place for IM...no audio, video, or large file moves)
But, I do agree that IM can be a boon in a business setting. I should have been more specific in my post.
OK....way in the minority here, but I absolutely abhor and despise IM of every flavor. None of the dozen or so (depends on what's not in pieces) PCs and laptops in my house have ANY instant stupidity installed. Anything that resembles AIM, MSM, etc. has been removed, disabled, or otherwise rendered inert.
Yes, I'm old and weird. My first PC was an IBM 360 in 1971. No tube...TTY terminal. No broadband...300bps ACOUSTIC modem. Batch processing. And yet, it was way cool in the day.
Anyway, my point is that the instant gratification of IM sucks people in and encourages STOOPID behaviors. Cyber cheaters, sexual predators, and other less-than-noble types use IM as the tool of their particular "trade".
Honestly, I can't think of one good aspect of IM. Sure, a decade or so ago, IM was WAY cheaper than calling grandma long distance in Florida, but then you had to CALL her to troubleshoot why she couldn't get AIM to work anyway! These days, long distance is cheap. Skype and the like makes it free or super cheap.
So why do people keep sending billions of emoticons every day?
I personally think most people are technophobic sheep and IM is the path of least resistance. That, and the anonymous nature lets them transform from a fat, bald married guy or desperate housewife into Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.
Hmm...this is probably cutting bunny rabbits, but it seems most of the issues are the power brick not the XBox chassis itself.
So this would be more of a supplier issue on that specific, external part. It should NOT require a recall of every unit built, just an exchange of the heat brick o' death.
Heck, block the vents or otherwise stifle cool air to any high-powered PC on the market and they'll lock up, crash, etc. Even the ones running a non-MS OS!:o)
I was killing time on an old IBM StinkPad with W2K and a whopping 256MB of RAM. Did the Jake Webstart, downloaded the 38MB Quake files, and I was rocking. It actually plays well. Had one lock-up during the initial session, but none since.
Oh HELL no! Coffee is my big addiction for sure. Of course, I sure did love a nice, hot cup of joe with a cigarette for breakfast! SIGH...........
Re:tobacco still sucks
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
" It makes you cough, stink and die. What's not to like? "
Absolutely...and does so very effectively and insidiously. Nicotine is amazingly good at the addictive-formation onslaught to the human brain. From personal experience, I can tell you that nicotine is a life-long template in your brain whether you're smoking or not. I smoked 22 years. And I wasn't a "light" smoker. 2-3 packs a day, more when I was drinking alcohol. I quit in 1994. I was thrilled to redsicover the taste of food, drink, and the air in general. I got into incredible physical shape and life was good. I got remarried in 2004 and discovered the wife was "a social smoker". I had only ever known two kinds of people, smokers and non-smokers. I had no idea a SMALL fraction of people get addicted to nicotine so slightly, that they APPEAR to be able to "take or leave" cigarettes. And, to top it off, she smoked my favorite brand. A few months ago, I found myself smoking 2-3 cigarettes every evening after dinner. Right up to the second I lit one up, I'd actually think "I won't be smoking any more of THESE" and do it anyway. I finally quit again 4 weeks ago as has the wife. Nicotine sucks.........
Hmmm....reminds of how to play "Rodeo" with your wife.
1) Mount her from behind. (and with gigantic beasts this IS tough)
2) Shout out some other woman's name.
3) Try to stay on for 8 seconds.
Yee haw, rodeo!
Slashdot Mirror
...apparently.
:o)
Seriously, space elevators are nothing new at all. Science fiction has been all over this for decades. One poster referred to an Analog article about the math and materials involved. Popular Science has done similar articles.
This (building a viable space elevator) is quite feasible. No, the materials aren't there yet and it won't be easy.
Neither was Apollo, yet nearly FORTY FREAKIN YEARS AGO, 12 (18 counting the Command Module pilots who stayed in orbit) people from Earth went to the moon and back in Apollo spacecraft (11 through 17 with 13 aborting and becoming a Tom Hanks movie)
How good was the design? Well, so good that the current NASA Director has stated that they can't come up with a better one. So, the "new" CEV spacecraft slated for missions to the moon...for as long as 6 months at a time....and then Mars is basically an updated Apollo capsule.
The point is that if you go back and read popular media after JFK's speech that "...we will land a man on the moon before the end of the decade", you'll see very smart people listing all sorts of reasons it couldn't be done.
Even further back, Arthur C. Clarke proposed what was to become communication satellites. The naysayers were legion. Geez, glad DirecTV didn't listen.
Basically, if a viable space elevator can be built, it will make the cost of moving people and material to LEO cheaper than flying from NYC to LA.
The economics will drive the technology and it will happen, probably in our lifetimes. I figure 20 years with 40 years as an outside figure. It just makes too much sense.
....welcome our new Cylon overlords and their laser-enhanced vision.
"By your command"
While I would agree there's an inverse function of CPU to graphic card power, it's not as bleak as that!
:o)
I have an "antique" 700Mhz Athlon machine with an AGP slot...which was "new technology" when I bought/built the machine. It originally had a VooDoo 3 AGP card, then an Nvidia 4200. Has a Radeon 9600XT now. While it's mostly used as an iTunes server these days, I still play Wolfenstein, America's Army, and a ton of other games on it. I get pretty darn good frame rates.
My main box is a "beefy" Athlon 64, 2GB of RAM, fast drives, and....a Radeon 9600XT. I got the pair for the price of one, so it was a no-brainer. With the obvious exceptions of Doom3 and Far Cry, most games play about the same on the two machines. The gating factor is the Radeon card for the most part. I should point out that I am a tuning freak, so my boxes scream and have only the bare necessities running. In other words, I don't rip DVDs while running PhotoShop and playing Call of Duty 2.
That said, I most likely will get a 7800 GS for the A64, but leave the mothball machine alone. At that point, I'm sure I would be CPU bound and wasting horsepower. Plus, the power supply in the old box won't handle much more! A new card like the 7800 would probably keep it from POSTing.
The point is that I am real happy to see an AGP part with some horsepower from Nvidia. I like the Radeons I have, but I usually have less grief with NV parts. I don't plan on building another box until some really mature dual-core parts are available from AMD. So, no PCIe slots until then. That makes a fast(er) AGP part a nice stopgap purchase.
And I think I will be seeing a buttload more than 5-6 fps.
Fender....there is no substitute. (to paraphrase Tom Cruise in "Risky Business")
Or, take your current bass and have it PLEK'd (www.plek.com); it'll sound a lot better and set you back less than $150.
Either way, I wouldn't buy Google. The stock is almost too good to be true and if enough folks think that, your $1000 will turn into $10.
Whereas a nice $1000 bass could someday sell for more.
My Fender Jazz set me back about $1100 4 years ago and I've had offers of $2000 as recently as last week.
Guitars make music and bring a smile to your face and soul. Google....doesn't.
...it would be Steve Jobs.
:o)
I've actually met both Gates and Jobs, although I doubt either would remember me in any detail, if at all.
However, I personally feel Gates is a weird little troll with a lot of luck early on that resulted in lots of money. I think if he weren't filthy rich, he'd have been arrested for stalking women from work or something equally creepy years ago.
Steve is a mutant, to be sure, but he has vision and intelligence and seems to be a nice guy most of the time.
That said, neither one is particularly "heroic" to me. They're geeks who got rich beyond avarice. Big deal.
Great news! (Qualias not dead)
:o)
I bought the 61 inch WEGA LCD 2 years ago because the SXRD sets weren't shipping yet. I figured I'd "get by" with the LCD set then upgrade to the SXRD line in 2007/2008.
I've seen the SXRDs...they are the best HDTV currently available...I couldn't believe Sony was dumping them!
Of course, the WEGA LCD I have doesn't exactly suck.
"You know that the underlying base of Mac OS X is BSD, right?"
:o)
""Not exactly. Strictly speaking, the "underlying base" of Mac OS X is Mach. The inclusion of BSD code was more like a siamese twin implant.""
I believe the KERNEL is MACH with a BSD 'wrapper' for functionality. Not a twin so much as a Tootsie Roll Pop.
Well, while some Mac users ARE pretty smug, I don't feel their faith in OS/X is completely misplaced.
I've been writing code since 1971 and have made money testing security.
As an exercise, I wrote "Plan 9", a UNIX-specific viral application. I turned it loose in a lab containing SCO UNIX, IBM AIX, some Windows machines, a Mac running Finder, a Novell file server, and some NeXT machines. All the systems were on the same subnet and had NFS mounts to each other.
Without specifics (and don't ask...I won't say), the virus was designed to disable login capability...a basic, but effective denial of service attack.
The SCO and IBM machines were toasted. Everything else was unaffected. Now, the NeXT boxes are NOT identical to today's Mac OS, but similar.
I haven't dissected OS/X (yet), but I would guess it's not an easy target. Could someone write code that would rape and pillage a Mac? Absolutely...nothing is bulletproof. But, some things are easier....like Windows...so the Mac community may have some justification in feeling more secure.
FWIW........
Yes...and no. When I folded the company...which ironically cratered due to a bad choice of investment partner...I piecemealed the intellectual property out.
So, technically it belongs to other people.
And remember, all of our code was on the NeXT; the only "Mac stuff" we did was to hack a SCSI driver to get a Mac peripheral to run on a NeXT cube.
MUMPS was ported by Plus Five from Washington University. I don't know if they still exist...we ceased operations and business relationships in late '92.
I wrote a medical transcription front-end for the MUMPS-based expert system...that's basically what we showed at the NeXTWorld deal in '90.
That same week, we did a dog and pony at the ACEP (American College of Emergency Physicians) Conference down the street at Moscone. That nothing blew up horribly still amazes me.
About 2 days before the NeXT show, we were compiling our code on like build 1981 of NeXTStep 2.0 when we noticed that all our voice files...pre-recorded status messages as well as our demo medical transcriptions...sounded like Satanic messages. Everything was running backwards.
Avi Tevanian came over, listened and watched us freak for about a minute at most. He says, "I know what this is!" and ran off down the hall. He's back in an hour with a new OS build that fixed the glitch and we went through both shows without a hitch. We did our last compile 2 hours before the show.
Anyway, I sold the "engine" for the transcription system for cash. It was nothing special but I was real proud of it back then.
The ER expert code, which was absolutely amazing, was written primarily by John Holbrook, M.D. from Mercy Springfield Hospital in Springfield, Mass. He had a company called Medical Horizons that did "ChartChecker", the expert app on other platforms. We did a joint project on the NeXT port but they always retained ownership of the app.
Know that doesn't help much...
I am an actual former NeXT Registered Developer. I was CEO of a software company that developed expert systems for physicians on the NeXT. We were instrumental in getting the MUMPS language ported to the NeXT.
Steve, at the time, had a real hard-on for stuff that WASN'T another spreadsheet, word processor, etc. (although everyone loved the hell out of Lotus Improv and that was definitely Steve's baby) so we were one of the companies selected to show our stuff in San Francisco in Septmember of 1990.
This was the event where the NeXT Dimension color card for the Cubes was introduced, along with the NeXTStation pizza-box, and of course, NeXTStep 2.0.
We were in the building for 3 or 4 days before the big show getting our stuff working on almost hourly new builds of the OS.
So, more than a few of us took breaks and watched Steve rehearse his presentation. Trust me, he leaves nothing to chance...nothing. His air of casualness is the result of lots or preparation and practice.
He absolutely IS a showman, but he's also unquestionably, undeniably brilliant.
People remember the Apple IIe and the first (1984) Mac, but forget the Lisa. That "girl" was one of the greased skids for showing Steve the door. Not because it failed, but because Steve wanted about 500 million to 1 billion to build a better machine like it...the NeXT. No, that wasn't its name...but the idea was already there. The board balked, he got the bum rush from his own company.
NeXTStep was/is Mac OS/X. Avi Tevanian was at NeXT, he's Chief Scientist or something at Apple now. Testified at the Microsoft anti-trust trial, etc.
Steve didn't write the MACH kernel or bolt on BSD primitives and Display PostScript to NeXTStep, but damn sure knew what people to recruit and hire to get it done. And then took them back to Apple.
Considering that the Lisa and the seminal ideas for NeXTStep came about around 1985-86...about the time OS/2 and Windows were being created, I'd say the current state of the Mac OS and Windows shows the man ain't too stupid.
No, I am not a Mac fanatic. I have more PC hardware than NeXT and Mac hardware. I'm pretty much agnostic on this stuff...been doing it too long to be religious about any of it these days.
The point is that there's a whole lot to the guy doing the keynotes at MacWorld.
Steve is cool.
I can't imagine who would buy this thing!
Looks to be an average keyboard with WASD colored gray. Ooohhh...that'll improve my scores in FarCry multi-player a bunch!
I think I'll wait for the RPM (Read Player's Mind) interface since it's bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.
"How much atmosphere (as a percentage of Earth's where Earth's = 100%) would be required to "protect" surface objects from significant damage?"
Apparently a lot more than we have...I just saw a Toyota truck get nailed on TV during the football game last night.
Thank goodness it was one of those meteor-proof models!
I don't think it would "remote destroy" so much as void the warranty, put you on a Homeland Security watchlist, and generate an IRS audit of your entire life.
Well, of course, but that's where the social engineering comes in.
Some people will so want their names/scores "up in lights", they'll ignore the fact that ET is phoning home.
I wonder if the 360 sends any "help me, I've been raped and pillaged" data to XBox Live?
At which point your $400-1000 console goes tits up.
MS certainly knows how people got inside the original XBox and it seems EVERY 360 game, multiplayer or not, "reports" scores and achievements to Live.
Seems like a cool feature and all, but it could very well be some crafty social engineering.
Given Sony's recent rootkit debacle, it isn't too much of stretch to believe Uncle Bill had the boys put in a "phone home and tattle" capability.
Work is indeed a different animal. Our shop is Locust Notes with Sametime IM. We've had it for quite a while and ironically, I did the network impact testing and analysis before we deployed.
:o)
About a year ago, I finally enabled the ST client for Notes and I do use it.
About once or twice a month.
I prefer writing to chatting and my analysis work often involves big attachments that won't fly with IM. (we have throttles in place for IM...no audio, video, or large file moves)
But, I do agree that IM can be a boon in a business setting. I should have been more specific in my post.
OK....way in the minority here, but I absolutely abhor and despise IM of every flavor. None of the dozen or so (depends on what's not in pieces) PCs and laptops in my house have ANY instant stupidity installed. Anything that resembles AIM, MSM, etc. has been removed, disabled, or otherwise rendered inert.
Yes, I'm old and weird. My first PC was an IBM 360 in 1971. No tube...TTY terminal. No broadband...300bps ACOUSTIC modem. Batch processing. And yet, it was way cool in the day.
Anyway, my point is that the instant gratification of IM sucks people in and encourages STOOPID behaviors. Cyber cheaters, sexual predators, and other less-than-noble types use IM as the tool of their particular "trade".
Honestly, I can't think of one good aspect of IM. Sure, a decade or so ago, IM was WAY cheaper than calling grandma long distance in Florida, but then you had to CALL her to troubleshoot why she couldn't get AIM to work anyway! These days, long distance is cheap. Skype and the like makes it free or super cheap.
So why do people keep sending billions of emoticons every day?
I personally think most people are technophobic sheep and IM is the path of least resistance. That, and the anonymous nature lets them transform from a fat, bald married guy or desperate housewife into Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.
So maybe IM'ing is a modern sexual issue.
And an IM virus is a new STD.
Guess that makes me an electronic abortionist!
Hmm...this is probably cutting bunny rabbits, but it seems most of the issues are the power brick not the XBox chassis itself.
:o)
So this would be more of a supplier issue on that specific, external part. It should NOT require a recall of every unit built, just an exchange of the heat brick o' death.
Heck, block the vents or otherwise stifle cool air to any high-powered PC on the market and they'll lock up, crash, etc. Even the ones running a non-MS OS!
I was killing time on an old IBM StinkPad with W2K and a whopping 256MB of RAM. Did the Jake Webstart, downloaded the 38MB Quake files, and I was rocking. It actually plays well. Had one lock-up during the initial session, but none since.
Totally non-heinous!
And remember, be excellent to each other!
(Especially if your thrashing around playing air guitar causes breakage of your roommate's furniture)
LMAO!!!! This explains much.
...and somewhat oral-fixated.
...and had a motto of "live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse".
:o)
1) I've always been a bit of a pyromaniac.
2)
3)
As for ganja...I lived in L.A. in the 70's...need I say more?
Oh HELL no! Coffee is my big addiction for sure. Of course, I sure did love a nice, hot cup of joe with a cigarette for breakfast! SIGH...........
" It makes you cough, stink and die. What's not to like? " Absolutely...and does so very effectively and insidiously. Nicotine is amazingly good at the addictive-formation onslaught to the human brain. From personal experience, I can tell you that nicotine is a life-long template in your brain whether you're smoking or not. I smoked 22 years. And I wasn't a "light" smoker. 2-3 packs a day, more when I was drinking alcohol. I quit in 1994. I was thrilled to redsicover the taste of food, drink, and the air in general. I got into incredible physical shape and life was good. I got remarried in 2004 and discovered the wife was "a social smoker". I had only ever known two kinds of people, smokers and non-smokers. I had no idea a SMALL fraction of people get addicted to nicotine so slightly, that they APPEAR to be able to "take or leave" cigarettes. And, to top it off, she smoked my favorite brand. A few months ago, I found myself smoking 2-3 cigarettes every evening after dinner. Right up to the second I lit one up, I'd actually think "I won't be smoking any more of THESE" and do it anyway. I finally quit again 4 weeks ago as has the wife. Nicotine sucks.........
Hmmm....reminds of how to play "Rodeo" with your wife. 1) Mount her from behind. (and with gigantic beasts this IS tough) 2) Shout out some other woman's name. 3) Try to stay on for 8 seconds. Yee haw, rodeo!
Yes, the blood test will show a likely infection, but tissue samples and visual examination are definitive; the blood test is not.