ooh, I love playing with this kind of stuff in my head. Ok, how about this.
A 1-d line segment (a non-infinite line) casts a 0-d or 1-d shadow in a 1-d or above world: If the "light source" is cast straight down from the end of the line, it will cast a 0-d shadow [a point]. If cast from anywhere else, it casts a 1-dimensional shadow. That is to say that if it is cast from OUTSIDE of the first dimension, it will cast a 1st dimensional shadow [a distorted line segment], given that you have at least a 1-dimensional surface on which to cast the shadow.
So a 2-d circle casts a 2-d or 1-d shadow. If cast from within the same two dimensions, it casts a line segment shadow, if cast from the third dimension, it casts a 2-dimensional shadow [a distorted circle], given that you have at least a 2-dimensional surface on which to cast te shadow. As far as I am aware, you cannot cast a 0-d shadow off of a 2-d object unless you cast that shadow from the 0th dimension, see my expansion on this in the 3d world below.
So a 3-d circle casts a 3-d or 2-d shadow. If you cast the shadow from within the same 3 dimensions, you get a 2-dimensional shadow. If you cast it from the 4th dimension, you could get a 3-dimensional shadow given that you have at least a 3-dimensional "surface" on which to cast the shadow. Unless you are casting the shadow from the 2nd dimension (a planar light source), you cannot get a 1-dimensional shadow, and unless you are casting the source from the 1st dimension [a line light source, similar to a laser], you cannot get a 0-dimensional [point] shadow.
So we derive a formula: shadowdimension = lesser([dimension_of_light-1], [dimensions_of_object],[dimension_of_surface])
Meaning that if we work with a 16th dimensional sphere, and we cast a shadow from the 8th dimension, we will get a 7th dimensional shadow so long as we have an 7th dimensional "surface" on which to cast. The same 16th dimensional sphere with a 23rd dimensional light source would cast a 16th dimensional shadow so long as we have at least a 16th dimensional "surface". And no matter how many dimensions our object and light source are, we can only get a 5th dimensional shadow if we only have a 5th dimensional "surface."
It is illegal to publish plans for making weapons of mass destruction under the US Patriot Act. Please report to your local police station for incarceration.
actually any more, they have a harmless chemical that is a VERY good stabilizer (*sigh, been what, 4 years since college chem? You'd think I'd remember this much), which slows down the breakdown process (since H2O is the stable atom, H2O2 is very unstable, thus why it breaks down to H2O and O [the single O being the actual oxidizer] or 2H2O2 => 2H20 + O2 given the lack of a catalist). But the long and short is that you can now keep home or laboratory grade hydrogen peroxide on the shelf for a long time.
I remember in chem class chunking the crust off the H2O2 bottle, and turning my finger tips white just from that (with out getting any moisture on my hands), because the stabilizing agent was so good that even dried there was still plenty of H2O2.
you're not inhaling it in to your lungs though, there are muscles and reflexes to prevent any of your bile from actually getting in to your lungs (if not, you'd have to deal with pneumonia afterwards). Inhaling HCl gas though, you're talking about directly damaging the bronchea, on a wide level throughout your entire lung. Plus, the fact that you've inhaled it means that it's adhered to the surfaces in your lungs all over, it wouldn't be coughable out, and would in fact dissolve the tissues of your deep lungs, leaving scar tissue behind, and reducing the efficiency of your lungs permanently.
IANAD (I am not a doctor), so that's just how it would seem to me though.
Re:But then, there's just plain stupid ...
on
When Users Attack
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· Score: 2
I'm gonna reply to this even though it scrubs a moderation I already did in this story.
I want to modify your metaphor a bit (unless I'm misunderstanding it, in which case it's an elaboration), yeah, most people know what kind of car they have, like most people know what kind of computer they have... "Dell" "Gateway" etc, it's printed in nice pretty letters on the shiny outside of their new toy, just like a car. A bit more advanced user might want to know how many cylidars it has (processor), whether it has antilock brakes (Ram / OS, etc), and how many people it seats (HD size). There are plenty of people who buy a car based on how the seat feels, whether it looks good, and what their friend said about the same kind of car. They don't know about the more advanced things, and they don't care to. They want a car that feels comfortable, gets them to work, and perhaps makes up for a phallic deficiency. Likewise with computers, they want something that lets them check email, read CNN, and shoot some aliens now and again. If it does those things, they're happy.
right, that would be the point of downloading to the T1 providers POP; he knows he's getting full T1 to his provider, what he doesn't know is whether his provider has full T1 to the net... "Sure, I'll sell you a hummer... *small print* it's got an engine from a VW rabbit though */small print*"
They could if they asked the drive to read the appropriate area several times, or until it receives a signal, it charges up a little capacitor, and when it has sufficient charge to return a signal, it does so. Though LED's are pretty power hungry little guys, I think it would probably require quite a bit of effort, and a capacitor with a fairly significant charge capacity (for being part of a very thin piece of hardware meant to fit within the standard thickness of a CD) to make it realalistically reliable, which could mean a 5 minute period of charging up the little guy. Remember, the LED is only on one side of the CD (which I assume is somehow counter-balanced; and one led on each side would require twice the charge), so it has to provide its signal as one bit per revolution, and has to remain lit for that whole revolution (or else respond to the laser light to light very briefly, which come to think of it is a pretty good way to do it with less power).
Really, it is a system that would work fairly well... sortof. Like copy protection schemes on games, it depends on unmodified software installers. You can't depend on that, and it won't be long at all until someone writes a little program for each release that provides the appropriate decryption key, and hard-inserts it in to the return value of what ever function call retrieves the archive decrypt key. Such programs would most certainly be covered as illegal under current US laws, as there's little doubt that they are copy protection circumvention, so they won't be as readily available on public warez sites.
The biggest concern here will most assuredly be the expense of this system: as said in another post, over $1 per CD is too much for standard use, and only really intended for special situations (super duper expensive software)... which means crackers have even fewer programs to crack, and a lot more motivation due to the expense.
I do have to wonder how the article thinks it could limit the number of different locations you can install it, since one of its touted advantages is not requiring registration of user information with a central repository (ala XP), so the best they could do is to program the thing to only allow you to install it a fixed number of times total, when you'd need a replacement CD. That hurts badly, especially for nice buggy Windows and Mac machines where you're looking at periodically just needing to scrub your drive, and reinstall. Oops, even though you own this software, and it's never seen a different machine, the disc says you've installed it too many times, bad YOU!
A great big basket of golfballs (half an hour at your local driving range at 2 am will greatly reduce the cost of this), and instructions to stand at the end of the hall, at 4am during finals week before upending it and running.
Nothing better than 80 sleep deprived, angry, bleary eyed college students all trying to figure out who did that.
Ok, this story isn't mine, it's one that one of my professors from college told me. I'm too young to have ever seen a system like I describe in active use, and am bringing this up from a few years ago, so if details are a little off, forgive me.
The university had just gotten a brand spanking new 2MB of RAM from DEC for their mainframe. It of course came in a full sized rack cabinet. If you've ever seen the insides of a unit like this, it consists of a whole lot of individual tiny ceramic (maybe rare earth) donuts all wired together in a huge 3d grid (filling the cabinet), each donut representing one bit.
They plugged the thing in, fired it up, and found to their dissapointment that the unit was not functioning properly. They checked and rechecked it, but couldn't figure out what they had done wrong, so they called DEC and an engineer came out.
He arrived, took one look at the box, noted its model number, and said "Ok, here's what I need. I need a 2x4 about three feet long." They brought him said board, and he proceeded to close the front door of the cabinet, reel back, and wail on the side of the cabinet with the 2x4 three or four times, VERY hard.
"Fire it up," he said. They did, and it worked. The reason? When they constructed this model, all those little wires holding all those donuts together must have their ends snipped. Those snippings fall down through the grid and some of them get stuck, causing a short circuit. The solution is to knock all those wires out, and the unit works again. He said that typically, shipping makes the snippets fall through to have the unit arrive functionally, but if you get a particularly conscientious shipper, you run in to this problem.
If there were a maturity litmus test, stick a piece of paper in your ear, turns pink, have access to violent video games sort of thing, then yeah, that'd be the way to go. Until that happens though, maturity and age are fairly highly correlated, so that's the closest you can get to a maturity test.
We can't carry around sniper rifles no matter how safe we'd be with them, because some people can't be trusted with them. Similarly for public good, some restrictions need to be realized in other areas where some of a demographic will abuse even though others of the same demographic won't.
What if I, purchaser of original said PC, never accepted the Windows license that came with it and promptly deleted the Windows software from the hard drive and destroyed the original disks. I can sell that hardware with out sending the license with it, because I never agreed to that license that states I must sell that license with the machine.
I think he means 2% are essentially vulerable, as in at no point in their day/month/year are they not vulnerable, versus the rest of the population that suffers from vulnerability as their mental faculties are worn down by their environment.
There are people who could be feeling great about themselves, you walk up to them and say "It is evil to feel good about yourself and you should feel ashamed. When you feel guilty, then your guilt can be replaced with good feelings." and these people would fall to the ground quivering because they constantly cycle between feeling good about themselves then feeling guilty for that, causing them to feel good about feeling guilty, ad-vegetum.
Well, probably not, but some people are extremely controllable in similar means.
First off, it wasn't a flame. Actually I was rather enjoying the discussion, and I'm sorry if I came off a bit snide.
Your hypothesis, however, is that the ice is residing at exactly 0 C (notwithstanding the seasonal changes which I'm glad you realize my education has been nebulous enough to encompas) and you use the increase in kinetic energy in your equations to purely take the ice from solid to liquid, not to apply any of that energy to transitioning between sub-0 temperatures to 0 itself.
The most significant part of what you say above is the status of graudually weakening the ice as it weakens and strengthens during the summer and winter seasons. But I have a feeling the year-to-year fluctuations in average temperature varies by far more than two degrees. Perhaps this year wouldn't quite have been enough to cause the breakup with out the global warming effect, but I really can't say. Perhaps if not for this year, plus global warming, the temperature would never again have gotten high enough to weaken it to the point of collapse, that's only something we can only tell once we've seen the years pass by.
However, I've really ceased to care, the thing broke up, global warming undoubtedly contributed to it in some scale, and we're likely the only ones left reading this thread.
Meanwhile I'm going to hop back in my gas powered car, go home, wonder how much ozone that burns off, feel bad about it, then go on about my life until a better option comes along.
True, but the area decrease in the melt line doesn't necessarily relate to the ice floe, as a lot of this is on the other side of Antarctica. Consider that the entire area of the ice floe has changed by +2 degrees. Unless this floe was hanging out at -1 degree C, global warming isn't what caused this thing to melt. We're talking about a thick shelf of ice.
The planet changes, things like this will occur naturally. Perhaps global warming played a role in when it broke up, but it did not cause it is all I'm saying. Yeah, the ice floe would be somewhat weakened by a 2 degree temperature increase, but it wouldn't be the single handedly destroyed by that. That's all I'm saying, I'm not discounting the effects of global warming on this thing, nor even saying that global warming is inconsequential, but only that it's not the entire culprit here.
Yeah, I had college physics too. And yes, if you condensed the energy increase of the entire atmosphere in to the area of this ice floe, you're going to increase the temperature of the floe by probably a few thousand degrees. Yeah, that'll melt it. The problem, however, is with the distribution of this energy. That energy isn't all condensed on to the ice floe. NOTWITHSTANDING the point that the mass of the earth's atmosphere versus the mass of the ice floe, I'd be willing to bet that the ice floe has more mass given that the ice floe is solid and the atmosphere is a gas.
All of that aside, the fact is that if the entire earth's surface has only raised two degrees, then that includes the ice floe, regardless of energies distributed elsewhere on the planet. If this floe was hanging out at -1 degree C, then yeah, that two degrees will melt this thing, but then a fly farting as it passes by would have melted it too.
Meanwhile when you figure out how to take the entire delta kinetic energy in the earth's atmosphere and condense it in to one area, I suggest that rather than using that energy for evil (melting the earth's ice caps), you use it instead for good and develop a generator out of it as an alternate power source.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't global warming talking about something on the order of a tenth of a degree every decade? Soo... The Industrial revolution was late 19th century, but we'll assume we've been abusing the atmosphere since the early 19th century. That's 2 centuries. That's 2 degrees. 2 degrees have melted this ice floe? What are you smoking? I'm not saying that because it's a slow speed of warming that we can continue to abuse the planet, but I am, however, saying that it's fairly unlikely that global warming is the monster who destroyed this ice floe, but rather that it was a natural part of the earth's ever changing environment. Maybe it broke up a year or two earlier than it would have, but two degrees isn't going to dissolve 500 million tonnes of ice in the span of a month.
Which is a logical fallicy. "I think therefore I am" does not necessitate "I think not therefore I am not." Is your pen/pencil nonexistant? Does it think?
The interesting thing about MPI (which, by the way, is the clustering software that's part of Microsoft's clusting kit) is that it's also available on Linux, Solaris, and other OS's if I recall correctly.
We used it in college, and we clustered between an array of Solaris SPARC machines and an array of PCs running Win2k. If you wrote your software correctly, it didn't matter what OS was on the thing as long as you had a version compiled for that environment.
So what I want to know is why on earth anyone would want to build a Windows cluster when they could avoid the bloat and use the exact same software in a more robust and secure environment of Linux.
In the Windows environment our accounts had to be granted administrative access in order for us to run our projects, we'd request the access and it'd be granted for the duration that we were in the lab, then revoked when we left, even if we were just "going to the bathroom quick."
But if they win the case and can ultimately pocket a penny a click (or whatever) the people who are in leadership positions in BT will be able to retire incredibly wealthy long before their patent expires.
As to the person below who said you shouldn't be able to patent software, well, they're not, they're patenting the idea of computers providing an easy to navigate function to arbitrarily reference, and allow you to go to another machine. Sounds like on-site linking isn't covered by this patent, but any link to another website is. Sucks to be a search engine.
I wish that were true, but it's not. At least as far as the Internet goes, people will stick with what they have because a) they don't feel like going elsewhere, and b) they only know people who are where they themselves are now.
Look at how many people use AOL as their dialup solution. I don't think there's a worse dialup solution on the market, it's a resource hog, it makes you watch their ads before you can get your email, etc etc etc. Then they eagerly gobble up new versions with more advertisements built right in, and no new features except maybe a facelift.
They are definately segregating themselves, but they're excluding everyone else, not themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
ooh, I love playing with this kind of stuff in my head. Ok, how about this.
A 1-d line segment (a non-infinite line) casts a 0-d or 1-d shadow in a 1-d or above world: If the "light source" is cast straight down from the end of the line, it will cast a 0-d shadow [a point]. If cast from anywhere else, it casts a 1-dimensional shadow. That is to say that if it is cast from OUTSIDE of the first dimension, it will cast a 1st dimensional shadow [a distorted line segment], given that you have at least a 1-dimensional surface on which to cast the shadow.
So a 2-d circle casts a 2-d or 1-d shadow. If cast from within the same two dimensions, it casts a line segment shadow, if cast from the third dimension, it casts a 2-dimensional shadow [a distorted circle], given that you have at least a 2-dimensional surface on which to cast te shadow. As far as I am aware, you cannot cast a 0-d shadow off of a 2-d object unless you cast that shadow from the 0th dimension, see my expansion on this in the 3d world below.
So a 3-d circle casts a 3-d or 2-d shadow. If you cast the shadow from within the same 3 dimensions, you get a 2-dimensional shadow. If you cast it from the 4th dimension, you could get a 3-dimensional shadow given that you have at least a 3-dimensional "surface" on which to cast the shadow. Unless you are casting the shadow from the 2nd dimension (a planar light source), you cannot get a 1-dimensional shadow, and unless you are casting the source from the 1st dimension [a line light source, similar to a laser], you cannot get a 0-dimensional [point] shadow.
So we derive a formula:
shadowdimension = lesser([dimension_of_light-1], [dimensions_of_object],[dimension_of_surface])
Meaning that if we work with a 16th dimensional sphere, and we cast a shadow from the 8th dimension, we will get a 7th dimensional shadow so long as we have an 7th dimensional "surface" on which to cast. The same 16th dimensional sphere with a 23rd dimensional light source would cast a 16th dimensional shadow so long as we have at least a 16th dimensional "surface". And no matter how many dimensions our object and light source are, we can only get a 5th dimensional shadow if we only have a 5th dimensional "surface."
Did I do that right? I think my brain broke.
It is illegal to publish plans for making weapons of mass destruction under the US Patriot Act. Please report to your local police station for incarceration.
actually any more, they have a harmless chemical that is a VERY good stabilizer (*sigh, been what, 4 years since college chem? You'd think I'd remember this much), which slows down the breakdown process (since H2O is the stable atom, H2O2 is very unstable, thus why it breaks down to H2O and O [the single O being the actual oxidizer] or 2H2O2 => 2H20 + O2 given the lack of a catalist). But the long and short is that you can now keep home or laboratory grade hydrogen peroxide on the shelf for a long time.
I remember in chem class chunking the crust off the H2O2 bottle, and turning my finger tips white just from that (with out getting any moisture on my hands), because the stabilizing agent was so good that even dried there was still plenty of H2O2.
you're not inhaling it in to your lungs though, there are muscles and reflexes to prevent any of your bile from actually getting in to your lungs (if not, you'd have to deal with pneumonia afterwards). Inhaling HCl gas though, you're talking about directly damaging the bronchea, on a wide level throughout your entire lung. Plus, the fact that you've inhaled it means that it's adhered to the surfaces in your lungs all over, it wouldn't be coughable out, and would in fact dissolve the tissues of your deep lungs, leaving scar tissue behind, and reducing the efficiency of your lungs permanently.
IANAD (I am not a doctor), so that's just how it would seem to me though.
I'm gonna reply to this even though it scrubs a moderation I already did in this story.
I want to modify your metaphor a bit (unless I'm misunderstanding it, in which case it's an elaboration), yeah, most people know what kind of car they have, like most people know what kind of computer they have... "Dell" "Gateway" etc, it's printed in nice pretty letters on the shiny outside of their new toy, just like a car. A bit more advanced user might want to know how many cylidars it has (processor), whether it has antilock brakes (Ram / OS, etc), and how many people it seats (HD size). There are plenty of people who buy a car based on how the seat feels, whether it looks good, and what their friend said about the same kind of car. They don't know about the more advanced things, and they don't care to. They want a car that feels comfortable, gets them to work, and perhaps makes up for a phallic deficiency. Likewise with computers, they want something that lets them check email, read CNN, and shoot some aliens now and again. If it does those things, they're happy.
from http://www.nationsonline.org, these are estimates.
European countries total 728,659,000
U.S and Canada total 309,504,000
Europe has 2.35x the population of Statsians and Canuks.
right, that would be the point of downloading to the T1 providers POP; he knows he's getting full T1 to his provider, what he doesn't know is whether his provider has full T1 to the net... "Sure, I'll sell you a hummer... *small print* it's got an engine from a VW rabbit though */small print*"
They could if they asked the drive to read the appropriate area several times, or until it receives a signal, it charges up a little capacitor, and when it has sufficient charge to return a signal, it does so. Though LED's are pretty power hungry little guys, I think it would probably require quite a bit of effort, and a capacitor with a fairly significant charge capacity (for being part of a very thin piece of hardware meant to fit within the standard thickness of a CD) to make it realalistically reliable, which could mean a 5 minute period of charging up the little guy. Remember, the LED is only on one side of the CD (which I assume is somehow counter-balanced; and one led on each side would require twice the charge), so it has to provide its signal as one bit per revolution, and has to remain lit for that whole revolution (or else respond to the laser light to light very briefly, which come to think of it is a pretty good way to do it with less power).
Really, it is a system that would work fairly well... sortof. Like copy protection schemes on games, it depends on unmodified software installers. You can't depend on that, and it won't be long at all until someone writes a little program for each release that provides the appropriate decryption key, and hard-inserts it in to the return value of what ever function call retrieves the archive decrypt key. Such programs would most certainly be covered as illegal under current US laws, as there's little doubt that they are copy protection circumvention, so they won't be as readily available on public warez sites.
The biggest concern here will most assuredly be the expense of this system: as said in another post, over $1 per CD is too much for standard use, and only really intended for special situations (super duper expensive software)... which means crackers have even fewer programs to crack, and a lot more motivation due to the expense.
I do have to wonder how the article thinks it could limit the number of different locations you can install it, since one of its touted advantages is not requiring registration of user information with a central repository (ala XP), so the best they could do is to program the thing to only allow you to install it a fixed number of times total, when you'd need a replacement CD. That hurts badly, especially for nice buggy Windows and Mac machines where you're looking at periodically just needing to scrub your drive, and reinstall. Oops, even though you own this software, and it's never seen a different machine, the disc says you've installed it too many times, bad YOU!
Nothing better than 80 sleep deprived, angry, bleary eyed college students all trying to figure out who did that.
The university had just gotten a brand spanking new 2MB of RAM from DEC for their mainframe. It of course came in a full sized rack cabinet. If you've ever seen the insides of a unit like this, it consists of a whole lot of individual tiny ceramic (maybe rare earth) donuts all wired together in a huge 3d grid (filling the cabinet), each donut representing one bit.
They plugged the thing in, fired it up, and found to their dissapointment that the unit was not functioning properly. They checked and rechecked it, but couldn't figure out what they had done wrong, so they called DEC and an engineer came out.
He arrived, took one look at the box, noted its model number, and said "Ok, here's what I need. I need a 2x4 about three feet long." They brought him said board, and he proceeded to close the front door of the cabinet, reel back, and wail on the side of the cabinet with the 2x4 three or four times, VERY hard.
"Fire it up," he said. They did, and it worked. The reason? When they constructed this model, all those little wires holding all those donuts together must have their ends snipped. Those snippings fall down through the grid and some of them get stuck, causing a short circuit. The solution is to knock all those wires out, and the unit works again. He said that typically, shipping makes the snippets fall through to have the unit arrive functionally, but if you get a particularly conscientious shipper, you run in to this problem.
Anyone have any mirrors? (by the time I'm done posting this, there'll probably have been a dozen "First Mirror Posts" but oh well.)
We can't carry around sniper rifles no matter how safe we'd be with them, because some people can't be trusted with them. Similarly for public good, some restrictions need to be realized in other areas where some of a demographic will abuse even though others of the same demographic won't.
What if I, purchaser of original said PC, never accepted the Windows license that came with it and promptly deleted the Windows software from the hard drive and destroyed the original disks. I can sell that hardware with out sending the license with it, because I never agreed to that license that states I must sell that license with the machine.
There are people who could be feeling great about themselves, you walk up to them and say "It is evil to feel good about yourself and you should feel ashamed. When you feel guilty, then your guilt can be replaced with good feelings." and these people would fall to the ground quivering because they constantly cycle between feeling good about themselves then feeling guilty for that, causing them to feel good about feeling guilty, ad-vegetum.
Well, probably not, but some people are extremely controllable in similar means.
First off, it wasn't a flame. Actually I was rather enjoying the discussion, and I'm sorry if I came off a bit snide.
Your hypothesis, however, is that the ice is residing at exactly 0 C (notwithstanding the seasonal changes which I'm glad you realize my education has been nebulous enough to encompas) and you use the increase in kinetic energy in your equations to purely take the ice from solid to liquid, not to apply any of that energy to transitioning between sub-0 temperatures to 0 itself.
The most significant part of what you say above is the status of graudually weakening the ice as it weakens and strengthens during the summer and winter seasons. But I have a feeling the year-to-year fluctuations in average temperature varies by far more than two degrees. Perhaps this year wouldn't quite have been enough to cause the breakup with out the global warming effect, but I really can't say. Perhaps if not for this year, plus global warming, the temperature would never again have gotten high enough to weaken it to the point of collapse, that's only something we can only tell once we've seen the years pass by.
However, I've really ceased to care, the thing broke up, global warming undoubtedly contributed to it in some scale, and we're likely the only ones left reading this thread.
Meanwhile I'm going to hop back in my gas powered car, go home, wonder how much ozone that burns off, feel bad about it, then go on about my life until a better option comes along.
True, but the area decrease in the melt line doesn't necessarily relate to the ice floe, as a lot of this is on the other side of Antarctica. Consider that the entire area of the ice floe has changed by +2 degrees. Unless this floe was hanging out at -1 degree C, global warming isn't what caused this thing to melt. We're talking about a thick shelf of ice.
The planet changes, things like this will occur naturally. Perhaps global warming played a role in when it broke up, but it did not cause it is all I'm saying. Yeah, the ice floe would be somewhat weakened by a 2 degree temperature increase, but it wouldn't be the single handedly destroyed by that. That's all I'm saying, I'm not discounting the effects of global warming on this thing, nor even saying that global warming is inconsequential, but only that it's not the entire culprit here.
then how is that caused by global warming?
Yeah, I had college physics too. And yes, if you condensed the energy increase of the entire atmosphere in to the area of this ice floe, you're going to increase the temperature of the floe by probably a few thousand degrees. Yeah, that'll melt it. The problem, however, is with the distribution of this energy. That energy isn't all condensed on to the ice floe. NOTWITHSTANDING the point that the mass of the earth's atmosphere versus the mass of the ice floe, I'd be willing to bet that the ice floe has more mass given that the ice floe is solid and the atmosphere is a gas.
All of that aside, the fact is that if the entire earth's surface has only raised two degrees, then that includes the ice floe, regardless of energies distributed elsewhere on the planet. If this floe was hanging out at -1 degree C, then yeah, that two degrees will melt this thing, but then a fly farting as it passes by would have melted it too.
Meanwhile when you figure out how to take the entire delta kinetic energy in the earth's atmosphere and condense it in to one area, I suggest that rather than using that energy for evil (melting the earth's ice caps), you use it instead for good and develop a generator out of it as an alternate power source.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't global warming talking about something on the order of a tenth of a degree every decade? Soo... The Industrial revolution was late 19th century, but we'll assume we've been abusing the atmosphere since the early 19th century. That's 2 centuries. That's 2 degrees. 2 degrees have melted this ice floe? What are you smoking? I'm not saying that because it's a slow speed of warming that we can continue to abuse the planet, but I am, however, saying that it's fairly unlikely that global warming is the monster who destroyed this ice floe, but rather that it was a natural part of the earth's ever changing environment. Maybe it broke up a year or two earlier than it would have, but two degrees isn't going to dissolve 500 million tonnes of ice in the span of a month.
Right =)
Which is a logical fallicy. "I think therefore I am" does not necessitate "I think not therefore I am not." Is your pen/pencil nonexistant? Does it think?
Shut up, I do so have a sense of humor!!
Links is a pretty darn good text based browser, it's amazing at rendering tables, etc.
The interesting thing about MPI (which, by the way, is the clustering software that's part of Microsoft's clusting kit) is that it's also available on Linux, Solaris, and other OS's if I recall correctly.
We used it in college, and we clustered between an array of Solaris SPARC machines and an array of PCs running Win2k. If you wrote your software correctly, it didn't matter what OS was on the thing as long as you had a version compiled for that environment.
So what I want to know is why on earth anyone would want to build a Windows cluster when they could avoid the bloat and use the exact same software in a more robust and secure environment of Linux.
In the Windows environment our accounts had to be granted administrative access in order for us to run our projects, we'd request the access and it'd be granted for the duration that we were in the lab, then revoked when we left, even if we were just "going to the bathroom quick."
I'm gonna change the sig when I think of something new, it's a bit bulky as it is.
As to the person below who said you shouldn't be able to patent software, well, they're not, they're patenting the idea of computers providing an easy to navigate function to arbitrarily reference, and allow you to go to another machine. Sounds like on-site linking isn't covered by this patent, but any link to another website is. Sucks to be a search engine.
I wish that were true, but it's not. At least as far as the Internet goes, people will stick with what they have because a) they don't feel like going elsewhere, and b) they only know people who are where they themselves are now.
Look at how many people use AOL as their dialup solution. I don't think there's a worse dialup solution on the market, it's a resource hog, it makes you watch their ads before you can get your email, etc etc etc. Then they eagerly gobble up new versions with more advertisements built right in, and no new features except maybe a facelift.
They are definately segregating themselves, but they're excluding everyone else, not themselves.