oh, and, no, we're not the biggest thing to hit the planet, but we are the most persistant. (And I believe the only single species to outnumber us in the history of the planet would probably be insects, bacteria and some smaller plants.
Really, these scary scenarios are not realistic at all.
Hoo boy, you are quite the optomist...
They are quite realistic, and actually very probable. Besides, in all likelyhood we're not going to have much notice before it happens. And even if we did, have you ever noticed how people bitch and moan when ten or fifteen people die in one day during a heatwave? Imagine what would happen if a couple billion did... that's less than half the worlds population.
He actually discusses this in his book as well. No, they didn't destroy all life on Earth, but they almost did. Apparently every human alive today is descended from a group of about 100 individuals, the sole survivors of an ice age or something like that.
Even if 2000 people out of 6.5 mil survived I think everyone would agree that's a pretty big disaster, especially to those of us who wouldn't survive...
If you really want to scare the pants off you and the shit outta you (preferably in that order, otherwise you'll have to change) read Bill Bryson's "A breif history of just about everything."
In it he explains how much of an anomoly we are, not only that life appeared on this planet, not only that it evolved to multicellular organisms, not only that it evolved into inteligent beings, but also that it survived all the many catastrophes that might have occurred throught that process, and how, at any minute, any number of things could completely wipe us off the planet.
He talks about how as greenhouse gasses build up in the atmosphere one of a couple things could happen, either the heat is trapped on the surface and continues to build rapidly, boiling the seas and creating more greenhouse gasses (a neverending cycle, it'd never end without some outside influence), or the gasses would reflect the heat from the sun causing the climate to initially heat up (shrinking the ice caps, and causing more evaporation) and then (relatively) suddenly getting very cold, creating more and more ice, which reflect more and more sunlight.
We're really kind of walking along a tightrope when it comes to this kinda thing, and we're dancing around mindlessly with a bowling ball in our hand, it's a total fluke that we havn't fallen yet.
Oh, and we're technically still in an ice age just at a short high point in temperature, normally the tempareature is either freezing cold (ice covering most of the planet) or swealtering hot (tropical just about everywhere), mostly freezing cold though...
and that's just the temperature, I didn't get into the potential extraterrestrial bombardment (now that doesn't mean aliens, it just means things not from Earth), supervolcanos (Yellowstone), disease, etc. Not to mention things that we've done, are doing, and may continue to do, to ourselves.
I highly reccomend Bill Bryson's book, it tells you we're doomed in a way that'll keep you laughing the entire time.
Hey, as long as we're applying units to measurements of a different type why not measure it in feet/sec, or perhaps in watts? volts? degrees kelvin? how about in hours?
I think what the anonymous poster was saying was stupid was when you said it'd be going slower than the speed of light. It would be going the speed of light, it'd just have longer to travel.
If two peoplle are on the banks of a lake 50miles wide and one travels 100mph over the lake directly to the other side, and the other travels 100mph around the lake, they both traveled at the same speed but one gets there before the other.
BTW, if it were a perfectly circular lake what would the average speed toward the opposite point be for the person who went around? (hint: find the circumfrence, halve it, find out how long it'd take the guy to travel that distance and divide that by 50mph)
A) they don't teach it in drivers training anymore.
B) have you ever tried to park a medium sized vehicle in a major city? It's a pain even trying to find a space let alone a space you can fit into. Not to mention all those streets with no left turns (especially when it's a one way street going left, so no right turns either). And then there's all the asshole drivers who scream at you because you're stopped in the middle of traffic and you can't back up anymore because they're right behind you...
No, they still teach that... people are just morons and assholes...
Around here we've got people who drift lanes.
My half-brother's half-brother (no relation to me) said it quite nicely: In Marin (north of San Fransisco) you've got people who drive like they're high, in the east bay (east of SF, duh) you've got people who drive like assholes, and in the city (SF, if you hadn't guessed it) you've got about 50/50...
Gate's version of charity is either giving money (which he does regularly, so he's not all bad... just like 99.99%...) or giving away licenses of Windows to schools and libraries (personally I wouldn't even pirate the stuff, it's like toxic or something...), but with no tech support or future upgrades... it's like get 'em hooked and then reel them in...
For people like us, yeah, 5 years is quite enough for a computer (we'd all like to be able to upgrade yearly...), however for most people (my mother and sister for example) they could go for quite a while without upgrading, yeah, OS X was pretty nasty in it's 10.0-10.1 days but 10.3 ran fine on my mom's cube, and that was notoriously a crummy computer... The only reason she upgraded is that her monitor died. I convinced her that she'd be upgrading in the next few years anyway and since she wanted a flat panel monitor it'd probably just be easier to upgrade now to an iMac ($300 for a flatpanel monitor which wouldn't be used with an iMac when she upgraded). Had the monitor not died she probably would have used that little cube into the ground...
Why is it that people continue to be so short sighted. Macs last so much longer than Wintels... Sure you pa $500-$3000 initially but you don't have to re-spend for another 5-10 years, vs. spending $300-$1500 and having to re-spend in 1-2 years or risk not being able to upgrade to the latest office (this is office folks, not some fancy shmancy photo editing software, it deals with text and equations, not much more), and they need the latest office because office doesn't seem to be backwards compatable ver consistantl (if at all)...
Personally, I'd rather spend the $3000 for a kick ass laptop and not have to get anything more for several years. Since 1990 my mom's had 4 computers, two were used and still held our attention for quite a while (I've still got one of them (a 512ke) tucked away, and last time I checked it still worked fine for playing the original sim city...). She only just recently replaced her 5 year old cube for an Intel iMac. It shouldn't be that hard now to build games for intel macs, in fact, many already run using wine, q and other such emulators and non-emulators.
As another poster has said, Windows is the only choice because people are too stupid to realize that there are other, better choices. It's like driving along a bumpy dirt road while passing on-ramps to nicely paved freeways...
I can't wait until Apple cracks down on this garbage, if they even decide to put forth the effort.
Why would they? You've already bought their system, why would they want to expend resources to crack down? The reason they crack down on making sure people can't (read: "have a hard time") using OS X on other systems is that they want you to buy their own systems, which I think is one of the reasons it works so well: they control the hardware.
Think of it as a rider lawn mower, why drive it around town? Because sometimes people don't have enough money (or need) to use a regular car. In this case, sometimes people need to use Windows but can't be bothered (for one reason or another) to put forth effort and resources (money, space, electricity) for an extra computer.
Personally I think it's more of a proof of concept thing, yeah, you can, but more or less useless. An Aqua'd wine would be much better...
I'm not aware of any type of motor that simply locks up when no power is applied.
Probably havn't been around many types of motors then. It could also be the gear configuration (wormdrive would make it impossible to free spin), or perhaps it's not locked up but the gear ratio is such that there's not enough traction to turn the motor (in which case it's probably better that it drags)
What they need is some way to pop the wheel off, perhaps with another in reserve (if only a freespinning one), kinda like PeeWee's handlebar...
A murderer could deny police access to their premises because they would find a body in her freezer that would incriminate her.
um... she could, unless they had a warrent... in fact, if the police barge in without your permission and without a warrent even if they find a dead body with your hand on the knife there's not a whole lot they can do, it's inadmissable in court (unless they had probable cause, like a scream...)
however this case is different the laptop belonged to the company (had it belonged to him the company would have been shit out of luck unless they were able to convince some police authority to get a warrent and seize it). Still though, there's no reason he could be brought up on any real charges even if he completely wiped the hard drive and over wrote it with zeros there'd be no damage to the laptop itself, a system install and it'd be fine, no damage to property, no laws broken.
if you kill someone and then clean everything up completely, the cleaning up is not going to be breaking the law (well, disturbing a crime scene, but they'd still have to prove it was a crime scene, in which case you're probably screwed anyway)
All I can say is: Bu-- mother--- gwa-- the-- fu-- jes-- ghaaaa! What the fuck is wrong with our elected officials... I think perhaps I need to start complaining more...
Slashdot Mirror
As Douglas Adams said: "Any finite number divided by an infinate number is as close to zero as you can ever get."
Thus a finite number divided by zero is as close to infinity as you can get.
(obviously this is the line of thought that eventually became bistromathics)
oh, and, no, we're not the biggest thing to hit the planet, but we are the most persistant. (And I believe the only single species to outnumber us in the history of the planet would probably be insects, bacteria and some smaller plants.
Hoo boy, you are quite the optomist...
They are quite realistic, and actually very probable. Besides, in all likelyhood we're not going to have much notice before it happens. And even if we did, have you ever noticed how people bitch and moan when ten or fifteen people die in one day during a heatwave? Imagine what would happen if a couple billion did... that's less than half the worlds population.
He actually discusses this in his book as well. No, they didn't destroy all life on Earth, but they almost did. Apparently every human alive today is descended from a group of about 100 individuals, the sole survivors of an ice age or something like that.
Even if 2000 people out of 6.5 mil survived I think everyone would agree that's a pretty big disaster, especially to those of us who wouldn't survive...
If you really want to scare the pants off you and the shit outta you (preferably in that order, otherwise you'll have to change) read Bill Bryson's "A breif history of just about everything."
In it he explains how much of an anomoly we are, not only that life appeared on this planet, not only that it evolved to multicellular organisms, not only that it evolved into inteligent beings, but also that it survived all the many catastrophes that might have occurred throught that process, and how, at any minute, any number of things could completely wipe us off the planet.
He talks about how as greenhouse gasses build up in the atmosphere one of a couple things could happen, either the heat is trapped on the surface and continues to build rapidly, boiling the seas and creating more greenhouse gasses (a neverending cycle, it'd never end without some outside influence), or the gasses would reflect the heat from the sun causing the climate to initially heat up (shrinking the ice caps, and causing more evaporation) and then (relatively) suddenly getting very cold, creating more and more ice, which reflect more and more sunlight.
We're really kind of walking along a tightrope when it comes to this kinda thing, and we're dancing around mindlessly with a bowling ball in our hand, it's a total fluke that we havn't fallen yet.
Oh, and we're technically still in an ice age just at a short high point in temperature, normally the tempareature is either freezing cold (ice covering most of the planet) or swealtering hot (tropical just about everywhere), mostly freezing cold though...
and that's just the temperature, I didn't get into the potential extraterrestrial bombardment (now that doesn't mean aliens, it just means things not from Earth), supervolcanos (Yellowstone), disease, etc. Not to mention things that we've done, are doing, and may continue to do, to ourselves.
I highly reccomend Bill Bryson's book, it tells you we're doomed in a way that'll keep you laughing the entire time.
Hey, as long as we're applying units to measurements of a different type why not measure it in feet/sec, or perhaps in watts? volts? degrees kelvin? how about in hours?
It's five hours big.
Works wonders...
I think what the anonymous poster was saying was stupid was when you said it'd be going slower than the speed of light. It would be going the speed of light, it'd just have longer to travel.
If two peoplle are on the banks of a lake 50miles wide and one travels 100mph over the lake directly to the other side, and the other travels 100mph around the lake, they both traveled at the same speed but one gets there before the other.
BTW, if it were a perfectly circular lake what would the average speed toward the opposite point be for the person who went around? (hint: find the circumfrence, halve it, find out how long it'd take the guy to travel that distance and divide that by 50mph)
A) they don't teach it in drivers training anymore.
B) have you ever tried to park a medium sized vehicle in a major city? It's a pain even trying to find a space let alone a space you can fit into. Not to mention all those streets with no left turns (especially when it's a one way street going left, so no right turns either). And then there's all the asshole drivers who scream at you because you're stopped in the middle of traffic and you can't back up anymore because they're right behind you...
No, they still teach that... people are just morons and assholes...
Around here we've got people who drift lanes.
My half-brother's half-brother (no relation to me) said it quite nicely: In Marin (north of San Fransisco) you've got people who drive like they're high, in the east bay (east of SF, duh) you've got people who drive like assholes, and in the city (SF, if you hadn't guessed it) you've got about 50/50...
Gate's version of charity is either giving money (which he does regularly, so he's not all bad... just like 99.99%...) or giving away licenses of Windows to schools and libraries (personally I wouldn't even pirate the stuff, it's like toxic or something...), but with no tech support or future upgrades... it's like get 'em hooked and then reel them in...
For people like us, yeah, 5 years is quite enough for a computer (we'd all like to be able to upgrade yearly...), however for most people (my mother and sister for example) they could go for quite a while without upgrading, yeah, OS X was pretty nasty in it's 10.0-10.1 days but 10.3 ran fine on my mom's cube, and that was notoriously a crummy computer... The only reason she upgraded is that her monitor died. I convinced her that she'd be upgrading in the next few years anyway and since she wanted a flat panel monitor it'd probably just be easier to upgrade now to an iMac ($300 for a flatpanel monitor which wouldn't be used with an iMac when she upgraded). Had the monitor not died she probably would have used that little cube into the ground...
only for less than half the world, so they're more late than early
wow... that is odd...
Oh, leave him alone. Not everyone can be even mildly observant...
Why is it that people continue to be so short sighted. Macs last so much longer than Wintels... Sure you pa $500-$3000 initially but you don't have to re-spend for another 5-10 years, vs. spending $300-$1500 and having to re-spend in 1-2 years or risk not being able to upgrade to the latest office (this is office folks, not some fancy shmancy photo editing software, it deals with text and equations, not much more), and they need the latest office because office doesn't seem to be backwards compatable ver consistantl (if at all)...
Personally, I'd rather spend the $3000 for a kick ass laptop and not have to get anything more for several years. Since 1990 my mom's had 4 computers, two were used and still held our attention for quite a while (I've still got one of them (a 512ke) tucked away, and last time I checked it still worked fine for playing the original sim city...). She only just recently replaced her 5 year old cube for an Intel iMac. It shouldn't be that hard now to build games for intel macs, in fact, many already run using wine, q and other such emulators and non-emulators.
As another poster has said, Windows is the only choice because people are too stupid to realize that there are other, better choices. It's like driving along a bumpy dirt road while passing on-ramps to nicely paved freeways...
That's still only 300,000,000 bit*meters/second... or 300 MbMps... emmbumips
Why would they? You've already bought their system, why would they want to expend resources to crack down? The reason they crack down on making sure people can't (read: "have a hard time") using OS X on other systems is that they want you to buy their own systems, which I think is one of the reasons it works so well: they control the hardware.
Think of it as a rider lawn mower, why drive it around town? Because sometimes people don't have enough money (or need) to use a regular car. In this case, sometimes people need to use Windows but can't be bothered (for one reason or another) to put forth effort and resources (money, space, electricity) for an extra computer.
Personally I think it's more of a proof of concept thing, yeah, you can, but more or less useless. An Aqua'd wine would be much better...
Probably havn't been around many types of motors then. It could also be the gear configuration (wormdrive would make it impossible to free spin), or perhaps it's not locked up but the gear ratio is such that there's not enough traction to turn the motor (in which case it's probably better that it drags)
What they need is some way to pop the wheel off, perhaps with another in reserve (if only a freespinning one), kinda like PeeWee's handlebar...
Only if they saw you BEFORE they entered your house... of course they could always lie and say they did... or that they heard something...
I think that was kind of the point...
"Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light" -> "To be fair, that was true at the time."
um... she could, unless they had a warrent... in fact, if the police barge in without your permission and without a warrent even if they find a dead body with your hand on the knife there's not a whole lot they can do, it's inadmissable in court (unless they had probable cause, like a scream...)
however this case is different the laptop belonged to the company (had it belonged to him the company would have been shit out of luck unless they were able to convince some police authority to get a warrent and seize it). Still though, there's no reason he could be brought up on any real charges even if he completely wiped the hard drive and over wrote it with zeros there'd be no damage to the laptop itself, a system install and it'd be fine, no damage to property, no laws broken.
if you kill someone and then clean everything up completely, the cleaning up is not going to be breaking the law (well, disturbing a crime scene, but they'd still have to prove it was a crime scene, in which case you're probably screwed anyway)
So... FIX THEM ... morons...
I mostly agree with you, it just continues to amaze me how idiotic people continue to be.
All I can say is:
Bu-- mother--- gwa-- the-- fu-- jes-- ghaaaa! What the fuck is wrong with our elected officials... I think perhaps I need to start complaining more...