Anti-matter weapons are the future. It will not be long until we have what I call a "Planetary Deadman switch".
It will be a _very_ long time before that happens. Antimatter generation is horribly inefficient, and even if they manage to jack up the efficiency to a near-100%, you will still need to put all the energy your antimatter weapon is going to release into it in the first place. Where's all that energy going to come from ? Nuclear fission (why not build a few thousand nuclear bombs with all that material ? Nuclear fusion (again, why not build a few thousand much simpler hydrogen bombs instead) ?
Antimatter weapons are quite unfeasible until we find a readly available, natural source of antimatter. And I very much doubt something like this exists in our solar system.
There is definately a "rush" they experience from eating foods/drinks with high sugar content.
No. And, actually, if the body's production of and reaction to insulin is normal, glucose will actually make you sleepy for a while due to the increased release of insulin following the glucose intake. Personally, I occasionally use a glass of uncaffeinated soda to help me wind down and go to sleep.
However, if you're in the US, and most "sugary" things actually contain fructose (as in "high fructose corn syrup"), things might be different.
And although a small slice of canny speculators managed to stay rich throughout, we still like our companies to grow slowly and stably, rather than a massive explosion of investment and no end product.
The problem is, you can have 1000 small companies that grow slowly ant stably, and no one will ever hear about it. But if you have 999 startups that went belly-up and one that made it big time... guess which one you'll hear about all the time.
Stimulants developed for attention deficit and narcolepsy are giving mentally healthy students an edge like athletes get from steroids or human growth hormone.
Stimulants are *not* psychopharmaceuticals, dude.
One of the great breakthroughs in treating ADD/ADHD was the realization that these conditions require simple stimulants (caffeine will do, but is probably not the least harmful in the long run) instead of pumping the kids full of actual psychopharmaceuticals.
And "testing" for these ? Oh please. You'd have to test for caffeine, too, and do you realize how many beverages contain caffeine nowadays ? Cola, Mountain Dew, Coffee, Tea,...
Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer."
(emphasis mine)
Sorry, but whoever wrote this ought to get a clue. Even if that robot had anything like the three laws implemented, that still wouldn't have magically made the sensors appear that would have spotted the person in its working area.
Also, the industrial robot does not have a lot of degrees of freedom in its decisions. Its governing program has very few if/else statements - it waits for a certain event, moves arm to position X, waits for another event, moves the arm to position Y and so on.
Todays industrial robots don't need anything like the three laws to increase their safety. If anything, they need automated shutoff mechanisms for cases where people are within the working area of the robot's arms.
Except that actually, you still can't, provided you're a computer nerd, and therefore know the difference between looking at stuff, versus executing stuff.
Yes you can, provided that you "look at" more than just directory and file names.
If you open any documents, you are effectively "executing" stuff - not directly (code that runs on your processor), but indirectly (document contents are interpretet by the application you use to "look at" them). An attacker who know security holes in the application you are likely to use can hide malicious code in a perfectly harmless-looking document (bitmaps, anyone ?).
The problem however is that it requires the drive to be installed first.
Fire up regedit. Search for "NoDriveTypeAutoRun". Set to 0xFF.
At least, that's what I do. I don't want Autorun on any type of drive, thank you, I'd like to decide that for myself.
So if you don't run any.exe,.scr files or simular after that you are pretty safe.
Of course you are safe. There is no such thing as bugs in applications (media players, picture viewers) that allow code embedded in unexectuable files to be executed...
It is also a question if one human has the right to latch on to another and feed and grow off of another for nine months.
Oh, what's next ? Do you also want to question an infants "right" to be fed and cared for, huh ?
Just in case you've not been in the situation, babies are a lot more inconvenient than pregancies, and that still doesn't jack shit give you the right to drown them in a bucket of cold water when you're fed up with the little sucker.
If someone was incapable of digesting food, but could put a tube in your neck and jump on your back, and live like that for nine months, should it be illegal for you to remove them?
Yep, killing someone just because he causes you some inconvenience is illegal.
The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, exists because an egg is clearly not a chicken.
The egg clearly has chicken DNA and therefore has to be considered to be part of the chicken species.
Therefore, it is easy to deduce that the egg came first. The first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, since the species of the egg is determined by the DNA of the creature that hatches from it, not by the species that laid the egg.
Simply put: If you have an egg, and a chicken hatches from it, then it was a chicken egg, regardless of whether it was laid by a frog, an alligator, or an ostrich.
Personally, I have trouble thinking of something that won't survive and grow without massive human intervention(a pregnancy is massive human intervention...) as being equal to a living, breathing person in deserving rights.
Bah, pregnancy is _nothing_ compared to doing the complete "maintenance & care & nutrition & entertainment" program for an infant for a few years. Do you think babies survive and grow on their own once they're born, huh ? They don't. And they usually require manual interventions at three in the morning, something an embryo or a fetus definitely doesn't.
If you say that this amount of cells are already a human being, than you have to monitor every female human, as natural failure after fertilization occurs every moment. Most women get pregnant and lose their "baby" in the first six weeks without even noticing.
And the point of this is... ?
Just because lots of people die from cancer, myocardiac infarction and traffic accidents doesn't mean that intentionally killing people is allowed.
Take away both completely and permanently, and he is not human.
So if either one is not absent permanently, he stays human ?
How long are you going to wait until you declare the absence of the two criteria permanent ? An embryo only needs a small number of months in the right environment to begin developing memories.
Btw, i heard once on the internet that american washing mashines work with cold water. Any truth to that?
Most American washin machines need to be hooked up to cold and hot water faucets, and their temperature settings merely indicate the ratio at which they mix the two inputs, not an actual temperature. So "hot" might be anything from near-boiling to lukewarm.
That is machine-specific. Until the thing actually starts letting water into the washing chamber, adding additional laundry should not be a problem.
Also, why is that a problem for washing machines and not really a problem for dishwashers ?
It is impossible to soak clothes overnight.
Duh. Don't houses over there come with more than one sink and/or a bathtub ?
I have learned to hate the "American" cheap-ass toploaders. You only get three temperature settings (Cold, Warm, Hot), and the actual temperature you get depends on what comes out of the hot water faucet... WTF ? I want my underwear washed at 90 degrees Celsius, and not at what my boiler thinks is "hot", thank you very much.
Why would it do this if it wasn't being vibrated at a resonance frequency?
I read the Wikipedia article and found it very interesting:
The vibration had nothing to do with the resonance frequency of the bridge as a structure, but with the fact that it was wind (as opposed to some other form of energy input, e.g. sound) that was exciting the bridge. At a certain wind speed, the bridge enters a positive feedback loop - when the small motion induced by the wind changes the angle of attack in a way that makes the bridge absorb more and more energy from the wind, eventually increasing the amplitude of the oscillation to a point where structural failure occurs.
To make it short: The bridge did not oscillate at one of its resonant frequencies - aerodynamics caused it to vibrate at an entirely different frequency but managed to pump enough mechanical energy into the bridge to break it anyway.
the fact that it didn't just explode in a 100 Megaton fissile explosion should be counted as a miracle.
Sorry, but... no way.
It is pretty much impossible to cause an actual nuclear explosion by sheer stupidity without having weapon-grade fissile material in the first place. You would have to mess around with an actual nuclear warhead in order to have such an "accident".
Slashdot Mirror
Battle fleets make great targets for tactical nuclear weapons. ..." ... you sure about that ?
"Surely China wouldn't dare
It will be a _very_ long time before that happens. Antimatter generation is horribly inefficient, and even if they manage to jack up the efficiency to a near-100%, you will still need to put all the energy your antimatter weapon is going to release into it in the first place. Where's all that energy going to come from ? Nuclear fission (why not build a few thousand nuclear bombs with all that material ? Nuclear fusion (again, why not build a few thousand much simpler hydrogen bombs instead) ?
Antimatter weapons are quite unfeasible until we find a readly available, natural source of antimatter. And I very much doubt something like this exists in our solar system.
Personally, I wouldn't mention a device that operates with lots of liquid sodium and "safe" in the same sentence.
Well then, the next logical step for the US is to prove that this logic is wrong, because the truth is:
If you don't have the bomb, you'll just be invaded. If you do have the bomb, you'll be nuked.
No. And, actually, if the body's production of and reaction to insulin is normal, glucose will actually make you sleepy for a while due to the increased release of insulin following the glucose intake. Personally, I occasionally use a glass of uncaffeinated soda to help me wind down and go to sleep.
However, if you're in the US, and most "sugary" things actually contain fructose (as in "high fructose corn syrup"), things might be different.
The problem is, you can have 1000 small companies that grow slowly ant stably, and no one will ever hear about it. But if you have 999 startups that went belly-up and one that made it big time ... guess which one you'll hear about all the time.
I'm paying 1200 a year, ... which is but a trifle compared to the tuition you'd have to pay at some US colleges/universities.
Now, they're worse. The BOFH does have technical expertise.
Stimulants are *not* psychopharmaceuticals, dude.
One of the great breakthroughs in treating ADD/ADHD was the realization that these conditions require simple stimulants (caffeine will do, but is probably not the least harmful in the long run) instead of pumping the kids full of actual psychopharmaceuticals.
And "testing" for these ? Oh please. You'd have to test for caffeine, too, and do you realize how many beverages contain caffeine nowadays ? Cola, Mountain Dew, Coffee, Tea,
(emphasis mine)
Sorry, but whoever wrote this ought to get a clue. Even if that robot had anything like the three laws implemented, that still wouldn't have magically made the sensors appear that would have spotted the person in its working area.
Also, the industrial robot does not have a lot of degrees of freedom in its decisions. Its governing program has very few if/else statements - it waits for a certain event, moves arm to position X, waits for another event, moves the arm to position Y and so on.
Todays industrial robots don't need anything like the three laws to increase their safety. If anything, they need automated shutoff mechanisms for cases where people are within the working area of the robot's arms.
Yes you can, provided that you "look at" more than just directory and file names.
If you open any documents, you are effectively "executing" stuff - not directly (code that runs on your processor), but indirectly (document contents are interpretet by the application you use to "look at" them). An attacker who know security holes in the application you are likely to use can hide malicious code in a perfectly harmless-looking document (bitmaps, anyone ?).
Fire up regedit. Search for "NoDriveTypeAutoRun". Set to 0xFF.
At least, that's what I do. I don't want Autorun on any type of drive, thank you, I'd like to decide that for myself.
Of course you are safe. There is no such thing as bugs in applications (media players, picture viewers) that allow code embedded in unexectuable files to be executed
... real men play rock, scissors and paper roulette, of course, to settle things once and for all.
Probably something that tasted like, and was almost, but not quite, chicken.
back to square 1
Nope. The species of the animal that laid the egg is entirely irrelevant.
Oh, what's next ? Do you also want to question an infants "right" to be fed and cared for, huh ?
Just in case you've not been in the situation, babies are a lot more inconvenient than pregancies, and that still doesn't jack shit give you the right to drown them in a bucket of cold water when you're fed up with the little sucker.
If someone was incapable of digesting food, but could put a tube in your neck and jump on your back, and live like that for nine months, should it be illegal for you to remove them?
Yep, killing someone just because he causes you some inconvenience is illegal.
The egg clearly has chicken DNA and therefore has to be considered to be part of the chicken species.
Therefore, it is easy to deduce that the egg came first. The first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, since the species of the egg is determined by the DNA of the creature that hatches from it, not by the species that laid the egg.
Simply put: If you have an egg, and a chicken hatches from it, then it was a chicken egg, regardless of whether it was laid by a frog, an alligator, or an ostrich.
Bah, pregnancy is _nothing_ compared to doing the complete "maintenance & care & nutrition & entertainment" program for an infant for a few years. Do you think babies survive and grow on their own once they're born, huh ? They don't. And they usually require manual interventions at three in the morning, something an embryo or a fetus definitely doesn't.
And the point of this is ... ?
Just because lots of people die from cancer, myocardiac infarction and traffic accidents doesn't mean that intentionally killing people is allowed.
So if either one is not absent permanently, he stays human ?
How long are you going to wait until you declare the absence of the two criteria permanent ? An embryo only needs a small number of months in the right environment to begin developing memories.
Btw, i heard once on the internet that american washing mashines work with cold water. Any truth to that?
Most American washin machines need to be hooked up to cold and hot water faucets, and their temperature settings merely indicate the ratio at which they mix the two inputs, not an actual temperature. So "hot" might be anything from near-boiling to lukewarm.
That is machine-specific. Until the thing actually starts letting water into the washing chamber, adding additional laundry should not be a problem.
Also, why is that a problem for washing machines and not really a problem for dishwashers ?
It is impossible to soak clothes overnight.
Duh. Don't houses over there come with more than one sink and/or a bathtub ?
I have learned to hate the "American" cheap-ass toploaders. You only get three temperature settings (Cold, Warm, Hot), and the actual temperature you get depends on what comes out of the hot water faucet
I read the Wikipedia article and found it very interesting:
The vibration had nothing to do with the resonance frequency of the bridge as a structure, but with the fact that it was wind (as opposed to some other form of energy input, e.g. sound) that was exciting the bridge. At a certain wind speed, the bridge enters a positive feedback loop - when the small motion induced by the wind changes the angle of attack in a way that makes the bridge absorb more and more energy from the wind, eventually increasing the amplitude of the oscillation to a point where structural failure occurs.
To make it short: The bridge did not oscillate at one of its resonant frequencies - aerodynamics caused it to vibrate at an entirely different frequency but managed to pump enough mechanical energy into the bridge to break it anyway.
Sorry, but
It is pretty much impossible to cause an actual nuclear explosion by sheer stupidity without having weapon-grade fissile material in the first place. You would have to mess around with an actual nuclear warhead in order to have such an "accident".