Actually, he probably would. We was a big time science geek in his day. He was big on free access to information (the man invented the public library you know), and would have absolutely loved the internet. He was a big lover of liberty, capitalism, good beer, women, and smoked pot on occasion (as did many Founding Fathers), wasn't a big fan of patents (refused to patent his inventions...and got screwed a few times for it, but believed that his inventions should be for the good of all and he still made very good money on them), and many other things which I'm sure Slashdottians can appreciate. I know I can, he's my favorite Founding Father!
Maybe you should read the Patriot act before you spout such nonsense.... However, he would be horrified by it, and by the current political state of our great nation.
The world may not be literally overcrowded, but when cities are built on the best farmland (standard practice in the US, and also, I understand, elsewhere) then, Yes, we ARE overcrowded. When populations sprawl rather than compact, then, Yes, we ARE overcrowded.
Cities may be built on the best farmland...but hardly a vast amount of it. And there's plenty of other "best farmland" around just as good as we put cities on...and we farm it. And, at least here in the US, agricultural technology has been advancing so that we use significantly less land to produce significantly more food year after year. Heck, we have vast tracks of unused farmland that have reverted, or is reverting, to forest. And before anyone says that we mooch off the rest of the world's food supply to have our great, rich, advanced nation...we're a net exporter of food. And populations sprawling....that's simply a matter of wanting space (plenty of it avaliable), but not a sign of actual overcrowding.
And when we overfish and overfarm and drive an increasing number of other species to extinction, then Yes, we ARE overcrowded.
Maybe globally we overfarm....because most farms worldwide are still third-world, ox and wooden plow, starving family style farms that don't use modern agricultural methods. In short, the problem there is economics. On the other hand...we do overproduce...we actually produce more food globally than we can eat (which, incidentally, is no sign of overpopulation). As for overfishing....some species we do yes, certainly salt-water species we do unfortunately. However, the last fish I ate I either caught myself (locally, of species which couldn't be overfished if you tried...rabbits of the waterways)....or were farmed fish, raised in aquatic pens exclusively for market.
But cities take a long time to build, and so would an archology. When is the singularity?
I think it's supposed to be around 2015 or so. Hard to predict exactly though, singularities are funny like that.
It may not be appropriate to start working seriously on the problems yet, but rather to start with smaller and more tractable problems. More tractable includes human overpopulation, and that is soluble, as the US, Europe, and Japan all have negative or declining birth rates.
Which is entirely due to standard of living. High standard of living equals low birth rates. Humans get rich, well fed, comfortable, living in a high tech world with advanced medical care where if it kills you it has to be something nasty rather than something like...chickenpox, get educated, get access to virtually any information they want access to, and birth rates drop through the floor.
Hell, people keep complaining about population, world population even....you could fit the entire world population into Texas, with a population density about the same as that of Manhattan...which isn't exactly an unpleasant place to live last I heard. The Earth isn't exactly overcrowded yet. Some places have a hell of a lot more people than others, but they aren't overcrowded.
I'd say India's main problems have been matters of economics, and politics...not population. Fact is...India's space program saves lives, helps farmers produce more food, more than likely helps them with their environmental issues, and helps educate their people....so I'd say it's a pretty damn benefitial program.
Well, I can get the idea of running another OS on Mac hardware. For instance, Linux runs fantastic on those perfectly fine PPC chips that they're getting rid of...much faster than OSX. But I seriously do not get the point of running Windows on a Mac. Someone would have to be brain damaged to want to do that.
Well...it could be that there is some as yet undiscovered mechanism that prevents time travel, preserving causality, and yet still allowing for some form of FTL travel. Or there's the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics...which would suggest that if you did go back in time, you'd merely be creating yet one more alternate reality to add to the mix...one in which you kill your grandfather and therefore never were born....but didn't have to be, because you were born in the reality you came from originally where you didn't kill your grandfather.
Of course the real question is....what kind of moron wants to go back in time and kill their grandfather?
Actually, nanobiotech is all about building nanomachines using parts derived from biological "machines" that already exist....but doing so in such a way that the new machines themselves are clearly not biological. It's really a stepping stone to the "harder" nanotech...since we have to do less figuring out about the actual parts to use.
Hell, who knows what the Air Force is really up to these days? I mean...they recently approached the U.S. Department of Energy about doing an experiment into a possible FTL drive for crying out loud....and that's public goings on. Who knows what the hell they're doing in private, inside hidden/classified facilities these days.
I think we still haven't solved the original problem...no way to produce enough alcohol to fuel remotely enough cars in the U.S.A. to make even the slightest dent.
And it hasn't dawned on you that Slackware might not be the most user friendly distribution out there, and is, in fact, made more for people who like going in and tweaking the old fashioned way? Most Linux distros you don't really have to go looking either, not any more than on Windows. Most Linux distros auto-config things like USB, and automount as well. Every Linux distro is different from every other, don't take your experiences with one, one designed mainly for techies, and go saying that Windows is easier than Linux in general....makes you look kind of ignorant.
Microsoft don't distribute other people's software with their software, simply because they're a commercial entity and don't want to put themselves out of business.
If you hadn't noticed, so are many Linux distribution makers.
Also, GNU/Linux, in addition to being free, runs faster on my iBook. I don't miss OS X, except for a few of the Gamehouse games I bought years ago.
Well yeah, OSX doesn't use the full capability of those nice PPC processors...and it's a bit hoggish too on resources compared to Linux on the same machines. It's a shame really, Apple has a very nice processor to run on...which they don't even use fully....and they're giving it up for low quality garbage like Intel.
Seems like circular reasoning to me. Any operating system which is a marketing success should dominate the market.
No, it means it should be popular, sell well, and make it's owners a profit...the current situation only arises aout of abuse of monopoly power.
Interestingly, I've known people who have taken one look at the utter crap that MS is putting into Vista and said, "That's it! I'm getting Linux!" or "That's it! I'm buying a Mac!"
can't count the number of times I've gone through the following process on Linux:
1. Drop to a command-line to find system information about my hardware.
You know there are GUI tools included with pretty much every distro for this right?
2. Download the driver from my functional Windows machine onto my thumb drive.
3. Plug in my thumb drive on the Linux machine and find that its not functional.
What kind of outdated Linux have you been running!?
4. Download drivers for my thumb drive to a floppy and repeat most of this process...
5. Compile drivers.
6. Install drivers.
7. Tweak some files in/etc to make drivers work.
USB stuff is handled automagically on the distros I've used in anything like recent years. All the drivers already there.
It's a self-made obstacle, though. The hardware requirement for installation of unbundled drivers is a floppy; you haven't met the hardware requirements, so of course it won't install.
The hardware requirement for an outdated OS like Windows you mean.
I have installed XP on literally thousands of machines and I cannot understand at all you having these problems and then to say LINUX is easier to install? No Possible Way.
Yes, it is. The most you have to do these days is click next a few times during install. Some distros, you don't even have to do that...they just install. And when done...you're done, you've got a working system with all your software and all your drivers. You generally don't have to go and hunt down driver disks (unless you've got an oddball piece of hardware or two) and install them too, then get a bunch of software CDs and install them too. Once Linux finishes installing...it's installed.
Stem-cell research is using the bodies of wouldbe humans.
No, it's just using a tiny clump of human cells.
Your state as a Stem-cell treatment would be nothing more than a few cells in somebodies back. This is a horrible existance. It would be better simply to not exist, because either way, you wouldn't be conscious, just in the latter you would be worse off.
Better off to simply not exist? There's no person existing there, except the one who got the cells implanted into them to enable them to walk! An embryo may be life, may be human (just cells up until a point)...but it sure as hell isn't a person. Personhood doesn't come for a good long while. And stem cells (which themselves are not embryos) certainly have no personhood, and come even farther from it than embryos do.
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And sadly, that's all most know about him.
Actually, he probably would. We was a big time science geek in his day. He was big on free access to information (the man invented the public library you know), and would have absolutely loved the internet. He was a big lover of liberty, capitalism, good beer, women, and smoked pot on occasion (as did many Founding Fathers), wasn't a big fan of patents (refused to patent his inventions...and got screwed a few times for it, but believed that his inventions should be for the good of all and he still made very good money on them), and many other things which I'm sure Slashdottians can appreciate. I know I can, he's my favorite Founding Father!
Maybe you should read the Patriot act before you spout such nonsense.... However, he would be horrified by it, and by the current political state of our great nation.
Hell, people keep complaining about population, world population even....you could fit the entire world population into Texas, with a population density about the same as that of Manhattan...which isn't exactly an unpleasant place to live last I heard. The Earth isn't exactly overcrowded yet. Some places have a hell of a lot more people than others, but they aren't overcrowded.
I'd say India's main problems have been matters of economics, and politics...not population. Fact is...India's space program saves lives, helps farmers produce more food, more than likely helps them with their environmental issues, and helps educate their people....so I'd say it's a pretty damn benefitial program.
Well, I can get the idea of running another OS on Mac hardware. For instance, Linux runs fantastic on those perfectly fine PPC chips that they're getting rid of...much faster than OSX. But I seriously do not get the point of running Windows on a Mac. Someone would have to be brain damaged to want to do that.
The Bomber and the standard TIE are both flying death traps. The others though...sweet rides.
Well...it could be that there is some as yet undiscovered mechanism that prevents time travel, preserving causality, and yet still allowing for some form of FTL travel. Or there's the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics...which would suggest that if you did go back in time, you'd merely be creating yet one more alternate reality to add to the mix...one in which you kill your grandfather and therefore never were born....but didn't have to be, because you were born in the reality you came from originally where you didn't kill your grandfather.
Of course the real question is....what kind of moron wants to go back in time and kill their grandfather?
Funny, considering that Sony and others have been saying this same stuff since back when the 360 was still in development...
Actually, nanobiotech is all about building nanomachines using parts derived from biological "machines" that already exist....but doing so in such a way that the new machines themselves are clearly not biological. It's really a stepping stone to the "harder" nanotech...since we have to do less figuring out about the actual parts to use.
Hell, who knows what the Air Force is really up to these days? I mean...they recently approached the U.S. Department of Energy about doing an experiment into a possible FTL drive for crying out loud....and that's public goings on. Who knows what the hell they're doing in private, inside hidden/classified facilities these days.
I think we still haven't solved the original problem...no way to produce enough alcohol to fuel remotely enough cars in the U.S.A. to make even the slightest dent.
And it hasn't dawned on you that Slackware might not be the most user friendly distribution out there, and is, in fact, made more for people who like going in and tweaking the old fashioned way? Most Linux distros you don't really have to go looking either, not any more than on Windows. Most Linux distros auto-config things like USB, and automount as well. Every Linux distro is different from every other, don't take your experiences with one, one designed mainly for techies, and go saying that Windows is easier than Linux in general....makes you look kind of ignorant.
Well...Billy-boy does tend to foam at the mouth a lot....
No, it means it should be popular, sell well, and make it's owners a profit...the current situation only arises aout of abuse of monopoly power.
Interestingly, I've known people who have taken one look at the utter crap that MS is putting into Vista and said, "That's it! I'm getting Linux!" or "That's it! I'm buying a Mac!"I've never heard of a geothermal powered automobile....
Not enough to fuel the country, not by a long shot.