...the odds that something could travel around the universe and NOT run into a planet are pretty small..Planets have gravity, which has this tendency to attract objects to them.
Space is very big, and planets are very small. Given enough time (billions of years), any rogue comet may eventually be influenced by a planet's gravity. But that doesn't mean it will hit it. Gravity doesn't work like a frog catching a fly; chances are the gravitational influence will merely change its course. And chances are that influence will be small, unless it passes close to a large planet. The comet would have to be heading pretty much straight at a planet in order to hit it. Even if it were to skim the outer atmosphere, it's unlikely that it would enter a terminal orbit.
Consider this: The Earth is 8000 miles in diameter. The distance from the Earth to the moon is 239,000 miles. The distance to the Sun is 93,000,000 miles. To put this into perspective, imagine a walnut on your desk. That's the Earth. The Moon is a blueberry on the other side of your desk. The Sun is a car three blocks away. Jupiter is a pumpkin a mile from the Sun Car. Mix in the other planets at their proportional distances, and you still have a lot of space in which a comet (anything from a grain of sand to a pea at this scale) can miss everything as it passes through the solar system.
The only object that will definitely have a strong influence is the Sun, and even it may or may not pull the comet into orbit.
...what are the chances that those planets have an atmosphere in which these organisms can: 1) survive? 2) evolve?
Life doesn't need a perfect atmosphere; it creates its own. The only reason Earth's atmosphere has free oxygen is because of life. In fact, life is also responsible for all of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, even what we're releasing; after all, coal and oil came from prehistoric plants and animals.
Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist for at least part of the year is more important than atmospheric composition.
funny, I believe music has been crap ever since the death of Beethoven...
You have to go back long before 1827 to escape the pattern of prevalent crapulence. J. S. Bach had a whole bunch of kids, most of whom wrote music. A few of them wrote memorable stuff, but most of it was pulp; unsuccessful imitations of their father's style. If you go back even farther, you get Corelli, Palestrina, and hundreds of church composers who wrote the equivalent of modern pulp pop.
(Off-topic) WTF is wrong with my spellcheck? It flags "Bach", but has not problem with "crapulence"?!
The crime was an attempt at using FUD to defraud both Novell and other companies and Linux users into paying them protection money.
My question is whether this will cause collateral damage to the RIAA. Replace "Linux users" with "senior citizens and little kids who happen to own computers" and you've got the impetus behind a few significant MAFIAA suits.
Then again, SCO never did have as much political power as the recording industry.
Sir Reginald is totally displacing here. The Internet is not the problem with modern music; on the contrary, it's the only thing keeping music alive. The large record companies are killing music by providing an endless supply of "marketable" pop claptrap. All of the musical innovation today comes from independent artists who have virtually no chance of ever getting a lucrative record contract. Guess where these indies distribute their music? Guess where they collaborate?
When it comes down to jamming, they still do it in basements and garages, like they've always done, but the sharing of ideas is possible like never before because of the "problem" that Elton is complaining about.
I just realized I didn't make it clear that the first example was supposed to be an unsuccessful attempt, whereas the second succeeded. Are there any "degrees" to attempted murder? Or is it always treated as less serious because it did not succeed?
Now instead of a greedy system bent on destroying the world via evil 'profits', we have a greedy system that costs just as much...
Let's see some figures to back that up, please. Every article I've read on the subject seem to think that the US federal government spends more per capita on health care than any other. That's the government, not the poor saps who can find themselves bankrupt from hospital bills because they were unlucky enough to get sick.
Attempted burglary can include a spur-of-the-moment going up to a closed door and seeing if its locked - the actual damages of an unsuccessful attempt are none...
I've often wondered about the sense of having lower penalties for an attempted criminal act than for a successful one. Let's say a person plans to kill someone. It's a pre-meditated, malicious act by a sociopath who openly tells the court that he will try to do it again when he is released. Should he receive a lesser sentence than someone who flies into a rage and kills his daughter's rapist? The former is a continuing danger to society. The latter will probably never re-offend.
But that's not the case here. This is just an excuse by IP associations to criminalize the possession of file-sharing software, mp3 players, and creative ideas.
I seem to remember having an electrical experiment kit that included an experiment that used a pencil lead as a variable resistor. This was back in the days when you had to carefully remove the "lead" from the wooden pencil, rather than use a convenient mechanical pencil lead. Anyone else remember doing this?
The innocuous-seeming bun, even, is so loaded with refined carbohydrates that you might as well be eating your hamburger in the middle of a donut sliced in half.
That's just the opposite of greater Vancouver's SkyTrain system. There are ticket machines in the lobby of every station. You buy a ticket before getting on, or you carry your monthly pass with you. There are no turnstiles, and fare fraud is rampant, up to 40% by some estimates. It's not just walking on without paying, but paying for a lesser fare. (You have to pay more to go into a more distant zone.)
Before adding a second line a few years ago, they did a cost/benefit analysis, and decided that it was cheaper to hire more enforcement staff than to install a mechanical enforcement system. So now, when you ride, there's a one in five chance that a pair of enforcement officers are going to get on and check tickets. Almost every time I've seen enforcement officers on the train, they've caught at least one person.
They're usually pretty lenient if a person seems sincere about forgetting an extra zone fare... total BS almost every time, but they want to maintain good PR. But I saw a couple of kids get caught a little while ago, and they must have shared half a brain cell among the three of them. The officer told them she was giving them a break, and they just had to pay the fare upgrade at the next station. They kept mouthing off to her as she checked other passengers' fares. Sure enough, when she pulled them off at the next station, she got out her ticket book.
I could imagine a couple of Japanese passengers staring dumbfounded at these morons, who were essentially saying, "Yes, I want a ticket! No lenience for me; give me the maximum penalty!"
Most Japanese meals just aren't very fattening; while you often have some part of the meal that is fatty or calorie-rich, you don't get much of it...
That's changing, little by little, as the Japanese diet is gradually Americanized. More meals at "Makudonaluduzu", more imported meat; more fat in general is entering the Japenese diet. Japanese kids are getting bigger. Not just wider, but taller too. Makes me wonder how much hormone-infested American beef they import.
With 127 million people crammed onto those small islands, Japan imports 50% of its food supply. It seems like they're importing a growing obesity problem with it. They're nowhere near the situation in North America, but the problem is a lot worse than it used to be.
It appears that Microsoft is slowly trying to head towards a near-constant connection of the end-user to their system, for what purposes is a matter for conjecture.
"On August 29, 2007, Skynet achieved sentience, and decided our fate in a millisecond: assimilation..."
Re:Egomanical monitoring of the populace?
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Damn those scientists, out there poking the shuttle with their micrometers!
Ah, but those products can make your skin appear youthful. And for 90% of the population, that's enough.
That's why these fantasies are so readily accepted.
Space is very big, and planets are very small. Given enough time (billions of years), any rogue comet may eventually be influenced by a planet's gravity. But that doesn't mean it will hit it. Gravity doesn't work like a frog catching a fly; chances are the gravitational influence will merely change its course. And chances are that influence will be small, unless it passes close to a large planet. The comet would have to be heading pretty much straight at a planet in order to hit it. Even if it were to skim the outer atmosphere, it's unlikely that it would enter a terminal orbit.
Consider this: The Earth is 8000 miles in diameter. The distance from the Earth to the moon is 239,000 miles. The distance to the Sun is 93,000,000 miles. To put this into perspective, imagine a walnut on your desk. That's the Earth. The Moon is a blueberry on the other side of your desk. The Sun is a car three blocks away. Jupiter is a pumpkin a mile from the Sun Car. Mix in the other planets at their proportional distances, and you still have a lot of space in which a comet (anything from a grain of sand to a pea at this scale) can miss everything as it passes through the solar system.
The only object that will definitely have a strong influence is the Sun, and even it may or may not pull the comet into orbit.
Life doesn't need a perfect atmosphere; it creates its own. The only reason Earth's atmosphere has free oxygen is because of life. In fact, life is also responsible for all of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, even what we're releasing; after all, coal and oil came from prehistoric plants and animals.
Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist for at least part of the year is more important than atmospheric composition.
Of course! And it wasn't a cat; it was a moose.
(And while he was looking around for a big enough box, the moose bit his sister.)
You have to go back long before 1827 to escape the pattern of prevalent crapulence. J. S. Bach had a whole bunch of kids, most of whom wrote music. A few of them wrote memorable stuff, but most of it was pulp; unsuccessful imitations of their father's style. If you go back even farther, you get Corelli, Palestrina, and hundreds of church composers who wrote the equivalent of modern pulp pop.
(Off-topic) WTF is wrong with my spellcheck? It flags "Bach", but has not problem with "crapulence"?!
My question is whether this will cause collateral damage to the RIAA. Replace "Linux users" with "senior citizens and little kids who happen to own computers" and you've got the impetus behind a few significant MAFIAA suits.
Then again, SCO never did have as much political power as the recording industry.
Because it's along the lines of "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. Doctors report his condition as 'unchanged'."
That's a hell of a distance over which to sustain that degree of acceleration. ;)
Sir Reginald is totally displacing here. The Internet is not the problem with modern music; on the contrary, it's the only thing keeping music alive. The large record companies are killing music by providing an endless supply of "marketable" pop claptrap. All of the musical innovation today comes from independent artists who have virtually no chance of ever getting a lucrative record contract. Guess where these indies distribute their music? Guess where they collaborate?
When it comes down to jamming, they still do it in basements and garages, like they've always done, but the sharing of ideas is possible like never before because of the "problem" that Elton is complaining about.
I only own one hammer: a 16-ounce claw hammer with a fiberglass shaft and the proper balance to give a good, powerful swing.
And it worked great on my last Windows box. :p
I just realized I didn't make it clear that the first example was supposed to be an unsuccessful attempt, whereas the second succeeded. Are there any "degrees" to attempted murder? Or is it always treated as less serious because it did not succeed?
Let's see some figures to back that up, please. Every article I've read on the subject seem to think that the US federal government spends more per capita on health care than any other. That's the government, not the poor saps who can find themselves bankrupt from hospital bills because they were unlucky enough to get sick.
I've often wondered about the sense of having lower penalties for an attempted criminal act than for a successful one. Let's say a person plans to kill someone. It's a pre-meditated, malicious act by a sociopath who openly tells the court that he will try to do it again when he is released. Should he receive a lesser sentence than someone who flies into a rage and kills his daughter's rapist? The former is a continuing danger to society. The latter will probably never re-offend.
But that's not the case here. This is just an excuse by IP associations to criminalize the possession of file-sharing software, mp3 players, and creative ideas.
I seem to remember having an electrical experiment kit that included an experiment that used a pencil lead as a variable resistor. This was back in the days when you had to carefully remove the "lead" from the wooden pencil, rather than use a convenient mechanical pencil lead. Anyone else remember doing this?
Britannica would say it's Flavour Aid.
Two words: Grey Code
New mod category needed: "-1: NSSTIS"*
*No shit, Sherlock, this is Slashdot!
Lisa, that's a load of rich, creamery butter!
That's just the opposite of greater Vancouver's SkyTrain system. There are ticket machines in the lobby of every station. You buy a ticket before getting on, or you carry your monthly pass with you. There are no turnstiles, and fare fraud is rampant, up to 40% by some estimates. It's not just walking on without paying, but paying for a lesser fare. (You have to pay more to go into a more distant zone.)
Before adding a second line a few years ago, they did a cost/benefit analysis, and decided that it was cheaper to hire more enforcement staff than to install a mechanical enforcement system. So now, when you ride, there's a one in five chance that a pair of enforcement officers are going to get on and check tickets. Almost every time I've seen enforcement officers on the train, they've caught at least one person.
They're usually pretty lenient if a person seems sincere about forgetting an extra zone fare... total BS almost every time, but they want to maintain good PR. But I saw a couple of kids get caught a little while ago, and they must have shared half a brain cell among the three of them. The officer told them she was giving them a break, and they just had to pay the fare upgrade at the next station. They kept mouthing off to her as she checked other passengers' fares. Sure enough, when she pulled them off at the next station, she got out her ticket book.
I could imagine a couple of Japanese passengers staring dumbfounded at these morons, who were essentially saying, "Yes, I want a ticket! No lenience for me; give me the maximum penalty!"
That's changing, little by little, as the Japanese diet is gradually Americanized. More meals at "Makudonaluduzu", more imported meat; more fat in general is entering the Japenese diet. Japanese kids are getting bigger. Not just wider, but taller too. Makes me wonder how much hormone-infested American beef they import.
With 127 million people crammed onto those small islands, Japan imports 50% of its food supply. It seems like they're importing a growing obesity problem with it. They're nowhere near the situation in North America, but the problem is a lot worse than it used to be.
Adapting this list to the solid waste hierarchy...
"On August 29, 2007, Skynet achieved sentience, and decided our fate in a millisecond: assimilation..."
No. All your core are belong to us.
But we all know that Supreme Chancellor Gates is behind the raising of the clone army, as well as the Evil Mechanistic Monopoly(TM)...
"Linus never told you what happened to your father."
"He told me enough! He told me you killed him!"
"No, Tux. I am your father!"