I find it sad you lump all gun owners in the category of those fanatically crazy people at McCain rallies that made everyone rational nervous.
A weapon is merely a tool. Granted, its a tool of force projection but it isn't exactly a nice world out there. Pacifisim is all fine and dandy from a philisophical standpoint but you can't say it is practical. All you need is one psycho willing to do violence and then you need some people willing to respond in turn or else everyone you care about is going to be in perpetual and immediate danger.
You sir do not seem to know what you are talking about. I've played around with Vista quite a bit. I still prefer XP on my laptop but that's because I'd rather have my Vista license for my desktop PC. (I don't pirate. If I don't want something I don't buy it.) On my desktop I have 0.2% of my CPU in use with 1.2GB of memory in use when my system is in what *I* consider "idle".
System Specs: Intel Q6600 Quad Core, 8GB DDR2 RAM (Crucial), x2 8800GT w/ 1GB RAM each, XONAR D2X Sound Card, 780i-SLI motherboard. I have currently two 500GB WD hard drives running as a JBOD RAID using SATA.
For applications I have Pidgin (with several chat accounts running) and Steam with full Aero eye candy turned on. A simple static background with the world at night and the Windows Gadgets on the right hand side monitoring my CPU and Memory usage. Typically I have 2-3 browsers open with 5-12 tabs open in each (different reasons). I'm seeding several torrents for various files (all legal) pretty much at all times via uTorrent and I only reboot my PC once a month when I update Vista.
Oh and I have AVAST! running, which I'm about to replace with AVG free again. I keep hearing how they no longer update the definitions in the free version, but I keep getting them on my XP so what the heck, I'll use it until I can't. I really don't like AVAST! as I have to turn it off when playing FarCry2 (causes lag from open file checks that affects my look speeds) but I don't have to turn of AVG.
My CPU usage at idle is at 0.2% and my memory usage is at about 1.2GB. This is according to Process Explorer and Task manager, not the stupid widgits on my desktop (though they say about the same). The usage only goes up when I'm playing a video game.
Before you cry out that there is a lot of memory in use, most of that is being held "ready" for other programs as they require more memory. Vista does that. It is actually a good thing. Just means faster access times for the program.
So yea. I'm positive 98% of all the Vista hate is irrelevant now unless you have 1GB of RAM or less. If you have 2GB and can run DirectX 9 you have no issues with Vista, or shouldn't be. There might be an exception to it:
My laptop came with Vista Home Basic (32-bit). Vista ran like a dog. The laptop specs were not bad (2GB RAM, AMD64 dual core turion, and an ATI video card sharing the system memory) but it was noticeably just bad. I have an OEM of Vista Ultimate x64. I was deciding between throwing XP x64 or Ultimate x64 on the laptop so i tried the Vista Ultimate for 30 days.
I am now certain that whatever Microsoft did to remove "features" such as Remote Desktop and Aero from Vista did more than just remove those features. The performance difference was INCREDIBLE. Vista Ultimate absolutely flew.
To be sure I tried installing Home Basic again. DELL includes OEM install discs now and puts the bloatware and drivers on separate discs. No more image CD/DVDs thankfully. Performance was still noticebly worse when compared to Vista Ultimate x64.
Personally I think they screwed up the registry a bit. Anyone who has made a mistake there knows only a full install ever gets the PC right again afterwords and all sorts of unexpected things happen when stuff goes wrong there. I just don't have any hard proof, but then neither do most people who seem to complain about Vista beyond their PCs only having 1GB or less of RAM.
For the curious I settled on XP x64 on my laptop. Partly because I had the license already and partly because I fell in love with it after using it on my old tower. That's a solid 64-bit OS, and has been since 6 months after its release when the drivers came out for everything.
IMO, mice will only be obsolete when we are able to get cybergenetic implants and use eye movements for controlling the pointer. Possibly it will be downgraded to a gaming input device rather than for the full system, but I don't find touch screens nearly as useful as a mouse. But then I'm also lazy and jackup my sensitivity so I only ever move it about a quarter inch at most.
I think you're confusing your Sci-Fi with reality. Most of what you just said isn't true right now, and the statement was about bringing back someone from 1900 or even earlier to modern times. You can't give a counter argument if you're basing that argument on things that are outside the scope of the question.
Um, no you are wrong. If the receiving individual is used to "slang" then its faster than speaking straight English or whatever language. The reason being, the uneducated (and nothing inherently wrong with that as long as the opportunity to become educated was adequately provided) do not KNOW the proper words. They only know the slang.
For example, in my job I'm still surprised how many people don't know what a colon is. They refer to it as "two dots".
You have a messed up sense of ethics. You do know that even criminals have ethics right? For instance, the majority of criminals will murderlate child rapists. Hell, rapists in general have a rougher time and are usually the victim of rape themselves (this is US prison I'm talking about). Vic Mackey was a greedy character with few scruples and a cruel streak. While he wouldn't mind screwing over criminals like that, he wasn't the kind that would shoot a kid or murder your average middle class, or even most lower class, family. He wanted money and had no issues taking it from criminals or killing people that tried to stop him but he wasn't random, like this law.
The lab is not the same as the real world. A lot of the time with exploits it isn't because of lazyness as much as the people testing it just didn't think the same way. This is why security is as much recovery from damage as preventing damage. I can't even count the number of times I've seen something tested in the lab to perfection work wrong in the field, or read of an exploit where in hindsight it seems like you would of tested that but when you really think about it just wouldn't have the time to come up with that attack vector in the lab. This is partly why new exploits are found in Windows. Sometimes it just takes that long for people to figure out that they even CAN exploit this or that service.
Seriously though, the way my mind works is fairly analytical (so I hear). I more easily compartmentalize and break things down. So looking at the C version its a lot easier to see what each segment is doing after only a brief explanation, or even less. For example "cout" makes sense because the language is C and its the OUTput.
Excuse me, what memory leaks? I leave my computer on 24/7 with Steam running. Once a month I do system updates unless there is something wrong or I hear good things. I leave a LOT of stuff running. I don't have any memory leaks. Steam doesn't eat up 500mb of memory, even with several steam chat windows left open. Hell, the network usage doesn't even reach double digit percentage unless I'm playing a game!
So what version of Windows are you running and what updates have you put into it? What else do you have running? What exactly is your hardware? Did you know bad/cheap memory can cause memory leaks?
I didn't believe so either, but a friend of mine has the same system setup I have but with a different brand of memory. I was playing WAR in windowed mode for a while when it first came out before I added it to my Steam Games list so I could play full screen and just use the Shift + Tab thing and bring up my friends list to talk to people. He tried the same thing and discovered a memory leak in WAR. If he played for three hours, it would crash and his memory would be at 100% usage. Me? I could play for 4-6 hours in windowed mode with no problem. Same processor, same video cards, same motherboard, same amount of memory, but different brand memory (same brand video cards and mobo).
So call me skeptical. I've only been using Steam since day one, and yes I have been lucky that I hadn't run into a lot of the issues people had early on. I don't think Steam is perfect. If it was, by default it would be operating in "offline mode" and only connect online when you try to PLAY online or when you set it to update automatically. But I'd have to see some real evidence of a memory leak to even believe you.
"Overhead" with Steam is a joke. Unless you have a PC that is only playing games as old as Half Life you won't even notice the memory usage. 1GB is enough memory to make Steam unnoticeable, 2GB if you play Source quality games on the higher settings. If you say otherwise I think your windows boxen needs a cleaning.
What happens if your box becomes a zombie and you aren't aware and it sends out millions of e-mails as part of a botnet? Face it, the majority of users DON'T know how to protect themselves online.
Nevermind the fact it seems Lori Drew herself didn't send any messages to Megan, merely approved of what was going on and possibly helped make the MySpace account. But the moral issue there is completely irrelevant as the ONLY thing she was found guilty of was violating the TOS for MySpace. If this doesn't get overturned, a lot of people are going to have their lives ruined for nothing in the near future.
Having used PowerPoint, I just don't see how it invites you to do anything. I've never seen it make suggestions or provide any tips. It gives you a blank card and several templates that you can choose to ignore. Beyond that its a bit like a word processor with extra graphical options thrown in and a restricted page size. I think you're a bit wrong here.
Um, how does his sig actually support what RMS said? It just says that people here are sheep because they were all for "cloud computing" before RMS said no.
Digression aside, Greenpeace are essentially terrorists. Their ethics are skewed so loss of human life doesn't matter, just loss of anything else. Also, the philosophy of vegans are flawed just like the philosophy of anything else man 'believes' in. The cost of an imperfect world I suppose.
I'm with most of the rest here. You eat what you want, I'll eat what I want. Most of the time what I want is a roll of bread and a hunk of cheese. The rest, give me a big ol' steak. Veal even. I don't care. I'm hungry and it tastes good.
That's easy. Because you only have one computer and want to do something while that's running on automatic. I could see people wanting to play games while doing other stuff such as ripping DVDs, compiling, defragging etc.
To them I say: Buy another computer. The reasons are obvious enough to someone who knows what the PC is doing but its understandable why people WANT to do such things.
1: I know how to speed up my system. The installation "image" was nothing of the sort, all the "crapware" is on a seperate disc. DELL ships a separate OS disc now, and it uses the Vista installer (same installer as on my Vista Ultimate x64 disc) at least that's what it looks like. There are no applications on the install from that disc that are not on my Vista Ultimate disc, though things like Remote Desktop are missing.
2: Like I said in my post, all the changes I've read are nothing performance related supposedly. All I know is there IS a performance difference. If I hadn't put Windows XP x64 on the laptop (drivers are hard to find and I got the hardware all working) or if I had some image software I'd do benchmarks.
3: Look mate. If I had time anymore to do the legwork, I'd benchmark the damn thing on 3 different systems and link you the results. Hell, I'd have a YouTube video of it as well. I've been tweaking systems since I was in high school. If you know what to turn off, you can get some OS' to really fly on hardware its not supposed to. Hell, for some GAMES you can get them to run on settings and hardware that aren't supposed to mix (my favorite was getting Doom3 when it came out to run on Ultra High on a crappy e-machine with an Nvidia FX5200 and 512 RAM while maintaining 45-60 fps).
Truth is, I just don't have the time to give you the hard data but I know what I'm talking about. Same exact hardware, just comparing default install to install. No manufacturer crapware, that came on seperate discs (Cyberlink's DVD player, Roxio DE for burning discs, and a separate DELL Driver disc that has all the stuff available from the DELL website for download, including optionals that were not installed in the first place when I first got it). Absolutely jack special and Ultimate x64 runs smoother and faster WITH Aero (shared memory) than Home Basic, and I'm talking user experiences.
Also, that seems a long time for Excel to open but I just counted and that's about right. Counted on my desktop though which is set up for playing.
Nuclear power is relatively mastered. Due to the wonderful world of politics, if you don't already have a nuclear reactor built there is very little chance of you ever being able to harness it. Hell, even Iran knows that nuclear power is the best bet. The only problem there is the byproducts of nuclear power are nuclear weapons and Israel really doesn't want that to happen considering they'd probably be the target.
The US' closest call was Three Mile Island and that whole thing was actually a success, the fail safes worked. The biggest disaster was Chernobyl which actually has vegetation reclaiming the area faster than anticipated(still not safe for human re-colonization). Some countries in Europe, namely France, have been using nuclear power without incident with great success. And no one likes the French, not even many French (btw: Thanks France! Without you the United States might not exist and my life would be vastly different) and if they can do it why can't we?!
So so far we have two "problems" that are solvable with technology we have TODAY but can't due to politics. As if there was any doubt who's best interests the politicians really looked after. In a perfect world, nuclear power would be rampant and there would be no energy crisis. In a perfect world, countries with excess food (such as the US) would be able to just export it to countries in need and everyone would get a fair share (rather than A) just the warlords or B) nobody because the country's leader doesn't want help while his people starve or C) because its not in the US' "best interest" to help those in need).
And mind you, if those 2 problems were solved a plethora of other issues ranging from (some) wars to pollution would be solved or a hairs' breath away from being solved. Then we just got to get used to people being able to have different ideas (fanatics/fundamentalists on all sides won't allow that) and different uniforms.
So, universal peace is obtainable but the odds make it impossible for all intents and purposes. I digressed a bit there, I apologize. But fixing the energy issue is very very important to the survival of the human race, and if we don't destroy ourselves first nuclear power is safest and cleanest way we have available in the long run.
Um, I know I for one know people online that I would consider friends. When you talk to someone on a daily basis for 8 years, you don't HAVE to meet them face to face to know you can trust them somewhat.
Course it helps when you do meet them face to face. Done that a few times with people I've met online. Not one has ended up creepy either.
Point is, if you grew up being "online" all the time and spent a lot of time on the 'Net, y ou probably have some friends you've never met that would like to know if you're gone. Possibly to attend the funeral, or just so they know what happened to you.
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I find it sad you lump all gun owners in the category of those fanatically crazy people at McCain rallies that made everyone rational nervous.
A weapon is merely a tool. Granted, its a tool of force projection but it isn't exactly a nice world out there. Pacifisim is all fine and dandy from a philisophical standpoint but you can't say it is practical. All you need is one psycho willing to do violence and then you need some people willing to respond in turn or else everyone you care about is going to be in perpetual and immediate danger.
You sir do not seem to know what you are talking about. I've played around with Vista quite a bit. I still prefer XP on my laptop but that's because I'd rather have my Vista license for my desktop PC. (I don't pirate. If I don't want something I don't buy it.) On my desktop I have 0.2% of my CPU in use with 1.2GB of memory in use when my system is in what *I* consider "idle".
System Specs: Intel Q6600 Quad Core, 8GB DDR2 RAM (Crucial), x2 8800GT w/ 1GB RAM each, XONAR D2X Sound Card, 780i-SLI motherboard. I have currently two 500GB WD hard drives running as a JBOD RAID using SATA.
For applications I have Pidgin (with several chat accounts running) and Steam with full Aero eye candy turned on. A simple static background with the world at night and the Windows Gadgets on the right hand side monitoring my CPU and Memory usage. Typically I have 2-3 browsers open with 5-12 tabs open in each (different reasons). I'm seeding several torrents for various files (all legal) pretty much at all times via uTorrent and I only reboot my PC once a month when I update Vista.
Oh and I have AVAST! running, which I'm about to replace with AVG free again. I keep hearing how they no longer update the definitions in the free version, but I keep getting them on my XP so what the heck, I'll use it until I can't. I really don't like AVAST! as I have to turn it off when playing FarCry2 (causes lag from open file checks that affects my look speeds) but I don't have to turn of AVG.
My CPU usage at idle is at 0.2% and my memory usage is at about 1.2GB. This is according to Process Explorer and Task manager, not the stupid widgits on my desktop (though they say about the same). The usage only goes up when I'm playing a video game.
Before you cry out that there is a lot of memory in use, most of that is being held "ready" for other programs as they require more memory. Vista does that. It is actually a good thing. Just means faster access times for the program.
So yea. I'm positive 98% of all the Vista hate is irrelevant now unless you have 1GB of RAM or less. If you have 2GB and can run DirectX 9 you have no issues with Vista, or shouldn't be. There might be an exception to it:
My laptop came with Vista Home Basic (32-bit). Vista ran like a dog. The laptop specs were not bad (2GB RAM, AMD64 dual core turion, and an ATI video card sharing the system memory) but it was noticeably just bad. I have an OEM of Vista Ultimate x64. I was deciding between throwing XP x64 or Ultimate x64 on the laptop so i tried the Vista Ultimate for 30 days.
I am now certain that whatever Microsoft did to remove "features" such as Remote Desktop and Aero from Vista did more than just remove those features. The performance difference was INCREDIBLE. Vista Ultimate absolutely flew.
To be sure I tried installing Home Basic again. DELL includes OEM install discs now and puts the bloatware and drivers on separate discs. No more image CD/DVDs thankfully. Performance was still noticebly worse when compared to Vista Ultimate x64.
Personally I think they screwed up the registry a bit. Anyone who has made a mistake there knows only a full install ever gets the PC right again afterwords and all sorts of unexpected things happen when stuff goes wrong there. I just don't have any hard proof, but then neither do most people who seem to complain about Vista beyond their PCs only having 1GB or less of RAM.
For the curious I settled on XP x64 on my laptop. Partly because I had the license already and partly because I fell in love with it after using it on my old tower. That's a solid 64-bit OS, and has been since 6 months after its release when the drivers came out for everything.
IMO, mice will only be obsolete when we are able to get cybergenetic implants and use eye movements for controlling the pointer. Possibly it will be downgraded to a gaming input device rather than for the full system, but I don't find touch screens nearly as useful as a mouse. But then I'm also lazy and jackup my sensitivity so I only ever move it about a quarter inch at most.
You don't see Carlin because he's stuck on the roof of my neighbor's house. He's rather flat, and his neon green is fading currently.
I think you're confusing your Sci-Fi with reality. Most of what you just said isn't true right now, and the statement was about bringing back someone from 1900 or even earlier to modern times. You can't give a counter argument if you're basing that argument on things that are outside the scope of the question.
Um, no you are wrong. If the receiving individual is used to "slang" then its faster than speaking straight English or whatever language. The reason being, the uneducated (and nothing inherently wrong with that as long as the opportunity to become educated was adequately provided) do not KNOW the proper words. They only know the slang.
For example, in my job I'm still surprised how many people don't know what a colon is. They refer to it as "two dots".
Given the number of web browsers, 20% is pretty good actually.
You have a messed up sense of ethics. You do know that even criminals have ethics right? For instance, the majority of criminals will murderlate child rapists. Hell, rapists in general have a rougher time and are usually the victim of rape themselves (this is US prison I'm talking about). Vic Mackey was a greedy character with few scruples and a cruel streak. While he wouldn't mind screwing over criminals like that, he wasn't the kind that would shoot a kid or murder your average middle class, or even most lower class, family. He wanted money and had no issues taking it from criminals or killing people that tried to stop him but he wasn't random, like this law.
Is it malicious if it is true?
Actually I like the Vista interface :P The "classic" on Vista looks funky.
On topic: thanks for the link! Keep them coming, this thread is giving me some much needed reading.
Troll? Seriously? Funny maybe, or just no mod at all. I just don't see how this is trying.
The lab is not the same as the real world. A lot of the time with exploits it isn't because of lazyness as much as the people testing it just didn't think the same way. This is why security is as much recovery from damage as preventing damage. I can't even count the number of times I've seen something tested in the lab to perfection work wrong in the field, or read of an exploit where in hindsight it seems like you would of tested that but when you really think about it just wouldn't have the time to come up with that attack vector in the lab. This is partly why new exploits are found in Windows. Sometimes it just takes that long for people to figure out that they even CAN exploit this or that service.
Weirdo.
Seriously though, the way my mind works is fairly analytical (so I hear). I more easily compartmentalize and break things down. So looking at the C version its a lot easier to see what each segment is doing after only a brief explanation, or even less. For example "cout" makes sense because the language is C and its the OUTput.
But to each their own.
Excuse me, what memory leaks? I leave my computer on 24/7 with Steam running. Once a month I do system updates unless there is something wrong or I hear good things. I leave a LOT of stuff running. I don't have any memory leaks. Steam doesn't eat up 500mb of memory, even with several steam chat windows left open. Hell, the network usage doesn't even reach double digit percentage unless I'm playing a game!
So what version of Windows are you running and what updates have you put into it? What else do you have running? What exactly is your hardware? Did you know bad/cheap memory can cause memory leaks?
I didn't believe so either, but a friend of mine has the same system setup I have but with a different brand of memory. I was playing WAR in windowed mode for a while when it first came out before I added it to my Steam Games list so I could play full screen and just use the Shift + Tab thing and bring up my friends list to talk to people. He tried the same thing and discovered a memory leak in WAR. If he played for three hours, it would crash and his memory would be at 100% usage. Me? I could play for 4-6 hours in windowed mode with no problem. Same processor, same video cards, same motherboard, same amount of memory, but different brand memory (same brand video cards and mobo).
So call me skeptical. I've only been using Steam since day one, and yes I have been lucky that I hadn't run into a lot of the issues people had early on. I don't think Steam is perfect. If it was, by default it would be operating in "offline mode" and only connect online when you try to PLAY online or when you set it to update automatically. But I'd have to see some real evidence of a memory leak to even believe you.
"Overhead" with Steam is a joke. Unless you have a PC that is only playing games as old as Half Life you won't even notice the memory usage. 1GB is enough memory to make Steam unnoticeable, 2GB if you play Source quality games on the higher settings. If you say otherwise I think your windows boxen needs a cleaning.
What happens if your box becomes a zombie and you aren't aware and it sends out millions of e-mails as part of a botnet? Face it, the majority of users DON'T know how to protect themselves online.
Apparently, when one makes a joke and there are plenty to hear it, it sometimes goes "woosh".
Nevermind the fact it seems Lori Drew herself didn't send any messages to Megan, merely approved of what was going on and possibly helped make the MySpace account. But the moral issue there is completely irrelevant as the ONLY thing she was found guilty of was violating the TOS for MySpace. If this doesn't get overturned, a lot of people are going to have their lives ruined for nothing in the near future.
Having used PowerPoint, I just don't see how it invites you to do anything. I've never seen it make suggestions or provide any tips. It gives you a blank card and several templates that you can choose to ignore. Beyond that its a bit like a word processor with extra graphical options thrown in and a restricted page size. I think you're a bit wrong here.
Um, how does his sig actually support what RMS said? It just says that people here are sheep because they were all for "cloud computing" before RMS said no.
Digression aside, Greenpeace are essentially terrorists. Their ethics are skewed so loss of human life doesn't matter, just loss of anything else. Also, the philosophy of vegans are flawed just like the philosophy of anything else man 'believes' in. The cost of an imperfect world I suppose.
I'm with most of the rest here. You eat what you want, I'll eat what I want. Most of the time what I want is a roll of bread and a hunk of cheese. The rest, give me a big ol' steak. Veal even. I don't care. I'm hungry and it tastes good.
That's easy. Because you only have one computer and want to do something while that's running on automatic. I could see people wanting to play games while doing other stuff such as ripping DVDs, compiling, defragging etc.
To them I say: Buy another computer. The reasons are obvious enough to someone who knows what the PC is doing but its understandable why people WANT to do such things.
1: I know how to speed up my system. The installation "image" was nothing of the sort, all the "crapware" is on a seperate disc. DELL ships a separate OS disc now, and it uses the Vista installer (same installer as on my Vista Ultimate x64 disc) at least that's what it looks like. There are no applications on the install from that disc that are not on my Vista Ultimate disc, though things like Remote Desktop are missing.
2: Like I said in my post, all the changes I've read are nothing performance related supposedly. All I know is there IS a performance difference. If I hadn't put Windows XP x64 on the laptop (drivers are hard to find and I got the hardware all working) or if I had some image software I'd do benchmarks.
3: Look mate. If I had time anymore to do the legwork, I'd benchmark the damn thing on 3 different systems and link you the results. Hell, I'd have a YouTube video of it as well. I've been tweaking systems since I was in high school. If you know what to turn off, you can get some OS' to really fly on hardware its not supposed to. Hell, for some GAMES you can get them to run on settings and hardware that aren't supposed to mix (my favorite was getting Doom3 when it came out to run on Ultra High on a crappy e-machine with an Nvidia FX5200 and 512 RAM while maintaining 45-60 fps).
Truth is, I just don't have the time to give you the hard data but I know what I'm talking about. Same exact hardware, just comparing default install to install. No manufacturer crapware, that came on seperate discs (Cyberlink's DVD player, Roxio DE for burning discs, and a separate DELL Driver disc that has all the stuff available from the DELL website for download, including optionals that were not installed in the first place when I first got it). Absolutely jack special and Ultimate x64 runs smoother and faster WITH Aero (shared memory) than Home Basic, and I'm talking user experiences.
Also, that seems a long time for Excel to open but I just counted and that's about right. Counted on my desktop though which is set up for playing.
Where's the -1 Not Funny moderation? :P
Nuclear power is relatively mastered. Due to the wonderful world of politics, if you don't already have a nuclear reactor built there is very little chance of you ever being able to harness it. Hell, even Iran knows that nuclear power is the best bet. The only problem there is the byproducts of nuclear power are nuclear weapons and Israel really doesn't want that to happen considering they'd probably be the target.
The US' closest call was Three Mile Island and that whole thing was actually a success, the fail safes worked. The biggest disaster was Chernobyl which actually has vegetation reclaiming the area faster than anticipated(still not safe for human re-colonization). Some countries in Europe, namely France, have been using nuclear power without incident with great success. And no one likes the French, not even many French (btw: Thanks France! Without you the United States might not exist and my life would be vastly different) and if they can do it why can't we?!
So so far we have two "problems" that are solvable with technology we have TODAY but can't due to politics. As if there was any doubt who's best interests the politicians really looked after. In a perfect world, nuclear power would be rampant and there would be no energy crisis. In a perfect world, countries with excess food (such as the US) would be able to just export it to countries in need and everyone would get a fair share (rather than A) just the warlords or B) nobody because the country's leader doesn't want help while his people starve or C) because its not in the US' "best interest" to help those in need).
And mind you, if those 2 problems were solved a plethora of other issues ranging from (some) wars to pollution would be solved or a hairs' breath away from being solved. Then we just got to get used to people being able to have different ideas (fanatics/fundamentalists on all sides won't allow that) and different uniforms.
So, universal peace is obtainable but the odds make it impossible for all intents and purposes. I digressed a bit there, I apologize. But fixing the energy issue is very very important to the survival of the human race, and if we don't destroy ourselves first nuclear power is safest and cleanest way we have available in the long run.
No, F4 as in Fantastic 4. The "Thing" reference should of been a dead give away. If you were attempting to be humourous it didn't work, sorry.
Um, I know I for one know people online that I would consider friends. When you talk to someone on a daily basis for 8 years, you don't HAVE to meet them face to face to know you can trust them somewhat.
Course it helps when you do meet them face to face. Done that a few times with people I've met online. Not one has ended up creepy either.
Point is, if you grew up being "online" all the time and spent a lot of time on the 'Net, y ou probably have some friends you've never met that would like to know if you're gone. Possibly to attend the funeral, or just so they know what happened to you.