The problem is not necessarily that population growth is or is not exponential- it is that the peak population might be greater than our civilization can adequately support. The medium UN prediction is that world population will peak at somewhere around 11 billion in approximately 100 years. That's something like a 50% increase on today's population. Can we adequately provide for a global population 50% larger than it is now (without buggering the planet in the process)?

Answers on a postcard, on that one.

It does sound "very little"- but that's just a cool realisation to make. It's easy to think of everything in the universe being very permanent and enduring- and a little shocking to realise that even mega-scale structures of the universe are only fleeting or are quite young.

Considering how long the universe's processes are expected to go on for (star formation might be expected to end roughly 100 trillion years from now), we are currently existing in the extremely early days of the universe. The universe has existed for barely the tiniest fraction of a percentage of it's "life", and we're here living it, enjoying its extreme youth. That's very cool.

I'm sorry, but what you've said there isn't correct in this case. As far as I can tell from TFA, we are not talking about a 13.7 billion year old image of something very far away (as is usually the case with this sort of story)- we're talking about a star that is still going, and is literally, right now, 6000 ly away. That is to say, the image we are seeing now is of the star as it was 6000 years ago. The image we are seeing now is NOT as the star was shortly after the Big Bang, it's of a star that was around shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years later.

To put it simply, small stars have very long lives. Red dwarves can last trillions of years. A star of this sort will burn for many billions of years more yet. This one formed 13.7 billion years ago, and has just kept on going.

Everyone: We want to be able to run the programmes that we use on our desktops on our phones too!

MS: OK, with Windows 8 we'll turn your desktop into a MASSIVE PHONE. All your favourite desktop programmes will have to be extensively rewritten so that they can run halfway gracefully on your new MASSIVE PHONE desktop, and will be able to run on your actual phone or tablet too (as long as you buy the software twice, seeing as we're not implementing an ARM/x86 emulation layer at all). Neat, huh?

Everyone: [despair]

Make sense?

If government agents lobbed military-grade ordinance at innocent civilians in the UK, we'd call that unlawful killing and lock the bastards up. And by the same token, if GCHQ had DoS'd targets belonging to legitimate wartime enemies, we wouldn't be criticizing them.

As a rough rule of thumb, the government isn't allowed to do things to citizens above and beyond what any civilian could do without a court mandate or a valid piece of legislation. Unless GCHQ have such a thing, they did wrong.

(Presuming that's a genuine question, and I'm not somehow wooshing myself).

MATE is a fork for the Gnome 2 shell, which maintains a simple desktop style of the classic variety. It is usually associated with the distro Mint. Competes on similar territory to XFCE, although I don't think they have an explicit "for lighter hardware" mandate in the same way as XFCE does.

Not to be confused with Cinnamon, which is a fork of the Gnome 3 shell which attempts to recreate a classic Gnome 2 style desktop, and is also usually associated with Mint.

Cooking up your own drugs probably can't be outlawed, any more than drinking household cleaners can be outlawed- it's impossible to legislate for every little thing a person could do to themselves.

On the other hand, it would be eminently possible to outlaw "supplying a substance to a person with the intention or knowledge that they would consume it without having been through the proper licensing and testing authorities", which essentially deals with Breaking Bad style home-cook drug dealers.

That's probably what the law you quoted is trying to achieve in your jurisdiction, and could be easily legislated for in others. Basically- if it looks like drug dealing, it probably is.

Incidentally, (while I'm a complete non-drug user- too square for any of that, I think) I'm generally for the legalisation of most milder recreational drugs, but still all for the kind of law specified above. Why? While I think that recreational drugs should be legalised, one of the main reasons for that is I think that they really need to be brought under a centrally managed quality control and safety testing regime, in the same way as tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and all food stuffs in general. There are few things more dangerous than narcotics which have been cooked up incorrectly or cut with something dodgy- it is possibly the singularly worst thing about current drug-taking culture. Amateur chemists cooking up narcotics and selling them to unsuspecting folks without having a good handle on what the effects and dangers will be is incredibly dangerous territory.

$1600 isn't bad for essentially nothing- i.e., assuming (like Linus) you don't have to change your behaviour at all to get it. That's still a couple of weeks salary for most people.

As you say, assuming that this isn't just launch hype. Which I expect it is.

I'm UK, and I haven't seen or heard anyone use Farenheit in as long as I can remember. And that includes in the (dead tree) papers I read (which would, indeed, talk about the temperature breaking 30, 35, 40, etc.)- maybe I'm just reading a better class of paper?

Last time anyone I knew was talking about temperatures in Farenheit was back when my parent's home (my childhood home) had a Farenheit-labeled themostat dating from when the house was built in the early 70s. That thermostat was replaced a decade and a half ago. Since then, not even my grandparents use it anymore...

I can't help but feel that this thread misses the interesting point of all this.

EVE Online has just managed (just about) to have a multiplayer game with 2200 players all playing against each other in the same in-game instance. That is, 2200 players in the same arena, being run by a single interoperating server. That is an absolutely absurd technical feat. Has any other multiplayer game ever come ever remotely close to this?

CCP have always been a fascinating one to watch in terms of their technical abilities. Arguably they've built one of the most advanced (in novel complexity terms) supercomputers in the world, certainly the most advanced in the entertainment industry. Both the hardware and the software of it, the load balancing and instance management, the ability to maintain uptime under unexpected loads, and the ability to maintain a playable state rather than submit to downtime in some of the worst conditions, is all extremely impressive.

I haven't looked into the technical details of CCP's set up in many years- does anyone have any details they'd care to share?

I used to play EVE years ago. There's an absurd amount going on, tactically and strategically, in these battles which isn't really visible just from a video play back.

As another poster pointed out, formations don't really play any part in things, so everything will just appear to be a big mishmash. But within the two opposing fleets, you'll have dozens of different groups with different tasks. You'll have your capital ships and largest sub-caps duking it out- if the whole fleet's big hitters coordinate and focus on a single target at a time, that target will not last more than a dozen or so (realtime) seconds. Each ship that is targeted will probably try and warp away and escape before it can be destroyed, where it can repair and rejoin the fight. There will be ships tasked with repairing and shield-boosting other ships- mostly in the battle (to "tank" a targeted ship), or stationed at a retreat point (to repair escapees). Other ships will be "warp jammers", to try to stop targets escaping. Others will have "electronic warfare" equipment, and will be coordinating to try to break targeting locks of either the big-hitters or any other class of ships (jammers, repairers, other ECM ships). Then there will be specialist hunter-killer ships designed specifically to take out these smaller support ships. And THOSE hunter-killer ships will themselves be targets of other hunter-killers. And that's just the tactical bit.

Strategically, you'll have fleets jumping from system to system, trying to ambush each other, blockade "warp gates", cut off reinforcement lines or escape routes, fleets pulling off feints and double bluffs.

It's all hideously complicated.

As others have pointed out, it's often more fun to talk about EVE than it is to actually play it. It is a game which is hugely about the meta-game, more than it's about actually flying your internet spaceship. It's possible to get quite a large portion of the fun of EVE Online without ever actually logging in and playing. All the planning of these battles will have taken place in internet forums outside of the game, and the actual battles will probably be being commanded via Skype and IRC as much as via in-game channels.

Fujitsu brand is still common in the UK. Possibly related to their relationship to old UK giant ICL- which (I think) used to sell rebadged Fujitsu PCs, and was later taken over by Fujitsu.

In any case, they're still a common enough brand. I have a Vista-era Fujitsu laptop on my desk right now, albeit not in working order.

Assuming you don't count the whole messy business with NeXt- i.e., Jobs leaving, founding a competing company, Apple heading to the point of bankruptcy, buying NeXt in a sort of reverse takeover in which the NeXt board (i.e. Jobs) takes control of the company, replacing their entire product line (Mac OS) with NeXt products. And then, of course, switching their primary business model to selling audio players and phones, with their major revenue source being a content distribution platform.

So yeah, definitely exactly the same company as existed in 1986.

I still take your point, but it's disingenuous to pretend that Apple hasn't been through the corporate meat grinder just as much as any other long-lived company.

That would make it a currency with an exchange rate pegged to the US dollar- it does not negate the fact that it is a separate currency. It is no different to any other currency which is pegged to the dollar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

The fact that it seems weird to call it a "separate currency" doesn't make it not so. The only potential difference between an Amazon gift voucher and an "Amazon Coin" would be the rules around it's issuance and exchange- the fundamentals would be the same.

As has been said so many times in this thread- same could be said of AOL, Geocities, MySpace...

Facebook is not the first useful social website. It will not be the last.