Submission + - Christopher Hitchens Dead at 62 (theglobeandmail.com)
Always a polarizing figure, his staunch support of atheism held fast throughout his illness. God speed, Mr. Hitchens...
What's the shortest distance between any two continents, anywhere in the world?
If you exclude continents that are actually touching, then the Europe and Africa across the Straits of Gibralter. The gap is only 14.3km at it's narrowest, so transcontinental artillery is easily achievable (105mm howitzers have a range well in excess of 15km, and larger artillery can go much, much further). Of course, a traditional cannonball maxes out at a few hundred yards so setting up the Mythbusters experiment in Morocco would have merely been a hazard to shipping, not buildings.
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30 PRINT "HELLO, HOSER"
RUN
RIM also announced that Mobile Fusion is in early beta testing and will be released in "late March". Not trying to flame here, but does anyone seriously believe RIM's ship date projections any more? Have any of their devices or software packages shipped on schedule in the last two years? Here's hoping that they've learned how to calculate an appropriate Scotty Factor.
Assuming you can ensure the safety of the construction workers, that actually makes a lot of sense.
Personally I've always preferred the SimCity method of urban planning, which is where you always put the nuclear plants in the corner. That way you only need to worry about a 90 degree arc of destruction, rather than a full 360 degrees. The problem with Japan is that it's an island, so you can't get to the corner of the board. They really should have thought of that before they started the game.
Because makeup artists working out of a tackle box-sized makeup kit in a random alleyway on a location shoot have room for a 42" TV?
Might be useful in niche markets such as film & television. Polaroids were often used to ensure continuity between takes and after breaks - take a picture of the actor before stopping and use it as a comparison point when it's time to get going again. Could use digital but this would just be easier.
Sure, but idealism only goes so far. If you're camping in the summer you can try to destroy the source of all the mosquitos, or you can apply bug spray. Only one will give you the desired result.
Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?
1. Lots of credible estimates out there. Wikipedia (which is never wrong, of course) provides an estimate for the observable universe of about 3 to 100 × 10^22 stars (30 sextillion to a septillion stars) organized in more than 80 billion galaxies. If you make an assumption on the average number of habitable planets per star (our solar system has one, for example), you have a rough guess.
2. There is one known planet with life (earth), so the odds for life orbiting any particular star at any point in time over the last 13.75 billion years is going to be better than one in a septillion, or 1:1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. I like those odds.
3. Stars are very far apart, and 13.75 billion years is a long time. The odds that another planet close enough to earth has intelligent life which developed inter-stellar travel and visited earth in the same 500-1,000-year period when might we actually be able to notice them is vanishingly small. I don't like those odds at all.
To sum up TFA:
1. Aliens are almost certainly real. Those who refuse to believe in the likely existence of extraterrestrial life either refuse to acknowledge or cannot comprehend the vastness of space and (especially) the vastness of time.
2. UFOs are absolutely real. There are lots of instances where people legitimately see objects in the sky that they cannot identify/classify.
3. UFOs are absolutely not aliens. Those who believe that aliens have visited earth either refuse to acknowledge or cannot comprehend the vastness of space and (especially) the vastness of time.
Don't forget the Kobo Vox - 7" colour eReader w/ web browser and Android apps for $199. The big advantage of Kobo is that you can run their software on the Kobo, iPad/iPhone, Android, BB, Palm or computer. Each title is fully transportable so you don't need to worry about device lock-in.
Seems like a very complicated way to collect taxes.
A useful application would be to target those vehicles which are going more than 10% (or 10km/h or whatever) faster than everyone else. That would actually improve safety and make the highway system more efficient (homogenous traffic reduces braking/lane changes and increases throughput). However, that's not the primary goal of highway speed enforcement so it will never happen
Interesting thought, but I don't think it's a good idea. Volunteering everything might work as long as there are very few people doing it -- but if everyone starts doing it, it then (i) the feds will focus on improving software that automatically filters out suspicious traits from the online data, and (ii) not sharing everything will be deemed suspicious.
We already have this - it's called Facebook.
Memory fault - where am I?