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Comment: Why it happened? The answer is ... (Score 1) 109

by Ihlosi (#38671678) Attached to: Tracking Down the First Oxygen Users

... evolution. That wasn't all that hard, was it?

Small errors leads to metabolisms that weren't just more resistant to oxygen (remember that it's a nasty poison to anything that's not used to it), but that could acutally use it to generate energy (in fact, more efficiently than by anaerobic metabolism). That opened up whole new habitats. Exponential growth ensues.

Comment: A very redundant puzzle. (Score 1) 180

by Ihlosi (#38084108) Attached to: $50,000 To Solve the Most Complicated Puzzle Ever

A German company solved this exact problem years ago, when trying to find a way to reconstruct documents of the former East German Staatssicherheit that had been shredded.

Oh, and they're not dealing 10000 pieces various documents, they're dealing with 10000 bags full of pieces of shredded documents. Crowd-source that.

Comment: Re:We're no danger to the Galaxy... (Score 1) 534

by Ihlosi (#37141818) Attached to: What If Aliens Came To Save the Galaxy From Mankind?
Anyone who has mastered FTL travel will be impossible to stop.

In fact, anyone who has mastered somewhat directed inter-stellar travel, even at sub-lightspeed, will be impossible to stop.

If they've mastered accelerating physical objects to even a significant fraction of c, then they could wipe us out before we even know about them just by slamming an object (any object) into any point on the earth.

No significant fraction of c necessary at all. All "they" would need is a space rock of sufficient size (which our solar system has plenty of), a large enough thruster, a few decades, and an "out of the sun" trajectory so we have no idea what's coming.

Comment: It's the boiling, not the alcohol. (Score 1) 840

by Ihlosi (#36597318) Attached to: With regards to beer, I prefer it to be:
Originally beer became popular because the alcohol in it protected you from the nasty stuff in the the water from wells and rivers.

Err ... no. Even todays' 5% alcohol stuff doesn't disinfect anything, and what they brewed hundreds of years ago without todays heavily cultured yeasts didn't even reach 5%.

However, making beer involves boiling the water used in brewing, which does indeed kill off most of the bad things in the water.

Comment: WTH is the problem? (Score 1) 1002

by Ihlosi (#36150368) Attached to: Do Developers Really Need a Second Monitor?
We're not in the 1980s or 1990s anymore, when monitors, especially large ones, would cost thousands of dollars.

Simple calculation: A monitors costs, what, $250? And now consider that it might save the developer just one or two minutes each day that he'd otherwise spend on switching between windows, resizing them, getting reoriented, etc. The extra monitor will pay for itself in a few months.

Comment: Wind. (Score 1) 436

by Ihlosi (#36138958) Attached to: What's Your Favorite Renewable Energy
It's basically available everywhere, and has much less correlation (in place and time) than solar power, which means that you need smaller areas than for solar power to even out the variance of each producer. Hydropower and geothermal power are nice, but only feasible if your country hit a geographical or geological jackpot.

Comment: Re:Dilbert is the closest to reality (Score 1) 316

by Ihlosi (#35755352) Attached to: Which Comic Character Is the Greatest Engineer?
Dilbert is a corporate tool intended to placate all of the cubicle-drones because they can have a chuckle and identify with him and think "well, gosh, things aren't so bad!"

What company are you referring to and where do I send my resume?

Or do you just assume that real-life engineering jobs must be better than what's depicted in Dilbert? I'm sorry.

... I don't like FRANK SINATRA or his CHILDREN.

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