|
|
You think I'm joking - there has been a baffling increase in the amount of "Russia had it better" posts around here lately.
I bet you could link to some of those posts to add impact to your statement, if you wanted to.
"...as they create a contact bridge between two points when they get electrocuted they release an alarm pheromone," says UT research assistant Edward LeBrun. "The other ants are attracted to the chemicals that other ants give off," he adds.
What kind of survival mechanism is that? "Oh! There's danger over there. Let's all go check it out..."
Given that(among the ants that don't have even cooler mechanisms, like specialized suicide soldiers who blow themselves up to shower the enemy with toxins) "swarm the enemy and keep biting and stinging without regards for casualties until nothing that isn't us is still moving" is considered a valid strategy, the chemical signalling actually makes sense: If an ant from another colony, or a predatory insect/arachnid, attacks a single ant, the ant's body automatically releases the alarm pheremone and the attacker gets zerg rushed.
It's just that, against implacable electronics that are totally indifferent to anything except being insulated by the uncounted bodies of the slain, this tactic doesn't work very well(see also: mammals that 'freeze' to avoid predators; but discover that cars aren't visual hunters; but they do kill anything that gets in their way)...
Seems like having a predilection for something that kills you is not an instinct that should be selected for. If they are electrocuted by the electronics shouldn't this problem take care of itself sooner or later?
I suspect that it depends on whether sensitivity to electrical fields is useful in other contexts, or(if not directly useful) at least tightly-coupled to some other sensory mechanism that is survival-critical and will take quite some time to iterate toward an electrically insensitive replacement.
Mass death upon the power lines is obvious folly; but electrification is, what, a century old(in any ecologically-relevant amount, I know about various independent developers of primitive chemical batteries going back a great deal further; but that sort of scale barely matters), the blink of an eye in evolutionary time.
If this electrical sense isn't all that useful elsewhere, or is just some accident that didn't previously cause trouble, it could actually be culled from much of the population fairly quickly. If it has some other use, or is connected to genes that code for multiple things, some of them extremely useful, they might take ages, if ever, to stop doing this.
I know most of
By mass, beasts have always reigned over the earth... A mixture of applied landscaping, chemical warfare, and rifles have allowed humans to carve out an enclave free of large mammals we don't approve of, and some of the nastier bugs and microbes(wealthy areas of the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where restricted by law or subverted by rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. Terms and conditions may apply); but we've never been close to having the upper hand against things too small to shoot and too resilient to just habitat-destroy into submission.
These foreigners are destroying good ol american jobs. I am liberal except for when it comes to things that effect me as I am a hypocrite.
Ah yes, isn't it repulsive how those 'liberals' just can't stay consistent on their support for indentured servants when their own economic interests are on the line? Truly a refutation of their ideology or something...
and they only took 15 million? One can only hope they didn't give up their rights in return.
I have to wonder why they talked to the VCs at all... I can imagine taking the risk if you've just started somebullshitwithnorevenuemodel.com and crazy guys in suits are offering you a giant stack of pretend internet money for it; but why would a company with an actual shipping product, and sales, and such, risk going up against the elite equity-diluting and value extraction skills of a hardened VC?
Very perceptive that highly evolved alien life forms would dig Bill Evans, since he was one of them.
A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Isn't that the place jazz was invented?"
A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Wasn't that a country on the planet that humans made inhabitable, but only after turning it into a vast work prison for virtual entities knows as "corporations"?
"And why didn't those stupid sonsabitches in the 20th century do something about it? Humans...maybe we're better off with them extinct."
Yep, that's what they'll say.
I, for one, am 100% gung-ho about having a 3rd-party in the 'cloud' handling every single one of my packets so that they can balance them between my connections!
The proprietary client adding complexity to my machine's network stack is a bonus, of course.
Hey, that's Sherlock Holmes!
Your typical slashdotter probably sits closer to their router than the plants. And is about as likely to germinate.
Good thing, too, or we'd see a rash of siamese sextuplets.
Though, to be fair, I'd thought that all the hallucinogens I took back in college had messed up my genes royally, but my daughter turned out perfect. Better than perfect. She can type like a banshee with those twelve fingers.
The videos are about people playing a game, not the game itself. That is a transformational use and thus a fair use. Nintendo is stealing from their own customers, plain and simple.
The other issue(aside from whether Nintendo has a right under law to do this or not) is whether Nintendo is being a load of idiots by doing this...
If a video of somebody playing a game is a good, or even adequate, substitute for that game, I think that it's fair to say that the game must really suck, badly. If it isn't a good substitute for the game, then "Let's Play" videos are likely to be free advertising for Nintendo, produced by enthusiasts. Given Nintendo's, um, totally commanding lead in the next-gen console area, maybe they shouldn't be turning that down, no?
You'd think that with all the federal money that Amtrak gets that they would already have better services available.
The federal money is to make sure there are not better services available. One of the strings tied to the federal subsidy is that many of the most useful national rail lines had to be abandoned to the private freight lines. This has been going on for decades now. Strangely, the private freight carriers don't seem to be the ones who worked so hard to kill the American passenger railroads.
Rail service in the US did not die because people didn't want it. It died because some very powerful interests didn't want people to have it. The corporatists and the political Right in America hate passenger trains with a passion. They actually get angry about it for some reason.
I took Joe_Dragon's comment to mean that the vast majority of rail service outside Boswash [wikipedia.org] is freight, not commuter service.
By design.
What's surprising is that passenger rail continues in the US despite the efforts of some very powerful lobbying groups to kill it.
People just like trains, and if they had just left more lines intact, the number of riders annually would be a lot more than the current 35 million. It boggles my mind that I cannot ride the train from Chicago to Memphis and back without some ridiculous routing.
Idaho state law makes it illegal for a man to give his sweetheart a box of candy weighing less than fifty pounds.