If there is an energy source in the soil itself, why there isn't an abundant amount of bacteria taking advantage of this. I guess I've come to believe that life will evolve to meet just about any condition, and an energy source seems to be about all it needs. Yet there has been no serious evidence of any type of life currently on mars.

He can always get suicided...

uuuh no, the story was an actual technical story with technical details (from Mark Russinovich) ( http://it.slashdot.org/story/05/10/31/2016223/sony-drm-installs-a-rootkit ), and there is actually insightful and interesting technical and political discussion in the thread.

You are 10 years late to that slashdot who liked to discuss technical stories such as deCSS, Sony Rootkit and Fyodor's nmap.

Heres the real benefit I see to 3840x2160 (or 3840x2400). Whatever. I'll call it 4k like everybody else is.

The real benefit is that you can start treating your monitor like a CRT again, feeding it arbitrary resolutions. First off, 1080p would work fine on a 3840x2160, and with any luck the monitor would just display it pixel-doubled so it wouldn't be any more blurry than a native 1080p monitor. That would be awesome. You can also run 1280x720p natively, as 3840x2160 is triple that, just like its double 1080p. But heres the real kicker - say you have some old game that tops out at 1280x1024 or something. You'll have to accept the black bars on the sides for games that aren't widescreen, but given that, you can upscale 1280x1024 to 2700x2160 or whatever. It'll still look good because theres so many excess pixels - more than double. Back when we were switching from CRTs to 15 and 17" or maybe a 19 if you're lucky, we had the issue that 800x600 looked like junk on a 1024x768 monitor and 1024x768 looked like junk on 1280x1024. At 3840x2160, we can display 1080p and 720p with literally no artifacts, and anything in between with minimal artifacts. In fact, the dot pitch of a 3840x2160 24" monitor is smaller than that of a typical 21" fine dot pitch aperture grille CRT. 3840x2160 at that resolution is only .13mm dot pitch. Remember when we thought .25mm dot pitch was awesome? Obviously we've got that beat, and that's why 3840x2160 is worth it even when not displaying native 3840x2160 images.

Aren't memories great? My guess is you had the CoCo (TRS Color Computer). Released in 1980. The original models had cassette (if my memory is correct) and a couple years later were offered with disk drive.

Floppies were a great step forward then... now I'm glad we don't have to deal with them. That is the cure of technology... nothing ever remains great.

I am almost positive that the hard card I got was for the Model IV. It is possible that I am confusing it with the Tandy 1000, but I don't think so. I remember getting the "card" which was almost the full length of the case and was heavy enough to kill a water buffalo. Now that i am typing this, I am trying to visualize puting it in the case... maybe it was the 1000 after all.

I'll have to ask my dad if he remembers.... this is really bugging me now :)

TRS-80 Model I with 4K of RAM. I was 6 and the thing came with a wonderfully put together BASIC programming manual. The beauty of the system is that you didn't need a lot of theory (any really) to get started.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "JOE WAS HERE"
30 GOTO 10

This was amazing to me. I ended up writing a few games, some math function and anything else I could do in 4K. Later on I went into programming as a career before turning to the dark side of management.

How does joining one group preclude you from associating with others outside of that group? I serve on the board of a technology group and a chess group.

Second question: If you think joining a high IQ group precludes you from interacting with folks with other skills not measured on an IQ test, then doesn't joining a special interest group also exclude you from really cool people that might excel in areas other than that special group?

Third question: Where did I say IQ isn't a measure of something valuable? I do think it isn't everything.

Dont be so sure. Back in the day when I played videogames there was a very strong Sony vs Nintendo rivalry. Specially in the SNES vs Genesis generation I remember some Sega people saying that the SNES was not truly 16bit (but super-charged 12 bits). The thing is, Sega fans would laugh at the thought of a Sonic game in a Nintendo console... fast forward 15 years, and it is the *only* place where you can get a Sega game.

I can imagine than in 5 to 10 years, all the Nintendo franchises (Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc) will be part of either Microsoft or Sony's console. The latter would be very funny (or sad, depending on how you see it) as in the beginning Sony's gaming technology was supposed to work for Nintendo.

most of them would end their lives are food or slaves.

Heh.

Congratulations, you caught me on an obvious typo.

Initially curiosity. Over the past couple of years I have found the social interaction to be beneficial.Higher signal to noise ratio in the conversation department. I woldn't want to hand around with smart folk all the time, hence my travels to Slashdot :)

I am a member of a high IQ "society" that discrimatinates against the lowest 99.9% of the general population. Yet, I would do very poorly on this test as my visual processing is poor. I excel in abstract reasoning but do poorly in other areas.

What is intelligence? What is IQ? What is it good for? All good questions.