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Comment Catastrophic event != Apocalypse (Score 1, Interesting) 737

by gvz (#46736791) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful?

This is a Hollywood-type confusion, very frequent.

A catastrophic event, as the one clearly meant in the summary, is one where lots of people die, technology is damaged (ie, electric infrastructure is busted, telecomm stops working, etc.) and life as we know it is no more, but life goes on.

Apocalypse is an event of biblical origin (apocalypse is the last book of the Bible, meaning "revelation"), and it explains the end of the world, that is, the end of life as we know it, and the world as we know it, and humans in general as we know them. Apocalypse will be a time when the dead will live again, with different qualities, and Earth will be renewed.

So talking of "life after apocalypse" is a confusion of terms. It would be a lot more proper to talk of "life after a catastrophic event".

It usually churns my stomach -as a Christian- to watch movies like 2012, where we have an "apocalypse" (catastrophic event falsely linked to the biblical event) just to find out that now we have a broken up, backwards world, ruled by some advantageous morons, and inhabited by egotistical ciizens. My, what a world!

To keep things clear, the main event of the biblical apocalypse is the second coming of Jesus Christ, to renew everything and rule an eternal life of complete happiness. And, if you are not christian, or believer, if you are a person (a lot of them here on /.) who mock on religion, judging that it is a lie, or a loss of time, or such opinions, at least accept the "apocalypse" as a cultural-literary event, described in the most reproduced book in history.

Apocalypse will invove a catastrophic event, no doubt, but things afterward will be a lot different.
Space

Submission + - Scientists Break Speed of Light

Submitted by PreacherTom
PreacherTom writes: Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that shoots about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum, to the point where the pulse seemed to exit the chamber before even entering it. Apparently, Uncle Albert is still resting comfortably: relativity only states that an object with mass cannot travel faster than light. Still, the results are sufficient to merit publication in the prestigious journal, Nature.
Microsoft

Microsoft Wanted To Drop Mac Office To Hurt Apple 479

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the airing-the-dirty-laundry dept.
Overly Critical Guy writes to mention that more documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considered dumping the Mac Office Suite entirely in a move to harm Apple. "The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time. It describes dumping development of the product as: 'The strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately.' The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'"

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