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IF you are concerned about safety, FDA or no, there has been extensive research on it. Very many studies demonstrate no difference between GMOs and non-GM crops, and as a result, the general scientific consensus is that they're safe. Even if we assume Monsanto is influencing the FDA, I doubt they exert the same influence over countless relevant experts. Heck, even countries like Iran and China have developed their own homegrown strains of GMO. Iran made the worlds first Bt rice. Is Monsanto bribing off what one of most anti-US countries in the world?

Those who claim that GMOs are dangerous haven't done a very good job of proving their claims, either. For something to be dangerous, I think we can all agree it must have a reason, yes? Just being GMO is not a valid reason, it must have some sort of chemical compount, not present in the unmodified counterpart, that is dangerous. To date, no such compound from a commercially approved GMO has been identified. No genetic reasoning, no chemical pathways given for the production, and no proven cases of people actually hurt by them. No reason in theory, no evidence in practice. Starfruit and kiwi have presented more problems than GMOs, yet no one protests them. And of course, GMOs must be reviewed on a case by case basis, maybe someday the FDA royally screws up and one that kills people is released , but if it is, there'll be a reason for it. And since there is neither a known reason as to why any of the commercial GMOs would hurt anyone nor evidence that it happens, I guess the FDA just puts them in a catagory similar to Generally Recognized As Safe after the testing has been done.

As for the weeds, that is a very real problem. The thing there is, everyone saw that coming. Even Monsanto said it would happen. The problem was that there are only two traits for herbicide resistance, Starlink and Round-Up Ready, and only Round-Up Ready was extensively used. The problem wasn't overuse, but over-reliance. If there were more approved traits, and people used multiple herbicides, it would much more difficult for a weed to develop resistance. Even if it were to acquire the resistance through horizontal gene transfer, if there were multiple genes confirming resistance to multiple compounds, it is still very unlikely. These weeds aren't really 'superweeds' by the way, just regular weeds that are resistant to the most popular herbicide, so they can still be taken out by other chemicals and methods, but still, this never should have been allowed to happen in the first place. I don't know why it wasn't done, why those traits weren't pushed out there, maybe the FDA was lax in approving them, maybe activists protested, maybe the companies just didn't care, whatever, but yes, someone screwed the pooch on that one.

FU masks.

That's your first wrong assumption. The ancient greeks had ideas about evolution

Nothing about speciation in that link, which is necessary to resolve the argument.

Which came first - and it's obvious that eggs were around before any warm-blooded animals existed, and that includes chickens. There is no circular dependency, just people who lack the ability to step out of the box, or make bad initial assumptions.

Chicken/egg is widely recognized as a causality dilemma due to the circular dependency. Furthermore, there are at least 4 valid interpretations of "egg" in the chicken/egg question, and I have provided a simple formal model explaining why my interpretation of egg makes the most sense (most other interpretations result in contradiction in the recursive relation).

Additionally, even if we take your view, then the egg STILL came first - because any egg that gives rise to a chicken is by definition a "chicken egg", even if it was laid by something that was one generation prior to crossing some arbitrary boundary into "chickenhood" - since the chicken is only fully developed at some point after the egg is created, same as a human is not really a human when it's just a clump of cells (or your arm isn't a separate human being if we cut it off).

My definition of "egg" is a conclusion, not an assumption.

Tell you what, you think I'm wrong, great. Point out the mistaken assumption or incorrect inference in my induction, otherwise my conclusion stands. You can argue informally till you're blue in the face, but reduce it to a formal argument if you want to convince me.

I argued with another person that was convinced as you are, and I broke down the model even further. Point out the mistake.

Not all eggs have a hard shell In fact, most don't - so this is a stupid question.

Additionally, other animals laid eggs well before chickens ever appeared. Dinosaurs, for example.

This is an invalid interpretation of the question. The Ancient Greeks had no notion of evolution, so the the question "which came first, the chicken or the fish egg" was meaningless to them. The chicken/egg question is a metaphor for resolving a circular dependency. If you analyze it inductively and ground it in biology, the only sensible answer is that the chicken came first.

Maybe everyone who can tell the difference between a-protein-now-found-in-chickens and a chicken has long ago come to the conclusion that what came first was some animal different enough from a chicken that we wouldn't call it that, which laid an egg that contained an animal similar enough to a chicken that we would call it a chicken. And only the logic deficient and the religious crazies are left arguing the options.

Recursive relation fail! A proper inductive analysis says the chicken came first.

Fundamentally it's based on artificial scarcity of something that can be endlessly copied for virtually no cost. You do not see a problem with this?

I in fact have an entire series on this on my blog: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2010/06/artificial-scarcity-intro.html

take a look http://www.the-2012-end.blogspot.com/ http://phenik.blogspot.com/

take a look http://www.the-2012-end.blogspot.com/ http://phenik.blogspot.com/

So the NIMBY hordes are secretly funded by the oil industry?

Yes, actually.

This isn't anything particularly new either. Check out this one from 1979. Even when environmental groups aren't being directly funded by the fossil fuel industry, they are propping up anti-nuke advertising.

So the NIMBY hordes are secretly funded by the oil industry?

Yes, actually.

This isn't anything particularly new either. Check out this one from 1979. Even when environmental groups aren't being directly funded by the fossil fuel industry, they are propping up anti-nuke advertising.

Highlights in the past 4 years:

• In 2007, NRG files for two ABWRs as the first mover in quite a while.
• This year, the Obama Administration has awarded loan guarantees for new reactors and more are being pushed.
• While the Finnish OL3 reactor is taking more time and money, major lessons are being learned as it is the first reactor being built in nearly 3 decades.
• Four reactors are under construction in China.
• More small reactor firms are popping up and gathering attention.
• New uranium enrichment plants are being built, and one has a green light from the NRC to begin operations in New Mexico.
• The nuclear supply chain is ramping up with new component manufacturing plants being built in Louisiana, Virginia, Ohio, and elsewhere.

Source

And of course, the article that was for this story has more information. But who reads that?

Circa 2003, I thought of a way to help bands gain their independence and, finally, level the playing field. My idea is called LIMB; League of Independent Musicians and Bands. For details, you can read my blog post on the topic. I know someone who used to work for the RIAA. He told me first hand that he didn't like their business practices and left. Yes, the RIAA deals a big blow to musicians, but the record label conglomerates don't help either. Many of them STILL take away the composers' copyrights to their intellectual property. Sure, a few musicians/bands get their fair share of reimbursement, but that doesn't stop the record labels from doing whatever they want with the music. "Oh, you want to take a couple of years off to spend time with your family? Well, you said that you'd crank out 5 albums in six years. You've only given us 4 albums. Don't worry. We'll release a 'Best of' and pocket all of the profits." And everyone knows that the RIAA frowns on bootlegging because it takes money out of their pocket; not the band's. You know there are thousands of bootlegs recorded directly from the soundboard. In many cases, probably not all, that's the band telling the sound crew, "Slip a little something out there for our fans so we don't have to spend money for studio time and other expenses to release an official live album." Sometimes these are even released by the band several years later as "official bootlegs". Heck, Genesis used to encourage the trading of bootlegs on their official site. Many other bands still do. I'm an amateur musician. If I ever did go pro, the only 2 record labels I'd consider are Discipline Global Mobile and RealWorld. All the conglomerates and the RIAA can take a long walk on a short pier.

blog, HP had published an academic paper about combining a data-center and farm, using biomass for local farms to power the servers in your server farm. Note however that transmission line and contenting to a the grid, don't cost very much in terms of efficiency (1 per cent, probably), or electricity price rate (is biomass cheaper than wind or sun, right now? varies with the weather doesn't it).

I was kidding. But one can only hope something shuts down that huge pile of crap.

A proposed settlement.

thanks Küçük Srlar

Genericide (trademark as a noun) for the web 2.0 generation :)
http://google-au.blogspot.com/2010/07/were-sorry.html is also fun reading about doing something interesting until exposed.

If you could get the laptop to provide a list of nearby WiFi access points, then you could convert that into a geo location. Like described
here.

Try again...

XP-SP3 yielded a ~10% performance gain over SP2 on the same hardware. So while it may consume more memory, there's little reason to still be running SP2--especially since it's from 2004.

http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-xp-sp3-yields-performance-gains.html

Well, duh. That's what you get when you "favor ability over experience".

Greater men than me have failed to answer that question but I'm arrogant enough to give it a try anyway.

In ancient Rome slaves provided for Roman citizens such that there was a large group of people who didn't have to work at all. Everything they wanted was given to them. They spent their time at theaters, bath houses, and feeding each other. Some turned to philosophy, some to learning, many to simply wasting their lives away in whatever they liked to do.

In today's UK there are many people living on the public welfare system. Their standard of living is significantly lower than that of Rome but their pursuits are about the same. It's not fair to say they aren't as intellectual: you would be comparing the average of today's time wasters with the progress of a thousand years of Roman philosophers.

In America there are many people in the inner cities existing with a very low standard of living (by today's ideas of a proper standard of living), most of that wealth given to them by the government. They have very poor lives and a high crime rate. It has been alleged that government handouts are causing this low standard living but another way to look at is that insufficient knowledge, improper allocation of handouts, and not enough handouts are causing the problems. If enough time and energy could be spent on those neighborhoods (especially in solving the social problems) they WOULD improve.

So what I'm saying is that given high enough productivity per person you would have the same social structures that have been seen where wealth is concentrated: look at Dubai's hotels and massive public works projects, the activities of today's ultra rich (often composed of wealth wasting contests like seeing who can get the most and best horses and proving who had enough time to spend learning just the right set of mannerisms) and the activities of the Roman wasters.

It may also by beneficial to compare lifestyles across times when wealth was plentiful and not so plentiful.It is not whether someone is working or not that determines their standard of living but only how much wealth they have. Below a certain point you have ghettos and severe social malignancy; above that level you have the desire to be warm, comfortable, well fed, and able to move about; and above that there is an increasing amount of conspicuous consumption where anything goes as long as it obviously cost enough.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/02/flynn-flynn-effect-has-reversed-among.html

This makes us wonder if it wasn't a bias artifact to begin with.

Creativity in the USA is declining because the USA is declining and -- the article did not mention this -- the average US IQ has also dropped. We were near Germany's 107 average at the turn of the century but now are probably closer to 98.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

It seems to me that average IQ is the cause of a nation's degree of wealth, not an effect of it. Which came first?

Per "The Spirit Level," there is a strong correlation between a country's academic achievement and its income equality. As I once blogged:

Imagine two relatively wealthy, industrialized societies. In society A, the price for not getting a good education is a life of poverty and shame. In society B, there is little market incentive not to squander your education, because the government provides generous welfare and unemployment benefits.

In Society A, the wealthiest people (those in the top 20%) make about ten times as much as the poorest people (those in the bottom 20%) do, so the rewards for being ambitious and doing well in school are huge. In Society B, the same comparison shows the wealthiest members of society only make about four times what the poorest do, so there is markedly less financial incentive to do well in school.

In Society A, polls of high school students show that almost all of them want to attend college. In Society B, a large fraction of the students say that they'd be happy with trade school. Thus, you would expect students in Society A to be more motivated to excel in their college preparatory work.

No surprise, Society A is the U.S., Society B is Finland, and despite what a social darwinist right winger would say are strong disincentives against performing well in school -- no chance at great wealth if you succeed, no risk of poverty if you fail -- Finnish kids outperform American kids by a wide margin. An interesting feature of this gap is that it is narrower when comparing the children of our wealthiest to the children of their wealthiest, and widens steadily as we go down the socioeconomic ladders.

It's almost as though giving kids security about their future and their place in society leads to a more conducive learning environment. But no, that's crazy.

Context: It's not just U.S. v. Finland in a Mathlete smackdown. The correlation is statistically significant across the industrialized world.

I have other reasons for thinking that decreasing income inequality will improve our education system, partly because of the issue you pointed out: parental involvement. But the point is, there are things that could be done at the federal level to improve educational outcomes. They're just not the ones you'd think of first.

As promised, I finally posted a series of articles on artificial scarcity on my blog.

I've recently begun following the Cybercrime blog, and this article talks about legal expectations of privacy, and (as I see it) the bar seems set pretty high. As usual with her blog entries, lots of supporting case law sprinkled throughout, so don't expect to coast through or skim these posts (unless you happen to be a lawyer). Sadly, the trend I've seen over my time of reading her stuff is that the courts seem to provide law enforcement with most of the wiggle room based on legal minutia, while denying that same wiggle room to the defendants. To my layman's eye, the system seems skewed in favor of the state.

In any case, if you have the time I heartily recommend adding this site to one's daily reading regimen. I think admins and users alike could stand to have a half-decent understanding of how the laws are currently being applied to our trade/hobby.

Citation: The Kitavans: Wisdom from the Pacific Islands.

  * Refined sugar is non-existant on Kitava

  * Over 75% of Kitavans smoke cigarettes.

  * Kitavans are also unfamiliar with external cancers, with the exception of one possible case of breast cancer in an elderly woman.

Now this is just one example, and there are other factors than refined sugar which contribute to the prevelance of cancer and other degenerative diseases. But it does show you can have a smoking habit and a sugar free diet and be cancer free. Weston Price's research showed that where ever sugar and refined flour was introduced into the diet in people previously eating traditional diets, rates of cancer shot up 10 fold and 100 fold.

They did: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html

It's not ok for google to inadvertadly capture minute packets of useless information, but it's ok for the government to direct ISPs to intercept data illegally.

The Australian Labor party have time and time again broken their promises, Barging ahead with Policies that their citizens do no want and completely fucking up things they tried to achieve

The only reason Google are in hot water is because they stood up to Senator Conroy and he got upset about it.

I for one will be making my vote count this year and I urge all fellow Australian slashdotters to do the same.

Their prime motivation behind Real ID was not the quality of the forums and helping users. It's the deal activision signed with facebook to promote closer cooperation. Activision saw Farmville's success and wanted a piece of the pie of social networking/gaming. Real ID was the first step towards the $$$ of a social networking/MMORPG. Imagine the targeted advertising potential in that monstrosity.

They couldn't care less about the user's complaints. They expected any money lost to cancellations to be made up with money from a new social networking/MMORPG model of targeted advertising.

Things only really hit home when this happened: http://asnowstormbyanyothername.blogspot.com/

Here is the reason they're backing off: http://asnowstormbyanyothername.blogspot.com/

It seems it's no skin off their nose until chickens come home to roost.

Hadis kayserisporThe UK has an effective system which enjoys largely popular support. An independent organisation, with clear governance, provides a list of URLs that contain illegal content. Those URLs are blocked on a voluntary basis by consumer ISPs. The performance hit is a red herring: the technology used is two-stage, so only the IP numbers that are hosting the material are proxied (it's done by injecting local /32 routes to a transparent proxy, mostly). Although there's an iron fist in the velvet glove of voluntary filtering, in that government has threatened to legislate, in reality every ISP is on board. Business connections may or may not be so filtered. There have been fuck-ups, most notably the Virgin Killer affair which (a) revealed that Wikipedia doesn't play nicely with ISP-level proxying and (b) there are edge-cases in the law on child porn. The argument that the record cover in question isn't child porn is weak, but the whole affair was mis-handled. diyaliz aliramazandinc

Update. Now there's an entire website providing details on the private information of every Blizzard employee they can trace.

Some pretty personal stuff there including details on children, political contributions, addresses, educational details, and so on. http://asnowstormbyanyothername.blogspot.com/

I have seen one on TV.

This is one of the comments from the article.
"A shrinking proton could possibly be explained by an alternative model of the proton, where it simply consists of a looping EM wave. Adding energy to the system (by replacing the electron with a muon) could reduce the wavelength of the looping EM wave – and thus also the diameter of the proton. Such a proton is elaborated on at http://classicalatom.blogspot.com/2008/09/simple-model-of-electrons-protons.html" Posted by: Simple Particle

They don't ask that (or at least, this i 5% of questions)

if you'd googled 'google interview questions' you get a better match

These are a better match even if it looks similar http://www.techinterviews.com/google-interview-questions

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html

The answer was posted yesterday at 2pm Eastern in the comments:
http://uscybercom-watch.blogspot.com/2010/06/uscybercom-logo.html

Here are some. Now, is there any credible (key word) evidence that GMOs do cause harm? And if so, why? What is the causative agent, the novel protein produced in the GMO, but not in the conventional crop? What is the chemical pathway taken to produce that compound? What is the genetic reason for it being produced like that? Why does it only happen in man made GMOs, and not in natural, uncontrolled horizontal gene transfers? Not a single one of those very critical questions have been answered for a single commercially approved crop by the any of the anti-GMO guys. There's something to be said for requiring something be shown reasonably safe, but there's also something to be said for perpetual goalpost shifting (one more study and a few more years!) requiring that a negative be proven (prove they aren't dangerous) and falsifiability (prove that they will never ever, via any presently unknown mechanisms, be dangerous).

Your repeatinbg outdated informaton (even if it is also all over the web, sadly). The US RDA for vitamin D is probably somewhere between ten times too low and one hundred times too low, which is where that misinformed calculation came from. For better information, see:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
"""
Studies show that if you go out in the summer sun in your bathing suit until your skin just begins to turn pink, you make between 10,000 and 50,000 units of cholecalciferol in your skin. Professor Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine has studied this extensively and believes a reasonable average of all the studies is 20,000 units. That means a few minutes in the summer sun produces 100 times more vitamin D than the government says you need! As discussed in other pages, this is the single most important fact about vitamin D.
    The skin does another amazing thing with cholecalciferol. It prevents vitamin D toxicity. Once you make about 20,000 units, the same ultraviolet light that created cholecalciferol begins to degrade it. The more you make, the more destroyed. So a steady state is reached that prevents the skin from making too much cholecalciferol. This is why no one has ever been reported to develop vitamin D toxicity from the sun, though it is possible when taking vitamin D orally.
"""

Darker skins may taked up to ten times longer to reach that level, BTW. Unintentionally, the advice you are repeating may even have caused the autism epidemic (since pregnant women not getting enough vitanmin D has been linked to autism)

So, you are just repeating outdated misinformation, sorry -- and it is misinformation that is literally sickening and killing millions of indoor tech professionals (especially ones who are odler, have darker skins, and live in northern areas) as well as their children. And it is not something I understood myself until faily recently, so don't feel too bad about it. But now you know...

A blood test is ideal to know for sure:
    http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

The only reason vitamin D is a wonder drug is that we are all so unnaturally deficient of it given our recent (last 50 years) lifestyle shift to mostly indoors activities and travel in enclosed vehicles. Even people who live in the south may be vitamin D deficient if they cover up most of the time and stay indoors in air conditioning while surfing the web instead of the ocean.

This is a major public health issue and occupational hazard for any indoor worker that is juct becoming better understood (even though 100 years ago people like Herbert Shelton used sunlight as a cure for some diseases). Dermatologists advising people to stay out of the sun (without alos recommending adequate supplements on the order of 5000 IU D3 daily for most people and regular blood testing) have caused vast amounts of health problems even as they do save us from a few skin cancers.

Also useful for good health related to eating patterns: http://www.drfuhrman.com/

With that said, there are some rare health conditions where vitamin D supplementaton may be problematical -- see that first site for more details.

It's funny that you mention that, because I've always figured it would go quite a ways to proving creationism if organisms had a built in anti-tampering device, that if altering the genes directly always produced something that was a dangerous. I don't know how you're post got modded troll, because it is spot on. Monsanto pricks? Sure. GMO ecologically damaging? Potentially. That's a very complex area, and you've also got to consider the differences in damage between an escaped gene and the amount of damage that they can prevent. Agriculture is very damaging to the environment. If, say, a nitrogen use efficiency, or pest resistance, or increased output trait can offset any other harm GMOs cause, it might be worth it. GMOs dangerous to your health? There is more evidence to indicate that Elvis is still alive. Genetic engineering, like any applied biology, is complicated. For example, in China, the adopted a GMO strain of cotton, stopped spraying pesticides, which improved insect biodiversity, which meant a once minor pest became a major one. These are certainty interesting times with thins technology, and times they are a' changin. And one thing we don't need is demonizing them based on unscientific fearmongering. The claims of GMOs causing health problems have no merit whatsoever, and it doesn't do any good for any one to make shit up. It is a problem that so many people are letting their strange ideology trump science and critical skeptical thinking.

Actually, the thing that showed up on /. a while back alleging organ damage from GMOs is what was debunked. The people who 'debunk' the 'myth' that genetic engineering doesn't give you [insert disease here] are usually the same people who, in their next post, wax about the virtues of homeopathy. As far as science is concerned, no horticulturist or biologist I've ever met could find a shred of evidence that GMOs posses any health risks. Plenty suggesting otherwise though. People claim that Monsanto is covering up all the proof that GMOs are dangerous. Conspiracies are not an arguments, they're a denialism tactic, an ultimate defense against evidence. What, I'm supposed to believe that Monsanto is bribing off the vast majority of relevant horticulturists, botanists, agronomists, microbiologists, geneticists, zoologists, ect in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zeland, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, ect.? Bullshit. Heck, scientists in Iran and China, the last places an American company is going to take over, have developed their own strains of GMO.

Really, I'm sad to see tripe like this on Slashdot. Anti-vaccine=anti-science. Anti-GW=anti-science. Anti-evolution=anti-science. Anti-Genetic engineering=oh so enlightened and wise. I can't believe that so many people have fallen for the agricultural equivalent of vaccine denialism. It's a little disheartening.

And sure, let's be fair, there's always the possibility that a GMO could be harmful. Here's one that was. But that does not imply that they are all harmful. In that case, they found the compound, the harm's causative agent, that was potentially harmful, the chemical pathways that produced that protein, they found the problem, and moved on. How many anti-GMO cranks can name a single causative agent for harm in an commercial GMO? Zero. Never happened. Not once. So, they fall back on vague appeals to long term health, although never say when we will have enough proof for them. Sound familiar? Like people who only want 'one more' transitional fossil? You can make these vague claims about anything, I could claim that the smallpox vaccine has some sort of crazy complex intergenerational side effect that will kill us all in a few years, and you can't disprove that (ain't non falsifiability grand?), but we have no evidence to suggest that is the case. Same with GMOs. I can't disprove that they'll kill us all, but that burden of proof doesn't rest on me. It is like saying that pork should be banned until we know that it won't cause eternal damnation. It's not a very rational position.

We really need to do for science based agriculture what was done for other areas that skeptics espouse, like science based medicine. Sure, Monsanto can be pricks, but I don't care if the CEO eats a bowl of kittens for breakfast everyday, that says nothing of the science behind GMOs, and one company does not own an entire branch of science. More people need to learn about the science, not the weaselly fearmongering you see from NGOs like the Union of Concerned Scientists [sic] or Greenpeace or the Organic Consumer's Union. The actual scientists have done the research, the evidence is in, GMOs are safe, they are effective, and they are the next big thing in agriculture. We need more people to be more aware, more scientifically literate, less magically thinking, about plant science, and to me as a one who studies horticultural, seeing so many poeple, on this site o

The fine petition includes the following description:

Website:
http://www.wix.com/mhostore/makehellaoff...
http://www.makehellaofficial.blogspot.com/
Mission:
To Whom It May Concern:

For all intents and purposes, the SI prefix system has served the scientific community extremely well since its inception. However, we believe there is one significant flaw in the system which demands immediate attention.

As you know, the largest number with a designated SI prefix is 10^24, which carries the name "yotta-". However, in our world of increasing physical awareness and experimental precision, this number is no longer a satisfactory "upper bound" in scientific nomenclature. The analysis of many physical phenomena reveals natural quantities in excess of 27 orders of magnitude, a number which is currently ignored by the SI system.

Designating a prefix for 10^27 is of critical importance for scientists in all fields. This number is significant in many crucial calculations, including the wattage of the sun, distances between galaxies, or the number of atoms in a large sample.

Addressing this issue presents an exciting opportunity. Since the SI system has traditionally adopted the last names of accomplished scientists for unit nomenclature, it follows that prefix designation should do the same. From this tradition comes the chance for the SI system to use nomenclature to honor a constantly overlooked scientific contributor: Northern California.

Northern California is home to many influential research institutions, including the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Countless contributions to science have been made by these and other local schools; in fact, elements 93-103 were all discovered at UC Berkeley in a span of 21 years.

However, science isn't all that sets Northern California apart from the rest of the world. The area is also notorious for the creation and widespread usage of the English slang "hella," which typically means "very," or can refer to a large quantity (e.g. "there are hella stars out tonight").

Thus, we believe that the SI system can not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California by formally establishing "hella-" as the prefix for 10^27.

Under this designation, the complexity of high-magnitude nomenclature would be greatly reduced. For example, the number of atoms in 120 kg of carbon-12 would be simplified from 6,000 yottaatoms to 6 hellaatoms. Similarly, the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts, rather than 300 yottawatts.

We believe the designation of the "hella-" prefix would have a positive impact on all parties involved, and thus warrants serious consideration. We thank you for your time.

Austin Sendek
Movement Founder
UC Davis Physics

List of current prefixes:

The International System of Units (abbr. SI, Systeme Internacional) has established standard prefixes for powers of ten from 10^-24 to 10^24. For example, one could say that the mass of 1.0 moles of carbon-12 is precisely 12 grams, 0.012 kilograms, 12000000 micrograms, or 0.000000000000000000000012 yottagrams. A list of these prefixes appears below.

Factor Name

10^24 yotta
10

Last thing we need is idiots going around licking cats to improve their football (that's right America football not soccer) skils.

Au contraire , my friend. Reports like these are perfect for cleansing mankind of idiots that fail to grasp simple logic. It's like eugenics, except the problem solves itself without any bloodshed or ill intent.

Not to mention they're very nonchalant about a parasite that is extremely harmful to pregnant women and their unborn child. It's not exactly harmless in other adults either; a girl I know was seriously sick from some weeks after contracting toxoplasmosis and said she felt weakened for months afterward. Last thing we need is idiots going around licking cats to improve their football (that's right America football not soccer) skils.

Don't register or host your domain in the U.S. if it's the least bit controversial. It's just too easy for a plaintiff or government agency to seize it. One of the worst examples was a Spanish travel agency that handled trips to Cuba and which was foolish enough to register their domain name in the U.S. See NYTimes article A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

See http://thespamdiaries.blogspot.com/2010/02/dont-register-or-host-your-domain-in-us.html for more on this topic.

First off, build a list of local electricians and plumbers, and the name of whomever is going to sign off on this house

Talk to your wife.

Talk to your bank. Your lawyer. Your real estate agent. Your insurance company.

This project of yours may have no re-sale value.

The equity you build in your home is an important part of your estate planning.

Take the time to get to know your neighbors - otherwise you will be dodging pitchforks from the day you begin.

We all grow older - and "cool" doesn't age well.

Ugly doesn't age well.

That is why the home buyer avoids the awkward, the eccentric, the physically demanding. Why he pays for comfort even at the cost of some efficiency.

architecture: turned upside down

wow.. shame no-one actually answered your question..

Short answer:

http://quantumg.blogspot.com/2010/07/jeff-greason-answers-why-humans-in.html

Longer answer:

http://quantumg.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-space.html

wow.. shame no-one actually answered your question..

Short answer:

http://quantumg.blogspot.com/2010/07/jeff-greason-answers-why-humans-in.html

Longer answer:

http://quantumg.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-space.html

Hi.

I'm trying to come up with various ODF templates for OpenOffice.org, and other compatible software. Would you tell me what obstacles you encounter with OpenOffice.org, please? I'm more interested in making templates for Writer & Draw.

I recommend the following corrections for your post.

"Being an OSS fan, I have, at various times, tried to..."

Most people will say that that is too many commas, but I find that it helps with readability. I think that the first comma is quite important.

"OpenOffice.org is commonly used here to style manuscripts. I find it better than Word for certain tasks, but there's nothing...".

I think that the first phrase works fine as its own sentence, and it would be incorrect to join it to the other phrase, without a word, like "and".

Just so that you know, I deliberately leave punctuation outside of quotes, parentheses and brackets, because of readability. It's wrong for me to do it, but many of us think that it is better that way.

Just so that you know, I wouldn't have noticed your English problem, if it weren't for your sig. Your English is quite good.

First thing I thought of was Heinlein's Shipstone. That too would blow up if anyone tried to disassemble it, ensuring the Shipstone Corporation a virtual monopoly on the assembly process, without the tedium of a patent.

An (Analogue) Artist's Reply to Just Criticism . Glynn Moody commented on this days ago

Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.

While I agree with that, I have some doubts that their view would have changed a lot if the test would have been done for weeks, month or years. I have used Free Software pretty much exclusively for the last 10+ years and a lot of stuff still just feels broken and/or incomplete, compared to the proprietary stuff I used back then. The reason is simple, professional proprietary software is developed to solve a problems people have, if it is not good enough, it might get overrun by a competing product. Free Software on the other side might start with solving somebodies problem, but after that it often just ends up being stuck in maintenance hell. Nobody goes out to actually analyses what people are using the software for and how it could be improved for that usecase. Either it kind of sort of already fits or people will be stuck with a half finished solution for a long while to come.

See Gimp, that multi-window interface has been an annoyance for what? A decade? Yet we still don't have that fixed. We might get that fixed in the next big release, maybe, but thats 10 years to long. Same with higher color depths, it has been a request feature for ages, even got a fork (FilmGimp/Cinepaint), yet mainline Gimp still can't do it. In the commercial world you might have quite a bit of an issue if you let users wait for ages, yet in the Free Software world that is pretty much standard. The only exceptions to this seems to be the commercial endeavorers like Ubuntu where they actually optimize the software for the user and not just randomly patch along.

Of course, thanks to it being Free Software I can go and patch it myself, but often times that is just not practical.