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i like to play this game where i change the topic of an argument to see if it makes sense... I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be rude, or mean. But seriously, if someone can't read a bus schedule well enough that they need their OWN CAR to get around, I really don't want them driving a deadly weapon around. Even if they're VERY careful, its just not safe. There WILL be accidents where people are killed, and I don't think that the value of someone getting to a location in a timely manner should outrank knowing that a human being will die as a result of this. 2.7 deaths per 100,000 hunting license sold - hunting fatalities in texas 16.8 per 100,000 people - highway fatalities in texas http://www.fedstats.gov/

Yes, those arguments were used during the industrial revolution and when computers first entered the workplace. Heck, wasn't it something like one computer replaced many accountants at each place they were introduced?

Let's look at the world today. There are only two things that are guaranteed investments: real estate and intellectual property. Both Bill Gates and the recording industry have shown us how much money there can be made from licensing. Donald Trump has shown us how profitable real estate can be.

If such a robot could be made today would either type of person sell you the robot, or sell you the rights to use it, perpetuating their income along the lifetime of the patent? If either type of person could buy the robot flat out like you can buy a car, what would stop them from increasing their bottom line at the expense of other people. With our sagging economy we see people with excellent degrees in computer science and the like flipping burgers at McDonalds. Sure, some new types of jobs might pop up, but will they be as high paying?

Go off to to FedStats for an education on how our "quality of life" has changed since the early 50's. Sure we have computers and other things we didn't have back then, but we also have to have two people earning a decent wage to support our "average" lifestyle.

Could one person buy a house reasonable close to or inside of a major city and hold an average job while supporting a family of four in todays economy? No. Why? The cost of real estate has gone up.

Could a business and afford to dish out the same percentage of income that they did many years ago? No. Why? The cost to pay an individual person has gone up (specialization), operating margins have gone down, more specialized tools (computers, CAD/CAM, etc) are required, the cost to conforma with local and federal regulations have gone up, and shareholders are greedy.

Cut out the need for insurance, workers compensation, vacation, sick leave, and real estate to park employee cars and you have guaranteed yourself the upper hand in business.

P.S. Mod me +5 Paranoid, -2 troll, or -5 idiot. Any is fine with me

The GBA and the GC combined, almost reach the sales of the PS2.

Where I come from, there are three kinds of lies: lies with short legs, lies with long noses, and statistics. Are you talking overall sales, or only the previous fiscal quarter? (The PS2's head start may not be relevant to some arguments.) Units, or dollars? (A GBA and a GCN put together cost only slightly more than a single PS2 system.)

North Korea: 120,540 sq km
South Korea: 98,480 sq km

New Jersey: 11,936 sq km

Will you people, who don't know what you are talking about, kindly shut the hell up.

... but it will only ever happen if We The People (for those outside the US, insert patriotic identifier for yourself and your fellow citizens here) stand up and demand it. And the way to do that is by voting for politicians who have an understanding of the value of implementing such a technology. In 2000, we did vote for such a candidate -- to forestall any stupid "invented the internet" jokes, I'm going to say that yes, damn it, Al Gore did have as much as any politican possibly could to bring the internet into existence, at a time when George W. Bush probably barely had any idea what a computer was -- but legal machinations prevented him from taking the office to which he was rightfully elected.

Good luck changing things now. Once-free overnments all over the world are moving in the direction of less openness, not more. In the US, the Freedom of Information Act is just about dead as a consequence of the "War On (Drugs/Terror/Iraq/villain of the month)". The irony is, of course, that at least some repressive governments are opening up, just a bit; at this point, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we see electronically open government in China before we see it in the US, or Great Britain, or France, or Germany, or Japan. (Depressed, but not surprised.)

Once upon a time, the US government was taking steps in this direction. FOIA requests, even by e-mail, were answered more often than not. Sites like FedStats still remain as monuments to a genuine initiative, during the last decade, to making the government's vast store of information a resoucre of the people, by the people, and for the people. Enjoy it while you can, folks, because right now the trend is toward taking this stuff away, not expanding it.

And for God's sake, keep voting. The fraud machinery that stole the 2000 election is powerful, but it's not unbeatable. Yet.

MapStats

Mind you, feeding a bunch of data into a read only system to be queried in a high deterministic way is hardly a real demanding task for a database system: As mentioned somewhere else -> They could have used dbase IV and ODBC for that, or IIS 4 + Microsoft Access.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.