Slashdot Mirror

• A theory circulating is that dinosaurs had feathers

A nice speculative rendition of feathered raptors can be found here:

There's also some nice work (by Greg Paul I think) that shows deinonychus as a giant wattled killer turkey. Challenging, but fun. It starts from the premise of "So, why do you think dinosaurs didn't have feathers?"

Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

Carlyle's definition of the fourth estate
However, from the perspective of those researchers who see the media as situated within the model of a pluralist liberal democracy, the mass media are often seen as fulfilling the vitally important rôle of fourth estate, the guardians of democracy, defenders of the public interest.

Of course not everyone reading this article will be coming from a VBScript background. Perhaps you've come from a Perl background, and have used CGI, or mod_perl or some such solution. What can PerlScript offer you? I'll cover exactly what it can offer in detail, but the key thing is the object model. This is the built in system that allows access to: Inter-process communication, session management, form and query string values, cookies, timeouts, and many more things. Hopefully you will be used to CGI.pm handling all these things for you, but as you'll see there are some things that ASP does that even CGI.pm doesn't do (and probably shouldn't)

But of course the great old classic in this category of games is Elite...

God only knows how much I've wanted multiplayer Elite with modern grafix...

What's up with David Braben nowadays anyway?

Dunno, but IIRC he is kind of a prick. Check here and here for more prickery.. Or just check out Ian Bell's Elite pages...

Your Working Boy,

It's called PerlScript. :)

Yeah! The philosophy behind Open Source should not remain merely in the realm of computers. There should be all kinds of equivalents of "open source", like in music, movies, novels, you-name-it.

On the other side, people who aren't creating stuff and putting it under open-source-like licenses should at least support the people who are doing this. As far as music is concerned, people should definitely support GAMH and read the Free Music Philosophy.

Also check out the CZR Public License

The people who want to control the entertainment industry wants to make you a couch potato. If you don't want to be one, do something about it! Go create something new and put an open-source-like license on it. Or at least, go support the people who are doing this. Sitting there on your desk typing messages on Slashdot won't accomplish that much. Save some of that energy and accomplish something.

A few months ago I was inspired to write a GPL style license for my own music. It can be found at http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~s.rob ertson/music/license. Since I've edited it myself, and since I'm not a lawyer, I can't guarantee that it's 100% watertight, so I'd really appreciate a few more pairs of eyes going over it to see if there's anything I've missed.

Self-promotion: If you're interested in the music it was written for, that can be found at http://mp3.com/czr.

- colin

A few months ago I was inspired to write a kind of GPL for my music. Since I edited it myself and since I'm not a lawyer I don't really know how safe it is, and I'd really appreciate a few more eyes going over it to see if I've missed anything.

It's at http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~s.robertson/music/licens e

Self-promotion: If you're interested in the music that inspired it, that can be found at http://mp3.com/czr

-- colin

First, he was "sitting on the back of the giants" - there was huge research in this field going for years. He didn't start with nothing: he definitely was the first one to get to the point of having a clone of a mammal not derived from embryo cells, but there are still some important issues. I wonder whether this patent is going to stop the scientific community from doing further research.

This patent is much more disturbing then the one from Amazon (after all, one click, two clicks, who cares, how much time you spend on reading the book you've bought with this marvellous technology?). It will hamper some of the most important research fields in modern medicine, like getting finally xenotransplants work.

If everyone patented every scientific discovery the way Wilmut did you wouldn't be reading slashdot now. And Wilmut wouldn't have had even the chance of starting his research. On the other hand - yes, I agree, the team at Roslin Institute is responsible for the breakthrough - namely, choosing the right cell cycle stage for nuclear transfer. Remember, he did not invent the nuclear transfer, which has been conducted for the first time in 1952.

Regards,

January

P.S. Two links for you:

The Cloning of Dolly, a nice and easy explanation what is this nuclear transfer all about and how cloning works, and

A brief history of nuclear transfer, a nice essay at the Roslin Institute.

Actually, I *was* a 'freakled 16yo antisocialite', and I did spend most of my time in dark rooms with only computers for company, and from my perspective people like me do have considerable power today. We are some of the most highly sought-after professionals in the world. I'm only 27 and my salary is higher than I thought it ever would be. So if money makes the world go round, hard-core computer geeks can be counted among the elite ruler class.

As for "the next step in human evolution", this is at best a simplification of the truth. qv the Transhumanism home page for more information on the relationship between computers and human evolution.

One thing we agree on: The G4 is little more than a stepping stone between less-powerful processors and more-powerful processors, part of the natural flow the technological progress.

-- Guges --