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> Where do you live where you can get cable Internet at a single address from multiple companies?

Some boston suburbs (but not boston proper).
You can get verizon fios/fios-tv, Comcast ISP and TV, and RCN ISP and TV all at the same address.

Source: I use to live there. Now I live in chattanooga where I get EPB gigabit fiber for cheaper than any of the choices I had available in Arlington.

We know how to cure Malaria, too... with Olive Leaf Extract. Known of for centuries before the discovery of Quinine, it has long been used to treat the condition.

I get to post this link again, hooray! The randomness comes from chopping up a very long segment of DNA in a couple of arbitrarily-chosen places. There are only about 25 million possible combinations... and the body also has a bunch of mechanisms for detecting and protecting native molecules, like this thing.

Here's part of your answer. There are only about twenty-five million possible naturally-occurring receptors. The other part of your answer lies squarely in the journal article's abstract: the antigen targeted naturally occurs in a subset of the body's B cells, and they ended up killing those off in the process of defeating the cancer.

I don't think it's possible to be a really good software engineer without also being a really good programmer. http://users.rcn.com/jcoplien/Patterns/Process/section16.html

In my experience, most people who perform the role you describe aren't software engineers, they're technically-minded business analysts, good at extracting requirements and perhaps painting the broadest strokes of an architecture, but need someone who really understands code to refine their architectures and turn them into good designs, and then good code.

>"Oh also - population reduction does not require war or killing. Education would do quite nicely. Negative population growth only requires a "one child per couple" mindset. Plus those kids get much more attention and resources from their parents than if they had siblings."

It's self-correcting - you needn't worry about population growth continuing exponentially indefinitely in the absence of "education": as societies reduce their birth rate as a function of increased wealth (which they reach by consuming those resources you're worried about) it will become self-limiting. There's a pretty good analysis here: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html.

While I can appreciate that your circle of friends believes greater diversity = better, and place some arbitrarily value on "highly biodiverse rainforest ecosystems", is there any particular reason you and your friends have concluded the current amount of biodiversity is optimal and should remain static?

It has been shown in the lab that low level exposure to radiation stimulates your immune system. The dose tends to be 30-100mSv. Beyond this, the positive effects starts to be overwhelmed by the negative effects.

For acute exposure, 100mSv is the limit where you start to see slight increase in cancer rates. 1000mSv is start of radiation sickness.

For prolonged exposure, that is over span of days and weeks, 400mSv is the limit where you start to see increase in cancer rates.

In radiation therapy (radiation cancer treatment), vital organs can receive radiation of 20,000mSv (20Sv) or sometimes even more, yet they do not die. But at these levels the exposure has to be localized. Whole body exposure of 20Sv kills your immune system and you die. CT scan can give you 25-45mSv exposure in just a minute or two (we are talking radiation levels higher 1Sv/h).

So overall, exposing a 70 year old to 250mSv over a period of weeks is not going to affect their lifespan significantly. It may even increase their lifespan, but all this is speculation. These people will need to be tracked - this would be not only volunteering but also an experiment in low-level to medium-level radiation exposure.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/R/Radiation.html

Look at these risks. Full body CT scan - 45mSv. You get 5 of these in your lifetime, and you get the limit for emergency worker at Fukushima! And how many people do a full body CT scan in the US every 5 years for "preventative measure"?? Exactly.

Isn't the "time to cancer" a function of both exposure AND age? It would seem sensible that the senior citizens' cells are already damaged by old age, so exposure to radiation would have a head start as opposed to a 20 year old.

No. Age and exposure are independent variables. From radiation therapy, there is no dependency on age, only on latency to cancer and exposure. On other words, age is independent of exposure.

For example, it is known that I-131 induces thyroid cancer (ie. increases risk) with about 28 year latency irrespective of age when it is administered for hyperthyroidism. And yes, I-131 is same iodine as was spread by the reactor, except for radiotherapy, you need 10s of 1000s times the "legal safe limit".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthyroidism#Radioiodine

What does "successful" mean, though?

Successful is probably not the word I should have used. "Fitness" is the more common term than success, at least in my experience (probably since success has different connotations.)

And this page concisely defines it:

Fitness is a measure of reproductive success. Those individuals who leave the largest number of mature offspring are the fittest. This can be achieved in several ways: Survival or mortality selection Mating success or sexual selection Family size or fecundity selection

From an evolutionary standpoint, rats are most certainly more fit than we are: they reproduce far more often, have far more offspring.

http://www.solresearch.org/~SOLR/rprt/LookNow.asp#Sct_1_NakedKidPics [solresearch.org] There have been many dozen cases of people taking pics of their baby kids in a bathtub or otherwise half dressed and successfully convicted.

I have seen all of those stories before, but let's start with the first one:
- Accusation: Yes
- Investigation: Yes
- Annoyance: Certainly
- Conviction: No

The second link on that site is a story I have not seen before, but that is probably because it is a 404.
The third link: one convicted and overturned, one convicted which was obviously wrong (with no further sources available).
In the fourth case listed there:

Angeli was never charged with child pornography, but she was charged with disorderly conduct, malicious destruction of property under $250, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. source

Summary: No convictions.

Hmm ... I apparently mis-remembered the incident. The photographer was arrested for child pornography and assault, but ultimately convicted only of disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property, not child abuse. Please read material at the link for more details

http://users.rcn.com/kyp/angindex.html

The carbon cycle is not in balance any more. The concentration of carbon dioxide has been at about 200-300 ppm for millions of years. Now that humans are burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate, the concentration is approaching 400 ppm. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, this is increasing the temperature of the planet. We will have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050 to keep temperatures from reaching two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This reduction can be achieved by increased energy efficiency and use of alternative methods of generating energy, such as nuclear power plants.

they can't be targeted by the autoimmune system because they can't be bonded to; And that is because of the blood-brain barrier

I'd also guess without doing any reading on the subject that being inside the cell further prevents this. If a virus is inside a cell, that will ideally (for the cell) trigger cell suicide. If that doesn't happen or the virus blocks it. Some (most?) cells move bits of protiens out to their surface after they've digested them as part of normal cell function. If a bit of a viral protein does this, immune cells can recognize it and tell the cell to kill itself or can signal other cells to kill the infected cell. Since the prion though is a protein that is normal, the digested bits I would guess don't trigger that response, the immune cell sees the fragment and doesn't think anything is wrong.

Normal prions are folded proteins that self-terminate. That is, they end after a certain number of repeats. But abnormal ones don't ever stop growing -- and they occasionally break apart, but they keep folding forever.

Not sure what is meant by self terminating vs repeats, sounds like you're talking about translation, that prions don't stop synthesizing an amino acid chain. This page suggests that the proteins are made normally, its just that the misfolded proteins bend the normal ones out of shape. These proteins are insoluable, they form clumps (aggregates) inside the cell that are resistant to digestion, so the cell can't get rid of them. It does say though that no one had shown that was the cause rather than just one effect.

Look, I believe in evolution, but never has there been found a parent species to something alive today. In other words, scientists can not point at any two distinct species, living or extinct, plant or animal, and say that this species evolved directly from that one.

No, this is not true. In plants, polyploidy can lead to the production of a new species, reproductively isolated from the parent species, and quite often ecologically distinct as well. This happens in a single generation, and in some cases you might find the parent species and the new species growing quite close together. So not only can you point to two species and say this one evolved from that one, but you might be able to do so literally, if both species are growing in the same location.

I don't have examples handy, but I found an explanation here.

yp.

Typical normal CT scan dose: 1-2 rem
Faulty CT scan overdose: 8-16 rem
1950s shoe-salesman's fluoroscope: 10 rem
Typical normal Therac-25 dose: 200 rem
Malfunctioning Therac-25 dose: 15-20,000 rem

Come on, seriously people. Yes, this is a mistake that needs to be fixed, but millions of kids in the '50s got their feet nuked with this much radiation and lived to become healthy normal adults with normal feet.

The Therac-25 cooked straight through people, leaving a hole of rotting meat behind. This is not even remotely in the same league.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/R/Radiation.html
http://chestjournal.chestpubs.org/content/107/1/113.full.pdf
http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm

>the conditions there are harsh like an ET environment (no air, pressure challenges)

I just replied to someone else pondering this claim.

I believe they are harsher. The only problem is the distance to the moon for instance and maybe lack of resources like water.

The pressure difference from earth to space is one athmosphere, down at 10m into the ocean it is already two athmospheres.

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

The temperature on the moon if you are under ground can be around 20degrees C at the equator while in the ocean it is around 0 to 2 degrees C
at higher depths.

http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Lunar_Temperature

Under water you have no to little access to solar energy, whereas you can get 10x to 3x of what you get at sealevel, on the moon.

In seawater you have also chemical stresses on equipment besides the mechanical stress. I could imagine that you will spend less on maintenance on the moon than you will on earth.

If you plan on staying longer in either location
you might be able to spread out the setup cost especially if you become self sufficient. All the maintenance will eat into whatever budget you have then.

I want to see somebodies plan of how to move to the sea from zero to whatever depth start a colony and become self sufficient over 100 years and be able to start a new colony like the first without help from the land.

Just looking at how nature itself is faring:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/N/NetProductivity.html

kilocalories/m2/year
Ocean close to shore 2,500
Open ocean 800 ...
Tall-grass prairie 2,000
Desert 500
Lawn, Washington, D.C. 6,800
Sugar cane, Hawaii 25,000

Not bad but not great.

So what is more difficult protecting against zero pressure or protecting against the pressure under water:

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

Here is another good one:

"At depths greater than a few hundred meters, the sun has little effect on water temperature, because the sun's energy has been absorbed by water at the surface. In the great depths of the ocean the water temperature is very cold. In fact, 75% of the water in the world ocean (the great depths) has a temperature between 0 ÂC and 2 ÂC."

The shelf is what is left to you, a bit meagre I would say.

And there is more:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/N/NetProductivity.html

so you are looking at:
"Estimated Net Productivity of Certain Ecosystems (in kilocalories/m2/year)"

Ocean close to shore 2,500
Open ocean 800 ...
Lawn, Washington, D.C. 6,800

Now compare this to the moons surface:

Surface temperature

"During the lunar day, the surface temperature averages 107ÂC, and during the lunar night, it averages -153ÂC."

At least it does get warm sometime and has negligible convection loss.

And it gets better:

http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Lunar_Temperature

"so at the equator T is about 296 K, or a comfortable 23 degrees C if you bury yourself sufficiently. At 60 degrees that drops to 249 K or -24 degrees C. The average subsurface temperature near the poles (85 degrees and higher) would be below 160 K or -110 degrees C."

Also compare the solar constant of 1366 W/m^2 to the 300-100 W/m^2 we are getting here on earth.

I might even venture a guess and predict that not only will you get a better power output of any solar power collection technology but also longer lifetime because the elements are just missing. As an example check out the ATS-3 satellite that has been working for ~30 years and compare to the 10 years you might get a warranty for on earth.

Personally I could imagine that the stresses on material on the moon especially underground could be manageable whereas you would have to deal with multiple atmospheres under water constantly. Also you would have to deal with corrosive sea water.

So you might cover the ocean with artificial islands maybe, but I doubt this will give you the bang for the buck, so far only oil drilling rigs get there. Granted getting the bang on the moon may require some searching for it.

Somehow I think the Dutch have found the best way to deal with the ocean.

The ecosystem on the moon unfortunately is missing, so I can offer no comparison there. But people will try to provide you with that information too:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/28/0238200

So finally to go to the ocean you have to take infrastructure with you and for a start you will find it difficult to support the same number of people than you can on land. Also you have to find a way to become somewhat independent from the land lubbers. You may find all mineral resources but the amount of energy available to you is similar to people on land and you have to expend more for maintenance and you also have to produce drinking water.

On the moon you have higher initial costs but over the eons they may become negligible. You have 3-10x more energy available per area covered. This will also reduce the amount of material you have to put into energy collecting technology. You may have similar maintenance but not all needed resources assuming that water may be hard to come by. You will have to do some travelling which may be easier if earth is not your destination.

For simplicity's sake I assumed that living is the goal not short term gains.

For another, how DNA is used and rendered into proteins, etc. is altered by chemicals that are carried along with the cell. If those are stripped away, information is lost.

Not true. The way DNA is encoded into aminoacids is a universal code which follows the same standards in animal, plant, or microorganism cells, with very few exceptions.

I love this solution too. I must wonder though whether future generations will be able to just let the trees stand, we can't trust ourselfs really, how can we trust future generations? All the other solutions regarding carbon sequestration hide the stuff somewhere. This ocean based solution is no different.

There are other positive aspects to having forests around. They affect the local climate by transpiration and they also, because of their dark color, convert sunlight into hot air essentially. The upwelling hot air can cause rainfall downstream enabling the forest to grow furter.

There is a book called "Vegetation Climate Interaction" wich explains this effect much better.

I wonder whether the ocean would be such a great storage medium. Even if the experiment had worked
the oceans are much less productive ecosystems than land (see "Food, Energy, and Society", Pimentel,..., this is even better http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/N/NetProductivity.html ).

People have also argued for the use of perennial plants and agroforestry which would help to reduce soil erosion and herbicide use. While this would fit nicely with your 10 trees per person it seems questionable to me whether perennials can become as productive as annuals and whether we will be able to live a lazy non agrarian lifestyle as we currently do.

I often wonder where people see "peak" or any other quantifying word on these advertisements. These companies slap a number on their website "10 Mbps*" and then when you look at the "*" it says "this is no guarantee". However, they nowhere tell you what exactly the 10 Mbps* DOES mean...

This is what I mean.

Two independent life forms could make the same right vs. left handed sugar choice with 50% odds. I find 1 in 20^64 magnitude odds more convincing: specifically the genetic code.

All life just coincidentally decided that CAG was going to mean glutamine? And with the exception of a few codes in mitochondria and a few eukaryotes, the hypothetical multiple genesis also gave us random agreement on the meaning of 63 other codons? No. If every cell on Earth agrees on 55 out of 64 codes, and most agree on all 64, it's a very safe bet that their translation machinery was an inheritance from the same ancestor.

Or what would happen if the heart enlarged and crushed itself against the ribcage because it got too big?

You would turn into a sensitive new age kind of guy. You'd weep at 'Hello Kitty' movies. Women would flock to your side. Actually, your heart would fail long before it expanded into your chest cavity so you'd be dead. But the putative substance shouldn't work much on cardiac muscle from the limited info in TFA

I just spent 2 days reading a few articles about this general area of research in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, so let me try to explain this to my fellow /.r's who so generously explain to me about warez and the penguin.

Doctors now believe that cancer goes through several stages before it becomes a problem. Cells become cancerous all the time, but usually the immune systen destroys them. To simplify a bit, immune cells such as dendrocytes (which is the hot immune cell these days) recognize cancer proteins. Dendrocytes take a piece of the cancer protein to a T cell, and the T cell kills the cancer cells. There's a great explanation of the immune process on Kimball's Biology Pages http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AntigenPresentation.html, and if you take a few minutes to figure it out you'll understand one of the most amazing discoveries of the last century.

The reason we get cancer is that sometimes that process doesn't work. All it takes is one time during your lifetime when a cancer cell "figures out" a way to evade the immune system, and the cancer takes off.

It obviously occurs to doctors that it would be cool (and probably win a Nobel prize) if they could figure out some way to goose the immune system into fighting cancer, just the way they goose it into fighting viruses with vaccines.

One guy who tried that was Steven Rosenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rosenberg at the NIH. Rosenberg took melanoma cells from patients, and tried to stimulate the patient's immune system with a molecule called interleukin-2 that cells use to signal immune attacks. I remember reading about that around 1984, I think. The cancer slowed down but it came back. Rosenberg has been working on it ever since.

I remember seeing a cover headline in Fortune magazine back then about Rosenberg, to the effect, "Cure for cancer." (No question mark.) Do you suppose the media hype these things?

In order to understand cancer research, you have to understand that they can kill cancer cells in laboratory bottles, they can cure cancer in mice, but when they try to kill cancer cells in humans, time and again, it doesn't work. When it finally works in humans, that's news. The other thing you have to understand is that there are many treatments that make cancer tumors shrink or disappear for a while, but they usually come back. Cancer patients don't want the cancer to go away for 6 months -- they want it to go away forever. There are a few cancers that can sometimes be cured, like testicular cancer and childhood leukemia, and maybe some prostate cancers, but most of the time, for the big 3 (colon, breast, lung) oncologists are just trying to extend life. Of course, if you're 65 and your doctor can keep you alive for another 20 years with colon cancer or leukemia, that's not so bad. Most of the successful treatments for cancer extend the life of a cancer patient from, say, 20 months to 25 months, or 40 months to 45 months, but sometimes they get a really big jump, and for people with chronic myelogenic leukemia, imatinab (Gleevec) can extend their lives indefinitely.

Anyway, the really big news is that somebody actually managed to get a treatment like Rosenberg's to work on a real human with melanoma, who seems to be cured after 2 years. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Treatment of metastatic melanoma with autologous CD4+ T cells against NY-ESO-1, Naomi Hunder et al., 358:2698 http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/25/2698 In the past, they've gotten melanoma (and kidney cancer) to regress for a while, but it came back. This time it seems to be gone for good -- in one patient.

Basically, they had a patient with melanoma that had spread to his lungs. He had T cells that

The real problem is that we're breeding like flies, and we're putting a lot of stress on the planet. We need to do a better job of making fewer babies, or we're going to put ourselves in a very ugly situation.

Exactly, and I'm surprised that this isn't brought up more often. And the insect analogy might be more apt than you intended. Many insect populations grow exponentially until they exceed the carrying capacity of the environment. Then the populations crash. Then the populations start rising exponentially again and rinse, lather, repeat.

For the human-population-on-earth experiment we're currently on the exponential rise portion of the graph. Time will tell whether humans are smart enough (unlikely) or lucky enough (possibly) to start into a negative population growth and allow the human species to live on the planet in some sort of desirable equilibrium rather that having everyone eck out some marginal existence boiling their dandelions for gas. Or worse, having mass die offs of humans (and likely other parts of the ecosystem). It's happened before. It will probably happen again. We might be able to control it.

Then again, maybe not. Murphy was an optimist.

This isn't how the laws are applied (at least in the US) though, they apply them by if the images aroused the person possessing them then it's child porn, even if no one else would be aroused by them. The intent of the producers of the images aren't important, what's important is the reaction of the viewer. This is a serious problem as it allows the judge/jury to basically guess what the defendant was thinking when viewing the images, making it a thought crime. Here's an example case for you, a Dr. Bruce Craft. A few pertinent quotes:

So here the judge alone, guided by the prosecution it sounds like, decided the photos were child porn even if no one sane would consider them that way, AND that even established guidelines (Dost factors) wouldn't consider them that way. To be honest it sounds more like the only people who found the photos arousing were the judge and prosecution, and yet this child psychiatrist ended up in jail.

This is the reality of these laws. This isn't what society wants, and by and large this is kept from them. They're using the rallying cry of "think of the children" to pass laws that allow them to basically find anyone they want to guilty with. And that's a serious problem.

But.... I was pretending spacetime was flat for ease of explanation.

Why do you have to drag out the Infinite Paint Can in threespace on my ass?

1) Any patent lawsuit against a user of a software component used by major vendors will automatically result in those vendors lending legal support to reduce the chance that their own customers will also end up being sued.
2) Any patent lawsuit costs the suing party at least several hundred thousand dollars.
3) Any patent put before the courts is at very great risk of being destroyed by prior art.
4) Any payout awarded from a single end user has to be in proportion to value of the patented technology. The value of a single instance will could only be measured in hundreds of dollars, not coming close to covering the costs of the lawsuit to the platiff.
5) Patent lawsuits take six years to over a decade to work it's way though appeals.
6) Developers will release new software using a method that circumvents the patent in question within two months. This will be quickly adopted and by the time the first patent case is resolved there will be no further customers for the patent holder to sue.
7) The outrage generated in taking out a case against any open source will result in Groklaw and other groups putting the suing party and their lawyers under the closest scrutiny. You will not believe the level of bad publicity, let alone the the amount of prior art, dirty business practices, and legal suspect practices and even violation of statutes that will be uncovered.

Lastly to quote Pulp Fiction, and then "we are going to get medieval on your ass."

Any IP case against users of open source puts the attacker at a far greater risk.

download music faster!

download movies faster!

play games faster!
 
this was the mantra that cable-tv-turned-isp has been chanting to the public for years!

now they want to change the billing model because some youngblood-hotshot-harvard-kellogg-MBA didn't realize that preaching faster downloads equates to higher bandwidth usage... or they intentionally planned to entice end users to switch to their network with the express intent of pulling a bait-and-switch on the billing model once the general public has swallowed whole, hook-line-sinker. either way it's stupid or underhanded...

here's a comcast press release specifically tauting faster mp3 download speeds

here's an RCN press release claiming speedier download speeds for videos, music, games, etc.

interestingly enough, aol/time-warner/roadrunner have been more discreet regarding claims of faster music and video downloading, perhaps because of their pre-existing media interests.

1) Any patent lawsuit against a user of a software component used by major vendors will automatically result in those vendors lending legal support to reduce the chance that their own customers will also end up being sued.
2) Any patent lawsuit costs the suing party at least several hundred thousand dollars.
3) Any patent put before the courts is at very great risk of being destroyed by prior art.
4) Any payout awarded from a single end user has to be in proportion to value of the patented technology. The value of a single instance will could only be measured in hundreds of dollars, not coming close to covering the costs of the lawsuit to the platiff.
5) Patent lawsuits take six years to over a decade to work it's way though appeals.
6) Developers will release new software using a method that circumvents the patent in question within two months. This will be quickly adopted and by the time the first patent case is resolved there will be no further customers for the patent holder to sue.
7) The outrage generated in taking out a case against any open source will result in Groklaw and other groups putting the suing party and their lawyers under the closest scrutiny. You will not believe the level of bad publicity, let alone the the amount of prior art, dirty business practices, and legal suspect practices and even violation of statutes that will be uncovered.

Lastly to quote Pulp Fiction, and then "we are going to get medieval on your ass."

Any IP case against users of open source puts the attacker at a far greater risk.

Well, technically speaking the dinosaurs weren't "cloned" in the book -- they used transgenic techniques. I'm not entirely certain if the DNA has to be living, but these techniques are very complicated and often do not succeed until many, many attempts have been made.

"There is an issue of terminological accuracy here that needs clarification. The terms orthogonal and uncorrelated (or nonorthogonal and correlated) are used as if they were interchangeable. While this is true if the variables or vectors involved are centered (have mean 0), it is not true in the general case. Formally, two vectors are orthogonal if their scalar product (or inner product) is 0. They are uncorrelated if the scalar product of their centered (mean corrected) forms is 0. All four logical possibilities of these two designations are possible. That is, two vectors can be both orthogonal and uncorrelated, orthogonal but correlated, nonorthogonal but uncorrelated, or nonorthogonal and correlated. Only if the variables or vectors with which one is dealing are by definition mean corrected or centered are the two terms interchangeable. For this reason, the way the terms have been used in this article is at best sloppy and technically simply incorrect." ( http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/library/ssnoadd.htm )

http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lw70-75c.htm , as an aid to understand the intrinsics of language.

CC.

The only issue I have with this is that it implies that OSS programmers typically aren't working with some overarching design in mind, and that simply isn't true. Spend some time on project mailing lists looking at how many patches get rejected because they don't fit within the architecture and development approach. Successful OSS projects have a ruthless focus on maintainability, which absolutely requires consistent application of well-defined architectural constraints.

People are certainly welcome to try to contribute however they like, but I'll tell you that in my experience pure visionaries are and will be ignored and, IMO, that's a good thing. Even in the corporate world I really dislike "pure" architects, and I've seen countless projects that have been destroyed by them and their cluelessness. Architecture is crucial, but it works best when the architect also implements. I'm an architect, by the way, and a big believer in structure, in having a clear, consistent vision of the desired outcome and in having a person who has the authority to make that vision stick. But that person must also be in the trenches and understand how to work a shovel.

Within the OSS world, credibility is established by producing functional, tight, bug-free, maintainable code. Visionaries who want to give others the big picture have to first establish themselves as people worth listening to. And that's a good thing, because there are always huge numbers of pure visionaries with conflicting ideas pushing any high-profile project. Even if the developers wanted to listen to them, doing so would ensure that nothing of substance ever got done.

Artists and designers, absolutely. UI design is important, difficult work that most programmers aren't very good at, and most OSS developers are perfectly aware that they can use all the help they can get in that department. Management... no. Not from managers who haven't proved themselves as able developers first, anyway.

Look at the Linux kernel as an example. It is a very well-managed project, and the leaders don't at this point write very much code at all, because they're too busy managing (which is the topic of TFA). Notice, though, that they became managers/architects by first obtaining the respect of other developers by producing good code. Now that they are leaders, they lead in a way that is very different from the norm in the corporate world. They lead not by telling people what to do, but by giving guidelines for acceptability. Linus will reject patches that violate tenets of the overall architecture -- if you want to get your code into the kernel, you have to produce something that is acceptable to him. Further, OSS managers have to logically justify all of their positions, they can never just state them and enforce them by fiat. That doesn't mean they have to convince everyone, but they have to convince enough people.

The bottom line, for me, is that what you seem to want simply isn't going to happen. OSS developers aren't going to listen to you just because you say they should. If you can find a way to earn their respect, then maybe they will, and the most direct way to accomplish that is to write a lot of good code. If you can't do that, and you don't have any other way to convince people that you're worth listening to, they won't listen to you. Sorry.

At long last! The scientific breakthrough we've all been waiting for: An anti-apoptosis drug that can be used to create real-life undead zombies!

Cells that would normally have died because everything else around them died can just keep on living. A brain and body will be able to continue to live even while decaying maggoty flesh sloughs off of limbs barely hanging on by strands of connective tissue. Maybe it'll even be possible to take a big dose, "die" by drowning, and get fished out and revived a week later with barnacles growing on your eyeballs and seaweed hanging off you and everything! This is going to be totally awesome!!!

if memory serves correctly, natural gas = CH4
so the chem reaction:
CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O

Seems like a lot of CO2 for being such a clean energy source.... but what the hell do i know?

Ah but methane is much more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is Methane is 30 tymes more effective according to this webpage as a greenhouse gas. However according to New Scientist methane is 21 tymes more effective. One tonne of methane has the same warming effect as 21 tonnes of CO2. So it's better to burn methane and emit the CO2 than it is to allow methane to enter the atmostphere.

How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?

It bugs me that when I buy bandwidth, I don't really get bandwidth. It's like the airlines used to be: oversold, on the assumption there will be no shows. But when there aren't, the people who've paid for a service don't get it.

So I guess you could have a mode where it told you there was a shortage and asked for volunteers to get bumped for a few days, perhaps in exchange for free bandwidth later (or free porn or whatever it is that people want to trade for in order to get them to voluntarily stand down). But that sounds like it still relies on someone to be willing to give up. If they're expecting to die of bird flu tomorrow, you might find a lot of people who want to watch YouTube or some porn site today before it's too late and don't really care to trade it away.

But I think a better solution would be to have selling someone bandwidth really mean selling them bandwidth. Stop all these stupid clauses in access providers saying you can't resell bandwidth (because those are just there to keep you from exposing the overselling of bandwidth they've supposedly promised you anyway and it should be your right to resell what you've legally purchased). Create large monetary penalties for any provider who sells you bandwidth and doesn't really reserve it for you.

No, I'm not anti-capitalism. I don't mind someone selling the notion of gambling on getting bandwidth and getting a cheaper price. I just don't think that should be sold by saying you're getting x bandwidth. It should be like on credit cards where you have to disclose the info in a manner plain for anyone to know, not hidden in terms of service that the gigantically fonted numbers about how fast the connection will be is not necessarily reliably there... and certainly if you're going to be in trouble for trying to use the capacity of what you're given, that should be in big letters, too. Just like the credit cards have the Schumer Box, broadband agreements should expose things like: what's the worst case? how much is it oversold? will it go down if everyone uses it at once? will it go down if more people in your neighborhood buy? under what circumstancse do they commit to increase bandwidth? With proper labeling, I have a lot fewer objections.

But also, if after proper labeling I find there's no one in my area who will sell reliable bandwidth and everyone will only sell me probabilistic bandwidth, that's significant, too. Right now, a lot of places probably figure they have broadband reliably available when really they have it only probabilistically available (that is, oversold).

It seems to me the reason bandwidth might fall short in an event like a bird flu emergency (if it might--and that's hard to know) is that there's no serious recourse to the consumer if it does. And so what's the motivation for vendors to even care?

RCN itemizes the resale of what you've paid for in bandwidth as Theft of Service.

Comcast restricts you from offering the service to others, as well as telling you that even if you use it for yourself, you (not they) are responsible for making sure your use is within the scope of what you were sold (as if the typical Joe Sixpack is going to know how to assure his use of YouTube is within such bounds) and warns you that if you exceed your quota, they can shut you down at their discretion

Time-Warner Cable has similar restrictions.

Verizon is alleged to be quite overly strict in similar ways. They make a point of noting that Verizon advertises itself as offering a service

This may seem weird but should not be so surprising. Autism is

classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests itself in markedly abnormal social interaction, communication ability, patterns of interests, and patterns of behavior...
...autism manifests itself in delays in "social interaction, language as used in social communication, or symbolic or imaginative play".

I have just been reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations where through a series of questions he gets to the complexity of language learning, how much of a social process it is, how much it involves games - should in fact be seen as a set of overlapping games. When playing with a human being, there is always immediate feedback between a child and the people and objects around it, which involves smiles, cuddles and frowns, movements, hopping up and down, hiding, etc. The people on kids programs try the best to do that, but they can never directly respond to the child's immediate emotions, and they are in the end only ever a two dimensional picture on a box. So that the objects they move don't have a physical presence for the child. If those objects fall they can't hurt the child, if the people speak about an object, the child can't participate, if the person lies the child can't be deceived.

Children placed all day in front of a TV may not cry, but there is something fundamental that they will be missing.

Corrected link : for numerous crimes centered around the recent activities of The SCO Group, Inc

The SEC should be prosecuting Jim Allchin, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, BayStar Capital LP, Baystar Capital II, L.P., BayStar Capital Management, LLC, Boies Schiller & Flexner, The Canopy Group, Brent Christensen, Steven Derby, Bill Gates, Lawrence Goldfarb, Jeff Hunsaker, Steven M. Lamar, Darl McBride, Microsoft Corporation, Morgan Keegan, Darcy Mott, Thomas Raimondi, Royal Bank of Canada, S2 Strategic Consulting, Blake Stowell, The SCO Group, Inc., Vulcan Capital, Ralph Yarro, and Bert Young. for numerous crimes centered around the recent activities of The SCO Group, Inc.

You can use GPUTILS to program PICs from Linux. A better option would be to switch to using AVRs (just as cheap, but far more capable) and use gcc, with your code in C. You can google for introductions to using gcc with the AVR.

I am on a 5Mbps down / 1Mbps up plan. From DSL Reports speed tests I get 4570 kbps down and 740 kbps up. Pretty close to what I signed up for!

And haven't experienced an outtage so far and good tech support. So loose the KomKast and sign up for RCN if you can.

http://www.rcn.com/

From the little a gained from the article, the screen seems like a giant compound eye. I wonder how much each sensor will overlap with others. Combining them into a single montage could be complicated.

Actually, speciation does not require millions of years, and we have seen it happen. Here's links to a few references.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.htm l
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910.html
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/S/Speciation.html

I'd also recommend reading the book "The Beak of the Finch", which is a lot more interesting that it sounds. A team of biologists tracked the entire finch population of one of the Galapagos Islands and watched it evolve from one extreme of the group of species of Darwin's finches to the other and back again.

the RNA in a virus has 90% of what it takes genetically to make a human.

I don't think so. This page says viruses have 3-100 genes, and this page says humans have 20,000 - 25,000 genes. That makes it anywhere from 0.012% to 0.5%. Not even close to 90%.

I think I may have an unfair advantage in this discussion over some, since I'm sitting here with Physical and Historical Geology courses (my major), Ahtropology, Paleontology, Botany and Zoology courses as well under my belt and forgive me, but I'm having a frustrated scientist moment. Please check out the writings of Stehen Jay Gould to learn what evolution really is http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library.html Please also understand the Hardy-Weinberg Principle when talking about population evolution (sorry about the spelling error before on that name) http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/H/Hardy_Weinberg.html Lastly, on a seemingly offtopic note, but equally as frustrating: for those of you who keep bringing up gods, creationism, and intelligent design and may wish it in our schools or discussed, it already is at the college level. It is a philosophy course on the "Teleological Argument" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument Sorry all. After reading all of these posts and making some of my own, I had to get that off my chest. I will probably suffer being moderated down for this, but I'm willing to take that. Kind of makes me feel like I'm a part of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" if it happens really. http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm Yes, science is a candle in the dark, please, don't hit it with your Bible.

Instead of proto-bacteria, it might be more accurate to use "protobiont," because the characteristics that make bacteria bacteria weren't necessarily around at the beginning of life. Also, self-replicating DNA is kind of a big first step - more modern theories point to ribozymes as the original self-replicating molecule, being a ribosome molecule that can act as an enzyme and therefore have information-storing and metabolic functions. The oil droplets, or micelles, that you mention are probably better known as liposomes (that's actually a really good article on selectively permeable membranes and the first cells) and the presence of what are essentially protists (mitochondria and chloroplasts) inside eukaryotic cells is called endosymbiosis, and occurred (at least with mitochondria) by endocytosis. More on that here.

And here's a bugmenot search for Discover.com: http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.discover. com

Lastly to quote Pulp Fiction, and then "we are going to get medieval on your ass."

Your reference does in fact claim that population *is* growing exponentially, with an exponential growth rate of r=1.2% growth per annum. Perhaps you intended to mention a different article?

Note the section "Looking Ahead" that reads very much like what I wrote (exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely due to resource constraints). As the article you cite points out, it isn't clear that we haven't already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet.

Had you read what I wrote, you'd notice that I was careful to mention off-world resources as a possible solution. I'd love to believe that this is a possibility but the investment required for this to happen would be astonishingly huge and it's extremely unclear that we have the resources, or the will, to pull it off.

Certainly, if we devoted all our resources to it right now, it'd be 20 years or perhaps a lot more before we saw the first ounce of extraterrestial steel or plastic. Certainly space technology would have to make far more progress in those 20 years than it has in the last 40 before we can start mining asteroids and the like. Expecting off-world resources to save us is a lot like expecting a lottery ticket to rescue you from bankruptcy.

Well, the first thing you have to realize is that your claimed fact (an assumption by Thomas Malthus, I might add) is wrong. The population is *not*, in fact, growing exponentially, as fertility rates in developed countries (and increasingly, in developing countries) is falling from the previous rates we have seen throughout human history.

And the second thing you have to ask yourself is: in an ever-expanding universe (or so physics has assured us), are the resources actually finite? Whatever happened to the idea of colonizing other planets? Whatever happened to renewable resources (e.g. agriculture (genetically-modified, if we want, to be even more-productive) for food; wind, solar, and ocean currents for electricity)?

You have to start thinking in terms of the gains in efficiency and discovery of resources due to technological progress. That is the reason Julian Simon won his 1980-1990 bet on commodities with Paul Ehrlich.

Why do overpopulation chicken-littles keep believing the economically-untrue argument that economics is a zero-sum game? It is not, and this becomes increasingly-apparent as time goes on...

evolution isn't just change, it's adaptive change.

Sorry, that is just not correct. Evolution is NOT defined in modern biology as adaptive change. Your basic premise is wrong, making your arguments specious.

Here's a link to a relevant page in a decent online Biology text. Give is a look.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/H/Hardy_Weinberg.html#When_the_Hardy-Weinberg _Law_Fails_to_Apply

It's been done. Quotezart, the musical stock tracker. (Doesn't work on my rig; ymmv.)

BZZT! You lose. It is not the drums that get damaged. It is the little tiny hairs that collect the sound, usually the high freqs.

A quick google has this but I'm sure there you can find more.

qz