from the tests I've done on different firefox builds, the extensions are by far the biggest problem in regard to memory use although firefox can use a lot of memory under certain conditions that have nothing to do with extensions. if firefox is left open for hours/days at a time, multiple pages etc... it will use a lot more memory.
Great idea, mediocre execution. (And why is gun control on a list of science and technology issues, but not stem cell research?)
or for that matter, what is their stance on whether or not we should ignore the constitution in regard to intelligent design being taught in schools? [probably been answered but hey what else on this list hasn't either?] seems like a rather important thing to know about a potential POTUS- whether or not they intend to inject religion into science education and all... It was rather dissappointing to see that clinton was the only one to say anything about her plans for the country in regard to space exploration.
you're right, it has little to do with the other topics although it's a very polar issue between the political parties and a lot of people feel strongly about one side or the other. It seems appropriate that this be addressed in the comparison. That is however, assuming that they actually end up doing what they say they are rather than what suits them as POTUS...
Okay, a glacier on the Martian equator might be a surprise, except perhaps on one of the Tharsis Bulge volcanoes or Nix Olympica (er, Olympus Mons to you young whippersnappers; now get off my lawn).
its location is at 47.5N, 28.4E so yes, very odd indeed.
Yet people seem to be surprised every time there's the merest hint, or act like it's of some cosmic significance. Sheesh.
yeah, a large percentage of the solar system's material consists of frozen water, no surprise by that account that water exists on Mars, what seems to be interesting here is how young it is and I presume the position as well. although if we were to find say liquid water anywhere nearby *that* would be far more interesting but no luck on the surface [confirmed that is] yet.
it's not sulfur, it's sodium and it's common enough in everything else that we've found in regard to rocks that sodium is a good bet for a relatively easy target for determining if there is indeed a liquid ocean under the surface. it's already suspected that ganymede has a liquid ocean under the surface with dissolved salts that cause the ocean to be conductive and conductive fluid interiors lend themselves to forming magnetic fields, thus it is also suspected that Enceladus has a similar ocean. Although in this case, the fact that Sodium wasn't detected doesn't fit the hypothesis that Enceladus has a liquid, saly ocean underneath.
what about tinyurl and proxied links to spam sites? maybe a link report system or a seperate modifier like -1 spam or something like that w/ a few metamods to confirm/deny the mod so rogue mods can't ditch legit links
yes, I should have rephrased that. there's no reason why we couldn't [eventually] build "life" based on entirely synthetic genetic systems. or for that matter, use it in lesser roles in lifeforms as they exist now. certain bacteria already modify their phosphate backbone with a sulfur based group which allows them to alter expression of their genes. morpholinos are already being used to temporarily modify gene expression; from there it would likely be a much shorter hop to replacing a much larger set of biochemical pathways with ones that could in principle, work with a slightly altered genetic system- small changes over time to eventually making entire organisms that don't even use DNA or RNA. or if we so choose, we could keep them using DNA/RNA as backbones and add aditional nucleotide bases [this is already being worked on] which can encode additional amino acids etc...
*ahem* there's no reason why we would need to specifically build artificial life based on DNA or RNA for that matter, there are several analogues that do jsut as well. maybe in time we'll find a completely different way of doing things that doesn't require anything remotely resembling the sugar phosphodiester backbone common in genetic systems today. even if we decided to base things on the DNA backbone, we could and probably will be using entirely different nucleotide bases to encode everything- none of which are known to exist in natural, healthy genetic systems.
who says artificial life needs to be based on DNA? The earliest forms of life probably used RNA instead or one of its cousins like TNA, GNA, PNA or LNA. DNA is only special in the fact that it is missing a key hydroxyl group in the 2 position. this makes DNA more stable because there's no nucleophillic group there toi assist in self-cleavage of the phosphodiester bond. GNA has a backbone of glycerol rather than ribose [RNA] or deoxyribose [DNA]. PNA uses a reperating serine polypeptide backbone and because the whole thing has no charge like DNA does it has a much higher melting temperature [can withstand more heat] which may make it superior to DNA or RNA in some applications in biology. TNA on the other hand, has a synthetic polymerase enzyme that has to my knowledge, been able to create strands 1000 bases long. then there's alternative nucleotide bases, there are similar molecules to the naturally occuring 5 that also can encode for proteins and act in genetic systems. there's a lot that can be done with this, it's just a pity that it will probably be encumbered in patents if and when any of it is realized.
How do you know it's not malicious? Being open source doesn't necessarily mean the right people are looking.
being opensource means that the source can be reviewed, that's a hell of a lot better than impossible to be reviewed now isn't it? now aside from that, there's the fact that there are people looking at the code, a lot of them- especially slashdotters that make a hell of a noise over things like this.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
good idea, although in the case of myspace, it wasn't a technical problem that prevented them from keeping pages "safe" [eg. preventing the execution of malicious code] it had to do with the fact that myspace, by default allows everything *on purpose* they could have built the system such that certain tags would/could be disabled [slashdot is an example] and as big as myspace is, resources are not a problem- apathy and the need to incorporate everything user generated into pages [to hell with security! we want to build our pages any which way we like!] is.
then what's to say that your (meaning "security experts") horror stories regarding voting booth irregularities aren't just another bunch of horror stories to be tossed aside as statistical anomolies?
because it is already happening in other countries and chances are that it is and has been occuring here too.
If we are going to say that deliberate tampering is a big problem with electronic voting booths, then how can we overlook the deliberate tampering with non-electronic systems?
we didn't overlook the problems of non-electronic voting [florida 2000 results ring a bell?] we are concerned that the sheer number of relatively obvious security breaches in electronic voting machines are a tad suspect. I would even go as far to say that electronic voting won't be ready for a decade or more, especially with the stakes being so high in regard to who wins the most votes. The major problems with the system as it is are: 1) poor physical security 2) risk of sabotage of code and components [corruption] 3) no paper trail to verify votes 4) code must be/remain open source to make sure the voting machines are not doing something shady without anyone's knowledge etc...
There was a case where just before the patent ran out on a drug, the drug company making it filed a seperate patent for the compound that the first drug metabolized into inside the body- the pantent was approved and now they have all that much more to their patent granted monopoly of the drug. genes are something worse in this regard, there are tons of permutations for any particular gene that function just as well as the original, in this case at what point does the patent no longer apply? when the gene is altered enough not to function as it did? *cringe*
Well, of course no "proven" theory has later been found to wrong either has it?
fail. it isn't that our theories are "perfect" or even "correct" as they are accurate in explaining what we are actually seeing. most of the real science deals with actually doing experiments and seeing if they do or do not confirm what your theories predict. If by experiment we find something that doesn't match up with current theory, we have two choices: first, modify said theory incorporating any new data- which is what happened with Einstein's theories which better explained gravity and space than did Newton's theories. Newton's theories were for a lack of a better word "correct" under most conditions but einstein's work expanded on them to include very high velocities and high gravity fields. the second choice is more radical, and that is to throw the whole theory its self out the window so to speak. This is what happened with spontaneous generation and geocentrism. why? neither theory could be modified to explain any of the new data. they tried with geocentrism, postulating an ever increasing number of concentric rings by which planets orbit but this no longer predicted any new phenomena with any where near the accuracy of the heliocentric theory. newton's advances in gravitational theory put the last nails in the coffin of geocentrism and later experiments confirmed the findings of heliocentric/gravitational theory. The point is that our current theories are correct to some degree, that is to say our current theories will always be good for predicting phenomena at this particular level of testing, further testing of the theories may indeed require current theories to be expanded or thrown out but new theories will need to explain what current theories do *and* predict future phenomena.
that is if copyrights don't get applied to genes like they do anything else. we may have the ability to alter our genes at will technologically but politically we are absolutely screwed. companies are already filing patents on plant and animal genes, even breeds that contain these genes- I shudder to think of what would happen if any of this were applied to people.
Furthermore, the output beam is infrared, which your average mirror or shiny metal isn't going to reflect.
er don't build your plane out of normal materials? a few hundred million$$ can buy a lot of strange materials that could do the job.
The other problem with shiny surfaces: how do you keep them shiny for long periods of time?
coat the infared reflective material in something that is relatively inert and relatively transparent to infared light. maybe a set of countermeasures a lot like party confetti only made of material that strongly disperses infared light.
It's killed 200 people, and was probably caused by the gas drilling company cutting corners on its drilling. I'd personally have that at #1 or #2
That's small potatoes to the sheer number of species we've been accidentally killing over the years, increasing the rate of extinction by many many fold over what is natural. *That* is a human caused disaster worth noting.
i also question having global warming as the #1 man made disaster, since i don't consider it being a disaster yet. The worst that comes to my mind is hurricane Katrina, and even then, there is no decisive link to the two.
indeed, most of the real damage hasn't even occured *yet* although there are pollution caused phenomena that are disasters like Chernobyl, deaths in London from pollution being trapped in a column of cold air, massive swaths of land contaminated with chemicals, the UNION CARBIDE toxic disaster in India which everyone seems to be forgetting about etc...
If I remember correctly a few ISPs were toying with the isea of actually rewriting webpage code, not just inserting a little javascript for flavoring. That's the problem. ISPs could modify web page code that isn't easily blocked without blocking the entire page. not really much is preventing them from inserting text-ads for example into a body of text on a web page.
Just a note about the fullerene filters mentioned in the article, they do not filter methane they filter Methanol specifically they prevent Methanol from diffusing across the memebrane of the fuel cell thus decreasing the amount of Methanol that is wasted.
THe one thing that can never really be dealt with in terms of keeping email private is the fact that no matter how much you encrypt, use tor etc. youcan't escape the fact the person at the other end can always make a backup copy. The lesson here? If you really don't want something to get out into the world in one way or another DONT SEND IT.
not tomention carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide/troxide, soot and miscellaneous cacinogins like PAHs and Benzene. nasty isn't it? millions of tons of coal burned just like that every year...
Slashdot Mirror
from the tests I've done on different firefox builds, the extensions are by far the biggest problem in regard to memory use although firefox can use a lot of memory under certain conditions that have nothing to do with extensions. if firefox is left open for hours/days at a time, multiple pages etc... it will use a lot more memory.
you're right, it has little to do with the other topics although it's a very polar issue between the political parties and a lot of people feel strongly about one side or the other. It seems appropriate that this be addressed in the comparison. That is however, assuming that they actually end up doing what they say they are rather than what suits them as POTUS...
it's not sulfur, it's sodium and it's common enough in everything else that we've found in regard to rocks that sodium is a good bet for a relatively easy target for determining if there is indeed a liquid ocean under the surface. it's already suspected that ganymede has a liquid ocean under the surface with dissolved salts that cause the ocean to be conductive and conductive fluid interiors lend themselves to forming magnetic fields, thus it is also suspected that Enceladus has a similar ocean. Although in this case, the fact that Sodium wasn't detected doesn't fit the hypothesis that Enceladus has a liquid, saly ocean underneath.
that is until the trolls start using image hosting domains to host goatse under an innocent looking link.
good point. now what?
what about tinyurl and proxied links to spam sites? maybe a link report system or a seperate modifier like -1 spam or something like that w/ a few metamods to confirm/deny the mod so rogue mods can't ditch legit links
yes, I should have rephrased that. there's no reason why we couldn't [eventually] build "life" based on entirely synthetic genetic systems. or for that matter, use it in lesser roles in lifeforms as they exist now. certain bacteria already modify their phosphate backbone with a sulfur based group which allows them to alter expression of their genes. morpholinos are already being used to temporarily modify gene expression; from there it would likely be a much shorter hop to replacing a much larger set of biochemical pathways with ones that could in principle, work with a slightly altered genetic system- small changes over time to eventually making entire organisms that don't even use DNA or RNA. or if we so choose, we could keep them using DNA/RNA as backbones and add aditional nucleotide bases [this is already being worked on] which can encode additional amino acids etc...
*ahem* there's no reason why we would need to specifically build artificial life based on DNA or RNA for that matter, there are several analogues that do jsut as well. maybe in time we'll find a completely different way of doing things that doesn't require anything remotely resembling the sugar phosphodiester backbone common in genetic systems today. even if we decided to base things on the DNA backbone, we could and probably will be using entirely different nucleotide bases to encode everything- none of which are known to exist in natural, healthy genetic systems.
who says artificial life needs to be based on DNA? The earliest forms of life probably used RNA instead or one of its cousins like TNA, GNA, PNA or LNA. DNA is only special in the fact that it is missing a key hydroxyl group in the 2 position. this makes DNA more stable because there's no nucleophillic group there toi assist in self-cleavage of the phosphodiester bond. GNA has a backbone of glycerol rather than ribose [RNA] or deoxyribose [DNA]. PNA uses a reperating serine polypeptide backbone and because the whole thing has no charge like DNA does it has a much higher melting temperature [can withstand more heat] which may make it superior to DNA or RNA in some applications in biology. TNA on the other hand, has a synthetic polymerase enzyme that has to my knowledge, been able to create strands 1000 bases long. then there's alternative nucleotide bases, there are similar molecules to the naturally occuring 5 that also can encode for proteins and act in genetic systems. there's a lot that can be done with this, it's just a pity that it will probably be encumbered in patents if and when any of it is realized.
good idea, although in the case of myspace, it wasn't a technical problem that prevented them from keeping pages "safe" [eg. preventing the execution of malicious code] it had to do with the fact that myspace, by default allows everything *on purpose* they could have built the system such that certain tags would/could be disabled [slashdot is an example] and as big as myspace is, resources are not a problem- apathy and the need to incorporate everything user generated into pages [to hell with security! we want to build our pages any which way we like!] is.
There was a case where just before the patent ran out on a drug, the drug company making it filed a seperate patent for the compound that the first drug metabolized into inside the body- the pantent was approved and now they have all that much more to their patent granted monopoly of the drug. genes are something worse in this regard, there are tons of permutations for any particular gene that function just as well as the original, in this case at what point does the patent no longer apply? when the gene is altered enough not to function as it did? *cringe*
that is if copyrights don't get applied to genes like they do anything else. we may have the ability to alter our genes at will technologically but politically we are absolutely screwed. companies are already filing patents on plant and animal genes, even breeds that contain these genes- I shudder to think of what would happen if any of this were applied to people.
If I remember correctly a few ISPs were toying with the isea of actually rewriting webpage code, not just inserting a little javascript for flavoring. That's the problem. ISPs could modify web page code that isn't easily blocked without blocking the entire page. not really much is preventing them from inserting text-ads for example into a body of text on a web page.
Just a note about the fullerene filters mentioned in the article, they do not filter methane they filter Methanol specifically they prevent Methanol from diffusing across the memebrane of the fuel cell thus decreasing the amount of Methanol that is wasted.
http://www.enn.com/sci-tech/article/26913
THe one thing that can never really be dealt with in terms of keeping email private is the fact that no matter how much you encrypt, use tor etc. youcan't escape the fact the person at the other end can always make a backup copy. The lesson here? If you really don't want something to get out into the world in one way or another DONT SEND IT.
not tomention carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide/troxide, soot and miscellaneous cacinogins like PAHs and Benzene. nasty isn't it? millions of tons of coal burned just like that every year...