This reminds me of the pumping system used on the Trans-Alaska pipeline. 1950's era Rolls-Royce jet engines are used to pump the oil. A turbofan is bolted down and the hot exhaust is aimed at a rotor. The rotor in turn is used to drive the physical pump that moves the oil. The beauty of this is the incredible range of throttle these engines provide, allowing for exacting adjustment in response to variations in oil viscosity etc. The jet fuel is refined on site from the oil in the pipeline. Each pump station has two engines, allowing for repairs and backup. The reason for the 1950's engines was reliability. When the system was designed in the early 1970's, the engine with the greatest proven track record was chosen. To their credit, these engines have been operating virtually non-stop 24/7/365 for 25 years. If I remember correctly they have broken several records. I just think it is interesting that over 20% of the United States' oil supply is moved by Eisenhower era engine technology.
Actually DNA is already encrypted. DNA is not allowed out of the nucleus of the cell and is incapable of making proteins by itself, it's a protected format. The information contained in the DNA has to be transcribed into RNA which is allowed into the cellular cytoplasm where it is translated into proteins by a ribosome. This process requires several proteins and enzymes. Copying DNA with DNA polymerase is like copying an encrypted file, it is useless untill it is converted into a "hackable" format and decrypted.
There are hundreds of amazing parallels between biological and digital information... after all it's just data.
Fist of all kudos to the Abiword people. I have been using their program for almost two years now. It is far more robust program for basic word processing than MS Word. The only things I still use Word for are lab reports (gotta have those tables and Excel integration) and Japanese word processing. I have never had good luck with using Japanese (Unicode or EUC- shiftJIS is baaaad) in Abiword. Currently I use Word or JWPce (a great GNU freeware Japanese processor) for my Japanese work. As soon as Abiword integrates good Asian language support I will delete Word and use the extra HD space for pr0..er..um.. research.
I consider Dr. Antinori to be a rouge scientist in the tradition of Dr. Frankenstein. He is so anxious to get his name in the history books that he is willing to violate legal and ethical codes. What truly worries me is if the clone is brought to term. The reason so many cloning attempts end in miscarage is the horrific developmental defects. During the cloning of Dolly and other farm animals, some animals were brought to term with non-functioning lungs, unconnected organs, veins and organs on the surface of the body etc. With animals it is ethical to euthanise the animal, but with a human that would be legally considered murder. Any human being with such defect (and they are certainly possible) would live a a truly horrifying (but mercifully short) existence. Even if a clone was born that seemed normal, it would not be out of the woods. Many animal clones, as they have matured have developed truly bizzare diseases; spontaneous organ failures, degenerative nervous diseases and the like. In addition there are questions about long term genetic defects, predisposition to cancer and shortened life spans. I hope, for the sake of the fetus he has created, that this cloning attempt fails. This man belongs in jail.
They also believed that people would grow horns and develop cow-like features , another fear was that the pustules would be little cow heads. This fear came from the fact that the smallpox vaccination was derived from the bovine cowpox virus. I bet that is Jenner had introduced vaccination a few hundred years earlier he would have been paid a visit by the inquisition. Religion and science tend to be destructive to each other. I get nervous whenever one confronts the other.
I assume you are refering to Western Europe or the United States in you weapons argument. There are several international bans on biological weapons (the United States has not engaged in offensive microbiological weapons since the Nixon administration). Also I must ask what you mean by "targeted" bioweapons. We do not posess the technology to "target" a weapon beyond the scope of what species it effects (which is usually a trait inherited from the natural stock microbe). It is (and will remain) impossible to target a virus or bacterium to kill one man or nationality. I do believe that the reason Sadam Hussein is the enemy of the year is HIS desire to develop bioweapons. I could see some dangerous applications to the retroviral method used, but I do not think we need to fear much from killer stem cells being released on an unsuspecting world. Lighten up!
Perhaps someone could fill me in as to why the suit was filed in a California court. From what I read in the article, the alleged hacking occurred in Israel, and the damaged business are in Europe. I do not see how California law could have jurisdiction in this matter.
...is that MSNBC is one of the only mainstream media outlets without strong ties to the recording industry. It is almost karmic that slashdoters are prasing an article from a MS affiliated outlet that can afford to be independent of the music industry due to the sheer power of its (allegedly evil) parents.
I wrote my senator, Stevens (sorry about him) at his local office. Most senators have some local offices in the state they (theoretically) represent, these are usually less busy than the DC offices. Letters sent to such an office are more likely to be read by an actual person, plus with the anthrax scare making mail to DC so slow, it will probably get read faster (PDF'd to DC or something).
My university teaches assembly programing using MIPS (mainly using the SPIM simulator on our department HPUX machines). I hope the company survives and prospers. I would hate to graduate with an obsolete skill. Does anyone know how common MIPS is in the CS/CoE/EE academic areas? Does the adoption of an standard in academia help it gain market share?
I agree, if parents let their children derive enjoyment from staring at CRT screens, they may become computer scientists or some other type of undesireable;-)
In my dealings with Asian languages, I have found PDF to be particularly helpful. PDF is a godsend after all of your formatting gets killed when you move from EUC to Shift-JIS. In addition I have seen some amazing computer produced art out of Asia. By pulling out of this market, lots of talented artists will be left in backwater (lets face it, no matter how good Gimp is, Photoshop is still the gold standard for the industry). Oh well...
It's a funny little article. A friend sent it to me about three months ago. As a student of Japanese my favorite part is the descriptions about the classmates. I laughed my ass off until I realised that being stuck in a class with *those* people was neither funny nor enjoyable.
It needs to be remembered that the majority of HS students are not technically savvy. Imagine you are a member of the cheerleading squad, you want to write a report and check your hotmail account, are you going to care about the cost of the underlying software? No, you want the MS Word doc you wrote on your Daddys laptop to open (and save) correctly, you want the floppy or zip disk you brought from home to mount (of course you wouldn't know what mounting a disk is). You want the internet browser to function correctly and you want to be able to view the latest flash content at MTV.com. Any system in an education market would have to be configured to be totally transparent to the end user. Remember the end user does not care how cheap or easily configured the software is.
On a side note, since the majority of schools use and continue to buy Apple... wouldn't there come a point where OSX is prevalent enough that ported open-source software would make sense?
In genetics we use somatic cell hybridization for genetic analysis and chromosome mapping. It is the process of fusing human mouse cells and culturing them in a lab.
Transgenic animals have already been created in many countries. Pigs with human genes to prevent rejection of heart valves come to mind.
In my opinion, the article was poorly translated and the initial post was misleading. People are having images of werewolves and such. At this point in time it would be impossible to successfully create a hybrid of this type. In 10 or 20 years this might actually be a problem. Until then, it's science fiction.
When I heard SNK of America was going under, I bought as many games as I could. They are in general excellent (Bust-A-Move Pocket has saved me on may long flights). Considering the drought of good games that we had during the Game Boy Color years (Olsen Twins Day Planner etc.) the NGPC was a godsend. It sits next to my Game Boy Advance and I play it often.
There is an emmulator called RAPE, last time I checked it did not have sound or controller inputs. Still, you could at least see the title screens of the cool little games that were never translated.
Indeed, DI H2O is a non-conductive liquid. The difficulty with water is its incredible abilities as a solvent. DI water would rapidly obtain ions fron the components submerged in it (metals such as lead, tin, silver come to mind). Eventually one of two things would happen. 1: The water obtains enough ions and becomes conductive, shorting the machine. Or 2: The water eats away some connection or component damaging the machine.
The attacks began at noon eastern time right? Well there is this line called the "International Date Line" it is the point where today becomes tomorrow, the attacks happened on the other side of this line... in tomorrow! Noon on Sunday here is early in the morning there.
There has been at least two test launches (I can remember) and a handfull of sub-orbital flights from this facility. This is the largest and most recent but certainly not the first. I remember reading the headlines when the first rockets were lit off in '98 (in our AK papers of course).
Florida has great weather, if you don't count all those hurricanes.
The Gulf of Alaska has bad weather yes. But most of that weather is rain, more rain and even more rain. Kodiak is not a tropical paradise, but it has much better weather than the Aleutians, which have the truly awful weather of the gulf.
AK Aerospace is a joint venture. The federal govt. is a partiner along with private companies and the state of Alaska. The overall organization is under the broader state chartered development corp.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the pumping system used on the Trans-Alaska pipeline. 1950's era Rolls-Royce jet engines are used to pump the oil.
A turbofan is bolted down and the hot exhaust is aimed at a rotor. The rotor in turn is used to drive the physical pump that moves the oil. The beauty of this is the incredible range of throttle these engines provide, allowing for exacting adjustment in response to variations in oil viscosity etc. The jet fuel is refined on site from the oil in the pipeline. Each pump station has two engines, allowing for repairs and backup.
The reason for the 1950's engines was reliability. When the system was designed in the early 1970's, the engine with the greatest proven track record was chosen. To their credit, these engines have been operating virtually non-stop 24/7/365 for 25 years. If I remember correctly they have broken several records. I just think it is interesting that over 20% of the United States' oil supply is moved by Eisenhower era engine technology.
Actually DNA is already encrypted. DNA is not allowed out of the nucleus of the cell and is incapable of making proteins by itself, it's a protected format. The information contained in the DNA has to be transcribed into RNA which is allowed into the cellular cytoplasm where it is translated into proteins by a ribosome. This process requires several proteins and enzymes. Copying DNA with DNA polymerase is like copying an encrypted file, it is useless untill it is converted into a "hackable" format and decrypted.
There are hundreds of amazing parallels between biological and digital information... after all it's just data.
Fist of all kudos to the Abiword people. I have been using their program for almost two years now. It is far more robust program for basic word processing than MS Word.
The only things I still use Word for are lab reports (gotta have those tables and Excel integration) and Japanese word processing. I have never had good luck with using Japanese (Unicode or EUC- shiftJIS is baaaad) in Abiword. Currently I use Word or JWPce (a great GNU freeware Japanese processor) for my Japanese work. As soon as Abiword integrates good Asian language support I will delete Word and use the extra HD space for pr0..er..um.. research.
It's a real link, not some link to goatland or something.
I consider Dr. Antinori to be a rouge scientist in the tradition of Dr. Frankenstein. He is so anxious to get his name in the history books that he is willing to violate legal and ethical codes. What truly worries me is if the clone is brought to term. The reason so many cloning attempts end in miscarage is the horrific developmental defects. During the cloning of Dolly and other farm animals, some animals were brought to term with non-functioning lungs, unconnected organs, veins and organs on the surface of the body etc. With animals it is ethical to euthanise the animal, but with a human that would be legally considered murder. Any human being with such defect (and they are certainly possible) would live a a truly horrifying (but mercifully short) existence. Even if a clone was born that seemed normal, it would not be out of the woods. Many animal clones, as they have matured have developed truly bizzare diseases; spontaneous organ failures, degenerative nervous diseases and the like. In addition there are questions about long term genetic defects, predisposition to cancer and shortened life spans.
I hope, for the sake of the fetus he has created, that this cloning attempt fails.
This man belongs in jail.
They also believed that people would grow horns and develop cow-like features , another fear was that the pustules would be little cow heads. This fear came from the fact that the smallpox vaccination was derived from the bovine cowpox virus.
I bet that is Jenner had introduced vaccination a few hundred years earlier he would have been paid a visit by the inquisition.
Religion and science tend to be destructive to each other. I get nervous whenever one confronts the other.
I assume you are refering to Western Europe or the United States in you weapons argument. There are several international bans on biological weapons (the United States has not engaged in offensive microbiological weapons since the Nixon administration).
Also I must ask what you mean by "targeted" bioweapons. We do not posess the technology to "target" a weapon beyond the scope of what species it effects (which is usually a trait inherited from the natural stock microbe). It is (and will remain) impossible to target a virus or bacterium to kill one man or nationality.
I do believe that the reason Sadam Hussein is the enemy of the year is HIS desire to develop bioweapons.
I could see some dangerous applications to the retroviral method used, but I do not think we need to fear much from killer stem cells being released on an unsuspecting world.
Lighten up!
~primenerd
Microbiology/ Computer Engineering Undergrad
Perhaps someone could fill me in as to why the suit was filed in a California court. From what I read in the article, the alleged hacking occurred in Israel, and the damaged business are in Europe. I do not see how California law could have jurisdiction in this matter.
...is that MSNBC is one of the only mainstream media outlets without strong ties to the recording industry. It is almost karmic that slashdoters are prasing an article from a MS affiliated outlet that can afford to be independent of the music industry due to the sheer power of its (allegedly evil) parents.
I wrote my senator, Stevens (sorry about him) at his local office. Most senators have some local offices in the state they (theoretically) represent, these are usually less busy than the DC offices. Letters sent to such an office are more likely to be read by an actual person, plus with the anthrax scare making mail to DC so slow, it will probably get read faster (PDF'd to DC or something).
...and leave them there.
My university teaches assembly programing using MIPS (mainly using the SPIM simulator on our department HPUX machines). I hope the company survives and prospers. I would hate to graduate with an obsolete skill. Does anyone know how common MIPS is in the CS/CoE/EE academic areas? Does the adoption of an standard in academia help it gain market share?
I agree, if parents let their children derive enjoyment from staring at CRT screens, they may become computer scientists or some other type of undesireable ;-)
In my dealings with Asian languages, I have found PDF to be particularly helpful. PDF is a godsend after all of your formatting gets killed when you move from EUC to Shift-JIS. In addition I have seen some amazing computer produced art out of Asia. By pulling out of this market, lots of talented artists will be left in backwater (lets face it, no matter how good Gimp is, Photoshop is still the gold standard for the industry). Oh well...
It's a funny little article. A friend sent it to me about three months ago. As a student of Japanese my favorite part is the descriptions about the classmates. I laughed my ass off until I realised that being stuck in a class with *those* people was neither funny nor enjoyable.
It needs to be remembered that the majority of HS students are not technically savvy. Imagine you are a member of the cheerleading squad, you want to write a report and check your hotmail account, are you going to care about the cost of the underlying software? No, you want the MS Word doc you wrote on your Daddys laptop to open (and save) correctly, you want the floppy or zip disk you brought from home to mount (of course you wouldn't know what mounting a disk is). You want the internet browser to function correctly and you want to be able to view the latest flash content at MTV.com. Any system in an education market would have to be configured to be totally transparent to the end user. Remember the end user does not care how cheap or easily configured the software is.
On a side note, since the majority of schools use and continue to buy Apple... wouldn't there come a point where OSX is prevalent enough that ported open-source software would make sense?
If the logic that whomever dominates the education market will by default dominate the rest of the OS market were true... Macs would rule the world.
I've heard him... Vader does the voiceover for the commericals! Verizon is part of the Empire!
"People everywhere just want to be free" (of Verizon)
In genetics we use somatic cell hybridization for genetic analysis and chromosome mapping. It is the process of fusing human mouse cells and culturing them in a lab.
Transgenic animals have already been created in many countries. Pigs with human genes to prevent rejection of heart valves come to mind.
In my opinion, the article was poorly translated and the initial post was misleading. People are having images of werewolves and such. At this point in time it would be impossible to successfully create a hybrid of this type. In 10 or 20 years this might actually be a problem. Until then, it's science fiction.
When I heard SNK of America was going under, I bought as many games as I could. They are in general excellent (Bust-A-Move Pocket has saved me on may long flights). Considering the drought of good games that we had during the Game Boy Color years (Olsen Twins Day Planner etc.) the NGPC was a godsend. It sits next to my Game Boy Advance and I play it often.
There is an emmulator called RAPE, last time I checked it did not have sound or controller inputs. Still, you could at least see the title screens of the cool little games that were never translated.
Indeed, DI H2O is a non-conductive liquid. The difficulty with water is its incredible abilities as a solvent. DI water would rapidly obtain ions fron the components submerged in it (metals such as lead, tin, silver come to mind). Eventually one of two things would happen. 1: The water obtains enough ions and becomes conductive, shorting the machine. Or 2: The water eats away some connection or component damaging the machine.
The attacks began at noon eastern time right? Well there is this line called the "International Date Line" it is the point where today becomes tomorrow, the attacks happened on the other side of this line... in tomorrow! Noon on Sunday here is early in the morning there.
There has been at least two test launches (I can remember) and a handfull of sub-orbital flights from this facility. This is the largest and most recent but certainly not the first. I remember reading the headlines when the first rockets were lit off in '98 (in our AK papers of course).
Florida has great weather, if you don't count all those hurricanes.
The Gulf of Alaska has bad weather yes. But most of that weather is rain, more rain and even more rain. Kodiak is not a tropical paradise, but it has much better weather than the Aleutians, which have the truly awful weather of the gulf.
AK Aerospace is a joint venture. The federal govt. is a partiner along with private companies and the state of Alaska. The overall organization is under the broader state chartered development corp.