Because these labels are all about creating fear in the mind of the consumer. There are no studies showing that GMOs are unsafe, so opponents are trying to skip the science and just scare people.
Some may be but not all. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The studies mostly just haven't been done, or if they were done they were internal to companies like Monsanto and were not published in a peer-reviewed journal. If you're introducing a gene for a foreign protein that the parent crop could never produce then that should be treated like any other food additive and should require testing for safety and the results of that testing to be part of the public record. Since corporatist governments will never go that far, at least label the suckers so those of us that frankly do not trust companies like Monsanto to operate in the publics best interest can avoid 'em. I'm NOT saying GMOs in the food chain is a bad thing per se, they can be a huge benefit in terms of agricultural productivity and can advance the business of food production by leaps that were inconceivable to previous generations. But as long as we're dependent on a big corporation saying "Trust us, they're fine. Eat up!" I'll be saying "No, thanks!"
Seriously, EVERYTHING YOU EAT is GMO.
The vast majority was done by selective breeding and grafting, a very small amount by directly fiddling with the genes.
There is not a single crop that hasn't been modified by humans in some way.
Frankly, that's a bogus argument. Selective breeding requires that the "parent" stock CAN interbreed. Introducing genes that code for some foreign protein that is derived from a totally different species is a different kettle of fish entirely. Speaking as a (former) molecular biologist I want that stuff labelled.
So suppose this works as described and we have a functional method of initiating pulses of controlled fusion in a rocket engine that when vented out the nozzle produces usable thrust.
Let's make that nozzle thinner and a bit more tubular than conical - a few hefty magnets around to to keep all that fusing stuff in a nice thin stream. While we're at it lets anchor the other end of the rocket to something HUGE that the thrust isn't going to have a prayer of shifting. Except here we call it recoil, because if you have made a fusion rocket you have also created the other staple of grand space opera... A plasma cannon:)
I too have made the jump into that industry, and I would tell the OP that the key is looking for a position within it that needs the knowledge and analytical thought skills they have already developed. The finance industry is, in many ways, somewhat balkanized - there are developers and architects who speak a totally different language to bankers, accountants and fund managers and they in their turn are dealing with industry regulations that were written by lawyers rather than financial professionals. A good software guy who can learn to be as fluent in the language of business and finance as they are in the language of IT folks is well suited to take on an analysts role, taking business needs and turning them into formal sets of software requirements. Particularly with the current chaotic state of financial regulation in the world economy there's a very high level of churn in the regulations the finance industry is operating under and in-house tool-sets are needing a LOT of updates right now. Software developers and QA folks are fairly common but folks who have the ability to take business logic defined (naturally so) in the language of that business and produce detailed requirements that tell a developer EXACTLY how the code they are writing is to behave are rarer.One just has to remember that one is not actually responsible for coding it any more and stick to telling the dev teams WHAT it must do in sufficient detail that they can properly design HOW it does it:)
Exercise a little google-fu and check out the Best Buy corporate HQ near the Minneapolis/St Paul airport... When they built that it seemed so appropriate and in line with their corporate attitude that they'd be headquartered in a bunch of sandcrawlers. We try to avoid buying from them but if we're running out of options, somebody in the family will always say "well, in the last resort we could go look what the Jawas have got... "
I was afraid of that....
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When they started introducing the post-nuke flash-sideways stuff I said to myself "oh $#!+, they are going to do a damn ghost whisperer/jacobs ladder/riverworld saccharine-fest at the end of this."
The series would have stood on its own without the ENTIRE sideways arc and its preachy-teachy allegory. The sideways arc just detracted from the main "really happened" island story. Maybe it wouldnt have if it had actually been an alternate timeline and the writers had come up with an interesting way to recombine them, but the "now you're all dead and its time to go to the light" stuff?
*puke*
Just skip over every single bit of the flash-sides when you watch it on DVD.. That superfluous allegory in the metaphysical swamp just chews the legs off the story and isnt worth your time.
Well, I DO have a background in genetics and to be honest I probably wouldnt need a sequencing machine to create something evil.
Give me the enzymes and nucleotide stocks, some e coli and some M13 bacteriophage. a couple glass plates and some acrylamide I'm quite capable of sequencing without one, thank you very much!
Not that much sequencing would be required, Monsanto have already done that work and have kindly provided a template with a known target sequence (the gene for the thuringensis toxin) already under the control of a highly active promoter. So lets start our hypothetical experiment with a sample of BT corn.
Ideally we'd look for a single-peptide toxin and recent research has provided a much "better" payload than either ricin or any other plant or bacterially derived peptide toxin and again much of the required preliminary work has already been done. We're going to replace the gene for thuringensis toxin with PRP and make sure, by site directed mutagenesis, which requires the same reagents and skills as sequencing, that as many as possible of the polymorphisms that encourage the refolding of this protein into the PRP-Sc form are present. Sure it will take time and persistence, but the techniques are no challenge.
Theres your upwind "pollen bomb." Mad Corn Disease, anyone?
I am a farmer and I will say I do NOT trust corporate big ag business (nor ag college academia that relies on the same big business for funding and has tame scientists in and out of the same big business) to be self regulating as to safety concerns nor do I trust the governmental regulators because of the revolving door "jobs" aspect that occur. (exactly the same as occurs with Wall Street/Federal Reserve/Treasury/SEC revolving door jobs).
I'm an ex-molecular biologist and I dont trust 'em either. Modern genetic techniques do indeed have the potential to bring tremendous benefits and I'll even go so far as to say the profit motive has a role in driving the deployment of some of those benefits but thats only with the most rigorous and transparent testing and verification. THAT is what we dont have, instead we have regulators willing to take the word of the guys who stand to make a huge pile from a favorable result of the testing. The end result of this will indeed be, as you predict at the end of your comment, that some minor factor which in testing was argued away as insignificant or negligible will become significant when the product is deployed on such scales as are applicable to food production.
I hope we're both wrong, but I dont believe we are.
Yeah, but unless it's going to offer the surreal experience of porn in 4-D, you're probably not going to get many people biting to spend this "paltry" amount.
Now, I CAN see the average man "investing" $15K for a new holodeck o'porn...Sad? Yes. True? Damn skippy.
so really it's all about the boink applications, I guess...
Agreed it has to be documented but a decent sysadmin or infrastructure architect is not a cheap resource - You dont want your most skilled and expensive staff doing stuff that is simply i-dotting and t-crossing and more importantly not in their core competencies. I never argued against change control itself, I wouldnt want to have responsibility for anything critical in an environment without it. It does have to be practical though.
For example, the best guy I ever worked for realized this and while we still had the monolithic and byzantine change management system, the word from the boss was "for non-emergency changes, email my secretary who will handle the forms and stuff. If questions come back you still need to answer them but I dont want you wasting your time over some auditors quibble over whether something is correctly coded for the type of service request or not" - effectively dividing up the work on the process so that the staff who were best trained to handle a particular part of it did so. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the teams under this guy had the best record for change management compliance in the entire company.
It's very much like security - if it's easy to comply with a policy, everybody will. If it's hard then you're giving folks an incentive to look for loopholes and work around it. Like security change control is an essential component of managing systems and networks but you cant afford to change manage yourself into total paralysis any more than you want to secure a server by shutting it down and unplugging it.
Excessive paperwork like 30 min to fill out a change request form to do something like make a 30 second edit to a config file and sighup a daemon is stupid and you'll hear no argument from me on that. Change control per se however, is essential, particularly in a large enterprise. Running part of that kind of infrastructure without change control would be like trying to manage the kernel source tree without cvs (or svn or $REPOS_OF_CHOICE, analogy holds either way.)
The problem is not change control, its the way it is implemented. Change control methodology is designed by PHBs who haven't actually done the tech work in years, if they ever did. It's then scribbled all over by a "business analyst" who thinks a sigpipe is a plumbing problem and by the time guys actually doing the work get hold of it it has become a nightmare of procedural BS when all you really needed was a way to make sure everything you do to a live production system is documented and that anything other than emergency break-fix at least got basic testing and a second pair of eyes looking at it before rolling it out.
Patent the antibiotic, sure.. but the ribosome structure never. Discoveries and natural properties, as opposed to inventions, are explicitly excluded from patentability in the law so pretty much all those "patents on genes" and "patents on naturally occurring proteins" are ripe for challenge. Now if you use the knowledge thus discovered to create novel compounds that interact with it in specific ways, like the antibiotics mentioned then sure, go ahead and file the patent on what you made. If you take a naturally occurring protein and find a novel therapeutic use for it go ahead and patent that.. Where I have a problem with it is that the patent is being used as a blunt instrument to prevent anyone else working on other applications of what you discovered. NOT the way its supposed to work.
Am I the only one here thinking of the slight parallel with the coulter counter and the way it made such a huge difference to blood counts once a tech no longer had to sit behind a microscope staring at a haemocytometer? Only real diff is that one does whole cells and the other is planned to read sections of individual macromolecules. Only a matter of scale really. Definitely a "darn, why didnt anyone think of that before?" moment. Hope they make it work.
Get a class subscription to "Analog" and relate both the editorials and the shorter stories (ie not the big serialized ones) to world events occurring in the previous year. Obviously the editorial in each issue will be relating to more recent events than the stories...
Really? Can someone elaborate on its usefulness? I gave up on it years ago.
The whois database has one MAJOR use.. Most firewalls dont bother to look up DNS before they filter packets - too much overhead, in most cases. That means when you're creating firewall rules you're working purely in numeric addresses. So, if I determine that a bunch of cracked machines or scriptkiddies is making a nuisance of themselves, how do I blackhole an entire ISPs dynamic allocation block without being able to look up that ISPs address range in whois?
I'm still doing it manually by reviewing the logs every so often but one day I really should finish off the perl script that takes a bunch of IPs out of my firewall logs, flags the domains that own more than one of them and then parses whois output to suggest the most efficient netblocks to ignore in order to make the issue go away. (other than the entirety of.cn, of course!)
Minor nitpick.. The original antibiotics were made by fungi and other bacteria as weapons against local competitor microorganisms. Fleming just happened to catch them at it and work out how they did it. Even at that stage there were bacteria that had adapted to coexisting with these toxic neighbors. Used properly, ie only when dealing with a bacterial infection and completing the full course of treatment even after symptoms disappear, the antibiotics and the immune system between them totally wipe out the infection - none survive to develop immunity. Used badly, giving antibiotics just in case, people not being educated that just because they are feeling better doesnt mean "stop taking the pills", saturating agribusiness with even more of the stuff.. THEN you have the low levels of exposure to antibiotics that function as a non-lethal selection pressure and push bacteria into swiftly developing immunities...
You are correct we manufacture our own nemesis, but it isn't the proper use of antibiotics that does it, it's their MISuse.
In the school I worked, the kids had no problem re-downloading the programs and music every. single. day. I assumed finding and re-downloading the stuff was more fun than listening to the teacher anyway. Plus, most of them started playing flash-games on the game websites as well.
Sure they will. But its a relatively trivial task to log every SYN packet outbound from the firewall for every student machine and condense it into a nightly report of "who's been where" It may require a dedicated linux box as the logging/reporting host:) Then you put in a login popup on all the windows machines that says "Every connection to non-local sites, for whatever reason, is logged. There are no blocks or filters, just the sure and certain knowledge that we will see you did it. Every time."
I genuinely believe that more can and should be done with both currently in development and especially in future PDAs with a different form factor, perhaps the "old" PSION style horizontal-type design? The keyboard layout alone was worth it IMHO but also it seems that the screen potentials as to sizes and resolutions would be another good reason.
Hell yes! If my old psion series V hadnt died (changed the batteries 3 years ago and it refused to function ever again - locked up solid on startup. Even doing a "factory reset made no diff, it just locked up differently) I'd have never bought another PDA. It would, admittedly, be getting a little long in the tooth nowadays but if one existed I'd be looking for a cross between it and this new zaurus - perhaps something in the 640x480 format that behaved like a pure pen device when "closed" but opened up a keyboard the full size of the device like the tablet-convertible laptops? Of course running linux:)
I was actually quite sad to see the series V go away. 4 years ago when I first started working here, everybody had some palm variant but they all found something to envy about the psion.
But how are they going to know what's in your car? Its not like they open the hood and check compression ratios, etc on cars that do inspections. I hear some places do checks for what your exhaust is putting out (CA? AZ?).
Many states that do inspections that involve emissions checks are using the computer interface to have the car itself report how clean its running. This, IMHO, is the reason opening up those standards aint ever going to be allowed to fly. If its all open and anyone can code stuff for it how long do you think it will be before the automotive equivalent of script-kiddies are offering downloadable patches that cause any vehicle to lie about its emissions or set it into "emissions test mode" where the computer stubbornly refuses to run the engine in any way that causes the vehicle to fail a test that is still performed by sticking a sensor in the tailpipe.
> Religion should be left where it belongs:
> in the Dark Ages.
Does this apply to all religions - Hinduism, Islam, etc? Or just to Christianity?
Whilst coming late to the "debate" (and I only put it in quotes because this is, after all, slashdot) I'd like to take a stab at answering this one...
Personally I do not believe religion should be left in the Dark Ages, the incorporation of religion into a persons life is often a real benefit and something of a safety net in what is becoming an increasingly uncertain world. Whether I agree with the principles of a given religion or not, I can nonetheless admire the discipline and dedication it takes for any individual to live according to their faith - particularly if that faith places more stringent standards on their behaviour than does the laws governing their place of residence. To put the same point another way, it doesnt take much faith to do it if its easy!
On the other hand, what should be left in the Dark Ages is the use of religion, any religion, as the justification of any aspect of secular law. This is particularly true when talking about laws that are founded on "moral" concerns, since it is incredibly hard to reflect community values in those laws without also reflecting that communities majority religion, even if that majority religion happens to be atheism.
I have no problem with the law failing to ban activities that my religion will not allow me to participate in, I am secure enough in my faith that I'm no more going to follow somebody elses example of what to me is morally questionable albeit legal behaviour than I'm going to go out and start acting out some idiotic video game. If I do, its my fault for behaving that way, not societies for failing to make it illegal!
Similarly, to use a current hot-button issue as an example, allowing the state has an interest in recognizing the formation of a household and permitting it the option of recognizing a religiously solemnized marriage as indicative that a household has been formed does not permit it to mandate that this is the ONLY way a household can be formed. Ones own religious beliefs, on the other hand, do dictate the ways in which one can participate in forming a household and nothing the law says or anyone else may do should alter that. This is not the moral relativism many people are so fond of deriding, in fact its quite the opposite - its a refusal to allow my own morals to be compromised by the simple means of applying the stricter of the two standards available, the laws and my own, to my behaviour. Provided I do not impinge on anothers human or civil rights by doing so, how can this be wrong? One of the attributes of a moral society is that it can afford liberal laws without risking its fundamental principles. Personally I think we have a society that is strong and mature enough to be openminded.
Have to say this one makes a lot of sense. Now, I could be biased based on having been a unix admin specialising in Solaris for the last 13 years or even by the way it seems that the parent was posted by a fellow-swordsman (damn, I wish I'd thought of using "swordgeek" as a handle;) ) but my take on Suns attitude for Solaris x86 is this...
For the SPARC product line and the enterprise servers that Sun build with it Solaris is the obvious choice. It would be sheer folly for Sun to market or recommend any other OS for this platform. At the other end of the market, in low-end machines Sun used to push Solaris x86 real hard, but then Linux matured a bit (along with all the other freely available *nix-alikes) and Sun thought the writing was on the wall and tried to drop Solaris x86. Lots of geeks using it at work where they also had SPARC boxes objected - they wanted the same OS with the same support contract on the other platform. Sun had to reintroduce it, but at the same time they were developing a line of x86-based products that were designed with Linux in mind. Now that this other product line has arrived, Solaris x86 is something of an orphaned project, having had its place in the companies product strategy grabbed by Linux. Personally I would applaud Sun for continuing to develop Solaris x86 and keep the patches and releases coming for this OS at the same service level at which they maintain the SPARC version - How different is this from a certain WA-based company with their "upgrade strategy"?
Personally I use Linux on x86 and Solaris on SPARC - I'm sufficiently familiar with both to be aware of the differences so they cause me no problems migrating stuff from one to the other. The only reason I'd consider Solaris x86 is if I was building a mammoth grid for numerical computing, and so far I havent needed to do that.
So then all someone would have to do is bounce an e-mail looking like a Microsoft advertisement off of a server in Malaysia and send it to Michael, and BAM!; instant legal action against the Evil Empire!
Lovely thought but I'm not talking about something as stupid as the DMCA-type "Take down this infringing site before we even discuss whether its infringing or not". No regulation of anything, let alone a phenomenon in an inherently anarchic environment like the internet, can afford to be that draconian or that devoid of appropriate boundaries.
The bottom line is that the guys generating the bulk of this shit do it to make money - if the folks with the money dont want to spend it on something that is potentially going to cost them more in financial terms and hassle than it gains them in sales they will spend it on some other way of marketing. If spamming brings no benefit to the spammers they will go off looking for some other way to get rich.
At my work I keep my mail logs for 6 weeks online and then for as long as the corporate types mandate preservation of backup tapes. If anyone spammed via any of the mailservers I control I'd have their ass. If anyone wanted me to prove that a particular mailburst didnt come from those servers I could do that too, probably in a matter of seconds. I know how little effort this takes so the prospect of proving that a raft of emails claiming to be from us were forgeries isnt that daunting. Send 'em from somewhere else and reference our webservers in there its not a technical problem, its a question of the corporate officers showing that they never paid anyone else to do it. For a business keeping proper records and not inclined to shred them at the first sniff of rat thats not a big deal either. If they dont keep proper records or manage to conveniently lose them then I'd say they deserve to go the same way as a certain energy trader.
Exactly how would such a law be enforced? It's not as if these companies sending all this SPAM readily identify themselves. And what about SPAM originating from outside of the U.S.?
Its a foregone conclusion that the places that originate the spam will be almost untraceable and outside the jurisdiction of whoever traces the small fraction that can be found. Going after the spammers directly is futile, but spam is useless unless it gives some way for the sucker to respond, usually this is a web page. If that web page or any of the web-bug images in the html email (which sadly we'll never be rid of now!) point to a server in US jurisdiction, thats where the enforcement action should be directed. If its a foreign domain is either admin or billing contact listed within the US?
Somewhere, somehow, somebody has to pay for the spammers time and expenses. If causing a spam to be sent or placing oneself in a position to profit from a spam campaign in any way made a corp or individual liable to the same penalties as if they had sent it themselves then the advertising spammers get starved of cash, leaving just the fraudsters, whos activities are already illegal.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the government to grow a brain and feel the cluestick though.
Another huge problem is that you can't fast forward or skim-listen to audio like you can with text or to a lesser degree video
So long as the audio capability is full-duplex (ie it can listen at the same time as speaking the list) this isnt a problem. We are, after all, talking about a list here, discrete items of data. If we're assuming enough voice-recognition and NLP capability to process spoken queries its probably trivial to require a feature that allows a spoken word to control the list.. How about saying "Skip" as soon as you determine you dont want this item? This should preempt the playback of that item and move immediately to the next. If the algorithm controlling list ranking is really smart it could then reorder the remaining items to reduce the rank of unheard items similar to the ones you skipped, making it more likely you'll hit the one you really want sooner.
Needless to say, "similarity" is subjective enough that geeks like us will want so many config options on this feature that the most hardcore tweaker will be kept happy for a while, but so long as its defaults will work for Joe Luser wheres the harm in that?
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Because these labels are all about creating fear in the mind of the consumer. There are no studies showing that GMOs are unsafe, so opponents are trying to skip the science and just scare people.
Some may be but not all. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The studies mostly just haven't been done, or if they were done they were internal to companies like Monsanto and were not published in a peer-reviewed journal. If you're introducing a gene for a foreign protein that the parent crop could never produce then that should be treated like any other food additive and should require testing for safety and the results of that testing to be part of the public record. Since corporatist governments will never go that far, at least label the suckers so those of us that frankly do not trust companies like Monsanto to operate in the publics best interest can avoid 'em. I'm NOT saying GMOs in the food chain is a bad thing per se, they can be a huge benefit in terms of agricultural productivity and can advance the business of food production by leaps that were inconceivable to previous generations. But as long as we're dependent on a big corporation saying "Trust us, they're fine. Eat up!" I'll be saying "No, thanks!"
Seriously, EVERYTHING YOU EAT is GMO. The vast majority was done by selective breeding and grafting, a very small amount by directly fiddling with the genes. There is not a single crop that hasn't been modified by humans in some way.
Frankly, that's a bogus argument. Selective breeding requires that the "parent" stock CAN interbreed. Introducing genes that code for some foreign protein that is derived from a totally different species is a different kettle of fish entirely. Speaking as a (former) molecular biologist I want that stuff labelled.
So suppose this works as described and we have a functional method of initiating pulses of controlled fusion in a rocket engine that when vented out the nozzle produces usable thrust. Let's make that nozzle thinner and a bit more tubular than conical - a few hefty magnets around to to keep all that fusing stuff in a nice thin stream. While we're at it lets anchor the other end of the rocket to something HUGE that the thrust isn't going to have a prayer of shifting. Except here we call it recoil, because if you have made a fusion rocket you have also created the other staple of grand space opera... A plasma cannon :)
I too have made the jump into that industry, and I would tell the OP that the key is looking for a position within it that needs the knowledge and analytical thought skills they have already developed. The finance industry is, in many ways, somewhat balkanized - there are developers and architects who speak a totally different language to bankers, accountants and fund managers and they in their turn are dealing with industry regulations that were written by lawyers rather than financial professionals. A good software guy who can learn to be as fluent in the language of business and finance as they are in the language of IT folks is well suited to take on an analysts role, taking business needs and turning them into formal sets of software requirements. Particularly with the current chaotic state of financial regulation in the world economy there's a very high level of churn in the regulations the finance industry is operating under and in-house tool-sets are needing a LOT of updates right now. Software developers and QA folks are fairly common but folks who have the ability to take business logic defined (naturally so) in the language of that business and produce detailed requirements that tell a developer EXACTLY how the code they are writing is to behave are rarer.One just has to remember that one is not actually responsible for coding it any more and stick to telling the dev teams WHAT it must do in sufficient detail that they can properly design HOW it does it :)
Exercise a little google-fu and check out the Best Buy corporate HQ near the Minneapolis/St Paul airport... When they built that it seemed so appropriate and in line with their corporate attitude that they'd be headquartered in a bunch of sandcrawlers. We try to avoid buying from them but if we're running out of options, somebody in the family will always say "well, in the last resort we could go look what the Jawas have got... "
When they started introducing the post-nuke flash-sideways stuff I said to myself "oh $#!+, they are going to do a damn ghost whisperer/jacobs ladder/riverworld saccharine-fest at the end of this."
The series would have stood on its own without the ENTIRE sideways arc and its preachy-teachy allegory. The sideways arc just detracted from the main "really happened" island story. Maybe it wouldnt have if it had actually been an alternate timeline and the writers had come up with an interesting way to recombine them, but the "now you're all dead and its time to go to the light" stuff?
*puke*
Just skip over every single bit of the flash-sides when you watch it on DVD.. That superfluous allegory in the metaphysical swamp just chews the legs off the story and isnt worth your time.
Give me the enzymes and nucleotide stocks, some e coli and some M13 bacteriophage. a couple glass plates and some acrylamide I'm quite capable of sequencing without one, thank you very much!
Not that much sequencing would be required, Monsanto have already done that work and have kindly provided a template with a known target sequence (the gene for the thuringensis toxin) already under the control of a highly active promoter. So lets start our hypothetical experiment with a sample of BT corn.
Ideally we'd look for a single-peptide toxin and recent research has provided a much "better" payload than either ricin or any other plant or bacterially derived peptide toxin and again much of the required preliminary work has already been done. We're going to replace the gene for thuringensis toxin with PRP and make sure, by site directed mutagenesis, which requires the same reagents and skills as sequencing, that as many as possible of the polymorphisms that encourage the refolding of this protein into the PRP-Sc form are present. Sure it will take time and persistence, but the techniques are no challenge.
Theres your upwind "pollen bomb." Mad Corn Disease, anyone?
I'm an ex-molecular biologist and I dont trust 'em either. Modern genetic techniques do indeed have the potential to bring tremendous benefits and I'll even go so far as to say the profit motive has a role in driving the deployment of some of those benefits but thats only with the most rigorous and transparent testing and verification. THAT is what we dont have, instead we have regulators willing to take the word of the guys who stand to make a huge pile from a favorable result of the testing. The end result of this will indeed be, as you predict at the end of your comment, that some minor factor which in testing was argued away as insignificant or negligible will become significant when the product is deployed on such scales as are applicable to food production.
I hope we're both wrong, but I dont believe we are.
Yeah, but unless it's going to offer the surreal experience of porn in 4-D, you're probably not going to get many people biting to spend this "paltry" amount.
Now, I CAN see the average man "investing" $15K for a new holodeck o'porn...Sad? Yes. True? Damn skippy.
so really it's all about the boink applications, I guess...
For example, the best guy I ever worked for realized this and while we still had the monolithic and byzantine change management system, the word from the boss was "for non-emergency changes, email my secretary who will handle the forms and stuff. If questions come back you still need to answer them but I dont want you wasting your time over some auditors quibble over whether something is correctly coded for the type of service request or not" - effectively dividing up the work on the process so that the staff who were best trained to handle a particular part of it did so. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the teams under this guy had the best record for change management compliance in the entire company.
It's very much like security - if it's easy to comply with a policy, everybody will. If it's hard then you're giving folks an incentive to look for loopholes and work around it. Like security change control is an essential component of managing systems and networks but you cant afford to change manage yourself into total paralysis any more than you want to secure a server by shutting it down and unplugging it.
Excessive paperwork like 30 min to fill out a change request form to do something like make a 30 second edit to a config file and sighup a daemon is stupid and you'll hear no argument from me on that. Change control per se however, is essential, particularly in a large enterprise. Running part of that kind of infrastructure without change control would be like trying to manage the kernel source tree without cvs (or svn or $REPOS_OF_CHOICE, analogy holds either way.)
The problem is not change control, its the way it is implemented. Change control methodology is designed by PHBs who haven't actually done the tech work in years, if they ever did. It's then scribbled all over by a "business analyst" who thinks a sigpipe is a plumbing problem and by the time guys actually doing the work get hold of it it has become a nightmare of procedural BS when all you really needed was a way to make sure everything you do to a live production system is documented and that anything other than emergency break-fix at least got basic testing and a second pair of eyes looking at it before rolling it out.
According to her online profile, unphotoshopped that model is 5'8" and wears a size 6, measuring 33-24-35. No need to alter those proportions at all.
Patent the antibiotic, sure.. but the ribosome structure never. Discoveries and natural properties, as opposed to inventions, are explicitly excluded from patentability in the law so pretty much all those "patents on genes" and "patents on naturally occurring proteins" are ripe for challenge. Now if you use the knowledge thus discovered to create novel compounds that interact with it in specific ways, like the antibiotics mentioned then sure, go ahead and file the patent on what you made. If you take a naturally occurring protein and find a novel therapeutic use for it go ahead and patent that.. Where I have a problem with it is that the patent is being used as a blunt instrument to prevent anyone else working on other applications of what you discovered. NOT the way its supposed to work.
Am I the only one here thinking of the slight parallel with the coulter counter and the way it made such a huge difference to blood counts once a tech no longer had to sit behind a microscope staring at a haemocytometer? Only real diff is that one does whole cells and the other is planned to read sections of individual macromolecules. Only a matter of scale really. Definitely a "darn, why didnt anyone think of that before?" moment. Hope they make it work.
Get a class subscription to "Analog" and relate both the editorials and the shorter stories (ie not the big serialized ones) to world events occurring in the previous year. Obviously the editorial in each issue will be relating to more recent events than the stories...
The whois database has one MAJOR use.. Most firewalls dont bother to look up DNS before they filter packets - too much overhead, in most cases. That means when you're creating firewall rules you're working purely in numeric addresses. So, if I determine that a bunch of cracked machines or scriptkiddies is making a nuisance of themselves, how do I blackhole an entire ISPs dynamic allocation block without being able to look up that ISPs address range in whois?
I'm still doing it manually by reviewing the logs every so often but one day I really should finish off the perl script that takes a bunch of IPs out of my firewall logs, flags the domains that own more than one of them and then parses whois output to suggest the most efficient netblocks to ignore in order to make the issue go away. (other than the entirety of .cn, of course!)
Minor nitpick.. The original antibiotics were made by fungi and other bacteria as weapons against local competitor microorganisms. Fleming just happened to catch them at it and work out how they did it. Even at that stage there were bacteria that had adapted to coexisting with these toxic neighbors. Used properly, ie only when dealing with a bacterial infection and completing the full course of treatment even after symptoms disappear, the antibiotics and the immune system between them totally wipe out the infection - none survive to develop immunity. Used badly, giving antibiotics just in case, people not being educated that just because they are feeling better doesnt mean "stop taking the pills", saturating agribusiness with even more of the stuff.. THEN you have the low levels of exposure to antibiotics that function as a non-lethal selection pressure and push bacteria into swiftly developing immunities...
You are correct we manufacture our own nemesis, but it isn't the proper use of antibiotics that does it, it's their MISuse.
Sure they will. But its a relatively trivial task to log every SYN packet outbound from the firewall for every student machine and condense it into a nightly report of "who's been where" It may require a dedicated linux box as the logging/reporting host :) Then you put in a login popup on all the windows machines that says "Every connection to non-local sites, for whatever reason, is logged. There are no blocks or filters, just the sure and certain knowledge that we will see you did it. Every time."
Hell yes! If my old psion series V hadnt died (changed the batteries 3 years ago and it refused to function ever again - locked up solid on startup. Even doing a "factory reset made no diff, it just locked up differently) I'd have never bought another PDA. It would, admittedly, be getting a little long in the tooth nowadays but if one existed I'd be looking for a cross between it and this new zaurus - perhaps something in the 640x480 format that behaved like a pure pen device when "closed" but opened up a keyboard the full size of the device like the tablet-convertible laptops? Of course running linux :)
I was actually quite sad to see the series V go away. 4 years ago when I first started working here, everybody had some palm variant but they all found something to envy about the psion.
Many states that do inspections that involve emissions checks are using the computer interface to have the car itself report how clean its running. This, IMHO, is the reason opening up those standards aint ever going to be allowed to fly. If its all open and anyone can code stuff for it how long do you think it will be before the automotive equivalent of script-kiddies are offering downloadable patches that cause any vehicle to lie about its emissions or set it into "emissions test mode" where the computer stubbornly refuses to run the engine in any way that causes the vehicle to fail a test that is still performed by sticking a sensor in the tailpipe.
Whilst coming late to the "debate" (and I only put it in quotes because this is, after all, slashdot) I'd like to take a stab at answering this one...
Personally I do not believe religion should be left in the Dark Ages, the incorporation of religion into a persons life is often a real benefit and something of a safety net in what is becoming an increasingly uncertain world. Whether I agree with the principles of a given religion or not, I can nonetheless admire the discipline and dedication it takes for any individual to live according to their faith - particularly if that faith places more stringent standards on their behaviour than does the laws governing their place of residence. To put the same point another way, it doesnt take much faith to do it if its easy!
On the other hand, what should be left in the Dark Ages is the use of religion, any religion, as the justification of any aspect of secular law. This is particularly true when talking about laws that are founded on "moral" concerns, since it is incredibly hard to reflect community values in those laws without also reflecting that communities majority religion, even if that majority religion happens to be atheism.
I have no problem with the law failing to ban activities that my religion will not allow me to participate in, I am secure enough in my faith that I'm no more going to follow somebody elses example of what to me is morally questionable albeit legal behaviour than I'm going to go out and start acting out some idiotic video game. If I do, its my fault for behaving that way, not societies for failing to make it illegal!
Similarly, to use a current hot-button issue as an example, allowing the state has an interest in recognizing the formation of a household and permitting it the option of recognizing a religiously solemnized marriage as indicative that a household has been formed does not permit it to mandate that this is the ONLY way a household can be formed. Ones own religious beliefs, on the other hand, do dictate the ways in which one can participate in forming a household and nothing the law says or anyone else may do should alter that. This is not the moral relativism many people are so fond of deriding, in fact its quite the opposite - its a refusal to allow my own morals to be compromised by the simple means of applying the stricter of the two standards available, the laws and my own, to my behaviour. Provided I do not impinge on anothers human or civil rights by doing so, how can this be wrong? One of the attributes of a moral society is that it can afford liberal laws without risking its fundamental principles. Personally I think we have a society that is strong and mature enough to be openminded.
For the SPARC product line and the enterprise servers that Sun build with it Solaris is the obvious choice. It would be sheer folly for Sun to market or recommend any other OS for this platform. At the other end of the market, in low-end machines Sun used to push Solaris x86 real hard, but then Linux matured a bit (along with all the other freely available *nix-alikes) and Sun thought the writing was on the wall and tried to drop Solaris x86. Lots of geeks using it at work where they also had SPARC boxes objected - they wanted the same OS with the same support contract on the other platform. Sun had to reintroduce it, but at the same time they were developing a line of x86-based products that were designed with Linux in mind. Now that this other product line has arrived, Solaris x86 is something of an orphaned project, having had its place in the companies product strategy grabbed by Linux. Personally I would applaud Sun for continuing to develop Solaris x86 and keep the patches and releases coming for this OS at the same service level at which they maintain the SPARC version - How different is this from a certain WA-based company with their "upgrade strategy"?
Personally I use Linux on x86 and Solaris on SPARC - I'm sufficiently familiar with both to be aware of the differences so they cause me no problems migrating stuff from one to the other. The only reason I'd consider Solaris x86 is if I was building a mammoth grid for numerical computing, and so far I havent needed to do that.
So then all someone would have to do is bounce an e-mail looking like a Microsoft advertisement off of a server in Malaysia and send it to Michael, and BAM!; instant legal action against the Evil Empire!
Lovely thought but I'm not talking about something as stupid as the DMCA-type "Take down this infringing site before we even discuss whether its infringing or not". No regulation of anything, let alone a phenomenon in an inherently anarchic environment like the internet, can afford to be that draconian or that devoid of appropriate boundaries.
The bottom line is that the guys generating the bulk of this shit do it to make money - if the folks with the money dont want to spend it on something that is potentially going to cost them more in financial terms and hassle than it gains them in sales they will spend it on some other way of marketing. If spamming brings no benefit to the spammers they will go off looking for some other way to get rich.
At my work I keep my mail logs for 6 weeks online and then for as long as the corporate types mandate preservation of backup tapes. If anyone spammed via any of the mailservers I control I'd have their ass. If anyone wanted me to prove that a particular mailburst didnt come from those servers I could do that too, probably in a matter of seconds. I know how little effort this takes so the prospect of proving that a raft of emails claiming to be from us were forgeries isnt that daunting. Send 'em from somewhere else and reference our webservers in there its not a technical problem, its a question of the corporate officers showing that they never paid anyone else to do it. For a business keeping proper records and not inclined to shred them at the first sniff of rat thats not a big deal either. If they dont keep proper records or manage to conveniently lose them then I'd say they deserve to go the same way as a certain energy trader.
Exactly how would such a law be enforced? It's not as if these companies sending all this SPAM readily identify themselves. And what about SPAM originating from outside of the U.S.?
Its a foregone conclusion that the places that originate the spam will be almost untraceable and outside the jurisdiction of whoever traces the small fraction that can be found. Going after the spammers directly is futile, but spam is useless unless it gives some way for the sucker to respond, usually this is a web page. If that web page or any of the web-bug images in the html email (which sadly we'll never be rid of now!) point to a server in US jurisdiction, thats where the enforcement action should be directed. If its a foreign domain is either admin or billing contact listed within the US?
Somewhere, somehow, somebody has to pay for the spammers time and expenses. If causing a spam to be sent or placing oneself in a position to profit from a spam campaign in any way made a corp or individual liable to the same penalties as if they had sent it themselves then the advertising spammers get starved of cash, leaving just the fraudsters, whos activities are already illegal.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the government to grow a brain and feel the cluestick though.
Another huge problem is that you can't fast forward or skim-listen to audio like you can with text or to a lesser degree video
So long as the audio capability is full-duplex (ie it can listen at the same time as speaking the list) this isnt a problem. We are, after all, talking about a list here, discrete items of data. If we're assuming enough voice-recognition and NLP capability to process spoken queries its probably trivial to require a feature that allows a spoken word to control the list.. How about saying "Skip" as soon as you determine you dont want this item? This should preempt the playback of that item and move immediately to the next. If the algorithm controlling list ranking is really smart it could then reorder the remaining items to reduce the rank of unheard items similar to the ones you skipped, making it more likely you'll hit the one you really want sooner.
Needless to say, "similarity" is subjective enough that geeks like us will want so many config options on this feature that the most hardcore tweaker will be kept happy for a while, but so long as its defaults will work for Joe Luser wheres the harm in that?