...jumped through the window in her building, across the street, and through that other one
Okay. I'll bite. What, exactly, would you have preferred? The writers bother to create an environment in which selected characters can manipulate what others call reality. These selected characters then use this talent to their advantage to battle their enemies. And you complain.
How do you have forward looking SF while not escaping the constraints of the present? This kind of entertainment is an escape. It's "gee, this is a fun idea. Let's see if we can get a budget." Would you pay to see a movie of the average suburbanites having an average week? No fucking way. That's boring as hell, which is the opposite of entertaining.
I can fully appreciate that you didn't like it, but I don't understand why you are upset that the screenwriters go beyond reality. They're not suggesting at all that this is possible in reality.
Ha ha! there is the problem. If M$ includes the capability to rip mp3' s in WMP, then some idiot who just got hisself one them computer things and done heard that you can rip yer cuntry music will look on his hard drive and find---WMP! and when he _does_ rip the music to mp3 he will find that it sucks shit. Then he might try WMA and find that it sucks far less shit. This will endear him to M$ and he will be on the front lines of the counteroffensive. He will lobby the hardware manufacturers to include WMA support to the portables and he will tell his friends that mp3 sucks. He may not be able to get the files to transfer to them, but hey, he's new at this innernet thing. He'll just lend the CD to them. No big deal, right?
I'm already pissed that I just had to buy another copy of Mozart's Requiem because my legal CD cracked. I've vowed to encode all of my music from now on and to keep my CD's in a safe place. I don't want some punk-ass bitch in Redmond telling me that I have to upgrade to this eventually, and that he's gonna break my software.
It is becoming clearer that windoze is more of an occasional gaming OS than anything else. When Wine can emulate games, we're all set.
The reason being that Fat is a parody of Michael Jackson's Bad song and video, but the star wars song (don't know real name) is not a parody of Don McLean's American Pie, but just uses that song to parody Star Wars.
Sure it's a parody of the song. What's the dividig line? Why can't I say that "Fat" isn't really a parody of "Bad", but a parody of fat people?
Al's just a really nice guy. He has no legal responsilbility to get the original artist's permission. As an example, take "Amish Paradise". Al thought that he had permission, but in reality Coolio didn't want any parodies done of Gansta's Paradise, as it was "too serious". Al released Amish Paradise to Coolio's chagrin, but there's nothing that he can do to Al legally.
Many architects don't like to use skylights anymore because they tend to not be maintained properly, especially by school systems. They then leak and the architect gets shit, so they end up being more trouble than they are worth.
In my middle school, I remember that there were lots of skylights in the cafeteria, but they were all sealed up.
ostensibly if a machine doesn't need a fan, it's not generating as much heat as one that does.
Example: the new apple g4's have a truly ginourmous heatsink--but they also have a huge (120mm!) fan in there, 'cuz it's cramped and that puppy sucks power.
the imac, otoh, doesn't throw as much heat and so can afford to be shoved in a translucent polycarbonate case with a CRT on top.
yeah, you can request not to be put on the list--BUT, if you do you're not allowed to look at it. I imagine that most people just figure that there's no harm in putting their info up and that being able to use the directory is good.
I just made a dummy account. Screw them.
The idea is that yes, they will. They're trying to engineer plants that require far less monetary outlay in herbicides, pesticides, and general care. This leads to higher yields at lower cost. The price of the seed every year should be covered.
>What's next, a farmer next to a Monsanto-poisoned field gets the pollen in his, Monsanto comes in with the jackbooted thugs and burns his crops?
Since the GE crops are sterile, this isn't a problem.
I also wouldn't call this "poisoning". Nobody _has_ to buy the seed.
I do not, however, think that the guy in the story should be prosecuted for this. He had no way of knowing what he was growing. Monsanto should incorporate a gene that makes the plants red (an ochre mutation).
If it can detect a few hundred organisms in 20 minutes, that is not enough time to grow them or do anything else that depends on reproducing them. The only other technology I'm aware of that could do that is the use of fluorescently-labelled DNA probes to detect the pathogen DNA directly. It seems likely, to me (IANAbiologist) anyway, that this could detect both bacteria and DNA-based viruses.
IAA biologist. DNA probing, especially in whole bacteria, takes more than 20 minutes, and won't do what you're talking about. The only thing you could do is to have several strands that would indicate different bacteria and label them with different fluorescent dyes. This would be messy, especially in the field.
The boon for food safety is obvious, but the boon in removing the fangs of bio-warfare is just as great. If you can detect a spray of bugs on the battlefield or in the New York subway, identify them by species in 20 minutes and have a readout of their genetic modifications (antibiotic resistance genes, etc.) in another 20,
umm... no. sorry. not now, anyway. DNA sequencing is kind of a bitch. first, you have to get the DNA out of the bugs and then amplify it with PCR. To do PCR, you have to cut up the DNA and put the pieces in a bacterial vector. (bacteria have a circular piece of DNA called a plasmid. You can stick a short [2500 bp] piece of your DNA into it). Now you can sequence the DNA. This is accomplished by separating the two strands and placing them in a reaction phial with all of the enzymes and the nucleotide triphosphates, as well as some that are altered in such a way that DNA polymerisation does not continue once one is attached. What ends up happening is that you get strands that are of all lengths. You also tag these altered nucleotides with a fluorescent dye so they show up differently on the gel.
The gel is the limiting factor. It takes a lot of space to resolve the different length strands, so you can only read about 300 bp per gel. If you need more than that, you have to do the whole process over again.
To sequence a bacterium will take a couple of weeks, using equipment that is most definately not portable.
So don't cringe. You can set a lot of mainstream CD players and rippers to use (FreeDB). Its datbase is extensive and it's free and guaranteed to be GPL'd.
The problem is that the OS thinks that it knows more than I do... for example, certain text editors on the mac will tag the files in such a way that netscape won't parse any html in the file. I find it very annoying as a non-mac user to have to figure out how to change the internal file descriptor. I know that it's very easy, but it's not obvious. On a Wintel machine, the extension controls everything, so if a program is freaking out, just change the extension.
I _hate_ it when programs act as if they know what I want to do all the time. If I want to edit a file in some other way than it was created, it should be easy to force the OS to open it up in whatever I want, and not treat it differently.
Yeah. Ad proxies like Guidescope (it's free!) look for any image that is served from a different domain and block it. It's a great way to kill bugs without screwing up most layouts.
We intelligent Americans hate the English system as much as the rest of the world. It's just Jimmy-Bob-Joe down the corner who don't want no Urrupean bullshit on his pickup truck.
I think that we just need to go cold turkey like the Canucks did. The hicks will deal.
I read an "editor's challenge" in Popular Mechanics once, on this topic. There were two letters published. The one in favour of metrification was from a well-spoken Canadian and he outlined his argument well. The one against metrification was poorly organised and his main arguments were: "well, the French had to come up with an easy system because they killed all of their smart people in the revolution" and "The metre is less accurate than the inch" whatever he was smoking, it was some good shit.
I agree with you. The RIAA wants to make deals with hardware manufacturers to limit copying and even have some content expire--so that we're effectively licensing the music.
They do not, however, want the responsibility of customer service that should come with a license agreement--if I walk into a music store, show the clerk a shattered CD, and ask for a new one at production cost, he'll laugh at me.
Bastards, all. I haven't bought a CD in years, mostly because all the new stuff sucks. Put out good music, and we may be able to talk.
The most interesting thing about this is that it's totally concevable that you would drop $160 plus access to DAT equipment. With CD's priced the way they are, people can justify that kind of hardware--it's only 8 CD's!
They don't see that if they just reduced the price of the discs, we wouldn't be nearly so inclined to steal the music.
Oh well. You can't enlighten the masses unless they want to be..
Again, look to Stephenson's Diamond Age. The Toner Wars are what will happen. If you think you're bugged, design a hunter-killer to destroy any nanobot that it encounters. They're so cheap that it could be part of your home's security system.
yeah... I mean, the article seems to talk about desk space and clutter.. why not just use rackmount systems and a KVM switch?
The only thing I can think is that cabling would be nasty, but who cares?
The Honda Insight has an optional wind generator that mounts to the roof when you're not driving.
Ars Technica did a review of said car.
This negates the toxics problem of solar brought up by another poster.
I hate this new trend of people running to the government when they think their children are in danger. They don't want to think that they have any responsibility in the matter, so they run to the feds.
My local library has a children's section, which has censorware installed. All of the other computers, AFAIK, are open.
Why do people who find something offensive assume that everyone does, or that it's universally considered bad? I guess it just happens that some of the more easily offended types have a lot of political power.
There is no need to censor the web in libraries... people become very upset when you mention banning books, and react as if it's a quaint thing that real people don't do anymore. They react to censoring the web as a necessity, though.
From where does this disparity come? Are people that afraid of technology? Do they really not get it?
While I am not personally very fond of MS and its products, I'm really not sure what good the attack by the US government has done. I don't think that it will do what they think it will do. Anyway, to steer more towards the topic: Look at the cracked pages mirror on attrition. They have stats on the os's of the cracked servers . Look at these. Currently, IIS, with approx 40% of the server market (yeah, yeah, I know, there are other servers, don't flame me.) has 56% of the cracked pages. Apache, OTOH, with 60% of the market, has 28% of cracked pages. Many of these can also be explained by sleeping admins who don't patch known bugs. The problem inherent with the big, lumbering beast that is MS is that nothing, even the most critical of security flaws, gets fixed until another SP comes out. When something goes wrong with your Linux distro, some hacker somewhere codes a fix and shoots it up to a server from which it is distributed around the world. If the admins are paying attention, they will very quickly have a secure system again. There is also the fact that many service packs make the NT system unstable. For example, I installed SP 5(?) on my dad's NT box and I couldn't install MS media player. It will _run_ if previously installed, but the installer chokes and dies.
People flock to MS because they think it's the easiest solution. It is, in a way--the setup is a lot less intimidating. But most of these people can't ever hope to fix their windows box. They have to hire somebody like me, at astronomical wages, to press enter or something. If they were using Linux, chances are that it wouldn't break as often, and when it did, they'd hire the same dude. They're just scared, but I doubt that they would notice if you just plunked them down in front of their shiny new box with WordPerfect for Linux running.
What? Some of the high quality Ricoh media is rated for _centuries_. I have lots of burned CD's (crappy bulk media) that are a couple of years old, and they read fine.
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...jumped through the window in her building, across the street, and through that other one
Okay. I'll bite. What, exactly, would you have preferred? The writers bother to create an environment in which selected characters can manipulate what others call reality. These selected characters then use this talent to their advantage to battle their enemies. And you complain.
How do you have forward looking SF while not escaping the constraints of the present? This kind of entertainment is an escape. It's "gee, this is a fun idea. Let's see if we can get a budget." Would you pay to see a movie of the average suburbanites having an average week? No fucking way. That's boring as hell, which is the opposite of entertaining.
I can fully appreciate that you didn't like it, but I don't understand why you are upset that the screenwriters go beyond reality. They're not suggesting at all that this is possible in reality.
Ha ha! there is the problem. If M$ includes the capability to rip mp3' s in WMP, then some idiot who just got hisself one them computer things and done heard that you can rip yer cuntry music will look on his hard drive and find---WMP! and when he _does_ rip the music to mp3 he will find that it sucks shit. Then he might try WMA and find that it sucks far less shit. This will endear him to M$ and he will be on the front lines of the counteroffensive. He will lobby the hardware manufacturers to include WMA support to the portables and he will tell his friends that mp3 sucks. He may not be able to get the files to transfer to them, but hey, he's new at this innernet thing. He'll just lend the CD to them. No big deal, right?
I'm already pissed that I just had to buy another copy of Mozart's Requiem because my legal CD cracked. I've vowed to encode all of my music from now on and to keep my CD's in a safe place. I don't want some punk-ass bitch in Redmond telling me that I have to upgrade to this eventually, and that he's gonna break my software.
It is becoming clearer that windoze is more of an occasional gaming OS than anything else. When Wine can emulate games, we're all set.
Actually, it's, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down a sewer and die."
-Mel Brooks
yup.. That's why I said "..do to Al legally".
The reason being that Fat is a parody of Michael Jackson's Bad song and video, but the star wars song (don't know real name) is not a parody of Don McLean's American Pie, but just uses that song to parody Star Wars.
Sure it's a parody of the song. What's the dividig line? Why can't I say that "Fat" isn't really a parody of "Bad", but a parody of fat people?
Al's just a really nice guy. He has no legal responsilbility to get the original artist's permission. As an example, take "Amish Paradise". Al thought that he had permission, but in reality Coolio didn't want any parodies done of Gansta's Paradise, as it was "too serious". Al released Amish Paradise to Coolio's chagrin, but there's nothing that he can do to Al legally.
Many architects don't like to use skylights anymore because they tend to not be maintained properly, especially by school systems. They then leak and the architect gets shit, so they end up being more trouble than they are worth.
In my middle school, I remember that there were lots of skylights in the cafeteria, but they were all sealed up.
ostensibly if a machine doesn't need a fan, it's not generating as much heat as one that does.
Example: the new apple g4's have a truly ginourmous heatsink--but they also have a huge (120mm!) fan in there, 'cuz it's cramped and that puppy sucks power.
the imac, otoh, doesn't throw as much heat and so can afford to be shoved in a translucent polycarbonate case with a CRT on top.
yeah, you can request not to be put on the list--BUT, if you do you're not allowed to look at it. I imagine that most people just figure that there's no harm in putting their info up and that being able to use the directory is good.
I just made a dummy account. Screw them.
>farmers will love sterile crops!
The idea is that yes, they will. They're trying to engineer plants that require far less monetary outlay in herbicides, pesticides, and general care. This leads to higher yields at lower cost. The price of the seed every year should be covered. >What's next, a farmer next to a Monsanto-poisoned field gets the pollen in his, Monsanto comes in with the jackbooted thugs and burns his crops?
Since the GE crops are sterile, this isn't a problem.
I also wouldn't call this "poisoning". Nobody _has_ to buy the seed.
I do not, however, think that the guy in the story should be prosecuted for this. He had no way of knowing what he was growing. Monsanto should incorporate a gene that makes the plants red (an ochre mutation).
If it can detect a few hundred organisms in 20 minutes, that is not enough time to grow them or do anything else that depends on reproducing them. The only other technology I'm aware of that could do that is the use of fluorescently-labelled DNA probes to detect the pathogen DNA directly. It seems likely, to me (IANAbiologist) anyway, that this could detect both bacteria and DNA-based viruses.
IAA biologist. DNA probing, especially in whole bacteria, takes more than 20 minutes, and won't do what you're talking about. The only thing you could do is to have several strands that would indicate different bacteria and label them with different fluorescent dyes. This would be messy, especially in the field.
The boon for food safety is obvious, but the boon in removing the fangs of bio-warfare is just as great. If you can detect a spray of bugs on the battlefield or in the New York subway, identify them by species in 20 minutes and have a readout of their genetic modifications (antibiotic resistance genes, etc.) in another 20,
umm... no. sorry. not now, anyway. DNA sequencing is kind of a bitch. first, you have to get the DNA out of the bugs and then amplify it with PCR.
To do PCR, you have to cut up the DNA and put the pieces in a bacterial vector. (bacteria have a circular piece of DNA called a plasmid. You can stick a short [2500 bp] piece of your DNA into it). Now you can sequence the DNA. This is accomplished by separating the two strands and placing them in a reaction phial with all of the enzymes and the nucleotide triphosphates, as well as some that are altered in such a way that DNA polymerisation does not continue once one is attached. What ends up happening is that you get strands that are of all lengths. You also tag these altered nucleotides with a fluorescent dye so they show up differently on the gel.
The gel is the limiting factor. It takes a lot of space to resolve the different length strands, so you can only read about 300 bp per gel. If you need more than that, you have to do the whole process over again.
To sequence a bacterium will take a couple of weeks, using equipment that is most definately not portable.
Yeah, I can see that... I always set my box to show me everything. (Just can't get away from DOS...)
I forget how 'doze comes stock sometimes...
So don't cringe. You can set a lot of mainstream CD players and rippers to use (FreeDB). Its datbase is extensive and it's free and guaranteed to be GPL'd.
The problem is that the OS thinks that it knows more than I do... for example, certain text editors on the mac will tag the files in such a way that netscape won't parse any html in the file. I find it very annoying as a non-mac user to have to figure out how to change the internal file descriptor. I know that it's very easy, but it's not obvious. On a Wintel machine, the extension controls everything, so if a program is freaking out, just change the extension.
I _hate_ it when programs act as if they know what I want to do all the time. If I want to edit a file in some other way than it was created, it should be easy to force the OS to open it up in whatever I want, and not treat it differently.
It'll probably delete the "data crypt" on uninstall... but I bet you could boot in good ol' DOS and make some sort of copy.
Yeah. Ad proxies like Guidescope (it's free!) look for any image that is served from a different domain and block it. It's a great way to kill bugs without screwing up most layouts.
We intelligent Americans hate the English system as much as the rest of the world. It's just Jimmy-Bob-Joe down the corner who don't want no Urrupean bullshit on his pickup truck.
I think that we just need to go cold turkey like the Canucks did. The hicks will deal.
I read an "editor's challenge" in Popular Mechanics once, on this topic. There were two letters published. The one in favour of metrification was from a well-spoken Canadian and he outlined his argument well. The one against metrification was poorly organised and his main arguments were: "well, the French had to come up with an easy system because they killed all of their smart people in the revolution" and "The metre is less accurate than the inch" whatever he was smoking, it was some good shit.
I agree with you. The RIAA wants to make deals with hardware manufacturers to limit copying and even have some content expire--so that we're effectively licensing the music.
They do not, however, want the responsibility of customer service that should come with a license agreement--if I walk into a music store, show the clerk a shattered CD, and ask for a new one at production cost, he'll laugh at me.
Bastards, all. I haven't bought a CD in years, mostly because all the new stuff sucks. Put out good music, and we may be able to talk.
The most interesting thing about this is that it's totally concevable that you would drop $160 plus access to DAT equipment. With CD's priced the way they are, people can justify that kind of hardware--it's only 8 CD's!
They don't see that if they just reduced the price of the discs, we wouldn't be nearly so inclined to steal the music.
Oh well. You can't enlighten the masses unless they want to be..
Again, look to Stephenson's Diamond Age. The Toner Wars are what will happen. If you think you're bugged, design a hunter-killer to destroy any nanobot that it encounters. They're so cheap that it could be part of your home's security system.
yeah... I mean, the article seems to talk about desk space and clutter.. why not just use rackmount systems and a KVM switch?
The only thing I can think is that cabling would be nasty, but who cares?
The Honda Insight has an optional wind generator that mounts to the roof when you're not driving. Ars Technica did a review of said car.
This negates the toxics problem of solar brought up by another poster.
I hate this new trend of people running to the government when they think their children are in danger. They don't want to think that they have any responsibility in the matter, so they run to the feds.
My local library has a children's section, which has censorware installed. All of the other computers, AFAIK, are open.
Why do people who find something offensive assume that everyone does, or that it's universally considered bad? I guess it just happens that some of the more easily offended types have a lot of political power. There is no need to censor the web in libraries... people become very upset when you mention banning books, and react as if it's a quaint thing that real people don't do anymore. They react to censoring the web as a necessity, though. From where does this disparity come? Are people that afraid of technology? Do they really not get it?
While I am not personally very fond of MS and its products, I'm really not sure what good the attack by the US government has done. I don't think that it will do what they think it will do.
Anyway, to steer more towards the topic: Look at the cracked pages mirror on attrition. They have stats on the os's of the cracked servers . Look at these. Currently, IIS, with approx 40% of the server market (yeah, yeah, I know, there are other servers, don't flame me.) has 56% of the cracked pages. Apache, OTOH, with 60% of the market, has 28% of cracked pages. Many of these can also be explained by sleeping admins who don't patch known bugs. The problem inherent with the big, lumbering beast that is MS is that nothing, even the most critical of security flaws, gets fixed until another SP comes out. When something goes wrong with your Linux distro, some hacker somewhere codes a fix and shoots it up to a server from which it is distributed around the world. If the admins are paying attention, they will very quickly have a secure system again. There is also the fact that many service packs make the NT system unstable. For example, I installed SP 5(?) on my dad's NT box and I couldn't install MS media player. It will _run_ if previously installed, but the installer chokes and dies.
People flock to MS because they think it's the easiest solution. It is, in a way--the setup is a lot less intimidating. But most of these people can't ever hope to fix their windows box. They have to hire somebody like me, at astronomical wages, to press enter or something. If they were using Linux, chances are that it wouldn't break as often, and when it did, they'd hire the same dude. They're just scared, but I doubt that they would notice if you just plunked them down in front of their shiny new box with WordPerfect for Linux running.
MONTHS
What? Some of the high quality Ricoh media is rated for _centuries_.
I have lots of burned CD's (crappy bulk media) that are a couple of years old, and they read fine.