As far as I can tell the great invention here is to use a sylus (of newton then palm fame, am I missing the real inventor?) with a notebook. Whats the great invention here?
I can't imagine using grafitti to post this post.
Just wait till our wireless revolution takes over and most Slashdot posts are Grafitti written on Palms saying "Hot grits!"....the poster just loses interest after all the effort it took to enter and edit the post for spe1lling e13rors.
This will give new meaning to the Slashdot customization options regarding length of post.
At this rate an entertainment company will be the first to get a manned mission to Mars. The mission will be paid for by a 24 hour, cable/satelite channel that broadcasts the entire mission complete with space sex (pay per view for that tho) after the audience has developed close personal relationships with each of the characters on the mission (a bunch of photogenic 20 something astronauts) we will all get to watch them crash into Mars..live..in the greatest rating event ever. Given the extreme financial success of this mission, the sequel show will be launched immediately, this one lands and then everyone starves to death in a gripping drama lasting months with a strange plot reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.
from the story "What do you think? Could Linux stake a claim as a server for this new standard?"
But as to the question whether Linux could become the standard server for this I think the answer is yes. The linux server would allow the applications on PC's to talk to one another.
Funny, when I first started using Macs, viruses were all over the place (this was in a University setting circa 1986). The only viruses I detect now are MS office related viruses sent to me by Windows folk. Most of these appear to do nothing to a Mac. Is it just that virus writers gave up on the mac platform due to loss in market share after windows came on the seen? Or is it because virus writers decided that they dislike windows more than macs. I feel like I wasted money on a antivirus product cause I havent found anything in the last 3 years.
Also, I had never even heard of a UNIX virus before this thread....guess there are none worth worrying about.
I guess we can thank Bill "the pied virus piper" Gates for our luck.
Yea, I don't remember that episode but the actor who played Max Headroom can be found currently on the TV show PSI factor (only on cable). Check him out, I keep waiting for him to stutter.
Have you spent much time using Google? In my book it blows all others including metacrawler hands down because it usually returns relevent sites first and the little bit of text below the link shows you the occurrance of your search words in that web link. If google fails then I like your two favorites and northernlight as secondary searches. All in all Google has saved me countless hours trying to find the relevent sites in my searches and now I may switch to topclick.
All these lawsuits by American companies against poor little foreigners (regular joes who post stuff on their sites) are really starting to piss me off. Americans (and American companies) think they are the police to the world not only in military matters but in internet matters too. These companies are using the intimidation of lawsuits to prevent freespeech elsewhere in the world. Even if the lawsuits are frivolous and based on the law in the defendants country, they are picking people who do not have the financial wherewithall to defend themselves, leading to court precedents that hurt everyone who follows. One of the most flagrant examples of this type of American attempt to impose their laws on foreign soil is the Helms-Burton act which would allow americans to sue foreign companies that have benefitted from properties that had formerly been American in another country. The bill was primarily aimed at Cuba (don't even get me started on that one) but affected any property worldwide that had once been American! Imagine if the Brittish were passing laws like this, they'd be able to sue most of countries in the industrialized nations. I'm not sure what the outcome of the act was (hopefully squashed) but the essense of it live on in lawsuits like this one.
The system of law in the US must be curtailed! It is out of control with $$$-hunters
If your child is bright enough to find the crack to cyber patrol on the web, download/run it, and beat your pathetic attempt at stopping that child from seeing whats really out there then you have little to worry about. You kid is smart, able to think for themself, aware of political censorship (you) and somewhat rebellious. All are admirable qualities!!
Congratulate your child for seeing through your silly attempt, and having graduated to the level of being able to view the real world for themselves. Your kid will trust you so much more when you trust them. (vice versa works too)
All the good stuff that should be in these documents has been censored. What a pity. Freedom of information act my ass. It should be the Denial of information act. Anything interesting is not in these documents.....what did I expect anyway.
I just downloaded and read the Lennon files and the Roswell file. Roswell is exactly one page long reporting that a suspicious weather baloon with an attached hexagonal radar device was found and being transported to a military base, it also notes that major networks are picking up on the story...thats it.......
Lennon's files is many pages (~80?) and has lots of pages left blank claiming it was covered in some other document, many others have a lot of black ink applied. Whats left? Lots of analysis about groups planning to organize peace concerts, lyrics from Lennons songs at these concerts, discussion as to whether or not he was illegally bugged, his afiliation and philanthropy to a new leftist organization planning a rally at the republican convention, newspaper articles, reports on what John said on the Michael Douglass show, that he does "narcs", etc etc.
One page had large handwriting proclaiming that "All extremists are dangerous". Many reports are written by SA (secret agent) XXXblacked outXXX. I can't believe these secret agents actually spent their time reporting on Lennon's peace efforts.
If anyone finds some really interesting stuff in here please note the page number of the PDF of interest so we don't all waste an hour trying to find the juice.
Your analogy of hiding code in a quicktime video is apt. It's like hiding a code in the collective data of the internet. Nobody can possibily have all the data on the internet at their disposal and search it for secret codes due to the sheer amount of data. DNA is similar in that it takes worldwide efforts to decode a very small part of it. Her (and the lab she worked in) scheme allows someone to know where to look for the message. A bit like pointing to a URL for the secret message.
See my other posts in this story for a more biological explanation.
For those who don't know the story, please visit your local library and get a book called "The Eight Day of Creation" it documents fairly accurately the set of events leading up to the current field known as molecular biology. It is held in high regard by all the biologists I have known who have read it. It is commonly known that Watson and Crick solved the structure of DNA by interpreting Rosalind's data. Had she lived to claim her Nobel prize (see other post in this thread) she would be a national treasure of England and would be on postage stamps etc. right now.
JunkDNA's post nails the issue. There are too many high-rated posts criticising the cryptography used here. Cryptography has nothing to do with it. The message is easy to read but it is hidden in a large volume of DNA sequence. The human genome project (a worldwide effort) has been working for years to sequence the entire genome...still unfinished. She proposes to bury the message in the genome of an organism. To try and use your sophisticated cryptography breaking algorithyms to "break the code" you first would have to sequence all the DNA present in your suspect message DNA. Given that coded DNA could be stored anywhere on a spy (in a stain on a dress for example) you would have to be able to sequence the human genome thousands of times over (once for every stain/suspect location) to have the data to apply encryption cracking algorithyms to. With the wonderful invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction), the code (two primers of defined sequence, ~ 18 base pairs in length) and the location of the stain are all that needed to read the message. This idea is brilliant. Its not based on crypto but on the unreadability of the data. Yet provides a method for the intended receiver to find the message with very little info. The beauty is that the decoding message is very small, simple and easily crypto'd into a conversation.
This idea is so simple and elegant that I'm sure the intelligence agencies around the world will use it now, if they are not already
This is how they make money. You get complete quack applications that will never be refuted (or demonstrated), the examiner gets a laugh and the USPTO gets ~15K for the coffers to pay for the patents that require hundreds of hours to be investigated by the examiners.
And then they start selling you platinum engraved plaques declaring your new patent to put on your office (garage, bedroom) wall to impress your friends with...at a steep price I might add.
The current experimentation in Gene Therapy is attempting to correct genetic defects in people only in their somatic cells, not germline cells. Thus if your diabetes was corrected and you have a kid, your kid will still be as likely to have diabetes as with the genetic modification.
Germline modifications are another thing altogether. Scientists current can modify mouse germlines and have made thousands of genetically modified mice, the typical experiment is to delete a gene, creating a mouse knockout for that gene. The scientists then see what effect the deletion has on the mouse and in this way try to discover the function of the genes. The ability to do similar things with humans became possible with the isolation of human embryonic stem cells in the last year or two. It is currently illegal in the US to make germline modifications in humans but I suspect somebody, somewhere will start trying. Given that it will take a about 16 years per experiment (100 years for any thorough expt). We can expect germline genetic enhancements to be a long way off. I think its likely that people will experiment with mice to enhance them and then try to apply equivalent changes in humans. None the less we are a really long way from having genetically enhanced humans.
Genetically modified crops are much more of a real and present danger as germline modified crops are being released into the environment currently. Although it is possible that these genetic modifications will significantly upset the natural balance, humans are upsetting the balance in other more profound ways (pollution, agriculture etc)
Postulate: Any intelligent species that discovers how it is wired will ultimately modify itself. I think this is a natural step in evolution.
We can ban it in the US but there is nothing to stop anybody in other countries from doing this. It will happen.
Would it be possible to design radiation resistant CPU's using the internet model? A cpu that can re-route instructions from one set of transistors to another set with equivalent functions on the fly to re-create the original CPU in a virtual sense? Sure it would be slow to begin with and would get slower with increasing damage but you would still retain the function. Perhaps a chip with thousands of copies of basis transistor sets working in parallel (would need parallel code written for it). These sets can be used simultaneously to achieve reasonable speed but the chip will keep running until there's only one basis set left even if it slows to Hz speed. When this happens NASA will hire boat loads of programmers whose job it to simplify the requests made on this chip to essential functions in the least demanding way possible to extend the useful life of the chip.
I guess its a minature beowolf cluster. My main point is that with a parallel approach, the weaker and smaller the individual processor the better as far as radiation resistance is concerned.
Disclaimer: I know shit about about what I just wrote. Just a little mental masturbation.
I know it's lame to reply to your own posts but I just did some Google searching and found the following. I can't verify that these results are true but they seem very possible.
English becomes the dominant language of countries that embrace the web and international e-commererce. This will result in cultural fragmentation/evolution in many countries. India and Pakistan are probably the most online third world countries because many citizens of these countries know enough english to understand english web sites and can therefore make use of the english web.
Can anyone tell me what the breakdown of web sites is by language (pie charts would be useful)
I'd really like to see a pie chart animation from 1990 onward with regard to #of sites in which language and another with bandwidth/site language.
I'll bet english is totally dominant on the bandwidth but loosing ground on the #of sites/language. What is the #2 language? Spanish? German? What is the fastest growing non-english language?
Personally I think most of the new games suck and I cant imagine why people get injuries playing boring games like the fighting games. If you are into reflex skill games, in my book nothing beats Stargate the arcade gave from the early 80's (advanced version of defender)
It had 8 controls: left hand: ball headed stick for up-down with a thumb button for direction reverse; right hand: thrust, fire, inviso, smart bomb; either hand hyperspace.
I used to get left thumb and right index finger skin problems (calloses sp? and blisters) but where else could you get and hour of adrenaline rush at extreme levels of complexity for a quarter.
msft would certainly put out Office for linux if they saw dollars in it. Could they expect to make money on it?
Would you pay $250 for Office for Linux? Would it be unwieldy to port to Linux due to support issues on all the distros?
Msft could offer Office for Redhat Linux (insert favorite distro) but then they would really be into antitrust problems. Would it be really difficult to port to Linux? Or is the support issue holding them back.
Some very interesting ideas but some problems too.
I can't wait for the first karma lottery!! Posters have to spend karma to enter and the result is that some bufoon gets 1000 karma and the holder of the lottery gets 10000. Slashdot becomes unreadable for weeks. CmdrTaco puts forth a new law that lotteries are not allowed but they just move offshore(site) pretty soon people are paying hard dollars on ebay to get all their posts moderated up.
A company <cough>Microsoft</cough> starts purchasing Karma on ebay, once they have accumulated enough karma they can moderate stories related to msft to their own wishes.
The basic problem with your system is that karma=moderation and people are allowed to hoard Karma. In the current system karma/= moderation and moderation expires after 3 days. This prevents a lot of abuses.
I may have interpreted your system wrong, if so please correct my understanding.
an easy fix to the excess of early +5's is to increase the max score to 10 and give out more moderation points.
Perhaps we could we implement a system like the tenure system at universities. Once you reach 40 karma you get permanent moderator status and are also allowed to post to the threads you moderate (with a disclaimer). Your tenure is revoked upon 10 negative metamods requireing you to attain 40 fresh karma points to regain tenure. I haven't thought this all the way through but is seems to be a way to reward insightful/interesting and funny posters beyond the +2. If the number of negative metamods was adjusted to allow tenure to last ~2 months this would be a good positive motivation system to keep people posting useful stuff yet prevent the quagmire known as tenure in universities which leads to dinosaurs.
You are very correct, we have no way of knowing if we have contaminated a foreign body after landing a craft on it. In fact it has recently been shown that of all the organisms in soil, we can only get about 1% of them to grow under laboratory conditions. We know know this because when we sequence the DNA present in a soil sample only 1% of the DNA sequences comes up as known or similar to known sequences.
Now take all of our sterilization techniques for example. We test them by their ability to prevent organisms from surviving the procedure........what about the ones we can't detect because we don't know how to culture them?? We can't access their ability to survive a given procedure.
So to be sure, we just irradiate the shit out of anything we plan to land on the surface of another potentially life bearing planet...guess what our scientists have found a strange organism called Deinococcus Radiodurans (for obvious reasons) that can thrives in radiation, in fact it would be happy at ground zero in Chernyobyl. This is but one of the mystery 99% of organisms.
NASA is right on the money on this decision. Now we just have to figure out a way to remote-sense life on the planet cause we'll never be sure we arn't contaminating it when landing spacecraft on the planet.
My 3 cents
ps. I usually hate trolls but you were the first to nail the issue as far as I'm concerned
The story may be true but do we really need stories designed to induce the majority of replies to try and make 'beaver' jokes. I can't imagine what this comment thread will look like by tomorrow.
Brace yourself for the slashdot locker room chatter.
Having grown up in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and then migrated to the US, I was happier than most when iCraveTv started broadcasting. Finally I could watch city tv again with all the local commercials. I enjoyed this so much I even watch an entire hourlong program over the web. This from someone with the amazing talent of being able to concentrate on things that are really annoying for hours on end. Fact is, even with kick ass content, broadcasting over the web is currently an annoying experience due to the low quality of image.
These law suits were not about losing money now but to protect the future interests of the media companies when the web will be able to deliver high quality streaming video (a few years from now IMO).
iCraveTv was not breaking any canadian laws but got sucked into a US court due to the stupiditiy of registering their domain in the states before moving shop to Canada. They quit fighting the law suits for lack of money. They also agreed not to broadcast any Canadian content (this was missed by many posters above)
see http://www.infoculture.cbc.ca/archives/newmedia/ne wmedia_02292000_icrave.phtml
I think the media companies do not like IP broadcasting because they cannot sell their marketing locally. They want to be able to sell local ads in every market they touch and this is currently impossible to do with the internet. Funnily this was what I liked most about watching iCrave..I watch as much for the commercials that were local to Toronto (Badboy Nooooooobody!!! etc).
I'm no network guru but it seem to me that the solution to this problem should be made at the router level. If we had routers that could roughly determine a person location on the internet by ping times the routers could tell the content provider which commercials to insert into their internet broadcast. Can routers be set up to do a ping whenever they get a packet requesting streaming video and attach their ping info to the packet before sending it on or is this a big waste of bandwidth? Could reverse DNS lookups do a good enough job to identify region?
Anyway, I think the local advertising problem is a major issue here
To have any effect on Amazon and similar companies that threaten freedom of innovation in the new wild west we must alert our media. If you cant get the attention of a major media outlet start small..ask your campus paper/radio to do a story on it. Contact NPR (BBC etc) and request this as a topic. Write a letter to your congressperson or the editor of your local rag. Write or call amazon and tell them how you feel. We need to hurt them where it counts, the bottom line or their perceived image in the public marketplace.
We need an organization that has the money to place public service advertizements telling JQ Public whats what in a direct, no bullshit and preferably funny way to keep these companies inline.
I am not very aware of such organizations if they exist. Can you tell me who I should be giving my charitable donation to?? (Tax time in the US..a good opportunity) Are they trustworthy?
My fav quote from the article...kinda sums it up
<i>In short, I think you're pissing in the well. </i><p>
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell the great invention here is to use a sylus (of newton then palm fame, am I missing the real inventor?) with a notebook. Whats the great invention here?
I can't imagine using grafitti to post this post.
Just wait till our wireless revolution takes over and most Slashdot posts are Grafitti written on Palms saying "Hot grits!"....the poster just loses interest after all the effort it took to enter and edit the post for spe1lling e13rors.
This will give new meaning to the Slashdot customization options regarding length of post.
At this rate an entertainment company will be the first to get a manned mission to Mars. The mission will be paid for by a 24 hour, cable/satelite channel that broadcasts the entire mission complete with space sex (pay per view for that tho) after the audience has developed close personal relationships with each of the characters on the mission (a bunch of photogenic 20 something astronauts) we will all get to watch them crash into Mars..live..in the greatest rating event ever. Given the extreme financial success of this mission, the sequel show will be launched immediately, this one lands and then everyone starves to death in a gripping drama lasting months with a strange plot reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.
At least we would have landed humans on Mars.
I just tried it and it worked, some else must have set it up.
Pretty easy to remember tho
But as to the question whether Linux could become the standard server for this I think the answer is yes. The linux server would allow the applications on PC's to talk to one another.
Funny, when I first started using Macs, viruses were all over the place (this was in a University setting circa 1986). The only viruses I detect now are MS office related viruses sent to me by Windows folk. Most of these appear to do nothing to a Mac. Is it just that virus writers gave up on the mac platform due to loss in market share after windows came on the seen? Or is it because virus writers decided that they dislike windows more than macs. I feel like I wasted money on a antivirus product cause I havent found anything in the last 3 years.
Also, I had never even heard of a UNIX virus before this thread....guess there are none worth worrying about.
I guess we can thank Bill "the pied virus piper" Gates for our luck.
Yea, I don't remember that episode but the actor who played Max Headroom can be found currently on the TV show PSI factor (only on cable). Check him out, I keep waiting for him to stutter.
Have you spent much time using Google? In my book it blows all others including metacrawler hands down because it usually returns relevent sites first and the little bit of text below the link shows you the occurrance of your search words in that web link. If google fails then I like your two favorites and northernlight as secondary searches. All in all Google has saved me countless hours trying to find the relevent sites in my searches and now I may switch to topclick.
All these lawsuits by American companies against poor little foreigners (regular joes who post stuff on their sites) are really starting to piss me off. Americans (and American companies) think they are the police to the world not only in military matters but in internet matters too. These companies are using the intimidation of lawsuits to prevent freespeech elsewhere in the world. Even if the lawsuits are frivolous and based on the law in the defendants country, they are picking people who do not have the financial wherewithall to defend themselves, leading to court precedents that hurt everyone who follows. One of the most flagrant examples of this type of American attempt to impose their laws on foreign soil is the Helms-Burton act which would allow americans to sue foreign companies that have benefitted from properties that had formerly been American in another country. The bill was primarily aimed at Cuba (don't even get me started on that one) but affected any property worldwide that had once been American! Imagine if the Brittish were passing laws like this, they'd be able to sue most of countries in the industrialized nations. I'm not sure what the outcome of the act was (hopefully squashed) but the essense of it live on in lawsuits like this one.
The system of law in the US must be curtailed! It is out of control with $$$-hunters
</rant>
If your child is bright enough to find the crack to cyber patrol on the web, download/run it, and beat your pathetic attempt at stopping that child from seeing whats really out there then you have little to worry about. You kid is smart, able to think for themself, aware of political censorship (you) and somewhat rebellious. All are admirable qualities!!
Congratulate your child for seeing through your silly attempt, and having graduated to the level of being able to view the real world for themselves.
Your kid will trust you so much more when you trust them. (vice versa works too)
All the good stuff that should be in these documents has been censored. What a pity. Freedom of information act my ass. It should be the Denial of information act. Anything interesting is not in these documents.....what did I expect anyway.
I just downloaded and read the Lennon files and the Roswell file. Roswell is exactly one page long reporting that a suspicious weather baloon with an attached hexagonal radar device was found and being transported to a military base, it also notes that major networks are picking up on the story...thats it.......
Lennon's files is many pages (~80?) and has lots of pages left blank claiming it was covered in some other document, many others have a lot of black ink applied. Whats left? Lots of analysis about groups planning to organize peace concerts, lyrics from Lennons songs at these concerts, discussion as to whether or not he was illegally bugged, his afiliation and philanthropy to a new leftist organization planning a rally at the republican convention, newspaper articles, reports on what John said on the Michael Douglass show, that he does "narcs", etc etc.
One page had large handwriting proclaiming that "All extremists are dangerous". Many reports are written by SA (secret agent) XXXblacked outXXX. I can't believe these secret agents actually spent their time reporting on Lennon's peace efforts.
If anyone finds some really interesting stuff in here please note the page number of the PDF of interest so we don't all waste an hour trying to find the juice.
Your analogy of hiding code in a quicktime video is apt. It's like hiding a code in the collective data of the internet. Nobody can possibily have all the data on the internet at their disposal and search it for secret codes due to the sheer amount of data. DNA is similar in that it takes worldwide efforts to decode a very small part of it. Her (and the lab she worked in) scheme allows someone to know where to look for the message. A bit like pointing to a URL for the secret message.
See my other posts in this story for a more biological explanation.
For those who don't know the story, please visit your local library and get a book called "The Eight Day of Creation" it documents fairly accurately the set of events leading up to the current field known as molecular biology. It is held in high regard by all the biologists I have known who have read it. It is commonly known that Watson and Crick solved the structure of DNA by interpreting Rosalind's data. Had she lived to claim her Nobel prize (see other post in this thread) she would be a national treasure of England and would be on postage stamps etc. right now.
JunkDNA's post nails the issue. There are too many high-rated posts criticising the cryptography used here. Cryptography has nothing to do with it. The message is easy to read but it is hidden in a large volume of DNA sequence. The human genome project (a worldwide effort) has been working for years to sequence the entire genome...still unfinished. She proposes to bury the message in the genome of an organism. To try and use your sophisticated cryptography breaking algorithyms to "break the code" you first would have to sequence all the DNA present in your suspect message DNA. Given that coded DNA could be stored anywhere on a spy (in a stain on a dress for example) you would have to be able to sequence the human genome thousands of times over (once for every stain/suspect location) to have the data to apply encryption cracking algorithyms to. With the wonderful invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction), the code (two primers of defined sequence, ~ 18 base pairs in length) and the location of the stain are all that needed to read the message. This idea is brilliant. Its not based on crypto but on the unreadability of the data. Yet provides a method for the intended receiver to find the message with very little info. The beauty is that the decoding message is very small, simple and easily crypto'd into a conversation.
This idea is so simple and elegant that I'm sure the intelligence agencies around the world will use it now, if they are not already
This is how they make money. You get complete quack applications that will never be refuted (or demonstrated), the examiner gets a laugh and the USPTO gets ~15K for the coffers to pay for the patents that require hundreds of hours to be investigated by the examiners.
And then they start selling you platinum engraved plaques declaring your new patent to put on your office (garage, bedroom) wall to impress your friends with...at a steep price I might add.
The current experimentation in Gene Therapy is attempting to correct genetic defects in people only in their somatic cells, not germline cells. Thus if your diabetes was corrected and you have a kid, your kid will still be as likely to have diabetes as with the genetic modification.
Germline modifications are another thing altogether. Scientists current can modify mouse germlines and have made thousands of genetically modified mice, the typical experiment is to delete a gene, creating a mouse knockout for that gene. The scientists then see what effect the deletion has on the mouse and in this way try to discover the function of the genes. The ability to do similar things with humans became possible with the isolation of human embryonic stem cells in the last year or two. It is currently illegal in the US to make germline modifications in humans but I suspect somebody, somewhere will start trying. Given that it will take a about 16 years per experiment (100 years for any thorough expt). We can expect germline genetic enhancements to be a long way off. I think its likely that people will experiment with mice to enhance them and then try to apply equivalent changes in humans. None the less we are a really long way from having genetically enhanced humans.
Genetically modified crops are much more of a real and present danger as germline modified crops are being released into the environment currently. Although it is possible that these genetic modifications will significantly upset the natural balance, humans are upsetting the balance in other more profound ways (pollution, agriculture etc)
Postulate: Any intelligent species that discovers how it is wired will ultimately modify itself. I think this is a natural step in evolution.
We can ban it in the US but there is nothing to stop anybody in other countries from doing this. It will happen.
Would it be possible to design radiation resistant CPU's using the internet model? A cpu that can re-route instructions from one set of transistors to another set with equivalent functions on the fly to re-create the original CPU in a virtual sense? Sure it would be slow to begin with and would get slower with increasing damage but you would still retain the function. Perhaps a chip with thousands of copies of basis transistor sets working in parallel (would need parallel code written for it). These sets can be used simultaneously to achieve reasonable speed but the chip will keep running until there's only one basis set left even if it slows to Hz speed. When this happens NASA will hire boat loads of programmers whose job it to simplify the requests made on this chip to essential functions in the least demanding way possible to extend the useful life of the chip.
I guess its a minature beowolf cluster. My main point is that with a parallel approach, the weaker and smaller the individual processor the better as far as radiation resistance is concerned.
Disclaimer: I know shit about about what I just wrote. Just a little mental masturbation.
Global Internet Stats by language says that Japanese is #2
Perhaps more interesting is their predictions for..the future.....Hello China!!!!!!
English becomes the dominant language of countries that embrace the web and international e-commererce. This will result in cultural fragmentation/evolution in many countries. India and Pakistan are probably the most online third world countries because many citizens of these countries know enough english to understand english web sites and can therefore make use of the english web.
Can anyone tell me what the breakdown of web sites is by language (pie charts would be useful)
I'd really like to see a pie chart animation from 1990 onward with regard to #of sites in which language and another with bandwidth/site language.
I'll bet english is totally dominant on the bandwidth but loosing ground on the #of sites/language. What is the #2 language? Spanish? German? What is the fastest growing non-english language?
Does anyone know the stats?
Personally I think most of the new games suck and I cant imagine why people get injuries playing boring games like the fighting games. If you are into reflex skill games, in my book nothing beats Stargate the arcade gave from the early 80's (advanced version of defender)
It had 8 controls: left hand: ball headed stick for up-down with a thumb button for direction reverse; right hand: thrust, fire, inviso, smart bomb; either hand hyperspace.
I used to get left thumb and right index finger skin problems (calloses sp? and blisters) but where else could you get and hour of adrenaline rush at extreme levels of complexity for a quarter.
I miss those blisters
msft would certainly put out Office for linux if they saw dollars in it. Could they expect to make money on it?
Would you pay $250 for Office for Linux? Would it be unwieldy to port to Linux due to support issues on all the distros?
Msft could offer Office for Redhat Linux (insert favorite distro) but then they would really be into antitrust problems. Would it be really difficult to port to Linux? Or is the support issue holding them back.
How is Correl doing with support?
Some very interesting ideas but some problems too.
/= moderation and moderation expires after 3 days. This prevents a lot of abuses.
I can't wait for the first karma lottery!! Posters have to spend karma to enter and the result is that some bufoon gets 1000 karma and the holder of the lottery gets 10000. Slashdot becomes unreadable for weeks. CmdrTaco puts forth a new law that lotteries are not allowed but they just move offshore(site) pretty soon people are paying hard dollars on ebay to get all their posts moderated up.
A company <cough>Microsoft</cough> starts purchasing Karma on ebay, once they have accumulated enough karma they can moderate stories related to msft to their own wishes.
The basic problem with your system is that karma=moderation and people are allowed to hoard Karma. In the current system karma
I may have interpreted your system wrong, if so please correct my understanding.
an easy fix to the excess of early +5's is to increase the max score to 10 and give out more moderation points.
Perhaps we could we implement a system like the tenure system at universities. Once you reach 40 karma you get permanent moderator status and are also allowed to post to the threads you moderate (with a disclaimer). Your tenure is revoked upon 10 negative metamods requireing you to attain 40 fresh karma points to regain tenure. I haven't thought this all the way through but is seems to be a way to reward insightful/interesting and funny posters beyond the +2. If the number of negative metamods was adjusted to allow tenure to last ~2 months this would be a good positive motivation system to keep people posting useful stuff yet prevent the quagmire known as tenure in universities which leads to dinosaurs.
You are very correct, we have no way of knowing if we have contaminated a foreign body after landing a craft on it. In fact it has recently been shown that of all the organisms in soil, we can only get about 1% of them to grow under laboratory conditions. We know know this because when we sequence the DNA present in a soil sample only 1% of the DNA sequences comes up as known or similar to known sequences.
Now take all of our sterilization techniques for example. We test them by their ability to prevent organisms from surviving the procedure........what about the ones we can't detect because we don't know how to culture them?? We can't access their ability to survive a given procedure.
So to be sure, we just irradiate the shit out of anything we plan to land on the surface of another potentially life bearing planet...guess what our scientists have found a strange organism called Deinococcus Radiodurans (for obvious reasons) that can thrives in radiation, in fact it would be happy at ground zero in Chernyobyl. This is but one of the mystery 99% of organisms.
NASA is right on the money on this decision. Now we just have to figure out a way to remote-sense life on the planet cause we'll never be sure we arn't contaminating it when landing spacecraft on the planet.
My 3 cents
ps. I usually hate trolls but you were the first to nail the issue as far as I'm concerned
The story may be true but do we really need stories designed to induce the majority of replies to try and make 'beaver' jokes. I can't imagine what this comment thread will look like by tomorrow.
Brace yourself for the slashdot locker room chatter.
Having grown up in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and then migrated to the US, I was happier than most when iCraveTv started broadcasting. Finally I could watch city tv again with all the local commercials. I enjoyed this so much I even watch an entire hourlong program over the web. This from someone with the amazing talent of being able to concentrate on things that are really annoying for hours on end. Fact is, even with kick ass content, broadcasting over the web is currently an annoying experience due to the low quality of image.
e wmedia_02292000_icrave.phtml
These law suits were not about losing money now but to protect the future interests of the media companies when the web will be able to deliver high quality streaming video (a few years from now IMO).
iCraveTv was not breaking any canadian laws but got sucked into a US court due to the stupiditiy of registering their domain in the states before moving shop to Canada. They quit fighting the law suits for lack of money. They also agreed not to broadcast any Canadian content (this was missed by many posters above)
see http://www.infoculture.cbc.ca/archives/newmedia/n
I think the media companies do not like IP broadcasting because they cannot sell their marketing locally. They want to be able to sell local ads in every market they touch and this is currently impossible to do with the internet. Funnily this was what I liked most about watching iCrave..I watch as much for the commercials that were local to Toronto (Badboy Nooooooobody!!! etc).
I'm no network guru but it seem to me that the solution to this problem should be made at the router level. If we had routers that could roughly determine a person location on the internet by ping times the routers could tell the content provider which commercials to insert into their internet broadcast. Can routers be set up to do a ping whenever they get a packet requesting streaming video and attach their ping info to the packet before sending it on or is this a big waste of bandwidth? Could reverse DNS lookups do a good enough job to identify region?
Anyway, I think the local advertising problem is a major issue here
my cent
To have any effect on Amazon and similar companies that threaten freedom of innovation in the new wild west we must alert our media. If you cant get the attention of a major media outlet start small..ask your campus paper/radio to do a story on it. Contact NPR (BBC etc) and request this as a topic. Write a letter to your congressperson or the editor of your local rag. Write or call amazon and tell them how you feel. We need to hurt them where it counts, the bottom line or their perceived image in the public marketplace.
We need an organization that has the money to place public service advertizements telling JQ Public whats what in a direct, no bullshit and preferably funny way to keep these companies inline.
I am not very aware of such organizations if they exist. Can you tell me who I should be giving my charitable donation to?? (Tax time in the US..a good opportunity) Are they trustworthy?
My fav quote from the article...kinda sums it up
<i>In short, I think you're pissing in the well. </i><p>