modern bills all have strips that fluoresce under UV light in a different color and location (except for $1). just get a reader and you are all set. "seeing" people would benefit by checking the authenticity of large bills with the same hardware, or in an environment where it is hard to see. Example:
I was passed off a phony $5 canadian bill at a gas station. when I tried to buy a falafel pita in ottowa, the pita lady told me my (last and only) $5 was fake! She pulled a good $5 out of her cash drawer and showed me the size, color and texture differences. My travelling companion graciously purchased my falafel for me and suggested I pass off the bill in a darker place. Getting drinks at the dance club later that night (unlike many slashdot users, I am actually not a total loser, but I couldn't C++ my way out of a wet paper bag...) I passed off the bill no problem. The barkeep was younger and sharper-eyed than pita-lady, but he didn't spot the fake because of poor viewing conditions. Therefore, a bill-reader that takes advantage of current UV or IR security features or future tech such as size, texture, would help detect frauds AND be a feature for disabled people.
Consider also that it would be a lot cheaper (and much faster) to distribute a device to authenticate money than to change the whole money supply... although they do that pretty frequently too...
Yeah, i thought this was a really cool modification, until i realized that exposure to locally high-magnitude EM fields would probably rip the magnet out of your hand. Nasty.
I agree. Kinderstart's webpage looks like one of those pages that you get to when typing in a URI that you "guess at" typing in. For instance "Oh, fu probably has a website at fu.com"; but when you visit the site, it is just a placeholder directory style website, with links to all sorts of random stuff.
In my opinion, these directory style sites are worse than worthless - actually detrimental - to the internet. It makes complete sense that Google would lower their rating once they observed this.
What is really funny is that these people are suing based on a computer generated proprietary index, not even an actual review! A million magazines and newspapers report on products and services with reviews, which would doubtlessly expose the worthless "leach-esqe" nature of the kinderstart website as the generic directory style site it truly is.
Any judge worth his or her salt will see these leeches as the scum that they are and will dismiss or penalize them for wasting the time of the judicial branch. I had a funny hypothetical thought along these lines: A man sues his "friend" for excluding him from his so-called friend's "Best Friends:" listing on myspace's website. It is not libel, it is merely exclusion.
There is a lot that could be argued about this issue, but I think the heart of the issue has been addressed in the above.
Re:Not an answer to "Where did life come from?"
on
Alien Rain Over India
·
· Score: 1
Q: Where did life on Earth come from? A: Life came from outer space. Q: Where did life in outer space come from?
likewise Q: Where did life on Earth come from? A: God created life on Earth. Q: Where did God come from?
The panspermia theory is intriging and genius for the same reason that the works of Copernicus/Galileo were. Yes, life might have begun on Earth, but it might also have begun someplace else. To assume that it began here is "earth-centric", just like the early christians were "earth-centric" in assuming that the Earth was the center of the universe.
Who cares where life originated? The important part is that it DID originate! Panspermia is just knocks us a rung lower on the "we are the center of everything" ladder.
Your idea seems quite plausible, especially since the area of India where this was happening is right next to the ocean. However, if they were of algal origin, the particles would almost certainly contain DNA, which they mentioned was not found. What they really need to do is send some of the particles to a proteomics lab. Knowing the structure of any proteins found in the particles would allow us to compare the protein sequence to known DNA terrestrial sequences. This information would give a clear indication of terrestrial (or other) origin.
The person who posted the video selected the so called censorship. Also, simply use a proxy to access the video: http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html just punch it into firefox's connection settings and watch away! (I used the swedish one: 192.165.166.4 8080 anonymous Sweden)
You seem to be misunderstanding the parent. When the parent author writes: "You went to McDonald's for lunch...did they record your license plate and/or VIN?", the answer in the USA is no, they didn't record it.
From my US perspective, it is creepy how many cameras the UK has installed all over the place.
But, perhaps, for a more "perfect" or "civilised" or "utopian" society, the punishments and surveillance must be that much more severe. I will illustrate my point with an obligitory Star Trek Next Generation example:
In the "Justice" episode of season one, Wesley Crusher breaks a greenhouse window (while playing catch) on the "paradise" planet of Edo and is sentenced to death by the government. This goes to show that perfection can be enforced, but that doing so is merely a countermeasure, not a solution.
they have been following a story about a boat parked in maine with some weird looking antennas on it. apparently, it is going to be used to track the launch. the urls to the first and second story.
according to what I read, some dude from space.com seems to know all about it and says nasa isn't doing any other space launches and the satellite launch is the only thing it could be.
This will be a great way to educate all americans. Usually reporters are not trained enough to interpret scientific results, and end up making judgements and generalizations not supported by the research. Like Kevin Costner said: publish the study and they will read it.
and now Slashdot only loads three times out of five.
That probably has nothing to do with your browser. Seriously. 'Get a life' as they said in the ninties.
Re:Sounds like a classic ominous foreboding future
on
Feed
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying that being a "stylized version of today" precludes it from being good science fiction, I'm just pointing out that particular fact. Plenty of good fiction has serious flaws in one way or another; perhaps intentionally, perhaps not.
Anyhow, I applaud any effort to kindle dead sticks of apathy to bright flames of well-informed rage (ie politcal participation).
Sounds like a stoner's dreamy thinking
on
Feed
·
· Score: 1
I mean, we really already are a glutinous, self-absorbed, incredibly selfish and illiterate country anyway. If you don't think corporations control educational materials today, you are sadly naive. This novel sounds not so much like a vision of the future, but a stylized version of today.
Luckily for us, reality will soon free us from our collective delusion of disconectedness. I find it humourous that in the novel the people rely on their amazing communication system to just look up words, in the same way I am amazed at the lack of overall collaboration (besides open source) that exists on the 'net today./rant.
Here is a description of Kuru, a brain wasting disease in humans transmitted by the traditional eating the brains of the deceased.
I am a biologist and I remember researching this when I was an undergrad:
Studying Kuru is much easier for researchers, because they can simply ask people who were involved in the tradition about symptoms and the spread of the disease. They were able to figure out that there are several different alleles in the wild (sections of DNA that code for proteins; each human has 2 copies of DNA for each protein). They found some of the alleles encoded a protein that was more resistant to corruption by the prions than others. They also found that people who were heterozygous (have 2 different copies of the protein) would take much longer to die of the disease than those who were homozygous (have 2 of the same copies).
Heterozygousity levels were high, as expected for those who had taken part and survived the old-fashioned (and now outlawed) practice of eating your dead relative's brains, because homozygotes were very susceptable to dying from this practice, and their levels would be somewhat lower due to selective pressure (ie death) in the past (but via genetics there would always be some homozygotes in each generation).
This is all well and good, but the real slammer here is this:
heterozygousity levels were also abnormally high in the general population around the world for this protein. This could have several meanings (i'll go into 2): 1. We are the descendents of cannibals. 2. Everyone dies of alzheimer's if they live to be old enough (ie they don't die of something else first).
Cannibalism could explain the abnormally high rate of heterozygousity for this protein. Supposedly, archaeologists and those types have uncovered widespread (ie global) evidence of cannibalism, but also found that is relatively rare at any one time. If people were eating other people on a large enough scale, this could cause selection against homozygotes in the long run.
Because of human family structure, old people (past breeding age) can still positively influence the fitness (reproductive cabability) of younger family members. This theoretically would produce selective pressure against homozygotes, although other factors might render it insignificant.
In any case it is clear that brains are not quite perfect as of the latest release. Some other interesting tidbits are that heavy smokers and drinkers have a slightly lower incidence of alzheimer's. This could be because they die of other health problems earlier, but I believe the study adjusted for details like that. The mechanism for this could be the higher incidence of "shock proteins" and "chaperone proteins" in cells that are more used to being stressed by the nasty destructive chemicals in ciggarettes and booze.
*takes a swig of beer*
These chaperone proteins help to fold newly-made proteins the proper way. Shock proteins help to keep your proteins from getting messed up from exposure to heat, chemicals, other proteins, etc.
Whew..there is some much to explain, I can't give much more than a brief overview. any questions?
Please help get this worthless legislation off the lawbooks. Throwing legal protections out the window may be handy at the moment, but I guarentee that it will bite you or someone you care about in the ass sooner or later. As Ben Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
a paypal account for this guy or something? He should be well-funded. He certainly seems to have proven the old fable that "nessesity is the mother of invention".
is everything. I remember a study that had people doing the same job tasks with a different layout of tools and resources. It turns out the least bored and most productive people didn't have everything at their fingertips, but had to move from "station to station" regularly in order to complete some aspect of their task. Apparently the physical activity and slight "break" from being in one exact spot seems to cut down on non-productive behaviors associated with dealing with boredom.
I remember reading a similar study that correlated higher productivity and worker happyness with workers being able to take short breaks to play computer games or take quick naps.
employees are going to waste some time regardless of how you try to prevent it. If you actually cater to the needs of your employees they will be much happier, more loyal and more effective.
A physicist once told me "i am interested in repeatable phenonmenon. even if god/ghosts/unique events exist, science cannot study them reliably because there is no way to get the same ghost to fly through the same wall when your instruments are ready.
As a biologist with a lot of background in physics and "hard science (TM)" this statement: If the data and rules disagree (and the data is valid) then "the rules" were never ever really correct. This is the most interesting and cognitively confounding element of science is especially interesting to me for several reasons:
Science is an algorhythm for unreliable hardware (human brains) to arrive at a theory that matches the known data. We need this algorhythm because human brains are designed to ignore most everything. Right now, even as you are reading this, your brain is ignoring the spot on each of your retinas where there are no rods and cones: your brain is filling in with the surrounding color.
Anyway, what i'm really getting at is that the conception of "rules" is innaccurate; they are predictions, not rules. People/people's brains are notorious for seeing what they believe or what matches their prediction: The amount of discomfort in accepting a conceptual paradigm shift may be one reason they happen so infrequently. It is much more comforting (or perhaps less agitating) to think of theories as "rules/laws" when you are trying to establish a new theory.
My point, summed up is: our brains like to work on one variable at a time. Therefore an artifact of our thinking process is to conceptualize supporting theories as fact. This is a tedious way to discover things, because when we encounter an observation that doesn't jive with the current theory, we have to backtrack and find out what part of what theory is not accurate.
A strong magnetic field generated by a backpack-sized device may be able to protect against ionized gas.
Also, consider Stanley Milgram's experiments. Technology like this may help further blur the line between what you personally believe is right and what you will accept as right because somebody told you it was right.
Slashdot Mirror
May the actions of these men lead to greater freedom on information in the future!
Accolades to those brave and capable enough to publish.
The unlocking and sharing of humanity's knowledge is the only way to a successful future (this website is proof enough)!
modern bills all have strips that fluoresce under UV light in a different color and location (except for $1).
just get a reader and you are all set. "seeing" people would benefit by checking the authenticity of large bills with the same hardware, or in an environment where it is hard to see. Example:
I was passed off a phony $5 canadian bill at a gas station. when I tried to buy a falafel pita in ottowa, the pita lady told me my (last and only) $5 was fake! She pulled a good $5 out of her cash drawer and showed me the size, color and texture differences. My travelling companion graciously purchased my falafel for me and suggested I pass off the bill in a darker place. Getting drinks at the dance club later that night (unlike many slashdot users, I am actually not a total loser, but I couldn't C++ my way out of a wet paper bag...) I passed off the bill no problem. The barkeep was younger and sharper-eyed than pita-lady, but he didn't spot the fake because of poor viewing conditions. Therefore, a bill-reader that takes advantage of current UV or IR security features or future tech such as size, texture, would help detect frauds AND be a feature for disabled people.
Consider also that it would be a lot cheaper (and much faster) to distribute a device to authenticate money than to change the whole money supply... although they do that pretty frequently too...
Yeah, i thought this was a really cool modification, until i realized that exposure to locally high-magnitude EM fields would probably rip the magnet out of your hand. Nasty.
Haha... mod parent up funny/insightful!
I agree. Kinderstart's webpage looks like one of those pages that you get to when typing in a URI that you "guess at" typing in. For instance "Oh, fu probably has a website at fu.com"; but when you visit the site, it is just a placeholder directory style website, with links to all sorts of random stuff.
In my opinion, these directory style sites are worse than worthless - actually detrimental - to the internet. It makes complete sense that Google would lower their rating once they observed this.
What is really funny is that these people are suing based on a computer generated proprietary index, not even an actual review! A million magazines and newspapers report on products and services with reviews, which would doubtlessly expose the worthless "leach-esqe" nature of the kinderstart website as the generic directory style site it truly is.
Any judge worth his or her salt will see these leeches as the scum that they are and will dismiss or penalize them for wasting the time of the judicial branch. I had a funny hypothetical thought along these lines: A man sues his "friend" for excluding him from his so-called friend's "Best Friends:" listing on myspace's website. It is not libel, it is merely exclusion.
There is a lot that could be argued about this issue, but I think the heart of the issue has been addressed in the above.
Q: Where did life on Earth come from?
A: Life came from outer space.
Q: Where did life in outer space come from?
likewise
Q: Where did life on Earth come from?
A: God created life on Earth.
Q: Where did God come from?
The panspermia theory is intriging and genius for the same reason that the works of Copernicus/Galileo were. Yes, life might have begun on Earth, but it might also have begun someplace else. To assume that it began here is "earth-centric", just like the early christians were "earth-centric" in assuming that the Earth was the center of the universe.
Who cares where life originated? The important part is that it DID originate! Panspermia is just knocks us a rung lower on the "we are the center of everything" ladder.
Your idea seems quite plausible, especially since the area of India where this was happening is right next to the ocean. However, if they were of algal origin, the particles would almost certainly contain DNA, which they mentioned was not found. What they really need to do is send some of the particles to a proteomics lab. Knowing the structure of any proteins found in the particles would allow us to compare the protein sequence to known DNA terrestrial sequences. This information would give a clear indication of terrestrial (or other) origin.
the above is way cooler and more useful than the wacky knobless doors!
The person who posted the video selected the so called censorship. Also, simply use a proxy to access the video: http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html
just punch it into firefox's connection settings and watch away!
(I used the swedish one: 192.165.166.4 8080 anonymous Sweden)
You seem to be misunderstanding the parent. When the parent author writes: "You went to McDonald's for lunch...did they record your license plate and/or VIN?", the answer in the USA is no, they didn't record it.
From my US perspective, it is creepy how many cameras the UK has installed all over the place.
But, perhaps, for a more "perfect" or "civilised" or "utopian" society, the punishments and surveillance must be that much more severe. I will illustrate my point with an obligitory Star Trek Next Generation example:
In the "Justice" episode of season one, Wesley Crusher breaks a greenhouse window (while playing catch) on the "paradise" planet of Edo and is sentenced to death by the government. This goes to show that perfection can be enforced, but that doing so is merely a countermeasure, not a solution.
according to what I read, some dude from space.com seems to know all about it and says nasa isn't doing any other space launches and the satellite launch is the only thing it could be.
I forgot to flip the CD! Now there's writing on the data side.... *scowl*
Do it.
This will be a great way to educate all americans. Usually reporters are not trained enough to interpret scientific results, and end up making judgements and generalizations not supported by the research. Like Kevin Costner said: publish the study and they will read it.
and now Slashdot only loads three times out of five.
That probably has nothing to do with your browser. Seriously. 'Get a life' as they said in the ninties.
I'm not saying that being a "stylized version of today" precludes it from being good science fiction, I'm just pointing out that particular fact. Plenty of good fiction has serious flaws in one way or another; perhaps intentionally, perhaps not.
Anyhow, I applaud any effort to kindle dead sticks of apathy to bright flames of well-informed rage (ie politcal participation).
I mean, we really already are a glutinous, self-absorbed, incredibly selfish and illiterate country anyway. If you don't think corporations control educational materials today, you are sadly naive. This novel sounds not so much like a vision of the future, but a stylized version of today.
/rant.
Luckily for us, reality will soon free us from our collective delusion of disconectedness. I find it humourous that in the novel the people rely on their amazing communication system to just look up words, in the same way I am amazed at the lack of overall collaboration (besides open source) that exists on the 'net today.
Here is a description of Kuru, a brain wasting disease in humans transmitted by the traditional eating the brains of the deceased.
I am a biologist and I remember researching this when I was an undergrad:
Studying Kuru is much easier for researchers, because they can simply ask people who were involved in the tradition about symptoms and the spread of the disease. They were able to figure out that there are several different alleles in the wild (sections of DNA that code for proteins; each human has 2 copies of DNA for each protein). They found some of the alleles encoded a protein that was more resistant to corruption by the prions than others. They also found that people who were heterozygous (have 2 different copies of the protein) would take much longer to die of the disease than those who were homozygous (have 2 of the same copies).
Heterozygousity levels were high, as expected for those who had taken part and survived the old-fashioned (and now outlawed) practice of eating your dead relative's brains, because homozygotes were very susceptable to dying from this practice, and their levels would be somewhat lower due to selective pressure (ie death) in the past (but via genetics there would always be some homozygotes in each generation).
This is all well and good, but the real slammer here is this:
heterozygousity levels were also abnormally high in the general population around the world for this protein. This could have several meanings (i'll go into 2):
1. We are the descendents of cannibals.
2. Everyone dies of alzheimer's if they live to be old enough (ie they don't die of something else first).
Cannibalism could explain the abnormally high rate of heterozygousity for this protein. Supposedly, archaeologists and those types have uncovered widespread (ie global) evidence of cannibalism, but also found that is relatively rare at any one time. If people were eating other people on a large enough scale, this could cause selection against homozygotes in the long run.
Because of human family structure, old people (past breeding age) can still positively influence the fitness (reproductive cabability) of younger family members. This theoretically would produce selective pressure against homozygotes, although other factors might render it insignificant.
In any case it is clear that brains are not quite perfect as of the latest release. Some other interesting tidbits are that heavy smokers and drinkers have a slightly lower incidence of alzheimer's. This could be because they die of other health problems earlier, but I believe the study adjusted for details like that. The mechanism for this could be the higher incidence of "shock proteins" and "chaperone proteins" in cells that are more used to being stressed by the nasty destructive chemicals in ciggarettes and booze.
*takes a swig of beer*
These chaperone proteins help to fold newly-made proteins the proper way. Shock proteins help to
keep your proteins from getting messed up from exposure to heat, chemicals, other proteins, etc.
Whew..there is some much to explain, I can't give much more than a brief overview. any questions?
Airplane (Land/Sea), Gyroplane, Glider, Airship, Balloon, Weight-shift-control (Land/Sea), and Powered Parachute (Land/Sea).
Airship?!!?!!!!!!!!!
repeal the "patriot" act!
write your rep
Contact your senator
Letters to leaders
Please help get this worthless legislation off the lawbooks. Throwing legal protections out the window may be handy at the moment, but I guarentee that it will bite you or someone you care about in the ass sooner or later. As Ben Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
a paypal account for this guy or something? He should be well-funded. He certainly seems to have proven the old fable that "nessesity is the mother of invention".
There.. it is now "+5 insightful"... happy?
come on back.. we need less of 'monopinion' and more thought!
(thanks to m-w.com)
is everything. I remember a study that had people doing the same job tasks with a different layout of tools and resources. It turns out the least bored and most productive people didn't have everything at their fingertips, but had to move from "station to station" regularly in order to complete some aspect of their task. Apparently the physical activity and slight "break" from being in one exact spot seems to cut down on non-productive behaviors associated with dealing with boredom.
I remember reading a similar study that correlated higher productivity and worker happyness with workers being able to take short breaks to play computer games or take quick naps.
employees are going to waste some time regardless of how you try to prevent it. If you actually cater to the needs of your employees they will be much happier, more loyal and more effective.
A physicist once told me "i am interested in repeatable phenonmenon. even if god/ghosts/unique events exist, science cannot study them reliably because there is no way to get the same ghost to fly through the same wall when your instruments are ready.
As a biologist with a lot of background in physics and "hard science (TM)" this statement: If the data and rules disagree (and the data is valid) then "the rules" were never ever really correct. This is the most interesting and cognitively confounding element of science is especially interesting to me for several reasons:
Science is an algorhythm for unreliable hardware (human brains) to arrive at a theory that matches the known data. We need this algorhythm because human brains are designed to ignore most everything. Right now, even as you are reading this, your brain is ignoring the spot on each of your retinas where there are no rods and cones: your brain is filling in with the surrounding color.
Anyway, what i'm really getting at is that the conception of "rules" is innaccurate; they are predictions, not rules. People/people's brains are notorious for seeing what they believe or what matches their prediction: The amount of discomfort in accepting a conceptual paradigm shift may be one reason they happen so infrequently. It is much more comforting (or perhaps less agitating) to think of theories as "rules/laws" when you are trying to establish a new theory.
My point, summed up is: our brains like to work on one variable at a time. Therefore an artifact of our thinking process is to conceptualize supporting theories as fact. This is a tedious way to discover things, because when we encounter an observation that doesn't jive with the current theory, we have to backtrack and find out what part of what theory is not accurate.
A strong magnetic field generated by a backpack-sized device may be able to protect against ionized gas.
Also, consider Stanley Milgram's experiments. Technology like this may help further blur the line between what you personally believe is right and what you will accept as right because somebody told you it was right.