If only there were a way to put words from the comment into some sort of a search giving a list of urls that, when clicked, took you directly to the post.
Let's identify the most offensive and dangerous aspect of the UK DNA database and this proposal:
The UK DNA database stores both "DNA samples" and the corresponding "DNA profiles" (or "DNA fingerprints") obtained from the DNA samples by geneting fingerprinting techniques.
However, there is no good reason to store the DNA samples themselves once the DNA profiles have been obtained from the samples because the DNA profiles contain all the information that is required to test any future DNA samples for matches against the DNA profiles in the database.
The DNA samples contain a copy of every single gene belonging to the person from whom the sample was taken; for example, your DNA sample contains the information required to make a genetic clone of you.The DNA samples should not be being stored. It is not necessary for law enforcement purposes. The DNA samples could be and ought to be destroyed immediately.
The problem and the danger is that keeping the DNA samples enables anybody in future to try searching through the database for people with particular genes that are suspected or claimed to be associated with particular types or patterns of human behaviors or capabilities. It is strongly suspected that there are clusters of genes, and maybe individual genes, that are at least statistically, and possibly even directly, associated with a likelihood to commit certain types of criminal or other undesirable behavior. The authoritarian personalities that typically become powerful politicians will jump at the chance to identify potential criminals at birth by their genetics.
Aldous Huxley made us all too aware of the awful consequences of casually allowing genetic engineering of the human race. Our precious human society could easily become something horribly unhuman resembling Huxley's Brave New World.
In summary, we should aim to ensure the UK DNA Database destroys all DNA samples once DNA profiles have been obtained. If and only if that is done, documented and tightly legislated in a way that no weasel word loving politician can wriggle out of, I don't have a personal problem with DNA profiles of all residents being stored.
Most flu infections are not transmitted by breathing in airborne virus particles. The commonest route of flu infection is actually
by touching shared surfaces such as door handles, toilets, items of furniture, coins and notes, doors, windows and seats especially those in taxis and other forms of public transportation, and
by not washing and disinfecting your hands afterwards before touching things that go in your mouth such as food, drink containers, toothbrushes, etc.
This is how most people get infected, and N95 face masks offer no protection against this.
Surfaces, especially damp or wet ones, easily become contaminated whenever a flu-infected person touches them or coughes or sneezes droplets of infected saliva or mucus onto them. Touching a flu-virus-contaminated surface is a very effective method of infecting yourself. It delivers a relatively massive dose of virus particles, several orders of magnitude more than by breathing contaminated air without wearing a face mask. Flu virus is extremely infectious by ingestion.
It is not true that flu is usually transmitted by airborne virus particles and that N95 face masks protect you against flu infection.
One of the countermeasures for a flu pandemic that is being considered is compulsory quarantine of infected people to prevent them coughing and sneezing their infected mucus and saliva onto public surfaces that would infect other people.
It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids.
It's still my personal favorite out of all the desktop planetariums. The best thing about it is you don't need to be online to use it like Google's, so you can run it on your laptop while outside viewing the stars with a scope using the "night vision" viewing mode to avoid ruining your eyes' dark adaptation.
If you re-read my comment, you'll see I wasn't disputing there is a trade off between performance and power consumption when choosing between what is currently available on the PC systems market. I was making a different point -- I was saying I do not accept the premise that future CPUs and PC systems will always require hundreds of Watts (for entire PC systems; tens for CPUs) of power in order to achieve the same or better performance. Future PC systems will consume less power than any of the current generation of Core2Duo and AMD based systems and they will also be faster than the current fastest systems (mainly due to process technology improvements).
97 Watts is impressively low. Any idea how much power a complete UltraSPARC T2 system would consume? It's a shame Sun may not be targeting the desktop market. I would straightaway buy several such desktop systems if they were priced below $1000 as a way of cutting down on power consumption.
I wonder if the UltraSPARC design team might have come up with a better low-power design than either Intel or AMD. I'm quite intrigued by the press release which says "UltraSPARC T2 processor, the fastest, most energy efficient microprocessor on the market" and "lowest Wattage per core of any processor in its class". I'm curious to see some simulated or measured Wattage figures for a complete UltraSPARC T2 desktop system. Does it beat a recent Core2Duo or AMD system having a power consumption measured in the hundreds of Watts? If not now, maybe the next one; I don't accept the premise that future CPU designs will always require hundreds of Watts of power. And what are typical retail prices for complete UltraSPARC T2 PC systems?
I can't wait for somebody to design a new generation of desktop PCs that have lower power consumption than that of previous generations but without sacrificing performance and graphics. Anybody know how much power typical UltraSPARC based desktop PCs consume compared to Intel or AMD based desktop PCs?
I also remember the 1980s worries about how the "multiplication" of restaurants could hurt the chances of people eating out. That was nothing compared to the mess we've got today with tourism, where upwards of 1 million destinations vie for the attention of tourists seeking an alternative to holidaying at home.
Interestingly this film is described as "newly declassified", but films capable of blocking all but visible light - based on transparent metal-dielectric layer sandwiches - have been around for several years and were publically reported here and herein 2002
Despite the several hundred requests the BBC has received for a Linux iPlayer (so said one insider), the BBC is not planning to make iPlayer available for licence-fee payers who use Linux.
About 20 years ago I had a small surplus stock of Kodak E6 professional transparency film left over at the end of a project. The storage recommendations from Kodak were to store E6 cold and dry, so I bagged and sealed the films and put them in low-humidity cold storage. As an experiment I left the films there. The films developed ok at 8 years age with excellent quality, and again at 15 years age, but by then slight fogging was visible. Maybe the fogging was due to cosmic rays, or perhaps the photochemicals had degraded. Anyway, the experiment ended when the E6 processing lab I used to use closed down (soon followed by its rival firms). I kinda miss E6. Really excellent true color reproduction and high resolving power (IIRC, over 100lines/mm).
Trying to shield your film stock against high-energy cosmic rays is an impossible task unless you consider storing it somewhere deep underground. And putting up shielding materials to protect your film may in fact make the fogging worse because very high energy cosmic rays hit the shielding material creating secondary radiation that will fog your film even more quickly.
If you are concerned about being able to use Velvia film in the long term, it might be easier and cheaper to get together with other like-minded folk and find a cheap contracting manufacturer somewhere like China or India who can copy the Velvia manufacturing process (if they bother follow licensing protocols...) to provide a supply of fresh film.
I agree that Taiwan has built up an impressive electronics manufacturing industry, though there have been some very sub-standard products along the way, e.g. the 2002-2003 epidemic of faulty Taiwanese capacitors destroying motherboards.
Unfortunately Japan did not like the whaling ban and has continually harrassed and bullied other nations unsuccessfully attempting to get the whaling ban overturned. The Japanese are using desperate tactics such as bribing land-locked third-world countries to support them: "When allegations of vote-buying by Japan were aired at the London IWC meeting in 2001 by the New Zealand delegate to the commission, Sandra Lee-Vercoe, the Japanese delegate, Mr Masayuki Komatsu, unsurprisingly denied the allegations, 'If Japan was buying votes, you would see 150 nations in the IWC and as a consequence the unnecessary moratorium would have been lifted years ago.'"
In 1986 Japan decided to ignore the IWC whaling ban, re-started commercial whaling under the marketing badge of so-called "scientific whaling", which is effectively identical to commercial whaling.
The Japanese whaling ship methods are notoriously cruel and horrific. Unlucky whales (often the nursing mothers because they are the slowest ones) are attacked with exploding harpoons. Many whales are not immediately killed by the harpoon. The whalers deny this. They claim the whales are killed instantly. But you can see the whales are definitely still alive because they are breathing, moving and their eyes are still rolling around. The whales are then hauled by steel cable winches onto the ship's deck. There, the fate of the unfortunate whales is certain slow death. The Japanese crew members use massive wiresaws to skin the animals alive and to cut them into little chunks and to skeletonize them. The killing process can take anywhere up to 45 minutes. The whalers of course claim that any live whales are killed by the first few cuts, which is plainly not true. A live whale which is being cut up on deck is a pitiful and disturbing sight. The whale shakes and writhes as much as it can within the limits imposed on it by the steel cables pinning it down. We cannot know whether such a whale dies in agony, but it looks like it does (even the whalers themselves will sometimes admit it).
Because of widespread concerns over the serious health risks of eating whalemeat and because whaling is increasingly being criticized by younger Japanese people, the Japanese industry often sells the whalemeat not openly as whalemeat but labelled as "tuna" or as any similarly dark colored fish. Japan's so-called "scientific" whaling is obviously nothing of the sort.
It used to be possible to get observer status on Japanese whaling ships and monitor what actually happens on the Japanese whaling ships. But the Japanese whalers did not like having observers because the observers had a nasty habit of telling the truth and explaining how slowly and awfully the whales were actually being killed, often documented with clear video footage as evidence. So, the Japanese whalers now only allow "friendly" observers - people who will agree not to criticize the whaling in any way.
There is something badly wrong with this article and it reflects very badly on the standard of journalism in New Scientist magazine. The article suggests that using bone vibrations to send messages is necessarily secure (against interception) because interception requires direct physical contact. However, that claim simply is not true. It should be obviously untrue from an understanding of elementary physics.
Think what happens when the device is operating. The vibrations it generates will propagate as sound waves not only into the adjacent bone but also into the air surrounding the device. With the right microphones and signal processing techniques it will certainly be possible to intercept the airborne sound waves at significant distances from the device (depending on ambient noise level, sound pressure level, internal body noise as a function of motions of body parts and clothing, etc).
Claiming that the device provides secure communication is wrong and potentially very misleading e.g. to any investors who read this article. I doubt the quote attributed to Liebschner is accurate given that this is only an article in that disappointingly woolly thinking New Scientist magazine.
Here is a brief history of the average size of each series of the Linux kernels (this is for the core kernel not including module sizes) that I have configured with very approximately the same set of features over the last 14 years from 1993 to 2007:
In 1993 a Linux 0.99 kernel zImage weighed in at 210 kBytes
In 1994 a Linux 1.0.x kernel zImage weighed in at 230 kBytes
In 1995 a Linux 1.2.x kernel zImage weighed in at 310 kBytes
In 1996 a Linux 2.0.x kernel zImage weighed in at 380 kBytes
In 1998 a Linux 2.2.x kernel bzImage weighed in at 650 kBytes
In 2000 a Linux 2.4.x kernel bzImage weighed in at 1000 kBytes
In 2003 a Linux 2.6.x kernel bzImage weighed in at 1300 kBytes
In 2007 a Linux 2.6.x kernel bzImage weighed in at 1500 kBytes
Remember the days when a kernel and root filesystem would comfortably fit on a 1.4MB floppy? Hush little kernel, nobody said you are getting a little f-a-t!
Is it necessarily true in our reality that we know the past and the future is uncertain? There are some very interesting theories of space-time involving multiple time or time-like dimensions, e.g. 3,3 spacetime. In these theories, the future and the past are interdependent and probabilistic. According to Carroll the future and past of an event arise from extra temporal properties which we do not otherwise notice. There was an article about 6-d space time here recently
Compatibility across versions is guaranteed only at the Source Code level
(Disclaimer: Linux is excellent) But is compatibility even guaranteed at source code level? Here are some specific examples where source level API changes have occurred:
1. Consider that up to linux-2.6.6 all SATA disks were treated as IDE PATA disks accessible via/dev/hd*, but in linux-2.6.7 they started to be treated as SATA disks only accessible via/dev/sd*. This changeover caused existing SATA disk systems to become unbootable after upgrading to linux-2.6.7 because the boot device at/dev/hd* was no longer accessible. Never documented in kernel/Documentation/*
2. And between linux-2.6.15 and linux-2.6.20 the way the usb subsystem handled usb devices was changed so that usermode usb drivers like the usermode speedtouch driver was broken due to kernel returning EINVAL from each USBDEVFS_SUBMITURB command which is required after a USBDEVFS_CONTROL command issued by the modem_run ADSL line monitoring process. This generates thousands of error messages per second via syslogd. No news of this particular aspect of the usb changes was ever documented in kernel/Documentation/*.
Slashdot Mirror
Phillips 3D LCD monitor, no glasses, viewable from all angles.
If only there were a way to put words from the comment into some sort of a search giving a list of urls that, when clicked, took you directly to the post.
Sony uses the Linux kernel too in its HDTVs and many other products. Here is the link to download the source (cookies and JS required).
The DNA samples contain a copy of every single gene belonging to the person from whom the sample was taken; for example, your DNA sample contains the information required to make a genetic clone of you.The DNA samples should not be being stored. It is not necessary for law enforcement purposes. The DNA samples could be and ought to be destroyed immediately.
The problem and the danger is that keeping the DNA samples enables anybody in future to try searching through the database for people with particular genes that are suspected or claimed to be associated with particular types or patterns of human behaviors or capabilities. It is strongly suspected that there are clusters of genes, and maybe individual genes, that are at least statistically, and possibly even directly, associated with a likelihood to commit certain types of criminal or other undesirable behavior. The authoritarian personalities that typically become powerful politicians will jump at the chance to identify potential criminals at birth by their genetics.
Aldous Huxley made us all too aware of the awful consequences of casually allowing genetic engineering of the human race. Our precious human society could easily become something horribly unhuman resembling Huxley's Brave New World.
In summary, we should aim to ensure the UK DNA Database destroys all DNA samples once DNA profiles have been obtained. If and only if that is done, documented and tightly legislated in a way that no weasel word loving politician can wriggle out of, I don't have a personal problem with DNA profiles of all residents being stored.
The commonest route of flu infection is actually
This is how most people get infected, and N95 face masks offer no protection against this.
Surfaces, especially damp or wet ones, easily become contaminated whenever a flu-infected person touches them or coughes or sneezes droplets of infected saliva or mucus onto them. Touching a flu-virus-contaminated surface is a very effective method of infecting yourself. It delivers a relatively massive dose of virus particles, several orders of magnitude more than by breathing contaminated air without wearing a face mask. Flu virus is extremely infectious by ingestion.
It is not true that flu is usually transmitted by airborne virus particles and that N95 face masks protect you against flu infection.
One of the countermeasures for a flu pandemic that is being considered is compulsory quarantine of infected people to prevent them coughing and sneezing their infected mucus and saliva onto public surfaces that would infect other people.
97 Watts is impressively low. Any idea how much power a complete UltraSPARC T2 system would consume? It's a shame Sun may not be targeting the desktop market. I would straightaway buy several such desktop systems if they were priced below $1000 as a way of cutting down on power consumption.
I wonder if the UltraSPARC design team might have come up with a better low-power design than either Intel or AMD. I'm quite intrigued by the press release which says "UltraSPARC T2 processor, the fastest, most energy efficient microprocessor on the market" and "lowest Wattage per core of any processor in its class". I'm curious to see some simulated or measured Wattage figures for a complete UltraSPARC T2 desktop system. Does it beat a recent Core2Duo or AMD system having a power consumption measured in the hundreds of Watts? If not now, maybe the next one; I don't accept the premise that future CPU designs will always require hundreds of Watts of power. And what are typical retail prices for complete UltraSPARC T2 PC systems?
I can't wait for somebody to design a new generation of desktop PCs that have lower power consumption than that of previous generations but without sacrificing performance and graphics. Anybody know how much power typical UltraSPARC based desktop PCs consume compared to Intel or AMD based desktop PCs?
I also remember the 1980s worries about how the "multiplication" of restaurants could hurt the chances of people eating out. That was nothing compared to the mess we've got today with tourism, where upwards of 1 million destinations vie for the attention of tourists seeking an alternative to holidaying at home.
page 1 and page 2
Interestingly this film is described as "newly declassified", but films capable of blocking all but visible light - based on transparent metal-dielectric layer sandwiches - have been around for several years and were publically reported here and here in 2002
Joking aside, there really are transparent metals that let visible light pass while blocking the rest of the EM spectrum. It was covered here too
Despite the several hundred requests the BBC has received for a Linux iPlayer (so said one insider), the BBC is not planning to make iPlayer available for licence-fee payers who use Linux.
200
About 20 years ago I had a small surplus stock of Kodak E6 professional transparency film left over at the end of a project. The storage recommendations from Kodak were to store E6 cold and dry, so I bagged and sealed the films and put them in low-humidity cold storage. As an experiment I left the films there. The films developed ok at 8 years age with excellent quality, and again at 15 years age, but by then slight fogging was visible. Maybe the fogging was due to cosmic rays, or perhaps the photochemicals had degraded. Anyway, the experiment ended when the E6 processing lab I used to use closed down (soon followed by its rival firms). I kinda miss E6. Really excellent true color reproduction and high resolving power (IIRC, over 100lines/mm).
If you are concerned about being able to use Velvia film in the long term, it might be easier and cheaper to get together with other like-minded folk and find a cheap contracting manufacturer somewhere like China or India who can copy the Velvia manufacturing process (if they bother follow licensing protocols...) to provide a supply of fresh film.
I agree that Taiwan has built up an impressive electronics manufacturing industry, though there have been some very sub-standard products along the way, e.g. the 2002-2003 epidemic of faulty Taiwanese capacitors destroying motherboards.
Unfortunately Japan did not like the whaling ban and has continually harrassed and bullied other nations unsuccessfully attempting to get the whaling ban overturned. The Japanese are using desperate tactics such as bribing land-locked third-world countries to support them: "When allegations of vote-buying by Japan were aired at the London IWC meeting in 2001 by the New Zealand delegate to the commission, Sandra Lee-Vercoe, the Japanese delegate, Mr Masayuki Komatsu, unsurprisingly denied the allegations, 'If Japan was buying votes, you would see 150 nations in the IWC and as a consequence the unnecessary moratorium would have been lifted years ago.'"
In 1986 Japan decided to ignore the IWC whaling ban, re-started commercial whaling under the marketing badge of so-called "scientific whaling", which is effectively identical to commercial whaling.
The Japanese whaling ship methods are notoriously cruel and horrific. Unlucky whales (often the nursing mothers because they are the slowest ones) are attacked with exploding harpoons. Many whales are not immediately killed by the harpoon. The whalers deny this. They claim the whales are killed instantly. But you can see the whales are definitely still alive because they are breathing, moving and their eyes are still rolling around. The whales are then hauled by steel cable winches onto the ship's deck. There, the fate of the unfortunate whales is certain slow death. The Japanese crew members use massive wiresaws to skin the animals alive and to cut them into little chunks and to skeletonize them. The killing process can take anywhere up to 45 minutes. The whalers of course claim that any live whales are killed by the first few cuts, which is plainly not true. A live whale which is being cut up on deck is a pitiful and disturbing sight. The whale shakes and writhes as much as it can within the limits imposed on it by the steel cables pinning it down. We cannot know whether such a whale dies in agony, but it looks like it does (even the whalers themselves will sometimes admit it).
Because of widespread concerns over the serious health risks of eating whalemeat and because whaling is increasingly being criticized by younger Japanese people, the Japanese industry often sells the whalemeat not openly as whalemeat but labelled as "tuna" or as any similarly dark colored fish. Japan's so-called "scientific" whaling is obviously nothing of the sort.
It used to be possible to get observer status on Japanese whaling ships and monitor what actually happens on the Japanese whaling ships. But the Japanese whalers did not like having observers because the observers had a nasty habit of telling the truth and explaining how slowly and awfully the whales were actually being killed, often documented with clear video footage as evidence. So, the Japanese whalers now only allow "friendly" observers - people who will agree not to criticize the whaling in any way.
Think what happens when the device is operating. The vibrations it generates will propagate as sound waves not only into the adjacent bone but also into the air surrounding the device. With the right microphones and signal processing techniques it will certainly be possible to intercept the airborne sound waves at significant distances from the device (depending on ambient noise level, sound pressure level, internal body noise as a function of motions of body parts and clothing, etc).
Claiming that the device provides secure communication is wrong and potentially very misleading e.g. to any investors who read this article. I doubt the quote attributed to Liebschner is accurate given that this is only an article in that disappointingly woolly thinking New Scientist magazine.
Hush little kernel, nobody said you are getting a little f-a-t!
Is it necessarily true in our reality that we know the past and the future is uncertain? There are some very interesting theories of space-time involving multiple time or time-like dimensions, e.g. 3,3 spacetime. In these theories, the future and the past are interdependent and probabilistic. According to Carroll the future and past of an event arise from extra temporal properties which we do not otherwise notice. There was an article about 6-d space time here recently
If you live in Ireland (guessing from your email address), perhaps you should visit the largest research library in Ireland at Trinity College, Dublin. Non-members can make a case to be allowed to use the library.
(Disclaimer: Linux is excellent) But is compatibility even guaranteed at source code level?
Here are some specific examples where source level API changes have occurred:
1. Consider that up to linux-2.6.6 all SATA disks were treated as IDE PATA disks accessible via /dev/hd*, but in linux-2.6.7 they started to be treated as SATA disks only accessible via /dev/sd*. This changeover caused existing SATA disk systems to become unbootable after upgrading to linux-2.6.7 because the boot device at /dev/hd* was no longer accessible. Never documented in kernel/Documentation/*
2. And between linux-2.6.15 and linux-2.6.20 the way the usb subsystem handled usb devices was changed so that usermode usb drivers like the usermode speedtouch driver was broken due to kernel returning EINVAL from each USBDEVFS_SUBMITURB command which is required after a USBDEVFS_CONTROL command issued by the modem_run ADSL line monitoring process. This generates thousands of error messages per second via syslogd. No news of this particular aspect of the usb changes was ever documented in kernel/Documentation/*.