KDE2's browser seems really appealing... That is, if the.gif extention would work with it.
It does, at least on my machine, but as I recall you have to specifically enable.gif support in QT when you compile it. I think they do this due to the patent issues with the compression in GIF's. While I, for one, only use PNG's any more, the ubiquity of GIF's makes lack of support for them a pain. I can't wait until 2003 when the ridiculous patent expires and I can look at the any GIF's still on the web without dealing with the complications brought about by the patents.
Other than that, and A)not-quite-ready javascript support (including especially that it doesn't yet support "javascript:" style URLs) and B)an occasional annoying "won't let go of the current site no matter what address you type in" bug, Konqueror so far seems really nice. It's fast and seems to render nearly everything well. I use it for about 80% of my browsing now - I suspect when a few bugs are fixed by the KDE 2.0.1 release that number will be up to 90-95%...I figure within 4-6 months I'll be able to dump Netscape entirely. If not, maybe the Mozilla branch will be ready for 'prime time' by then.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
most licensing agreement require you, if questioned, to prove that you own the software that you are using
I hope so...because if I never agreed to any such license (or, indeed, never even purchased software WITH that license), perhaps one could haul the BSA into CRIMINAL court for trespassing and/or "unlawful detainment" or something similar, for the unwarranted harrassment. At least some sort of harrassment charge, perhaps.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
I'm sure everyone agrees that being in the position of "threefold duplication of effort" as he puts it, is not a good one.
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is automatically bad at all.
One can certainly argue (and I think many have) that Gnome and KDE, for one example, are a 'duplication of effort' (to develop a "user friendly linux for the desktop"). Yet the result is two different implementations to choose from, with their own strengths and weaknesses. KDE Developers can learn things from the way Gnome handles things, and Gnome developers can learn things from KDE's implementation (even if what's learned is "Gee, I'm sure glad WE didn't do it that way", it's still somewhat informative).
We have OSS and ALSA 'duplicating' their efforts to generate sound drivers. We have Koffice, The new "OpenOffice" (That's what Sun was calling StarOffice 6.0 release, wasn't it?), Applix, Corel, and who knows who else 'duplicating' the effort to create a 'featureful' Office application suite. I'm sure many others can add more examples.
From my perspective, this all gives us more choices, and a better view of what works and what doesn't for particular real-world applications. I, for one, like this. Choice good.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
That's not the only problem; the level of apathy in the US has reached an all-time high. The majority of voters don't really care about who will take the presidency this year.
...And don't even NOTICE all of the other offices being elected for.
I do vote, and further I vote for whichever candidate I think best represents my views, and pollsters' opinions of who can and can not win be damned. The apathy of so much of the rest of the population, though, does make me feel at times that I'm trying to compete in a "three-legged race"[*] and my partner is comatose.
* - for anyone who doesn't already know, the 'three-legged race' is a somewhat silly form of foot race wherein two people each have one of their legs tied together with the other's leg. Winning the race obviously depends then on how well the two can work together coordinating their 'inside' leg...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
...it is clear that, at present, most works available in DVD format are also available in analog format (VHS tape) as well.
Not to mention that "Macrovision" encoding and similar "copy-prevention" schemes prevent copying of even "fair-use sized" snippets of video from even these VHS Tapes, which makes this argument even MORE bogus...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Could being "no longer in print" or "no longer available" be considered a form of obsolescence?
Is there any way we might convince a judge somewhere that this is true, and that therefore abandoned literary works (e.g. works no longer being made available commercially) should be copyable?
(And can certain provisions of copyright law be considered themselves "access control" mechanisms? [e.g. "if you access this, we'll sue you"?])
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
So do some radical, stop consuming pirated culture and support folks who are doing their own thing free of the capitalist system.
I agree completely and wholeheartedly with this...except for the 'free of the capitalist system' part. (Now, now, hear me out...)
From my perspective, the much-to-be-admired producers of 'free' content (in any real sense of the word 'free') are indulging in the ultimate in free-market capitalism - not only do they have complete control of the distribution and how much they get paid, they also are making good use of their right to decide in what form they get paid - e.g. fame, prestige, "good stuff to put on their resume'", free bug-checking and/or critiques and/or coding help (for software), possible more content for themselves to use produced by other people encouraged by their example, etc. etc.
In short, an admirable barter system that includes, where desired, barter for 'intangibles' rather than simply 'hard' goods and services.
Just a philosophical quibble. I do, personally, think that "capitalism" and "corporatism" are two rather different things...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
This is the same theory as the Terminator gene. Even after a patent expires, companies will be able to control who grows a seed. Well, they will also need a law making it illegal to bypass the terminator gene.
I keep seeing this written (that the 'Terminator' gene is just there to screw over farmers who want to save seeds).
In reality, as I understand it, the "terminator" part of the genetic alteration is to appease people worried about the spread of the OTHER genetic alterations in the seeds (BT protein production, for example) into the wild. The idea was that if somehow the modified plant DID cross-pollinate with a "wild" plant, the "terminator" gene would prevent the seeds produced by the wild plant infertile, so that the other genetic alterations wouldn't enter the 'wild' population.
Besides (to get back at least tangentially to the topic at hand), unlike means for playing DVD's, Monsanto DOESN'T (at least, not yet) have complete control of how someone grows corn. It is, at the moment, still possible to legally obtain similar corn seeds from other vendors that don't have the 'terminator' restrictions.
Though, I suppose in a broad sense, the 'teminator' gene is a 'copy control method'...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
So, fair use as defined in Chapter 1 section 107 still stands[...]Surely this can't be that hard to demonstrate in front of a judge?
Well, no. But it can be hard to get the judge to see you demonstrating it when he covers his face with MPAA/Time-Warner paperwork and rocks back and forth with his hands on his ears saying "LA LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING TO YOU 'HACKER' PUNKS! LA LA LA LA"...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Did he actually just say that he's going to eliminate government funding for scientific research because "government, um, sucks and stuff"?
No, he said "Government doesn't work". (particularly the FEDERAL government - I see no reason that states, if they/their citizens so desired, couldn't continue to themselves fund research. Or Counties. Or Cities. Or private individuals or groups thereof.) Our 'Friend', the Federal Govt Inc, doesn't just "throw free money at researchers". No, they have a great deal of influence on where large chunks of our money (i.e. money earned by US taxpaying citizens) are spent. Millions on "Cold Fusion". The FBI's "scientific" investigations into using "psychics". The FDA being paid to block access to possibly lifesaving drugs because not enough money has been spent on getting it approved yet. There are plenty more examples, but I'll stop there. (This is, of course, AFTER the administrators, assistant administrators, middle-managers, secretaries, janitors, and kickback-recipients within and around the relevant federal agencies get their share of the money first.
As I recall, around $5000 was taken from me in taxes. I would much rather have directly spent that $5000 on lab equipment. (Yes, I'm serious. There are plenty of us out here willing to do research because we like it, rather than because of economic need or bribes from federal agencies.) Better still, if I could find a few more individuals with similar research interests, and we ALL had $5000 that the Federal Gov't Inc hadn't taken from us, I don't see that it would be too difficult to start our own research organization and lab. Even WITH punitive tax rates, people still give large amounts of charitable donations to, for example, the American Cancer Society to help fund cancer research - how much more might they get if EVERYONE had thousands of dollars more each year to spend or donate as they wanted?
Besides, it is in a companies' best interests to keep research going. Companies involved in science need trained scientists to run and operate their programs, and research is, I would argue, the best way there is to train scientists.
That, in summary, is how I interpret what Harry Browne just said about scientific research funding.
Realistically, on the other hand, I don't think ALL Federally Funded scientific research would go away, even under a purely Libertarian-controlled Federal government - scientific research will always be an important part of national defense. The military doesn't just need 'new guns' - ways to make transportation more efficient, better ways to cure and maintain the health of, and FEED military troops, better communication, and so on are vitally important to maintaining a strong, capable military, and I think most of us can agree that more efficient transportation, better medicine and 'health maintenance', better food, and better communication are all things that benefit everyone.
That's my opinion, anyway.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Now I have a new way to bring my Athlon 800 to a crawl!!
Are we talking about the same software here? I've been running KDE 2.0RC2 on an old P-100 laptop with no L2 Cache and 48MB of RAM, where it's performance (for what I do with it, at least) is "adequate". It also runs quite nicely on my old K6-2/350 at home.
Certainly, the older KDE 1.9x beta's of KDE2 were rather slow, but recent builds are much improved.
On a side note, someone mentioned in a previous story that compiling qt-2.2.1 with "-fno-exceptions" improves the speed still further. It seems to work for me, at least.
However your unabashed support of Gore is puzzling.
There is a disturbing proportion of likely Gore voters who aren't actually voting FOR GORE but merely think that a vote for Gore is the best way to vote "Against Bush" (most people in this category that I talk to say that it's because Bush is, in their opinion, "Scary".)
At the same time, there seems to be a subsection of Bush votes that are merely "against Gore" in the same way.
So long as people keep themselves trapped on this treadmill, the 'two parties' will continue to 'scare' you out of voting for anyone else who may happen to represent your views better. It will take a few elections of people actually voting for someone else to get the metaphorical snowball rolling on so-called '3rd party' candidates to make them 'electable'...(and even then, the electoral college can veto us...)
Or is it "pronk"?
(According to Cat's Paws and Catapults [the name of the author escapes me at the moment], the name of the 'gait' ("gallop","trot",etc.) for a creature pushing upwards off of all four legs simultaneously is called 'pronk'. I wonder, would this apply to these robots, the pictures of which imply that they are 'one-legged'?)
No, most bacteria DON'T cause diseases. No flame intended - I used to think the same thing, long ago.
Take a Microbiology class. Seriously. If it's a good one, you'll realize just how ubiquitous bacteria (and other microorganisms) are EVERYWHERE you go, and you'll come to one of two conclusions:
We must all seal ourselves in Latex bubbles for the rest of our lives
All of this has been all around me all my life and hasn't caused me any problem? Wow, that's a relief. I guess Bacteria aren't so bad in general after all.
Honestly - Yogurt, cheese, beer (ever tried a Belgian lambic? GOOD stuff, but seeing a list of everything that grows in it [it's not just brewer's yeast!] while it's fermenting might scare the E.Coli out of anyone who didn't know better), pickles, vinegar....we EAT these examples of 'rotted' food all over the world, and most of them are considered not only harmless but downright healthy.
So, relax. Except for a rather small minority that seems to get all of the media attention, bacteria and other microoganisms are either harmless or downright helpful. (Why does this sound like I'm describing 'Hackers'?):-)
I wonder how they would measure lifetime of this creature?
You mean, how do they know it was from "about 250 million years ago?" I would actually guess that they were really dating the mineral itself to see when it was formed (presumably trapping the bacteria at the same time). Geologist types have ways of estimating such things, which from what I understand of it generally means comparing the proportion of one isotope of an element somewhere in the mineral to another. Knowing the half-life of the isotope means they can get a good estimate of how long the elements have been 'trapped' in the crystal. (I hope that made sense...)
What would be certainly more interesting than bringing the thing back to life would be sequencing its DNA, completely, and finding what it is genetically most similar to, and then contrasting the differences.
Never mind the whole thing, I'd settle for some ribosomal RNA sequences that I could compare with other existing rRNA sequences from the public databases. It'd be a simple matter to grab some sequences from The Ribosomal RNA Project database, align them with a sequence from this bacteria in ClustalX, and then generate a phylogenetic 'tree' with fastDNAml, which gives a nice, simple representation of how closely related the sequences are to each other.
It's fun to do. At least, I think so, but then again, I'm a sick puppy.
Ask the sharks. The answer is "because they didn't have any reason to", essentially.
Either that, or their local Microbial Legislature outlawed evolution in their pond...
(I can see the debate now - "Maybe YOU evolved from free-floating strands of nucleotides, but I didn't! This phospolipid bilayer is PROOF of divine influence!")
Vote for George Bush if you think the Second Amendment is more important than the First.
Bear in mind at the same time, that the other 'mainstream' candidate doesn't seem particularly fond of the 1st amendment, either - being part of the push for government mandated 'V-Chips', 'ratings' on television programs, etc. (I don't actually have a problem with either of those two things, it's the 'government mandated' part that worries me).
In my opinion, voting for one of the other candidates (Harry Browne is my personal favorite, but even Ralph Nader, in my opinion, is a better choice than 'TweedleRep or TweedleDem').
No, neither are likely to actually WIN this election, but the more people who show willingness to vote for "someone else", the more people will consider doing the same in the next election.
Naturally, this only applies in the US. Are other 'free' countries having this kind of problem as well (limited candidate choice)?
...pretty sure that doing so is illegal, although completely unenforced...
Paradoxically, the fact that 'casual' technically-illegal copying like this is unenforced is a big part of the problem with the DMCA, or more specifically, with the problem of apathy towards the DMCA among way too much of the US population.
"Everybody" seems to feel that since the copying they do for their friends is already illegal, and yet they haven't been hit with any legal problems as a result, they seem to feel that even further restrictions on what they're allowed to do with legally-purchased material won't affect them, either.
I fear that by the time "everybody" starts noticing that they ARE running into problems simply for trying to, for example, watch their legal DVD on their Linux box with the help of DeCSS, it'll be too late to do much about it.
(Yes, I know the 'domain name' has nothing to do with the routing itself, but...)
I was struck by a whacky idea yesterday - how about a '.lan', used to designate a 'local area network' domain (essentially the.tld counterpart to the 192.168.x.x, etc. non-routable IP addresses). In practice, software would be set up to treat any.lan names as 'if it's not in/etc/hosts or on a dns with a non-routable (i.e. on the lan) IP address, don't bother querying any further'.
Potentially useful, or am I an idiot?
(And, yes, perhaps that's not an 'or' question:-) )
Does anyone have any firm information on the progress of these schemes?
I'm eagerly wondering about these, as well. I've got a collection of 'scrounged' computers at home on my network, a copy of Mosix, and the ability to write download scripts for packets...I'm just itching to find out how big my home cluster will have to get to finance a broadband connection for me...:-)
I have a hard time believing the gov't is interested in going around to EVERY person who has an MP3 archive or "neato shell scripts."
They don't. Only those they want a way to 'get'. It makes a convenient excuse.
"This person is subversive. We need to take him out of circulation. Has he done anything we can arrest him for?"
"Well, according to our specialists, the records in his ISP's logs indicate an 85% chance that he's downloaded a potentially copyrighted.mp3 file, but then, everybody does that."
"So what, it's still illegal. Bring him in, and confiscate his computer..."
Slashdot Mirror
It does, at least on my machine, but as I recall you have to specifically enable .gif support in QT when you compile it. I think they do this due to the patent issues with the compression in GIF's. While I, for one, only use PNG's any more, the ubiquity of GIF's makes lack of support for them a pain. I can't wait until 2003 when the ridiculous patent expires and I can look at the any GIF's still on the web without dealing with the complications brought about by the patents.
Other than that, and A)not-quite-ready javascript support (including especially that it doesn't yet support "javascript:" style URLs) and B)an occasional annoying "won't let go of the current site no matter what address you type in" bug, Konqueror so far seems really nice. It's fast and seems to render nearly everything well. I use it for about 80% of my browsing now - I suspect when a few bugs are fixed by the KDE 2.0.1 release that number will be up to 90-95%...I figure within 4-6 months I'll be able to dump Netscape entirely. If not, maybe the Mozilla branch will be ready for 'prime time' by then.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
I hope so...because if I never agreed to any such license (or, indeed, never even purchased software WITH that license), perhaps one could haul the BSA into CRIMINAL court for trespassing and/or "unlawful detainment" or something similar, for the unwarranted harrassment. At least some sort of harrassment charge, perhaps.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is automatically bad at all.
One can certainly argue (and I think many have) that Gnome and KDE, for one example, are a 'duplication of effort' (to develop a "user friendly linux for the desktop"). Yet the result is two different implementations to choose from, with their own strengths and weaknesses. KDE Developers can learn things from the way Gnome handles things, and Gnome developers can learn things from KDE's implementation (even if what's learned is "Gee, I'm sure glad WE didn't do it that way", it's still somewhat informative).
We have OSS and ALSA 'duplicating' their efforts to generate sound drivers. We have Koffice, The new "OpenOffice" (That's what Sun was calling StarOffice 6.0 release, wasn't it?), Applix, Corel, and who knows who else 'duplicating' the effort to create a 'featureful' Office application suite. I'm sure many others can add more examples.
From my perspective, this all gives us more choices, and a better view of what works and what doesn't for particular real-world applications. I, for one, like this. Choice good.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Ahem...make that "access control circumvention devices...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hey, yeah, and Boeing is willfully distributing these access control devices (what's more, they're even doing it for a profit)! LAWSUIT!
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
I do vote, and further I vote for whichever candidate I think best represents my views, and pollsters' opinions of who can and can not win be damned. The apathy of so much of the rest of the population, though, does make me feel at times that I'm trying to compete in a "three-legged race"[*] and my partner is comatose.
* - for anyone who doesn't already know, the 'three-legged race' is a somewhat silly form of foot race wherein two people each have one of their legs tied together with the other's leg. Winning the race obviously depends then on how well the two can work together coordinating their 'inside' leg...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Not to mention that "Macrovision" encoding and similar "copy-prevention" schemes prevent copying of even "fair-use sized" snippets of video from even these VHS Tapes, which makes this argument even MORE bogus...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
A single, simple question:
Could being "no longer in print" or "no longer available" be considered a form of obsolescence?
Is there any way we might convince a judge somewhere that this is true, and that therefore abandoned literary works (e.g. works no longer being made available commercially) should be copyable?
(And can certain provisions of copyright law be considered themselves "access control" mechanisms? [e.g. "if you access this, we'll sue you"?])
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
I agree completely and wholeheartedly with this...except for the 'free of the capitalist system' part. (Now, now, hear me out...)
From my perspective, the much-to-be-admired producers of 'free' content (in any real sense of the word 'free') are indulging in the ultimate in free-market capitalism - not only do they have complete control of the distribution and how much they get paid, they also are making good use of their right to decide in what form they get paid - e.g. fame, prestige, "good stuff to put on their resume'", free bug-checking and/or critiques and/or coding help (for software), possible more content for themselves to use produced by other people encouraged by their example, etc. etc.
In short, an admirable barter system that includes, where desired, barter for 'intangibles' rather than simply 'hard' goods and services.
Just a philosophical quibble. I do, personally, think that "capitalism" and "corporatism" are two rather different things...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
I keep seeing this written (that the 'Terminator' gene is just there to screw over farmers who want to save seeds).
In reality, as I understand it, the "terminator" part of the genetic alteration is to appease people worried about the spread of the OTHER genetic alterations in the seeds (BT protein production, for example) into the wild. The idea was that if somehow the modified plant DID cross-pollinate with a "wild" plant, the "terminator" gene would prevent the seeds produced by the wild plant infertile, so that the other genetic alterations wouldn't enter the 'wild' population.
Besides (to get back at least tangentially to the topic at hand), unlike means for playing DVD's, Monsanto DOESN'T (at least, not yet) have complete control of how someone grows corn. It is, at the moment, still possible to legally obtain similar corn seeds from other vendors that don't have the 'terminator' restrictions.
Though, I suppose in a broad sense, the 'teminator' gene is a 'copy control method'...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Well, no. But it can be hard to get the judge to see you demonstrating it when he covers his face with MPAA/Time-Warner paperwork and rocks back and forth with his hands on his ears saying "LA LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING TO YOU 'HACKER' PUNKS! LA LA LA LA"...
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
No, he said "Government doesn't work". (particularly the FEDERAL government - I see no reason that states, if they/their citizens so desired, couldn't continue to themselves fund research. Or Counties. Or Cities. Or private individuals or groups thereof.) Our 'Friend', the Federal Govt Inc, doesn't just "throw free money at researchers". No, they have a great deal of influence on where large chunks of our money (i.e. money earned by US taxpaying citizens) are spent. Millions on "Cold Fusion". The FBI's "scientific" investigations into using "psychics". The FDA being paid to block access to possibly lifesaving drugs because not enough money has been spent on getting it approved yet. There are plenty more examples, but I'll stop there. (This is, of course, AFTER the administrators, assistant administrators, middle-managers, secretaries, janitors, and kickback-recipients within and around the relevant federal agencies get their share of the money first.
As I recall, around $5000 was taken from me in taxes. I would much rather have directly spent that $5000 on lab equipment. (Yes, I'm serious. There are plenty of us out here willing to do research because we like it, rather than because of economic need or bribes from federal agencies.) Better still, if I could find a few more individuals with similar research interests, and we ALL had $5000 that the Federal Gov't Inc hadn't taken from us, I don't see that it would be too difficult to start our own research organization and lab. Even WITH punitive tax rates, people still give large amounts of charitable donations to, for example, the American Cancer Society to help fund cancer research - how much more might they get if EVERYONE had thousands of dollars more each year to spend or donate as they wanted?
Besides, it is in a companies' best interests to keep research going. Companies involved in science need trained scientists to run and operate their programs, and research is, I would argue, the best way there is to train scientists.
That, in summary, is how I interpret what Harry Browne just said about scientific research funding.
Realistically, on the other hand, I don't think ALL Federally Funded scientific research would go away, even under a purely Libertarian-controlled Federal government - scientific research will always be an important part of national defense. The military doesn't just need 'new guns' - ways to make transportation more efficient, better ways to cure and maintain the health of, and FEED military troops, better communication, and so on are vitally important to maintaining a strong, capable military, and I think most of us can agree that more efficient transportation, better medicine and 'health maintenance', better food, and better communication are all things that benefit everyone.
That's my opinion, anyway.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Are we talking about the same software here? I've been running KDE 2.0RC2 on an old P-100 laptop with no L2 Cache and 48MB of RAM, where it's performance (for what I do with it, at least) is "adequate". It also runs quite nicely on my old K6-2/350 at home.
Certainly, the older KDE 1.9x beta's of KDE2 were rather slow, but recent builds are much improved.
On a side note, someone mentioned in a previous story that compiling qt-2.2.1 with "-fno-exceptions" improves the speed still further. It seems to work for me, at least.
There is a disturbing proportion of likely Gore voters who aren't actually voting FOR GORE but merely think that a vote for Gore is the best way to vote "Against Bush" (most people in this category that I talk to say that it's because Bush is, in their opinion, "Scary".)
At the same time, there seems to be a subsection of Bush votes that are merely "against Gore" in the same way.
So long as people keep themselves trapped on this treadmill, the 'two parties' will continue to 'scare' you out of voting for anyone else who may happen to represent your views better. It will take a few elections of people actually voting for someone else to get the metaphorical snowball rolling on so-called '3rd party' candidates to make them 'electable'...(and even then, the electoral college can veto us...)
Or is it "pronk"?
(According to Cat's Paws and Catapults [the name of the author escapes me at the moment], the name of the 'gait' ("gallop","trot",etc.) for a creature pushing upwards off of all four legs simultaneously is called 'pronk'. I wonder, would this apply to these robots, the pictures of which imply that they are 'one-legged'?)
No, most bacteria DON'T cause diseases. No flame intended - I used to think the same thing, long ago.
Take a Microbiology class. Seriously. If it's a good one, you'll realize just how ubiquitous bacteria (and other microorganisms) are EVERYWHERE you go, and you'll come to one of two conclusions:
- We must all seal ourselves in Latex bubbles for the rest of our lives
- All of this has been all around me all my life and hasn't caused me any problem? Wow, that's a relief. I guess Bacteria aren't so bad in general after all.
Honestly - Yogurt, cheese, beer (ever tried a Belgian lambic? GOOD stuff, but seeing a list of everything that grows in it [it's not just brewer's yeast!] while it's fermenting might scare the E.Coli out of anyone who didn't know better), pickles, vinegar....we EAT these examples of 'rotted' food all over the world, and most of them are considered not only harmless but downright healthy.So, relax. Except for a rather small minority that seems to get all of the media attention, bacteria and other microoganisms are either harmless or downright helpful. (Why does this sound like I'm describing 'Hackers'?) :-)
You mean, how do they know it was from "about 250 million years ago?" I would actually guess that they were really dating the mineral itself to see when it was formed (presumably trapping the bacteria at the same time). Geologist types have ways of estimating such things, which from what I understand of it generally means comparing the proportion of one isotope of an element somewhere in the mineral to another. Knowing the half-life of the isotope means they can get a good estimate of how long the elements have been 'trapped' in the crystal. (I hope that made sense...)
Never mind the whole thing, I'd settle for some ribosomal RNA sequences that I could compare with other existing rRNA sequences from the public databases. It'd be a simple matter to grab some sequences from The Ribosomal RNA Project database, align them with a sequence from this bacteria in ClustalX, and then generate a phylogenetic 'tree' with fastDNAml, which gives a nice, simple representation of how closely related the sequences are to each other.
It's fun to do. At least, I think so, but then again, I'm a sick puppy.
Ask the sharks. The answer is "because they didn't have any reason to", essentially.
Either that, or their local Microbial Legislature outlawed evolution in their pond...
(I can see the debate now - "Maybe YOU evolved from free-floating strands of nucleotides, but I didn't! This phospolipid bilayer is PROOF of divine influence!")
We've got our bread and circuses (or is it "Government price-controls/subsidies on food, and Television"?), what else is there to care about?
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Bear in mind at the same time, that the other 'mainstream' candidate doesn't seem particularly fond of the 1st amendment, either - being part of the push for government mandated 'V-Chips', 'ratings' on television programs, etc. (I don't actually have a problem with either of those two things, it's the 'government mandated' part that worries me).
In my opinion, voting for one of the other candidates (Harry Browne is my personal favorite, but even Ralph Nader, in my opinion, is a better choice than 'TweedleRep or TweedleDem').
No, neither are likely to actually WIN this election, but the more people who show willingness to vote for "someone else", the more people will consider doing the same in the next election.
Naturally, this only applies in the US. Are other 'free' countries having this kind of problem as well (limited candidate choice)?
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Paradoxically, the fact that 'casual' technically-illegal copying like this is unenforced is a big part of the problem with the DMCA, or more specifically, with the problem of apathy towards the DMCA among way too much of the US population.
"Everybody" seems to feel that since the copying they do for their friends is already illegal, and yet they haven't been hit with any legal problems as a result, they seem to feel that even further restrictions on what they're allowed to do with legally-purchased material won't affect them, either.
I fear that by the time "everybody" starts noticing that they ARE running into problems simply for trying to, for example, watch their legal DVD on their Linux box with the help of DeCSS, it'll be too late to do much about it.
Joe Sixpack is dead!
(Yes, I know the 'domain name' has nothing to do with the routing itself, but...)
I was struck by a whacky idea yesterday - how about a '.lan', used to designate a 'local area network' domain (essentially the .tld counterpart to the 192.168.x.x, etc. non-routable IP addresses). In practice, software would be set up to treat any .lan names as 'if it's not in /etc/hosts or on a dns with a non-routable (i.e. on the lan) IP address, don't bother querying any further'.
Potentially useful, or am I an idiot? :-) )
(And, yes, perhaps that's not an 'or' question
Joe Sixpack is dead!
I'm eagerly wondering about these, as well. I've got a collection of 'scrounged' computers at home on my network, a copy of Mosix, and the ability to write download scripts for packets...I'm just itching to find out how big my home cluster will have to get to finance a broadband connection for me... :-)
Joe Sixpack is dead!
They don't. Only those they want a way to 'get'. It makes a convenient excuse. .mp3 file, but then, everybody does that."
"This person is subversive. We need to take him out of circulation. Has he done anything we can arrest him for?"
"Well, according to our specialists, the records in his ISP's logs indicate an 85% chance that he's downloaded a potentially copyrighted
"So what, it's still illegal. Bring him in, and confiscate his computer..."
Joe Sixpack is dead!