This story is worthy of/. One of the things many online personages (especially the young'uns) lack is a sense of historical perspective. This sort of thing should be dredged up once in a while, just to remind us all that the Man has been trying to f**k us for a loooong time. Can't say that the PTB don't have foresight, this was indubitably done to try and set a precedent against future users of the then-nascent "public" internet and BBS's. Unfortunately it backfired, guess the Feds got the "wrong" judge...
Too bad Leonard Peltier can't sue the FBI the same way...
Well, the first thing I thought when I saw him was "Thresh!", and I've never even seen a picture of the guy. If it wasn't him, it sure was supposed to be a similar type of guy. Obviously a reference for those of us in the know... Except the bit about coding for the CIA, Thresh doesn't code does he?
(His handle should have been "Flail" - that woulda been hilarious!)
Where can we get more information on this practice? Is there a link to a more detailed story somewhere? I didn't find advert.dll on my machine, but this still pisses me off (though as long as I don't catch this from Paint Shop Pro I won't be _hopping_ mad...)
I didn't check this story out but "Britishing" probably refers to killing a famous netizen's character in a multiplayer universe. After some guy who assassinated Lord British (the leader of Brittania) in Ultima Online. I'm too lazy to recall the name of the guy who plays Lord British, but he is the main developer of Ultima and was supposed to be invulnerable.
Thanks for the plug for one of the great Canadian authors. Not depressingly moribund like a lot of our fiction (couldn't stomach The Stone Angel and its ilk...), Davies can be both disturbing and funny, sometimes in the same sentence. And his small towns are pretty interesting, of course in a different way than Wyndham's:-)
Yes, self-selected survey groups are about as "scientific" as push polling. But on an issue like this, who's going to fund a REAL survey? It's an interest piece, nothing more. That said, it's _interesting_. I never slack on "female" players in Quake 2, but that's because I try to shoot 'em before I can see what sex they are >:-) It's illuminating to see what reasons these guys gave: I mean who woulda thunk that RPG players would be shelling out their hard-earned magical items to the first pretty-young-virtual-elf that came along? Certainly not me. But as a Guy, I understand. It's instinctual, sort of:-)
Right now I'm too preoccupied with school to care much about the news, but when I do want to get the dirt on whatever fresh hell the world is producing today, I sure as hell don't want to spend 20 minutes reading it on a CRT. I spend too much time staring into the new "glass teat" as it is, sometimes it's nice to just have hard copy. I know this has already been said, but I reiterate: until computers aren't so physically taxing to read from, papers, magazines and books will have a place.
Oh ya, try reading Slashdot while cuddled in bed with your sweetie at 10:00 on a Sunday morning:-)
www.peacefire.org (Was it the word "Eros"?)
on
Color Images of Eros
·
· Score: 1
So is Surfwatch so clumsy as to block a site simply because it contains the word "Eros"? That blows goats. I mean how many p*rn sites contain the word "Eros" anyway? It would be better to block the string "Natalie Portman's pink taco" - oh wait, then this page would be blocked. Peacefire is a website that can show you how to disable blocking software.
I sympathize. My box sounds like a freakin' microwave when it's running, and I can't leave it on all night anymore b/c it wakes me up. Surprisingly little noise, if it's constant, can blow that good night's sleep right out the window.
So how do you picture it being used for your benefit? Would you go for (potentially more risky) surgical augmentation, or for an exoskeleton-type device? Would you want it designed so you were "average" in strength etc. or would you go straight for "superhuman"?
Evolution does work like a "Quantum Computer" in one way, essentially having to do witht he fact that both are massively parallel. I don't think we need to introduce the Occam's Razor-defying hypothesis of quantum evolution to explain how beneficial mutations propagate. To totally beat a dead horse, positive mutations are "chosen" not by the cell/organism that has them but simply by the fact that that cell/organism survives and leaves more offspring than other cells/organisms that don't have the mutation. The DNA doesn't have to be in a state of nebulous quantum uncertainty from which individual cells can somehow "pluck" a favourable outcome.
And to reiterate previous posters' point, we can't speculate on the probability of life arising until we have a sample size of greater than one. On to Europa!:-)
Am I the only one who thinks this thing is rather reminiscent of the "Esper" machine in Blade Runner, which reconstructed 3D environments from pictures and helped Decker find things that weren't even visible in the original photos? Obviously in a very embryonic stage here though. I always wondered, however, where the Esper got its information, since it seemed to use regular 2D photos, even really old ones (which obviously had no possibility of a "holographic" information layer of some kind).
I kinda like the idea that the "File/Folder" paradigm is western-centric. I mean, really it does deal in organizational concepts geared towards tie-wearing office drones. That said, I can't think of a better way of expressing the heirarchical tree concept. Would anybody else who's actually from India care to comment on the matter, and perhaps suggest a more culturally appropriate scheme?
Now I could look up the respective thermal stabilities of the enzymes mentioned here, but I'm lazy:-) What I want to get at is that enzymes are proteins and as such have a finite lifetime at room temparature. They have a nasty habit of denaturing (losing their 3D shape) and thus losing activity. You can store them at 4 degrees C but they don't have much activity then. So you might not want to power your phone with an enzyme-dependent fuel cell.
A solution to this might be to use enzymes from deep-sea vent bacteria, they have evolved to stay active under thermal stress. But they still have a finite lifetime, eventually they will lose activity. In living cells, enzymes have very short lifetimes before they are broken down into amino acids and recycled.
At the Canadian Society of Plant Physiologists meeting I was at recently there was a symposium on dealing with CO2 accumulation. One of the speakers outlined a project to genetically manipulate green algae to perform this task, essentially using atmospheric CO2 to produce alcohol for fuel (you alcoholic AC's out there will be cheered to know that he was planning on producing ethanol though). Basically the algae would be grown in "bioreactors" and would continually produce ethanol that could be distilled from the culture medium. Pretty good idea but I don't think it'd make much of a dent in the excess atmospheric CO2 unless we covered, oh, the _state of Ohio_ with algae tanks...
WE'RE NOT GOING TO REVERSE THE DAMAGE THAT EASILY, PEOPLE! (so be nice to your planet, and don't leave your monitor turned on all night:-)
That's tricky ethical ground... (Caveat: if I lost a body part, I'd probably be saying "fuck ethics!"). I mean, even if you could successfully create an anacephalic/microcephalic clone of yourself (not a trivial technical question, BTW), that clone would still legally be considered a person, just as naturally occurring anacephalic babies are. I'm no lawyer, but I suspect keeping them on life support and harvesting body parts from them at will would not be allowed in any jurisdiction...
Well, my title says it all. I just wanted to remind everyone how absolutely amazing this kind of medical advance is. I mean, we often feel rather jadedly unexcited when we hear that some new body part can be transplanted, or that monkeys have been cloned by embryo-splitting, or some other scientific breakthrough, but I'd just like to remind everyone that while you can make code do pretty much whatever you want, the Real World is somewhat more difficult:-)
Now, maybe this can be used to save those of us with early-onset repetitive strain injuries... Quake on!
Slashdot Mirror
This story is worthy of /. One of the things many online personages (especially the young'uns) lack is a sense of historical perspective. This sort of thing should be dredged up once in a while, just to remind us all that the Man has been trying to f**k us for a loooong time. Can't say that the PTB don't have foresight, this was indubitably done to try and set a precedent against future users of the then-nascent "public" internet and BBS's. Unfortunately it backfired, guess the Feds got the "wrong" judge...
Too bad Leonard Peltier can't sue the FBI the same way...
Well, the first thing I thought when I saw him was "Thresh!", and I've never even seen a picture of the guy. If it wasn't him, it sure was supposed to be a similar type of guy. Obviously a reference for those of us in the know... Except the bit about coding for the CIA, Thresh doesn't code does he?
(His handle should have been "Flail" - that woulda been hilarious!)
Where can we get more information on this practice? Is there a link to a more detailed story somewhere? I didn't find advert.dll on my machine, but this still pisses me off (though as long as I don't catch this from Paint Shop Pro I won't be _hopping_ mad...)
I didn't check this story out but "Britishing" probably refers to killing a famous netizen's character in a multiplayer universe. After some guy who assassinated Lord British (the leader of Brittania) in Ultima Online. I'm too lazy to recall the name of the guy who plays Lord British, but he is the main developer of Ultima and was supposed to be invulnerable.
Thanks for the plug for one of the great Canadian authors. Not depressingly moribund like a lot of our fiction (couldn't stomach The Stone Angel and its ilk...), Davies can be both disturbing and funny, sometimes in the same sentence. And his small towns are pretty interesting, of course in a different way than Wyndham's :-)
Yes, self-selected survey groups are about as "scientific" as push polling. But on an issue like this, who's going to fund a REAL survey? It's an interest piece, nothing more. That said, it's _interesting_. I never slack on "female" players in Quake 2, but that's because I try to shoot 'em before I can see what sex they are >:-) It's illuminating to see what reasons these guys gave: I mean who woulda thunk that RPG players would be shelling out their hard-earned magical items to the first pretty-young-virtual-elf that came along? Certainly not me. But as a Guy, I understand. It's instinctual, sort of :-)
Right now I'm too preoccupied with school to care much about the news, but when I do want to get the dirt on whatever fresh hell the world is producing today, I sure as hell don't want to spend 20 minutes reading it on a CRT. I spend too much time staring into the new "glass teat" as it is, sometimes it's nice to just have hard copy. I know this has already been said, but I reiterate: until computers aren't so physically taxing to read from, papers, magazines and books will have a place.
:-)
Oh ya, try reading Slashdot while cuddled in bed with your sweetie at 10:00 on a Sunday morning
So is Surfwatch so clumsy as to block a site simply because it contains the word "Eros"? That blows goats. I mean how many p*rn sites contain the word "Eros" anyway? It would be better to block the string "Natalie Portman's pink taco" - oh wait, then this page would be blocked. Peacefire is a website that can show you how to disable blocking software.
I sympathize. My box sounds like a freakin' microwave when it's running, and I can't leave it on all night anymore b/c it wakes me up. Surprisingly little noise, if it's constant, can blow that good night's sleep right out the window.
So how do you picture it being used for your benefit? Would you go for (potentially more risky) surgical augmentation, or for an exoskeleton-type device? Would you want it designed so you were "average" in strength etc. or would you go straight for "superhuman"?
Evolution does work like a "Quantum Computer" in one way, essentially having to do witht he fact that both are massively parallel. I don't think we need to introduce the Occam's Razor-defying hypothesis of quantum evolution to explain how beneficial mutations propagate. To totally beat a dead horse, positive mutations are "chosen" not by the cell/organism that has them but simply by the fact that that cell/organism survives and leaves more offspring than other cells/organisms that don't have the mutation. The DNA doesn't have to be in a state of nebulous quantum uncertainty from which individual cells can somehow "pluck" a favourable outcome.
:-)
And to reiterate previous posters' point, we can't speculate on the probability of life arising until we have a sample size of greater than one. On to Europa!
Am I the only one who thinks this thing is rather reminiscent of the "Esper" machine in Blade Runner, which reconstructed 3D environments from pictures and helped Decker find things that weren't even visible in the original photos? Obviously in a very embryonic stage here though. I always wondered, however, where the Esper got its information, since it seemed to use regular 2D photos, even really old ones (which obviously had no possibility of a "holographic" information layer of some kind).
I kinda like the idea that the "File/Folder" paradigm is western-centric. I mean, really it does deal in organizational concepts geared towards tie-wearing office drones. That said, I can't think of a better way of expressing the heirarchical tree concept. Would anybody else who's actually from India care to comment on the matter, and perhaps suggest a more culturally appropriate scheme?
Now I could look up the respective thermal stabilities of the enzymes mentioned here, but I'm lazy :-) What I want to get at is that enzymes are proteins and as such have a finite lifetime at room temparature. They have a nasty habit of denaturing (losing their 3D shape) and thus losing activity. You can store them at 4 degrees C but they don't have much activity then. So you might not want to power your phone with an enzyme-dependent fuel cell.
A solution to this might be to use enzymes from deep-sea vent bacteria, they have evolved to stay active under thermal stress. But they still have a finite lifetime, eventually they will lose activity. In living cells, enzymes have very short lifetimes before they are broken down into amino acids and recycled.
At the Canadian Society of Plant Physiologists meeting I was at recently there was a symposium on dealing with CO2 accumulation. One of the speakers outlined a project to genetically manipulate green algae to perform this task, essentially using atmospheric CO2 to produce alcohol for fuel (you alcoholic AC's out there will be cheered to know that he was planning on producing ethanol though). Basically the algae would be grown in "bioreactors" and would continually produce ethanol that could be distilled from the culture medium. Pretty good idea but I don't think it'd make much of a dent in the excess atmospheric CO2 unless we covered, oh, the _state of Ohio_ with algae tanks...
:-)
WE'RE NOT GOING TO REVERSE THE DAMAGE THAT EASILY, PEOPLE! (so be nice to your planet, and don't leave your monitor turned on all night
Nobody cares to read an Anonymous Coward with a score of zero. Oh, and didn't anyone ever tell you it's not wise to say nasty things about moderators?
That's tricky ethical ground... (Caveat: if I lost a body part, I'd probably be saying "fuck ethics!"). I mean, even if you could successfully create an anacephalic/microcephalic clone of yourself (not a trivial technical question, BTW), that clone would still legally be considered a person, just as naturally occurring anacephalic babies are. I'm no lawyer, but I suspect keeping them on life support and harvesting body parts from them at will would not be allowed in any jurisdiction...
Well, my title says it all. I just wanted to remind everyone how absolutely amazing this kind of medical advance is. I mean, we often feel rather jadedly unexcited when we hear that some new body part can be transplanted, or that monkeys have been cloned by embryo-splitting, or some other scientific breakthrough, but I'd just like to remind everyone that while you can make code do pretty much whatever you want, the Real World is somewhat more difficult :-)
Now, maybe this can be used to save those of us with early-onset repetitive strain injuries... Quake on!