I'm thinking of cells considerably larger than that. That couldn't be written with an adapted ink-jet mechanism. Think more of something about the size of a skin cell to represent a bit.
Most of the mammoth DNA is totally gone. There are a few fragments than can be retrieved with immense effort. And even those only exist because of the tremendous number of copies made. Even Quagga DNA hadn't been found the last time I checked, and that became extinct within the last couple of centuries.
A million years *does* seem like overkill. OTOH, for many purposes 1,000 years doesn't seem long enough. Say it needs to be long enough for Mickey Mouse to get out of copyright. Estimate 5,000 years, but a bit longer wouldn't hurt.
But the problem is being able to read it even if you have it preserved. I ran into that problem in less than 2 decades with 200 BPI Even parity mag tape. (Granted, the tapes probably weren't good any longer, but there wasn't anyplace accessible where I could even try.) Binary tape would have been a worse problem, however, because I would have needed an IBM 7094 to interpret them. Like row binary was worse than column binary on punched cards. (Ever wonder why punched cards were 72 + 8 columns rather than just 80? In row binary you got two 36 bit words per row per card, and columns 73 through 80 were for sequence numbers, in case you dropped the deck.)
So say we go through a few decades where they laws prohibit copying for much longer than the durability of the storage media (enforced by DRM, of course, as well as by lawyers and police). Civilization doesn't need to collapse in order to cause near total loss of records. Popular interest waxes and wanes, so illegal copying can't be depended upon as a way around this. It may extend the life of some records, but not even as much as three times the durability. (Most things are only popular for at most a year, with VERY rare exceptions.)
Disney used to figure on releasing their movies once every seven years, so figure that long on how long it takes something popular to sink into obscurity. Which means that illegal copying will only extend the lifetime of a work by about seven years. 21 is being extremely generous. That's not very long measured against even current history. And studios, e.g., have a long history of destroying works that they don't feel are worth reissuing. (Not making them public, destroying them.)
So 5,000 years seems like a good goal. That doesn't require tungsten+silicon nitride. But it does require that the material be stored without DRM and without compression. Even then if the mechanism has been forgotten, it will be difficult to read.
Preservation requires multiple copies as well as durability. And it requires durability as well as multiple copies (unless you are saying something like "This is how you metabolize oxygen".).
To me this sounds like a stabilized matrix that has cells that are either filled or left empty. The cells could be quite small, and it could be written by a specially adapted ink-jet printer. But you would want to fill the cells with something that was both stable and contrasting. Possibly a carbon matrix with a titanium white filler. This wouldn't survive high temperatures, but it could be quite cheap to produce, so you could have multiple copies. I'm thinking of something sort of like a high-tech paper that could be read by a microscope. An adaption of the microfiche idea, but using something a lot more stable than film, a lot cheaper than film, and with a binary coding rather than photographic images. I envision it as being "normally" processed by somthing vaguely like a cross between paper tape readers/writers and mag tape readers/writers. It would NOT be a cheap medium to have the ability to process, but it would be cheap to process once you had the equipment. And it would be intended just about solely for archival purposes.
OTOH, there's nothing that says something similar but easier to handle couldn't be common. It could store information quite densely, though probably only around 2^20 bits/square inch. (Note that tha's only 1024 bits/linear inch, which is a lot less than current mag tape. But I'm using area rather than just linear measure. The difficulties would be that this wouldn't be a mass-market product, so cost would be an issue.) Perhaps a bit less. (The dots would be quite small, after all.) I'm envisioning a matrix of carbon nanotubes as the basis, which makes it rather strong. But it also needs to be handleable and manufacturable...which that isn't, yet.
Sorry, but... The only DNA that's preserved without corruption over the long term is that portion that is vital to the continued reproductive success of the organism. So even if you managed to encode a message into it, it would never be interpreted as other than functional.
P.S.: Over evolutionary time, and a billion years is actually quite a bit longer than the minimal evolutionary time, even vital functions tend to be altered. There are a very few segments of DNA that have been preserved unaltered for that long, but VERY few. Perhaps cytochrome-c, or some of the HOX genes. Even there you get neutral drift.
Yeah, vote third party. But don't lie to yourself and pretend that it makes a difference. The structure of the electoral system guarantees that only two parties have a chance of electing a candidate. The publicity factor guarantees that both of them will be bought ahead of time.
FWIW, I did vote thrid party last time. I usually do. But I don't pretend that it makes a difference. Do a bit of systems analysis, for gods sake.
No. You don't understand the electoral process as implemented in the US. Only a narcissistic control-freak would even consider running for president, and just about only one of those would consider running for Senator. (The senatorial comment is more applicable to the larger states, but it's somewhat true even of, say, Vermont.)
Even the House of Representatives has an ovewhelming proportion of narcissistic control-freaks. And the comments about Senators also applies to Governors.
The current electoral system guarantees that the most qualified candidates won't run. We'd do better with a lottery. At least most of the "winners" wouldn't be psychotic at the beginning of their term.
It's not the "60's hippie notions" that are the problem. It's that she's just using the rhetoric as camoflage.
P.S.: Many of the "60's hippie notions" aren't particularly useful, but just about none of them are in the same league as the danger of authoritarian worship/manifestation that she engages in.
Sorry, he's much worse than he appeared to be (the first time), but the only plausible alternative was worse.
P.S.: I *did* vote third party, but I was well aware that the structure of the electoral system meant that this was nearly a waste of time. I just couldn't stomach voting for either official choice. And I feel a compulsion to vote, even though I know it's nearly meaningless.
P.P.S.: On reflection I *do* think that Obama was worse then Bush, but only because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
You didn't read the article. He can write the books using a text editor, but when he wants to send them to the publisher, they must be in MSWord. And when he gets them back, they ARE in MSWord.
(Actually, IIRC he writes them in Scriviner before converting them to MSWord, but I may be confusing what he does with someone else's comment.)
Point...sometimes. When you are trying to display a box with wrapped text in it...
Perhaps LaTex has a decent way of doing this, but I never found it.
At the time I was trying to display params for functions in a class in a consistent and visually separated way. So I needed to wrap the text. And I couldn't get LaTex to wrap the text within the box without hand adjusting after every change. And these changes tended to cascade down the page(s) so after every change I had to check all text beneath it for alterations.
P.S.: I'm clearly not a Tex wizard, but that was too steep a learning curve for me. LibreOffice was much better. Yes, I'll grant that you can do ANY text formatting in Tex. I wouldn't be surprised if it were Turing complete. This doesn't make it a reasonable platform to use.
Yes, you *can* do anything. But it can take a long time to do it. (Actually, I *think* it's a LaTex problem, it could be a Tex problem. I tried to get to like it for a few weeks, because it would handle some things that my other tools wouldn't handle. But it was really lousy at some things I do all the time. I had to dick around with cascading changes every time I edited a line.
(Actually, that doesn't make much sense to me, as I would expect the problem to be that it didn't know what a paragraph was, but I remember it as it didn't know what a line was. And couldn't decently word-wrap.)
It does (used to) work in Roulette. But not well enough to beat the house. (It had to do with uneven wear on the support of the wheel. And it was specific to each individual wheel. I think they eliminated that possibility by occasionally polishing the bearings, or perhaps it was the axel.)
The ISP's speed test should be fine for judging the connection between him and the ISP. If he's actually being DDOSed, then that should slow down the connection to his ISP (during the attack). OTOH, if it's the ISP that has the problem, then you're right, that might well not reveal it. So both tests are useful, for showing different information.
The advice about recording transmissions sounds like good advice, and I've heard WireShark praised before for that kind of diagnosis.
If you do that, then you can identify what signals are coming from where. If it's a DDOS, of course, there will be a wide variety of different TCP addresses, but THAT is informative, too. Not directly helpful, but good evidence as to what is going on.
Don't be too sure that your anti-virus and anti-malware tools actually catch all viruses/malware. They are generally obsolete at the time they are released. They catch the ones known about at the time.
If the attacks are quite frequent, try booting off a live CD/DVD, say a recent KNOPPIX. (I think that has diagnostic tools. They don't all, so you may need a specialized distro.) That way you can be sure that nothing in the local software is causing the problem. And THEN record the results onto a USB stick.
P.S.: This is from theory. I've never actually experienced your problem.
P.P.S.: Did you release your TCP connection? I don't know how to do that under MSWind, which I'm guessing you are using, because you talk about being a gamer. But replacing your router won't automatically do that. It's probably done somewhere in network configuration.
Sorry, but Apple used to be a lot more reliable. I'll admit that I don't know anything about their systems since the late 1990's, but they USED to be a lot more reliable than MS. AND easier to use.
I switched away from Apple not because I considered their systems poor, but over licensing issues. (Admittedly MS was worse, but Apple snuck in licensing modifications in a security patch, which I find unforgivable.)
I'm sorry, but ever since Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize over Viet-nam I've declined to consider it as anything but a badge of shame.
While the idea is trivially obvious, the implementation is a bit difficult. What they've discovered isn't theory, but technology. And telling them what they should try first wouldn't help if you don't also tell them how to try it.
FWIW, the Casimir effect is normally quite difficult to observe, because it only appears when two extrememly flat pieces of conductor are brought close enough together to suppress virtual particle pair production. This causes the space between the two flat pieces of metal to have a lower energy level that the space outside, where virtual pair production isn't suppressed. And THAT is what tries to push the two pieces of conductive material closer together.
Now for a mem, this will generally be in the form of a cylinder within a cylinder, which will tend to be dynamically pushed off center. So you're talking about doing machining on smooth pieces of metal that are extremely small, and which will still end up with making contact on one side. Rails, which is what this sounds like, then need to be not only small, but smooth and sharp. Not a simple machining problem. And you probably need three or four of them on each cylinder. And they must be extremely smooth, because ordinary lubricants won't work in this environment. (Think vacuum contact welds.) This probably means that the rails need to be of a different material than the thing they make contact with, but with the same default electric charge. (At this point I'm guessing wildly. But you get the kind of thing that needs to be considered.)
Historically, dying was the most common option. If it were easy to choose another, people probably would have.
I can think of a few exceptions, e.g. once in China people starved to death in southern China rather than eat the donated wheat from northern China. I'm not sure how voluntary the donation was, but the starving to death was voluntary. (Though I might have that backwards. It could have been the wheat farmers of northern China that starved to death rather than eat rice.)
FWIW, the evidence I'm aware of tends to support the assertion that humans group together in "large" populations naturally. Depending on what you consider large. Certainly in the humdreds, and probably in the thousands. This doesn't mean that they live that way all the time, but as far back as we can trace things (i.e., apparently before agriculture) people seem to have tended to gather together periodically in large groups. The reasons are a trifle obscure, but my guess is to encourage exogamous marriages. (Caution: I Am Not An Anthropologist.)
Depends on the posters. Libel may be involved. Also obscentiy. (Obscenity is more unreasonable, and tends to yield harsher punishment, but is also more subject to a "Freedom of Speech" defense, though I'm not sure that would work on a public billboard.
OTOH, given the graffiti I've seen remain posted, sometimes for weeks, any prosecution would have a hard time extablishing violation of community values, no matter WHAT was posted..
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking of cells considerably larger than that. That couldn't be written with an adapted ink-jet mechanism. Think more of something about the size of a skin cell to represent a bit.
Most of the mammoth DNA is totally gone. There are a few fragments than can be retrieved with immense effort. And even those only exist because of the tremendous number of copies made. Even Quagga DNA hadn't been found the last time I checked, and that became extinct within the last couple of centuries.
A million years *does* seem like overkill. OTOH, for many purposes 1,000 years doesn't seem long enough. Say it needs to be long enough for Mickey Mouse to get out of copyright. Estimate 5,000 years, but a bit longer wouldn't hurt.
But the problem is being able to read it even if you have it preserved. I ran into that problem in less than 2 decades with 200 BPI Even parity mag tape. (Granted, the tapes probably weren't good any longer, but there wasn't anyplace accessible where I could even try.) Binary tape would have been a worse problem, however, because I would have needed an IBM 7094 to interpret them. Like row binary was worse than column binary on punched cards. (Ever wonder why punched cards were 72 + 8 columns rather than just 80? In row binary you got two 36 bit words per row per card, and columns 73 through 80 were for sequence numbers, in case you dropped the deck.)
So say we go through a few decades where they laws prohibit copying for much longer than the durability of the storage media (enforced by DRM, of course, as well as by lawyers and police). Civilization doesn't need to collapse in order to cause near total loss of records. Popular interest waxes and wanes, so illegal copying can't be depended upon as a way around this. It may extend the life of some records, but not even as much as three times the durability. (Most things are only popular for at most a year, with VERY rare exceptions.)
Disney used to figure on releasing their movies once every seven years, so figure that long on how long it takes something popular to sink into obscurity. Which means that illegal copying will only extend the lifetime of a work by about seven years. 21 is being extremely generous. That's not very long measured against even current history. And studios, e.g., have a long history of destroying works that they don't feel are worth reissuing. (Not making them public, destroying them.)
So 5,000 years seems like a good goal. That doesn't require tungsten+silicon nitride. But it does require that the material be stored without DRM and without compression. Even then if the mechanism has been forgotten, it will be difficult to read.
Preservation requires multiple copies as well as durability. And it requires durability as well as multiple copies (unless you are saying something like "This is how you metabolize oxygen".).
To me this sounds like a stabilized matrix that has cells that are either filled or left empty. The cells could be quite small, and it could be written by a specially adapted ink-jet printer. But you would want to fill the cells with something that was both stable and contrasting. Possibly a carbon matrix with a titanium white filler. This wouldn't survive high temperatures, but it could be quite cheap to produce, so you could have multiple copies. I'm thinking of something sort of like a high-tech paper that could be read by a microscope. An adaption of the microfiche idea, but using something a lot more stable than film, a lot cheaper than film, and with a binary coding rather than photographic images. I envision it as being "normally" processed by somthing vaguely like a cross between paper tape readers/writers and mag tape readers/writers. It would NOT be a cheap medium to have the ability to process, but it would be cheap to process once you had the equipment. And it would be intended just about solely for archival purposes.
OTOH, there's nothing that says something similar but easier to handle couldn't be common. It could store information quite densely, though probably only around 2^20 bits/square inch. (Note that tha's only 1024 bits/linear inch, which is a lot less than current mag tape. But I'm using area rather than just linear measure. The difficulties would be that this wouldn't be a mass-market product, so cost would be an issue.) Perhaps a bit less. (The dots would be quite small, after all.) I'm envisioning a matrix of carbon nanotubes as the basis, which makes it rather strong. But it also needs to be handleable and manufacturable...which that isn't, yet.
Sorry, but...
The only DNA that's preserved without corruption over the long term is that portion that is vital to the continued reproductive success of the organism. So even if you managed to encode a message into it, it would never be interpreted as other than functional.
P.S.: Over evolutionary time, and a billion years is actually quite a bit longer than the minimal evolutionary time, even vital functions tend to be altered. There are a very few segments of DNA that have been preserved unaltered for that long, but VERY few. Perhaps cytochrome-c, or some of the HOX genes. Even there you get neutral drift.
Yeah, vote third party. But don't lie to yourself and pretend that it makes a difference. The structure of the electoral system guarantees that only two parties have a chance of electing a candidate. The publicity factor guarantees that both of them will be bought ahead of time.
FWIW, I did vote thrid party last time. I usually do. But I don't pretend that it makes a difference. Do a bit of systems analysis, for gods sake.
No. You don't understand the electoral process as implemented in the US. Only a narcissistic control-freak would even consider running for president, and just about only one of those would consider running for Senator. (The senatorial comment is more applicable to the larger states, but it's somewhat true even of, say, Vermont.)
Even the House of Representatives has an ovewhelming proportion of narcissistic control-freaks. And the comments about Senators also applies to Governors.
The current electoral system guarantees that the most qualified candidates won't run. We'd do better with a lottery. At least most of the "winners" wouldn't be psychotic at the beginning of their term.
It's not the "60's hippie notions" that are the problem. It's that she's just using the rhetoric as camoflage.
P.S.: Many of the "60's hippie notions" aren't particularly useful, but just about none of them are in the same league as the danger of authoritarian worship/manifestation that she engages in.
Hypocritical, yes. But not silly. I'm not current, but in the near recent past their neighbors had the avowed policy of eradicating Israel.
Sorry, he's much worse than he appeared to be (the first time), but the only plausible alternative was worse.
P.S.: I *did* vote third party, but I was well aware that the structure of the electoral system meant that this was nearly a waste of time. I just couldn't stomach voting for either official choice. And I feel a compulsion to vote, even though I know it's nearly meaningless.
P.P.S.: On reflection I *do* think that Obama was worse then Bush, but only because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
You didn't read the article. He can write the books using a text editor, but when he wants to send them to the publisher, they must be in MSWord. And when he gets them back, they ARE in MSWord.
(Actually, IIRC he writes them in Scriviner before converting them to MSWord, but I may be confusing what he does with someone else's comment.)
Point...sometimes. When you are trying to display a box with wrapped text in it...
Perhaps LaTex has a decent way of doing this, but I never found it.
At the time I was trying to display params for functions in a class in a consistent and visually separated way. So I needed to wrap the text. And I couldn't get LaTex to wrap the text within the box without hand adjusting after every change. And these changes tended to cascade down the page(s) so after every change I had to check all text beneath it for alterations.
P.S.: I'm clearly not a Tex wizard, but that was too steep a learning curve for me. LibreOffice was much better. Yes, I'll grant that you can do ANY text formatting in Tex. I wouldn't be surprised if it were Turing complete. This doesn't make it a reasonable platform to use.
LibreOffice had the same "feature" the last time I tried.
Different publishers handle different areas. I'm sure that mathematical journal publishers handle LaTex, but that doesn't help an author of fiction.
But it doesn't know what a line is.
Yes, you *can* do anything. But it can take a long time to do it. (Actually, I *think* it's a LaTex problem, it could be a Tex problem. I tried to get to like it for a few weeks, because it would handle some things that my other tools wouldn't handle. But it was really lousy at some things I do all the time. I had to dick around with cascading changes every time I edited a line.
(Actually, that doesn't make much sense to me, as I would expect the problem to be that it didn't know what a paragraph was, but I remember it as it didn't know what a line was. And couldn't decently word-wrap.)
It does (used to) work in Roulette. But not well enough to beat the house. (It had to do with uneven wear on the support of the wheel. And it was specific to each individual wheel. I think they eliminated that possibility by occasionally polishing the bearings, or perhaps it was the axel.)
What are the tenets of Reformed Norse Paganism? Are they related to Reformed Druidism?
The ISP's speed test should be fine for judging the connection between him and the ISP. If he's actually being DDOSed, then that should slow down the connection to his ISP (during the attack). OTOH, if it's the ISP that has the problem, then you're right, that might well not reveal it. So both tests are useful, for showing different information.
The advice about recording transmissions sounds like good advice, and I've heard WireShark praised before for that kind of diagnosis.
If you do that, then you can identify what signals are coming from where. If it's a DDOS, of course, there will be a wide variety of different TCP addresses, but THAT is informative, too. Not directly helpful, but good evidence as to what is going on.
Don't be too sure that your anti-virus and anti-malware tools actually catch all viruses/malware. They are generally obsolete at the time they are released. They catch the ones known about at the time.
If the attacks are quite frequent, try booting off a live CD/DVD, say a recent KNOPPIX. (I think that has diagnostic tools. They don't all, so you may need a specialized distro.) That way you can be sure that nothing in the local software is causing the problem. And THEN record the results onto a USB stick.
P.S.: This is from theory. I've never actually experienced your problem.
P.P.S.: Did you release your TCP connection? I don't know how to do that under MSWind, which I'm guessing you are using, because you talk about being a gamer. But replacing your router won't automatically do that. It's probably done somewhere in network configuration.
Sorry, but Apple used to be a lot more reliable. I'll admit that I don't know anything about their systems since the late 1990's, but they USED to be a lot more reliable than MS. AND easier to use.
I switched away from Apple not because I considered their systems poor, but over licensing issues. (Admittedly MS was worse, but Apple snuck in licensing modifications in a security patch, which I find unforgivable.)
I'm sorry, but ever since Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize over Viet-nam I've declined to consider it as anything but a badge of shame.
That sounds like a benefit alright, but wouldn't transistors work just as well?
While the idea is trivially obvious, the implementation is a bit difficult. What they've discovered isn't theory, but technology. And telling them what they should try first wouldn't help if you don't also tell them how to try it.
FWIW, the Casimir effect is normally quite difficult to observe, because it only appears when two extrememly flat pieces of conductor are brought close enough together to suppress virtual particle pair production. This causes the space between the two flat pieces of metal to have a lower energy level that the space outside, where virtual pair production isn't suppressed. And THAT is what tries to push the two pieces of conductive material closer together.
Now for a mem, this will generally be in the form of a cylinder within a cylinder, which will tend to be dynamically pushed off center. So you're talking about doing machining on smooth pieces of metal that are extremely small, and which will still end up with making contact on one side. Rails, which is what this sounds like, then need to be not only small, but smooth and sharp. Not a simple machining problem. And you probably need three or four of them on each cylinder. And they must be extremely smooth, because ordinary lubricants won't work in this environment. (Think vacuum contact welds.) This probably means that the rails need to be of a different material than the thing they make contact with, but with the same default electric charge. (At this point I'm guessing wildly. But you get the kind of thing that needs to be considered.)
Just saying rails doesn't help that much.
Historically, dying was the most common option. If it were easy to choose another, people probably would have.
I can think of a few exceptions, e.g. once in China people starved to death in southern China rather than eat the donated wheat from northern China. I'm not sure how voluntary the donation was, but the starving to death was voluntary. (Though I might have that backwards. It could have been the wheat farmers of northern China that starved to death rather than eat rice.)
FWIW, the evidence I'm aware of tends to support the assertion that humans group together in "large" populations naturally. Depending on what you consider large. Certainly in the humdreds, and probably in the thousands. This doesn't mean that they live that way all the time, but as far back as we can trace things (i.e., apparently before agriculture) people seem to have tended to gather together periodically in large groups. The reasons are a trifle obscure, but my guess is to encourage exogamous marriages. (Caution: I Am Not An Anthropologist.)
There are people who got married online. Whether they spent their wedding night online wasn't covered in the news story.
Depends on the posters. Libel may be involved. Also obscentiy. (Obscenity is more unreasonable, and tends to yield harsher punishment, but is also more subject to a "Freedom of Speech" defense, though I'm not sure that would work on a public billboard.
OTOH, given the graffiti I've seen remain posted, sometimes for weeks, any prosecution would have a hard time extablishing violation of community values, no matter WHAT was posted..