I have an old Apple//e sitting in a corner. Amdek green screen monitor and 2 Quentin 5.25" floppy drives. Haven't tried to boot it in years, but the last time I did it still worked.
Comparing the camera shutter speed to an optical microscope makes about as much sense as saying the camera "has a false-positive rate of just one in a million". Someone forgot to read the article before posting, again.
Nice how they include the link for the "dead tree" version but the online version is much harder to find. Here it is http://en.flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/
That is a good point. I contribute to Folding@Home because it is doing pure research to understand the way proteins fold. If it happens to contribute to a cure for Alzheimer's or some other concrete result, that would be fantastic. But that is not the point. Pure research to advance the body of human knowledge is what I am hoping to support.
When I first heard about SETI@Home, I thought it was a really cool idea. At that time, it was in beta, and they were not accepting any more beta testers. Rather than wait, I went looking for another distributed computing project, and found distributed.net. So I started brute forcing an encrypted message. About 6 months later, SETI started accepting regular users, bit I was hooked on monitoring my stats, and did not want to give it all up to move to a different project. By the time the message was cracked in 2002, I was pretty bored with it and decided not to work on the next (larger key) project. I looked around again, and found Folding@Home. I realized that contributing to biological research would be a lot more satisfying than seeing how long it would take to brute force an encryption key, or look for anomalies in radio signals from space. Over the years, I have looked for good deals on refurbished boxes and put them into service folding proteins. I only have 10 boxes folding, but I can definitely relate to the "expensive hobby".
How does the butterfly know what its own wings look like? I can understand selective breeding changing the patterns on the wings. Doesn't the article imply a simultaneous change to the butterfly's brain to make it want to mate with individuals displaying the new pattern, and shun those with either of the parent patterns? What mechanism keeps those two changes in lockstep? Wouldn't it be more likely that the hybrid butterflys would be attracted to one or the other parent species, who would reject them because of their weird appearance?
Did anyone else think Gary Lauder's argument was a little strange? He provides 11 reasons that VOD is better and more economical than a PVR, then concludes that "PVRs + Satellite wil eat cable's lunch"! If his 11 points are valid, then it should be cable + VOD that eats PVRs lunch. Now I don't believe that, for many reasons that have already been discussed -- but I would like to see the cable company try to deliver a service that was good enough for people to choose even in the face of some real competition. Naah, much easier and cheaper to use tactical lawsuits to deal with the competition.
- Dave
Now I understand why the feds were so insistant that the Scarfo bug fell under their search warrant, and no wiretap warrant was needed. If no agent visits the premises then presumably no search warrant is required. And Scarfo establishes that no wiretap warrant is required to keylog a suspects pass phrase. So my bet is, this thing will not "phone home", but save the pass phrase on the victims hard drive. When the feds come, search warrant in hand, to collect the computer, they just happen to find the pass phrase sitting in a hidden file.
Now I'm starting to feel paranoid.
Like a lot of you, I wondered how they can non-destructivly authenticate DNA in the field. Take a look at the PSA/DNA web site. This is a sports memorabilia authentication company with a gimmick. They include synthetic DNA in a special ink which is used to tag an item. A special laser can make the tagging visible. Does the laser prove which DNA lot was used to tag the item? NO way! Eventually, someone will figure out how to make an ink that glows under the special laser, and their system will be worthless. Presumably, a sample could be taken to the lab, and analyzed, but this would be expensive, slow and destructive -- the very things they claim not to be.
It has been quite a few years, but when I was at Johns Hopkins University, they had a History of Science department. I always thought that would be a cool major. I don't know what someone would do with such a degree except teach, but the folks who run the department probably do!
--Dave
Slashdot Mirror
I have an old Apple //e sitting in a corner. Amdek green screen monitor and 2 Quentin 5.25" floppy drives. Haven't tried to boot it in years, but the last time I did it still worked.
Comparing the camera shutter speed to an optical microscope makes about as much sense as saying the camera "has a false-positive rate of just one in a million". Someone forgot to read the article before posting, again.
Nice how they include the link for the "dead tree" version but the online version is much harder to find. Here it is http://en.flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/
That is a good point. I contribute to Folding@Home because it is doing pure research to understand the way proteins fold. If it happens to contribute to a cure for Alzheimer's or some other concrete result, that would be fantastic. But that is not the point. Pure research to advance the body of human knowledge is what I am hoping to support.
When I first heard about SETI@Home, I thought it was a really cool idea. At that time, it was in beta, and they were not accepting any more beta testers. Rather than wait, I went looking for another distributed computing project, and found distributed.net. So I started brute forcing an encrypted message. About 6 months later, SETI started accepting regular users, bit I was hooked on monitoring my stats, and did not want to give it all up to move to a different project. By the time the message was cracked in 2002, I was pretty bored with it and decided not to work on the next (larger key) project. I looked around again, and found Folding@Home. I realized that contributing to biological research would be a lot more satisfying than seeing how long it would take to brute force an encryption key, or look for anomalies in radio signals from space. Over the years, I have looked for good deals on refurbished boxes and put them into service folding proteins. I only have 10 boxes folding, but I can definitely relate to the "expensive hobby".
How does the butterfly know what its own wings look like? I can understand selective breeding changing the patterns on the wings. Doesn't the article imply a simultaneous change to the butterfly's brain to make it want to mate with individuals displaying the new pattern, and shun those with either of the parent patterns? What mechanism keeps those two changes in lockstep? Wouldn't it be more likely that the hybrid butterflys would be attracted to one or the other parent species, who would reject them because of their weird appearance?
Did anyone else think Gary Lauder's argument was a little strange? He provides 11 reasons that VOD is better and more economical than a PVR, then concludes that "PVRs + Satellite wil eat cable's lunch"! If his 11 points are valid, then it should be cable + VOD that eats PVRs lunch. Now I don't believe that, for many reasons that have already been discussed -- but I would like to see the cable company try to deliver a service that was good enough for people to choose even in the face of some real competition. Naah, much easier and cheaper to use tactical lawsuits to deal with the competition.
- Dave
Now I understand why the feds were so insistant that the Scarfo bug fell under their search warrant, and no wiretap warrant was needed. If no agent visits the premises then presumably no search warrant is required. And Scarfo establishes that no wiretap warrant is required to keylog a suspects pass phrase. So my bet is, this thing will not "phone home", but save the pass phrase on the victims hard drive. When the feds come, search warrant in hand, to collect the computer, they just happen to find the pass phrase sitting in a hidden file.
Now I'm starting to feel paranoid.
Pardon my cynicism, but can you really trust someone who thinks that
cat access_log| grep -i ".."
will find anything useful in the log? And why -i ???
Like a lot of you, I wondered how they can non-destructivly authenticate DNA in the field. Take a look at the PSA/DNA web site. This is a sports memorabilia authentication company with a gimmick. They include synthetic DNA in a special ink which is used to tag an item. A special laser can make the tagging visible. Does the laser prove which DNA lot was used to tag the item? NO way! Eventually, someone will figure out how to make an ink that glows under the special laser, and their system will be worthless. Presumably, a sample could be taken to the lab, and analyzed, but this would be expensive, slow and destructive -- the very things they claim not to be.
try www.psadna.com
It has been quite a few years, but when I was at Johns Hopkins University, they had a History of Science department. I always thought that would be a cool major. I don't know what someone would do with such a degree except teach, but the folks who run the department probably do! --Dave