The West African Black Rhino went extinct two-to-five years ago, or thereabouts. The Yahtzee River Dolphin went extinct in about the same timeframe. The Tasmanian Tiger went extinct something like 80-100 years ago. The Moa and Haast Eagle went extinct 100-200 years ago. The wolves and wild boar native to Britain went extinct around 500 years ago, the re-introduction efforts are using nearest kin.
All of these could potentially be recovered - or, if not recovered in full, recovered to some degree.
We transfer only the nucleic DNA. Thus, if there are important interactions between the nucleic DNA and the mitochondrial DNA, we cannot produce those using the injection technique. We require a fully-intact stem cell. Secondly, such a transfer is itself risky - the more operations you perform on something delicate like that, the greater the probability of damaging it. Thus, if you can leave it in-situ, you greatly increase your odds of success.
With one major proviso.
If you want the DNA to operate in-situ, you HAVE to be able to convert the cell into an embryonic stem cell. Otherwise, you have nothing useful. If you can't move the DNA to a stem cell, then you obviously need to move the stem cell's characteristics to the DNA. This works, but only in theory. In practice, nobody knows how to despecialize cells in that way. It's possible - some tumours are variants on the theme - but the exact method of deprogramming is as yet beyond the experts in the field.
There is the other condition - the DNA has to start off by being intact - but that is true no matter what cloning method you use. Well, almost. We know how to chop DNA up, and we know how to sew fragments of DNA together. Although we can't do the latter process beyond a very small DNA fragment size, yet, it would in principle be possible to use this technique to take DNA over a wide range of samples and use intact fragments from one piece to fill in gaps from another. You merely need enough fragments for the statistics to work out that all gaps are filled. In the case of mammoths, where you have many animals and many cells in each and where preservation conditions are almost perfect, there is a very slim chance this may be possible. It's certainly better than zero. But again, the techniques for such mix-and-match lie well beyond what can currently be done in the laboratory. We just don't have the means to sew DNA fragments of that kind of size together at the present time. My estimate for how long it'll take is an estimate of the number of things that would need to be invented and how close we are to inventing each, assuming the standard rule of thumb that it takes about 10 years to get from a theory to a prototype, and another 10 to go from prototype to something viable, and assuming that some of those developments HAVE to be performed sequentially, not in parallel.
Since my estimate is in the region of 80 or so years, you can see I think there are many sequential operations that have to be performed before we have anything useful for cloning highly sophisticated species.
The idea of being able to convert adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells would be that you'd have all the benefits you've listed for adult stem cells (as that's what you start off with) but increased flexibility (as the embryonic form would be able to be used to generate tissue adult stem cells can't), and you'd not have the rejection issue as it's from the same person, so the DNA is all the same. This is why the conversion process is so important. Essentially adult stem cells are embryonic stem cells with certain functions switched on or off, so that you don't have the complete flexibility. Now, it is obvious that you can revert adult stem cells, because it does happen in nature. It's extremely rare, but medically well-documented, for example, for a doctor to surgically remove a cyst and find teeth or bone within it. That is only possible if the adult stem cells within skin have changed state to something closer to an embryonic stem cell, and therefore become capable of generating really freakish stuff.
Research into embryonic stem cells is thus important to know what the increased flexibility actually means in practice, and research into adult stem cells (for the purpose of converting them into embryonic stem cells) is important to actually produce a cure worth having. The adult stem cells alone are useful, as you have pointed out, but if you can increase that usefulness by switching stem cell mode, then you have something truly valuable.
There is recent research which shows that you can de-specialize an adult stem cell and cause it to act as if it were an embryonic stem cell, but as things stand this is only theoretical, as far as I know. Nobody has perfected the conversion, certainly. If they had, genetic research could bypass the puritain nonsense entirely. I don't know what the current state-of-play is, in that, whether they've actually got an adult stem cell to produce something it couldn't normally produce, for example. I also see it as having limited interest until we know better more about what stem cells can be used for, medically. However, in the case of an extinct species, adult stem cells might be the best chance of revival, IF (and only if) conversion to embyonic stem cell state moves past the pure theory into the realm of the practical.
Standard nucleic DNA cloning has a very high failure rate and a very high juvenile death rate. I'm guessing that this is either nucleic DNA damage and/or a mismatch of some kind with the rest of the cell, including the mtDNA. The failure rate for species revival is likely to be considerably higher. Whatever is causing the failures is likely to be many times worse when you're dumping nucleic DNA into a far distant million-times-removed relative rather than something virtually identical from a genetic standpoint.
Ergo, if you want to revive an extinct species, your best bet depends utterly on research producing a reliable mechanism for generalizing adult stem cells, then obtaining such cells for an extinct organism. Dolly the sheep suffered from very rapid decay and wastage, using conventional cloning techniques. Embedding mammoth DNA into an elephant cell is a near-certain failure. But if appropriate stimulation forced a mammoth adult stem cell to become a mammoth embryonic stem cell, your odds of success should be much higher.
However, this isn't next week's technology we're talking about. The furthest I've heard of such work is, like I said, theoretical based on some observations. I don't expect to see sufficient progress to the point of actually seeing a clone produced by such a technique (ie: without a cellular host) for 30-50 years, based on my rule-of-thumb of 10 years per stage of development, adjusted for the current wave of conservatism, assuming such a clone is possible. If the method cannot be used in practice, I would not expect enough migration from theory to practice to take place to establish that beyond all doubt for 10-20 years. Allowing 10 years for another alternative path to be found, you'd then be looking at 50-80 years for cloning without the need of a host cell.
So, provided adult stem cells can be reverted, I can expect to live long enough to see a thoroughbred cloned Mammoth or something of that order of complexity - and still be cognicent enough to appreciate it, and might live long enough to see advanced regenerative medicine. If adult stem cells prove completely unusable and no other cell can be readily reverted, I would need to be extremely lucky to see anything much in the way of major results and certainly won't live long enough to see any medical benefits. So, naturally, I'm rather more eager to see cell reversion efforts achieve good results. Adult stem cells, being some of the least specialized of all cells in the body, should be the easiest to revert. Neurons - the sort of cell formed by default if no other stimulus is present - would logically be the next easiest, as it's very easy to subtract nothing, once nothing has been added.
(Those listing me as a foe on Slashdot would probably argue that, my case, nothing is exactly what my neurons consist of and that subtracting nothing would be amputating my brain. My teachers, back when I was at school, certainly would have argued that.)
Early man had ADD. Assuming this applies to all ancient life, this yeast will not attentricate in the presence of shiny things and pretty colours. Bipalpation will not been a problem, as most elections produce a one-sided Government. Galoration will occur at a rate of one gallon a gallon. Gatoration can be expected to be snappy.
At present, the record for retrieving completely intact yDNA is 3,000 years, and the record for completely intace mitochondrial DNA (from inside the hair of a Mammoth) is 10,000 years, although older fragments have been recovered. Jurassic Park is therefore unlikely, but Neolithic Park would appear well within reach. (That might raise some interesting ethical questions. How human does one have to be to be considered as qualifying for human rights?)
The only way to not have to clone an extinct creature would be if you could recover an intact, viable stem cell. In principle, this is no different from recovering any other single-celled organism, and we've recovered those just fine. Most animals - humans included - have many sources of stem cells, the skin included, which could be exploited to make something that acted like an embryonic stem cell. It's not easy - as I understand the subject, it's never been accomplished, merely proven theoretically possible. Gotta start somewhere, though.
The idea that a few skin cells might be trapped in amber is an interesting one. A strand of hair (for obtaining the DNA and using regular cloning) also seems a possibility, assuming there was much in the way of hair at the different times amber has been formed. (Baltic amber is considered the most interesting, but there are many others. Recently did some research on amber, owing to a Bronze Age find in England of an amber necklace and pendant in a region that couldn't possibly have been rich enough on its own merits to have bought such stuff.)
Personally, though, Jurassic Park ideas seem like a fun-for-a-moment sort of thing, soon to be forgotten. A one trick show where the trick looked better in the movies. I'd be much more interested in chemists and biologists figuring out what differences there must have been in the DNA of the trees that produced Baltic Amber and modern pines. You don't need to recreate the ancient trees, you only need to create a tree that produces sap with the same chemistry. Then put the sap under pressure, and produce (nearly) instant ancient amber. Ideally, you'd destroy the market for the really ancient stuff, so biologists and microbiologists can more easily obtain the stuff to look for interesting bugs, leaves and beer yeasts.
MediaSentry/SafeNet employees are a mix of Borg, T1000s and Daleks. This makes attacks by such groups (Cyber^2) Attacks. As the *AA are run by Cybermen and Cylons, if you trace back to them, the attacks become Cyber Cubes, which sounds like a really neat game machine for alien marauders.
...IBM released JFS for Linux, works with the Apache group, have released DB/2 for Linux, continued releasing Informix for Linux, have released 500 patents (a mix of hardware and software) for Open Source projects, developed DAISY - an on-the-fly machine code translation engine, worked on Linux M:N threading, and were one of the first vendors to install a Linux distro on their hardware as standard. Many of their Open Source projects have been abandoned and deleted from their site, however, which is a pain.
They are not perfect - they suffer from many of the brain diseases associated with big business - but their contributions to Open Source are dramatic. SGI is one of the few big businesses to seriously compete with IBM on open source software released and contributions to the community. Both IBM and SGI deserve high praise and strong support for the work they have done. Likewise, they both deserve a stiff rap over the knuckles for deleting Open Source software they had released. (In SGI's case, Open B1, which was a nice insight into SGI's security models.)
In light of their history, I would be inclined to argue that IBM and SGI merit the presumption of innocence that is generally withdrawn for large corporations, at least in regards to Open Source and open standards. There needs to be a good reason to believe they are violating acceptable conduct, we can't simply assume it, because they have demonstrated for a great many years that this is one specific subject in which they have worked hard to be trustworthy. It's better to repay that than to give them an incentive to revert to mainstream corporate practices in these areas.
Oh, and you can perform further diagnostics by using DAKOTA and KOJAK to profile a standard MPI application across the supercomputer. Since these profilers give you internal details, you should be able to see where specifically slow-downs occur - be it a processing quirk, a system library flaw or a networking glitch. Hell, I wish someone paid me to benchmark supercomputers. I can pretty much guarantee RoleMaster fans will love the numbers, even if nobody else can cope with the stats.
To be honest, I thought most people already knew about and used HPC Challenge, which produces 7 different benchmarks covering different types of mathematical problem, memory bandwidth and communications bandwidth. I also imagined people would use MPI-IO for measuring MPI performance, that the numbers on the Top500 was simply because it's hard to track a vast number of stats in a meaningful way.
Of course, if it's actually the case that people are dumb, lazy or in marketing, then that would explain why we don't get a full range of stats, even though the tools have existed for many years and are certainly widely known.
There isn't necessarily a "fight" scenario. The individuals could very easily train themselves into regarding their acts as no different from a postman delivering a parcel. Assuming, of course, the person IS the one with the hostile intent - if the system is remotely effective, groups could be expected to migrate to unwitting "volunteers". Of course, such systems may be jammable, depending on how they work. It doesn't matter if vulnerabilities appear to be theoretical - organizations that are willing to, well, burn money (literally at extreme temperatures and pressures) are likely to find exploits because a populace deluded into thinking they are safe would logically be easier to manipulate and control by fear.
It's easy to move heat around, so any simple thermal camera can be tricked into thinking the person looks normal. This is only useful if the camera is simple. The heat has to go somewhere, so you'd see some point being much hotter than expected, but any software designed to reject absurd anomalies would reject such a point as impossible.
Facial expressions would logically require a course at an acting school or a few minutes with a bottle of latex and a blow-drier to create a fake facial skin. Criminals would not require the skill of Hollywood. They would only need to fool automatic face recognition and facial expression recognition software. At worst, they'd also need to fool low-res, low frame-rate CCTV operators at range. Most LARP groups have experience at producing very realistic face masks. Learning from them would produce someone who could (if they wanted to) be totally secure against CCTV systems. Many ethnic profilers could logically be fooled with similar methods.
As for false positives - anyone who is ill will show higher-than-normal heat, as will anyone who has gone jogging or exercising. Anyone caught in a hot car due to snarled-up roads will be hot and show an angry, hostile expression. Many in New England are permanently in a state of anger. So, in all probability, 90% of all city-dwellers and New Englanders will be classed as potential terrorists. Of course, I've always been somewhat suspect of Philadelphia cheese, but that seem to be taking the complaint a bit too far.
I thought it was the name of a rock group, y'know, like Disaster Area. Or maybe some giants out of the Old Testament. Something exciting. Mothballs are exciting only to moths.
Here's the official list, but I tend to track the changelog, where chipsets and mainboards are added almost daily. I suggest looking at the Freshmeat record, where I've noted what has been added to the software prior to being officially designated as verified.
LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less. Add in a busybox/light distro, and you've usable editors, network tools, utilities and the BSD games available about as fast as you'll get. Well, if you replace the flash with a large enough PROM, you might shave a little more time, as a permanent gate should be faster than a programmable gate.
If the R101 is in any shape to support anything, it's the ground. Obviously, with the R100 design, you'd need a much larger volume (but hydrogen is still vastly lighter than the CO2 of Martian air), a much lower mass (the R100 was designed to support a large human crew, aviation fuel and gigantic engines, and had a frame made of steel and aluminium as I recall, whereas a UAV version for unmanned Martian missions needs a few tens of pounds of payload, solar panels and a few light electric motors, and a frame of carbon fibre with airgel struts should be solid enough for such purposes). The R100 was also much much lighter than Terran air. It supported its own weight, but at significant (for the time) altitude.
Notice I'm talking about an airship that actually IS comparable in size to the R100, not something scaled down the way the payload is. Nothing, when compressed, doesn't take up much space, and the lower air pressure of Mars means that the air bags would be filled with mostly nothing. All you need to store is the hydrogen gas under pressure. As per the Archimedes Diver, the relative pressure in the airship can be used to control altitude, so long as the containment is adequate. For those familiar with the device, it is clear you don't NEED to shed the gas used for buoyancy so long as pressure is controllable. In consequence, you only need to ship enough to inflate the device, you don't need to ship any for re-inflating later.
Other factors include temperature. So long as the relative temperature of the hydrogen is high, you get extra volume and therefore extra buoyancy. (You only need to displace the airship's mass to float, and displacing more is what makes you rise until the relative air pressure means you are only displacing an equal amount. Which is how you can tell that anything that can handle 20,000 or so feet above mean sea level must be far lighter than the air displaced at ground level and not just supporting its own weight (which implies a ground level measurement). A black surface (that ultra-black stuff reported on Slashdot not too long ago, for example) should be handy for that, as would any heating elements. Not much risk of fire if there's not much oxygen, so frankly you might as well push such a design to the limits of the material.
And that's the key thing. The material. You need gas bags - basically floatation bladders no different from those in fish - that can swell sufficiently to allow maximum altitude but be strong enough to support Archimedian descent through pressure rather than through deflation. The latter requirement also takes care of surviving the storms, as any material strong enough to handle the pressure from the inside is strong enough to handle the buffeting from the outside. And, yes, you would need a huge airship to support even a small mass, due to the lower air pressures involved. But, frankly, that's the only engineering problem I can see. The rest was mastered by humans a century ago and by evolution two billion years ago.
Well, project maintainers tend to be very lazy when it comes to things like Freshmeat, which is why I maintain something like 120 project records and semi-regularly update 50+ others that I've subscribed to. (I should be paid full-time by Sourceforge or someone for the level of work I put in. Yeah, right.) If project maintainers were, oh, a little more forthcoming and not hiding releases, we'd all be a damn sight better off.
Google should be a good source, but the problem there is that it's so hard to search for anything where all your keywords are common words. There's no good, juicy, unambiguous keyword to use, and search engines just aren't any good at semantics. They're only useful for syntax-based searches.
The FSF's software page is excellent for projects the FSF knows about and is associated with in some way (even if just as an umbrella or as a webpage host), but you'd not get much done if you only used software they linked to. A pity, but they can't do everything, though they do try to do exactly that.
Sourceforge's search engine seems to turn up everything Sourceforge hosts, and there are a million and one Sourceforge-like sites these days.
Getting information, therefore, depends massively on volunteers trawling every imaginable report, rumour and hint of Open Source and indexing it somewhere. And there just aren't anything like enough volunteers to make anything close to a dent in what's out there. Which is a real problem, as projects that nobody knows about WILL die. Even when something IS known about, if updates aren't announced in a meaningful way, it will also die. Likewise, if people don't contribute, the project will die. Or if the maintainer doesn't release early and often, the project will die. And even after all that, if it's not in any of the major distributions, there won't be a sustainable userbase or a large enough supply of bug reports and the project will die.
In this case, I think most of the above apply.
The R100 plan is ideal for exactly those sorts of conditions. The original actually did fly through some really nasty storms - quite possibly 60mph or worse - and modern materials and building techniques should provide vastly superior structural strength. The superior shape to modern blimps means you should be able to fly directly into 60mph winds, as you have a far and away lower profile. For the same reason, side winds should be much less of a threat. However, the R100 is usually also described as much stronger and lighter than the Zeppelins (which were tough enough to pose a serious threat to the RAF), suggesting that even the whirlwinds that crop up should not be a serious threat. If you can survive high-speed machine-gun bullets, you can probably survive a sandstorm - at least, so long as you're high up enough to avoid the worst. You can't ride over it entirely, but all you need is a low enough density that you're not having an entire side panel sand-blasted out of existence.
Slashdot Mirror
The West African Black Rhino went extinct two-to-five years ago, or thereabouts. The Yahtzee River Dolphin went extinct in about the same timeframe. The Tasmanian Tiger went extinct something like 80-100 years ago. The Moa and Haast Eagle went extinct 100-200 years ago. The wolves and wild boar native to Britain went extinct around 500 years ago, the re-introduction efforts are using nearest kin.
All of these could potentially be recovered - or, if not recovered in full, recovered to some degree.
I offer no money down, but the former owners get a share in all profits I make from it.
Hey, I'm not broken! I do perfectly well on all days that don't include two or more vowels.
We transfer only the nucleic DNA. Thus, if there are important interactions between the nucleic DNA and the mitochondrial DNA, we cannot produce those using the injection technique. We require a fully-intact stem cell. Secondly, such a transfer is itself risky - the more operations you perform on something delicate like that, the greater the probability of damaging it. Thus, if you can leave it in-situ, you greatly increase your odds of success.
With one major proviso.
If you want the DNA to operate in-situ, you HAVE to be able to convert the cell into an embryonic stem cell. Otherwise, you have nothing useful. If you can't move the DNA to a stem cell, then you obviously need to move the stem cell's characteristics to the DNA. This works, but only in theory. In practice, nobody knows how to despecialize cells in that way. It's possible - some tumours are variants on the theme - but the exact method of deprogramming is as yet beyond the experts in the field.
There is the other condition - the DNA has to start off by being intact - but that is true no matter what cloning method you use. Well, almost. We know how to chop DNA up, and we know how to sew fragments of DNA together. Although we can't do the latter process beyond a very small DNA fragment size, yet, it would in principle be possible to use this technique to take DNA over a wide range of samples and use intact fragments from one piece to fill in gaps from another. You merely need enough fragments for the statistics to work out that all gaps are filled. In the case of mammoths, where you have many animals and many cells in each and where preservation conditions are almost perfect, there is a very slim chance this may be possible. It's certainly better than zero. But again, the techniques for such mix-and-match lie well beyond what can currently be done in the laboratory. We just don't have the means to sew DNA fragments of that kind of size together at the present time. My estimate for how long it'll take is an estimate of the number of things that would need to be invented and how close we are to inventing each, assuming the standard rule of thumb that it takes about 10 years to get from a theory to a prototype, and another 10 to go from prototype to something viable, and assuming that some of those developments HAVE to be performed sequentially, not in parallel.
Since my estimate is in the region of 80 or so years, you can see I think there are many sequential operations that have to be performed before we have anything useful for cloning highly sophisticated species.
The idea of being able to convert adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells would be that you'd have all the benefits you've listed for adult stem cells (as that's what you start off with) but increased flexibility (as the embryonic form would be able to be used to generate tissue adult stem cells can't), and you'd not have the rejection issue as it's from the same person, so the DNA is all the same. This is why the conversion process is so important. Essentially adult stem cells are embryonic stem cells with certain functions switched on or off, so that you don't have the complete flexibility. Now, it is obvious that you can revert adult stem cells, because it does happen in nature. It's extremely rare, but medically well-documented, for example, for a doctor to surgically remove a cyst and find teeth or bone within it. That is only possible if the adult stem cells within skin have changed state to something closer to an embryonic stem cell, and therefore become capable of generating really freakish stuff.
Research into embryonic stem cells is thus important to know what the increased flexibility actually means in practice, and research into adult stem cells (for the purpose of converting them into embryonic stem cells) is important to actually produce a cure worth having. The adult stem cells alone are useful, as you have pointed out, but if you can increase that usefulness by switching stem cell mode, then you have something truly valuable.
There is recent research which shows that you can de-specialize an adult stem cell and cause it to act as if it were an embryonic stem cell, but as things stand this is only theoretical, as far as I know. Nobody has perfected the conversion, certainly. If they had, genetic research could bypass the puritain nonsense entirely. I don't know what the current state-of-play is, in that, whether they've actually got an adult stem cell to produce something it couldn't normally produce, for example. I also see it as having limited interest until we know better more about what stem cells can be used for, medically. However, in the case of an extinct species, adult stem cells might be the best chance of revival, IF (and only if) conversion to embyonic stem cell state moves past the pure theory into the realm of the practical.
Standard nucleic DNA cloning has a very high failure rate and a very high juvenile death rate. I'm guessing that this is either nucleic DNA damage and/or a mismatch of some kind with the rest of the cell, including the mtDNA. The failure rate for species revival is likely to be considerably higher. Whatever is causing the failures is likely to be many times worse when you're dumping nucleic DNA into a far distant million-times-removed relative rather than something virtually identical from a genetic standpoint.
Ergo, if you want to revive an extinct species, your best bet depends utterly on research producing a reliable mechanism for generalizing adult stem cells, then obtaining such cells for an extinct organism. Dolly the sheep suffered from very rapid decay and wastage, using conventional cloning techniques. Embedding mammoth DNA into an elephant cell is a near-certain failure. But if appropriate stimulation forced a mammoth adult stem cell to become a mammoth embryonic stem cell, your odds of success should be much higher.
However, this isn't next week's technology we're talking about. The furthest I've heard of such work is, like I said, theoretical based on some observations. I don't expect to see sufficient progress to the point of actually seeing a clone produced by such a technique (ie: without a cellular host) for 30-50 years, based on my rule-of-thumb of 10 years per stage of development, adjusted for the current wave of conservatism, assuming such a clone is possible. If the method cannot be used in practice, I would not expect enough migration from theory to practice to take place to establish that beyond all doubt for 10-20 years. Allowing 10 years for another alternative path to be found, you'd then be looking at 50-80 years for cloning without the need of a host cell.
So, provided adult stem cells can be reverted, I can expect to live long enough to see a thoroughbred cloned Mammoth or something of that order of complexity - and still be cognicent enough to appreciate it, and might live long enough to see advanced regenerative medicine. If adult stem cells prove completely unusable and no other cell can be readily reverted, I would need to be extremely lucky to see anything much in the way of major results and certainly won't live long enough to see any medical benefits. So, naturally, I'm rather more eager to see cell reversion efforts achieve good results. Adult stem cells, being some of the least specialized of all cells in the body, should be the easiest to revert. Neurons - the sort of cell formed by default if no other stimulus is present - would logically be the next easiest, as it's very easy to subtract nothing, once nothing has been added.
(Those listing me as a foe on Slashdot would probably argue that, my case, nothing is exactly what my neurons consist of and that subtracting nothing would be amputating my brain. My teachers, back when I was at school, certainly would have argued that.)
Early man had ADD. Assuming this applies to all ancient life, this yeast will not attentricate in the presence of shiny things and pretty colours. Bipalpation will not been a problem, as most elections produce a one-sided Government. Galoration will occur at a rate of one gallon a gallon. Gatoration can be expected to be snappy.
At present, the record for retrieving completely intact yDNA is 3,000 years, and the record for completely intace mitochondrial DNA (from inside the hair of a Mammoth) is 10,000 years, although older fragments have been recovered. Jurassic Park is therefore unlikely, but Neolithic Park would appear well within reach. (That might raise some interesting ethical questions. How human does one have to be to be considered as qualifying for human rights?)
The only way to not have to clone an extinct creature would be if you could recover an intact, viable stem cell. In principle, this is no different from recovering any other single-celled organism, and we've recovered those just fine. Most animals - humans included - have many sources of stem cells, the skin included, which could be exploited to make something that acted like an embryonic stem cell. It's not easy - as I understand the subject, it's never been accomplished, merely proven theoretically possible. Gotta start somewhere, though.
The idea that a few skin cells might be trapped in amber is an interesting one. A strand of hair (for obtaining the DNA and using regular cloning) also seems a possibility, assuming there was much in the way of hair at the different times amber has been formed. (Baltic amber is considered the most interesting, but there are many others. Recently did some research on amber, owing to a Bronze Age find in England of an amber necklace and pendant in a region that couldn't possibly have been rich enough on its own merits to have bought such stuff.)
Personally, though, Jurassic Park ideas seem like a fun-for-a-moment sort of thing, soon to be forgotten. A one trick show where the trick looked better in the movies. I'd be much more interested in chemists and biologists figuring out what differences there must have been in the DNA of the trees that produced Baltic Amber and modern pines. You don't need to recreate the ancient trees, you only need to create a tree that produces sap with the same chemistry. Then put the sap under pressure, and produce (nearly) instant ancient amber. Ideally, you'd destroy the market for the really ancient stuff, so biologists and microbiologists can more easily obtain the stuff to look for interesting bugs, leaves and beer yeasts.
I was more concerned with them extracting spice from worms, and whether the eyes of the researchers had changed any.
Heisenbenchmarks. They could either use a supercomputer for that, or know how fast that supercomputer was, but they couldn't do both at the same time.
MediaSentry/SafeNet employees are a mix of Borg, T1000s and Daleks. This makes attacks by such groups (Cyber^2) Attacks. As the *AA are run by Cybermen and Cylons, if you trace back to them, the attacks become Cyber Cubes, which sounds like a really neat game machine for alien marauders.
...IBM released JFS for Linux, works with the Apache group, have released DB/2 for Linux, continued releasing Informix for Linux, have released 500 patents (a mix of hardware and software) for Open Source projects, developed DAISY - an on-the-fly machine code translation engine, worked on Linux M:N threading, and were one of the first vendors to install a Linux distro on their hardware as standard. Many of their Open Source projects have been abandoned and deleted from their site, however, which is a pain.
They are not perfect - they suffer from many of the brain diseases associated with big business - but their contributions to Open Source are dramatic. SGI is one of the few big businesses to seriously compete with IBM on open source software released and contributions to the community. Both IBM and SGI deserve high praise and strong support for the work they have done. Likewise, they both deserve a stiff rap over the knuckles for deleting Open Source software they had released. (In SGI's case, Open B1, which was a nice insight into SGI's security models.)
In light of their history, I would be inclined to argue that IBM and SGI merit the presumption of innocence that is generally withdrawn for large corporations, at least in regards to Open Source and open standards. There needs to be a good reason to believe they are violating acceptable conduct, we can't simply assume it, because they have demonstrated for a great many years that this is one specific subject in which they have worked hard to be trustworthy. It's better to repay that than to give them an incentive to revert to mainstream corporate practices in these areas.
Oh, and you can perform further diagnostics by using DAKOTA and KOJAK to profile a standard MPI application across the supercomputer. Since these profilers give you internal details, you should be able to see where specifically slow-downs occur - be it a processing quirk, a system library flaw or a networking glitch. Hell, I wish someone paid me to benchmark supercomputers. I can pretty much guarantee RoleMaster fans will love the numbers, even if nobody else can cope with the stats.
Of course, if it's actually the case that people are dumb, lazy or in marketing, then that would explain why we don't get a full range of stats, even though the tools have existed for many years and are certainly widely known.
If they'd finished the Berlin GUI, you could have played one hell of a game of Quake.
It's easy to move heat around, so any simple thermal camera can be tricked into thinking the person looks normal. This is only useful if the camera is simple. The heat has to go somewhere, so you'd see some point being much hotter than expected, but any software designed to reject absurd anomalies would reject such a point as impossible.
Facial expressions would logically require a course at an acting school or a few minutes with a bottle of latex and a blow-drier to create a fake facial skin. Criminals would not require the skill of Hollywood. They would only need to fool automatic face recognition and facial expression recognition software. At worst, they'd also need to fool low-res, low frame-rate CCTV operators at range. Most LARP groups have experience at producing very realistic face masks. Learning from them would produce someone who could (if they wanted to) be totally secure against CCTV systems. Many ethnic profilers could logically be fooled with similar methods.
As for false positives - anyone who is ill will show higher-than-normal heat, as will anyone who has gone jogging or exercising. Anyone caught in a hot car due to snarled-up roads will be hot and show an angry, hostile expression. Many in New England are permanently in a state of anger. So, in all probability, 90% of all city-dwellers and New Englanders will be classed as potential terrorists. Of course, I've always been somewhat suspect of Philadelphia cheese, but that seem to be taking the complaint a bit too far.
I thought it was the name of a rock group, y'know, like Disaster Area. Or maybe some giants out of the Old Testament. Something exciting. Mothballs are exciting only to moths.
...that TV stations don't exist, they're a Hollywood movie script. They must be, if the station itself is subject to the DMCA.
Here's the official list, but I tend to track the changelog, where chipsets and mainboards are added almost daily. I suggest looking at the Freshmeat record, where I've noted what has been added to the software prior to being officially designated as verified.
LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less. Add in a busybox/light distro, and you've usable editors, network tools, utilities and the BSD games available about as fast as you'll get. Well, if you replace the flash with a large enough PROM, you might shave a little more time, as a permanent gate should be faster than a programmable gate.
If the R101 is in any shape to support anything, it's the ground. Obviously, with the R100 design, you'd need a much larger volume (but hydrogen is still vastly lighter than the CO2 of Martian air), a much lower mass (the R100 was designed to support a large human crew, aviation fuel and gigantic engines, and had a frame made of steel and aluminium as I recall, whereas a UAV version for unmanned Martian missions needs a few tens of pounds of payload, solar panels and a few light electric motors, and a frame of carbon fibre with airgel struts should be solid enough for such purposes). The R100 was also much much lighter than Terran air. It supported its own weight, but at significant (for the time) altitude. Notice I'm talking about an airship that actually IS comparable in size to the R100, not something scaled down the way the payload is. Nothing, when compressed, doesn't take up much space, and the lower air pressure of Mars means that the air bags would be filled with mostly nothing. All you need to store is the hydrogen gas under pressure. As per the Archimedes Diver, the relative pressure in the airship can be used to control altitude, so long as the containment is adequate. For those familiar with the device, it is clear you don't NEED to shed the gas used for buoyancy so long as pressure is controllable. In consequence, you only need to ship enough to inflate the device, you don't need to ship any for re-inflating later. Other factors include temperature. So long as the relative temperature of the hydrogen is high, you get extra volume and therefore extra buoyancy. (You only need to displace the airship's mass to float, and displacing more is what makes you rise until the relative air pressure means you are only displacing an equal amount. Which is how you can tell that anything that can handle 20,000 or so feet above mean sea level must be far lighter than the air displaced at ground level and not just supporting its own weight (which implies a ground level measurement). A black surface (that ultra-black stuff reported on Slashdot not too long ago, for example) should be handy for that, as would any heating elements. Not much risk of fire if there's not much oxygen, so frankly you might as well push such a design to the limits of the material. And that's the key thing. The material. You need gas bags - basically floatation bladders no different from those in fish - that can swell sufficiently to allow maximum altitude but be strong enough to support Archimedian descent through pressure rather than through deflation. The latter requirement also takes care of surviving the storms, as any material strong enough to handle the pressure from the inside is strong enough to handle the buffeting from the outside. And, yes, you would need a huge airship to support even a small mass, due to the lower air pressures involved. But, frankly, that's the only engineering problem I can see. The rest was mastered by humans a century ago and by evolution two billion years ago.
Well, project maintainers tend to be very lazy when it comes to things like Freshmeat, which is why I maintain something like 120 project records and semi-regularly update 50+ others that I've subscribed to. (I should be paid full-time by Sourceforge or someone for the level of work I put in. Yeah, right.) If project maintainers were, oh, a little more forthcoming and not hiding releases, we'd all be a damn sight better off. Google should be a good source, but the problem there is that it's so hard to search for anything where all your keywords are common words. There's no good, juicy, unambiguous keyword to use, and search engines just aren't any good at semantics. They're only useful for syntax-based searches. The FSF's software page is excellent for projects the FSF knows about and is associated with in some way (even if just as an umbrella or as a webpage host), but you'd not get much done if you only used software they linked to. A pity, but they can't do everything, though they do try to do exactly that. Sourceforge's search engine seems to turn up everything Sourceforge hosts, and there are a million and one Sourceforge-like sites these days. Getting information, therefore, depends massively on volunteers trawling every imaginable report, rumour and hint of Open Source and indexing it somewhere. And there just aren't anything like enough volunteers to make anything close to a dent in what's out there. Which is a real problem, as projects that nobody knows about WILL die. Even when something IS known about, if updates aren't announced in a meaningful way, it will also die. Likewise, if people don't contribute, the project will die. Or if the maintainer doesn't release early and often, the project will die. And even after all that, if it's not in any of the major distributions, there won't be a sustainable userbase or a large enough supply of bug reports and the project will die. In this case, I think most of the above apply.
But... but... carriage returns would require ponies and that Slashdot style isn't available right now.
The R100 plan is ideal for exactly those sorts of conditions. The original actually did fly through some really nasty storms - quite possibly 60mph or worse - and modern materials and building techniques should provide vastly superior structural strength. The superior shape to modern blimps means you should be able to fly directly into 60mph winds, as you have a far and away lower profile. For the same reason, side winds should be much less of a threat. However, the R100 is usually also described as much stronger and lighter than the Zeppelins (which were tough enough to pose a serious threat to the RAF), suggesting that even the whirlwinds that crop up should not be a serious threat. If you can survive high-speed machine-gun bullets, you can probably survive a sandstorm - at least, so long as you're high up enough to avoid the worst. You can't ride over it entirely, but all you need is a low enough density that you're not having an entire side panel sand-blasted out of existence.