Always use bold tags. To Karma Whore well you need Visibility.
Negligence is an interesting issue. How secure does a server have to be before it is free from liability? I used to work for a law firm, and I've seen Nevada casinos sued many times for having inadequate numbers of security guards. (Do these suits win? I don't know, because we always, always, always settled. Trial is expensive.)
I'm racking my brain for a good, solid analogy to a web server, but it really feels like apples and oranges. Should a corporation be liable and open to lawsuits simply because it uses Microsoft products?
In conclusion, this suit is in some ways a good thing, because we really need to bring this sort of issue to the attention of the courts so they can formulate some kind of clear law on the matter.
The open source movement's principles don't really apply to games the same way they apply to software which is actually useful.
Sure, there are some sections of games which might--and this is a big might--have applications in "real" software. For example, someone who designes a new 3D engines or AI module might have legitimate cause to let people review it. But let's face it--how much can anyone really learn from Heroes of Might and Magic III--and how important is it to submit it to endless peer review to get the bugs out? The worst thing a bug is generally going to do is destroy your saved game, and even though it might feel like it, that isn't the end of the world.
There are three main reasons that people write code: 1) To make money; 2) To show off or impress or entertain people; and 3) To make the world a better place. Writing an operating system, or a tool, can include all three, hence open-sourcing. But those who write games are not generally concerned about making the world a better place. They want to look cool and make money.
In conclusion, if Microsoft opened Windows 2000, but left Minesweeper in binary form, I would have no complaints.
Isn't it weird that the average Slashdot discussion is completely non-gender specific, yet Rei finds it necessary to mention gender in 60% of her posts?
When all you have is a hammer, all the world resembles a nail...
Re:One Point - Anyone else suspicious??
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 2
I think it's pretty clear this is not Jon Katz.
Of course, given the fact that he's posting at automatic +1, he's done a pretty good job of not appearing to be a troll, but if I recall correctly, isn't Slashdot curretly written in Perl? And isn't Perl case sensitive? AFAIK, no one has ever written in the line(s) it would take to make "JonKatz" equivalent to "jonkatz".
Second, posters of stories don't generally participate in their own discussions. Actually, I've never seen it happen. This jonkatz has posted 19 articles in the past few weeks. Why would an author want to flamebait his own discussion by tagging someone's post as "meaningless and incomprehensible"?
Finally, this isn't written in Katz's (unfortunately) familiar style. Katz is more verbose than this, and he makes fewer grammatical errors (with the exception of those caused by typos, which he doesn't check for). He would never say "The issue here is how is society supposed to deal with its many consequences." Instead, he would say something like, "Genetic Engineering has been a 'buzzword' for the new millenium for some time; only now, however, is society in a position to deal with it, and we should not ignore the issue at hand or try to obscure the blah blah blah blah"
Frankly, it sounds like Dell and Compaq are playing it smart. Let the other companies see if there is a demand AND take the heat for the slow speed* and then come out with laptops in about 6 months.
Maybe Dell and Compaq have actually been watching the Sega vs. Nintendo saga (heheh "Sega Saga".. sorry) and have actually learned something from it, as opposed to, for example, Sega.
In my opinion, being first is only important if you aren't an established company and you really need to make your mark and get your name out there. Otherwise, you'll put out a product, it will get press like, "What a great idea!! Too bad it's slow and clunky and ugly", and six months later, megacorporation X will do it right.
In conclusion, the first person to put this out should be me. Personally. Mail venture capital to: P.O. Box 1784...
I'm not sure I agree that it's actually so terribly smart of a thing to do. I mean, the guy is planning on going 60 miles into the atmosphere. NASA supposedly defines space as starting at 62 miles up. What happens if his already rough-sounding calculations are off by a couple of percent, and he ends up in space for real?
Dude, Earth's atmosphere gets gradually thinner as you go up. It's not like somewhere between 60 and 62 miles, you break through this "membrane", and then smash into it while you're trying to get back down.
I mean, really. That's a weird concept of "space". You do know that the air gets to thin to breathe on top of mountains, right?
In conclusion, this guy will die, but not because he overshoots his target by one mile.
Just out of curiousity, Did Wilbur and Orville have thousands of people from the top 1% of university graduates backing them? How bout that Lindbergh fella?
It's probably dangerous that we hear so much about the heroes who managed to do these things despite all odds, and not a single word about the sixty guys who must have fallen to their deaths trying.
Still, I tend to agree with both basic sides of this post: 1) This guy is a moron; and 2) It's not totally unworthwhile to try something moronic.
In conclusion, I'm glad my band's guitar player doesn't read Slashdot because he'd be guaranteed to try to do this first.
It seems pretty clear to me that Jon Katz was behind this little initiative. Consider: a "columnist" reads Dilbert strips about amassing an army of nerds and intimidating companies, gets a bright idea, slips into our midst, publishes long rambling "Karma Whore" stories, essentially repeating everything we say but diluting the message, and declares himself our king.
The next step, obviously, is to replace the "Slashdot Poll" with the "Slashdot Petition". It's not to hard to get 40,000 Slashdotters to say that they use a telegraph to connect to the internet. How hard could it really be to disguise a Petition as a Poll? For example: I use Linux because A) Jon Katz should be king; B) I am 733T; C) Go to hell.
On a more serious note, though, it's going to a piece of cake for us to put a "Repeal the anti-encryption law" on every ballot in the nation, thus boring 98% of the population.
In conclusion, this idea is stupid, but we very well may end up "laughing all the way to the bank", as it were.
I agree. I'm much more comfortable spilling McDonald's Sweet & Sour Sauce all over the front page of a newspaper than on the keyboard of my Vaio. Also, I've had concepts that I simply could not grasp after reading hours of documentation, explained to me in literally two sentences.
It's nice to read this kind of article. It isn't written from any doomsday perspective, doesn't hate technology, and manages to show us pretty convincingly that we're still the masters of our technology, rather than the other way around.
In conclusion, although we're certain to devolve into some hideous borg-like species whose survival is intrinsicly tied with its technology, that hasn't happened yet, except to Signal 11.
... that we're going to have to actually use the header "bxxp://".
I mean, for people who just surf around, I'm sure IE and Netscape will quickly adapt to be able to fill that in themselves, and that just typing "Yahoo" will be enough to find either bxxp://www.yahoo.org or http://yahoo.com depending on how the defaults are set.
But for those of us writing CGIs, this kind of sucks. Sometimes the "http" has to be very explicit. It's a simple matter to know when to use http://, ftp://, telnet://, etc., because the protocols are so unrelated, but with these related ones, it will be a headache.
Of course, if bxxp can handle http, I guess this problem shouldn't exist at all. It still will.
I have to say that I've never liked the idea of "case by case basis".
Without rigid standards in our law, we're plunged into chaos - any man can find his entire life completely at the mercy of any random judge or seven joe blows - and let me tell you, out here in Nevada, where some of the judges have never been lawyers (they're ranchers--I saw a guy get 40 years for cattle rustling a month after another guy got 20 for first degree murder), that scares me.
And, come on, most of us are computer people. What would computers be like if the answer to the question "What does 'ls' do?" was "Well, that's pretty much on a case-by-case business. In Debian, it lists your files, but in Caldera, it pretty much acts like rm -r."
In conclusion, we need good law on this. Which is why, in a sense, the RIAA's barrage of lawsuits is a good thing - it brings this to the forefront and forces us to hammer out our priorities. I believe in freedom - but not freedom behind the government's back. Freedom should be able to be pretty much sanctioned and out in the open.
After reading this article, it was pretty clear to me that the RIAA didn't exactly have a picture of what should and should not be illegal. The only thing that they were claiming is that since the kid who put up the hyperlinks had the knowledge that some crime was being committed, and the intention that the crime be committed, then there's some crime going on, right? Right?
The RIAA isn't exactly a philosophical organization with a broad view of the future. They're a day-to-day business, and right now, their strategy seems pretty clear to me: they want to see what they can and can't get away with. Does shutting down file-sharing protocols have any legal validity? Their answer: Who knows? We'll never know until we give it a shot. Does shutting down hyperlinking have any legal validity? Their answer? Who knows? Let's... give it a shot.
I cringe at the legal costs they must be incurring, but for a behemoth like the RIAA, that's really just business as usual.
It's easy to point fingers, but I don't think we can blame the RIAA for this - they're doing exactly what any other company whose business was threatened (or perceived to be threatened) would do. Hopefully, the courts will come to their senses and realize that this is just another frivolous attempt to gag free speech in the name of big business. If they don't, we know how to blame.
In conclusion, the only thing we can do is dilute the law by breaking it so often that a policy of salutory neglect must be followed.
As far as I understand, the human genome project gives us the ability to say, "Wow! Jon Katz's gene #34289689 on Chromosone #23 is ATCA.. that means he can't produce any pseudochlorohydrolynanelanymine-B in the cell membranes of his T-x84dg white blood cells!
Well, big holy shit.
In a way, if I make a tired Linux analogy, I'd equate the "completion of the human genome project" with "figuring out how to type ls, going into every directory, and drawing the tree". Of course, the analogy is flawed because filenames are (slightly) intuitive; this would be more along the lines of finally being able to read the file system, when the average file was named "a0sd8fhj09bv".
Give it a shot some time. Write a Perl script to rename every single file in Debian to a random string of fifteen characters. Then go get your mom, tell her that "ls" looks at files, and ask her to install Enlightenment.
In conclusion, we're all a little bit too excited about this.
It should be clear to anyone that this is, in fact, the end of the internet. To me, it's sort of sad: now I have to get a real life, figure out how to work on a carbeurator, and adjust to occasionally being in the sun.
Well, it was inevitable that something like this "shutting down illegal trading of copyrighted material" would signify the end of the internet. I mean, there were dozens of things that I've been reading about that had the same effect. Privacy violations. Corporate-owned backbones. Pop-up ads.
R.I.P., internet. I will miss thee. Maybe I should get a cat.
In conclusion, these headlines fucking suck and you should all go to hell.
I do not agree to be bombarded with bandwith hogging ads, especially when they cut into my time and hinder me from surfing somewhere else all the while being charged time to view the ads.
I sincerely believe that you do. Did you actually read anything other than the words, "I agree"? Chances are, AOL also has all the intellectual property rights to any country/western songs you may write or record for the next forty years.
My guess is that these people come from the same shallow end of the gene-pool as those that haven't learned how to turn the caps lock off. I DONT UNDERSTAND HOW TO TURN OFF MY POPUP ADS HELLOOOOOOOO??? CAN ANYONE READ THIS??? IM PAYING LOTS OF $$$ FOR THE INTERWEB AND I GET ADVERTISEMENTS JUST LIKE TV BUT IT ISNT FREE HOW DO I GET ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB???!?? WHAT IS YOUR A/S/L??? HELLO??? CAN ANY1 HEAR ME?? I HEARD PPL ON THE SLASHDOT COULD HELP ME WITH MY PROBLEM. IM GETTING ADS EVEN THOUGH IM PAYING AND I CANT GET ON THE WORLD WIBE INTERWEB
Sometimes the lameness filter is, well, lame. And how the heck does Oog get past it? OKAY HAVE IT YOUR WAY YOULL HEAR FROM MY LAWYERS
Congratulations. This is the lamest post in the history of mankind. Granted, for about 5990 years (roughly) after the agricultural revolution, no one posted anything, unless you count tacking papyrus to someone's door. However, over the past 10-20 years, we've been trying to make up for lost time, big time, so for you to post the lamest thing ever is actually quite an accomplishment.
In conclusion, I believe the guy was asking "What's a flop", meaning "What is the flop you're referring to," because in the wording of the post, it was a little ambiguous whether the flop in queston was the convention itself or something being showcased at the convention.
Whose DNA have they sequenced? Isn't everyone's somewhat unique? How do they take an "average" person's DNA, considering all of us have something unique, and/or some type of mutation in our genome. Don't get me wrong, I'm in total support of the HGP, I think it'll revolutionize medicine. I'm just curious as to what sampling methods they employ
My understanding is that each gene in any human codes for a specific protein. For example, in the case of albinos, a gene that would normally code for the protien which causes skin pigmentation is missing or damaged. Apparently, every human follows the same "template": even though you might be able to roll your tongue into a "taco" and I can't, the protiens that create those muscle structures are coded for on the same gene.
So, this "mapping" isn't exactly the sequencing of any person's DNA - they're just figuring out which protiens go to which genes (or gene clusters). It's a little deceptive, because when it comes down to it, they have no idea what most of the protiens actually do.
I know I'm jumping the gun a lot here, since we can't do much more sophisticated things than cloning a sheep and curing cystic fibrosis in lung tissue that is not attached to an organism, but...
It strikes me that genetics are a lot like source code, and that we've sort of reverse-engineered a template for writing this code.
So the big question is: when they start coming up with genetic enhancements to make us smarter, stronger, and more fragrant, are they going to be packaged in such a way that we can't tell what they are without doing the whole reverse engineering process over again (i.e. MicroSoft Harry), or are the specs going to be put out for all to see, so that we can all create our own personalized monkey-men (i.e. GnuMonkeyMan)?
Things like growing modified human clones (with, say, an eye in the back of the head) would never ever pass any kind of review board
In the past, the traditional ways of circumventing review boards included:
1. Mad scientists 2. Fascist governments 3. Bribery 4. The certainty that someone would profit
Fortunately, in this age of the internet, I don't think it's terribly unlikely that a bunch of random guys are going to get together, gather a bunch of genetic information, and build a genetic abomination solely for the sake of leveling their Everquest character.
Slashdot Mirror
Always use bold tags.
To Karma Whore well you need
Visibility.
Negligence is an interesting issue. How secure does a server have to be before it is free from liability? I used to work for a law firm, and I've seen Nevada casinos sued many times for having inadequate numbers of security guards. (Do these suits win? I don't know, because we always, always, always settled. Trial is expensive.)
I'm racking my brain for a good, solid analogy to a web server, but it really feels like apples and oranges. Should a corporation be liable and open to lawsuits simply because it uses Microsoft products?
In conclusion, this suit is in some ways a good thing, because we really need to bring this sort of issue to the attention of the courts so they can formulate some kind of clear law on the matter.
The open source movement's principles don't really apply to games the same way they apply to software which is actually useful.
Sure, there are some sections of games which might--and this is a big might--have applications in "real" software. For example, someone who designes a new 3D engines or AI module might have legitimate cause to let people review it. But let's face it--how much can anyone really learn from Heroes of Might and Magic III--and how important is it to submit it to endless peer review to get the bugs out? The worst thing a bug is generally going to do is destroy your saved game, and even though it might feel like it, that isn't the end of the world.
There are three main reasons that people write code: 1) To make money; 2) To show off or impress or entertain people; and 3) To make the world a better place. Writing an operating system, or a tool, can include all three, hence open-sourcing. But those who write games are not generally concerned about making the world a better place. They want to look cool and make money.
In conclusion, if Microsoft opened Windows 2000, but left Minesweeper in binary form, I would have no complaints.
Isn't it weird that the average Slashdot discussion is completely non-gender specific, yet Rei finds it necessary to mention gender in 60% of her posts?
When all you have is a hammer, all the world resembles a nail...
I think it's pretty clear this is not Jon Katz.
Of course, given the fact that he's posting at automatic +1, he's done a pretty good job of not appearing to be a troll, but if I recall correctly, isn't Slashdot curretly written in Perl? And isn't Perl case sensitive? AFAIK, no one has ever written in the line(s) it would take to make "JonKatz" equivalent to "jonkatz".
Second, posters of stories don't generally participate in their own discussions. Actually, I've never seen it happen. This jonkatz has posted 19 articles in the past few weeks. Why would an author want to flamebait his own discussion by tagging someone's post as "meaningless and incomprehensible"?
Finally, this isn't written in Katz's (unfortunately) familiar style. Katz is more verbose than this, and he makes fewer grammatical errors (with the exception of those caused by typos, which he doesn't check for). He would never say "The issue here is how is society supposed to deal with its many consequences." Instead, he would say something like, "Genetic Engineering has been a 'buzzword' for the new millenium for some time; only now, however, is society in a position to deal with it, and we should not ignore the issue at hand or try to obscure the blah blah blah blah"
In conclusion, this is a truly evil troll.
Dodge One
Dodge Two
Dodge Three
Dodge Delta
Dodge Delta 2
Dodge Delta 3
Dodge Delta Delta
Which gets me thinking.. "Pentium 5" is kind of redundant in some weird way. Maybe they'll call it Pentium Squared?
It feels pretty weird
To type "Natalie Portman"
And not lose Karma.
Frankly, it sounds like Dell and Compaq are playing it smart. Let the other companies see if there is a demand AND take the heat for the slow speed* and then come out with laptops in about 6 months.
Maybe Dell and Compaq have actually been watching the Sega vs. Nintendo saga (heheh "Sega Saga".. sorry) and have actually learned something from it, as opposed to, for example, Sega.
In my opinion, being first is only important if you aren't an established company and you really need to make your mark and get your name out there. Otherwise, you'll put out a product, it will get press like, "What a great idea!! Too bad it's slow and clunky and ugly", and six months later, megacorporation X will do it right.
In conclusion, the first person to put this out should be me. Personally. Mail venture capital to: P.O. Box 1784...
I'm not sure I agree that it's actually so terribly smart of a thing to do. I mean, the guy is planning on going 60 miles into the atmosphere. NASA supposedly defines space as starting at 62 miles up. What happens if his already rough-sounding calculations are off by a couple of percent, and he ends up in space for real?
Dude, Earth's atmosphere gets gradually thinner as you go up. It's not like somewhere between 60 and 62 miles, you break through this "membrane", and then smash into it while you're trying to get back down.
I mean, really. That's a weird concept of "space". You do know that the air gets to thin to breathe on top of mountains, right?
In conclusion, this guy will die, but not because he overshoots his target by one mile.
Just out of curiousity, Did Wilbur and Orville have thousands of people from the top 1% of university graduates backing them? How bout that Lindbergh fella?
It's probably dangerous that we hear so much about the heroes who managed to do these things despite all odds, and not a single word about the sixty guys who must have fallen to their deaths trying.
Still, I tend to agree with both basic sides of this post: 1) This guy is a moron; and 2) It's not totally unworthwhile to try something moronic.
In conclusion, I'm glad my band's guitar player doesn't read Slashdot because he'd be guaranteed to try to do this first.
It seems pretty clear to me that Jon Katz was behind this little initiative. Consider: a "columnist" reads Dilbert strips about amassing an army of nerds and intimidating companies, gets a bright idea, slips into our midst, publishes long rambling "Karma Whore" stories, essentially repeating everything we say but diluting the message, and declares himself our king.
The next step, obviously, is to replace the "Slashdot Poll" with the "Slashdot Petition". It's not to hard to get 40,000 Slashdotters to say that they use a telegraph to connect to the internet. How hard could it really be to disguise a Petition as a Poll? For example: I use Linux because A) Jon Katz should be king; B) I am 733T; C) Go to hell.
On a more serious note, though, it's going to a piece of cake for us to put a "Repeal the anti-encryption law" on every ballot in the nation, thus boring 98% of the population.
In conclusion, this idea is stupid, but we very well may end up "laughing all the way to the bank", as it were.
I agree. I'm much more comfortable spilling McDonald's Sweet & Sour Sauce all over the front page of a newspaper than on the keyboard of my Vaio. Also, I've had concepts that I simply could not grasp after reading hours of documentation, explained to me in literally two sentences.
It's nice to read this kind of article. It isn't written from any doomsday perspective, doesn't hate technology, and manages to show us pretty convincingly that we're still the masters of our technology, rather than the other way around.
In conclusion, although we're certain to devolve into some hideous borg-like species whose survival is intrinsicly tied with its technology, that hasn't happened yet, except to Signal 11.
... that we're going to have to actually use the header "bxxp://".
I mean, for people who just surf around, I'm sure IE and Netscape will quickly adapt to be able to fill that in themselves, and that just typing "Yahoo" will be enough to find either bxxp://www.yahoo.org or http://yahoo.com depending on how the defaults are set.
But for those of us writing CGIs, this kind of sucks. Sometimes the "http" has to be very explicit. It's a simple matter to know when to use http://, ftp://, telnet://, etc., because the protocols are so unrelated, but with these related ones, it will be a headache.
Of course, if bxxp can handle http, I guess this problem shouldn't exist at all. It still will.
I have to say that I've never liked the idea of "case by case basis".
Without rigid standards in our law, we're plunged into chaos - any man can find his entire life completely at the mercy of any random judge or seven joe blows - and let me tell you, out here in Nevada, where some of the judges have never been lawyers (they're ranchers--I saw a guy get 40 years for cattle rustling a month after another guy got 20 for first degree murder), that scares me.
And, come on, most of us are computer people. What would computers be like if the answer to the question "What does 'ls' do?" was "Well, that's pretty much on a case-by-case business. In Debian, it lists your files, but in Caldera, it pretty much acts like rm -r."
In conclusion, we need good law on this. Which is why, in a sense, the RIAA's barrage of lawsuits is a good thing - it brings this to the forefront and forces us to hammer out our priorities. I believe in freedom - but not freedom behind the government's back. Freedom should be able to be pretty much sanctioned and out in the open.
After reading this article, it was pretty clear to me that the RIAA didn't exactly have a picture of what should and should not be illegal. The only thing that they were claiming is that since the kid who put up the hyperlinks had the knowledge that some crime was being committed, and the intention that the crime be committed, then there's some crime going on, right? Right?
The RIAA isn't exactly a philosophical organization with a broad view of the future. They're a day-to-day business, and right now, their strategy seems pretty clear to me: they want to see what they can and can't get away with. Does shutting down file-sharing protocols have any legal validity? Their answer: Who knows? We'll never know until we give it a shot. Does shutting down hyperlinking have any legal validity? Their answer? Who knows? Let's... give it a shot.
I cringe at the legal costs they must be incurring, but for a behemoth like the RIAA, that's really just business as usual.
It's easy to point fingers, but I don't think we can blame the RIAA for this - they're doing exactly what any other company whose business was threatened (or perceived to be threatened) would do. Hopefully, the courts will come to their senses and realize that this is just another frivolous attempt to gag free speech in the name of big business. If they don't, we know how to blame.
In conclusion, the only thing we can do is dilute the law by breaking it so often that a policy of salutory neglect must be followed.
Perhaps he can even make a Beowulf cluster of them.
As far as I understand, the human genome project gives us the ability to say, "Wow! Jon Katz's gene #34289689 on Chromosone #23 is ATCA.. that means he can't produce any pseudochlorohydrolynanelanymine-B in the cell membranes of his T-x84dg white blood cells!
Well, big holy shit.
In a way, if I make a tired Linux analogy, I'd equate the "completion of the human genome project" with "figuring out how to type ls, going into every directory, and drawing the tree". Of course, the analogy is flawed because filenames are (slightly) intuitive; this would be more along the lines of finally being able to read the file system, when the average file was named "a0sd8fhj09bv".
Give it a shot some time. Write a Perl script to rename every single file in Debian to a random string of fifteen characters. Then go get your mom, tell her that "ls" looks at files, and ask her to install Enlightenment.
In conclusion, we're all a little bit too excited about this.
It should be clear to anyone that this is, in fact, the end of the internet. To me, it's sort of sad: now I have to get a real life, figure out how to work on a carbeurator, and adjust to occasionally being in the sun.
Well, it was inevitable that something like this "shutting down illegal trading of copyrighted material" would signify the end of the internet. I mean, there were dozens of things that I've been reading about that had the same effect. Privacy violations. Corporate-owned backbones. Pop-up ads.
R.I.P., internet. I will miss thee. Maybe I should get a cat.
In conclusion, these headlines fucking suck and you should all go to hell.
I do not agree to be bombarded with bandwith hogging ads, especially when they cut into my time and hinder me from surfing somewhere else all the while being charged time to view the ads.
I sincerely believe that you do. Did you actually read anything other than the words, "I agree"? Chances are, AOL also has all the intellectual property rights to any country/western songs you may write or record for the next forty years.
My guess is that these people come from the same shallow end of the gene-pool as those that haven't learned how to turn the caps lock off.
I DONT UNDERSTAND HOW TO TURN OFF MY POPUP ADS
HELLOOOOOOOO??? CAN ANYONE READ THIS???
IM PAYING LOTS OF $$$ FOR THE INTERWEB AND I GET ADVERTISEMENTS JUST LIKE TV BUT IT ISNT FREE
HOW DO I GET ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB???!??
WHAT IS YOUR A/S/L??? HELLO??? CAN ANY1 HEAR ME?? I HEARD PPL ON THE SLASHDOT COULD HELP ME WITH MY PROBLEM. IM GETTING ADS EVEN THOUGH IM PAYING AND I CANT GET ON THE WORLD WIBE INTERWEB
Sometimes the lameness filter is, well, lame. And how the heck does Oog get past it? OKAY HAVE IT YOUR WAY YOULL HEAR FROM MY LAWYERS
That's right. You were trying to make a lame pun, and you fucked even that up.
I pity you.
Congratulations. This is the lamest post in the history of mankind. Granted, for about 5990 years (roughly) after the agricultural revolution, no one posted anything, unless you count tacking papyrus to someone's door. However, over the past 10-20 years, we've been trying to make up for lost time, big time, so for you to post the lamest thing ever is actually quite an accomplishment.
In conclusion, I believe the guy was asking "What's a flop", meaning "What is the flop you're referring to," because in the wording of the post, it was a little ambiguous whether the flop in queston was the convention itself or something being showcased at the convention.
Go to hell.
I don't know about you, but I have no desire to be MORE fragrant. Less is more like it.
As any good Linux user knows, less is more.
In conclusion, I don't think I ever want to be in the same room with you.
Whose DNA have they sequenced? Isn't everyone's somewhat unique? How do they take an "average" person's DNA, considering all of us have something unique, and/or some type of mutation in our genome. Don't get me wrong, I'm in total support of the HGP, I think it'll revolutionize medicine. I'm just curious as to what sampling methods they employ
My understanding is that each gene in any human codes for a specific protein. For example, in the case of albinos, a gene that would normally code for the protien which causes skin pigmentation is missing or damaged. Apparently, every human follows the same "template": even though you might be able to roll your tongue into a "taco" and I can't, the protiens that create those muscle structures are coded for on the same gene.
So, this "mapping" isn't exactly the sequencing of any person's DNA - they're just figuring out which protiens go to which genes (or gene clusters). It's a little deceptive, because when it comes down to it, they have no idea what most of the protiens actually do.
I know I'm jumping the gun a lot here, since we can't do much more sophisticated things than cloning a sheep and curing cystic fibrosis in lung tissue that is not attached to an organism, but...
It strikes me that genetics are a lot like source code, and that we've sort of reverse-engineered a template for writing this code.
So the big question is: when they start coming up with genetic enhancements to make us smarter, stronger, and more fragrant, are they going to be packaged in such a way that we can't tell what they are without doing the whole reverse engineering process over again (i.e. MicroSoft Harry), or are the specs going to be put out for all to see, so that we can all create our own personalized monkey-men (i.e. GnuMonkeyMan)?
I'm a little disturbed by my own post.
Things like growing modified human clones (with, say, an eye in the back of the head) would never ever pass any kind of review board
In the past, the traditional ways of circumventing review boards included:
1. Mad scientists
2. Fascist governments
3. Bribery
4. The certainty that someone would profit
Fortunately, in this age of the internet, I don't think it's terribly unlikely that a bunch of random guys are going to get together, gather a bunch of genetic information, and build a genetic abomination solely for the sake of leveling their Everquest character.
In conclusion, technology is good.