Because Cuban is a billionaire Net entrepreneur. Including harnessing P2P for infrastructure, while publicly championing the technique's place on the Internet despite network operator and copyright holder intererence. He's also spoken influentially for realistic revisions to copyright, contrary to some of his obvious interests as a major copyright holder, as an informed Internet business guru.
The fact that this occurred in June of '04 and he's being charged for it now implies that either it takes that long to build up evidence for a case or you don't hear about this until someone slips up.
Whatever happened happened in 2004, but he's being charged only in the last few weeks Bush can direct the SEC.
Funny how the other thing that happened recently was that Cuban just launched a website, BailoutSleuth looking into and organizing against the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.
BTW, in America people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when Bush has a political crusade at stake. Even if Cuban is guilty, it's pretty "coincidental" timing to start prosecuting him.
Interesting how Cuban suddenly gets prosecuted right after he launches a website organizing against the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout called BailoutSleuth, in the final weeks of Bush's power to direct the SEC, even though Cuban's transactions happened in 2004.
And by "interesting", I mean "suspiciously consistent with Bush's treatment of the Justice Department as a political asset for selective prosecution".
No, faith is just a way of knowing things without proof. That makes it unreliable, compared to knowledge from proof. Faith is a product of ignorance, because "the reason why" is unknowable, by definition, even if the article of faith is knowable. It's guessing. Sometimes those guesses are right, but they're guesses.
But I didn't even mention faith, so I don't know where you get off telling me that something I didn't say is me saying something that's "bigoted, prejudiced and unscientific".
In fact, it sounds to me like you're some faithy reactionary who's scared that your faith is threatened by the purely materialistic reasons for caring what each other believes and thinks, and the meaning of life, which are usually claimed by some faith monopoly.
You can accept whatever unreasonable ideas you want. Just don't expect me to accept them.
Besides, if I'm wrong about "god", then I'm just doing the best I can with what "god" gave me. That I do practically everything that "god" is said to tell me to do, but without needing some ominpotent boss to threaten me if I don't, makes me a better person than if I did it out of fear or because some human authority trained me to. If "god" is some kind of jerk who's just punking us as some kind of test only they can understand, then I'm not going to play along with it, especially if it requires my denying perfectly reasonable ideas about the undeniable life we actually have. Especially not on some "Pascal's wager" logic that has me betting against the odds purely because it's against the odds.
What if you're wrong, and you wasted your entire and only life on some random guess, skipping what you could have had for no good reason?
The point is that "chance" is an illusion created by merely not knowing what will have happened. Once it has happened, it's certainty. "Chance" and probability are different from certainty only in a lack of information, either raw data or analysis of known information. "Chance" is a manner of speaking about our upfront ignorance.
I am sure of it, because I know it. I have explained it. The explanation is purely scientific. That's why I can be sure of it. Though even science is based on at least one unprovable assertion (that disprovability determines whether a statement is scientific or not), the probability is exceedingly low that the scientific explanation is really just a randomly correct guess. And more to the point, that probability would be zero if we had some more info about knowledge. Or at least as close as we can get to zero, that merits being so sure.
Understanding chance clearly as ignorance doesn't make "it all" meaningless, or render pointless caring what people think or believe. In fact, minimizing chance by knowing more makes caring what people think or believe - some of the most relevant info to each other, whose lives are defined by what people think or believe - that much more essential. Though of course we cannot actually know to exclusive certainty what anyone thinks or believes, even ourselves, not to the ultimate precision and accuracy.
The point is to get along with each other, which depends on what we each think or believe, whatever that might be. Understanding how it works, whether intuitively or by "doing the math" (and understanding the meaning of the math's terms), is the best way to get along within how it works. Creating more illusions just makes it harder, and makes something else even harder to understand and deal with. Though a little mystery is tolerable enough to appreciate its excitement, the mystery isn't the point. Especially if we just make up the mystery to confuse ourselves.
Once something has happened, however improbable it was, its probability of happening turned out to be 100.0%.
Probability isn't about "luck". It's about the unknown certainty that something will have happened once it did, even if many other things could have happened instead.
We do indeed live in a universe that is improbable because it's one of the very few, of all that could exist, that can and does make sense to us. That's because we evolved in it, as part of it. We were selected by the universe's laws and materials to have bodies that include organs which can hold information modeling the universe. But that doesn't mean anything miraculous occurred to us. It just means that we're the parts of the universe that generated the mechanisms to have the model. Mars' many rocks were also generated, but don't have the hardware to notice, or at least to replay an accurate rendition to their parts that can notice. Likewise, something like 15 billion years have passed until now, when we're noticing that we're noticing - until now, we weren't "miraculous", and what has changed is simply our interaction with ourselves, nothing "divine".
Every lottery winner can think they've received a miracle, because the odds were so slim, they have to think "why me?" But someone was certain to win, eventually, even in lotteries where the chances of even one winner are tiny - if the game goes on long enough.
What is at work with these "divine selection" delusions is not metaphysics, or even determinism. It's ignorance of math, of the mechanics of consciousness, of the basics of selection. "God" does indeed play dice with the universe: all "god" does is roll dice, in every quantum event, and probably on an even finer scale. We're just dice that eventually rolled unp parts that notice what's showing on the other die. We're just getting started, and many of us have yet to make the lucky guess that that's all we are, which is special enough without having to invent a roller.
You do realize that the "Google Earth goggles" I described will be used by real people to communicate with each other, right? I recommended that they travel to important sites and experience them in person, which is one of the biggest stimuli to human imagination. But even if they're used as others have suggested, to visit these places virtually (goggles only, no travel to the enhanced artifacts), they will stimulate the imagination.
And indeed that tech will be used by other people to dress up the rest of the world we look at through them. The flipside of this tech, implicit in it, is the creation of the images projected in the goggles. People have to create them, using their imaginations. Google Earth has SketchUp, and an open modeling format (KML). More and more modeling is created by people in open archives, hosted by Google and among independent people. That makes Google Earth, and supporting SW and HW, into a medium. It's only a matter of time before either Google Earth hosts a SecondLife, or SecondLife is as open to modeling as is Google Earth, or there's some merger, or an alternate source of a merger - people interacting with people, rather than just viewing or interacting with objects. That is very clearly a medium. Media require imagination to create content, whether the scenarios or the conversations and relationships between people in them.
A lot of people complained about computers, and especially PCs, as "crutches for the mind" that would destroy imagination by making us lazy and dependent on machines. That wasn't true even before networking's popularity, but traditional imaginative works were different, and the people whose imaginations were harnessed were different (engineers rather than artists). But once PCs evolved into network terminals, that prejudice against "imaginative computing" was possible only among the most elite traditionalists (and the ignoramuses they can fool). Which eventually gave us Google Earth. And which will eventually give us "VR goggles". And indeed converge all our independent media into interactive ones, interacting with each other among tremendous and complex amounts of content.
These machines are levers for the mind. Whether they make us fat and lazy or muscular and athletic depends on culture, societal and personal. They will have each kind of effect on different people in differing degrees. What's important is to grow people with skills of imagination, which requires learning to guide the natural impulse, rather than just decide they're robotic, shallow traps and choose to live with them that way. Either path is one that is indeed chosen in the imaginations of people, either in those influential on culture or in each person in the culture. The way to feed the imagination is to embrace the technologies, imagine them growing our imaginations, and then act out our dreams.
And since the tech is upon us with the fiercest momentum, we have little choice except whether to use it well or to use it poorly. Just rejecting it is pure fantasyland.
No, Gates needed his corporate lawyer parents and their pick to be MS's lawyer to help him actually negotiate with IBM. Including waiting for the IBM execs who were against exclusivity to be out of town when Gates finally cut a better deal with their temporary replacements.
The deal was most certainly exclusive, in Gates' favor: IBM was excluded from using any other OS, but Gates could license DOS to any other PC maker. Gates even negotiated a "concession" to IBM: if IBM wanted to make a successor to DOS, AKA OS/2, they could use code from DOS to build it on. Which meant that DOS programs had an advantage on running on the new OS, and MS had the insider position of shaping the entire rest of the other OS. Even enough to design it to die in competition with DOS (which are a couple of reasons why Windows remained based on DOS for so long, until OS/2 was safely dead).
Gates deserves credit for the insights that such lockin would pay off in monopoly power for decades, as the PC rose to replace most of IBM's big iron. But the negotiations were courtesy of his parents' corporate lawyer connections. And their $millions in the bank, which incidentally let Gates drop out of Harvard to market BASIC without worrying. For which I give his parents at least as much credit, for allowing it.
Bill Gates is William Henry Gates IV. His father, Bill Sr (born "III") was one of America's top corporate lawyers, as was his mother. That's why Microsoft was able to outmaneuver IBM on a one-way exclusive contract for PC DOS, and later even weasel out of the "landmark" US monopoly judgement (the senior Gates' lobbying lawfirm Preston Gates & Ellis was where Republican uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff got his start until Bush's "Justice" Department took over the "penalty" phase).
I'd rather be lucky than good any day. For Bill Gates, that's his birthright.
Gibson's _Virtual Light_ even more so. Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ is even better (as gadget, as story and as writing), and was written (just months) before VL was.
The home version is exciting for that reason. But actually being there is still a blast. The point is not just the VR, but "bringing the scene to life". Actually being there, after actually going there, swings all kinds of human wetware into actually connecting with the scene. And connecting it with the current scene there. All of which connects the person to the history, with the actual artifacts as the base props that encourage the suspension of disbelief that is the most powerfully convincing special effect.
I want to visit the real Rome with overlay goggles tuned to Google Earth's reconstructions, with GPS. So when I look at the ruins, there's overlay of the original sites. With animations of recreated everyday scenes, and famous scenes (like Senate arguments and speeches, revolts, Coliseum battles, etc) running for my amusement.
In fact, I'd love to see these overlays in goggles in any museum showing artifacts. They're always in crappy shape in their cases (the intact articles are probably all in private collections, the broken ones sold off to finance them). Goggles showing them in their original condition, and in their original usage, would turn those displays from mere trophy cases of booty into actual demonstrations of history and our global heritage.
Not exactly. AFAICT, the "molecules that resonate light", are really chromophores, parts of a molecule, that are integrated into the DNA sequence as part of a single DNA molecule. The mechanism of transmitting light from chromophore to chromophore along the length of DNA isn't explained.
But in glass optical fibers, "conduits of minimal resistance" isn't really a good description of the transmission. That optical medium is made of molecules that accept incoming photons, then emit outgoing photons, along the momentum axis of the photon, but refracting from the juncture of the optical medium with another medium with sufficiently different refraction index. The chromophores appear to do the same thing, but it's not really clear. They do form "optical conduits", or they wouldn't transmit photons, though indeed the article doesn't really make clear that the quanta aren't passed as electrons until being emitted by a final chromophore, which would invalidate the entire comparison to "optical fibers".
Just one of several textual analyses of the torah showing revisions is Friedman's breakdown into several component parts, written at different times.
There's even more details about history of "bible" authorship that explains how most of the source texts that christians used around 1700 years ago were left out of the canonization of the New Testament, mostly gnostic rivals to the people who decided on the canon.
Anonymous faithy Coward, my post was a response to several separate claims in the post to which I responded. Each rebuttal was clear and to the point. If you could read, you'd know, but I suppose not even reading skills are required of bible worshippers: just faith, and some of you to spout baseless insults in public to keep the ball rolling.
All of the people who held a firm belief in god who produced most of our science and technology also believed many other wrong things that science and technology have easily disproven. Practically all of those people also owned slaves: so what? Their slave ownership and their belief in god had nothing to do with their scientific and technological discoveries and creations. But I suppose that to a bible worshipper, the only thing that matters is that someone believe in "god" - even if they didn't believe that "god" was much like the one that you believe in. Which is also irrelevant, though I'm sure you'd claim otherwise.
The list of scientific contributors who believed the Sun orbited the Earth was pretty large and significant, but that doesn't count against what they got right.
You faithy people don't know how to keep some sense to your faith. It's OK for you to guess about unproveable knowledge. Just don't pretend your guesses are at all as reliable as our scientific knowledge. And don't pretend you can know that your faith is right and someone else's is wrong, any more than they can know about theirs over yours. And don't pretend you can tell anyone what to do or think because of your faith that they don't have. Grow up enough to treat your own faith responsibly, instead of its nearly unbroken history of going way overboard, and you can talk about it in public without reasonable people finding you too childish to deal with.
There is no physical evidence of "divine creation". The whole point is that "god created the heavens and the Earth" by some miraculous act.
You're a Creationist. You "know" that god created existence, and Adam and Eve. The way you know it is by reading a book written before you were born. You have faith in that knowledge, which means you know something that cannot be either proven or disproven.
Others have their own faiths, like tribal Americans who believe a Creator created some garden plants, then made the first people out of them. Neither of you can prove the other is wrong, because faith is independent of proof. You're both guessing. It's sufficient for you, because you don't require proof to believe things.
I require proof. Until I get proof, I know that knowledge is merely provisional. And I don't take any serious actions based on provisional knowledge.
But regardless of the place for your way of knowing things, you are a Creationist. That you deny it just undermines any reason to respect the rest of what you claim to know.
I read the links. For someone divinely inspired, you're not a very good guesser.
I didn't see anything in there about "1914". Nor do I see the number "1914" anywhere in "the" bible.
The other "bibles" I'm talking about are those held sacred (and literal) by other faiths, such as the Mahabarata and other Vedic scriptures, any number of Buddhist sutras, the oral traditions of North American tribes, the Greek, Roman or Egyptian texts and traditions, and on and on around the world. Of course you don't think of those as "the bible", but rather just some superstition, but of course their believers think the same of yours, and of each other.
There are other things that have changed. Even the Hebrew torah changed in important ways about 2000 years ago, and there's plenty of analysis showing it changed from an original form to its form around the time of the Roman conquest in specific sections. And of course the original christian canon of over 400 different texts was reduced to the 4 in the "new testament" by a christian order about 1600 years ago. The persistence of biblical transcription and consistency through the millennia is still remarkable, but owes to the priority for exact transcription, and the fear of punishment for failure in both the living world, and the expected "afterlife". Zoroastrian gospel has been at least as consistent since about 3000 years ago, while spending its first millennium transmitted only orally, with at least as many "efforts to destroy it entirely".
There is no evidence that "the" bible you prefer is effective for family life, work ethic, view of money, treatment of fellow man, etc. Practically no one follows the entire literal prescriptions of the bible, to the exclusion of any other source of life guidance. And there are plenty of perfectly functional and happy people who follow their own bibles, with little influence sourced from "the" bible you prefer.
I know "the" bible, and its blindered, faithy adherents (of many denominations, many bibles), quite well, thank you. I also know science and reason, which make it easy to debunk any of the bible worshippers' contrived arguments like you've offered here. The only way that bible worship ever meets science and reason with any chance of survival is by willful blindness, or acceptance of science and reason debunking the bible except as a self-programming exercise in pure metaphysics.
The bible's got some good lessons, co-evolving with a successful style of civilization the dominance of which self-selects for successful life strategies within its constructed values. But it's a work of humans, even if quite an excellent one. Except maybe when it doesn't matter what's true, and what you're looking for is a good story to share with other people you like, when believing it's something supernatural is harmless fun. Taking it further than that is unwarranted, and usually leads to terrible consequences fairly quickly.
You guessed right that the DNA is just the "scaffolding" determining paths of chromophores "doped" into the DNA along their paths. That the light is transmitted through the sequence of chromophores (though the article doesn't specify just what mechanism transmits the light along the chromophore trail).
But that doesn't at all discount these structures from being counted as "optical fibers". They just introduce a new class of optical fibers that aren't a contiguous optically transparent medium the way glass fibers (and their plastic analogues) are.
It's worthwhile to consider them as optical fibers, because they are, and because they could be much more engineerable at the microscale and nanoscale than are internally reflective photonics. We've got a pretty good scientific understanding of engineering DNA topologies. We can literally program shapes of interconnected DNA, even to arbitrary topologies of high complexity. We have biochemistry to interconnect engineered DNA with inorganic devices like microchips and organic but nonbiological materials like nanotubes. We are practically on the verge of tech that clones our arbitrary DNA structures once the "prototype" is constructed, making mass manufacturing at nanoscale completely feasible and economical.
This demonstration shows that we can get the communications effects of more familiar optical fibers by using chromophore-doped DNA instead. They're fibers, they're optical, and they do what we thought we wanted glass fibers to do to interconnect logic devices. Why not call them optical fibers, and just accept that some optical fibers work by means other than total internal reflectance? We'd be opening our opportunities the same way as if we stopped insisting that all geometry be "triangular".
These DNA "optical fibers" are made by inserting chromophores into DNA strands. The DNA is the path between two points, a substrate on which to lay out a sequence of chromophores. The chromophore path can transfer photons from one chromophore to another. The light isn't "reflecting", its transmission is something like the inverse of internally refractive transmission through an optically transparent medium. Chromophores do form the path through which light travels, but this new publication doesn't specify the physical mechanism by which light is transmitted from one chromophore to another along the DNA. However, the chromophores are not a contiguous optically transparent medium, so they're not transferring the photons the way that familiar fiberoptics do, which depends on them acting as a contiguous optical medium.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Cuban is a billionaire Net entrepreneur. Including harnessing P2P for infrastructure, while publicly championing the technique's place on the Internet despite network operator and copyright holder intererence. He's also spoken influentially for realistic revisions to copyright, contrary to some of his obvious interests as a major copyright holder, as an informed Internet business guru.
He just got hit with an SEC suit by the outgoing Bush on 4 year old charges, right after he launched a website investigating and organizing against Bush's Wall Street bailout.
Those topics are all often popular on Slashdot.
Whatever happened happened in 2004, but he's being charged only in the last few weeks Bush can direct the SEC.
Funny how the other thing that happened recently was that Cuban just launched a website, BailoutSleuth looking into and organizing against the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.
BTW, in America people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when Bush has a political crusade at stake. Even if Cuban is guilty, it's pretty "coincidental" timing to start prosecuting him.
Interesting how Cuban suddenly gets prosecuted right after he launches a website organizing against the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout called BailoutSleuth, in the final weeks of Bush's power to direct the SEC, even though Cuban's transactions happened in 2004.
And by "interesting", I mean "suspiciously consistent with Bush's treatment of the Justice Department as a political asset for selective prosecution".
No, faith is just a way of knowing things without proof. That makes it unreliable, compared to knowledge from proof. Faith is a product of ignorance, because "the reason why" is unknowable, by definition, even if the article of faith is knowable. It's guessing. Sometimes those guesses are right, but they're guesses.
But I didn't even mention faith, so I don't know where you get off telling me that something I didn't say is me saying something that's "bigoted, prejudiced and unscientific".
In fact, it sounds to me like you're some faithy reactionary who's scared that your faith is threatened by the purely materialistic reasons for caring what each other believes and thinks, and the meaning of life, which are usually claimed by some faith monopoly.
You can accept whatever unreasonable ideas you want. Just don't expect me to accept them.
Besides, if I'm wrong about "god", then I'm just doing the best I can with what "god" gave me. That I do practically everything that "god" is said to tell me to do, but without needing some ominpotent boss to threaten me if I don't, makes me a better person than if I did it out of fear or because some human authority trained me to. If "god" is some kind of jerk who's just punking us as some kind of test only they can understand, then I'm not going to play along with it, especially if it requires my denying perfectly reasonable ideas about the undeniable life we actually have. Especially not on some "Pascal's wager" logic that has me betting against the odds purely because it's against the odds.
What if you're wrong, and you wasted your entire and only life on some random guess, skipping what you could have had for no good reason?
The point is that "chance" is an illusion created by merely not knowing what will have happened. Once it has happened, it's certainty. "Chance" and probability are different from certainty only in a lack of information, either raw data or analysis of known information. "Chance" is a manner of speaking about our upfront ignorance.
I am sure of it, because I know it. I have explained it. The explanation is purely scientific. That's why I can be sure of it. Though even science is based on at least one unprovable assertion (that disprovability determines whether a statement is scientific or not), the probability is exceedingly low that the scientific explanation is really just a randomly correct guess. And more to the point, that probability would be zero if we had some more info about knowledge. Or at least as close as we can get to zero, that merits being so sure.
Understanding chance clearly as ignorance doesn't make "it all" meaningless, or render pointless caring what people think or believe. In fact, minimizing chance by knowing more makes caring what people think or believe - some of the most relevant info to each other, whose lives are defined by what people think or believe - that much more essential. Though of course we cannot actually know to exclusive certainty what anyone thinks or believes, even ourselves, not to the ultimate precision and accuracy.
The point is to get along with each other, which depends on what we each think or believe, whatever that might be. Understanding how it works, whether intuitively or by "doing the math" (and understanding the meaning of the math's terms), is the best way to get along within how it works. Creating more illusions just makes it harder, and makes something else even harder to understand and deal with. Though a little mystery is tolerable enough to appreciate its excitement, the mystery isn't the point. Especially if we just make up the mystery to confuse ourselves.
Once something has happened, however improbable it was, its probability of happening turned out to be 100.0%.
Probability isn't about "luck". It's about the unknown certainty that something will have happened once it did, even if many other things could have happened instead.
We do indeed live in a universe that is improbable because it's one of the very few, of all that could exist, that can and does make sense to us. That's because we evolved in it, as part of it. We were selected by the universe's laws and materials to have bodies that include organs which can hold information modeling the universe. But that doesn't mean anything miraculous occurred to us. It just means that we're the parts of the universe that generated the mechanisms to have the model. Mars' many rocks were also generated, but don't have the hardware to notice, or at least to replay an accurate rendition to their parts that can notice. Likewise, something like 15 billion years have passed until now, when we're noticing that we're noticing - until now, we weren't "miraculous", and what has changed is simply our interaction with ourselves, nothing "divine".
Every lottery winner can think they've received a miracle, because the odds were so slim, they have to think "why me?" But someone was certain to win, eventually, even in lotteries where the chances of even one winner are tiny - if the game goes on long enough.
What is at work with these "divine selection" delusions is not metaphysics, or even determinism. It's ignorance of math, of the mechanics of consciousness, of the basics of selection. "God" does indeed play dice with the universe: all "god" does is roll dice, in every quantum event, and probably on an even finer scale. We're just dice that eventually rolled unp parts that notice what's showing on the other die. We're just getting started, and many of us have yet to make the lucky guess that that's all we are, which is special enough without having to invent a roller.
You do realize that the "Google Earth goggles" I described will be used by real people to communicate with each other, right? I recommended that they travel to important sites and experience them in person, which is one of the biggest stimuli to human imagination. But even if they're used as others have suggested, to visit these places virtually (goggles only, no travel to the enhanced artifacts), they will stimulate the imagination.
And indeed that tech will be used by other people to dress up the rest of the world we look at through them. The flipside of this tech, implicit in it, is the creation of the images projected in the goggles. People have to create them, using their imaginations. Google Earth has SketchUp, and an open modeling format (KML). More and more modeling is created by people in open archives, hosted by Google and among independent people. That makes Google Earth, and supporting SW and HW, into a medium. It's only a matter of time before either Google Earth hosts a SecondLife, or SecondLife is as open to modeling as is Google Earth, or there's some merger, or an alternate source of a merger - people interacting with people, rather than just viewing or interacting with objects. That is very clearly a medium. Media require imagination to create content, whether the scenarios or the conversations and relationships between people in them.
A lot of people complained about computers, and especially PCs, as "crutches for the mind" that would destroy imagination by making us lazy and dependent on machines. That wasn't true even before networking's popularity, but traditional imaginative works were different, and the people whose imaginations were harnessed were different (engineers rather than artists). But once PCs evolved into network terminals, that prejudice against "imaginative computing" was possible only among the most elite traditionalists (and the ignoramuses they can fool). Which eventually gave us Google Earth. And which will eventually give us "VR goggles". And indeed converge all our independent media into interactive ones, interacting with each other among tremendous and complex amounts of content.
These machines are levers for the mind. Whether they make us fat and lazy or muscular and athletic depends on culture, societal and personal. They will have each kind of effect on different people in differing degrees. What's important is to grow people with skills of imagination, which requires learning to guide the natural impulse, rather than just decide they're robotic, shallow traps and choose to live with them that way. Either path is one that is indeed chosen in the imaginations of people, either in those influential on culture or in each person in the culture. The way to feed the imagination is to embrace the technologies, imagine them growing our imaginations, and then act out our dreams.
And since the tech is upon us with the fiercest momentum, we have little choice except whether to use it well or to use it poorly. Just rejecting it is pure fantasyland.
I notice that you're using the crutch of an actual Internet, rather than just daydreaming it. Or I'd notice (or rather, I wouldn't have).
You've gotta meet them halfway, mon - irie heights.
I have a good enough imagination to both imagine the application I just described, and to enjoy its augmentation of my senses.
But indeed, most adults don't. Which is why goggles like these would be popular.
No, Gates needed his corporate lawyer parents and their pick to be MS's lawyer to help him actually negotiate with IBM. Including waiting for the IBM execs who were against exclusivity to be out of town when Gates finally cut a better deal with their temporary replacements.
The deal was most certainly exclusive, in Gates' favor: IBM was excluded from using any other OS, but Gates could license DOS to any other PC maker. Gates even negotiated a "concession" to IBM: if IBM wanted to make a successor to DOS, AKA OS/2, they could use code from DOS to build it on. Which meant that DOS programs had an advantage on running on the new OS, and MS had the insider position of shaping the entire rest of the other OS. Even enough to design it to die in competition with DOS (which are a couple of reasons why Windows remained based on DOS for so long, until OS/2 was safely dead).
Gates deserves credit for the insights that such lockin would pay off in monopoly power for decades, as the PC rose to replace most of IBM's big iron. But the negotiations were courtesy of his parents' corporate lawyer connections. And their $millions in the bank, which incidentally let Gates drop out of Harvard to market BASIC without worrying. For which I give his parents at least as much credit, for allowing it.
Bill Gates is William Henry Gates IV. His father, Bill Sr (born "III") was one of America's top corporate lawyers, as was his mother. That's why Microsoft was able to outmaneuver IBM on a one-way exclusive contract for PC DOS, and later even weasel out of the "landmark" US monopoly judgement (the senior Gates' lobbying lawfirm Preston Gates & Ellis was where Republican uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff got his start until Bush's "Justice" Department took over the "penalty" phase).
I'd rather be lucky than good any day. For Bill Gates, that's his birthright.
The analog is the reverse of the digital :).
Orbital Rastas.
Gibson's _Virtual Light_ even more so. Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ is even better (as gadget, as story and as writing), and was written (just months) before VL was.
The home version is exciting for that reason. But actually being there is still a blast. The point is not just the VR, but "bringing the scene to life". Actually being there, after actually going there, swings all kinds of human wetware into actually connecting with the scene. And connecting it with the current scene there. All of which connects the person to the history, with the actual artifacts as the base props that encourage the suspension of disbelief that is the most powerfully convincing special effect.
Congress shall make no law infringing the right of the people to keep and bear 100KW lasers.
I want to visit the real Rome with overlay goggles tuned to Google Earth's reconstructions, with GPS. So when I look at the ruins, there's overlay of the original sites. With animations of recreated everyday scenes, and famous scenes (like Senate arguments and speeches, revolts, Coliseum battles, etc) running for my amusement.
In fact, I'd love to see these overlays in goggles in any museum showing artifacts. They're always in crappy shape in their cases (the intact articles are probably all in private collections, the broken ones sold off to finance them). Goggles showing them in their original condition, and in their original usage, would turn those displays from mere trophy cases of booty into actual demonstrations of history and our global heritage.
Not exactly. AFAICT, the "molecules that resonate light", are really chromophores, parts of a molecule, that are integrated into the DNA sequence as part of a single DNA molecule. The mechanism of transmitting light from chromophore to chromophore along the length of DNA isn't explained.
But in glass optical fibers, "conduits of minimal resistance" isn't really a good description of the transmission. That optical medium is made of molecules that accept incoming photons, then emit outgoing photons, along the momentum axis of the photon, but refracting from the juncture of the optical medium with another medium with sufficiently different refraction index. The chromophores appear to do the same thing, but it's not really clear. They do form "optical conduits", or they wouldn't transmit photons, though indeed the article doesn't really make clear that the quanta aren't passed as electrons until being emitted by a final chromophore, which would invalidate the entire comparison to "optical fibers".
The modern canonical torah was finalized sometime between 1700 and 1900 years ago, as can be seen in differences from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Just one of several textual analyses of the torah showing revisions is Friedman's breakdown into several component parts, written at different times.
There's even more details about history of "bible" authorship that explains how most of the source texts that christians used around 1700 years ago were left out of the canonization of the New Testament, mostly gnostic rivals to the people who decided on the canon.
Anonymous faithy Coward, my post was a response to several separate claims in the post to which I responded. Each rebuttal was clear and to the point. If you could read, you'd know, but I suppose not even reading skills are required of bible worshippers: just faith, and some of you to spout baseless insults in public to keep the ball rolling.
All of the people who held a firm belief in god who produced most of our science and technology also believed many other wrong things that science and technology have easily disproven. Practically all of those people also owned slaves: so what? Their slave ownership and their belief in god had nothing to do with their scientific and technological discoveries and creations. But I suppose that to a bible worshipper, the only thing that matters is that someone believe in "god" - even if they didn't believe that "god" was much like the one that you believe in. Which is also irrelevant, though I'm sure you'd claim otherwise.
The list of scientific contributors who believed the Sun orbited the Earth was pretty large and significant, but that doesn't count against what they got right.
You faithy people don't know how to keep some sense to your faith. It's OK for you to guess about unproveable knowledge. Just don't pretend your guesses are at all as reliable as our scientific knowledge. And don't pretend you can know that your faith is right and someone else's is wrong, any more than they can know about theirs over yours. And don't pretend you can tell anyone what to do or think because of your faith that they don't have. Grow up enough to treat your own faith responsibly, instead of its nearly unbroken history of going way overboard, and you can talk about it in public without reasonable people finding you too childish to deal with.
There is no physical evidence of "divine creation". The whole point is that "god created the heavens and the Earth" by some miraculous act.
You're a Creationist. You "know" that god created existence, and Adam and Eve. The way you know it is by reading a book written before you were born. You have faith in that knowledge, which means you know something that cannot be either proven or disproven.
Others have their own faiths, like tribal Americans who believe a Creator created some garden plants, then made the first people out of them. Neither of you can prove the other is wrong, because faith is independent of proof. You're both guessing. It's sufficient for you, because you don't require proof to believe things.
I require proof. Until I get proof, I know that knowledge is merely provisional. And I don't take any serious actions based on provisional knowledge.
But regardless of the place for your way of knowing things, you are a Creationist. That you deny it just undermines any reason to respect the rest of what you claim to know.
I read the links. For someone divinely inspired, you're not a very good guesser.
I didn't see anything in there about "1914". Nor do I see the number "1914" anywhere in "the" bible.
The other "bibles" I'm talking about are those held sacred (and literal) by other faiths, such as the Mahabarata and other Vedic scriptures, any number of Buddhist sutras, the oral traditions of North American tribes, the Greek, Roman or Egyptian texts and traditions, and on and on around the world. Of course you don't think of those as "the bible", but rather just some superstition, but of course their believers think the same of yours, and of each other.
There are other things that have changed. Even the Hebrew torah changed in important ways about 2000 years ago, and there's plenty of analysis showing it changed from an original form to its form around the time of the Roman conquest in specific sections. And of course the original christian canon of over 400 different texts was reduced to the 4 in the "new testament" by a christian order about 1600 years ago. The persistence of biblical transcription and consistency through the millennia is still remarkable, but owes to the priority for exact transcription, and the fear of punishment for failure in both the living world, and the expected "afterlife". Zoroastrian gospel has been at least as consistent since about 3000 years ago, while spending its first millennium transmitted only orally, with at least as many "efforts to destroy it entirely".
There is no evidence that "the" bible you prefer is effective for family life, work ethic, view of money, treatment of fellow man, etc. Practically no one follows the entire literal prescriptions of the bible, to the exclusion of any other source of life guidance. And there are plenty of perfectly functional and happy people who follow their own bibles, with little influence sourced from "the" bible you prefer.
I know "the" bible, and its blindered, faithy adherents (of many denominations, many bibles), quite well, thank you. I also know science and reason, which make it easy to debunk any of the bible worshippers' contrived arguments like you've offered here. The only way that bible worship ever meets science and reason with any chance of survival is by willful blindness, or acceptance of science and reason debunking the bible except as a self-programming exercise in pure metaphysics.
The bible's got some good lessons, co-evolving with a successful style of civilization the dominance of which self-selects for successful life strategies within its constructed values. But it's a work of humans, even if quite an excellent one. Except maybe when it doesn't matter what's true, and what you're looking for is a good story to share with other people you like, when believing it's something supernatural is harmless fun. Taking it further than that is unwarranted, and usually leads to terrible consequences fairly quickly.
You guessed right that the DNA is just the "scaffolding" determining paths of chromophores "doped" into the DNA along their paths. That the light is transmitted through the sequence of chromophores (though the article doesn't specify just what mechanism transmits the light along the chromophore trail).
But that doesn't at all discount these structures from being counted as "optical fibers". They just introduce a new class of optical fibers that aren't a contiguous optically transparent medium the way glass fibers (and their plastic analogues) are.
It's worthwhile to consider them as optical fibers, because they are, and because they could be much more engineerable at the microscale and nanoscale than are internally reflective photonics. We've got a pretty good scientific understanding of engineering DNA topologies. We can literally program shapes of interconnected DNA, even to arbitrary topologies of high complexity. We have biochemistry to interconnect engineered DNA with inorganic devices like microchips and organic but nonbiological materials like nanotubes. We are practically on the verge of tech that clones our arbitrary DNA structures once the "prototype" is constructed, making mass manufacturing at nanoscale completely feasible and economical.
This demonstration shows that we can get the communications effects of more familiar optical fibers by using chromophore-doped DNA instead. They're fibers, they're optical, and they do what we thought we wanted glass fibers to do to interconnect logic devices. Why not call them optical fibers, and just accept that some optical fibers work by means other than total internal reflectance? We'd be opening our opportunities the same way as if we stopped insisting that all geometry be "triangular".
These DNA "optical fibers" are made by inserting chromophores into DNA strands. The DNA is the path between two points, a substrate on which to lay out a sequence of chromophores. The chromophore path can transfer photons from one chromophore to another. The light isn't "reflecting", its transmission is something like the inverse of internally refractive transmission through an optically transparent medium. Chromophores do form the path through which light travels, but this new publication doesn't specify the physical mechanism by which light is transmitted from one chromophore to another along the DNA. However, the chromophores are not a contiguous optically transparent medium, so they're not transferring the photons the way that familiar fiberoptics do, which depends on them acting as a contiguous optical medium.