A consortium of universities will release the first draft of the BioBrick Public License in 2008. It will allow anyone to use the biological parts -- essentially a cellular dev kit -- for free.
What is this crap about a license taking months to produce and release? They should just release it with a license saying everything made with the kit is in the public domain, with the single exception to that disclaimer of all rights that any derivative must also come with that license. Why would it take more than 5 minutes to agree to release that license, and release it?
When some university comes after me for metabolizing glucose as part of my job (moving a muscle during business hours, just like you sometimes do), I don't want to have to argue about some license they've got on some DNA they synthesized.
All these patents on discovered genes are the purest BS violation of prior art. Any complexity in this BioBrick Public License will create more problems than it could ever solve.
I'm looking forward to seeing the new tag "hooey" become the most popular at Slashdot. And, if measured by Google hits, the very definition of "Slashdot" (the noun).
Why bother looking, when the NSA's malicious incompetence (at respecting the Constitution - they're excellent at invading privacy) is already proven beyond doubt?
Don't look for excuses where criminal convictions will do much better.
The NSA is spying on all telecom signals passing through the US (including this message. Hi, Dick Cheney!). Despite the Constitution's prohibitions. Why would you trust them not to make your crypto crackable?
This situation shows one of the strongest arguments for open source. Trust no one.
Energy research doesn't just wait 30 years. Researchers' innovation pays off every day, with multiple product cycles every year. If we don't fund it throughout, we'll arrive 30 years from now with piles of nuke waste and only coal as the alternative. Luckily the US is so huge and rich that we can do multiple things at once. Unless all the funding and attention is siphoned off for subsidizing nuke, oil, coal, and other dirty industries that already make the biggest profits, but still get the handouts.
I'd like to see how many of those college students would give up their other Constitutionally protected right, freedom from slavery. Would they take a million dollars in exchange for becoming a slave for about 40 years, until they turned 65 years old? Ten million?
Rights are inalienable. We can't surrender them, though sometimes we can suffer their infringement. The more temporary the infringement, the more voluntary, the more we can suffer it. But any infringement pressures people in a way that inevitably becomes intolerable, and we don't tolerate it. That's why we create governments to protect those rights. Because not only our rights, but the rights of everyone around us, are infringed only at a much greater cost, even if it can sometimes be postponed.
False dichtomy. Like "I'd rather cut out my left eye than my right, because I see better out of my right". How about we do neither, and instead spend all that time and money building a power system that doesn't pump any radioactive pollution into our face?
Nuke power is "very clean" only if you ignore the dirty process for mining and processing its fuel, and all the extremely toxic waste it produces for which there's no alternative but watching it like a hawk for what amounts to forever.
Nuke power boosters think we're stupid, because every time they think we're desperate enough to fall for lies about nuke power's extreme costs, they rehash them again.
When nuke scientists have a way to process the waste into safe byproducts within a decade or so, and when making the fuel is less filthy than, say, building an equivalent amount of tidal or geothermal plants, then they should try again. They've got some good ideas. I'd just like to see more on the science and engineering, and less on the made-up marketing.
Only about 110M votes are cast even in our biggest elections. But they're cast in small precincts in parallel. Each precinct can have a small group of people who take a few days to count the few thousand votes cast in their precinct, without much trouble.
The nice thing about people is that we're different. Which means that having two or three people count the same ballot, setting aside any exceptions, adds to reliability, while having three of the same machine count them adds nothing but another chance to fail.
Another nice thing about people is that holding us accountable for our actions means something. Which is why having humans count means something, if the retained evidence proves the counts were wrong, and a scheme can be proven from the evidence. Proving the machines counted wrong only means that someone who helped make the machine was responsible, but we never hold them accountable, even when (eg. Diebold) they're demonstrably guilty. The machines offer our system a scapegoat. Live counters offer people little reward considered against substantial risk.
Counting them first with machines, then making it official (and looking for fraud) by counting it by hand gives us all we want. Why not?
There is clearly an urgent need that mass media rushes to satisfy. That doesn't mean that releasing counts before the polls close is OK, as you point out. But Americans very clearly want to know as soon as they themselves have voted (if not sooner) who has won. YMMV, but you're not "America".
The machine generated ballots can be used for initial counting estimates counted by machines. That will satisfy Americans' urgent need to instantly know who won after they each cast their vote. Those counts should not be legally binding. The ballots should be counted by hand for the officially binding count. In the event that there's any substantial differences, the state should automatically open a formal investigation into vote rigging. Which would deter that kind of rigging, so it would rarely be tried, and the investigations rarely begun.
There's no reason the official count can't take a few days to complete, even doublechecked by multiple counts. That kind of human responsibility for the counting is entirely consistent with the democracy we're populating with the votes.
In June 1945, Dr. Koval's duties expanded to include top-secret plants near Dayton, said John C. Shewairy, an Oak Ridge spokesman. The factories refined polonium 210, a highly radioactive material used in initiators to help start the bomb's chain reaction.
There are precedents all through literary history. But the genre really was defined by those radio catalogs' fiction, which was tied to the prompt appearance of radio serials like Flash Gordon. Wells and Verne prepared the ground, much as Poe's detective stories prepared the ground for mysteries like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
SF is technology marketing. It started as the "articles" in radio parts catalog "technoporn", which expanded the catalogs' audience outside those who actually built their own radios. And ever since, it's appealed to people who want to fantasize about science and engineering more than they can actually do it. Which is of course where the culture's overall desires for science and tech come from. SF writers articulate possible worlds, visualizing how we'd live in them. Their biggest audience is science and engineering students, and people who consume their products.
Art in general is the way our society transmits new knowledge about the world and how it works from the discoverers/inventors to the rest of us. SF is art about what we can buy to live the way the stories tell us is possible.
And we've been hearing about universal media networks long enough that we've finally got them. In the case of the "Internet", SF took a lot longer to explain it to us than it was taking to deliver, partly because SF was preoccupied with the rockets that also produced the Internet. Now what we need is a better vision of what we'll become, now that we're actually on that network, and SF has new media in which to work. Someday someone will produce a networked multimedia game that will tell us what the next paradigm will be like. I'm betting on "psychic".
If the FCC, or the government in general, were serious about regulating these cablecos in the public interest, they'd just revise all the laws to treat cable "TV", "phone" and "data" networks all the same. What makes them different is no longer their content, as each of those three kinds of companies deliver the "triple play" of video/voice/data, and therefore the same customers. There might be distinctions among networks that cross state lines, or that have either government contracts specifying special liabilities (eg 911 service operators) or market status (eg monopoly or some subsidy for growth or competition), or perhaps even provided by a government.
But they're all networks. They all have directly comparable service levels, competition requirements, public interest requirements, consumer protections. The distinctions by their content type, even if their media mix is somewhat different, is largely irrelevant. They should all be regulated to ensure they offer the same levels of service in their products, especially as they market those products to the same consumers as being "the same" as their competitors, like TV from the "phone company" or phone from "the cable company" or all of it from "an ISP". And of course the content should be regulated separately from the network access/connection - perhaps even regulated to break up vertical monopolies that currently bundle content and network together.
After the basic rules they can make whatever smaller exceptions are appropriate. Radio broadcasts, including TV and "wireless networks", that use the public airwaves, all can get their special treatment different from that distributed on private wires/fibers. Private wires/fibers that use public rights of way (like in most cities) can have their concessions to the public in exchange for their right of way access. And purely private networks can have their protection from regulation, where that's appropriate, specified. Unrestricted content, like pure broadcast (eg open websites, basic cable) can be distinguished from content requested by adults - which should be largely unrestricted, except where production of that content might violate (non-telecom) laws in force where the content is produced (eg pornography or defamation).
The sum total of all the regulations, even in the "deregulated" modern environment, is now a huge mass that raises operating costs (and therefore prices) by requiring lawyers and bureaucrats at every turn. A reformed legal basis could be much shorter, simpler, and appropriate to the modern age, where tech and marketing has leveled the playing field in a way that is not at all recognizable in current law.
antenna that consists of plasma and essentially vanishes when you turn it off. While it may seem to not have many uses in the commercial world,
Everyone who parks their car in NYC and other hostile environments wants an antenna that vanishes when you turn it off. Plasma probably wouldn't jam after a year of use like a retractable antenna, and might even clean the snow off your car, including the pile burying you from the street plows.
Over a year ago, some hackers figured out how to run Linux on a Treo smartphone. The Treo 7xx series for Windows Mobile looks even more hackable to Linux.
Can anyone install Android as the Linux running one of these Treos? That makes all the devices work, including touchscreen and (cell) radio?
STMs can be used to push together atoms into molecules. If they can get the access time down, and the seek time, put it into a cheap USB enclosure, then I'll take one.
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What is this crap about a license taking months to produce and release? They should just release it with a license saying everything made with the kit is in the public domain, with the single exception to that disclaimer of all rights that any derivative must also come with that license. Why would it take more than 5 minutes to agree to release that license, and release it?
When some university comes after me for metabolizing glucose as part of my job (moving a muscle during business hours, just like you sometimes do), I don't want to have to argue about some license they've got on some DNA they synthesized.
All these patents on discovered genes are the purest BS violation of prior art. Any complexity in this BioBrick Public License will create more problems than it could ever solve.
Corporate slavery is not real slavery. Look into it.
"Trust the Spies" is the subject. My advice is "don't".
I'm looking forward to seeing the new tag "hooey" become the most popular at Slashdot. And, if measured by Google hits, the very definition of "Slashdot" (the noun).
Why bother looking, when the NSA's malicious incompetence (at respecting the Constitution - they're excellent at invading privacy) is already proven beyond doubt?
Don't look for excuses where criminal convictions will do much better.
The NSA is spying on all telecom signals passing through the US (including this message. Hi, Dick Cheney!). Despite the Constitution's prohibitions. Why would you trust them not to make your crypto crackable?
This situation shows one of the strongest arguments for open source. Trust no one.
Energy research doesn't just wait 30 years. Researchers' innovation pays off every day, with multiple product cycles every year. If we don't fund it throughout, we'll arrive 30 years from now with piles of nuke waste and only coal as the alternative. Luckily the US is so huge and rich that we can do multiple things at once. Unless all the funding and attention is siphoned off for subsidizing nuke, oil, coal, and other dirty industries that already make the biggest profits, but still get the handouts.
I'd like to see how many of those college students would give up their other Constitutionally protected right, freedom from slavery. Would they take a million dollars in exchange for becoming a slave for about 40 years, until they turned 65 years old? Ten million?
Rights are inalienable. We can't surrender them, though sometimes we can suffer their infringement. The more temporary the infringement, the more voluntary, the more we can suffer it. But any infringement pressures people in a way that inevitably becomes intolerable, and we don't tolerate it. That's why we create governments to protect those rights. Because not only our rights, but the rights of everyone around us, are infringed only at a much greater cost, even if it can sometimes be postponed.
False dichtomy. Like "I'd rather cut out my left eye than my right, because I see better out of my right". How about we do neither, and instead spend all that time and money building a power system that doesn't pump any radioactive pollution into our face?
Nuke power is "very clean" only if you ignore the dirty process for mining and processing its fuel, and all the extremely toxic waste it produces for which there's no alternative but watching it like a hawk for what amounts to forever.
Nuke power boosters think we're stupid, because every time they think we're desperate enough to fall for lies about nuke power's extreme costs, they rehash them again.
When nuke scientists have a way to process the waste into safe byproducts within a decade or so, and when making the fuel is less filthy than, say, building an equivalent amount of tidal or geothermal plants, then they should try again. They've got some good ideas. I'd just like to see more on the science and engineering, and less on the made-up marketing.
What's the difference, when they both translate to a demand to get it that will be fulfilled by people who can give it to them? That's America.
Only about 110M votes are cast even in our biggest elections. But they're cast in small precincts in parallel. Each precinct can have a small group of people who take a few days to count the few thousand votes cast in their precinct, without much trouble.
The nice thing about people is that we're different. Which means that having two or three people count the same ballot, setting aside any exceptions, adds to reliability, while having three of the same machine count them adds nothing but another chance to fail.
Another nice thing about people is that holding us accountable for our actions means something. Which is why having humans count means something, if the retained evidence proves the counts were wrong, and a scheme can be proven from the evidence. Proving the machines counted wrong only means that someone who helped make the machine was responsible, but we never hold them accountable, even when (eg. Diebold) they're demonstrably guilty. The machines offer our system a scapegoat. Live counters offer people little reward considered against substantial risk.
Counting them first with machines, then making it official (and looking for fraud) by counting it by hand gives us all we want. Why not?
There is clearly an urgent need that mass media rushes to satisfy. That doesn't mean that releasing counts before the polls close is OK, as you point out. But Americans very clearly want to know as soon as they themselves have voted (if not sooner) who has won. YMMV, but you're not "America".
The machine generated ballots can be used for initial counting estimates counted by machines. That will satisfy Americans' urgent need to instantly know who won after they each cast their vote. Those counts should not be legally binding. The ballots should be counted by hand for the officially binding count. In the event that there's any substantial differences, the state should automatically open a formal investigation into vote rigging. Which would deter that kind of rigging, so it would rarely be tried, and the investigations rarely begun.
There's no reason the official count can't take a few days to complete, even doublechecked by multiple counts. That kind of human responsibility for the counting is entirely consistent with the democracy we're populating with the votes.
There are precedents all through literary history. But the genre really was defined by those radio catalogs' fiction, which was tied to the prompt appearance of radio serials like Flash Gordon. Wells and Verne prepared the ground, much as Poe's detective stories prepared the ground for mysteries like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
SF is technology marketing. It started as the "articles" in radio parts catalog "technoporn", which expanded the catalogs' audience outside those who actually built their own radios. And ever since, it's appealed to people who want to fantasize about science and engineering more than they can actually do it. Which is of course where the culture's overall desires for science and tech come from. SF writers articulate possible worlds, visualizing how we'd live in them. Their biggest audience is science and engineering students, and people who consume their products.
Art in general is the way our society transmits new knowledge about the world and how it works from the discoverers/inventors to the rest of us. SF is art about what we can buy to live the way the stories tell us is possible.
And we've been hearing about universal media networks long enough that we've finally got them. In the case of the "Internet", SF took a lot longer to explain it to us than it was taking to deliver, partly because SF was preoccupied with the rockets that also produced the Internet. Now what we need is a better vision of what we'll become, now that we're actually on that network, and SF has new media in which to work. Someday someone will produce a networked multimedia game that will tell us what the next paradigm will be like. I'm betting on "psychic".
If the FCC, or the government in general, were serious about regulating these cablecos in the public interest, they'd just revise all the laws to treat cable "TV", "phone" and "data" networks all the same. What makes them different is no longer their content, as each of those three kinds of companies deliver the "triple play" of video/voice/data, and therefore the same customers. There might be distinctions among networks that cross state lines, or that have either government contracts specifying special liabilities (eg 911 service operators) or market status (eg monopoly or some subsidy for growth or competition), or perhaps even provided by a government.
But they're all networks. They all have directly comparable service levels, competition requirements, public interest requirements, consumer protections. The distinctions by their content type, even if their media mix is somewhat different, is largely irrelevant. They should all be regulated to ensure they offer the same levels of service in their products, especially as they market those products to the same consumers as being "the same" as their competitors, like TV from the "phone company" or phone from "the cable company" or all of it from "an ISP". And of course the content should be regulated separately from the network access/connection - perhaps even regulated to break up vertical monopolies that currently bundle content and network together.
After the basic rules they can make whatever smaller exceptions are appropriate. Radio broadcasts, including TV and "wireless networks", that use the public airwaves, all can get their special treatment different from that distributed on private wires/fibers. Private wires/fibers that use public rights of way (like in most cities) can have their concessions to the public in exchange for their right of way access. And purely private networks can have their protection from regulation, where that's appropriate, specified. Unrestricted content, like pure broadcast (eg open websites, basic cable) can be distinguished from content requested by adults - which should be largely unrestricted, except where production of that content might violate (non-telecom) laws in force where the content is produced (eg pornography or defamation).
The sum total of all the regulations, even in the "deregulated" modern environment, is now a huge mass that raises operating costs (and therefore prices) by requiring lawyers and bureaucrats at every turn. A reformed legal basis could be much shorter, simpler, and appropriate to the modern age, where tech and marketing has leveled the playing field in a way that is not at all recognizable in current law.
What Republicans told me and the rest of the world for the past 7 years:
If you're not guilty, you won't mind being searched - so now we have to search you much more closely. Mr Bush, please drop your drawers.
Everyone who parks their car in NYC and other hostile environments wants an antenna that vanishes when you turn it off. Plasma probably wouldn't jam after a year of use like a retractable antenna, and might even clean the snow off your car, including the pile burying you from the street plows.
Oh, you mean LinuxMCE with Cisco 7970 phones.
To complete your dream, make the LMCE Orbiter run on an Android mobile phone.
Over a year ago, some hackers figured out how to run Linux on a Treo smartphone. The Treo 7xx series for Windows Mobile looks even more hackable to Linux.
Can anyone install Android as the Linux running one of these Treos? That makes all the devices work, including touchscreen and (cell) radio?
This story is about "The Top Ten Off Switches". For switches that turn on, we can wait for a story about nanotech molecules terminating in COOH.
I'd say The Button is the #1 off switch - it is the high bit on the entire world.
STMs can be used to push together atoms into molecules. If they can get the access time down, and the seek time, put it into a cheap USB enclosure, then I'll take one.