I'm fairly hardware platform agnostic; I'm not choosy, I'll take the hardware that gives the best bang for the buck. I also have occasional runs of brilliant luck in finding near-new products at incredible bargains. As a result, I have come across non-X86 hardware that is a good enough deal that I can't pass it up. However, I am very choosy about my software - I want it to work the way I want it to, which is why I use Linux, I have choice. OSX just doesn't give me the freedom, even though the hardware is pretty decent.
Because some people want to have choice in how they use their computer. Now, Aqua may have it's fans, but I'm not one of them; I like the more simplistic, straightforward looks of WindowMaker, I feel that the Aqua interface is bloated and ugly. Choice is a good thing - it causes better products all around, this is just another option for the user.
Unfortunately, Novak is somewhat of an amateur lawyer whose hobbies include suing people. So, you'd be going after someone who has a decent idea of what the law is. I would say that Novak is the same class of being as pond scum, but I'm afraid I'd be sued - the Pond Scum Anti-Defamation League is very powerful, from what I hear.
It's always been a stretch. The trick to any good AFJ is to come up with a good, yet outlandish, prank, and a delivery so brilliant and so believable that people fall for it, such as the infamous write only memory ad.
Forget DNF, I want some of that glow in the dark caffeinated beer - I figure if I drink enough of the stuff, I won't need to turn on the lights if I need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Check your local hardware store; if it's a decent place, they'll have tons of the stuff. It's usually sold as insulation - you spray some of this stuff into your walls before you put up the drywall, and it acts as the equvalent as a bat of the more traditional insulation.
Again, we have more than enough food, even when feeding it to dairy/meat animals. It's simply that there are corrupt governments around the world who take the food donations intended for poor people and sell it to pad their own coffers. It makes sense too, in a perverse way, because if you keep your population hungry, you can control them better. Were we to get rid of the dictatorships in the world, hunger would be eliminated extremely quickly as well, as it's much more of a distribution problem than a supply problem
The better question is, why would NASA want to create this stuff in the first place?
Face it, people like meat. To a large portion of the population, it tastes good, and is an easy way to get a large amount of protein.
it's practically unworkable keeping livestock on earth once the population starts approaching 10 billion;)
I don't think so. You do realize that right now an incredibly large amount of food goes to waste due to a number of sociopolitical reasons. I'd say that a huge amount of hunger is caused by corruption, not livestock.
There are some superb vegan recipes available now, and I think NASA would be better advised to experiment with some of the great flavors that contemporary vegan cooking can produce...I think this NASA meat idea is a holdover from 1950s thinking, when everyone thought meat had to be the center of the meal, for both taste and nutrition.
I partially agree with you here. Most meals for long space trips are going to be plant-based, and justifiably so. Once again, though, most people like meat, and so a low-impact way to create something that will more than likely be an occasional treat will be a great morale booster.
I'd like to see NASA devote its (too scarce) resources to making plant-based foods taste fantastic in a space environement. It sure beats the thought of microwaved synthetic meat. Spending money developing weird meat substitutes seems like a gross misappropriation of this agency's funds, when better and cheaper food alternatives are available. After all, shouldn't Nasa's money, as much as possible, go to space exploration?
The people working for NASA are no fools, they're not putting all their eggs in one basket. Sure this one research lab is working on ways to create meat suitable for space travel, but the lab down the hall is probably working on good tasting vegetable-based meals. It's all a matter of personal preference and taste.
Besides, there are people who do develop allergies to plant-based proteins as well; I think you'd agree that it's a good idea to have a contingency plan in place before any problems develop. This, if anything else, could be a contingency plan if someone were to develop an allergy to the primary protein source - just move them over to a fish-based diet and let the mission continue without many worries about allergic reactions.
It's probably more or less code that does the same thing as when you realize you're going to fall. It'll first attempt to lower itself so that the force of the impact is minimized. If that doesn't work, it'll probably attempt to break the fall with a more durable part. You do a lot of this automatically when you fall, and this robot is probably no different.
Reasons like this are exactly why I don't bother trying to upgrade using the Mozilla RPMs. Due to the fact that Mozilla is still Beta, and thus a moving target, any internal API changes are bound to break any programs that rely on a feature of Mozilla that has changed in the latest milestone. I've found that the best solution to this problem is to install Mozilla into its own directory away from the system libraries, and calling the program through a shell script. I know it means blowing about 30 megs additional hard drive space, but it's much more reliable, and you don't end up pulling your hair out anytime a program breaks because it relies on an API that's changed.
Nope, the 20th anniversary Mac was just another in a series of all-in-one LCD systems made at about that time. It made its debut in '97, and was beat off the line by the aforementioned Compaq, the Monorail, and other PCs. It's just that '96-97 was when LCDs were giving the first hints of becoming reasonably affordable, so everyone wanted to put out a system with one of them in it.
The composer [wendycarlos.com] has some really interesting notes on how it was nearly lost forever until it was baked. Yes, baked, as in an oven.
Baking audio tapes is actually a fairly common with media from that era. The media was fairly unstable, so recovering the audio, or data, tracks would involve baking it, then quickly copying the data to a new medium, hopefully one which is more stable.
It makes for a fascinating story, especially considering the future of classic works -- will they be lost forever when the media disintegrates?
Tale as old as time here. Think of all of the thousands of priceless history books torched during the dark ages, or the books that have rotted away, or the movies that have disintegrated because the early film was closely related to gunpowder.
Essentially, the only thing that's changed here is the fact that there's now an additional layer of indirection here needed to reach the information. Perhaps situations like this is why we need a way to bootstrap computer technology; that is, create a way of designing instructions to build up to the point to where a future society can read the information we've left behind. Think about all the technologies that have fallen by the wayside - for many of those devices, the schematics aren't even available anymore, so any information on them is essentially lost forever.
What really caught me off gaurd was the distance they were able to capture the data from. Apparently for some, they found they could capture data from "at least across the street".
Shouldn't be all that surprising. Most ADAT outputs use an LED laser, which provides an extremely coherent light source. Heck, my little handheld laser pointer had a range of several hundred feet. As long as the signal is reasonable intact and ambient conditions reasonably dark, lasers have simply incredible ranges.
Actually, quite a few programs were like that. In order to save a little bit of memory, they would use the high bits to store information. Thus, the Amiga, the Macintosh, and any other 68k system had programs that failed miserably when the processors were migrated to true 32 bit addressing. The expression 32 bit clean, which most mac people will recommend, comes from programs which don't use this trick to get a little extra memory.
As an aside, the early IBM/360's had the same problem decades earlier. The machines, like the 68000's, used 24 bit addressing, and when they were upgraded to true 32 bit machines, all kinds of programs broke, even though there was supposed to be binary compatibility.
someone was working on flywheel technology for automobiles a few years ago but it didn't get far. don't know why.
Unfortunately, even with current technology in the field of exotic materials, flywheels are too dangerous/unwieldy for automotive use. It's very difficult to control a disk spinning at tens of thousands of RPMS; IIRC, someone was killed when one of the flywheels disintegrated in road testing.
smaller capacitors? if you put a lot of little batteries together you get more voltage but not more power. stored potential depends on total mass, no matter how you break it up.
There are two ways to connect batteries. If you connect them in series, you get increased voltage; in parallel, you get increased amperage. Most complex, high-amperage systems use a combination of the two. Your car's battery, for example, is such a hybrid; it has 6 cells, each providing 2 volts, in series so that it can provide the 12 volts your car runs on. In each cell, though, it contains several cells, sometimes up to a dozen, connected in parallel, to provide the needed amperage. If the same cells were connected in series, you'd never have enough current to start your car.
SuSE does this. The default install installs a "personal firewall", which shuts down pretty much everything. For purposes of setting the machine up as a more full-featured firewall, it comes with a package called susefirewall, which consists of a fairly quick configuration process that gets pretty good results. I'd say it comes close to, if not matching, the capabilities of the dedicated firewall distros.
On the same note would gambling also be considered "earning money"
Depends on the country. In the US, gaming winnings are considered taxable. In fact, with any large casino winning, they make you sign a stack of tax papers, and will take the taxes out of your winnings right there at the highest tax rate of 33%.
So when I'm forty, I no longer have the rights to something I wrote when I was twenty? How is that a logical, financially viable, and potentially useful solution?
Should a washed-up forty year old basketball player receive the same salary as a twenty year old superstar? Like anything, talent and skill are transient, and the smart person knows to invest for the lean years. Remember, the intent of the copyright clause of the constitution is to provide incentive for people to be creative, and IMO, near-eternal copyrights don't provide much incentive to creativity.
This has nothing to do with the MPAA and everything to do with poorly run theater chains. First off, it's illegal for a film company to own their own theater chain. Second off, the theater chains are in trouble because, like many companies in the dot com boom, they expanded way too fast and profits failed to expand as rapidly. As a result, many of these chains filed for the various bankruptcy protections/liquidations and are struggling. Thus, they can't afford the expensive digital projection equipment. IMax, on the other hand, is expanding slowly, and only when they're fairly certain they can make a profit. Thus, they've got good quality and a good bank account.
As far as domesticated animals go, cloning is actually pretty silly. First off is the aforementioned fact that this is not true cloning in the pulp science fiction sense, but rather a time-delayed clone. The personality and fur pattern will more than likely be different; I'm certain the first few people will be disappointed because the cat won't be the same, even though it has the same DNA.
As far as service animals go, its similarly a silly point. It's far cheaper to rescue animals from animal shelters and train them. The methods already in place for getting them is already very good, cloning will only lead to service animals being more expensive.
Yes, it's interesting technology, but essentially, is a waste of money.
The idea of couples recreating through complex, often ugly, and really uneeded methods is pretty silly, if you ask me. I suppose its a matter of taste - but why go through all of that - there are thousands of children waiting to be adopted or given foster care.
I'm agreeing with you mostly here. There are a lot of children in foster care who need good homes. I have an adopted brother, and three of my cousins are adopted, all of them from troubled families. I also know all about the politics involved in attempting to adopt as well - many families have given up after the heartache involved in the process.
There is also the undeniable psychological factor in a child of your "own". There is an imense instinctual desire to procreate; this procedure gives just another path to fulfilling that desire. This technology would simply provide another means to those childless couples who may not want to adopt, for whatever reasons they may have.
As for other species, its interesting - but likely it will prove to be very expensive, less reliable than "normal" birth, and of course, kinda of freakish. If the outer born animal has problems, who will really know if it came from the womb (or lack of) or from other factors?
Finally, I see no benefit in restoring lost species. I'd rather work on keeping the ones we have now around. Typically, lost species were lost for a reason.
Simple statistical modelling would be able to tell you if the procedure if more or less reliable than a natural birth. After a few attempts, it becomes fairly easy to discern if a technology is useful, or creates too many deformed babies to be considered. Trust me, though, there are species out there where this sort of procedure would be extremely useful in helping to preserve them.
Also, you must admit that there is a certain amount of destruction that has been done by humans. Species such as the aforementioned thylacine, or the javan tiger, which were not driven to extinction by natural selection, but rather by habitat loss deserve a second chance at existence, in my opinion. There are also threatened species, such as the cheetah, which are difficult to breed in captivity due to oddities in their mating rituals. If we are able to artificially create these species, maybe we can help restore some of the loss of bioodiversity we have inflicted on this planet.
This is truly earth-changing technology, perhaps even more revolutionary than the internet could ever hope to be. Imagine a childless couple able to give birth to a child outside the womb. Or zoologists able to grow endangered and/or hard to breed animals, such as the giant panda or certain large cat species. Or transgendered persons able to give birth.
Yes there are downsides, like the aforementioned Brave New World scenario. It's inevitable that some people are going to take this extremely beneficial technology and and attempt to pervert it to serve some megamaniacal goal. It's my opinion, however, that the benefits far outnumber the drawbacks to this technology. Before dismissing this technology, think about species such as the thylacine, which were wiped out by people. Now imagine this technology able to restore those species, and give them a second chance at survival.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fairly hardware platform agnostic; I'm not choosy, I'll take the hardware that gives the best bang for the buck. I also have occasional runs of brilliant luck in finding near-new products at incredible bargains. As a result, I have come across non-X86 hardware that is a good enough deal that I can't pass it up. However, I am very choosy about my software - I want it to work the way I want it to, which is why I use Linux, I have choice. OSX just doesn't give me the freedom, even though the hardware is pretty decent.
Because some people want to have choice in how they use their computer. Now, Aqua may have it's fans, but I'm not one of them; I like the more simplistic, straightforward looks of WindowMaker, I feel that the Aqua interface is bloated and ugly. Choice is a good thing - it causes better products all around, this is just another option for the user.
Unfortunately, Novak is somewhat of an amateur lawyer whose hobbies include suing people. So, you'd be going after someone who has a decent idea of what the law is. I would say that Novak is the same class of being as pond scum, but I'm afraid I'd be sued - the Pond Scum Anti-Defamation League is very powerful, from what I hear.
Naw, Wil's been slashdotted a few times before, I doubt he cares all that much.
It's always been a stretch. The trick to any good AFJ is to come up with a good, yet outlandish, prank, and a delivery so brilliant and so believable that people fall for it, such as the infamous write only memory ad.
Forget DNF, I want some of that glow in the dark caffeinated beer - I figure if I drink enough of the stuff, I won't need to turn on the lights if I need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Check your local hardware store; if it's a decent place, they'll have tons of the stuff. It's usually sold as insulation - you spray some of this stuff into your walls before you put up the drywall, and it acts as the equvalent as a bat of the more traditional insulation.
Again, we have more than enough food, even when feeding it to dairy/meat animals. It's simply that there are corrupt governments around the world who take the food donations intended for poor people and sell it to pad their own coffers. It makes sense too, in a perverse way, because if you keep your population hungry, you can control them better. Were we to get rid of the dictatorships in the world, hunger would be eliminated extremely quickly as well, as it's much more of a distribution problem than a supply problem
Face it, people like meat. To a large portion of the population, it tastes good, and is an easy way to get a large amount of protein.
I don't think so. You do realize that right now an incredibly large amount of food goes to waste due to a number of sociopolitical reasons. I'd say that a huge amount of hunger is caused by corruption, not livestock.
I partially agree with you here. Most meals for long space trips are going to be plant-based, and justifiably so. Once again, though, most people like meat, and so a low-impact way to create something that will more than likely be an occasional treat will be a great morale booster.
The people working for NASA are no fools, they're not putting all their eggs in one basket. Sure this one research lab is working on ways to create meat suitable for space travel, but the lab down the hall is probably working on good tasting vegetable-based meals. It's all a matter of personal preference and taste.
Besides, there are people who do develop allergies to plant-based proteins as well; I think you'd agree that it's a good idea to have a contingency plan in place before any problems develop. This, if anything else, could be a contingency plan if someone were to develop an allergy to the primary protein source - just move them over to a fish-based diet and let the mission continue without many worries about allergic reactions.
It's probably more or less code that does the same thing as when you realize you're going to fall. It'll first attempt to lower itself so that the force of the impact is minimized. If that doesn't work, it'll probably attempt to break the fall with a more durable part. You do a lot of this automatically when you fall, and this robot is probably no different.
Reasons like this are exactly why I don't bother trying to upgrade using the Mozilla RPMs. Due to the fact that Mozilla is still Beta, and thus a moving target, any internal API changes are bound to break any programs that rely on a feature of Mozilla that has changed in the latest milestone. I've found that the best solution to this problem is to install Mozilla into its own directory away from the system libraries, and calling the program through a shell script. I know it means blowing about 30 megs additional hard drive space, but it's much more reliable, and you don't end up pulling your hair out anytime a program breaks because it relies on an API that's changed.
Nope, the 20th anniversary Mac was just another in a series of all-in-one LCD systems made at about that time. It made its debut in '97, and was beat off the line by the aforementioned Compaq, the Monorail, and other PCs. It's just that '96-97 was when LCDs were giving the first hints of becoming reasonably affordable, so everyone wanted to put out a system with one of them in it.
Baking audio tapes is actually a fairly common with media from that era. The media was fairly unstable, so recovering the audio, or data, tracks would involve baking it, then quickly copying the data to a new medium, hopefully one which is more stable.
Tale as old as time here. Think of all of the thousands of priceless history books torched during the dark ages, or the books that have rotted away, or the movies that have disintegrated because the early film was closely related to gunpowder.Essentially, the only thing that's changed here is the fact that there's now an additional layer of indirection here needed to reach the information. Perhaps situations like this is why we need a way to bootstrap computer technology; that is, create a way of designing instructions to build up to the point to where a future society can read the information we've left behind. Think about all the technologies that have fallen by the wayside - for many of those devices, the schematics aren't even available anymore, so any information on them is essentially lost forever.
Shouldn't be all that surprising. Most ADAT outputs use an LED laser, which provides an extremely coherent light source. Heck, my little handheld laser pointer had a range of several hundred feet. As long as the signal is reasonable intact and ambient conditions reasonably dark, lasers have simply incredible ranges.
As an aside, the early IBM/360's had the same problem decades earlier. The machines, like the 68000's, used 24 bit addressing, and when they were upgraded to true 32 bit machines, all kinds of programs broke, even though there was supposed to be binary compatibility.
Unfortunately, even with current technology in the field of exotic materials, flywheels are too dangerous/unwieldy for automotive use. It's very difficult to control a disk spinning at tens of thousands of RPMS; IIRC, someone was killed when one of the flywheels disintegrated in road testing.
There are two ways to connect batteries. If you connect them in series, you get increased voltage; in parallel, you get increased amperage. Most complex, high-amperage systems use a combination of the two. Your car's battery, for example, is such a hybrid; it has 6 cells, each providing 2 volts, in series so that it can provide the 12 volts your car runs on. In each cell, though, it contains several cells, sometimes up to a dozen, connected in parallel, to provide the needed amperage. If the same cells were connected in series, you'd never have enough current to start your car.
SuSE does this. The default install installs a "personal firewall", which shuts down pretty much everything. For purposes of setting the machine up as a more full-featured firewall, it comes with a package called susefirewall, which consists of a fairly quick configuration process that gets pretty good results. I'd say it comes close to, if not matching, the capabilities of the dedicated firewall distros.
Depends on the country. In the US, gaming winnings are considered taxable. In fact, with any large casino winning, they make you sign a stack of tax papers, and will take the taxes out of your winnings right there at the highest tax rate of 33%.
But not from that link =3 But Here's a link that actually works. Additionally, if you want to buy it without an affiliate, here's a link over to Amazon.
Should a washed-up forty year old basketball player receive the same salary as a twenty year old superstar? Like anything, talent and skill are transient, and the smart person knows to invest for the lean years. Remember, the intent of the copyright clause of the constitution is to provide incentive for people to be creative, and IMO, near-eternal copyrights don't provide much incentive to creativity.
D'oh! IT used to be illegal for production companies to own theater chains, I forgot they had redacted that law.
This has nothing to do with the MPAA and everything to do with poorly run theater chains. First off, it's illegal for a film company to own their own theater chain. Second off, the theater chains are in trouble because, like many companies in the dot com boom, they expanded way too fast and profits failed to expand as rapidly. As a result, many of these chains filed for the various bankruptcy protections/liquidations and are struggling. Thus, they can't afford the expensive digital projection equipment. IMax, on the other hand, is expanding slowly, and only when they're fairly certain they can make a profit. Thus, they've got good quality and a good bank account.
As far as service animals go, its similarly a silly point. It's far cheaper to rescue animals from animal shelters and train them. The methods already in place for getting them is already very good, cloning will only lead to service animals being more expensive.
Yes, it's interesting technology, but essentially, is a waste of money.
I'm agreeing with you mostly here. There are a lot of children in foster care who need good homes. I have an adopted brother, and three of my cousins are adopted, all of them from troubled families. I also know all about the politics involved in attempting to adopt as well - many families have given up after the heartache involved in the process.
There is also the undeniable psychological factor in a child of your "own". There is an imense instinctual desire to procreate; this procedure gives just another path to fulfilling that desire. This technology would simply provide another means to those childless couples who may not want to adopt, for whatever reasons they may have.
Simple statistical modelling would be able to tell you if the procedure if more or less reliable than a natural birth. After a few attempts, it becomes fairly easy to discern if a technology is useful, or creates too many deformed babies to be considered. Trust me, though, there are species out there where this sort of procedure would be extremely useful in helping to preserve them.
Also, you must admit that there is a certain amount of destruction that has been done by humans. Species such as the aforementioned thylacine, or the javan tiger, which were not driven to extinction by natural selection, but rather by habitat loss deserve a second chance at existence, in my opinion. There are also threatened species, such as the cheetah, which are difficult to breed in captivity due to oddities in their mating rituals. If we are able to artificially create these species, maybe we can help restore some of the loss of bioodiversity we have inflicted on this planet.
Yes there are downsides, like the aforementioned Brave New World scenario. It's inevitable that some people are going to take this extremely beneficial technology and and attempt to pervert it to serve some megamaniacal goal. It's my opinion, however, that the benefits far outnumber the drawbacks to this technology. Before dismissing this technology, think about species such as the thylacine, which were wiped out by people. Now imagine this technology able to restore those species, and give them a second chance at survival.