Ummm, no. You see, shipping goods by sea has always been cheaper than by rail.
It makes sense for the Chunnel because the cost of putting stuff (especially cars and people) on and off the ships for that short crossing is a relatively large overhead. But that goes out the window if you're talking about halfway around the world.
All the more reason to join the distributed computing project Folding@Home, where we figure out how those big long carbon-based chains turn into the twisted little convoluted proteiny things that make every little twitchy thing in your body work.
Won'tcha give us a hand guvner?
BTW: I don't recommend the Windows screen saver on Win9x, too unstable. Run or schedule the console version (it runs at low priority, even on Win98), and manually stop/re-start it when you do something that needs more of your CPU.
BBTW: No firewall support yet. They're working on it.
You're methodology is all wrong and quite inapropriate.
A search for Hate Linux reveals 174,000 hits, while a search for Hate Windows reveals around a half million hits. Hate Microsoft gets a third of a million. Hate Sun Microsystems gets 10,000, while Hate AOL gets a half million. Hate Canada and Hate USE also get around a half million each. Hate France gets 350,000.
Of course my initial methodology is poor too. I should only be counting those that are highly correlated, for example using only complete quote delimited phrases:
Hate Microsoft.....7,775
Hate AOL...........3,290
Hate Unix............347
Hate Linux...........393
Hate Sun Microsystems..5
Hate America.......2,090
Hate Canada..........260
Hate USA.............213
Hate France..........185
Hate Quebec...........42
Hate Saskatchewan......1
Hate You.........121,000
Hate Me...........95,200
Hate God...........5,510
Hate Satan...........236
Love Satan.........1,760
Hate Nobody..........323
Hate No One..........758
Hate Everybody.....2,930
Hate Everyone......6,910
Hate Everything....8,690
Love Her.........283,000
Love Him.........335,000
Love Me..........471,000
Love You.......1,060,000
Not only that, but being the combustion product itself, the water is *really* hot. In fact, all of the heat is entirely in the water. We don't normally call it water, we call it super-heated steam. And we launch space shuttles with it.
Now there's a strange parallel. The space shuttle uses solid rocket motors (the Hindenburg was coated in solid rocket fuel) and hydrogen main engines (the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen).
Agreed. 95%-98% of the time I have Javascript turned off, and it's only once every second day that I have to switch it on for 10 minutes to see something that I actually need to see.
The only places I have ever had to turn Java on were the occasional scientific or 3leet demo or something. So once every two months for 5 minutes I have Java turned on.
Au contraire, I read both the Nature pdf file end to end and the ABC article. I did not come across anything that would answer my questions. I was a physicist, not a biologist, nor do I remember my grade school biology teaching us the difference in the number of bases between species (doesn't mean they didn't tell us, just means I don't remember every sentence 12 years later).
But I will agree, my post didn't deserve a 4. When I wrote it, I distinctly thought to myself "this isn't worth any points, but some of the answers might...", so I of course didn't use my +2.
There are some strange contradictions in the ABC article.
It first claims that "The sequencing of 118.7 billion base pairs of the nuclear genetic complement of a model plant is enormously significant". Then it says something near the bottom regarding "the 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome". So what's going on here? The plant can't have more genetic information than us.
The Nature article talks about giving away 5000 CDs containing the data, and mentiones somewhere that the dataset is 120 Megabytes. So I presume that is compressed, down from the 3.2(*2) billion bits that ABC quotes. Are these numbers accurate? (And just how much information is there per base pair? Is my translation of four nucleotides to 4 possible states (2 bits) correct?)
It would be one thing if their 'innovation' had actually ended up in something useful being done. IE: if they had never come up with it or patented it, would it have changed *ANYTHING*??? Have they actual created *ANY* value in the world?
The answer is clearly no. (They discovered that they had the patent...)
Please, pretty please, if in the distant future any of you come across someone who was involved in deciding to move ahead with actions like this, whether they are former managers, lawers, etc etc, please, give them a F****NG earful!
It's too bad big companies weren't lead by real leaders. Real leaders would see this for what it is, gang up, and drive BT into the ground.
"Hey Larry
(1), this is Bill(2). Have you seen the BT hyperlink thing? . Yeah, me too. I've got a few million to throw in the pot to intervene in the case. How about you?.. Great! . Have your people call my people. . Now you call Scott(3) and I'll call Ted(4) and Steve(5), and we'll crush these worthless leaches."
(1) Elison
(2) Gates
(3) McNealy
(4) Turner
(5) Case
> and locking up the people that made the high quality photographic paper and the ink used to create the images!
WRT the replies: The analogy between paper makers and these guys may not be 100%, and I completely understand you not liking the fact that this software is available, and I agree technically that you have a right to block anyone you choose, and that the RBL is just a list of people who have done a set of things. An 'advisory'.
Hell if you want to blackhole Yahoo for some screwball reason, there's nothing stopping you. Except your own customers and clients abandoning *you* yourself!
But I will strongly argue with people who want to make 'certain software' illegal or unobtainable, where 'certain' can be a nice big fuzzy thing on the slippery slope to who the hell knows where. (Do you also RBL people who host databases of actual viruses? Why not? Oh, just the once that you decide have 'evil' intentions at heart, eh? That's nice and clear cut!) After arguing philosophy with you and trying to persuade everyone else listening in, the next thing is to apply the similar pressure to you that you are applying to them.
At this point I'm dropping RBL, and I won't deal with anyone who is using it. This is no longer "prevention", nor "applying pressure", this is extortion, not simply against the person who owns the building where handguns are made, but also the other 1000 people that live in other buildings owned by the same landlord. After handguns, then what? Hunting rifles? Cars? Baseball bats? Big ugly dogs?
"That was the line back there, and you stepped over it..."
They're not harboring spammers!! This is about someone who makes a piece of software that can be used to spam. This is the difference between locking up the kiddy pornographer and locking up the people that made the high quality photographic paper and the ink used to create the images!
> Because it cost them time and money they get a tiny return on the efforts of thier spam.
You would think so, but in actual reality 90% of the people on the net are not techies like you and me. They are people like my last land-lady, a 60 year old women with an IQ of 95-105. Or like my brother's boss, owner of a plumbers shop, with an IQ of 90.
More than enough average people, enabling the smarter *ambitious* SOB'ing spammers to make a quarter million a year. Yes, that's right, a quarter a million. That's the numbers that were in the books of a famous southern US spammer and her husband, which were 'lifted' by an anti-spammer who penetrated their home network and copied a few hundred meg of their internal documents (along with some revealing 'home photos').
Damn, I can't find my bookmark. I do know the pages containing the juciest bits of the pilfered documents are mirrored in lots of places.
Yes, tons of spammers are not ingenious enough, persistent enough, nor *ambitious* enough, to make it work. But there are some who do. (Typically they do *spamming for hire*.) They are the ones that are going to be hard to kill. They are the ones that will survive as long as there are a few spam-friendly holes in the earth somewhere.
A ton of people have said that Ellison's purchase is keeping the speaker making people warm for the winter. The problem with that logic is that it ignores half the entire equation.
Instead of:
- people employed making 10' speakers
we could have:
- people employed making houses
- more people being able to afford housing
or better yet:
- people employed teaching people something useful
- more people doing more useful things
I could go on and on. What's Larry Ellison's speaker going to do from today onwards for anyone except Larry Ellison?
.
One of their PDF papers explicitly mentions some of the ways they go about reducing speckle, and shows some comparisons. So they are aware of it and are dealing with it, and it looks like they can do so without any significant added cost or system complexity.
It's using the exact same physical principle, and in an application where most people wouldn't have imagined it would be useful or usable, just like Cannon's DO lens.
Diffraction and interference, the property of light which makes the anti-reflection coating on your glasses work. The diffraction and interference is created using different physical systems, however the basics are the same. One quarter lambda.
BTW: Ever notice that after a while you get used to the failure modes, but every once in a long while a new one comes along that supprises and astounds you?
Just yesterday I was browsing the net looking for just the right icon, and I came across a collection which displayed little 32x32 gif images of *all* the 1000 icons on a single page in a massive table. 10-20 per row, 100 rows. I sat there as Netscape 4.75 began filling them in, (four at a time, the number of simultaneous connections used by modern browsers), and I thought "What an idiot, this isn't good, this isn't good at all...".
But I decided to let it finish, thinking it would just take a while, and I wouldn't dare navigate away from that page until I was done "opening in a new window" the links there. Then, a few seconds later, as Netscape got 1/4 of the way through, the kernel lost it. (all the separate continuous new TCP/IP connections maybe?) It wasn't like a normal freeze, everything went 8 bit blocky. I was really worried I'd lose data with that one.
This was one of those ones that had my mouth pop open and utter a "holy [profanity]".
Now *that* was insightful. I'm serious. That one five minute 'lesson' has lead to what? A rewarding well paid career! I remember the same kind of thing happening to me.
> There's just one little problem--software engineering has ZIP to do with
> the problems this not-quite-up-to-speed writer had. Bottom line: the article is a waste of time.
Bullshit. I'm a software engineer in a company that writes monitoring software for mission critical back end systems. In my personal life, I've grown more and more and more frustrated at the utter shit I have to put up with in software on my home computer.
It's not a problem if you're granny six pack and all you want to do is read your e-mail and browse the net for a few hours a week, but try and do anything more than simple, and you get beat to death by software bugs. Quite ironically, I now harbour a savage hatred of all the other software companies out there churning out all the garbage, the managers that run them, and the people that own them.
A couple months ago I ended up not using my home computer for 6 weeks for one reason or another, and boy, I didn't miss a thing because what I did miss was completely compensated by the fact that I wasn't struggling with crappy software and bugs.
I routinely tell friends and family who don't yet have a computer - "your're not missing anything, $2000 just to read email and browser the web 3 hours a week isn't worth it".
Paraphrased: There is no such thing as enough bandwidth.
That is incorrect. The most bandwidth I can use is limited by my disk subsystem, CPU, my input devices (including video camera), and the number of individuals who want to see my content all at one time.
Remember, there *is* such a thing as too much porn.
> Anyone who's read NASA Watch for some time knows how clueless NASA's PR shop is.
No *shit*! I attempted to watch NasaTV over the net this past weekend, to watch the interesting stuff going on.
They showed me "live" video of a zoom on a joint. For a solid hour. This is *while* the two astronauts were outside doing stuff. The astronauts have suit mounted video cameras, you know, like they tried with the football helmets years ago? There are also a half dozen payload bay cameras.
And all they showed me was this static zoom of a piece of white painted steel. For a solid hour.
Dumb bastards (1) or poor bastards (2). Either way I won't waste my time checking in on their 'transmissions' any time soon.
(1) Dumb as in "They had good downlinks of the suit mounted cameras as the astronauts went about their work, but for some idiotic reason decided to broadcast a 'live' static shot of some piece of metal."
(2) Poor as in "They don't have enough money to afford more than one full motion video downlink at a time from the Shuttle, and they have to use that on mission critical things, like what the joint is doing and thus whether the 80 ton load is shifting on them."
Either way, we're screwed out of a spectacular experience.
That's ok for one page. But the hyperlinks within the one page typically don't work, one would have to go to the trouble of manually putting them into another google request.
We need google to change the hyperlinks in it's cached pages to refer to the other google-cached pages.
Of course no matter how convenient, it'll never happen. Legally troublesome. (Well, at least for 36-100 more years:)
Re:So much rhetoric, so little reality
on
On Asteroid Mining
·
· Score: 1
> But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem.
> I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit
> in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas.
> The world is very big.
Texas is a big place. The world is only a couple orders of magnitude bigger. Exponential population growth means that if your numbers are right, within a half dozen generations such housing would cover earth's landmasses from end to end.
Personally I'm certain that we'll get the rest of the world's women well educated enough to prevent that from happening. But how much closer we get before that happens will be most interesting.
So, what are everyone's bets as to where the Earth's population will level out?
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, no. You see, shipping goods by sea has always been cheaper than by rail.
It makes sense for the Chunnel because the cost of putting stuff (especially cars and people) on and off the ships for that short crossing is a relatively large overhead. But that goes out the window if you're talking about halfway around the world.
All the more reason to join the distributed computing project Folding@Home, where we figure out how those big long carbon-based chains turn into the twisted little convoluted proteiny things that make every little twitchy thing in your body work.
Won'tcha give us a hand guvner?
BTW: I don't recommend the Windows screen saver on Win9x, too unstable. Run or schedule the console version (it runs at low priority, even on Win98), and manually stop/re-start it when you do something that needs more of your CPU.
BBTW: No firewall support yet. They're working on it.
PS: All patriotic Canucks, join us!
You're methodology is all wrong and quite inapropriate.
A search for Hate Linux reveals 174,000 hits, while a search for Hate Windows reveals around a half million hits. Hate Microsoft gets a third of a million. Hate Sun Microsystems gets 10,000, while Hate AOL gets a half million. Hate Canada and Hate USE also get around a half million each. Hate France gets 350,000.
Of course my initial methodology is poor too. I should only be counting those that are highly correlated, for example using only complete quote delimited phrases:
Hate Microsoft.....7,775
Hate AOL...........3,290
Hate Unix............347
Hate Linux...........393
Hate Sun Microsystems..5
Hate America.......2,090
Hate Canada..........260
Hate USA.............213
Hate France..........185
Hate Quebec...........42
Hate Saskatchewan......1
Hate You.........121,000
Hate Me...........95,200
Hate God...........5,510
Hate Satan...........236
Love Satan.........1,760
Hate Nobody..........323
Hate No One..........758
Hate Everybody.....2,930
Hate Everyone......6,910
Hate Everything....8,690
Love Her.........283,000
Love Him.........335,000
Love Me..........471,000
Love You.......1,060,000
Feel better now?
Phhhhttt!!! Then we'll build our own damn stuff to use on it. Leave those sorry SOBs behind.
I was just thinking to myself, "All I really need to quit watching TV and going to movies is a good reason. This would be a damn good reason."
Not only that, but being the combustion product itself, the water is *really* hot. In fact, all of the heat is entirely in the water. We don't normally call it water, we call it super-heated steam. And we launch space shuttles with it.
Now there's a strange parallel. The space shuttle uses solid rocket motors (the Hindenburg was coated in solid rocket fuel) and hydrogen main engines (the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen).
Agreed. 95%-98% of the time I have Javascript turned off, and it's only once every second day that I have to switch it on for 10 minutes to see something that I actually need to see.
The only places I have ever had to turn Java on were the occasional scientific or 3leet demo or something. So once every two months for 5 minutes I have Java turned on.
Ahhh yes, to be the first human being to visually examine a spot, any spot, on Mars.
Only a few things better than that. Namely, being there.
Au contraire, I read both the Nature pdf file end to end and the ABC article. I did not come across anything that would answer my questions. I was a physicist, not a biologist, nor do I remember my grade school biology teaching us the difference in the number of bases between species (doesn't mean they didn't tell us, just means I don't remember every sentence 12 years later).
But I will agree, my post didn't deserve a 4. When I wrote it, I distinctly thought to myself "this isn't worth any points, but some of the answers might...", so I of course didn't use my +2.
There are some strange contradictions in the ABC article.
It first claims that "The sequencing of 118.7 billion base pairs of the nuclear genetic complement of a model plant is enormously significant". Then it says something near the bottom regarding "the 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome". So what's going on here? The plant can't have more genetic information than us.
The Nature article talks about giving away 5000 CDs containing the data, and mentiones somewhere that the dataset is 120 Megabytes. So I presume that is compressed, down from the 3.2(*2) billion bits that ABC quotes. Are these numbers accurate? (And just how much information is there per base pair? Is my translation of four nucleotides to 4 possible states (2 bits) correct?)
It would be one thing if their 'innovation' had actually ended up in something useful being done. IE: if they had never come up with it or patented it, would it have changed *ANYTHING*??? Have they actual created *ANY* value in the world?
The answer is clearly no. (They discovered that they had the patent...)
Please, pretty please, if in the distant future any of you come across someone who was involved in deciding to move ahead with actions like this, whether they are former managers, lawers, etc etc, please, give them a F****NG earful!
It's too bad big companies weren't lead by real leaders. Real leaders would see this for what it is, gang up, and drive BT into the ground.
WRT the replies: The analogy between paper makers and these guys may not be 100%, and I completely understand you not liking the fact that this software is available, and I agree technically that you have a right to block anyone you choose, and that the RBL is just a list of people who have done a set of things. An 'advisory'.
Hell if you want to blackhole Yahoo for some screwball reason, there's nothing stopping you. Except your own customers and clients abandoning *you* yourself!
But I will strongly argue with people who want to make 'certain software' illegal or unobtainable, where 'certain' can be a nice big fuzzy thing on the slippery slope to who the hell knows where. (Do you also RBL people who host databases of actual viruses? Why not? Oh, just the once that you decide have 'evil' intentions at heart, eh? That's nice and clear cut!) After arguing philosophy with you and trying to persuade everyone else listening in, the next thing is to apply the similar pressure to you that you are applying to them.
At this point I'm dropping RBL, and I won't deal with anyone who is using it. This is no longer "prevention", nor "applying pressure", this is extortion, not simply against the person who owns the building where handguns are made, but also the other 1000 people that live in other buildings owned by the same landlord. After handguns, then what? Hunting rifles? Cars? Baseball bats? Big ugly dogs?
"That was the line back there, and you stepped over it..."
They're not harboring spammers!! This is about someone who makes a piece of software that can be used to spam. This is the difference between locking up the kiddy pornographer and locking up the people that made the high quality photographic paper and the ink used to create the images!
This is not right.
> Because it cost them time and money they get a tiny return on the efforts of thier spam.
You would think so, but in actual reality 90% of the people on the net are not techies like you and me. They are people like my last land-lady, a 60 year old women with an IQ of 95-105. Or like my brother's boss, owner of a plumbers shop, with an IQ of 90.
More than enough average people, enabling the smarter *ambitious* SOB'ing spammers to make a quarter million a year. Yes, that's right, a quarter a million. That's the numbers that were in the books of a famous southern US spammer and her husband, which were 'lifted' by an anti-spammer who penetrated their home network and copied a few hundred meg of their internal documents (along with some revealing 'home photos').
Damn, I can't find my bookmark. I do know the pages containing the juciest bits of the pilfered documents are mirrored in lots of places.
Yes, tons of spammers are not ingenious enough, persistent enough, nor *ambitious* enough, to make it work. But there are some who do. (Typically they do *spamming for hire*.) They are the ones that are going to be hard to kill. They are the ones that will survive as long as there are a few spam-friendly holes in the earth somewhere.
A ton of people have said that Ellison's purchase is keeping the speaker making people warm for the winter. The problem with that logic is that it ignores half the entire equation.
Instead of:
- people employed making 10' speakers
we could have:
- people employed making houses
- more people being able to afford housing
or better yet:
- people employed teaching people something useful
- more people doing more useful things
I could go on and on. What's Larry Ellison's speaker going to do from today onwards for anyone except Larry Ellison?
.
One of their PDF papers explicitly mentions some of the ways they go about reducing speckle, and shows some comparisons. So they are aware of it and are dealing with it, and it looks like they can do so without any significant added cost or system complexity.
It's using the exact same physical principle, and in an application where most people wouldn't have imagined it would be useful or usable, just like Cannon's DO lens.
Diffraction and interference, the property of light which makes the anti-reflection coating on your glasses work. The diffraction and interference is created using different physical systems, however the basics are the same. One quarter lambda.
Fair enough.
BTW: Ever notice that after a while you get used to the failure modes, but every once in a long while a new one comes along that supprises and astounds you?
Just yesterday I was browsing the net looking for just the right icon, and I came across a collection which displayed little 32x32 gif images of *all* the 1000 icons on a single page in a massive table. 10-20 per row, 100 rows. I sat there as Netscape 4.75 began filling them in, (four at a time, the number of simultaneous connections used by modern browsers), and I thought "What an idiot, this isn't good, this isn't good at all...".
But I decided to let it finish, thinking it would just take a while, and I wouldn't dare navigate away from that page until I was done "opening in a new window" the links there. Then, a few seconds later, as Netscape got 1/4 of the way through, the kernel lost it. (all the separate continuous new TCP/IP connections maybe?) It wasn't like a normal freeze, everything went 8 bit blocky. I was really worried I'd lose data with that one.
This was one of those ones that had my mouth pop open and utter a "holy [profanity]".
Now *that* was insightful. I'm serious. That one five minute 'lesson' has lead to what? A rewarding well paid career! I remember the same kind of thing happening to me.
> There's just one little problem--software engineering has ZIP to do with
> the problems this not-quite-up-to-speed writer had. Bottom line: the article is a waste of time.
Bullshit. I'm a software engineer in a company that writes monitoring software for mission critical back end systems. In my personal life, I've grown more and more and more frustrated at the utter shit I have to put up with in software on my home computer.
It's not a problem if you're granny six pack and all you want to do is read your e-mail and browse the net for a few hours a week, but try and do anything more than simple, and you get beat to death by software bugs. Quite ironically, I now harbour a savage hatred of all the other software companies out there churning out all the garbage, the managers that run them, and the people that own them.
A couple months ago I ended up not using my home computer for 6 weeks for one reason or another, and boy, I didn't miss a thing because what I did miss was completely compensated by the fact that I wasn't struggling with crappy software and bugs.
I routinely tell friends and family who don't yet have a computer - "your're not missing anything, $2000 just to read email and browser the web 3 hours a week isn't worth it".
Paraphrased: There is no such thing as enough bandwidth.
That is incorrect. The most bandwidth I can use is limited by my disk subsystem, CPU, my input devices (including video camera), and the number of individuals who want to see my content all at one time.
Remember, there *is* such a thing as too much porn.
After reading your post, I noticed that with a little practice, I can do the same thing, and it is indeed faster.
Thanks!
> Anyone who's read NASA Watch for some time knows how clueless NASA's PR shop is.
No *shit*! I attempted to watch NasaTV over the net this past weekend, to watch the interesting stuff going on.
They showed me "live" video of a zoom on a joint. For a solid hour. This is *while* the two astronauts were outside doing stuff. The astronauts have suit mounted video cameras, you know, like they tried with the football helmets years ago? There are also a half dozen payload bay cameras.
And all they showed me was this static zoom of a piece of white painted steel. For a solid hour.
Dumb bastards (1) or poor bastards (2). Either way I won't waste my time checking in on their 'transmissions' any time soon.
(1) Dumb as in "They had good downlinks of the suit mounted cameras as the astronauts went about their work, but for some idiotic reason decided to broadcast a 'live' static shot of some piece of metal."
(2) Poor as in "They don't have enough money to afford more than one full motion video downlink at a time from the Shuttle, and they have to use that on mission critical things, like what the joint is doing and thus whether the 80 ton load is shifting on them."
Either way, we're screwed out of a spectacular experience.
That's ok for one page. But the hyperlinks within the one page typically don't work, one would have to go to the trouble of manually putting them into another google request.
We need google to change the hyperlinks in it's cached pages to refer to the other google-cached pages.
Of course no matter how convenient, it'll never happen. Legally troublesome. (Well, at least for 36-100 more years :)
> I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit
> in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas.
> The world is very big.
Texas is a big place. The world is only a couple orders of magnitude bigger. Exponential population growth means that if your numbers are right, within a half dozen generations such housing would cover earth's landmasses from end to end.
Personally I'm certain that we'll get the rest of the world's women well educated enough to prevent that from happening. But how much closer we get before that happens will be most interesting.
So, what are everyone's bets as to where the Earth's population will level out?
I'll take 20 billion.
At this moment in time it's a '404'. If I go to the root of rendell, it comes up with the default Apache page.
Something screwy is going on. Anyone got a mirror?