VCRs, TVs, dryers and refrigerators are tested as entire, complete units. There is little variation from one unit to another as it comes off the assembly line.
Computers are built from a Tower of Babel of separate components. The CPU, motherboard, memory, graphics and hard drive may all be high quality, tested components on their own. Combine them all into a single unit and you end up with a flaky problem child with all kinds of unforeseen interactions and problems.
It just shows that computer technology is still in its infancy. It's a wonder any computer works given the way we cobble them together.
China could be the best thing that ever happened to the US space program.
The current emphasis on non-manned space flight shows that our space program is more mature and pragmatic now that we don't see Russia as much of a threat. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This makes it easier to justify the expenses to already over-burdened taxpayers.
The perception that we were behind the USSR was good for the space program and engineering in general. US taxpayers may be short sighted when it comes to seeing value of pure research, but if you threaten our perception of being the world's greatest superpower, that's when the giant awakens. I hope China gets men into space. The public may not see space research as a priority until they feel we might lose the pissing contest between superpowers.
Agreed. The moral panic is nothing new and far from exclusive to gamers. Just another example of well meaning, but reactionary parents who have grown up enough to forget all those stupid things their parents over reacted about when they were kids.
You can see the analogy with the attack on rave culture. You would think a youth culture based on peace, love, unity and respect (PLUR) would be tough to demonize. You hear precious little media coverage of PLUR, just hard-hitting stories that warn parents of sex and death and undercover exposes that identify innocuous glow sticks and pacifiers as signs of rampant drug abuse. "Parents: Your kids could die tonight!, news at eleven!". Far from the bigger truth but good for ratings and it makes all that overzealous police response to these kids seem justified.
The attack on youth culture by parents is not going to go away as long as parents have all the political power and their children have none. It's easy for politicians to disenfranchise those that are too young to vote and those too apathetic to once they have that power.
"What's interesting here is that inadverently, GWB's case has transferred a significant amount of power from the States to the Federal Government."
Democrats are all for the federal government stomping over states rights to impose the federal nanny state. Only when they want their man in the White House, to they find that old time states rights religion.
Republicans are all for states rights when it comes to gun laws and restricting abortions. When your state decides to decriminalize medical marijuana or physician-assisted suicide, the Republicans come out of the woodwork to impose the power of the federal government on these uppity states.
Just goes to show that both major parties are inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to states rights. The one good thing that can come of the mess is a new resurgence in third-party voters. This Libertarian doesn't have much hope, but there can't be a clearer example that the major parties stand for nothing. There is no principle that they will let get in the way of their victory.
We ruin sci-fi adaptations by focusing on action and technology. Europeans, especially the BBC, take a much more thoughtful, character-driven approach. Dune will demand that approach.
The BBC has given us some great sci-fi. I would put Cold Lazarus or the BBC production of John Christopher's series The Tripods over most any TV that has come out of the US. The last truly great thing that has come out of the US was the PBS adaptation of Lathe of Heaven. It was so good, it's probably a Canadian production.
A&E set the bar pretty high for a compelling TV mini-series with Longitude. A testament to the fact that if you take the time needed to tell a story and don't underestimate the intelligence of the audience, great TV is possible.
"With the arrival of the Internet and e-mail," he wrote, "(U.S. Spanish speakers) have begun... to adopt Spanish-ized terms for technical computer jargon: aplodear for 'upload,' chatear for 'chat,' printear for 'print,' and many others."
Is something like this a bigger threat to English or Spanish? Your answer is probably based on whether you see the linguistic glass as half-empty or half-full.
The English language is constantly embracing other languages, whether from foreign countries or from slang of our own streets. We adopt the language of our enemies and allies. Hell, we even adopt the language of our slaves and the Native Americans who have been so lucky to avoid our attempts at genocide. English is the "Embrace and extend" language of modern times.
The power of English comes from its innate flexibility and willingness to change by embracing the best in all languages. In a sense, it represents to openness of US culture to accept new ideas and the peoples of other lands. The power of English is multiplied when used within a cultural context that demands its ability to change quickly, combined with the willingness of the culture to accept that change.
The real goal of these authors is to document these crimes. Criminals don't act in a vacuum. These stories highlight the failures of government oversight and can be helpful in showing criminal techniques. This can help people avoid being victimized in the future. Books like these are helpful to society.
If readers glorify criminals, it is not the author's fault. Reserve your distain for the society, which glorifies fame for any reason. These authors have much to teach about the criminal mind and the culture of fame of which we are all too eager to feed on.
"This chasm first opened on the cultural front, with the evolution of distinctly youth-centered entertainment forms like hip-hop, rock 'n' roll and then Nintendo and Sega..."
The youth culture chasm goes much further back than hip-hop. The Lindy Hop of the 20's and 30's had kids dancing the "animal dance" of former slaves.
I find the cultural argument pretty weak with all this retro revival going on. I can find kids dressing up like their parents and grandparents to jitterbug their Saturday night away.
The cultural chasm between youth and their parents has always existed and is never as wide as we may believe
Lets make sure the new digital constitution is filled with the same kinds of "...shall not be infringed" rights that are regularly ignored by the US government.
A few decades ago, one might have postulated that bacteria whose metabolism is based on sulfur as fuel and had no connection to creatures that utilized the power of sunlight would be genetically unrelated to anything on earth. Scientists, whose only experience was with creatures that lived within a very narrow range on the surface of the earth, might believe that a creature like this might be extraterrestrial. That is until the Alvin finds colonies of these things clinging to black smokers at the bottom of the Galapagos Rift.
If further study of such a creature revealed a genome that was totally unrelated to anything on the surface of the earth, would this point to an extraterrestrial origin or highlight an example of parallel evolution in a closed system that has remained separated from the surface ecology.
If we find something that is totally non-DNA based, we might have something to talk about, but could we know for sure? Maybe there are non-DNA based creatures thriving in some nook or cranny deep within the crust of the earth. Maybe there are non-DNA based metabolisms thriving unnoticed and undetected right under our noses, perhaps even within us and around us. Would we even know what to look for?
We are currently limited in what we can know with our incomplete knowledge of even the single planet we reside on. After we get some planet hopping under our collective belts, we should have some limited basis for proving that some form of life might be extraterrestrial in origin whether it's based on DNA or not.
"...Michael Frayn's shockingly successful Broadway play "Copenhagen," about the famed World War II Bohr-Heisenberg encounter (the two devoted ex-colleagues could never agree on what did or didn't take take place), the purpose of which has had physicists and historians buzzing for decades."
Frayn merely took advantage of the fact that in Bohr-Heisenberg encounters you may know the position of the meeting but not the momentum of the conversation.
This genetic land grab sounds like the feudal kingdoms that use the control strategic locations to control trade. Need to move your trade goods through my strategic pass? Pay me or find some other route to get your goods to their destination.
The scenario of patenting the sequence itself doesn't make sense. The real valuable discoveries are not in the base pairs, but how they code for amino acids, how those amino acid chains cause the protein to fold, how that folded structure causes the protein to behave in the bigger metabolic picture. These areas are where the real work is done and these are the things that should be rewarded with patents.
With mobile versions of Geforce and Radeon coming and Transmeta doing similar things for the CPU, I wonder why the mobile market is the one driving this.
Just because my machine is plugged in doesn't mean I shouldn't care about power consumption. I still pay for the electricity I use. I don't want to burn more coal so my GPU and CPU can chew up energy while my machines are idle. Desktop users won't sacrifice performance over efficiency, but why should any CPU/GPU design use more power than is needed at any time. This shouldn't just be a requirement for a mobile design.
"There seems to be a need for social and technological reforms, not merely political ones. Government has failed to use technology to deal with civic information in the Information Age, and citizens are paying the price."
Is this a surprise? The government is rarely an agent for reform or change of any kind. It should be no surprise that we don't get leadership from the federal government. Government generates followers, not leaders.
Citizens always pay the price when they depend on the government to make any societal, technological, or political change.
Anyone who has tried to teach their mom how to program a VCR should know that older voters can easily get confused. From what I can see these ballots are confusing.
That being said, what can Florida do about it? It's up to individual voters to take the time to understand what they are doing at the time they are voting. These ballots were submitted for approval before the election and no one complained. If voters were confused, they had the opportunity to get help when they were casting their ballots. I think this is an example of how little thought process some people put into their voting.
This is the electoral equivalent of getting caught behind a Florida driver who doesn't understand the concept of the passing lane.
"She sees a palpable spiritual yearning -- reflected in the right-wing zeal of the Christian Coalition...."
Spiritual renewal starts with the person in the mirror. That's where it ends. It doesn't rely on politics or institutions to promote it or influence it. I'm all for people becoming more spiritual, but for the Christian Right, it's all about getting the government to impose their high standards of morality, which they rarely live up to themselves, on everyone else.
Real Spirituality is an individual living a spiritual life. That individual becomes a spiritual beacon to be emulated by those around them. I'm tired of all the remarried, ex-philanderers lecturing me on family values. If your morality is so clearly convincing, others should be influenced to follow your example. If your morality requires a bunch of politicians and police to enforce it, it must not be a very compelling philosophy. The only standards of morality we can expect to have an impact are the ones that most individuals agree to by choice. The coercion of the state will never lead to a moral society.
The power of multinationals comes from their ability to convince consumers to use their products and services.
Wal-Mart does not destroy local economies. Local shoppers make the choice to avail themselves of the convenience and selection of these mega stores. Local shops suffer. Is it a conspiracy or just the choice that consumers make?
McDonalds success merely proves that many consumers choose convenience and consistency over taste.
Barnes & Noble shows that consumers want a large selection of material over the atmosphere of a mom and pop bookstore.
If multinationals are a threat, their power doesn't come from technology. The power is contained in the consumer's wallet. You have the choice to keep it in your pocket.
I think we will find our freeze recovery tools from the human and animal genomes. Biological systems provide enzymes that build and distribute intracellular structure and those that guide and distribute different cells across the entire body. These would be the things we need to repair the damage. The bots will probably be viruses with engineered DNA/RNA payloads.
I agree that revival of those nitrogen popsicles is a long shot. In the future we will probably focus on pre-conditioning the body before it is suspended. Repair after the fact is probably a lost cause.
If the Electoral College is the key to the presidency, the state ballot is the key to the Electoral College.
To be included in the debates, a candidate should be on enough state ballots to conceivably win the Electoral College. Getting on state ballots indicates grass-roots support for the party in question and should be able to weed down the number of candidates that would be included.
Nobody expects the debate stage to include everyone that is running, but those that could possibly win. I think a 15% poll threshold will always rule out all but the two major parties. Using a state ballot threshold would include the major third parties without having to include an overwhelming number of candidates
Slashdot Mirror
"The S/390 is able to host up to 30,000 virtual Linux servers at the same time, using IBM's VM (Virtual Machine) operating system"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of one of these!
... internet access from Malaysian boats has a promising future.
Is this the new kinder, gentler DOD president Bush used to talk about?
VCRs, TVs, dryers and refrigerators are tested as entire, complete units. There is little variation from one unit to another as it comes off the assembly line.
Computers are built from a Tower of Babel of separate components. The CPU, motherboard, memory, graphics and hard drive may all be high quality, tested components on their own. Combine them all into a single unit and you end up with a flaky problem child with all kinds of unforeseen interactions and problems.
It just shows that computer technology is still in its infancy. It's a wonder any computer works given the way we cobble them together.
China could be the best thing that ever happened to the US space program.
The current emphasis on non-manned space flight shows that our space program is more mature and pragmatic now that we don't see Russia as much of a threat. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This makes it easier to justify the expenses to already over-burdened taxpayers.
The perception that we were behind the USSR was good for the space program and engineering in general. US taxpayers may be short sighted when it comes to seeing value of pure research, but if you threaten our perception of being the world's greatest superpower, that's when the giant awakens. I hope China gets men into space. The public may not see space research as a priority until they feel we might lose the pissing contest between superpowers.
Agreed. The moral panic is nothing new and far from exclusive to gamers. Just another example of well meaning, but reactionary parents who have grown up enough to forget all those stupid things their parents over reacted about when they were kids.
You can see the analogy with the attack on rave culture. You would think a youth culture based on peace, love, unity and respect (PLUR) would be tough to demonize. You hear precious little media coverage of PLUR, just hard-hitting stories that warn parents of sex and death and undercover exposes that identify innocuous glow sticks and pacifiers as signs of rampant drug abuse. "Parents: Your kids could die tonight!, news at eleven!". Far from the bigger truth but good for ratings and it makes all that overzealous police response to these kids seem justified.
The attack on youth culture by parents is not going to go away as long as parents have all the political power and their children have none. It's easy for politicians to disenfranchise those that are too young to vote and those too apathetic to once they have that power.
"What's interesting here is that inadverently, GWB's case has transferred a significant amount of power from the States to the Federal Government."
Democrats are all for the federal government stomping over states rights to impose the federal nanny state. Only when they want their man in the White House, to they find that old time states rights religion.
Republicans are all for states rights when it comes to gun laws and restricting abortions. When your state decides to decriminalize medical marijuana or physician-assisted suicide, the Republicans come out of the woodwork to impose the power of the federal government on these uppity states.
Just goes to show that both major parties are inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to states rights. The one good thing that can come of the mess is a new resurgence in third-party voters. This Libertarian doesn't have much hope, but there can't be a clearer example that the major parties stand for nothing. There is no principle that they will let get in the way of their victory.
We ruin sci-fi adaptations by focusing on action and technology. Europeans, especially the BBC, take a much more thoughtful, character-driven approach. Dune will demand that approach.
The BBC has given us some great sci-fi. I would put Cold Lazarus or the BBC production of John Christopher's series The Tripods over most any TV that has come out of the US. The last truly great thing that has come out of the US was the PBS adaptation of Lathe of Heaven. It was so good, it's probably a Canadian production.
A&E set the bar pretty high for a compelling TV mini-series with Longitude. A testament to the fact that if you take the time needed to tell a story and don't underestimate the intelligence of the audience, great TV is possible.
... but the IIS got in the way.
"With the arrival of the Internet and e-mail," he wrote, "(U.S. Spanish speakers) have begun ... to adopt Spanish-ized terms for technical computer jargon: aplodear for 'upload,' chatear for 'chat,' printear for 'print,' and many others."
Is something like this a bigger threat to English or Spanish? Your answer is probably based on whether you see the linguistic glass as half-empty or half-full.
The English language is constantly embracing other languages, whether from foreign countries or from slang of our own streets. We adopt the language of our enemies and allies. Hell, we even adopt the language of our slaves and the Native Americans who have been so lucky to avoid our attempts at genocide. English is the "Embrace and extend" language of modern times.
The power of English comes from its innate flexibility and willingness to change by embracing the best in all languages. In a sense, it represents to openness of US culture to accept new ideas and the peoples of other lands. The power of English is multiplied when used within a cultural context that demands its ability to change quickly, combined with the willingness of the culture to accept that change.
The real goal of these authors is to document these crimes. Criminals don't act in a vacuum. These stories highlight the failures of government oversight and can be helpful in showing criminal techniques. This can help people avoid being victimized in the future. Books like these are helpful to society.
If readers glorify criminals, it is not the author's fault. Reserve your distain for the society, which glorifies fame for any reason. These authors have much to teach about the criminal mind and the culture of fame of which we are all too eager to feed on.
"This chasm first opened on the cultural front, with the evolution of distinctly youth-centered entertainment forms like hip-hop, rock 'n' roll and then Nintendo and Sega..."
The youth culture chasm goes much further back than hip-hop. The Lindy Hop of the 20's and 30's had kids dancing the "animal dance" of former slaves.
I find the cultural argument pretty weak with all this retro revival going on. I can find kids dressing up like their parents and grandparents to jitterbug their Saturday night away.
The cultural chasm between youth and their parents has always existed and is never as wide as we may believe
Lets make sure the new digital constitution is filled with the same kinds of "...shall not be infringed" rights that are regularly ignored by the US government.
A few decades ago, one might have postulated that bacteria whose metabolism is based on sulfur as fuel and had no connection to creatures that utilized the power of sunlight would be genetically unrelated to anything on earth. Scientists, whose only experience was with creatures that lived within a very narrow range on the surface of the earth, might believe that a creature like this might be extraterrestrial. That is until the Alvin finds colonies of these things clinging to black smokers at the bottom of the Galapagos Rift.
If further study of such a creature revealed a genome that was totally unrelated to anything on the surface of the earth, would this point to an extraterrestrial origin or highlight an example of parallel evolution in a closed system that has remained separated from the surface ecology.
If we find something that is totally non-DNA based, we might have something to talk about, but could we know for sure? Maybe there are non-DNA based creatures thriving in some nook or cranny deep within the crust of the earth. Maybe there are non-DNA based metabolisms thriving unnoticed and undetected right under our noses, perhaps even within us and around us. Would we even know what to look for?
We are currently limited in what we can know with our incomplete knowledge of even the single planet we reside on. After we get some planet hopping under our collective belts, we should have some limited basis for proving that some form of life might be extraterrestrial in origin whether it's based on DNA or not.
"...Michael Frayn's shockingly successful Broadway play "Copenhagen," about the famed World War II Bohr-Heisenberg encounter (the two devoted ex-colleagues could never agree on what did or didn't take take place), the purpose of which has had physicists and historians buzzing for decades."
Frayn merely took advantage of the fact that in Bohr-Heisenberg encounters you may know the position of the meeting but not the momentum of the conversation.
... the Russian Space Agency (RKA) announced that the controlled descent of MIR was completed over Chechnya just outside Grozny.
An RKA spokesman blamed the error on an English to Metric conversion error.
This genetic land grab sounds like the feudal kingdoms that use the control strategic locations to control trade. Need to move your trade goods through my strategic pass? Pay me or find some other route to get your goods to their destination.
The scenario of patenting the sequence itself doesn't make sense. The real valuable discoveries are not in the base pairs, but how they code for amino acids, how those amino acid chains cause the protein to fold, how that folded structure causes the protein to behave in the bigger metabolic picture. These areas are where the real work is done and these are the things that should be rewarded with patents.
With mobile versions of Geforce and Radeon coming and Transmeta doing similar things for the CPU, I wonder why the mobile market is the one driving this.
Just because my machine is plugged in doesn't mean I shouldn't care about power consumption. I still pay for the electricity I use. I don't want to burn more coal so my GPU and CPU can chew up energy while my machines are idle. Desktop users won't sacrifice performance over efficiency, but why should any CPU/GPU design use more power than is needed at any time. This shouldn't just be a requirement for a mobile design.
"There seems to be a need for social and technological reforms, not merely political ones. Government has failed to use technology to deal with civic information in the Information Age, and citizens are paying the price."
Is this a surprise? The government is rarely an agent for reform or change of any kind. It should be no surprise that we don't get leadership from the federal government. Government generates followers, not leaders.
Citizens always pay the price when they depend on the government to make any societal, technological, or political change.
Anyone who has tried to teach their mom how to program a VCR should know that older voters can easily get confused. From what I can see these ballots are confusing.
That being said, what can Florida do about it? It's up to individual voters to take the time to understand what they are doing at the time they are voting. These ballots were submitted for approval before the election and no one complained. If voters were confused, they had the opportunity to get help when they were casting their ballots. I think this is an example of how little thought process some people put into their voting.
This is the electoral equivalent of getting caught behind a Florida driver who doesn't understand the concept of the passing lane.
"She sees a palpable spiritual yearning -- reflected in the right-wing zeal of the Christian Coalition...."
Spiritual renewal starts with the person in the mirror. That's where it ends. It doesn't rely on politics or institutions to promote it or influence it. I'm all for people becoming more spiritual, but for the Christian Right, it's all about getting the government to impose their high standards of morality, which they rarely live up to themselves, on everyone else.
Real Spirituality is an individual living a spiritual life. That individual becomes a spiritual beacon to be emulated by those around them. I'm tired of all the remarried, ex-philanderers lecturing me on family values. If your morality is so clearly convincing, others should be influenced to follow your example. If your morality requires a bunch of politicians and police to enforce it, it must not be a very compelling philosophy. The only standards of morality we can expect to have an impact are the ones that most individuals agree to by choice. The coercion of the state will never lead to a moral society.
I agree that Protestants need to be more tolerant of Catholics.
The power of multinationals comes from their ability to convince consumers to use their products and services.
Wal-Mart does not destroy local economies. Local shoppers make the choice to avail themselves of the convenience and selection of these mega stores. Local shops suffer. Is it a conspiracy or just the choice that consumers make?
McDonalds success merely proves that many consumers choose convenience and consistency over taste.
Barnes & Noble shows that consumers want a large selection of material over the atmosphere of a mom and pop bookstore.
If multinationals are a threat, their power doesn't come from technology. The power is contained in the consumer's wallet. You have the choice to keep it in your pocket.
I think we will find our freeze recovery tools from the human and animal genomes. Biological systems provide enzymes that build and distribute intracellular structure and those that guide and distribute different cells across the entire body. These would be the things we need to repair the damage. The bots will probably be viruses with engineered DNA/RNA payloads.
I agree that revival of those nitrogen popsicles is a long shot. In the future we will probably focus on pre-conditioning the body before it is suspended. Repair after the fact is probably a lost cause.
If the Electoral College is the key to the presidency, the state ballot is the key to the Electoral College.
To be included in the debates, a candidate should be on enough state ballots to conceivably win the Electoral College. Getting on state ballots indicates grass-roots support for the party in question and should be able to weed down the number of candidates that would be included.
Nobody expects the debate stage to include everyone that is running, but those that could possibly win. I think a 15% poll threshold will always rule out all but the two major parties. Using a state ballot threshold would include the major third parties without having to include an overwhelming number of candidates