There are at least two interesting aspects to this:
First, why do you care if you're "illegally" downloading the episodes? You put some minor effort into finding them on edonkey or wherever, and use bandwidth and equipment you've paid for (and that of a nebulous cooperative of other donkey users) to download the show. If you were buying it, you'd be parting out some minor portion of effort from your day job earnings for the same purpose. The people who made the show have already been paid - in fact, they were paid by you and your peers, whether you wanted to or not at the time, in the cost of products and services you buy. They may have some absurd expectation of infinite rewards for their scifi series, but that's ludicrous - you don't have to believe in their nutty business model (and again, we all paid for it whether we believe in it or not).
This leads to point two, whether pay-per-view (or per-download) would actually work. My strong suspicion is that it wouldn't. The reason people become interested in these shows, watch them, maniacally download or tape them to make a complete "collection", etc, is really simply that they didn't have a choice about financing them in the first place. Ad-supported TV is a juggernaut that churns this stuff out whether we want it or not - in that environment, people have some interest in watching "free" TV. If we actually had to buy our video entertainment in the same way as, say, groceries - do I want to pay for this? will I eat it? do I NEED it? - most of this stuff would be completely nonviable. At best it'd have little splinter audiences, nowhere near enough to pay the massively inflated rates that keep Hollywood afloat.
Sure, advertising supported television is a creaking dinosaur. It continues largely because of the endless fear of uncreative network execs who can't imagine alternatives - but in many ways I think their fear is justified - the situation I hint at above scares the crap out of them. If people really knew how much of their hard-earned wages they're paying for this shite, there'd probably be an instant rebellion. Hopefully, one day there will be.
Originality is one of the rarest things around. We've all been exposed to so many different stories, movies, etc that there's really not much we haven't seen.
There are an infinite number of possibilities we haven't seen. The problem is that we've become so conditioned by what we have seen and so arrogant in our outlook that we've become blind to those possibilities. Thus what we see as brilliant genius or creativity generally springs from a simple open-mindedness that we're all capable of...except (as your comment illustrates) we're already convinced there's nothing new under the sun, so we don't bother trying.
There are new stories - you just need to step away from the old ones in order to tell them. Harder than it sounds, I'll admit, but not impossible (else your thesis would reduce to absurdity, and nothing new would ever have been done before for us to rip off;).
Interesting link, thanks. It's a bit credulously written though, in the sense that it regards there as being a real difference between a doll and an action figure, as opposed to it being purely arbitrary marketing terminology. Since the existence of that term occupies about forty years out of the 100,000 or so that humans of all ages and genders have been playing with dolls (including those that can be stood on their own feet, or can't), I tend to the latter view. A deeper look into the subject might explore where the late 20th century American machismo that makes it verboten for boys to play with dolls actually came from (you can bet Rudyard Kipling called his dolls, dolls). For now we can blame Soviet Russia.;)
The thing I find funny is the consistent use of the term "action figure" (or even just "figure") to describe these things, even by people who are way too old and media-literate to be fooled any longer. Clearly, they're dolls, and hey, I played with them too (I probably still have R2-D2 - and if that one doesn't give the lie to the term "action" I don't know what does). Even as a ten year old boy I was apparently secure enough in my masculinity that I didn't have a problem with this - if we assume the same applied to the other members of the target demographic, who was the concocted "action figure" term actually meant to placate? The marketroids who coined it? The male parents, already distressed that their scifi-obsessed heir prefers fiddling with this weird crap to playing football like a good little oaf? I'm genuinely curious.
For that matter I'd love to know the history of the weird marketing term itself; were the Star Wars dollies the first use of "action figure", or was it ever used before that, say for certain toys with certain Kung-Fu grips? I'm pretty sure my disastrously-easy-to-disassemble Steve Austin doll wasn't called a "figure", whether or not he was a "doll". Though he would have been proud to be either, damn it.
The amazing thing to me is that no mainstream media seems to have picked up that astonishing, week-old "Dow sues protestors" story. It doesn't seem to exist outside of indie and activist sites. Guess that's not the sort of anniversary they want to allude to this time of year? Another reason to hate xmas, I suppose - it makes the media even more useless than it usually is.
I imagine someone somewhere has examined whether the measured deceleration of the Pioneer probes might correspond with the predictions of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics)? This is an ad-hoc change to Newton's second law by Mordehai Milgrom, designed to explain the observed rotational motion of stars and galaxies without having to invoke dark (non-baryonic) matter. It does this surprisingly well, and it's main flaw is lack of a theoretical basis to date. Since MOND is different from traditional Newtonian dynamics only concerning "slow-moving" matter, Pioneer 10 might be an interesting test (or, it might just be too small - I'm not physicist enough to know:).
Anyone read anything on the subject? A quick google search doesn't turn much up.
36W for the 2300c (or 24W for the older Duos) is actually what the power adaptor is rated for, rather than the actual consumption. That includes all the bits of hardware (sound, hard drive, backlight, modem, any microdocks like the floppy, SCSI, or ethernet models), charging the battery while operating, and some engineering overhead. I had a 270c and then a 2300c many years ago and ran a little control strip gizmo that talked to the power management unit to report realtime power consumption; running everything and charging the battery still took less than 15W, usually more like 10-12W. The 68LC040 in the 280c uses more power than the 68030 in the 270c and it lacks the throttle-down power saving mode that the OS invokes in idle periods (which *really* cuts down the power draw), but running it in the limited way this person is would probably still draw less than 10W, especially from a RAM disk. Using a 270c instead of a 280c would save more power, plus it has better odds of running 68k Linux, as someone else points out.
Those Duos had to be stingy with power, because the NiMH batteries back then weren't so great. The monochrome screen, FPU-less 68030 models could run for six hours without trying hard on the later batteries. Not bad for 1994, especially the hardware ability and OS support to turn off and throttle back individual hardware subunits when they're idle. Wintel notebooks still haven't really caught up with that, unfortunately.
It's trivial to add an ADB port to a Duo, on the spacious power on/off board that fills in for the optional modem. One could also unwrap an ethernet microdock and incorporate it into the frame, providing both a 10BaseT and an ADB port. The ethernet microdocks are less common than the Duos themselves, though, and cost nearly as much on eBay.
"You may not use the Software in
connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products
or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate
any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography."
The clauses starting with "infringe" cannot be semantically connected to "use the software" - in other words, this licence enjoins you to refrain from infringing M$ IP, violate any law (wasn't that already, uh, illegal?), or promote racism, hatred, or porn - whether you're using this software or just living your life. Obviously this is absurd, but that's the clear phrasing. Clear to anyone with a half decent understanding of the English language, anyway (ie. not a contract lawyer).
It's also not clear whether the "parties" whose IP rights you may not infringe (at any time) are the M$ bunch, or the sites that disparage them. That grammatical objection wouldn't hold up in court though.;)
The last piece of crappy M$ software I use is Mac IE. One of these days iCab will come of age and I'll be rid of it. But I'll assume I have the right to "disparage" them by misspelling their initials in this post, because I'm using lynx at the moment.;)
You seem to have missed the point, which is that emulating game consoles is neither interesting nor important enough to be considered "blatant stealing", "a turning point", or anything but a slashdot article for a sleepy Thursday.
As for the deal itself, it's a great move for Connectix - the software was a hopeless case as a commercial offering, and all but dead since the PS/2's appearance anyway. Glad they got some cash out of it before tucking it in the dustbin. They could never have open-sourced it anyway (Sony would have been relentless in their legal opposition, regardless of the fact that they have no case).
I don't know anything about this guy, and don't much give a shit. The fact that many of the people involved in game emulation (or vid gaming in general) are pathetic 15-year olds trapped in flabby 30something bodies is not a revelation (does gut check...lookin' good!).
What really dismayed me was the bit at the end of that linked-to diatribe where some guy named "Gene" proves himself the owner of an equal number of mindzits by taking it out on this Timmah guy's wife, fer chrissakes. WTF did she do? If this guy is as bad as he sounds, doesn't she have enough problems being married to him? There might be validity in the previous paragraphs, but it's completely thrown away by that last crack.
Honestly, the idea that you can insult someone by saying "oh yeah, your wife's ugly" is even lower than using "gay" as a pejorative. She's not a collectible, you dumb fuck, and she appears to have nothing to do with this pathetic tempest in a teapot. It'd be nice if we could go back to expecting a/. link to point to something other than a couple of pipsqueaks in a flame war that lacks even good namecalling.
I've never actually heard of "dicing" involving the plural noun for randomness cubes (though I have heard it in reducing vegetables to similar cubes). And I would argue "gaming" pretty much has sprung up as a marketing term; I didn't really hear it used before the early 90s and the advent of highly profitable computer games (and "gamers" as a target market, whoever they're actually supposed to be). And I even played AD&D in the 80s (which is exactly how we said it then, dammit;).
My reply was of course slightly flippant; I don't oppose the evolution of the language, and in fact I enjoy participating in it myself. I do particularly dislike the three terms I included ("leverage", "interface", and the godawful "transition"). I think the real reasons have more to do with the intentional vagueness of the terms as employed by marketeers, and the way that sort of verbification seems to spring from mere laziness instead of directed creativity. Hackerspeak frequently produces new verbs that are interesting, specific, and appropriate (as mentioned in the Jargon file), while marketspeak spews them out bland, vague, and unnecessary. Hmm.
It is the latter process that should be patented and then ruthlessly policed for infringing use, of course.;)
I've never actually heard of "dicing" involving the plural noun for randomness cubes (though I have heard it in reducing vegetables to similar cubes). And I would argue "gaming" pretty much has sprung up as a marketing term; I didn't really hear it used before the early 90s and the advent of highly profitable computer games (and "gamers" as a target market, whoever they're actually supposed to be). And I even played AD&D in the 80s (which is exactly how we said it then, dammit;).
My reply was of course slightly flippant; I don't oppose the evolution of the language, and in fact I enjoy participating in it myself. I do particularly dislike the three terms I included ("leverage", "interface", and the godawful "transition"). I think the real reasons have more to do with the intentional vagueness of the terms as employed by marketeers, and the way that sort of verbification seems to spring from mere laziness instead of directed creativity. Hackerspeak frequently produces new verbs that are interesting, specific, and appropriate (as mentioned in the Jargon file), while marketspeak spews them out bland, vague, and unnecessary. Hmm.
It is the latter process that should be patented and then ruthlessly policed for infringing use, of course.;)
Actually, I think you could easily patent the innovative use of nouns as marketing verbs that's been increasingly occurring in recent years. You could also trademark the process as "nerbs" or "vouns" or something for that cachet of legitimacy. But mostly you could charge impossible rates to licence this special linguistic butchering process, so I wouldn't have to read about marketeers leveraging the language to interface with the transitioning of my tastes or whatever the hell it is they're after...
Prior art might be a problem...but this stuff isn't exactly art.
Good question, and in fact this is exactly what an old "dual-scan" screen is (two passive matrix screens, one above the other - in this case the main reason was to double the scan rate, since passive screens are pretty slow otherwise). I don't know if it's as feasible to do this with active matrices, since they require more traces to feed the transistors individually. I also dunno whether you could accomplish something similar with four quadrant panels - probably not easily. In any event you'd almost certainly be able to see the joins, as you can with dual-scan screens.
That story pertains to a different device and a different process - the NASA experiment is attempting to partially cancel gravity (uncurve space?) by rotating a superconductor in a magnetic field. The Dutch study used diamagnetic resistance to a static magnetic field to merely counteract the force of gravity. You've confused the issue.
However, I'd be interested in reading any followups to that 1997 Popular Mechanics article, like say the results of the NASA experiment. It looks like they were being fearfully closemouthed about it and may never have reported their results, which is really bad science (but probably not unusual for funding-driven agencies like NASA, sad to say). Science itself is weak enough without compromising it by breaking its own principles.
Oh well; your quest is a bit of a lost cause anyway, since your cows and chickens and pigs were probably fed with ground-up sheep brains and fishmeal anyway. Unless you're a subsistence farmer, in which case I salute you. But I wonder if there are any real vegetarians-once-removed out there (people for whom this is a code). If you can have breathearians (and what the hell, they might be right), I figure anything goes. Although that flies in the face of the "food chain" (nicely illustrated in the Simpsons) argument for omnivorous humans; if the justification is that other animals prey on each other, maybe you should only eat predators.;) Including frogs, of course.
It's worth noting that this is a static field (not changing flux), so it's probably ok. But your knowledge of physiology isn't much less existent than the sum total of scientific research on the effects of magnetic and electric fields on living things, so the bottom line is that no one really knows.
What I find neat about diamagnetic levitation (what's holding up that frog in its blob of water) is that the force acts within each atom of the levitatee, so the net force on each of the frog's atoms becomes zero (gravity is exactly counteracted). Since the diamagnetic force is really pretty much equivalent in this to the way gravity normally acts on us all, the frog is probably fine. I'm actually a fairly strong proponent of animal rights (for slashdot anyway, you bunch of carnivorous bastards) but this particular frog was probably happier in the physics experiment with the whimsical researchers than when it went back to the (ulp) biology lab.
As another respondent notes, a strong and rapidly changing magnetic field can tear you inside out, by comparison. But it probably wouldn't levitate you very well either.;)
I'm entirely pro-choice, but I have a serious problem with the mother in this story claiming she couldn't possibly naturally conceive and then abort a child if it tested positive for this disease, but she's fine ending the existence of several embryos that started life in a petri dish (as her son did) because they weren't viable donors for her daughter. This "free perk" stuff is just grim.
As far as I can tell, this simply exposes the absurdity in the anti-choice side of the abortion debate; just when are we supposed to think that life "begins"? Note that I'm not accusing this mother of anything but make a personal, emotional decision - but call it what it is. You can't be revulsed by abortion and find preimplantation selection just fine without admitting that there's no grounds for a philosophical argument here whatsoever.
I pretty much agree with you, and I'm equally worried by the implications of all this. But in this case, and in many like it, the quality of life of the younger sibling is going to be improved by being born into a family free of the stress of a daughter dying of leukemia. Let's face it, that's just good for everyone in the family and anyone who even remotely knows them.
The problem with your fine line is that it's often illusory - what's currently regarded as a "medical reason" may not be tomorrow, or vice-versa. Stress is a huge influence on every aspect of a child's development, and there are many ways that this sort of monkeying about can reduce it.
The first ? has a black Apple logo in the top-left, so it may be the logo for a local Mac or OS X user's group (unless that's the Darwin logo?). The one you've identified as *BSD is actually specifically FreeBSD, and the one after it (the puffed-up fugu) is an OpenBSD logo.
The StrongARM series was developed by Advanced RISC Machines in the UK - I believe they were bought by Intel (not Compaq). Actually I was rather dismayed to see both Digital and ARM - cool, innovative companies making slick fast chips - bought by crapmeisters like Intel and Compaq. The triumph of mass-marketing over good design, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean Gates III, etc.
Not a lot different to Bush II, of course...
So much for the death of the aristocracy.
There are at least two interesting aspects to this:
First, why do you care if you're "illegally" downloading the episodes? You put some minor effort into finding them on edonkey or wherever, and use bandwidth and equipment you've paid for (and that of a nebulous cooperative of other donkey users) to download the show. If you were buying it, you'd be parting out some minor portion of effort from your day job earnings for the same purpose. The people who made the show have already been paid - in fact, they were paid by you and your peers, whether you wanted to or not at the time, in the cost of products and services you buy. They may have some absurd expectation of infinite rewards for their scifi series, but that's ludicrous - you don't have to believe in their nutty business model (and again, we all paid for it whether we believe in it or not).
This leads to point two, whether pay-per-view (or per-download) would actually work. My strong suspicion is that it wouldn't. The reason people become interested in these shows, watch them, maniacally download or tape them to make a complete "collection", etc, is really simply that they didn't have a choice about financing them in the first place. Ad-supported TV is a juggernaut that churns this stuff out whether we want it or not - in that environment, people have some interest in watching "free" TV. If we actually had to buy our video entertainment in the same way as, say, groceries - do I want to pay for this? will I eat it? do I NEED it? - most of this stuff would be completely nonviable. At best it'd have little splinter audiences, nowhere near enough to pay the massively inflated rates that keep Hollywood afloat.
Sure, advertising supported television is a creaking dinosaur. It continues largely because of the endless fear of uncreative network execs who can't imagine alternatives - but in many ways I think their fear is justified - the situation I hint at above scares the crap out of them. If people really knew how much of their hard-earned wages they're paying for this shite, there'd probably be an instant rebellion. Hopefully, one day there will be.
(Fred & Barney lighting up vs. Chocolate Frosty Sugar Bombs)
Good examples both, since refined sugar is pretty much the nicotine of the future.
There are an infinite number of possibilities we haven't seen. The problem is that we've become so conditioned by what we have seen and so arrogant in our outlook that we've become blind to those possibilities. Thus what we see as brilliant genius or creativity generally springs from a simple open-mindedness that we're all capable of...except (as your comment illustrates) we're already convinced there's nothing new under the sun, so we don't bother trying.
There are new stories - you just need to step away from the old ones in order to tell them. Harder than it sounds, I'll admit, but not impossible (else your thesis would reduce to absurdity, and nothing new would ever have been done before for us to rip off ;).
Interesting link, thanks. It's a bit credulously written though, in the sense that it regards there as being a real difference between a doll and an action figure, as opposed to it being purely arbitrary marketing terminology. Since the existence of that term occupies about forty years out of the 100,000 or so that humans of all ages and genders have been playing with dolls (including those that can be stood on their own feet, or can't), I tend to the latter view. A deeper look into the subject might explore where the late 20th century American machismo that makes it verboten for boys to play with dolls actually came from (you can bet Rudyard Kipling called his dolls, dolls). For now we can blame Soviet Russia. ;)
The thing I find funny is the consistent use of the term "action figure" (or even just "figure") to describe these things, even by people who are way too old and media-literate to be fooled any longer. Clearly, they're dolls, and hey, I played with them too (I probably still have R2-D2 - and if that one doesn't give the lie to the term "action" I don't know what does). Even as a ten year old boy I was apparently secure enough in my masculinity that I didn't have a problem with this - if we assume the same applied to the other members of the target demographic, who was the concocted "action figure" term actually meant to placate? The marketroids who coined it? The male parents, already distressed that their scifi-obsessed heir prefers fiddling with this weird crap to playing football like a good little oaf? I'm genuinely curious.
For that matter I'd love to know the history of the weird marketing term itself; were the Star Wars dollies the first use of "action figure", or was it ever used before that, say for certain toys with certain Kung-Fu grips? I'm pretty sure my disastrously-easy-to-disassemble Steve Austin doll wasn't called a "figure", whether or not he was a "doll". Though he would have been proud to be either, damn it.
Shoulda kept the Darda cars. Stupid kid.
The amazing thing to me is that no mainstream media seems to have picked up that astonishing, week-old "Dow sues protestors" story. It doesn't seem to exist outside of indie and activist sites. Guess that's not the sort of anniversary they want to allude to this time of year? Another reason to hate xmas, I suppose - it makes the media even more useless than it usually is.
I imagine someone somewhere has examined whether the measured deceleration of the Pioneer probes might correspond with the predictions of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics)? This is an ad-hoc change to Newton's second law by Mordehai Milgrom, designed to explain the observed rotational motion of stars and galaxies without having to invoke dark (non-baryonic) matter. It does this surprisingly well, and it's main flaw is lack of a theoretical basis to date. Since MOND is different from traditional Newtonian dynamics only concerning "slow-moving" matter, Pioneer 10 might be an interesting test (or, it might just be too small - I'm not physicist enough to know :).
Anyone read anything on the subject? A quick google search doesn't turn much up.
36W for the 2300c (or 24W for the older Duos) is actually what the power adaptor is rated for, rather than the actual consumption. That includes all the bits of hardware (sound, hard drive, backlight, modem, any microdocks like the floppy, SCSI, or ethernet models), charging the battery while operating, and some engineering overhead.
I had a 270c and then a 2300c many years ago and ran a little control strip gizmo that talked to the power management unit to report realtime power consumption; running everything and charging the battery still took less than 15W, usually more like 10-12W.
The 68LC040 in the 280c uses more power than the 68030 in the 270c and it lacks the throttle-down power saving mode that the OS invokes in idle periods (which *really* cuts down the power draw), but running it in the limited way this person is would probably still draw less than 10W, especially from a RAM disk.
Using a 270c instead of a 280c would save more power, plus it has better odds of running 68k Linux, as someone else points out.
Those Duos had to be stingy with power, because the NiMH batteries back then weren't so great. The monochrome screen, FPU-less 68030 models could run for six hours without trying hard on the later batteries.
Not bad for 1994, especially the hardware ability and OS support to turn off and throttle back individual hardware subunits when they're idle. Wintel notebooks still haven't really caught up with that, unfortunately.
It's trivial to add an ADB port to a Duo, on the spacious power on/off board that fills in for the optional modem.
One could also unwrap an ethernet microdock and incorporate it into the frame, providing both a 10BaseT and an ADB port. The ethernet microdocks are less common than the Duos themselves, though, and cost nearly as much on eBay.
"You may not use the Software in
;)
;)
connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products
or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate
any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography."
The clauses starting with "infringe" cannot be semantically connected to "use the software" - in other words, this licence enjoins you to refrain from infringing M$ IP, violate any law (wasn't that already, uh, illegal?), or promote racism, hatred, or porn - whether you're using this software or just living your life. Obviously this is absurd, but that's the clear phrasing. Clear to anyone with a half decent understanding of the English language, anyway (ie. not a contract lawyer).
It's also not clear whether the "parties" whose IP rights you may not infringe (at any time) are the M$ bunch, or the sites that disparage them. That grammatical objection wouldn't hold up in court though.
The last piece of crappy M$ software I use is Mac IE. One of these days iCab will come of age and I'll be rid of it. But I'll assume I have the right to "disparage" them by misspelling their initials in this post, because I'm using lynx at the moment.
You seem to have missed the point, which is that emulating game consoles is neither interesting nor important enough to be considered "blatant stealing", "a turning point", or anything but a slashdot article for a sleepy Thursday.
As for the deal itself, it's a great move for Connectix - the software was a hopeless case as a commercial offering, and all but dead since the PS/2's appearance anyway. Glad they got some cash out of it before tucking it in the dustbin. They could never have open-sourced it anyway (Sony would have been relentless in their legal opposition, regardless of the fact that they have no case).
I'm not so sure that emulating game consoles qualifies as a "turning point in human history". But I could be wrong.
I don't know anything about this guy, and don't much give a shit. The fact that many of the people involved in game emulation (or vid gaming in general) are pathetic 15-year olds trapped in flabby 30something bodies is not a revelation (does gut check...lookin' good!).
/. link to point to something other than a couple of pipsqueaks in a flame war that lacks even good namecalling.
What really dismayed me was the bit at the end of that linked-to diatribe where some guy named "Gene" proves himself the owner of an equal number of mindzits by taking it out on this Timmah guy's wife, fer chrissakes. WTF did she do? If this guy is as bad as he sounds, doesn't she have enough problems being married to him? There might be validity in the previous paragraphs, but it's completely thrown away by that last crack.
Honestly, the idea that you can insult someone by saying "oh yeah, your wife's ugly" is even lower than using "gay" as a pejorative. She's not a collectible, you dumb fuck, and she appears to have nothing to do with this pathetic tempest in a teapot. It'd be nice if we could go back to expecting a
Stupid HTML Formatted default.
;).
;)
I've never actually heard of "dicing" involving the plural noun for randomness cubes (though I have heard it in reducing vegetables to similar cubes). And I would argue "gaming" pretty much has sprung up as a marketing term; I didn't really hear it used before the early 90s and the advent of highly profitable computer games (and "gamers" as a target market, whoever they're actually supposed to be). And I even played AD&D in the 80s (which is exactly how we said it then, dammit
My reply was of course slightly flippant; I don't oppose the evolution of the language, and in fact I enjoy participating in it myself. I do particularly dislike the three terms I included ("leverage", "interface", and the godawful "transition"). I think the real reasons have more to do with the intentional vagueness of the terms as employed by marketeers, and the way that sort of verbification seems to spring from mere laziness instead of directed creativity. Hackerspeak frequently produces new verbs that are interesting, specific, and appropriate (as mentioned in the Jargon file), while marketspeak spews them out bland, vague, and unnecessary. Hmm.
It is the latter process that should be patented and then ruthlessly policed for infringing use, of course.
I've never actually heard of "dicing" involving the plural noun for randomness cubes (though I have heard it in reducing vegetables to similar cubes). And I would argue "gaming" pretty much has sprung up as a marketing term; I didn't really hear it used before the early 90s and the advent of highly profitable computer games (and "gamers" as a target market, whoever they're actually supposed to be). And I even played AD&D in the 80s (which is exactly how we said it then, dammit ;).
My reply was of course slightly flippant; I don't oppose the evolution of the language, and in fact I enjoy participating in it myself. I do particularly dislike the three terms I included ("leverage", "interface", and the godawful "transition"). I think the real reasons have more to do with the intentional vagueness of the terms as employed by marketeers, and the way that sort of verbification seems to spring from mere laziness instead of directed creativity. Hackerspeak frequently produces new verbs that are interesting, specific, and appropriate (as mentioned in the Jargon file), while marketspeak spews them out bland, vague, and unnecessary. Hmm.
It is the latter process that should be patented and then ruthlessly policed for infringing use, of course. ;)
Actually, I think you could easily patent the innovative use of nouns as marketing verbs that's been increasingly occurring in recent years. You could also trademark the process as "nerbs" or "vouns" or something for that cachet of legitimacy. But mostly you could charge impossible rates to licence this special linguistic butchering process, so I wouldn't have to read about marketeers leveraging the language to interface with the transitioning of my tastes or whatever the hell it is they're after...
Prior art might be a problem...but this stuff isn't exactly art.
Good question, and in fact this is exactly what an old "dual-scan" screen is (two passive matrix screens, one above the other - in this case the main reason was to double the scan rate, since passive screens are pretty slow otherwise). I don't know if it's as feasible to do this with active matrices, since they require more traces to feed the transistors individually. I also dunno whether you could accomplish something similar with four quadrant panels - probably not easily. In any event you'd almost certainly be able to see the joins, as you can with dual-scan screens.
That story pertains to a different device and a different process - the NASA experiment is attempting to partially cancel gravity (uncurve space?) by rotating a superconductor in a magnetic field. The Dutch study used diamagnetic resistance to a static magnetic field to merely counteract the force of gravity. You've confused the issue.
However, I'd be interested in reading any followups to that 1997 Popular Mechanics article, like say the results of the NASA experiment. It looks like they were being fearfully closemouthed about it and may never have reported their results, which is really bad science (but probably not unusual for funding-driven agencies like NASA, sad to say). Science itself is weak enough without compromising it by breaking its own principles.
Oh well; your quest is a bit of a lost cause anyway, since your cows and chickens and pigs were probably fed with ground-up sheep brains and fishmeal anyway. Unless you're a subsistence farmer, in which case I salute you. But I wonder if there are any real vegetarians-once-removed out there (people for whom this is a code). If you can have breathearians (and what the hell, they might be right), I figure anything goes. Although that flies in the face of the "food chain" (nicely illustrated in the Simpsons) argument for omnivorous humans; if the justification is that other animals prey on each other, maybe you should only eat predators. ;) Including frogs, of course.
Holy -1 Offtopic.
It's worth noting that this is a static field (not changing flux), so it's probably ok. But your knowledge of physiology isn't much less existent than the sum total of scientific research on the effects of magnetic and electric fields on living things, so the bottom line is that no one really knows.
;)
What I find neat about diamagnetic levitation (what's holding up that frog in its blob of water) is that the force acts within each atom of the levitatee, so the net force on each of the frog's atoms becomes zero (gravity is exactly counteracted). Since the diamagnetic force is really pretty much equivalent in this to the way gravity normally acts on us all, the frog is probably fine. I'm actually a fairly strong proponent of animal rights (for slashdot anyway, you bunch of carnivorous bastards) but this particular frog was probably happier in the physics experiment with the whimsical researchers than when it went back to the (ulp) biology lab.
As another respondent notes, a strong and rapidly changing magnetic field can tear you inside out, by comparison. But it probably wouldn't levitate you very well either.
I'm entirely pro-choice, but I have a serious problem with the mother in this story claiming she couldn't possibly naturally conceive and then abort a child if it tested positive for this disease, but she's fine ending the existence of several embryos that started life in a petri dish (as her son did) because they weren't viable donors for her daughter. This "free perk" stuff is just grim.
As far as I can tell, this simply exposes the absurdity in the anti-choice side of the abortion debate; just when are we supposed to think that life "begins"? Note that I'm not accusing this mother of anything but make a personal, emotional decision - but call it what it is. You can't be revulsed by abortion and find preimplantation selection just fine without admitting that there's no grounds for a philosophical argument here whatsoever.
I pretty much agree with you, and I'm equally worried by the implications of all this. But in this case, and in many like it, the quality of life of the younger sibling is going to be improved by being born into a family free of the stress of a daughter dying of leukemia. Let's face it, that's just good for everyone in the family and anyone who even remotely knows them.
The problem with your fine line is that it's often illusory - what's currently regarded as a "medical reason" may not be tomorrow, or vice-versa. Stress is a huge influence on every aspect of a child's development, and there are many ways that this sort of monkeying about can reduce it.
The first ? has a black Apple logo in the top-left, so it may be the logo for a local Mac or OS X user's group (unless that's the Darwin logo?). The one you've identified as *BSD is actually specifically FreeBSD, and the one after it (the puffed-up fugu) is an OpenBSD logo.
The StrongARM series was developed by Advanced RISC Machines in the UK - I believe they were bought by Intel (not Compaq). Actually I was rather dismayed to see both Digital and ARM - cool, innovative companies making slick fast chips - bought by crapmeisters like Intel and Compaq. The triumph of mass-marketing over good design, or something.