Oddly enough, just to check things out, I typed 'evil empire' in the search field on Google... it crashed the copy of IE.
When I brought it back up and tried again, it actually returned sites, most of which are either anti-M$ sites (what a shock there!) or sites on Reagan's policies towards the U.S.S.R.
Yeah, it looks like they changed their search
algorithm a bit, as the title of the web page seems to be weighed more heavily as a good result rather then having the text of the query somewhere else in the page. Maybe they did this to stop all the embedded text pr0n sites which have entire dictionaries of words the same colour as the background.
EverQuest is also evolving their storyline over time to fit the new areas they bring up, but like mentioned, they have patches almost every week, many of them lasting 8 or more hours. And almost always after the patch is the patch to the patch because it wasn't properly tested.
From what I've experienced though, other then the patches (which are almost always announced days ahead of time) there is very little server downtime. There have been several times when I experienced either severe network lag or packet loss, and you get to watch a lot of the game sprites of PCs and monster 'jump' around a lot because of it.
No game is perfect though. Well, Pac-man, maybe...
There was a recent article somewhere talking about that (and if I could dig up the link, I would) where those concerns were brought up. Sure, there's the obvious "answers" that any use of the word 'Microsoft' will point to their home page, and the like, but who decides? (Well, duh, M$ does, and that's the problem.) And what if you have a very anti-M$ page reporting on their utter slackness in all things programming? You sure as Hell(tm) aren't going to want to have every other sentence with a link to the evil ones themselves....
Now, my concern is this... they are putting links in my web pages (well, if I had any that were finished, that is), which, in effect, is helping them to advertise other sites. Any other media outlet would have some sort of financial contract for advertising, but here I'm "shilling" for free.
Okay, yeah, I can put my favorite links up on a page, and that's shilling too, but the difference is, I put those links on my page, and I know what they go to. I don't need any help deciding what should be linked to my pages.
All in all, it really boils down to one of two major possibilities: (1) They're going to try and sneak it all in later or, (2) They, for once, realized what an amazing can of worms they would open on themselves and decided not to go through with it. I'm keeping that meta tag handy though.
I'm personally waiting for the American Indian Movement to jump all over AOL... they've been using AIM (the acronym) since at least 1973... probably earlier...
Oh yeah, I'm waiting for the light switch to get hacked and have the bulb start pulsing at 90Hz until it implodes or causes an epileptic seizure.
Ok, there's probably loads of ways to protect your house from being hacked like that, but the security won't be SOTA forever, and all it takes is one house being hAX0R3d into the ground to generate enough bad publicity to make a trip on the Hindenburg look nice in comparison.
Might it be because record keeping was much better and more easily available for periods 100 years ago then 5000 years ago? I can find all kinds of documents on the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, etc. but it is much harder to find good documentation of things that happened in 3000 B.C.
And it is that much more interesting because we don't know all the answers...
I don't know about engineers and doctors actually working to move the blocks, but it did take a long time to build a pyramid. So long, in fact, that one of the first things a new Pharoah would do upon rising to the position would be to order his pyramid to be built, so it might be finished before he died. Of course, since each Pharoah was trying to outdo the ones before him, this, no doubt, became harder and harder to do.
Now, did they use kites? Dunno. My time machine is in the shop, but I like the idea that it was something besides the obvious (brute labor). Sure, they probably had a whole mess of people move the stone from the quarries and all, but given the temperatures they were working in, I'd imagine they'd go through a bugger lot of slaves really quickly, to the point where they'd have to find some method of construction that was more efficient. Whether that means using kites, better engineering methods, or just treating the slaves better, I have no idea.
Kierthos
Re:You mean they use real guns with real bullets?!
on
MilSpec Biotech
·
· Score: 1
Excuse me for being so last year and all, but if I want a cell phone, I just want a cell phone. It does not need to play games, act as a GPS, connect to a laptop, get local weather reports, tell me sports scores, or have a "cool" sound clip for when it rings.
It needs to just be a phone. Because I don't want any damn toys on it and I don't want to pay for things I'm not going to use.
Oddly enough, I have, in the past, argued with both the local telephone and local cable companies and gotten credits on my service. And they were pretty polite about it, even when I requested that the $300 in calls to New Guinea be taken off (no one at the my place made them), and they accomadated my request. With the cable company, they were incredibly polite about it, to the point where they gave me three free months of digital cable because they had screwed up the installation (although it wasn't obvious at the time).
Sure, Time-Warner has a monopoly in the area on cable and digital cable, but they aren't abusing it as far as I can see. (Of course, I only pay $10/month for cable now because of the apartment complex's deal, but still, they're incredibly efficient...)
Why is it that they always point to oxygen and/or water as proof of life? Isn't it possible for life to exist without one or the other? (I mean, just because we need it is not proof.) Anaerobic organisms exist on Earth, why not elsewhere?
Man, I'm really waiting for some methane breathers from the far reaches of space to show up and prove that everything we know about what constitutes a living organism is only a limited slice of the possibilities.
Good point. Evolution can be grossly defined as an organism's changes in response to its' environment (presuming that the environmental changes are are not so relatively drastic to cause the immediate death of the organism).
Humans, by and large, currently alter much of our environment to suit us. Too hot? Air conditioning. Too cold? Central heating. We can install air and water filters to insure purity, and we can add vitamins to our diet to insure proper nutrition. We aren't evolving any more.
Of course, given that you usually can't see evolutionary changes in less then a couple dozen lifetimes of the organism in question...
I would, but that would be redundant. Okay, define learning as something other then memories of facts and processed data? You can't. You don't learn that you shouldn't touch hot stove elements until you observe the deletorious effects. (In my case, it was watching someone else burn themselves accidentally that made me never want to touch a hot stove element.) You learn to read by association of letters with sounds and you learn what the words mean by association of the words themselves with pictures or ideas.
What else is there? (Yes, I know, I'm leaving myself open for all kinds of things about racial memory and scores of other ideas, but this is also known as trying to foster discussion. BTW, I don't believe in racial memory...)
One thing that bothered me about Gattaca-style testing... let's say you give a blood sample. Fine and dandy. What if, however, there are a few cancerous or mutated cells in there, say just enough to throw off a genetic test? Sure, it might warn you that you need to take your anti-cancer pill, or cut down on the hard radiation in the workplace, but wouldn't this also reduce the number of people available for the "high profile" jobs in the Dystopian Utopia that is 'Gattaca'?
Kierthos
Re:How can he calm fears Gattaca will come to pass
on
Heredity and Humanity
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but people aren't being denied any but the most menial jobs because they aren't "perfect". Gattaca had anyone who wasn't in prime physical and mental condition being relegated to either janitor status or being pretty much cast out of society. We're not there... yet.
It doesn't bother me personally that there are laws against it. If nothing else, the scientific community would effectively police its own. What bothers me is that the law is, as I said, being made by people who don't even understand the science they are regulating. I'm not demanding that our lawmakers be geneticists, but something other then lawyers would be nice for a change. Actually, something other then idiots would be nice for a change, but that's a different rant.
What gets me is how many politicians are swayed by the religious angles of genetic research and still insist that there is a seperation of church and state. (Right up there with one of the S.C. State Congressmen arguing that tattooing should remain illegal in S.C. because the Bible says so.)
1) Because we don't know what we're doing yet. Tamper not with forces you don't understand.
2) We don't even understand the map fully yet. Yeah, that little bit of genetic code that could get rid of Type 2 diabetes in 8.3% of the people suffering from it could also increase their chances of developing some form of cancer. If you can't understand the instructions, don't mess with the recipe.
3) Education and genetic engineering are far different then you pre-suppose. Education is really nothing more then memorization of existing facts. You "learn" that 2+2=4. You "learn" what verbs are. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is changing the basic building blocks of life to suit a "whim". A whim not to have diabetes, or to have green eyes, or whatever.
Now, I'm not a neo-Luddite. If there were a safe way to genetic engineer things so I didn't need glasses, didn't have asthma, and didn't stand a decent chance of getting some sort of cancer within the next 25 years, I'd go for it. But at this point in the game, not even the people who actually what the hell they are talking about are ready to take that step. AFAIK, they're still in the 'experiment on white mice' stage. Look at the sheep clones, for one example. The clone is genetically as old as the original, and right now they can't fix that. Do you really want anyone playing with human genetics at this stage where we still don't undertand it?
Yes, I realize that everyone, to some extent, practices their own genetic manipulations in the dating/marriage scene. But it's one thing to marry that cute redhead so your kids can have red hair. It's another thing entirely to try and alter DNA without knowing for absolute certain what will happen.
I believe in the Spider Robinson viewpoint. We are not our genes. Our genes may define how tall or short we are, the colour of our hair (sans bleaching or dying it), the colour of our eyes, etc. But a person is more then the physical characteristics of their body. Our memories and experiences make us people.
Sure, gene therapy and other genetic manipulations may produce healthier and prettier people. But they won't necessarily be better people. (Perhaps I should say more ethical people, but my ethics are guarenteed to match anyone else's so I hereby refuse to use my ethics as a standard to judge other people. And I'm not moderating any more either.:P )
Journalists have to write to that level as most, if not all of their readers don't understand the science behind the article. I mean, I consider myself a fairly smart person, and 99% of Scientific American is above my head. Similarly, I can't debug most programs worth a darn, fix cars beyond an oil change, or cook very well. I also only have a layman's understanding of genetics (hah! I did get back on topic!). Therefore, reading an article where the average word has 12 syllables is only going to confuse me.
But if it is put in terms that I do understand, I can eventually, if I am interested enough, build on it by reading other articles.
What should bother you more is that the laws concerning genetics research are made by people who not only don't understand it, but oftentimes refuse to try and understand it.
Does the fact that the human genome is mapped mean that the geneticists automatically know what everything does? Clearly not... I can look at a map and not know where everything is, because I can't focus on the entire map. And a lot of the map and the results are still being debated over.
Because there isn't enough genetic matter (or combinations of DNA sequences) to map all human characteristics, it must mean that there is some genetic "Dark Matter" equivalent. Or, well, I forget the term, but there is a part of the DNA sequence in humans that doesn't seem to do anything. Might be that once you get past a certain stage in embryo development, parts of the genetic code aren't needed any more. How often does the human genetic code need to be "told" that a human is supposed to have five fingers on each hand, or two eyes? Or that your eye colour is blue (or brown, green, whatever?)
As for insurance companies, it all depends. If gene therapy becomes widespread, insurance companies will probably end up covering a variety of procedures, but only once it is an "accepted medical treatment". I could just as easily see them raising life insurance rates on someone who could have a genetic ailment cured but refuses to do so, thereby increasing the likelyhood of injury or ailment.
*shrug*
Kierthos
Re:"Selling" a "free" OS is a good business.
on
Red Hat In The Black
·
· Score: 1
And if you make it impossible to fix by yourself, you have Windows.
Of course not! When the last time that "Bill the Gates" had anything positive to say about any competitor, no matter how large or small it may be?
Personally, I've grown used to the fact that Gates and Microsmurf will try and quash any competition that they can't take over. And obviously, they can't take over the GPL. I just wonder how long it will be until Bill makes/corrupts/screws up a M$ version of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough, just to check things out, I typed 'evil empire' in the search field on Google... it crashed the copy of IE.
When I brought it back up and tried again, it actually returned sites, most of which are either anti-M$ sites (what a shock there!) or sites on Reagan's policies towards the U.S.S.R.
Yeah, it looks like they changed their search
algorithm a bit, as the title of the web page seems to be weighed more heavily as a good result rather then having the text of the query somewhere else in the page. Maybe they did this to stop all the embedded text pr0n sites which have entire dictionaries of words the same colour as the background.
Kierthos
EverQuest is also evolving their storyline over time to fit the new areas they bring up, but like mentioned, they have patches almost every week, many of them lasting 8 or more hours. And almost always after the patch is the patch to the patch because it wasn't properly tested.
From what I've experienced though, other then the patches (which are almost always announced days ahead of time) there is very little server downtime. There have been several times when I experienced either severe network lag or packet loss, and you get to watch a lot of the game sprites of PCs and monster 'jump' around a lot because of it.
No game is perfect though. Well, Pac-man, maybe...
Kierthos
There was a recent article somewhere talking about that (and if I could dig up the link, I would) where those concerns were brought up. Sure, there's the obvious "answers" that any use of the word 'Microsoft' will point to their home page, and the like, but who decides? (Well, duh, M$ does, and that's the problem.) And what if you have a very anti-M$ page reporting on their utter slackness in all things programming? You sure as Hell(tm) aren't going to want to have every other sentence with a link to the evil ones themselves....
Now, my concern is this... they are putting links in my web pages (well, if I had any that were finished, that is), which, in effect, is helping them to advertise other sites. Any other media outlet would have some sort of financial contract for advertising, but here I'm "shilling" for free.
Okay, yeah, I can put my favorite links up on a page, and that's shilling too, but the difference is, I put those links on my page, and I know what they go to. I don't need any help deciding what should be linked to my pages.
All in all, it really boils down to one of two major possibilities: (1) They're going to try and sneak it all in later or, (2) They, for once, realized what an amazing can of worms they would open on themselves and decided not to go through with it. I'm keeping that meta tag handy though.
Kierthos
I'm personally waiting for the American Indian Movement to jump all over AOL... they've been using AIM (the acronym) since at least 1973... probably earlier...
Kierthos
Oh yeah, I'm waiting for the light switch to get hacked and have the bulb start pulsing at 90Hz until it implodes or causes an epileptic seizure.
Ok, there's probably loads of ways to protect your house from being hacked like that, but the security won't be SOTA forever, and all it takes is one house being hAX0R3d into the ground to generate enough bad publicity to make a trip on the Hindenburg look nice in comparison.
Kierthos
Might it be because record keeping was much better and more easily available for periods 100 years ago then 5000 years ago? I can find all kinds of documents on the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, etc. but it is much harder to find good documentation of things that happened in 3000 B.C.
And it is that much more interesting because we don't know all the answers...
Kierthos
I don't know about engineers and doctors actually working to move the blocks, but it did take a long time to build a pyramid. So long, in fact, that one of the first things a new Pharoah would do upon rising to the position would be to order his pyramid to be built, so it might be finished before he died. Of course, since each Pharoah was trying to outdo the ones before him, this, no doubt, became harder and harder to do.
Now, did they use kites? Dunno. My time machine is in the shop, but I like the idea that it was something besides the obvious (brute labor). Sure, they probably had a whole mess of people move the stone from the quarries and all, but given the temperatures they were working in, I'd imagine they'd go through a bugger lot of slaves really quickly, to the point where they'd have to find some method of construction that was more efficient. Whether that means using kites, better engineering methods, or just treating the slaves better, I have no idea.
Kierthos
*cough* *cough* Army Corp of Engineers *cough*
Kierthos
Excuse me for being so last year and all, but if I want a cell phone, I just want a cell phone. It does not need to play games, act as a GPS, connect to a laptop, get local weather reports, tell me sports scores, or have a "cool" sound clip for when it rings.
It needs to just be a phone. Because I don't want any damn toys on it and I don't want to pay for things I'm not going to use.
Is simplicity of design lost these days?
Kierthos
Oddly enough, I have, in the past, argued with both the local telephone and local cable companies and gotten credits on my service. And they were pretty polite about it, even when I requested that the $300 in calls to New Guinea be taken off (no one at the my place made them), and they accomadated my request. With the cable company, they were incredibly polite about it, to the point where they gave me three free months of digital cable because they had screwed up the installation (although it wasn't obvious at the time).
Sure, Time-Warner has a monopoly in the area on cable and digital cable, but they aren't abusing it as far as I can see. (Of course, I only pay $10/month for cable now because of the apartment complex's deal, but still, they're incredibly efficient...)
Kierthos
Why is it that they always point to oxygen and/or water as proof of life? Isn't it possible for life to exist without one or the other? (I mean, just because we need it is not proof.) Anaerobic organisms exist on Earth, why not elsewhere?
Man, I'm really waiting for some methane breathers from the far reaches of space to show up and prove that everything we know about what constitutes a living organism is only a limited slice of the possibilities.
Kierthos
Good point. Evolution can be grossly defined as an organism's changes in response to its' environment (presuming that the environmental changes are are not so relatively drastic to cause the immediate death of the organism).
Humans, by and large, currently alter much of our environment to suit us. Too hot? Air conditioning. Too cold? Central heating. We can install air and water filters to insure purity, and we can add vitamins to our diet to insure proper nutrition. We aren't evolving any more.
Of course, given that you usually can't see evolutionary changes in less then a couple dozen lifetimes of the organism in question...
Kierthos
I would, but that would be redundant. Okay, define learning as something other then memories of facts and processed data? You can't. You don't learn that you shouldn't touch hot stove elements until you observe the deletorious effects. (In my case, it was watching someone else burn themselves accidentally that made me never want to touch a hot stove element.) You learn to read by association of letters with sounds and you learn what the words mean by association of the words themselves with pictures or ideas.
What else is there? (Yes, I know, I'm leaving myself open for all kinds of things about racial memory and scores of other ideas, but this is also known as trying to foster discussion. BTW, I don't believe in racial memory...)
Kierthos
One thing that bothered me about Gattaca-style testing... let's say you give a blood sample. Fine and dandy. What if, however, there are a few cancerous or mutated cells in there, say just enough to throw off a genetic test? Sure, it might warn you that you need to take your anti-cancer pill, or cut down on the hard radiation in the workplace, but wouldn't this also reduce the number of people available for the "high profile" jobs in the Dystopian Utopia that is 'Gattaca'?
Kierthos
Yeah, but people aren't being denied any but the most menial jobs because they aren't "perfect". Gattaca had anyone who wasn't in prime physical and mental condition being relegated to either janitor status or being pretty much cast out of society. We're not there... yet.
Kierthos
It doesn't bother me personally that there are laws against it. If nothing else, the scientific community would effectively police its own. What bothers me is that the law is, as I said, being made by people who don't even understand the science they are regulating. I'm not demanding that our lawmakers be geneticists, but something other then lawyers would be nice for a change. Actually, something other then idiots would be nice for a change, but that's a different rant.
What gets me is how many politicians are swayed by the religious angles of genetic research and still insist that there is a seperation of church and state. (Right up there with one of the S.C. State Congressmen arguing that tattooing should remain illegal in S.C. because the Bible says so.)
Kierthos
1) Because we don't know what we're doing yet. Tamper not with forces you don't understand.
2) We don't even understand the map fully yet. Yeah, that little bit of genetic code that could get rid of Type 2 diabetes in 8.3% of the people suffering from it could also increase their chances of developing some form of cancer. If you can't understand the instructions, don't mess with the recipe.
3) Education and genetic engineering are far different then you pre-suppose. Education is really nothing more then memorization of existing facts. You "learn" that 2+2=4. You "learn" what verbs are. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is changing the basic building blocks of life to suit a "whim". A whim not to have diabetes, or to have green eyes, or whatever.
Now, I'm not a neo-Luddite. If there were a safe way to genetic engineer things so I didn't need glasses, didn't have asthma, and didn't stand a decent chance of getting some sort of cancer within the next 25 years, I'd go for it. But at this point in the game, not even the people who actually what the hell they are talking about are ready to take that step. AFAIK, they're still in the 'experiment on white mice' stage. Look at the sheep clones, for one example. The clone is genetically as old as the original, and right now they can't fix that. Do you really want anyone playing with human genetics at this stage where we still don't undertand it?
Yes, I realize that everyone, to some extent, practices their own genetic manipulations in the dating/marriage scene. But it's one thing to marry that cute redhead so your kids can have red hair. It's another thing entirely to try and alter DNA without knowing for absolute certain what will happen.
Kierthos
Excuse me, that should read "...my ethics are not guarenteed to match anyone else's."
The danger of not previewing is now obvious to me. *sigh*
Kierthos
I believe in the Spider Robinson viewpoint. We are not our genes. Our genes may define how tall or short we are, the colour of our hair (sans bleaching or dying it), the colour of our eyes, etc. But a person is more then the physical characteristics of their body. Our memories and experiences make us people.
:P )
Sure, gene therapy and other genetic manipulations may produce healthier and prettier people. But they won't necessarily be better people. (Perhaps I should say more ethical people, but my ethics are guarenteed to match anyone else's so I hereby refuse to use my ethics as a standard to judge other people. And I'm not moderating any more either.
Kierthos
Journalists have to write to that level as most, if not all of their readers don't understand the science behind the article. I mean, I consider myself a fairly smart person, and 99% of Scientific American is above my head. Similarly, I can't debug most programs worth a darn, fix cars beyond an oil change, or cook very well. I also only have a layman's understanding of genetics (hah! I did get back on topic!). Therefore, reading an article where the average word has 12 syllables is only going to confuse me.
But if it is put in terms that I do understand, I can eventually, if I am interested enough, build on it by reading other articles.
What should bother you more is that the laws concerning genetics research are made by people who not only don't understand it, but oftentimes refuse to try and understand it.
Kierthos
Does the fact that the human genome is mapped mean that the geneticists automatically know what everything does? Clearly not... I can look at a map and not know where everything is, because I can't focus on the entire map. And a lot of the map and the results are still being debated over.
Because there isn't enough genetic matter (or combinations of DNA sequences) to map all human characteristics, it must mean that there is some genetic "Dark Matter" equivalent. Or, well, I forget the term, but there is a part of the DNA sequence in humans that doesn't seem to do anything. Might be that once you get past a certain stage in embryo development, parts of the genetic code aren't needed any more. How often does the human genetic code need to be "told" that a human is supposed to have five fingers on each hand, or two eyes? Or that your eye colour is blue (or brown, green, whatever?)
As for insurance companies, it all depends. If gene therapy becomes widespread, insurance companies will probably end up covering a variety of procedures, but only once it is an "accepted medical treatment". I could just as easily see them raising life insurance rates on someone who could have a genetic ailment cured but refuses to do so, thereby increasing the likelyhood of injury or ailment.
*shrug*
Kierthos
And if you make it impossible to fix by yourself, you have Windows.
Kierthos
Ahh, but if the name change does happen, we'll need an application called "Mirrorshades".
Kierthos
Of course not! When the last time that "Bill the Gates" had anything positive to say about any competitor, no matter how large or small it may be?
Personally, I've grown used to the fact that Gates and Microsmurf will try and quash any competition that they can't take over. And obviously, they can't take over the GPL. I just wonder how long it will be until Bill makes/corrupts/screws up a M$ version of it.
Kierthos
Eternal Cynic
No, no... they want a Mars mission that won't crash!
Kierthos