Oh my god! This is so true - I had an AOpen motherboard running my PIII system with outdated 1998 BIOS, but no problems when synching my palm Vx. So, I thought "This is 2001 - new millenium, time for new BIOS!":) Probably the worst decision I've made this year...
Just 5 hours after updating my BIOS to the latest 2001 version the system *literally* explodes - a smoking insurance writeoff. Apparently (according to the techies working for the insurance company) the 'smoothing capacitor in the PSU recieved a fatal overvoltage when connecting a peripheral'.
Sorry I don't have more details but I haven't been able to access my HDD (where I keep info on any upgrades I do) since the system fried....but I should be getting a new MB soon - fortunately the rest of the (rather expensive) components were spared.
So if you've got an AOpen motherboard with (I think) Award BIOS.....DONT UPDATE!!!
-Nano.
Good analogy! - just like coins in a newspaper dispenser, your e-mail address will be returned to the wider circulation of e-mail addresses around the internet by large companies. You have no say where that coin goes after it enters that machine, and the same goes for your e-mail address once given out.
The best way to deal with the legality of this issue is as a case of informed consent. A child (choose an age) is deemed incapable (either physically or legally) of making a giving informed consent when it comes to sex.
Here's a kicker of an informed consent issue though:
Doctors are able to prescribe heroin (diamorphine) to patients in severe pain. This tells us that the government has deemed heroin to be safe in the hands of qualified doctors.
However, as a qualified doctor I would have no right to choose to take heroin myself EVEN THOUGH I can force it upon patients in certain conditions (e.g. patient on operating table demonstrating signs of pain) without their informed consent.
But any 16-year old can walk into a newsagents and choose to become addicted to nicotine.
I think the cake episode just highlighted what a load of vote-whores our MPs are - they condemned a fictional 'drug' (chocolate cake) without the slightest background knowledge.
When it comes to drug issues, MPs are more interested in maintaining the status quo that 'these drugs good, these drugs baaaad' (said in an orwellian 1984-esque '4 legs good, 2 legs baaaad' manner )because it brings instant electability - and scores of Daily Mail readers along for the ride - without having to require much reasoning ability or really engaging the issues.
This sounds a lot like those guys in the pentagon have been reading too much of Peter F. Hamilton's night's dawn trilogy - kinetic missiles.....what next? ZTT and blackhawks? neural nanonic weapons.
heh:)
-Nano.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance but I've never studied economics/management etc.
Just one question: Why do companies hype games so much MONTHS before they're released, and in some cases (it seems) MONTHS before the programmers even have a plan.
What do companies gain out of this? Investment....I doubt it.
Advertising....nope, that costs money rather than making it.
Product placement is the only thing I can see as an advantage of MASSIVELY EARLY hyping, but then when the game goes sorely wrong and things go belly-up for the company they need to do some maths:
Profit (from idiots who bought a buggy product) - advertising costs (for stupidly hyping the game too early) and salaries etc.
So in most cases, this type of business scheme should lose money and should be avoided at all costs. Isn't that the type of thing that managers should know?
But then again, I never studied economics or management.
The plain old numbers game doesn't work with the genome - we have 3 billion base pairs but frogs have 9 billion. We've got 46 chromasomes but dogs have 76.
The most telling figure is that we're 99%++ genetically identical to chimpanzees and yet we can't interbreed (not that I've tried...).
What really matters on a genomic level is the interplay between genes during crucial times of development, not just the functions of individual genes (our ribosomes are nearly identical to bacterial ones) - many of which were selected by evolutionary pressures meaning that once a problem had been solved, for example how to copy DNA, that gene was 'set in stone'. After all, who wants to keep solving a problem once you've found a solution?
Back to the point on crucial times of development - could you imagine what the result would be if the gene(s) controlling synapse differentiation in the fetus stayed active for an extra hour? day? week? - that, ladies and gentlemen, may be all that is separating us from chimpanzees. Just a simple interplay of genes, subtly disturbed by a simple mutation, perhaps lengthening a crucial phase in brain development.
So the numbers game is just irrelevant.
-Nano.
>>If you have to have the actors speaking their thoughts to the audience, then clearly actors, director and writers have not done a good enough job.
Have you actually read a book by Frank Herbert - he packs in so many internal monologues and contemplations that you can't convey an ounce of what he's writing without characters doing just that.
>>The stupid thing with the shouting-at-people weapon.
Yes, let's just ignore the weirding-weapons and the whole concept of 'Muad'dib' being an unknown 'power-word' for the Fremen people. That was an important turning point in the book if you don't remember.
I believe you will find that Frank Herbert was actually very disappointed with the original film and originally thought his book would be best conveyed as a miniseries (although I seem to recall him saying it would take 6 1hr episodes to get through the whole thing).
On another note - any FH fans out there waiting to see a Destination:Void/Jesus Incident film made? I sure as hell am!
Perhaps the reason we don't have to worry so much about violent crime in Britain is PRECISELY because we have so few guns here. Or didn't your edukashun teach you that?
And BTW - 'If I have a problem with kids at the end of the street with baseball bats the I defend myself with a gun' doesn't sound much like self-defence to me - shooting kids just 'cause they have baseball bats is just the kind of mindless violence caused by gun advocacy.
The point is - they can't AFFORD to pay M$'s exorbitant licensing fees....we're talking POOR district schools, where they struggle to get the computers in the first place.
That sounds like a great idea to me - the linux community should come together to create a 'school standard' linux (PS-Linux for 'public-school') that is then distributed quickly and freely amongst public schools.
And on the point of computers in schools - they don't need to do anything complex really, I learned on a BBC (if anyone remembers those, I'll be surprised) and all we had was a text-editor like vim, a few text/minor graphics RPGs and i think one cute scrolling game. All less than 640x480 resolution.
The 'standard program set' ould be very easy to create - kids use computers to learn about maths (with very simple programs, we ain't talking triple-nested integrals here), typing tutors, cool graphics programs, simple 'theory of programming' programs (I remember a program called 'turtle' where you'd have to move it around the screen using a set of symple functions and syntax).....hmmm, what else - a few easy games for learning words or maybe even a foreign language (Spanish, French to start with...).
Amazingly easy to do and distribute. Someone with more knowhow ought to do this! And remember, when little Jimmy tells his dad about the 'new computers' they're using in school - you may even get daddy hooked on linux, and from there - who knows?
Why would china want to help Iraq, when they're just as likely to go volatile and bomb China as they are the US? The Chinese aren't stupid - they know that nuclear proliferation is just as bad as the rest of the world, it's just that they want to maintain good allies (read: not insane ones).
That's what I was thinking - all this has been done already (and quite a bit better if you ask me - multiple regions, MP3 support etc..).
So why are you all shouting off like this is something new - Chinese making/copying DVDs and/or their players....
Plus - does the PS2 even use CSS? Or does it use another proprietary system that they don't want hacked.
I think that, more importantly, with the Japanese economy as it is (strong, but could be stronger - lots of unemployment still around from the crash in the late 90s) they're probably a bit peeved that Japanese production plants aren't getting the work whilst Taiwanese and/or cheaper Chinese plants are. It's all about employment and maintaining the economy - how would you like it if in a period of high unemployment the USA decided that a major new product would be manufactured in Cuba?
Just what I like about the States - incredibly harsh penalties, right out of line with the rest of the western world.
Because remember, it's been proven through 3000-odd years of history that locking people up for ages in response to their offence rehabilitates them REALLY effectively, AND deters others. NOT!
Then again, I don't see how else the US could maintain such a diverse conglomeration of people without what I call the 'democratic equivalent of military rule' - summary justice, the right to revenge (death penalty includes a lot of this), harsh unwavering enforcement - except it's done by a judiciary rather than a military.
I used to think liberalisation was bad, that it eroded society's 'moral framework', until I realised that in the moral world morals are totally subjective and irrelevant to government and the judiciary.
Something along the same lines:
I believe last week's New Sci. had a little bit on how the Russian space agency is touting their space shuttle (with a payload of 100 tons vs. NASA's 25) and setting it up for a comeback.
New Scientist is a weekly condensation of all Nature, Science etc. etc. (big journal) articles aimed at the everyday science reader. It also contains discussion pages, letters and interviews with big players on the science front (e.g. Craig Venter of Celera a few months back).
Just because it wasn't printed in the USA (but it is available there - I suggest you read a copy before slagging it off) doesn't mean that it unreliable or not credible.
-Nano.
p.s. I've been reading it for the past 4 years, and they broke that 'rapid sequencing' story you've got on/. today WAAAY back.
Being a doc, I'm sure you could have gone into the actual electrophysiology of cardiac myocyte contraction and oxidative phosphorylation but decided not to bore everyone here silly.
More interestingly though, and TOTALLY offtopic, for all you non scientists out there - our mitochondria (the 'cellular powerhouses') use a pH gradient across their inner membranes to physically turn the F1-F0 ATPase to regenerate ATP (the chemical source of cellular energy) from ADP and AMP....so they essentially act as a battery (H+ gradient) to turn electrical energy (electrons extracted via oxidative phosphorylation cascade) into chemical energy that can be used by our cells.
This is probably the process they were thinking of when they wrote the matrix (really? you reckon?).
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Oh my god! This is so true - I had an AOpen motherboard running my PIII system with outdated 1998 BIOS, but no problems when synching my palm Vx. So, I thought "This is 2001 - new millenium, time for new BIOS!" :) Probably the worst decision I've made this year...
Just 5 hours after updating my BIOS to the latest 2001 version the system *literally* explodes - a smoking insurance writeoff. Apparently (according to the techies working for the insurance company) the 'smoothing capacitor in the PSU recieved a fatal overvoltage when connecting a peripheral'.
Sorry I don't have more details but I haven't been able to access my HDD (where I keep info on any upgrades I do) since the system fried....but I should be getting a new MB soon - fortunately the rest of the (rather expensive) components were spared.
So if you've got an AOpen motherboard with (I think) Award BIOS.....DONT UPDATE!!!
-Nano.
Good analogy! - just like coins in a newspaper dispenser, your e-mail address will be returned to the wider circulation of e-mail addresses around the internet by large companies. You have no say where that coin goes after it enters that machine, and the same goes for your e-mail address once given out.
-Nano.
Quick, someone get a creationist in here - their amusing take on the laws of entropy will whip us up a perpetual motion thingamajig in no time! -Nano.
:( oops...my bad.
The best way to deal with the legality of this issue is as a case of informed consent. A child (choose an age) is deemed incapable (either physically or legally) of making a giving informed consent when it comes to sex.
Here's a kicker of an informed consent issue though:
Doctors are able to prescribe heroin (diamorphine) to patients in severe pain. This tells us that the government has deemed heroin to be safe in the hands of qualified doctors.
However, as a qualified doctor I would have no right to choose to take heroin myself EVEN THOUGH I can force it upon patients in certain conditions (e.g. patient on operating table demonstrating signs of pain) without their informed consent.
But any 16-year old can walk into a newsagents and choose to become addicted to nicotine.
Hmm...
Slightly offtopic, but here goes -
I think the cake episode just highlighted what a load of vote-whores our MPs are - they condemned a fictional 'drug' (chocolate cake) without the slightest background knowledge.
When it comes to drug issues, MPs are more interested in maintaining the status quo that 'these drugs good, these drugs baaaad' (said in an orwellian 1984-esque '4 legs good, 2 legs baaaad' manner )because it brings instant electability - and scores of Daily Mail readers along for the ride - without having to require much reasoning ability or really engaging the issues.
This sounds a lot like those guys in the pentagon have been reading too much of Peter F. Hamilton's night's dawn trilogy - kinetic missiles.....what next? ZTT and blackhawks? neural nanonic weapons. heh :)
-Nano.
Yah, only I think he's y'know, kinda dead. -Nano.
That must be a law of some kind - The only good rap music wasn't rap to begin with.
Puff Daddy - I'll be missing you
Puff Daddy - Kashmir
Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby (well, stretching things a little on that one)
Ahh damnit! There are so many more, but I just (for some unknown reason *cough*) don't remember the names to rap songs.
-Nano.
You'll have to forgive my ignorance but I've never studied economics/management etc.
Just one question: Why do companies hype games so much MONTHS before they're released, and in some cases (it seems) MONTHS before the programmers even have a plan.
What do companies gain out of this? Investment....I doubt it.
Advertising....nope, that costs money rather than making it.
Product placement is the only thing I can see as an advantage of MASSIVELY EARLY hyping, but then when the game goes sorely wrong and things go belly-up for the company they need to do some maths:
Profit (from idiots who bought a buggy product) - advertising costs (for stupidly hyping the game too early) and salaries etc.
So in most cases, this type of business scheme should lose money and should be avoided at all costs. Isn't that the type of thing that managers should know?
But then again, I never studied economics or management.
-Nano.
Was that meant to be sarcasm? Because it didn't work.
-Nano.
The plain old numbers game doesn't work with the genome - we have 3 billion base pairs but frogs have 9 billion. We've got 46 chromasomes but dogs have 76. The most telling figure is that we're 99%++ genetically identical to chimpanzees and yet we can't interbreed (not that I've tried...). What really matters on a genomic level is the interplay between genes during crucial times of development, not just the functions of individual genes (our ribosomes are nearly identical to bacterial ones) - many of which were selected by evolutionary pressures meaning that once a problem had been solved, for example how to copy DNA, that gene was 'set in stone'. After all, who wants to keep solving a problem once you've found a solution? Back to the point on crucial times of development - could you imagine what the result would be if the gene(s) controlling synapse differentiation in the fetus stayed active for an extra hour? day? week? - that, ladies and gentlemen, may be all that is separating us from chimpanzees. Just a simple interplay of genes, subtly disturbed by a simple mutation, perhaps lengthening a crucial phase in brain development. So the numbers game is just irrelevant. -Nano.
>>If you have to have the actors speaking their thoughts to the audience, then clearly actors, director and writers have not done a good enough job.
Have you actually read a book by Frank Herbert - he packs in so many internal monologues and contemplations that you can't convey an ounce of what he's writing without characters doing just that.
>>The stupid thing with the shouting-at-people weapon.
Yes, let's just ignore the weirding-weapons and the whole concept of 'Muad'dib' being an unknown 'power-word' for the Fremen people. That was an important turning point in the book if you don't remember.
-Nano.
I believe you will find that Frank Herbert was actually very disappointed with the original film and originally thought his book would be best conveyed as a miniseries (although I seem to recall him saying it would take 6 1hr episodes to get through the whole thing).
On another note - any FH fans out there waiting to see a Destination:Void/Jesus Incident film made? I sure as hell am!
-Nano.
Yeehar cowboy!
Perhaps the reason we don't have to worry so much about violent crime in Britain is PRECISELY because we have so few guns here. Or didn't your edukashun teach you that?
And BTW - 'If I have a problem with kids at the end of the street with baseball bats the I defend myself with a gun' doesn't sound much like self-defence to me - shooting kids just 'cause they have baseball bats is just the kind of mindless violence caused by gun advocacy.
-Nano.
The point is - they can't AFFORD to pay M$'s exorbitant licensing fees....we're talking POOR district schools, where they struggle to get the computers in the first place.
-Nano.
That sounds like a great idea to me - the linux community should come together to create a 'school standard' linux (PS-Linux for 'public-school') that is then distributed quickly and freely amongst public schools.
And on the point of computers in schools - they don't need to do anything complex really, I learned on a BBC (if anyone remembers those, I'll be surprised) and all we had was a text-editor like vim, a few text/minor graphics RPGs and i think one cute scrolling game. All less than 640x480 resolution.
The 'standard program set' ould be very easy to create - kids use computers to learn about maths (with very simple programs, we ain't talking triple-nested integrals here), typing tutors, cool graphics programs, simple 'theory of programming' programs (I remember a program called 'turtle' where you'd have to move it around the screen using a set of symple functions and syntax).....hmmm, what else - a few easy games for learning words or maybe even a foreign language (Spanish, French to start with...).
Amazingly easy to do and distribute. Someone with more knowhow ought to do this! And remember, when little Jimmy tells his dad about the 'new computers' they're using in school - you may even get daddy hooked on linux, and from there - who knows?
-Nano.
Why would china want to help Iraq, when they're just as likely to go volatile and bomb China as they are the US? The Chinese aren't stupid - they know that nuclear proliferation is just as bad as the rest of the world, it's just that they want to maintain good allies (read: not insane ones).
-Nano.
That's what I was thinking - all this has been done already (and quite a bit better if you ask me - multiple regions, MP3 support etc..).
So why are you all shouting off like this is something new - Chinese making/copying DVDs and/or their players....
Plus - does the PS2 even use CSS? Or does it use another proprietary system that they don't want hacked.
I think that, more importantly, with the Japanese economy as it is (strong, but could be stronger - lots of unemployment still around from the crash in the late 90s) they're probably a bit peeved that Japanese production plants aren't getting the work whilst Taiwanese and/or cheaper Chinese plants are. It's all about employment and maintaining the economy - how would you like it if in a period of high unemployment the USA decided that a major new product would be manufactured in Cuba?
-Nano.
Let's hope he never booked an airline ticket online or he'll have hell trying to get bail.
"Yer honour, we have proof of the defendent repeatedly trying to flee the crimescene."
hee hee.
-Nano.
right, so he should pay compensation to the amount of ~300 PII CPUs (assuming 450MHz Xeons w. 512k cache)
What's that work out to....hmm...$9,000!
So get digging under your couch seats everyone!
-Nano.
Just what I like about the States - incredibly harsh penalties, right out of line with the rest of the western world.
Because remember, it's been proven through 3000-odd years of history that locking people up for ages in response to their offence rehabilitates them REALLY effectively, AND deters others. NOT!
Then again, I don't see how else the US could maintain such a diverse conglomeration of people without what I call the 'democratic equivalent of military rule' - summary justice, the right to revenge (death penalty includes a lot of this), harsh unwavering enforcement - except it's done by a judiciary rather than a military.
I used to think liberalisation was bad, that it eroded society's 'moral framework', until I realised that in the moral world morals are totally subjective and irrelevant to government and the judiciary.
-Nano.
Something along the same lines:
I believe last week's New Sci. had a little bit on how the Russian space agency is touting their space shuttle (with a payload of 100 tons vs. NASA's 25) and setting it up for a comeback.
-Nano.
New Scientist is a weekly condensation of all Nature, Science etc. etc. (big journal) articles aimed at the everyday science reader. It also contains discussion pages, letters and interviews with big players on the science front (e.g. Craig Venter of Celera a few months back).
/. today WAAAY back.
Just because it wasn't printed in the USA (but it is available there - I suggest you read a copy before slagging it off) doesn't mean that it unreliable or not credible.
-Nano.
p.s. I've been reading it for the past 4 years, and they broke that 'rapid sequencing' story you've got on
Being a doc, I'm sure you could have gone into the actual electrophysiology of cardiac myocyte contraction and oxidative phosphorylation but decided not to bore everyone here silly.
More interestingly though, and TOTALLY offtopic, for all you non scientists out there - our mitochondria (the 'cellular powerhouses') use a pH gradient across their inner membranes to physically turn the F1-F0 ATPase to regenerate ATP (the chemical source of cellular energy) from ADP and AMP....so they essentially act as a battery (H+ gradient) to turn electrical energy (electrons extracted via oxidative phosphorylation cascade) into chemical energy that can be used by our cells.
This is probably the process they were thinking of when they wrote the matrix (really? you reckon?).
Interesting, but offtopic.
-Nano.