For space exploration purposes, people suck. They have two advantages- local decision making ability, and propaganda value. That's it.
By all other standards human beings are horrible astronauts. They need to be pampered with reasonable temperatures and pressures, a comfortable oxygen environment, water, food, toilets, thick heavy shielding from cosmic rays, and worst of all, a return trip! The rockets carrying them need to conform to tighter specifications and when they inevitably crash we have to sit through another God Bless America orgy. Humans get unexpected disorders and diseases and require elaborate medical care. Even in pedestrian frontiers like Antarctica we've been treated to spectacles like a doctor performing a biopsy on herself and administering herself chemotherapy using medical supplies dropped from a plane. Can you imagine someone developing cancer, appendicitis, or schizophrenia halfway to Mars? Although it would save a great deal of money and actually make some missions practical to carry out, we would never ask a volunteer to go to the surface of Mars or Europa and then take a cyanide pill. But that's because we're a bunch of hypocrites. This is practically what we are doing when we send people into space.
This is all a high price to pay for local decision making ability, especially when you consider that humans are likely to travel no more than a few light-minutes away anyway, in regions of the solar system that are easily accessible by radio with relatively short ping times. And there is NO reason to send people to low earth orbit. What the hell is the point of that? LOW EARTH ORBIT IS NOT SPACE EXPLORATION.
Robots make much better astronauts than people do. When they're in accidents, nobody cares. In fact, the French crashed an unmanned rocket last month and it was a one day "ha ha" story. Our robots have visited several planets and have even landed on the surface of a few of them. Despite the small amounts of funding they get, their track record is much more impressive. And there are many more things we would be doing with robots within the solar system, if it weren't for the crowd-pleasing money pits known as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
And what the hell is the point of these programs? Critics usually counter with some dumb argument involving the Wright brothers. But air travel has obvious benefits. You can get from point A to point B really fast in an airplane. What is the point of cramming people into garbage cans in low earth orbit? Except to suck money away from more deserving programs? In a few years our launch window for Pluto will have expired. It is receding into the further part of its orbit. By the time a probe arrives, its atmosphere will have frozen onto its surface where it will remain for centuries. You could fund a dozen of these programs with the money wasted on a single shuttle launch.
If you feel strongly that we should fund the shuttle because "the future of mankind is in space", you're fooling yourself. The most the Space Shuttle will do is scatter mankind across Texas and parts of Louisiana.
Rights can be forfeited. That's one thing you're free to do with liberty- you can squander it, and give it away. Once you've done that, it's gone, and it's difficult to say why you still deserve it. Which is sort of the point- its an unwise trade.
The Franklin quote is cited in every privacy story. There sure seem to be more and more boneheads every day who need to hear it. It seems that most people really don't mind a tyrannical snooping government as long as they're taken care of.
OK, well I think Reeve is a hero for what he is doing now. And he is also an unwitting hero for letting his own disability serve as a warning to those who would otherwise have been doing foolish things on horses these past couple years. But that's only my opinion.
When you lose your jaw, and then you get a second jaw from a cadaver, everything you do with that new jaw seems more satisfying than before, because you realize how ephemeral your lower jaw really is. At any moment you might lose it again, so you want to enjoy every moment to its fullest.
I bet right now this guy is chewing on the sweetest, juiciest Red Man chewing tobacco he's ever tasted!
"If he had done this work without an obvious personal stake in the outcome, I'd be far more likely to call him a hero."
Yes! People always say I'm being cynical when I say this, but I just respond that I'm not being as cynical as Reeve himself is.
I suppose you two would be willing to consider people like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela heroes if they were white guys with no "obvious personal stake" in the outcomes of their actions?
You aren't being fair to cynicism. Yeah, there's a little bit of cynicism in Reeve's actions, as you correctly observe, but cynicism does have a positive role to play in shaping the world. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it can and has been used for constructive purposes. Unfortunately it most often manifests itself in the form of illogical morons sitting in the sidelines and jeering the heroic actions of others, so it gets a negative connotation that it doesn't really deserve. Whether you're more or less cynical than Reeve is an open question, but unlike Reeve's cynicism, yours appears to serve no purpose at all except to make yourself feel smug and superior.
do you remember what coffee was like in most of the US before Starbucks got there?
I was drinking coffee as good as the coffee I'm drinking today before I even heard of Starbucks. Mr. Coffee certainly did us a greater service than Starbucks did. Since drip coffeemakers came out, the only people I've seen using percolators are old people who are still paying rent on their phones.
But what about all the other people who have had nasty accidents leaving them paralyzed? Does this make them heroes as well?
No. Admittedly it was much easier for Reeve to become a "hero" in this way, because of his preexisting celebrity, than it would be for me if I got paralyzed by a car accident tomorrow. But fate treats people differently. The definition of a "hero" is subjective as hell anyway, but I think it has more to do with changing the world for the better somehow. Mere victimhood doesn't automatically elevate you to hero status. When some people were saying that every person who died on Flight 93 was a hero, for example, I remember Bill Maher saying that no, the passengers who got up from their seats were the heroes on that flight. The other passengers were victims of terrorism.
Would Reeve have done anything with this if he hadn't the obvious vested interest?
Would anyone even listen to his opinion on the topic if he weren't paralyzed? People tend to resent celebrities when they take advantage of their celebrity status to further any cause. You're just a stupid movie star, why do YOU get to be on TV expressing YOUR opinions to a mass audience? Reeve being paralyzed himself defuses that logic. (Of course, if he were to speak up about something besides paralysis, like the war with Iraq, he'd be jeered as if he were Susan Sarandon.)
The fact that he would personally benefit from a cure for paralysis is irrelevant. It's not like he's lobbying for something that will benefit himself to the detriment of everyone else, the way Sonny Bono worked to give us extended copyrights. If there's a cure for spinal disorders ten years from now due to his efforts, the fact that he is paralyzed himself won't mean squat in the long run.
Reeve is a hero because of the work he's done on behalf of paralyzed people everywhere. He is keenly aware of his own propaganda value (I used to be Superman, now I need my diapers changed) and he has wisely taken advantage of it. There's always the question of "fairness". What if no celebrity gets the disease YOU have? But Reeve has been piping up and making noise about the religious suppression of medical research, and this helps all sorts of disabled people.
They're adding the requirement that you have to show a real invention that uses the gene for a real, useful purpose. Before, companies were sequencing genes like mad and running to the patent office armed with bundles of CD-Rs full of A, C, T, and G. That isn't considered good enough anymore. Basically you have to present them with something like a mechanism of action for a drug.
This isn't perfect for several reasons:
-The genes themselves are discoveries, not inventions, should never have been patentable in the first place, and should still not be patentable now even if it is harder to do so. (The fact that a lot of money was spent does not change this.)
-A gene patent is publicly disclosed after 18 months, which tips off competition that the gene might be interesting for further research. Companies will be more reluctant to patent genes, and will simply choose to keep them a secret instead. Since the patents turned out to be strategically worthless anyway, this could be a bad development from the perspective of technological and scientific advancement.
-The tighter rules mean fewer useless gene patents will come in, freeing up a number of USPTO examiners, which means more time to rubber stamp other unrelated, and perhaps more damaging, patents.
''In the early days, a company could say, in effect, that if you accumulated enough of the gene, you could fill a vessel with it and use it as a paperweight - there was the utility,'' said Bruce Sunstein, a partner at Bromberg & Sunstein LLP in Boston, only partly in jest.
Ironically, this is an argument that cannot be used to defend a software patent.
Saying a consumer has more rights than a producer is the kind of attitude that schackles productivity. This doesn't benefit either producers or consumers.
Benefit of producers or consumers has nothing to do with it. This is about protection of the public interest.
Freedom of speech is important because without it, the government can suppress political speech and introduce political bias into the public sphere with the force of law. The First Amendment was meant to prevent laws like the Sedition Act of 1798, which outlawed criticism of the government, not the Communications Act of 1934, which established public ownership of the airwaves. The amendment was obviously not established to guarantee that a single party should always be free to own all of a community's radio stations (or newspapers) instead of merely most of them. The argument is absurd on its face. And since the airwaves are public property, the point is largely moot for radio anyway. Also, it's fairly obvious that the people who claim that restrictions on media ownership constitute a serious threat to the First Amendment are the same people whose political views are well served by the current state of corporate media monopolization, which has been proven so effective in preventing certain competing political ideas from entering the public sphere.
"A bill to impose a moratorium on the implementation of datamining under the Total Information Awareness program of the Department of Defense and any similar program of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes."
It has three co-sponsors in the Senate: Jon Corzine [D-NJ], Bill Nelson [D-FL], and Ron Wyden [D-OR].
But it isn't just Democrats that are creeped out by the Total Information Awareness initiative. Even some Republicans like Phyllis Schafly and Bob Barr are beginning to express concerns about it.
"The only guy in the Senate with the balls to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Thanks, Russ. When the rest of them panicked and stampeded to trade our liberty for security, you were the one true patriot."
Only ccording to you and people who think like you. Don't you ever forget that.
Did I even claim to be speaking on behalf of anonymous pussies like yourself?
I agree completely. While lesser men were defending the skies of Texas (except when AWOL, that is), McCain spent years chained up in a tiny rat infested cell being starved, dehydrated, poked at with sticks, and having bamboo shoots shoved under his fingernails. He knows what it means to suffer. That's the kind of guy who should be in the White House.
The only guy in the Senate with the balls to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Thanks, Russ. When the rest of them panicked and stampeded to trade our liberty for security, you were the one true patriot.
All you nerds in Wisconsin better vote for this guy when he comes up for reelection. A good Senator is a rare thing indeed.
Probably a better solvent is alcohol (90% isopropyl is best). Soak a big wad of chewing tobacco in that for a couple hours. Then filter it, and let the alcohol evaporate until you have poisonous yellow goo.
Actually, don't do that, because it's dangerous. Nicotine is easily administered transdermally.
I remember hearing a story in a college lecture about a florist, who was spraying a nicotine solution on flowers to kill bugs. He spilled some on a counter and later sat down on it, so it soaked his pants. The nicotine entered his bloodstream through his ass, and an hour later, he's in the ambulance speeding to the hospital.
They give him a shot (I forget what, some nicotinic acetylcholine antagonist) and he's fine and goes home. He puts the same pair of pants back on, and has to go to the hospital again!
The tactics of the big tabacco companies show that they are taking it as a serious threat. They also argue that the genetically modified plants could end up pollinating normal tabacco plants and rendering the resulting strains nicotine free. That would be my big concern.
I wouldn't worry about that.
People forget that nicotine is an insecticide. It only exists in tobacco in the first place because it kills insects and furnishes a reproductive advantage to the plant. Nicotine-free tobacco may escape into the wild, but it certainly won't take over the world or it would have done so already by natural processes. It has a competitive disadvantage over normal tobacco.
What would be worrisome would be a crop of some plant other than tobacco, genetically modified to produce nicotine.
Using palladium to treat tobacco, they produced a cigarette that caused 70 percent fewer tumors in mice. Trumpeting the research, LeBow launched a $25 million advertising campaign in 2001 and released what was dubbed the Omni.
Soon you won't be able to get any tobacco without this Palladium crap in it! What if I want to roll my own cigarettes?
A simple patch to feed nicotine to the bloodstream won't cut it, because the addiction isn't chemical alone.
Patches aren't as satisfying (or as addictive for that matter) because they don't give you the ability to titrate the dose. A cigarette gives you an exceptional level of control over your nicotine levels. The level also varies more quickly over a shorter timescale.
When one of the major network anchors (I forget which one) explains charges of bias by saying (paraphrase) ``It happens that the media always spends time on issues some people consider liberal, like homelessness''---by which he means ``the media always consults experts some people consider liberal on issues like homelessnee''---you don't think that is in itself an indication of bias?
Your post may just be the most unconvincing thing I have ever read.
This is what always amuses me when the big 3 network anchors try to defend themselves from charges of liberal bias. They always just end up showing how subtle and unconcious that bias is.
Yes, it's like charges of witchcraft. There's really almost no point in any news organization denying that it has a "liberal bias", because its accusers will spin the denial into proof of the bias.
No evidence is ever offered for this "bias", nor is it ever explained what the bias is relative to. All that is needed is an accusation, and dumb people will believe it.
I met an engineering consultant for the original Biosphere Project a few months ago. He had a rather low opinion of the entire venture.
One of his stories was about how they didn't do a good job of taking care of the beehives in the dome somehow. As a result the bees died (i.e. went "extinct"). In order to maintain their food supply, the people living in the dome ended up having to run around like mad doing hand pollination of thousands of little flowers! Ouch!
This Jim Blair guy is full of shit. You have 30 days to activate the software. It's not "crippled" in any way until that 30 day timer is over. Unless, of course, he did the install 30 days ago, and waited to install NOW. Point is, this really doesn't matter, and this guy can kiss my ass -- "I gotta stop my project for some unknown length of time" sounds like the lamest excuse I've ever heard. Maybe he's gotta make a run to Krispy Kreme. Regardless, XP allows you 30 days grace (beta versions 14 days).
Well, I can see why Bruce Perens added you to his foes list.
The 30-day grace is for an initial install. For hardware changes the rules are different:
Users will have up to 3 days to re-activate Windows XP after making a hardware change that triggers the need to re-activate. Previously, users were required to re-activate immediately upon the next boot after the hardware changes were made.
The take home lesson here: until the activation servers come back up, you should not install any new hardware on an XP system or your machine will be rendered inoperable. Unless you've installed SP1 first. In that case you can install your new hardware and cross your fingers that the MS activation servers are back up within 72 hours.
Re:Java applications I've SEEN are unimpressive...
on
The Future of Java?
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· Score: 1
I've been using early access versions of IDEA for several months and my impression is that they've been spending their time packing new features into it at an alarming rate. At the same time the footprint has exploded since the 2.6 version. The 3.0 version of IDEA is a wonderful program but it will bring your computer to its knees, so don't buy it if you're going to use it on an old computer. They promised that following 3.0 they would spend time making optimizations, rather than introducing new features. I hope so.
IDEA uses its own custom Swing UI layer, so you wouldn't expect it to look native at all. There's a preference somewhere to use Sun's Windows L&F (although Sun didn't pull off the native look either). I actually like its appearance. Although I don't like the screen refresh problems it has during garbage collects! Someone at IntelliJ needs to take a break from feature creep long enough to run a profiler on the damn thing. Still, it saves so much time in other ways (with its refactoring tools, etc.) that these are relatively minor annoyances.
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For space exploration purposes, people suck. They have two advantages- local decision making ability, and propaganda value. That's it.
By all other standards human beings are horrible astronauts. They need to be pampered with reasonable temperatures and pressures, a comfortable oxygen environment, water, food, toilets, thick heavy shielding from cosmic rays, and worst of all, a return trip! The rockets carrying them need to conform to tighter specifications and when they inevitably crash we have to sit through another God Bless America orgy. Humans get unexpected disorders and diseases and require elaborate medical care. Even in pedestrian frontiers like Antarctica we've been treated to spectacles like a doctor performing a biopsy on herself and administering herself chemotherapy using medical supplies dropped from a plane. Can you imagine someone developing cancer, appendicitis, or schizophrenia halfway to Mars? Although it would save a great deal of money and actually make some missions practical to carry out, we would never ask a volunteer to go to the surface of Mars or Europa and then take a cyanide pill. But that's because we're a bunch of hypocrites. This is practically what we are doing when we send people into space.
This is all a high price to pay for local decision making ability, especially when you consider that humans are likely to travel no more than a few light-minutes away anyway, in regions of the solar system that are easily accessible by radio with relatively short ping times. And there is NO reason to send people to low earth orbit. What the hell is the point of that? LOW EARTH ORBIT IS NOT SPACE EXPLORATION.
Robots make much better astronauts than people do. When they're in accidents, nobody cares. In fact, the French crashed an unmanned rocket last month and it was a one day "ha ha" story. Our robots have visited several planets and have even landed on the surface of a few of them. Despite the small amounts of funding they get, their track record is much more impressive. And there are many more things we would be doing with robots within the solar system, if it weren't for the crowd-pleasing money pits known as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
And what the hell is the point of these programs? Critics usually counter with some dumb argument involving the Wright brothers. But air travel has obvious benefits. You can get from point A to point B really fast in an airplane. What is the point of cramming people into garbage cans in low earth orbit? Except to suck money away from more deserving programs? In a few years our launch window for Pluto will have expired. It is receding into the further part of its orbit. By the time a probe arrives, its atmosphere will have frozen onto its surface where it will remain for centuries. You could fund a dozen of these programs with the money wasted on a single shuttle launch.
If you feel strongly that we should fund the shuttle because "the future of mankind is in space", you're fooling yourself. The most the Space Shuttle will do is scatter mankind across Texas and parts of Louisiana.
Rights can be forfeited. That's one thing you're free to do with liberty- you can squander it, and give it away. Once you've done that, it's gone, and it's difficult to say why you still deserve it. Which is sort of the point- its an unwise trade.
The Franklin quote is cited in every privacy story. There sure seem to be more and more boneheads every day who need to hear it. It seems that most people really don't mind a tyrannical snooping government as long as they're taken care of.
I gave up my essential liberties to obtain a little temporary security, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
It is reported that in the UK, mandatory anal probes have an overwhelming approval rating
According to a recent study done on behalf of a consortium of anal probe manufacturers.
Meanwhile, makers of rat poison said yesterday that what the public really wants from their government is more rat poison in their drinking water.
OK, well I think Reeve is a hero for what he is doing now.
And he is also an unwitting hero for letting his own disability serve as a warning to those who would otherwise have been doing foolish things on horses these past couple years.
But that's only my opinion.
When you lose your jaw, and then you get a second jaw from a cadaver, everything you do with that new jaw seems more satisfying than before, because you realize how ephemeral your lower jaw really is. At any moment you might lose it again, so you want to enjoy every moment to its fullest.
I bet right now this guy is chewing on the sweetest, juiciest Red Man chewing tobacco he's ever tasted!
"If he had done this work without an obvious personal stake in the outcome, I'd be far more likely to call him a hero."
Yes! People always say I'm being cynical when I say this, but I just respond that I'm not being as cynical as Reeve himself is.
I suppose you two would be willing to consider people like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela heroes if they were white guys with no "obvious personal stake" in the outcomes of their actions?
You aren't being fair to cynicism. Yeah, there's a little bit of cynicism in Reeve's actions, as you correctly observe, but cynicism does have a positive role to play in shaping the world. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it can and has been used for constructive purposes. Unfortunately it most often manifests itself in the form of illogical morons sitting in the sidelines and jeering the heroic actions of others, so it gets a negative connotation that it doesn't really deserve. Whether you're more or less cynical than Reeve is an open question, but unlike Reeve's cynicism, yours appears to serve no purpose at all except to make yourself feel smug and superior.
do you remember what coffee was like in most of the US before Starbucks got there?
I was drinking coffee as good as the coffee I'm drinking today before I even heard of Starbucks. Mr. Coffee certainly did us a greater service than Starbucks did. Since drip coffeemakers came out, the only people I've seen using percolators are old people who are still paying rent on their phones.
But what about all the other people who have had nasty accidents leaving them paralyzed? Does this make them heroes as well?
No.
Admittedly it was much easier for Reeve to become a "hero" in this way, because of his preexisting celebrity, than it would be for me if I got paralyzed by a car accident tomorrow. But fate treats people differently.
The definition of a "hero" is subjective as hell anyway, but I think it has more to do with changing the world for the better somehow. Mere victimhood doesn't automatically elevate you to hero status. When some people were saying that every person who died on Flight 93 was a hero, for example, I remember Bill Maher saying that no, the passengers who got up from their seats were the heroes on that flight. The other passengers were victims of terrorism.
Would Reeve have done anything with this if he hadn't the obvious vested interest?
Would anyone even listen to his opinion on the topic if he weren't paralyzed? People tend to resent celebrities when they take advantage of their celebrity status to further any cause. You're just a stupid movie star, why do YOU get to be on TV expressing YOUR opinions to a mass audience? Reeve being paralyzed himself defuses that logic. (Of course, if he were to speak up about something besides paralysis, like the war with Iraq, he'd be jeered as if he were Susan Sarandon.)
The fact that he would personally benefit from a cure for paralysis is irrelevant. It's not like he's lobbying for something that will benefit himself to the detriment of everyone else, the way Sonny Bono worked to give us extended copyrights. If there's a cure for spinal disorders ten years from now due to his efforts, the fact that he is paralyzed himself won't mean squat in the long run.
Reeve is a hero because of the work he's done on behalf of paralyzed people everywhere. He is keenly aware of his own propaganda value (I used to be Superman, now I need my diapers changed) and he has wisely taken advantage of it.
There's always the question of "fairness". What if no celebrity gets the disease YOU have? But Reeve has been piping up and making noise about the religious suppression of medical research, and this helps all sorts of disabled people.
They're adding the requirement that you have to show a real invention that uses the gene for a real, useful purpose. Before, companies were sequencing genes like mad and running to the patent office armed with bundles of CD-Rs full of A, C, T, and G. That isn't considered good enough anymore. Basically you have to present them with something like a mechanism of action for a drug.
This isn't perfect for several reasons:
-The genes themselves are discoveries, not inventions, should never have been patentable in the first place, and should still not be patentable now even if it is harder to do so. (The fact that a lot of money was spent does not change this.)
-A gene patent is publicly disclosed after 18 months, which tips off competition that the gene might be interesting for further research. Companies will be more reluctant to patent genes, and will simply choose to keep them a secret instead. Since the patents turned out to be strategically worthless anyway, this could be a bad development from the perspective of technological and scientific advancement.
-The tighter rules mean fewer useless gene patents will come in, freeing up a number of USPTO examiners, which means more time to rubber stamp other unrelated, and perhaps more damaging, patents.
''In the early days, a company could say, in effect, that if you accumulated enough of the gene, you could fill a vessel with it and use it as a paperweight - there was the utility,'' said Bruce Sunstein, a partner at Bromberg & Sunstein LLP in Boston, only partly in jest.
Ironically, this is an argument that cannot be used to defend a software patent.
Saying a consumer has more rights than a producer is the kind of attitude that schackles productivity. This doesn't benefit either producers or consumers.
Benefit of producers or consumers has nothing to do with it. This is about protection of the public interest.
Freedom of speech is important because without it, the government can suppress political speech and introduce political bias into the public sphere with the force of law. The First Amendment was meant to prevent laws like the Sedition Act of 1798, which outlawed criticism of the government, not the Communications Act of 1934, which established public ownership of the airwaves. The amendment was obviously not established to guarantee that a single party should always be free to own all of a community's radio stations (or newspapers) instead of merely most of them. The argument is absurd on its face. And since the airwaves are public property, the point is largely moot for radio anyway. Also, it's fairly obvious that the people who claim that restrictions on media ownership constitute a serious threat to the First Amendment are the same people whose political views are well served by the current state of corporate media monopolization, which has been proven so effective in preventing certain competing political ideas from entering the public sphere.
Two weeks ago Feingold introduced the Data-Mining Moratorium Act (S-188).
"A bill to impose a moratorium on the implementation of datamining under the Total Information Awareness program of the Department of Defense and any similar program of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes."
It has three co-sponsors in the Senate: Jon Corzine [D-NJ], Bill Nelson [D-FL], and Ron Wyden [D-OR].
But it isn't just Democrats that are creeped out by the Total Information Awareness initiative. Even some Republicans like Phyllis Schafly and Bob Barr are beginning to express concerns about it.
"The only guy in the Senate with the balls to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Thanks, Russ. When the rest of them panicked and stampeded to trade our liberty for security, you were the one true patriot."
Only ccording to you and people who think like you.
Don't you ever forget that.
Did I even claim to be speaking on behalf of anonymous pussies like yourself?
I want this guy for President in 2004.
I agree completely. While lesser men were defending the skies of Texas (except when AWOL, that is), McCain spent years chained up in a tiny rat infested cell being starved, dehydrated, poked at with sticks, and having bamboo shoots shoved under his fingernails. He knows what it means to suffer. That's the kind of guy who should be in the White House.
The only guy in the Senate with the balls to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Thanks, Russ. When the rest of them panicked and stampeded to trade our liberty for security, you were the one true patriot.
All you nerds in Wisconsin better vote for this guy when he comes up for reelection. A good Senator is a rare thing indeed.
Probably a better solvent is alcohol (90% isopropyl is best). Soak a big wad of chewing tobacco in that for a couple hours. Then filter it, and let the alcohol evaporate until you have poisonous yellow goo.
Actually, don't do that, because it's dangerous. Nicotine is easily administered transdermally.
I remember hearing a story in a college lecture about a florist, who was spraying a nicotine solution on flowers to kill bugs. He spilled some on a counter and later sat down on it, so it soaked his pants. The nicotine entered his bloodstream through his ass, and an hour later, he's in the ambulance speeding to the hospital.
They give him a shot (I forget what, some nicotinic acetylcholine antagonist) and he's fine and goes home. He puts the same pair of pants back on, and has to go to the hospital again!
The tactics of the big tabacco companies show that they are taking it as a serious threat. They also argue that the genetically modified plants could end up pollinating normal tabacco plants and rendering the resulting strains nicotine free. That would be my big concern.
I wouldn't worry about that.
People forget that nicotine is an insecticide. It only exists in tobacco in the first place because it kills insects and furnishes a reproductive advantage to the plant. Nicotine-free tobacco may escape into the wild, but it certainly won't take over the world or it would have done so already by natural processes. It has a competitive disadvantage over normal tobacco.
What would be worrisome would be a crop of some plant other than tobacco, genetically modified to produce nicotine.
Using palladium to treat tobacco, they produced a cigarette that caused 70 percent fewer tumors in mice. Trumpeting the research, LeBow launched a $25 million advertising campaign in 2001 and released what was dubbed the Omni.
Soon you won't be able to get any tobacco without this Palladium crap in it! What if I want to roll my own cigarettes?
A simple patch to feed nicotine to the bloodstream won't cut it, because the addiction isn't chemical alone.
Patches aren't as satisfying (or as addictive for that matter) because they don't give you the ability to titrate the dose. A cigarette gives you an exceptional level of control over your nicotine levels. The level also varies more quickly over a shorter timescale.
When one of the major network anchors (I forget which one) explains charges of bias by saying (paraphrase) ``It happens that the media always spends time on issues some people consider liberal, like homelessness''---by which he means ``the media always consults experts some people consider liberal on issues like homelessnee''---you don't think that is in itself an indication of bias?
Your post may just be the most unconvincing thing I have ever read.
This is what always amuses me when the big 3 network anchors try to defend themselves from charges of liberal bias. They always just end up showing how subtle and unconcious that bias is.
Yes, it's like charges of witchcraft. There's really almost no point in any news organization denying that it has a "liberal bias", because its accusers will spin the denial into proof of the bias.
No evidence is ever offered for this "bias", nor is it ever explained what the bias is relative to. All that is needed is an accusation, and dumb people will believe it.
I met an engineering consultant for the original Biosphere Project a few months ago. He had a rather low opinion of the entire venture.
One of his stories was about how they didn't do a good job of taking care of the beehives in the dome somehow. As a result the bees died (i.e. went "extinct"). In order to maintain their food supply, the people living in the dome ended up having to run around like mad doing hand pollination of thousands of little flowers! Ouch!
Unless, of course, he did the install 30 days ago, and waited to install NOW. Point is, this really doesn't matter, and this guy can kiss my ass -- "I gotta stop my project for some unknown length of time" sounds like the lamest excuse I've ever heard. Maybe he's gotta make a run to Krispy Kreme. Regardless, XP allows you 30 days grace (beta versions 14 days).
Well, I can see why Bruce Perens added you to his foes list.
The 30-day grace is for an initial install. For hardware changes the rules are different:
Source: Service Pack 1 Changes to Product Activation. So apparently the guy had the nerve to install new hardware on an XP system that didn't have this service pack applied.
The take home lesson here: until the activation servers come back up, you should not install any new hardware on an XP system or your machine will be rendered inoperable. Unless you've installed SP1 first. In that case you can install your new hardware and cross your fingers that the MS activation servers are back up within 72 hours.
I've been using early access versions of IDEA for several months and my impression is that they've been spending their time packing new features into it at an alarming rate. At the same time the footprint has exploded since the 2.6 version. The 3.0 version of IDEA is a wonderful program but it will bring your computer to its knees, so don't buy it if you're going to use it on an old computer. They promised that following 3.0 they would spend time making optimizations, rather than introducing new features. I hope so.
IDEA uses its own custom Swing UI layer, so you wouldn't expect it to look native at all. There's a preference somewhere to use Sun's Windows L&F (although Sun didn't pull off the native look either). I actually like its appearance. Although I don't like the screen refresh problems it has during garbage collects! Someone at IntelliJ needs to take a break from feature creep long enough to run a profiler on the damn thing. Still, it saves so much time in other ways (with its refactoring tools, etc.) that these are relatively minor annoyances.