Applying to only *web* objects is a slightly grey area too.
No it's not, I've been using CVS for web pages since about 5 minutes after my first web page, what's that, 94? When did these guys file the patent. Plus if I thought of it, and didn't think anything of it, it certainly fails the "non-obvious" test. Then again is this really news? I'd be surprised to see the headline "patent granted on a real invention in software!!!!" I mean has a really clever algorithm been invented since quicksort that wasn't just ported from mathmatics or physics? (I'm counting theoretical cs and graph theory as mathmatics, since, um it's not "practical" and so hardly ever patented.)
Hydro power isn't considered all that sustainable.
It depends, if it's a river then it will keep going as long as it rains up stream. Now with global warming we have no idea where it will rain in the future. Plus is messes up river ecosystems, so even if it's sustainable, it isn't very green.
There are a number of "dams" that are just a tunnel through a mountain tapping melting ice. This probably doesn't mess up any ecosystem, just taps energy that would go into rock erosion and turns it into electricity. But it probably isn't sustainable, our glaciers are for the most part melting faster than they grow from precipitation. But it's very green, no flora or fauna is destroyed, and gases are emitted aside from H2O which would have been emitted anyway.
Did you ever try that? I did, and I can tell you that there just simply was not enough memory to run a BBS, a DOS shell and some applications. You could run a BBS and have a separate DOS shell running, but hardly any applications (I don't think edlin is an application). And what exactly can you do with a dos shell if you can't run any applications with it?
Yep, I did. I ran the Citadel BBS, K2NE variety in 200K. Then I had about 32 K for an 8K DOS shell (prolly DR-DOS 3/4 or MS-DOS 2) which was enough to look around for files and "type" them and other such simple tasks. Then there was over 300K left for applications, Wordstar and Borland Pascal + tasm ran fine, they were all overlayed programs and I had a big 10MB hard drive to swap out to. (I think the seek time was like 8ms, faster than my current 40GB laptop drive.) This was on a 8088 10 Mhz (turbo!) with 1MB (I had to solder some of them on;). I think one of my little utilities lengthened the time between RAM refresh to give me an extra 7-8% performance boost...
Aside: As for the AC's asking for proof, go look for it yourselves! If the word of an honest guy like me isn't taken over that of a known liar and shameful perjurer, then what can I say? If you really care I'm sure you can find out. I don't give a damn. I really admired Microsoft back then, but I remember this because it was one of those things a quarter of the room knew he'd regret saying and the rest were to excited to even think about the words coming out of the guy's mouth. I don't think it was a thought out thing, which might explain why he doesn't remember it, and we all know that when he's not rocking in a chair he's not really thinking.
I remember when he said that. I think it was at some conference. He may not remember it, that doesn't effect reality unless you have lousy fact checkers. Not that it really matters, we've all said silly things in the past, and relative to 64K, 640K wasn't so bad. Plus there were little utilities that gave you an extra 100-150K, as long as you didn't have a Hercules card or a bulky (IBM) BIOS. This was useful if you used one of those pre-emptive multitasking programs, you could run your BBS in 200K, a DOS shell in 16K, and leave the rest for applications and TSRs.
I'm sick of hearing this, I have an ISP that is quite happy to have me sharing bandwidth. And I know of at least two other ISP's in the area that explicitly allow it under their TOS.
It's only the big companies used to having government sanctioned monopolies that think they can sign up everyone for $50 for home internet access plus $60 for mobile internet access, plus $40 for mobile phone access, plus $30 for home phone access, plus $60 for cable service, plus some other amount for using using any of these services, plus advertising, plus a media tax on your backup media.
Say there's a one-lane dirt road that goes between two towns, and it has gotten awfully crowded because people now commute between these towns a lot.
So you replace it with a 20-lane superhighway. I really cannot see how that'd make the commute slower.
I don't think this theory applies to a highway connecting two seperate towns. Here there would be some settlement along the road, assuming it's long enough, to service the travelers, but it wouldn't have more congestion. The reason this theory comes up in urban planning is because any road you build outside a city will connect some suburb to the city. The land reached by the road is 4x greater for every doubling of its length, you reach a large number of single family homes very quickly. But the space left for lanes into the city shrinks the closer you get to the city center, so if everyone is heading there all you do by widening a feeder highway is move the bottleneck closer to the city. This is bad, you effectively lower the marginal cost of moving further away from the center of the city (with the no uncongested highway), and increase the cost of living for everyone (in terms of time spent in traffic). This forces people out further, increasing average trip time and congesting the road again. Now everyone is spending more time in traffic, a lose-lose situation for the city and its suburbs. (There are always some winners, for instance, the housing developers that buy some farmland to convert to housing when the highway comes.)
No I think they are great. But I've also serialized classes before and you HAVE to write your own searilizing methods. Every bit of serialization documentation tells you they are not yet compatible accross JVM versions, and the defaults are very fat anyway. Thankfully, it's easy to write your own read & write methods...
The memo is a good thing, I've been quite annoyed to see my bug reports closed as "will not fix" and sometimes attended to until over a year later, when I'm working at a differnet company.
we don't have any experience with interspecies cloning to date
It has been widely publicized
s/any/much
There is still a big difference between trying to clone a wolly mammoth and a the still living gaur. With the gaur you still have all the genetic material and get to chose which cells you use, and still only get a 1 in 700 chance of the creature even living to birth. With the mammoth it's more of a challenge, and that's the point. This is especially important after birth, the gaur-cow probably has most, if not all of it's immune system. Even if this is true of the mammoth it may be maladapted to today's germs, or maybe germs are maladapted to attack it, there's only one way to find out. I just don't understand how this couldn't be fascinating to anyone who still has any scientific curiosity.
Seriously though, I don't think this is a good idea. What possible purpose (save entertainment value) could be served by reviving a long extinct species? (A species which has been long extinct for a reason, I might add.)
There are really two reasons, the entertainment/turist value and as an experiment. You need more reasons to get turists to go to Syberia aside from prison camps and cold weather. The experiment part is that we don't have any experience with interspecies cloning to date and there are likely to be significant hurdles. If you don't have a mammoth egg you will be trying to create a creature with part elephant and part mammoth DNA. This means there will probably be essential mitochondria missing. We'll need to figure out where we can get the missing ones, either by repairing the elephant copies that no longer function or by finding similar DNA/RNA in other creatures. There is also the question of knowing if you really are missing something. What if the creature looks like a mammoth but can't digest the syberian vegitation, is that because the vegitation has changed or because the animal is missing some enzyme?
While you might believe in extinction always happens for good reasons. In this case, there is good reason to believe it was simply the result of bad land management by the ancient human inhabitants who overhunted the creature to extinction. The had depended on it and there were probably mass starvation of humans once they eliminated their source of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Not only is there evidence of the overhunting, but there were isolated islands where the mammoth lived into historic times simply because they weren't hunted. But this isn't going to bring the mammoth back, very few creatures have any chance of survival once their genetic pool gets constricted to a few hundred creatures. It would take another 10,000 years for them to recover their genetic health if we had that many, and frankly that is impossible. The best we could hope for is some DNA that could help us save the Asian or African elephants if it comes to that. (The plains African elephant is in a healthy recovery in enough countries but that may change with AIDS, and we just don't know enough about the forest elephant, which we just realized was a different species last year. The Asian elephant may be genetically saved through domestication, but it's wild cousin is practically gone.) But, there are big cats that have had hardly recovered from the feline AIDS pandemic before humans started burning down the land to create farms, the techniques learned with mammoths might be able to save them genetically from extinction do to our early inefficient farming efforts. This would save us the effort of trying to successfully introduce new predators to their ranges, something we've not had great success with before.
While I'm sure ADM and the Sierra Club both have uses for interspecies cloning the main arguement for learning how to do it is just for the basic knowledge of how we work, using mammoths is not only going to give them headlines, which are essential to getting funding, but is also practical because we actually do have some from over 10,000 years ago, providing a great snapshot into the past.
$500 game not selling like hotcakes? Really?
on
Sim-Dud?
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C'mon, even if it were a great game they can't expect people to pay $10 a month forever + deal with annoying advertising + pay 10% upfront. The upfront fee alone could pay for a good game. They need to eliminate the upfront fee and lower the cost to one two hundred bucks, say billed as $10 every three months. Then have the option of paying by being subjected to advertising instead of CC billing.
You can't try to milk profits like this on a product launch. You may think of consumers as thoughtless cows, but even cows will eat fresh grass when they have the option of avoiding your offer of year old cud with complimentary electroshock.
Am I the only person who gets maybe 2 spams a week?
You're not the only one. I have some addresses that get virtually no spam. The problem is with my work e-mail. I've had the same one for about 8 years so it's by now it has long ago escaped into the wild. I never give out my real e-mail unless I'm personally handing someone a business card yet I get shitloads of spam. Thankfully with the help of my SysAdmins non-blocking spam filter I've set up a procmail script that sends those and any other suspicious e-mails to my spam folder. Not more than 3-5 get through a week now. And, I like the non-blocking aspect of it since it means I can check for real e-mails every few weeks. The SysAdmin also only allows fully patched SSL capable mailservers to connect which probably cuts down on SPAM too, though that has sent some e-mails into the ether.
The best system for longer-lived archivation (and excuse me my Engrish, i'm from Belgium...) is actually something we all know from those russian mumbling, raincoat-wearing types: MICROFILM
Microfilm has a long lifetime per cm^2 for film, but even compared to highly acidic newspaper paper it has a very short lifetime. The advantage of digital media is not that a copy will last very long on whatever media it is recorded on, but that you can make near-perfect copies of data that has decent error correction codes. Then you reconstitute the ECC, and you have a new copy that will last as long as the first copy. Microfilm has been very valueable though as a warning to us not to destroy the originals after we've copied it into another media. We'll probably never know as much about the early 21st century as we've learned about the 17-19th centuries because of all the newspapers we pulped. Now those pages we actually photographed are not only bad copies but are also getting fuzzier by the minute... (Read "Double Fold" by Nick Baker for more info, as someone who quit a law library in discust when I was asked to participate, I can tell you he understates the danger our so called libraries are to the future of civilization.)
This is another reminder of the great crime to history long copyrights and immoral copy-protection schemes are.
As far as I know, I can download MP3s for music I have a license for.
Maybe you're right, but MP3.com lost their case for allowing you to download MP3's of CD's you had bought from them. So while their hasn't been a test case for whether you can download it, there has been a test case saying no one can provice you with that copy to download even if they have rock solid proof that you own a copy of the CD.
I personally thought the MP3 case was a sickening sign of the evil of our war on citizens system. Formerly known as the "justice system." I used to think judges were just out of touch on technology, but there were enough cases in the 90's that just proved that they are as a whole an axis evil not just ignorant men we could hope to educate.
Just a sidenote. I was doing my jury duty last year and was talking to some of the people who had been rejected from serving on one trial. It was a drug trial and everyone had said they didn't believe drugs should be illegal. This was in New York, in general a pro-freedom place. Well the judge had gone absolutely ballistic on people. He threatened to put this one girl on a rape and mutilation trial. Another guy on a child abuse trial. I got sent to the 12 week boring as hell bank fraud trial, but was rejected by that judge. I wonder how fair juries can be when people who disagree with the stupid or fascist laws aren't allowed on the jury. Still juries often seem to be the only thing that still somewhat works in this country.
Basically, the rules are straightforward, it's just that some actions (like relicensing) because prohibitively expensive because they require too much agreement from people that you may not even be able to find again.
It's much easier to find the software authors than it is to find the assigns of long dead authors. Sure in 250 years it will be near-impossible to relicence Mozilla, but now it is much easier since so little time has passed. A friend of mine licenses things for TV and it's often impossible to find the owner of something 20-25 years old, she has to tell the producers to can the projects. They sometimes go ahead anyway, but artsy people are like that, if legal catches them putting it on air...
I agree there should be a web page with the same text. But, since this is a whitepaper I think he sort of expects people to print it out to read it, and PDF does that better. Though why it wasn't formatted into nice readable columns I don't know.
BTW Just to talk about the story for a second, I think the guy would be right about TCPA not being evil if it wasn't widely adopted and Microsoft didn't exist. Unfortunately it will be, and with webmasters writing Windows IE only web pages, and even NPR using all DRM encoded streams, anything that makes it impossible for your average English Professor to run MS Media Player with a trustworthy OS like *BSD or Linux will mean the end of fair use, the end of artistic expression, the end of democracy. Now I leave out the details, they are discussed often enough here. But seriously just because some IBM engineer thinks your mom will break out the oscilliscope and SMT iron doesn't mean he's right. (Yeah, not really a reply to your point except maybe hey this guy used PDF when HTML which launches that DMCA happy corp's document browser on most computers doesn't exactly lend him much credibility. So I just think you used the wrong angle on the PDF annoyance.)
If someone made a deep-sea diving sub with a pressure hull made of a material very resistant to rapid change in pressure, there would be no theoretical limit to dive rate, even with a human inside.
Almost... if you go accelerate too fast the G's would kill you. Of course I have no idea where you'd get the power to do that, even with a nuclear reactor. But first we have to find a stronger alloy anyway. I think there is hope we'll do that before we create the high efficiency fusion reactors to rocket down to the trenches.;)
I may be very very wrong, but this is my observation.
In fact, in five years time you may not be able to buy brand-new CRTs any more. I would bet you're wrong, they are absolutely essential for high quality images. DLP is the only thing on the market that has any chance of displacing the high end of the CRT market. A monitor might cost you $5k in 5 years, but there will still be a healthy niche demand for them.
Why would you want to hang around in such a market?
Well for a consumer goods manufacturer like Sony it probably won't make sense if LCD prices continue to fall. But once the large players move out of the CRT market small ones will take their place and enjoy very healthy margins. But I may be wrong, if somebody makes a 525Mhz high-res DLP you might see 7 color projectors with decent refresh rates that will give monitors a run for their money.
I got a Zyxel DSL router from my ISP and the first thing I did was change the password. As I bet anyone concerned with security at all does. But lets face it most users are running Windows so what does it matter that your modem can be 0wned when your friggin' computer can be as well?
Not that the story isn't important, if Sprint is so unconcerned as to let these modems out the door unprogrammed what's to say their whole operation isn't infiltrated?
This is certainly the most effective & least expensive method to produce these things. Would you pay $129 for a piece of memory that claimed to be manufactured in an environmentaly friendly way, when the "regular" memory of the same type and size was only $59?
I read about how Texas Instruments used to wash all their circuit boards in CFCs when there was awareness of the environmental impact they decided to try water. It turned out to be cheaper. But you're right, that's why we should shift some of our taxing from income and payroll taxes to resource depletion taxes. This would make labor cheaper and while by slowing resource exploitation. The taxes would have to be introduced slowly to not kill industries by the shock, but instead allow them to adapt. Suspending patents on environmentally effective techniques, like washing things in water, might be needed to allow better techniques to spread quickly, though a manditory licensing scheme may work (like for songs on radio).
If the chip costs $59, it might just cost us $100-$200 more in the future in cleanup costs. But I'd rather not pay $129 if we could keep the price down to $69 and raise my income through reduced taxes 20%. Leaving me with a little left over for another cup of coffee...
BTW The old school "just stop it" method has worked for CFC's, the holes are starting to shrink now. Though my countrymen in Iceland still have to apply sunscreen in winter, their grandchildren probably won't have to. Even so, with a better tax system TI might have saved that money sooner. Business can be ingenious in finding ways to drastically reduce the cost of their products. (Assuming they don't have a monopoly that isn't affected by price. But even those eventually fall if they aren't protected by their government. Bribery laws are a different issue...)
You know if they ad five or six channels of music not affiliated with the RIAA I don't mind paying a couple hundred bux for the reciever. I'd like to hear more music I might actually spend money on.
NPR has been long attacked by both right-wing and left-wing groups for being too liberal and too conservative, respectively. They've done surveys on this, and found that about as many people think they are biased conservatives as think they are biased liberals
The programs also vary. Most of their news programs are right in the middle. Though some of their reporters have done stints in the Bush whitehouse. Here in New York there are some apolitical* shows in the morning and early afternoon, followed by some liberal shows out of boston, followed by the news again, and a slightly conservative financial news program, and then some stuff I never listen to and finaly the conservative NewsHour. (I'm ignoring the weekend programming, mostly national entertainment programs.)
I do notice there are a lot fewer ads. Maybe 5-10 minutes out of the hour. WNYC is on XM. Though I don't know if it is the AM or FM station, I don't think I've touched the FM dial in like 3 years. There is just nothing but crap on all the station. I don't think XM will be much better. Like, umm, one corp programming 70 stations. Where the programmers meet in one room in one city? No thanks.
(*one of the 'apolitical' shows is actually a current events program that interviews politicians, but they are very C-Span about it, you know the mary-jane candidate follows the right to lifer. The other show interviews authors on book tours and anyone else interesting they can get their hands on, usually very good.)
depends on the value of ax... this may seem silly since it's going to be zero, but with a superscalar architectures it can mean a stalled pipe waiting for ax to be set before you clear it. For speed optimized code which one to use depends on the surrounding instuctions. For a BIOS stored in potentially slow memory and then only 64KB or 128KB of it xor always makes sense, but gcc -O3 should probably use mov.. The difference between xor and sub is like one flag in this case (both are two bytes.) I'd go with the xor because it's a simpler instruction and probably consumes some part of a nanoWatt less energy. But may in fact not be the case, and it hasn't ever been high enough on my list of todo's to measure.
The only resolution would be to have an encrypted swap space, but that means an encryptor that preallocates space for the encryption process when one is out of physical memory.
I think Mandrake supports this. Though I'm not sure, I haven't used swap in years. Might have to start again to when I get to 4Gigs.. Hopefully I'll have a better computer by then, if not I'll look into an encrypted swap.
Cyan is the absence of red, Yellow is the absence of blue, and magenta is the absense of green. Why is it so hard to convert colors?
Converting to a CMYK color space is not difficult. But you have to consider that as an additive model the color of the paper matters to the conversion, as does the ink used. You also have to provide a means for the user to adjust their monitor so what they see on the screen has some correspondence to what the final output looks like. A good CMYK conversion can save you hundreds of dollars per image in the fewer proofs you'll need before the final output looks good. You also really want to do this yourself because if you leave it up to the printshop you soon begin to believe that all their employees are color blind.
Photoshop has profiles for major printers with brand-name ink and paper plus less effective monitor profiles. It also has support for little sensors you stick on your monitor to measure it's whitepoint. This almost works, but you need very controlled lighting, and it still needs to be adjusted a bit because your eyes aren't standardized... (everyone sees additive and subtractive images differently, but how differently depends not only on the ambient lighting and the brightness of the monitor but your particular eyes too.)
So to sum up converting to a CMYK colorspace is not so hard, converting to the right one is a PiTA.
Slashdot Mirror
Applying to only *web* objects is a slightly grey area too.
No it's not, I've been using CVS for web pages since about 5 minutes after my first web page, what's that, 94? When did these guys file the patent. Plus if I thought of it, and didn't think anything of it, it certainly fails the "non-obvious" test. Then again is this really news? I'd be surprised to see the headline "patent granted on a real invention in software!!!!" I mean has a really clever algorithm been invented since quicksort that wasn't just ported from mathmatics or physics? (I'm counting theoretical cs and graph theory as mathmatics, since, um it's not "practical" and so hardly ever patented.)
Hydro power isn't considered all that sustainable.
It depends, if it's a river then it will keep going as long as it rains up stream. Now with global warming we have no idea where it will rain in the future. Plus is messes up river ecosystems, so even if it's sustainable, it isn't very green.
There are a number of "dams" that are just a tunnel through a mountain tapping melting ice. This probably doesn't mess up any ecosystem, just taps energy that would go into rock erosion and turns it into electricity. But it probably isn't sustainable, our glaciers are for the most part melting faster than they grow from precipitation. But it's very green, no flora or fauna is destroyed, and gases are emitted aside from H2O which would have been emitted anyway.
Did you ever try that? I did, and I can tell you that there just simply was not enough memory to run a BBS, a DOS shell and some applications. You could run a BBS and have a separate DOS shell running, but hardly any applications (I don't think edlin is an application). And what exactly can you do with a dos shell if you can't run any applications with it?
;). I think one of my little utilities lengthened the time between RAM refresh to give me an extra 7-8% performance boost...
Yep, I did. I ran the Citadel BBS, K2NE variety in 200K. Then I had about 32 K for an 8K DOS shell (prolly DR-DOS 3/4 or MS-DOS 2) which was enough to look around for files and "type" them and other such simple tasks. Then there was over 300K left for applications, Wordstar and Borland Pascal + tasm ran fine, they were all overlayed programs and I had a big 10MB hard drive to swap out to. (I think the seek time was like 8ms, faster than my current 40GB laptop drive.) This was on a 8088 10 Mhz (turbo!) with 1MB (I had to solder some of them on
Aside:
As for the AC's asking for proof, go look for it yourselves! If the word of an honest guy like me isn't taken over that of a known liar and shameful perjurer, then what can I say? If you really care I'm sure you can find out. I don't give a damn. I really admired Microsoft back then, but I remember this because it was one of those things a quarter of the room knew he'd regret saying and the rest were to excited to even think about the words coming out of the guy's mouth. I don't think it was a thought out thing, which might explain why he doesn't remember it, and we all know that when he's not rocking in a chair he's not really thinking.
I remember when he said that. I think it was at some conference. He may not remember it, that doesn't effect reality unless you have lousy fact checkers. Not that it really matters, we've all said silly things in the past, and relative to 64K, 640K wasn't so bad. Plus there were little utilities that gave you an extra 100-150K, as long as you didn't have a Hercules card or a bulky (IBM) BIOS. This was useful if you used one of those pre-emptive multitasking programs, you could run your BBS in 200K, a DOS shell in 16K, and leave the rest for applications and TSRs.
I'm sick of hearing this, I have an ISP that is quite happy to have me sharing bandwidth. And I know of at least two other ISP's in the area that explicitly allow it under their TOS.
It's only the big companies used to having government sanctioned monopolies that think they can sign up everyone for $50 for home internet access plus $60 for mobile internet access, plus $40 for mobile phone access, plus $30 for home phone access, plus $60 for cable service, plus some other amount for using using any of these services, plus advertising, plus a media tax on your backup media.
amino acids not found elsewhere on Earth
Read it again, slowly.
It doesn't say "amino acids that do not exist elsewhere on Earth."
Simply that they haven't been found elsewhere, including, I assume, on rocks near the impact crater.
Say there's a one-lane dirt road that goes between two towns, and it has gotten awfully crowded because people now commute between these towns a lot.
So you replace it with a 20-lane superhighway. I really cannot see how that'd make the commute slower.
I don't think this theory applies to a highway connecting two seperate towns. Here there would be some settlement along the road, assuming it's long enough, to service the travelers, but it wouldn't have more congestion. The reason this theory comes up in urban planning is because any road you build outside a city will connect some suburb to the city. The land reached by the road is 4x greater for every doubling of its length, you reach a large number of single family homes very quickly. But the space left for lanes into the city shrinks the closer you get to the city center, so if everyone is heading there all you do by widening a feeder highway is move the bottleneck closer to the city. This is bad, you effectively lower the marginal cost of moving further away from the center of the city (with the no uncongested highway), and increase the cost of living for everyone (in terms of time spent in traffic). This forces people out further, increasing average trip time and congesting the road again. Now everyone is spending more time in traffic, a lose-lose situation for the city and its suburbs. (There are always some winners, for instance, the housing developers that buy some farmland to convert to housing when the highway comes.)
No I think they are great. But I've also serialized classes before and you HAVE to write your own searilizing methods. Every bit of serialization documentation tells you they are not yet compatible accross JVM versions, and the defaults are very fat anyway. Thankfully, it's easy to write your own read & write methods...
The memo is a good thing, I've been quite annoyed to see my bug reports closed as "will not fix" and sometimes attended to until over a year later, when I'm working at a differnet company.
we don't have any experience with interspecies cloning to date
It has been widely publicized
s/any/much
There is still a big difference between trying to clone a wolly mammoth and a the still living gaur. With the gaur you still have all the genetic material and get to chose which cells you use, and still only get a 1 in 700 chance of the creature even living to birth. With the mammoth it's more of a challenge, and that's the point. This is especially important after birth, the gaur-cow probably has most, if not all of it's immune system. Even if this is true of the mammoth it may be maladapted to today's germs, or maybe germs are maladapted to attack it, there's only one way to find out. I just don't understand how this couldn't be fascinating to anyone who still has any scientific curiosity.
Seriously though, I don't think this is a good idea. What possible purpose (save entertainment value) could be served by reviving a long extinct species? (A species which has been long extinct for a reason, I might add.)
There are really two reasons, the entertainment/turist value and as an experiment. You need more reasons to get turists to go to Syberia aside from prison camps and cold weather. The experiment part is that we don't have any experience with interspecies cloning to date and there are likely to be significant hurdles. If you don't have a mammoth egg you will be trying to create a creature with part elephant and part mammoth DNA. This means there will probably be essential mitochondria missing. We'll need to figure out where we can get the missing ones, either by repairing the elephant copies that no longer function or by finding similar DNA/RNA in other creatures. There is also the question of knowing if you really are missing something. What if the creature looks like a mammoth but can't digest the syberian vegitation, is that because the vegitation has changed or because the animal is missing some enzyme?
While you might believe in extinction always happens for good reasons. In this case, there is good reason to believe it was simply the result of bad land management by the ancient human inhabitants who overhunted the creature to extinction. The had depended on it and there were probably mass starvation of humans once they eliminated their source of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Not only is there evidence of the overhunting, but there were isolated islands where the mammoth lived into historic times simply because they weren't hunted. But this isn't going to bring the mammoth back, very few creatures have any chance of survival once their genetic pool gets constricted to a few hundred creatures. It would take another 10,000 years for them to recover their genetic health if we had that many, and frankly that is impossible. The best we could hope for is some DNA that could help us save the Asian or African elephants if it comes to that. (The plains African elephant is in a healthy recovery in enough countries but that may change with AIDS, and we just don't know enough about the forest elephant, which we just realized was a different species last year. The Asian elephant may be genetically saved through domestication, but it's wild cousin is practically gone.) But, there are big cats that have had hardly recovered from the feline AIDS pandemic before humans started burning down the land to create farms, the techniques learned with mammoths might be able to save them genetically from extinction do to our early inefficient farming efforts. This would save us the effort of trying to successfully introduce new predators to their ranges, something we've not had great success with before.
While I'm sure ADM and the Sierra Club both have uses for interspecies cloning the main arguement for learning how to do it is just for the basic knowledge of how we work, using mammoths is not only going to give them headlines, which are essential to getting funding, but is also practical because we actually do have some from over 10,000 years ago, providing a great snapshot into the past.
C'mon, even if it were a great game they can't expect people to pay $10 a month forever + deal with annoying advertising + pay 10% upfront. The upfront fee alone could pay for a good game. They need to eliminate the upfront fee and lower the cost to one two hundred bucks, say billed as $10 every three months. Then have the option of paying by being subjected to advertising instead of CC billing.
You can't try to milk profits like this on a product launch. You may think of consumers as thoughtless cows, but even cows will eat fresh grass when they have the option of avoiding your offer of year old cud with complimentary electroshock.
Am I the only person who gets maybe 2 spams a week?
You're not the only one. I have some addresses that get virtually no spam. The problem is with my work e-mail. I've had the same one for about 8 years so it's by now it has long ago escaped into the wild. I never give out my real e-mail unless I'm personally handing someone a business card yet I get shitloads of spam. Thankfully with the help of my SysAdmins non-blocking spam filter I've set up a procmail script that sends those and any other suspicious e-mails to my spam folder. Not more than 3-5 get through a week now. And, I like the non-blocking aspect of it since it means I can check for real e-mails every few weeks. The SysAdmin also only allows fully patched SSL capable mailservers to connect which probably cuts down on SPAM too, though that has sent some e-mails into the ether.
The best system for longer-lived archivation (and excuse me my Engrish, i'm from Belgium...) is actually something we all know from those russian mumbling, raincoat-wearing types: MICROFILM
Microfilm has a long lifetime per cm^2 for film, but even compared to highly acidic newspaper paper it has a very short lifetime. The advantage of digital media is not that a copy will last very long on whatever media it is recorded on, but that you can make near-perfect copies of data that has decent error correction codes. Then you reconstitute the ECC, and you have a new copy that will last as long as the first copy. Microfilm has been very valueable though as a warning to us not to destroy the originals after we've copied it into another media. We'll probably never know as much about the early 21st century as we've learned about the 17-19th centuries because of all the newspapers we pulped. Now those pages we actually photographed are not only bad copies but are also getting fuzzier by the minute... (Read "Double Fold" by Nick Baker for more info, as someone who quit a law library in discust when I was asked to participate, I can tell you he understates the danger our so called libraries are to the future of civilization.)
This is another reminder of the great crime to history long copyrights and immoral copy-protection schemes are.
As far as I know, I can download MP3s for music I have a license for.
Maybe you're right, but MP3.com lost their case for allowing you to download MP3's of CD's you had bought from them. So while their hasn't been a test case for whether you can download it, there has been a test case saying no one can provice you with that copy to download even if they have rock solid proof that you own a copy of the CD.
I personally thought the MP3 case was a sickening sign of the evil of our war on citizens system. Formerly known as the "justice system." I used to think judges were just out of touch on technology, but there were enough cases in the 90's that just proved that they are as a whole an axis evil not just ignorant men we could hope to educate.
Just a sidenote. I was doing my jury duty last year and was talking to some of the people who had been rejected from serving on one trial. It was a drug trial and everyone had said they didn't believe drugs should be illegal. This was in New York, in general a pro-freedom place. Well the judge had gone absolutely ballistic on people. He threatened to put this one girl on a rape and mutilation trial. Another guy on a child abuse trial. I got sent to the 12 week boring as hell bank fraud trial, but was rejected by that judge. I wonder how fair juries can be when people who disagree with the stupid or fascist laws aren't allowed on the jury. Still juries often seem to be the only thing that still somewhat works in this country.
Basically, the rules are straightforward, it's just that some actions (like relicensing) because prohibitively expensive because they require too much agreement from people that you may not even be able to find again.
It's much easier to find the software authors than it is to find the assigns of long dead authors. Sure in 250 years it will be near-impossible to relicence Mozilla, but now it is much easier since so little time has passed. A friend of mine licenses things for TV and it's often impossible to find the owner of something 20-25 years old, she has to tell the producers to can the projects. They sometimes go ahead anyway, but artsy people are like that, if legal catches them putting it on air...
I agree there should be a web page with the same text. But, since this is a whitepaper I think he sort of expects people to print it out to read it, and PDF does that better. Though why it wasn't formatted into nice readable columns I don't know.
BTW Just to talk about the story for a second, I think the guy would be right about TCPA not being evil if it wasn't widely adopted and Microsoft didn't exist. Unfortunately it will be, and with webmasters writing Windows IE only web pages, and even NPR using all DRM encoded streams, anything that makes it impossible for your average English Professor to run MS Media Player with a trustworthy OS like *BSD or Linux will mean the end of fair use, the end of artistic expression, the end of democracy. Now I leave out the details, they are discussed often enough here. But seriously just because some IBM engineer thinks your mom will break out the oscilliscope and SMT iron doesn't mean he's right. (Yeah, not really a reply to your point except maybe hey this guy used PDF when HTML which launches that DMCA happy corp's document browser on most computers doesn't exactly lend him much credibility. So I just think you used the wrong angle on the PDF annoyance.)
If someone made a deep-sea diving sub with a pressure hull made of a material very resistant to rapid change in pressure, there would be no theoretical limit to dive rate, even with a human inside.
;)
Almost... if you go accelerate too fast the G's would kill you. Of course I have no idea where you'd get the power to do that, even with a nuclear reactor. But first we have to find a stronger alloy anyway. I think there is hope we'll do that before we create the high efficiency fusion reactors to rocket down to the trenches.
I may be very very wrong, but this is my observation.
IAAE and you're not very very wrong.
In fact, in five years time you may not be able to buy brand-new CRTs any more.
I would bet you're wrong, they are absolutely essential for high quality images. DLP is the only thing on the market that has any chance of displacing the high end of the CRT market. A monitor might cost you $5k in 5 years, but there will still be a healthy niche demand for them.
Why would you want to hang around in such a market?
Well for a consumer goods manufacturer like Sony it probably won't make sense if LCD prices continue to fall. But once the large players move out of the CRT market small ones will take their place and enjoy very healthy margins. But I may be wrong, if somebody makes a 525Mhz high-res DLP you might see 7 color projectors with decent refresh rates that will give monitors a run for their money.
I got a Zyxel DSL router from my ISP and the first thing I did was change the password. As I bet anyone concerned with security at all does. But lets face it most users are running Windows so what does it matter that your modem can be 0wned when your friggin' computer can be as well?
Not that the story isn't important, if Sprint is so unconcerned as to let these modems out the door unprogrammed what's to say their whole operation isn't infiltrated?
This is certainly the most effective & least expensive method to produce these things. Would you pay $129 for a piece of memory that claimed to be manufactured in an environmentaly friendly way, when the "regular" memory of the same type and size was only $59?
I read about how Texas Instruments used to wash all their circuit boards in CFCs when there was awareness of the environmental impact they decided to try water. It turned out to be cheaper. But you're right, that's why we should shift some of our taxing from income and payroll taxes to resource depletion taxes. This would make labor cheaper and while by slowing resource exploitation. The taxes would have to be introduced slowly to not kill industries by the shock, but instead allow them to adapt. Suspending patents on environmentally effective techniques, like washing things in water, might be needed to allow better techniques to spread quickly, though a manditory licensing scheme may work (like for songs on radio).
If the chip costs $59, it might just cost us $100-$200 more in the future in cleanup costs. But I'd rather not pay $129 if we could keep the price down to $69 and raise my income through reduced taxes 20%. Leaving me with a little left over for another cup of coffee...
BTW The old school "just stop it" method has worked for CFC's, the holes are starting to shrink now. Though my countrymen in Iceland still have to apply sunscreen in winter, their grandchildren probably won't have to. Even so, with a better tax system TI might have saved that money sooner. Business can be ingenious in finding ways to drastically reduce the cost of their products. (Assuming they don't have a monopoly that isn't affected by price. But even those eventually fall if they aren't protected by their government. Bribery laws are a different issue...)
"with the RIAA not..."
You know if they ad five or six channels of music not affiliated with the RIAA I don't mind paying a couple hundred bux for the reciever. I'd like to hear more music I might actually spend money on.
NPR has been long attacked by both right-wing and left-wing groups for being too liberal and too conservative, respectively. They've done surveys on this, and found that about as many people think they are biased conservatives as think they are biased liberals
The programs also vary. Most of their news programs are right in the middle. Though some of their reporters have done stints in the Bush whitehouse. Here in New York there are some apolitical* shows in the morning and early afternoon, followed by some liberal shows out of boston, followed by the news again, and a slightly conservative financial news program, and then some stuff I never listen to and finaly the conservative NewsHour. (I'm ignoring the weekend programming, mostly national entertainment programs.)
I do notice there are a lot fewer ads. Maybe 5-10 minutes out of the hour. WNYC is on XM. Though I don't know if it is the AM or FM station, I don't think I've touched the FM dial in like 3 years. There is just nothing but crap on all the station. I don't think XM will be much better. Like, umm, one corp programming 70 stations. Where the programmers meet in one room in one city? No thanks.
(*one of the 'apolitical' shows is actually a current events program that interviews politicians, but they are very C-Span about it, you know the mary-jane candidate follows the right to lifer. The other show interviews authors on book tours and anyone else interesting they can get their hands on, usually very good.)
xor ax, ax
depends on the value of ax... this may seem silly since it's going to be zero, but with a superscalar architectures it can mean a stalled pipe waiting for ax to be set before you clear it. For speed optimized code which one to use depends on the surrounding instuctions. For a BIOS stored in potentially slow memory and then only 64KB or 128KB of it xor always makes sense, but gcc -O3 should probably use mov.. The difference between xor and sub is like one flag in this case (both are two bytes.) I'd go with the xor because it's a simpler instruction and probably consumes some part of a nanoWatt less energy. But may in fact not be the case, and it hasn't ever been high enough on my list of todo's to measure.
The only resolution would be to have an encrypted swap space, but that means an encryptor that preallocates space for the encryption process when one is out of physical memory.
I think Mandrake supports this. Though I'm not sure, I haven't used swap in years. Might have to start again to when I get to 4Gigs.. Hopefully I'll have a better computer by then, if not I'll look into an encrypted swap.
Cyan is the absence of red, Yellow is the absence of blue, and magenta is the absense of green. Why is it so hard to convert colors?
Converting to a CMYK color space is not difficult. But you have to consider that as an additive model the color of the paper matters to the conversion, as does the ink used. You also have to provide a means for the user to adjust their monitor so what they see on the screen has some correspondence to what the final output looks like. A good CMYK conversion can save you hundreds of dollars per image in the fewer proofs you'll need before the final output looks good. You also really want to do this yourself because if you leave it up to the printshop you soon begin to believe that all their employees are color blind.
Photoshop has profiles for major printers with brand-name ink and paper plus less effective monitor profiles. It also has support for little sensors you stick on your monitor to measure it's whitepoint. This almost works, but you need very controlled lighting, and it still needs to be adjusted a bit because your eyes aren't standardized... (everyone sees additive and subtractive images differently, but how differently depends not only on the ambient lighting and the brightness of the monitor but your particular eyes too.)
So to sum up converting to a CMYK colorspace is not so hard, converting to the right one is a PiTA.