We were developing an intranet portal that included a similar search engine along with 'AI' technology that monitors what people are working on so it can dynamically assign weightings for areas of interest and expertise - for example, if you want to find out something specific about maritime law you'd search for any work product (including emails, etc.) regarding the issue and then you'd search for intra-company talent - you'd get not only profiles of employees who declare their maritime expertise (in their public profile, essentially their.plan) but you'd also get info on employees who've written emails, articles, or just stored notes on the system regarding maritime issues. This allows large multi-national corporations to effectively leverage their human cap. blah blah blah blah. We started this a couple years ago and at that point we were using a mix of technology, some of it already several years old. Thus I conclude this is neither new nor particularly interesting.
I was really excited about the dynamic expertise algorithms, and I think everyone should be interested in technology that helps people find other people who can help them, can't we talk about how cool some of this stuff is instead?
IF "When it comes down to it, the site was designed for U of U, run on U of U servers, with U of U's name on it. Flikx put in a lot of time and effort, but that doesn't mean that he gets the IP rights to it."
THEN why is he held responsible for the content. They can't have it both ways, it's theirs to copyright and destroy but it's his material for disciplinary purposes? I mean, if they copy wrote it, technically they should discipline themselves for the malfeasant content they're claiming is their own.
ELSE as has been pointed out we don't have the whole story, so it could be the punishment has nothing to do with the content on the site.
Either way Flikx has my sympathy. It's like getting up one day and finding a semi has rode through your door and is bearing down on your still bed-bound self. I have nightmares like this. Best of luck, I hope the ACLU can help.
Bush will *love* it! Think about it, billions of dollars of sensitive materials in space, vital to national interests, this needs somethin' to defend it now doesn't it? We need Space Based Defense Systems. And we'll need about 2 trillion dollars for the defense industry to develop it. Think about it - we need an enemy, meteors trying to cut off the power that keeps our internet-connected refrigerator running make as good an enemy as any. And when we're not pointing the kill-o-zap guns at meteors we can pick off annoying dictators or political opponents or something with them.
as to (1) and (2) - OK, I'm serious here, instead of solar panels, remember those little lightbulb shaped toys with the black and white bladed fans inside, you put them in the sun and they spin? Couldn't we do something similar in space - with 24/7 high enengy exposure to sunlight, and maybe using something similar to a solar sail material rather than black-and-white blades (with ever increasing velocity the longer the station is in orbit) - the lightbulb thing provided a vacuum, which space conveniently has. Basically a huge solar powered windmill in space, convert the energy to microwaves and send them down to the reception dish, nicely housed on Bush's Texas ranch.
Hrm. I thought Win. Update worked with a client-side applet that interprets M$ Update page and only displays what the applet sees is nescessary. Kind of like an ISAPI filter only it works on the client. That way the applet knows what's on your system but the M$ site doesn't - the site sends the exact same info to all computers and only the pertenent parts get rendered in your browser.
Of course, the only way for me to be sure is to run some detection software. And Win. Update still blows b/c the documentation on the patches, not to mention the patches themselves, range from mediocre to Shocking Pink Atrocity. Patch and pray. I used to spend several days to a week on every @%$(*!(@! win security patch before I could release it in beta to our network. Then 2 weeks of beta before it went out to all the clients. argh.
BTW reactive barriers (ghost in the shell lingo?) I haven't found but voluntary port scanners (voluntary cheese worms if you will) abound. I work in windows land so I only know those... hrm, there's cerberus a free-as-in-beer proggie that scans your servers, explains what's wrong and suggests how to fix it - like nmap but light and friendly....
Re:Biotech Hobbyist Kits?!?
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 1
*heh* that caught my eye too and I started doing my patented '1/2 hour to total knowledge through google' research (also available in a kit for $24.95). I thought Natalie sounded interesting so I started there. Wow, she *is* interesting, a definite want-to-meet (an artist who worked at Xerox PARC and has shown in both MIT Media Lab (didn't they do Purple Crayon Mush?) and the Guggenheim? cool). But very little info about the kit. I found her one-issue biotech hobbiest magazine at irrational.org which makes some reference to a 'SK-A1 Starter Skin kit' in the 'how to grow your own skin' article but I can't find the kit anywhere. There are some OK biotech links in there though.
At the end of my 1/2 hour trip I have not found the kit yet but, as usual, I found a boatload of other cewl stuff. Has anyone else found it yet????
Re:Wars, Famines and Pestilences
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 1
Finally, I think the only reason biological warfare isn't *more* common is becuase most people don't realize how easy biology is.
Great post, thanks. I've loosely followed this subject for a while and have asked myself the question "why isn't biological warfare more common" (or terrorism...) many times but haven't come up with a good answer yet. I'm not sure it's because people don't realize how easy it is - I mean, all you need is to know one person who's taken at least 2 years of college bio... it seems if one was interested in destruction a-la-terrorism one would pursue thier interests *at least* far enough to chat with someone who has taken the requisite bio.
I bring this up because it disturbs me that literally any day someone could upgrade from releasing poison gas on the Tokyo subway to releasing anthra-ebol-pox in the same subway. And I really don't want to be in the subway that day. Basically. Maybe it's just my cold-war nuclear-holocaust-is-a-day-away-kiss-your-ass-good bye 1980's childhood fear that has repositioned itself but this article, and many others I've read, seem to say the opposite - that making a biological weapon of nuclear-proporions is much, much easier than making, well, a nuclear weapon of nuclear-proportions. And when i think about it, I get a little afraid.
If anyone knows why I shouldn't be afraid, please feel free to share...
I feel so... old and fragile. Jesus, I mean, I'm kind of speechless. I remember finding his books again, in a used book store, an anthology of the first 4, just a few years ago. During rough times, you know, the usual, hopeless, alone, stuck to the bed like a sheet of plexiglass is pressed on top of me, I've reached over and found that big green book. I can't say he saved my life, but he certainly made my life better. I put him in with Pynchon and Faulkner, Duras and Nietzsche - people who have deeply influenced me, again and again. *sigh*
My phone says Don't Panic when I open it. I guess I feel like Ford...
"When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidentally change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way this remark threw Ford Prefect off his."
erm? will keep some history and get those - i must say none of my regular sites (here, satirewire, mediabuilder, webmonkey (gasp), blah blah) have problems, it's usually when I'm following links all over looking for something in particular (the number of pink SUVs in Winsconsin or something) that I start noticing this. You're totally right, I should have had URLs in hand.
I set up Mozilla 0.9 a couple days ago and I don't think it's the bugs that are the biggest problem. Mozilla chokes on poorly written HTML. Now I know it's been said before that this is good, that people need to start writing better. While this is true, still, I'd say we're talking 90% (and I'm being generous here) of the web is written without a clue. Ergo Mozilla can't render a *ton* of pages correctly. I have to browse with I.E. and Mozilla open, and cut and paste URLs into I.E. whenever Mozilla chokes.
Now I agree that to work towards how things should be is better than to accept the status quo and try to work around it, but until Mozilla can handle the real world of the web I can't see it being a useful primary browser.
Love the interface though.
(disclaimer: until I started writing XML I wrote HTML without a clue too. I think the way HTML is "taught" is utter crap and responsible for most of the problems out there. But I wander off-topic...)
OK, honestly, a) I didn't know those things on the sidewald were the IBM promo I'd heard about b) I generally think any kind of sidewalk art is a good thing, I mean, really, at worse it's messing up, what, a dirty sidewalk but c) I thought it meant hippies love linux. You know like I *heart* NY means I love NY? And Peace loves Linux didn't make sense so... I was confused if it was pro or anti linux to say the least. It seemed maybe someone was saying real people who wash and have jobs don't love linux? I mean, engaging in the popular stereotypes (I have some hippie friends who both wash and have jobs, erm, not both in the same friend, but in the aggregate...)
ahright I know that post was at least half-troll but look, it's not just if they can but if they think they can. You know if it looks hard, and don't tell me, for example, looking at the gnutella website doesn't look at least a bit complicated, most people will react with fear and uncertainty, thier brains will go *cwathunk* and they'll decide to work on something like, say, plugging in the TiVo. The first 3 sentences are "There is no official program named "Gnutella". The original version, 0.56, was released as an early beta. The program was excellent, but not completed. " - so joe says, 'hrm, the program doesn't exist, beta means hard, I don't undersand these numbers and something right above this says it's released by hackers and something about cults.' See? No chance he'll install it.
"...Joe six-pack likes napster..."
True but can Joe six-pack work encryption, or even figure out how to use gnutella or work with freedom network? I've been thinking alot about this lately - now I'm not the fastest fish in the sea but I work w/ computers for a living and it takes me an hour or two to figure some of these systems out. Napster is Joe six-packs favorite because, IMHO, it's the only easy to use file sharing system out there, completely monkey proof; more importantly it feels easy to use. It's a friendly site that Joe six-pack can figure out even after the first three beers.
Which reminds me that a friend judges ease of use by how drunk he can be and still figure out how to use it. I actually like this as a test...
So I've been thinking alot about how we can get friendly, easy to use (not the same thing, remember) access to all these neat-o technologies like MP4, anonymous encrypted filesharing, etc. (MP4s - anyone try to figure out how to make a @#$!%# MP4 with flask and then make, say WMA (heheh) play it? It's not brain surgery but it's most _definately_ drunk-proof, at least it was 4 months ago when I was drunk and trying to figure it out).
o-u-t-r-e-a-c-h
Since this is also an issue w/ linux in general I thought there might be some ideas out there. Are there any groups trying to make more cutting-edge technologies in the web more friendly? I'd voulenteer to do monkeyproof hand-holding documentation and tutorials in a second.
one - is there a simple household appliance one can use to detect infared light sources (yea, palm pilots count as simple household devices). If there is, can't we get a gaggle of geeks out to the local wall-whatever stores and just poke around product displays? It would be interesting to un[earth? mask?] a few stores and see how they react. I'll print up the posters and buy the wallpaper paste.
two - This reminds me of the recent discussion here about how your right to free speach doesn't equate to a right to anonymous free speach, but should this annoy us? After all, we're, that is, america (sorry for the inclusive) is allegedly based on individualism, if we want our rights as individuals we can't complain when we're pricked out by those same qualities we covet and laud. I guess we have to learn to be responsible for ourselves and live up to whatever we say or do, wherever that is. In other words, screw them if they want to know who I am and what I do. I fart in your general direction. etc.
That is until this information is used by entrenched powers against me. Say if I want to run for political office. Hrm.
As I said, these are just thoughts. To summarize - why do we care if they watch us and identify us individually? It's the misuse of this information that is against the constitution, not the information itself. Right?
OK, one last thing. Anyone ever read Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)? I'll not get into a plot summary here (mostly because that would be almost impossible w/ that book) but the description of experiments on poor slothrop, where they knew everything about him (including exactly what kind of woman would turn him on, etc.) and used it to generally turn him into a labrat (again, this is not a plot summary). This is turning out to be more accurate than dear Orwell's predictions now, isn't it?
-end-
Hey, if your DSL is so slow might be because of your signal to noise ratio is too high (above.3 or so is too much), I'd check your wiring, a loose wire touching another or grouding out (anywhere on the line, not just the pair the DSL is running on).
COVAD HAS BEEN GREAT FOR ME. I'm on Oak and Laguna a half mile from the financial district, and am getting a solid 900-1.2 kbps down and around 300 up for enhance service (89 bucks a month for the enhanced upstream). I moved to Covad/XO from PacBell after they broke my DSL then took 3 months to fix it. Seriously. They dropped me then insisted I could not be re-added due to computer problems. 2 Pacbell tech appointments where they didn't even SHOW UP. Covad/XO has treated me well so far.
*I deny sigs exist*
I've heard... well, OK, I've passes a few idle hours on some web gambling sites and the (free) ones all use this method, quite effectively I'd say. Take, for example, lycos gaming, a free gambling service (free as in beer, as in you don't bet any money but you can win money), uses forced adds between games. I'd imagine they have a high rate of exposure and clickthrus since most gambling fools are just staring at the screen counter waiting for thier next fix. If you have a site with periodic content like this, forced ads are great.
*I deny sigs exist*
I just heard (from the ever reliable 'a friend' source) that Honolulu is rolling out a city-wide gigabit ethernet infostructure. Presumably to provide cheap high-bandwidh internet but I can't find anything on the net that's talking about this.
Now I was thinking this is the excuse I needed to move to the Islands. Anyone know if this is true, or what the details are?
*I deny sigs exist*
You miss a much larger source of downtime related to patches. Personal experience has shown about, oh, I'd say 1/4th of all patches break something. Usually something I really really didn't want broken. M$ fixes are more destructive than the vulnerabilities thier designed to fix, ergo, no patch. Now to be truthful I'm thinking more of thier desktop OS's, (I was a client-side guy) can anyone say if the W2K server patches are as flakey as thier desktop patches once were? Also, to be fair, virus def. updates were nearly as terror-instilling as security patches, it's not *just* M$ that farks up thier updates.
ooops missed that post 2 above mine (stupid stupid stupid *head slaps* read thru the end *slaps some more until unconscious). So I ammend my post to "um, yea, what he said, except for that NMR bodyscanner thingy"
*grin*
*i deny sigs exist*
how is it no one noticed the earlier slashdot article on this (when it was really, really vaporware)?
I hate getting all excited about how the world is going to change dramatically a-la the genome project without good cause so I looked up our professor. Quite a lot. I found
1. he's hardly mentioned on the web *at all*. How does someone so luminary in his field manage to stay utterly unknown to the computer world at large?
2. ok you could argue *unknown* - after all he practically invented the nuclear magnetic resonance bodyscanner. Or so one article said in some official-looking website. Search on it - Ted appears in conjunction with nuclear resonance 5 times. All the exact same article, reprinted.
I conclude that this is either the most underrecognized genius in modern science or it's rather unlikely we'll see this invention materialized based on the cred. of its inventor. But if it does... wow, so cool - the kind of thing that makes me very very happy to work in tech.
*i deny sigs exist*
Perspective. A) you're wrong, as other posters have pointed out, in your logic about costs - you can legitimately claim lost productivity, either through re-assignments of work, inability to work, or other impediments generally virii-related (yea, it's not the plural but it sounds cool and latin). And in this model I think 17 billion is conservative (based on my experience in a medium-sized law firm). HOWEVER you have to put this perspective, the cost of going to the bathroom is estimated in the billions as well (can't find the link now but will post when I do). The cost of forwarding virii warnings (social engineered virii which use people and computers to propagate) costs... millions if not billions. pr0n. need I say more?
so it's not a matter of how you look at it, it's a matter of what you at next to it.
*i deny sigs exist*
is it just me (usually is) or does this remind ya of SGML/XML. I realize it's 'object oriented' but it has that removed... structured description of information (rather than information itself) feel to it. Self-describing language. I guess it just gets tricky when you try to make that language actually *do* something other than talk about itself.
but as I said, I'm probably just confused...
*kill your sig*
McSweeny's did a great interview with some key people in this around August 1999. I don't mention this so much for the na-na old-news taunt but to mention McSweeney's because it is the most hope-inspiring awe-tingling side-crunching source of all things good I've yet to find in any 'journal.' Here's a sample of questions the obliging scientists answered - excerpted from the full interview (it appeared in the third volume of the journal, it's not on-line)
INTERVIEWER So, how long before I can get a three-pack of bulletproof underwear? (response - 3 - 5 years).
INTERVIEWER So to sum up, you're taking dwarf goats from Madagascar, and inserting the gene(s) of a black widow spider into them, thus altering their DNA so that they will produce, through the natural process of lactation, spider silk in their milk...Not to be crass, but basically these are silk-squirting baby spidergoats?... SPAGNA (scientist@Berkley in response to INTERVIEWER's question about timothy leary's spider experiments) I found a few pages once... showing drug vs. normal webs from caffeine, LSD and adenochrome dosed spiders... (shows a book illustrating the LSD dosed spiders made *improvements* in their web.)
INTERVIEWER Wow, caffeine = bad; LSD = not so bad. Shouldn't we extrapolate this to a human scale, for instance, supplying LSD and other hallucinogens, to, say, architects and construction workers?SPAGNA...these questions are extremely important...there are very few social arachnologists... INTERVIEWER Dr. Lewis, do you have any ethical concerns yourself with spidergoat research? Dr. LEWIS (U. Wyoming)...Since my kids and I raise sheep, which started as their 4-H projects, I don't have problems with raising animals for a variety of uses...
See you just don't get quality journalism like this from Forbes.
*kill my sig*
Didn't see any deep technical specs on this phone but all this talk about paper made me... remember an article on printing out your own computer - on that wacky zzz site.
So as one poster said, fax me a phone.
wow, what the nationalistic pride is going on here? Utility - well, it's a government-regulated monopoly, and we don't think the Government is efficient, it should be smaller and let the market run things the market runs best, which is everything, if you'd just stop taxing it so much and let it really perform.
Therefore we should deregulate the utilities, create a free market for power. And to ensure the utility monopoly does not run amuk in the free market, we're going to force the utilities to *sell off* all thier power plants. The utilities help write the legislation. They like it. They get to write off 10b and recoup the costs through rates fixed artificially high. The 'free market' decided a bunch of the plants were too expensive to keep. They closed.
This legislation, this talk of deregulation and free market synergies and efficiencies, does this sound like the Demo's econ or the Grand Olde Party's?
Good! OK, so now other states, like Texas, where they *make oil* have done well with deregulation. It works great. So expect to see more of it across the nation. California will be forgotten or written off as a bad hippie experiment gone wrong. Like this post is paving the way for. I hope your states make oil, or uranium, or have lots and lots of really big waterfalls.
The first post saying California deserves it was more interesting. At least he was saying that people want to stop something without ever elucidating how they expect this to affect thier lives. Most USers aren't willing to put up with the inconvenience of a green lifestyle. Bad populist, not telling your population what it is they're supporting *slaps the wacky uber-liberals on the nose with a rolled up paper*
So... are there any questions? You're *both* wrong, the left and right, just in different ways. Opposite ends of a circle are right next to eachother.
Slashdot Mirror
I was really excited about the dynamic expertise algorithms, and I think everyone should be interested in technology that helps people find other people who can help them, can't we talk about how cool some of this stuff is instead?
THEN why is he held responsible for the content. They can't have it both ways, it's theirs to copyright and destroy but it's his material for disciplinary purposes? I mean, if they copy wrote it, technically they should discipline themselves for the malfeasant content they're claiming is their own.
ELSE as has been pointed out we don't have the whole story, so it could be the punishment has nothing to do with the content on the site.
Either way Flikx has my sympathy. It's like getting up one day and finding a semi has rode through your door and is bearing down on your still bed-bound self. I have nightmares like this. Best of luck, I hope the ACLU can help.
Of course, the only way for me to be sure is to run some detection software. And Win. Update still blows b/c the documentation on the patches, not to mention the patches themselves, range from mediocre to Shocking Pink Atrocity. Patch and pray. I used to spend several days to a week on every @%$(*!(@! win security patch before I could release it in beta to our network. Then 2 weeks of beta before it went out to all the clients. argh.
BTW reactive barriers (ghost in the shell lingo?) I haven't found but voluntary port scanners (voluntary cheese worms if you will) abound. I work in windows land so I only know those ... hrm, there's cerberus a free-as-in-beer proggie that scans your servers, explains what's wrong and suggests how to fix it - like nmap but light and friendly. ...
At the end of my 1/2 hour trip I have not found the kit yet but, as usual, I found a boatload of other cewl stuff. Has anyone else found it yet????
Great post, thanks. I've loosely followed this subject for a while and have asked myself the question "why isn't biological warfare more common" (or terrorism...) many times but haven't come up with a good answer yet. I'm not sure it's because people don't realize how easy it is - I mean, all you need is to know one person who's taken at least 2 years of college bio ... it seems if one was interested in destruction a-la-terrorism one would pursue thier interests *at least* far enough to chat with someone who has taken the requisite bio.
I bring this up because it disturbs me that literally any day someone could upgrade from releasing poison gas on the Tokyo subway to releasing anthra-ebol-pox in the same subway. And I really don't want to be in the subway that day. Basically. Maybe it's just my cold-war nuclear-holocaust-is-a-day-away-kiss-your-ass-good bye 1980's childhood fear that has repositioned itself but this article, and many others I've read, seem to say the opposite - that making a biological weapon of nuclear-proporions is much, much easier than making, well, a nuclear weapon of nuclear-proportions. And when i think about it, I get a little afraid.
If anyone knows why I shouldn't be afraid, please feel free to share...
My phone says Don't Panic when I open it. I guess I feel like Ford...
"When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidentally change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way this remark threw Ford Prefect off his."
erm? will keep some history and get those - i must say none of my regular sites (here, satirewire, mediabuilder, webmonkey (gasp), blah blah) have problems, it's usually when I'm following links all over looking for something in particular (the number of pink SUVs in Winsconsin or something) that I start noticing this. You're totally right, I should have had URLs in hand.
Now I agree that to work towards how things should be is better than to accept the status quo and try to work around it, but until Mozilla can handle the real world of the web I can't see it being a useful primary browser.
Love the interface though.
(disclaimer: until I started writing XML I wrote HTML without a clue too. I think the way HTML is "taught" is utter crap and responsible for most of the problems out there. But I wander off-topic...)
Which reminds me that a friend judges ease of use by how drunk he can be and still figure out how to use it. I actually like this as a test...
So I've been thinking alot about how we can get friendly, easy to use (not the same thing, remember) access to all these neat-o technologies like MP4, anonymous encrypted filesharing, etc. (MP4s - anyone try to figure out how to make a @#$!%# MP4 with flask and then make, say WMA (heheh) play it? It's not brain surgery but it's most _definately_ drunk-proof, at least it was 4 months ago when I was drunk and trying to figure it out).
o-u-t-r-e-a-c-h
Since this is also an issue w/ linux in general I thought there might be some ideas out there. Are there any groups trying to make more cutting-edge technologies in the web more friendly? I'd voulenteer to do monkeyproof hand-holding documentation and tutorials in a second.
two - This reminds me of the recent discussion here about how your right to free speach doesn't equate to a right to anonymous free speach, but should this annoy us? After all, we're, that is, america (sorry for the inclusive) is allegedly based on individualism, if we want our rights as individuals we can't complain when we're pricked out by those same qualities we covet and laud. I guess we have to learn to be responsible for ourselves and live up to whatever we say or do, wherever that is. In other words, screw them if they want to know who I am and what I do. I fart in your general direction. etc.
That is until this information is used by entrenched powers against me. Say if I want to run for political office. Hrm.
As I said, these are just thoughts. To summarize - why do we care if they watch us and identify us individually? It's the misuse of this information that is against the constitution, not the information itself. Right? OK, one last thing. Anyone ever read Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)? I'll not get into a plot summary here (mostly because that would be almost impossible w/ that book) but the description of experiments on poor slothrop, where they knew everything about him (including exactly what kind of woman would turn him on, etc.) and used it to generally turn him into a labrat (again, this is not a plot summary). This is turning out to be more accurate than dear Orwell's predictions now, isn't it? -end-
Hey, if your DSL is so slow might be because of your signal to noise ratio is too high (above .3 or so is too much), I'd check your wiring, a loose wire touching another or grouding out (anywhere on the line, not just the pair the DSL is running on).
COVAD HAS BEEN GREAT FOR ME. I'm on Oak and Laguna a half mile from the financial district, and am getting a solid 900-1.2 kbps down and around 300 up for enhance service (89 bucks a month for the enhanced upstream). I moved to Covad/XO from PacBell after they broke my DSL then took 3 months to fix it. Seriously. They dropped me then insisted I could not be re-added due to computer problems. 2 Pacbell tech appointments where they didn't even SHOW UP. Covad/XO has treated me well so far.
*I deny sigs exist*
I've heard ... well, OK, I've passes a few idle hours on some web gambling sites and the (free) ones all use this method, quite effectively I'd say. Take, for example, lycos gaming, a free gambling service (free as in beer, as in you don't bet any money but you can win money), uses forced adds between games. I'd imagine they have a high rate of exposure and clickthrus since most gambling fools are just staring at the screen counter waiting for thier next fix. If you have a site with periodic content like this, forced ads are great.
*I deny sigs exist*
I just heard (from the ever reliable 'a friend' source) that Honolulu is rolling out a city-wide gigabit ethernet infostructure. Presumably to provide cheap high-bandwidh internet but I can't find anything on the net that's talking about this. Now I was thinking this is the excuse I needed to move to the Islands. Anyone know if this is true, or what the details are? *I deny sigs exist*
You miss a much larger source of downtime related to patches. Personal experience has shown about, oh, I'd say 1/4th of all patches break something. Usually something I really really didn't want broken. M$ fixes are more destructive than the vulnerabilities thier designed to fix, ergo, no patch. Now to be truthful I'm thinking more of thier desktop OS's, (I was a client-side guy) can anyone say if the W2K server patches are as flakey as thier desktop patches once were? Also, to be fair, virus def. updates were nearly as terror-instilling as security patches, it's not *just* M$ that farks up thier updates.
ooops missed that post 2 above mine (stupid stupid stupid *head slaps* read thru the end *slaps some more until unconscious). So I ammend my post to "um, yea, what he said, except for that NMR bodyscanner thingy" *grin* *i deny sigs exist*
how is it no one noticed the earlier slashdot article on this (when it was really, really vaporware)? I hate getting all excited about how the world is going to change dramatically a-la the genome project without good cause so I looked up our professor. Quite a lot. I found ... wow, so cool - the kind of thing that makes me very very happy to work in tech.
*i deny sigs exist*
1. he's hardly mentioned on the web *at all*. How does someone so luminary in his field manage to stay utterly unknown to the computer world at large?
2. ok you could argue *unknown* - after all he practically invented the nuclear magnetic resonance bodyscanner. Or so one article said in some official-looking website. Search on it - Ted appears in conjunction with nuclear resonance 5 times. All the exact same article, reprinted. I conclude that this is either the most underrecognized genius in modern science or it's rather unlikely we'll see this invention materialized based on the cred. of its inventor. But if it does
Perspective. A) you're wrong, as other posters have pointed out, in your logic about costs - you can legitimately claim lost productivity, either through re-assignments of work, inability to work, or other impediments generally virii-related (yea, it's not the plural but it sounds cool and latin). And in this model I think 17 billion is conservative (based on my experience in a medium-sized law firm). HOWEVER you have to put this perspective, the cost of going to the bathroom is estimated in the billions as well (can't find the link now but will post when I do). The cost of forwarding virii warnings (social engineered virii which use people and computers to propagate) costs ... millions if not billions. pr0n. need I say more?
so it's not a matter of how you look at it, it's a matter of what you at next to it.
*i deny sigs exist*
is it just me (usually is) or does this remind ya of SGML/XML. I realize it's 'object oriented' but it has that removed ... structured description of information (rather than information itself) feel to it. Self-describing language. I guess it just gets tricky when you try to make that language actually *do* something other than talk about itself.
but as I said, I'm probably just confused...
*kill your sig*
McSweeny's did a great interview with some key people in this around August 1999. I don't mention this so much for the na-na old-news taunt but to mention McSweeney's because it is the most hope-inspiring awe-tingling side-crunching source of all things good I've yet to find in any 'journal.' Here's a sample of questions the obliging scientists answered - excerpted from the full interview (it appeared in the third volume of the journal, it's not on-line) INTERVIEWER So, how long before I can get a three-pack of bulletproof underwear? (response - 3 - 5 years). INTERVIEWER So to sum up, you're taking dwarf goats from Madagascar, and inserting the gene(s) of a black widow spider into them, thus altering their DNA so that they will produce, through the natural process of lactation, spider silk in their milk...Not to be crass, but basically these are silk-squirting baby spidergoats? ... SPAGNA (scientist@Berkley in response to INTERVIEWER's question about timothy leary's spider experiments) I found a few pages once ... showing drug vs. normal webs from caffeine, LSD and adenochrome dosed spiders ... (shows a book illustrating the LSD dosed spiders made *improvements* in their web.)
INTERVIEWER Wow, caffeine = bad; LSD = not so bad. Shouldn't we extrapolate this to a human scale, for instance, supplying LSD and other hallucinogens, to, say, architects and construction workers?SPAGNA ...these questions are extremely important ...there are very few social arachnologists ... INTERVIEWER Dr. Lewis, do you have any ethical concerns yourself with spidergoat research? Dr. LEWIS (U. Wyoming) ...Since my kids and I raise sheep, which started as their 4-H projects, I don't have problems with raising animals for a variety of uses...
See you just don't get quality journalism like this from Forbes.
*kill my sig*
Didn't see any deep technical specs on this phone but all this talk about paper made me ... remember an article on printing out your own computer - on that wacky zzz site.
So as one poster said, fax me a phone.
wow, what the nationalistic pride is going on here? Utility - well, it's a government-regulated monopoly, and we don't think the Government is efficient, it should be smaller and let the market run things the market runs best, which is everything, if you'd just stop taxing it so much and let it really perform. Therefore we should deregulate the utilities, create a free market for power. And to ensure the utility monopoly does not run amuk in the free market, we're going to force the utilities to *sell off* all thier power plants. The utilities help write the legislation. They like it. They get to write off 10b and recoup the costs through rates fixed artificially high. The 'free market' decided a bunch of the plants were too expensive to keep. They closed. This legislation, this talk of deregulation and free market synergies and efficiencies, does this sound like the Demo's econ or the Grand Olde Party's? Good! OK, so now other states, like Texas, where they *make oil* have done well with deregulation. It works great. So expect to see more of it across the nation. California will be forgotten or written off as a bad hippie experiment gone wrong. Like this post is paving the way for. I hope your states make oil, or uranium, or have lots and lots of really big waterfalls. The first post saying California deserves it was more interesting. At least he was saying that people want to stop something without ever elucidating how they expect this to affect thier lives. Most USers aren't willing to put up with the inconvenience of a green lifestyle. Bad populist, not telling your population what it is they're supporting *slaps the wacky uber-liberals on the nose with a rolled up paper* So ... are there any questions? You're *both* wrong, the left and right, just in different ways. Opposite ends of a circle are right next to eachother.