If a zebrafish escapes, it has a gene that is potentially very damaging -- it's easy for predators to see. It's unlikely to do very well. Glowing zebrafish will probably die out in the wild quickly, leaving only regular zebrafish. Nature is pretty robust.
There was a very interesting article in Science News a few issues back about studies of GM plants. There were several solid conclusions:
The gene *will* escape into the wild. In every single case studied, it escaped despite all precautions in production settings. Lab settings were more successful in keeping the lid on.
Whether the escaped gene propagates widely beyond the escape point depends on its survival advantage.
Survival advantages are not easy to guess. Setting up test ecosystems was fairly successful in determing survival advantage. The results were often quite surprising.
Bt corn has a high survival advantage, and has escaped whereever it has been planted. It will continue to spread rapidly in the wild.
Problems like those with Bt can be compensated for by adding additional transgenes that convey a survival disadvantage in the wild (without comprising desired function too much). This doesn't always work, because the traits can become separated.
We won't know whether the glowing fish might have your guessed disadvantage without trying it. For instance by putting some normal and glowing fish in a tank with predators in conditions as close to natural as can be arranged without letting the glowing fish escape. These fish should not be put into the hands of consumers until it is demonstrated that they don't last long if released. As others have pointed out, large numbers of these fish can easily have unforeseen consequences. Self-reproducing unforeseen consequences are a Very Dangerous Thing.
to keep well documented cabling. A policy of requiring a tenent to remove cabling when leaving is usually a good idea. However, sometimes the wiring is generic and well documented, and an asset to the next tenant. For instance, Cat 5 from several outlets in each room to a big patch panel in another room. In these cases, it should be possible to sign an agreement to leave such cable in place. The exiting tenent saves the removal costs. The entering tenant saves the installation costs.
Even when the cable is obsolete, it is useful for pulling new cable through. It is a shame to have to redo all that crawl space work when leaving one wire between nodes while removing would be so easy.
In fact, because of these inefficiencies with the exiting tenant rule, I actually prefer a rule requiring the incoming tenent to either use existing cable or remove it.
Anyway, I submit to you that, although it's to a lesser extent than something physically routed through a city, computer operating systems are also a natural monopoly. It takes special effort to make competing OS'es use compatable data files. That's effort that companies don't want to put forth since it helps their competitors. So you have the situation where if your co-worker used Windows to write a program, you have to use it too to run it. And thus a strong network effect is born, where there is great value in everybody using the same system.
There were in fact competing implementations of Microsoft APIs, but Microsoft illegally destroyed them by, for instance, making Win3.1 recognize DRDOS and change its operation. It is completely feasible to create an opensource Windows NT implementation - and there is a project to do just that. The obstacles are Microsoft secret APIs and patents.
Patents are a government intervention, but secret APIs are akin to Medieval trade guilds - and seem support your thesis that an OS is a natural monopoly. However, while you may call a programming platform with secret APIs an "OS", I do not. The Windows programming platform can only be fully exploited by Microsoft. In my opinion, an open specification is a necessary for a system to be an "OS" - otherwise it is essentially an embedded device with some user programmability (and that is exactly what MS wants Windows to become).
Another proprietary system, Java, meets my definition because it has an open specification, and in fact there are competing implementations both proprietary and open source at all scales (Micro to Enterprise). (Yes, I know there are some questions about patents in some APIs.) That is what Windows should be like.
I'm not sure if the government should enforce that, however. People wouldn't buy into such a scam in such numbers except for the need to read documents in secret formats that require MS software to decode.
If there is any government intervention, it should be only this: require all publicly funded electronic information to be available in a format with an open specification. E.g., US Customs listing of foreign ports (something I must translate to use in my work) - post it in DOC format if you wish, but there had better be an ASCII or XML or other format with a public spec. If MS DOC and XLS acquire open specs - more power to them.
If the tax is restricted to mail sent using SMTP on port 25, then it could work. Of course, the tax could be avoided for correspondents with whom you have a preexisting relationship by using VPN, SSH, etc. - and the law should make this explicitly ok (otherwise they are essentially taxing all information transmitted, not just email, which they already do when you pay your ISP bill). However, to send email to someone for the first time requires the use of SMTP port 25 - and paying the tax. Think of it as a tax on "introductions". Having been introduced, the parties can exchange public keys and avoid the tax in future correspondance. In fact, the tax should only apply to unencrypted/unauthenticated mail. There is no point in forcing the use of non SMTP based encryption once parties are introduced.
The mail difficulty with any tax or sender pays solution is that most spam comes from Asia. However, this tax can enforced for the US by simply blocking incoming port 25 for foreign ISPs unless they are current on payments for the tax bill (based on total bytes transferred, and/or with a little more work, total number of messages). This forces Asian ISPs to pass on the costs in some way. We don't care whether the actual spammers end up paying.
It is port 25 that is being abused, so only port 25 should be restricted. Yes, anyone can send or listen for mail on some other port, but you can bet I won't be listening for mail on port 1025 from strangers!
If the tax on port 25 is too high, then alternate introduction services will arise - and the tax law should not make such services illegal. Of course, goverments hate to lose revenue, and this is the biggest danger of any tax scheme.
The effect would be that port 25 would end up being used mostly for "quality" commericial email in quantities resembling those in your snail mail box. Friends would exchange public keys instead of email addresses to avoid the tax.
In an ideal world, packaged installs will be a compressed single file, containing all source code, configurable on any *nix like normal source code EXCEPT that now there's a graphical interface so that setting compile options, creating desktop shortcuts, and "Make clean, make install, make uninstall" now all work under X with a point-and-click.
You just described Source RPMS.
And while I can appreciate the desire to compile everything from source, it doesn't cut it when you are managing 40 production machines, most of which have no compiler installed (for security reasons and lack of need). Instead, I compile the Source RPMS on my devel machine, and push the binary RPMS to the 40 installations. I still get to use optimizations like compiling for i686 since all installed machines have Celeron or better.
I like the way RPM tracks installed files and keeps a database of MD5s to detect changes.
Think of the memory of a reversible system as initialized so that you have your program and data, plus a store of bits - some (half maybe) initialized to 1 and some initialized to 0. Imagine that every gate is perfect and loses no energy. However, no energy can be added to the system either. You are forever stuck with the same number of 1 bits and 0 bits. All you can do is shuffle them around. A real reversible computer is like this, except that the gates aren't perfect and lose some energy to heat during operation - but less than a conventional computer.
All your logic operations accomplish the equivalent of rearranging bits. For instance, there is no 'copy' or 'move' instruction. Instead you have an 'exchange' instruction. If you want to make a variable have the value of zero, you can't copy 0's to it. But you can exchange it with one of your known 0 words.
You carefully write your program so that it keeps track of values exchanged for known 0 and 1 bits so that it can reuse them later. But this becomes more and more difficult as the computation becomes more complex. Eventually, your supply of known 0 and known 1 bits dwindles and you have an increasing supply of "garbage" bits with essentially random values. They are really only pseudo-random, because all logic operations are deterministic (not to mention reversible), but their value is not known easily enough to be useful. When you run completely out of known bits, your computation has reached maximum entropy, or 'heat death'. To continue, you can clear some of the garbage bits to 0 (draining any charge in them to ground and dissipating heat in the process), and set other garbage bits to 1 (adding energy to charge any 0 bits). Having discharged its entropy into the host environment, your reversible computer can continue its computation.
Don't think you can get known 0 or known 1 bits for free by 'testing' them. Your 'test' instruction is reversible too. It must be possible to reconstruct the original memory state by simply running the logic in reverse. If this isn't obvious, remember that 'testing' a bit drains its energy, and the energy must be put somewhere. So the 'test' instruction operates by exchanging the tested bit with another bit - which can then be used to reverse the operation. Think Uncertainly Principle.
Once you get the hang of thermodynamic programming, you have a handle on understanding entropy and quantum mechanics. It makes you wonder: are entropy and the uncertainty principle necessary properties of any possible world? Or does the similarly between our mechanical model and our universe indicate that our universe is actually a gigantic reversible computation?
A practical device would probably not grind to a halt to set and clear a vast store of known bits. Instead, it would reuse bits as much as practical, but provide for a continuous supply of known 0s and known 1's (at the expense of adding energy and dissipating heat to do so).
Finally, when modelling physics, all computations should be reversible - because physical processes are reversible. An egg is difficult to unscramble without running time backward for the same reason that the memory of your reversible computer fills up with "garbage" bits. Enforcing reversibility provides a check for the correctness of the simulation.
It is very frustrating when your ISP is blacklisted by SPEWS - for good reason, they are definitely spam friendly - but they are the absolutely only option for broadband internet in your area. Several of our customer have this problem.
We end up letting them relay outgoing mail through our server.
Saying "use a different ISP" is fine - when there is actually some competition.
Oh yeah, I 0wn thousands of MP3s. Take that RIAA! Here's my address and phone number in case you want to sue me.
Since all my MP3s are completely legal (from independent artists' websites radio broadcasts and church services my dad recorded on tape in the 60s, and now magnatune.com), I would be tempted to say exactly that. The only drawback would be that work is keeping me real busy. (So why am I on slashdot?)
I didn't say anything about "no carb". I pointed out that real, as opposed to imaginary, Atkins programs have a balance of carbs, fat, and protein. Really low carbs are not recommended except for a short initial time period. And not by all systems.
No carb is *not* good for you. The Atkins diet simply corrects the way too much carb in a typical western diet.
I've been doing this every time we upgrade a customer since 1985. But on a private LAN. Is this a case of "do what people have been doing with computers for 20 years, but do it on the web!"? Or is migrating configuration via any kind of network covered by the patent?
Having had several family members use Atkins successfully, I can say that the above is misleading. It is true that high protein with near 0 carbs is hard on your kidneys. However, this extreme measure is only recommended for the first week, to "jump start" the weight loss. Some versions of Atkins don't recommend it at all.
To balance the dangers of high protein, 0 carb, consider the danger of a diet high in simple carbs: adult onset diabetes. That can cause permanent damage also - and is way too prevalent in America. (Throw away that Jolt.)
After the initial week, a typical Atkins regimine reintroduces fruits and grains - but in measured amounts to keep calories from carbs around 15%. After the desired weight loss is reached, carb percentage can be gradually increased to a stable ratio. Just make sure those carbs aren't "empty". You need those fruits and whole grains. You don't need that soda.
If I had a drive that was destroyed by an install, I'd say "good ridance" (even if installing XP). Unless the software is overwriting the firmware or something, this is simply cruddy hardware.
A decent CD-ROM is pretty cheap - I'd probably get a CD-RW while I was at it.
RPM dependencies have worked very well for me. I notice that Ximian Gnome issues quite a few release that simply fix dependency bugs - but I have never run into any. It seems to work for ordinary users also.
My dad wanted to try gthumb on RedHat 7.3 with KDE desktop. He just clicked on the rpm in RedCarpet, and it automatically downloaded an installed all 27 megs worth of gtk2 libraries needed to support that. It all just worked. He has a Gig of memory, so having both KDE and Gnome libraries loaded is not a problem:-)
The family summer camp we attended (jokingly) touted their rooms as "climate controlled". This meant that they had no A/C, and the temperature was controlled by the climate.
When I fist saw the title, I thought, "Good news, consumers are getting back some control". Then I read the rest of the article and was confused for a moment.
Since both fuel cells and batteries are ultimately recharged via electricity, it doesn't really matter. Rather than focus on distributing hydrogen gas, the focus should be on small electric rechargers for fuel cells (taking water or hydrocarbons as input, for instance). Then there can be a mixture of fuel cell and battery powered vehicles - all refueled via electricity. Both technologies can compete and improve. Don't forget that fuel cells require weight and bulk to store the hydrogen. I can even imaging a standard "power pack" form factor that can contain either a fuel cell or batteries. We would switch powerpack technologies as easily as switching AA cell technologies.
Yes, it is OK by the GPL to charge as much as the market will bear for binaries and support. For instance, SuSe charges for binaries. RedHat gives away binaries, but charges for support. Both companies are doing well.
If I have a closed source software, and use some open source "bits" that have been distributed under GPL, can't I just encapsulated the GPL stuff in a library and give the source to the library, and not the complete source to the software?
That works for LGPL. With GPL, you have to go a little farther and encapsulate the GPL code as a 'plugin', allowing the user to create their own derivative plugins for your proprietary application environment. For instance, a Windows application is a 'plugin' for the MS environment.
On our home system, we have a 486/66 with 20M RAM in use as an LTSP terminal (every ones last choice). It has an old monitor with top resolution of 1024x768 interlaced (matches the old Cirrus VLBus video card).
We have a Pentium I/200 and a Cyrix/233 with 64M RAM each of which make very nice LTSP terminals. The Pentium I is early 90s vintage. It is descended through a line of upgrades from a 256K IBM XT serial number 00100 with 10Meg disk running SCO Xenix. The old XT supported two users just fine, one on an ASCII terminal (which gave up the ghost just this year) and one on the console with the IBM MDA (text only) video adapter. I could never figure what people saw in DOS.
Finally, we have a ThinkNiC LTSP terminal from just a year or so ago.
The server is a $400 Dell 500SC with 384M ECC RAM and we have a Linksys 100BT switch. I bought RedHat 7.2 boxed retail set at MicroCenter and bought the Ximian Gnome CD (and keep both upgraded via cable modem).
We support 5 users for less money and better performance on word processing and web browsing than a single user Windoze machine. Caveats: The LTSP terminals can play "breakout" just fine on the 100BT network (except for the 486), but more intensive arcades require the console. Also, I suspect the reason our neighbors Windoze setups are so slow has more to do with Virii/Spyware/Adware than with Windows efficiency.
Yes, all terminals are in use quite often as our 4 daughters, my wife, and myself all try to work/play at the same time (we are still one short!)
While the neighbors are impressed, the line of 4 terminals on a long table (the fifth is in another room) makes them think it is some sort of special computer lab setup. They simply will not believe this is an ordinary consumer setup (or more likely they lose interest when they find out it won't run Windows games).
there is a much better solution to this and many other problems. Homeschool. I don't like WiFi either, but the sun puts out microwaves too, and I'm *much* more concerned about the content of Family Life Education here in Virginia. So we homeschool.
In the early days of public schools in America, each school was closely supervised by a relatively small number of parents with mostly compatible philosophy. Think Oklahoma! or Anne of Green Gables. This arrangement worked well. Public school today is a gigantic institution where parents are unwelcome nuisances. The huge NEA union is concerned about maintaining their cash flow and social engineering rather than education as most of us understand it.
Some who agree with me on the problem, think that the Public Schools can be fixed. I think they are too far gone.
Buying older systems can very likely cost you loads more on your electric bill.
When setting up my home network, my first configuration had my 486-66DX acting as a firewall router. It was plenty fast enough for the job and was free. However, we pay 8 cents/kwhr for electricity (which is effectively 24 cents/kwhr in 2 months of the summer for the A/C to remove the heat). At 100W - 200W, that adds up. I soon replaced it with a Linksys NAT firewall/router/switch at 10W. I figured it would pay for itself in about a year (I paid $80 for it at the time) just in electricity savings.
The drawback is that the Linksys firewall is far less capable than iptables. However, I just run iptables on the server to complement the NAT firewall. Since the Linksys has so few options to configure, this is very little extra admin.
Great! We'll see how well I do at burning my own audio CD. I've only been doing data.
Any suggestions for making CD labels in Linux? I have been using glabels-0.4.3 with Memorex CD label kit. My labels have been strictly text for programming stuff, but an audio CD needs some pictures.
I suspect that most music you object to (and I'll have to continue groping in the dark until you start naming artists whose music or sound you think is ugly) was made with the intent of creating something beautiful. People play electric guitars through Marshall stacks not because they want to disgust you with their ugly sound, but because electric guitars make a beautiful sound when amplified and distorted.
I think we may be finding some common ground. I have no objection to signal processing. The "music" I object to was designed to communicate rage and pain - which it does effectively. I accept the message of rage and pain, and will do my best to make things better, but I don't call it music. By "screaming", I don't mean any kind of signal processing - but specifically those kinds of distortion that make the instrument sound like it is screaming in pain. There are popular guitar effects that instead create the excitement and feeling of revving a motorcycle. I wouldn't call that screaming. I dislike motorcycles, but can understand why other people enjoy them (but I cringe when I see someone riding past on their motorbike in a T-shirt and shorts - I can't help imagining the result of the bike hitting a rock or swerving too sharp to avoid a car running a light). My daughter has lots of music of that sort. It is not conducive to studying, but is very conducive to aerobic exercise:-)
It also occurs to me that I don't mean screaming as in what people are sometimes said to do on a roller coaster. I would call that "squealing". "Screaming" to me has entirely negative connotations.
Not having had the argument before, I don't keep track of ugly music. But if I run into any in the next few days, I'll post it.
Actually, a few years back we were into country music. None of it involved physical "screaming", but there is a certain kind of country music that is obsessed with pain, infidelity, loneliness, depression, and suicide - screaming inside, if you will. I drew the line then at suicide, because of their young age. Now, we would only listen to such music with our full attention, paying attention to the words, talking about the situations that would make suicide seem attractive, not letting it poison our dreams.
You think it's ugly because you do not comprehend it. You don't like it, and you've made up a neat little story as an excuse to make you feel justified in not liking it, but your story is wrong, and you keep dancing around it instead of seeing it for the bullshit it is.
Are there *any* sounds you would consider ugly? I don't mean ugly just to you, but objectively ugly? If not, you are a relativist. If so, then what if someone makes those sounds and calls it "music"?
There are forms of music which I don't personally like (e.g. abstract jazz), but which I can see how other people would like it and can perceive intellectually the beauty of it. Similarly, I dislike the looks of skinny women, but can see how many find them especially attractive. Personal likes and dislikes are not the measure of objective beauty.
When I claim that beauty (and ugliness) is objective, I am not claiming that I am the ultimate authority and can easily be wrong. But I can have reasonable certainty on judgements that I have carefully researched. I have listened to some forms of American music, empathized with the rage and pain, read stories written by those in the culture describing what it is like to live in that culture, but the music is ugly. Perhaps it is not the musicians fault, any more than the woman with the scarred face, but it is ugly.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a very interesting article in Science News a few issues back about studies of GM plants. There were several solid conclusions:
- The gene *will* escape into the wild. In every single case studied, it escaped despite all precautions in production settings. Lab settings were more successful in keeping the lid on.
- Whether the escaped gene propagates widely beyond the escape point depends on its survival advantage.
- Survival advantages are not easy to guess. Setting up test ecosystems was fairly successful in determing survival advantage. The results were often quite surprising.
- Bt corn has a high survival advantage, and has escaped whereever it has been planted. It will continue to spread rapidly in the wild.
- Problems like those with Bt can be compensated for by adding additional transgenes that convey a survival disadvantage in the wild (without comprising desired function too much). This doesn't always work, because the traits can become separated.
We won't know whether the glowing fish might have your guessed disadvantage without trying it. For instance by putting some normal and glowing fish in a tank with predators in conditions as close to natural as can be arranged without letting the glowing fish escape. These fish should not be put into the hands of consumers until it is demonstrated that they don't last long if released. As others have pointed out, large numbers of these fish can easily have unforeseen consequences. Self-reproducing unforeseen consequences are a Very Dangerous Thing.Even when the cable is obsolete, it is useful for pulling new cable through. It is a shame to have to redo all that crawl space work when leaving one wire between nodes while removing would be so easy.
In fact, because of these inefficiencies with the exiting tenant rule, I actually prefer a rule requiring the incoming tenent to either use existing cable or remove it.
There were in fact competing implementations of Microsoft APIs, but Microsoft illegally destroyed them by, for instance, making Win3.1 recognize DRDOS and change its operation. It is completely feasible to create an opensource Windows NT implementation - and there is a project to do just that. The obstacles are Microsoft secret APIs and patents.
Patents are a government intervention, but secret APIs are akin to Medieval trade guilds - and seem support your thesis that an OS is a natural monopoly. However, while you may call a programming platform with secret APIs an "OS", I do not. The Windows programming platform can only be fully exploited by Microsoft. In my opinion, an open specification is a necessary for a system to be an "OS" - otherwise it is essentially an embedded device with some user programmability (and that is exactly what MS wants Windows to become).
Another proprietary system, Java, meets my definition because it has an open specification, and in fact there are competing implementations both proprietary and open source at all scales (Micro to Enterprise). (Yes, I know there are some questions about patents in some APIs.) That is what Windows should be like.
I'm not sure if the government should enforce that, however. People wouldn't buy into such a scam in such numbers except for the need to read documents in secret formats that require MS software to decode.
If there is any government intervention, it should be only this: require all publicly funded electronic information to be available in a format with an open specification. E.g., US Customs listing of foreign ports (something I must translate to use in my work) - post it in DOC format if you wish, but there had better be an ASCII or XML or other format with a public spec. If MS DOC and XLS acquire open specs - more power to them.
The mail difficulty with any tax or sender pays solution is that most spam comes from Asia. However, this tax can enforced for the US by simply blocking incoming port 25 for foreign ISPs unless they are current on payments for the tax bill (based on total bytes transferred, and/or with a little more work, total number of messages). This forces Asian ISPs to pass on the costs in some way. We don't care whether the actual spammers end up paying.
It is port 25 that is being abused, so only port 25 should be restricted. Yes, anyone can send or listen for mail on some other port, but you can bet I won't be listening for mail on port 1025 from strangers!
If the tax on port 25 is too high, then alternate introduction services will arise - and the tax law should not make such services illegal. Of course, goverments hate to lose revenue, and this is the biggest danger of any tax scheme.
The effect would be that port 25 would end up being used mostly for "quality" commericial email in quantities resembling those in your snail mail box. Friends would exchange public keys instead of email addresses to avoid the tax.
You just described Source RPMS.
And while I can appreciate the desire to compile everything from source, it doesn't cut it when you are managing 40 production machines, most of which have no compiler installed (for security reasons and lack of need). Instead, I compile the Source RPMS on my devel machine, and push the binary RPMS to the 40 installations. I still get to use optimizations like compiling for i686 since all installed machines have Celeron or better.
I like the way RPM tracks installed files and keeps a database of MD5s to detect changes.
All your logic operations accomplish the equivalent of rearranging bits. For instance, there is no 'copy' or 'move' instruction. Instead you have an 'exchange' instruction. If you want to make a variable have the value of zero, you can't copy 0's to it. But you can exchange it with one of your known 0 words.
You carefully write your program so that it keeps track of values exchanged for known 0 and 1 bits so that it can reuse them later. But this becomes more and more difficult as the computation becomes more complex. Eventually, your supply of known 0 and known 1 bits dwindles and you have an increasing supply of "garbage" bits with essentially random values. They are really only pseudo-random, because all logic operations are deterministic (not to mention reversible), but their value is not known easily enough to be useful. When you run completely out of known bits, your computation has reached maximum entropy, or 'heat death'. To continue, you can clear some of the garbage bits to 0 (draining any charge in them to ground and dissipating heat in the process), and set other garbage bits to 1 (adding energy to charge any 0 bits). Having discharged its entropy into the host environment, your reversible computer can continue its computation.
Don't think you can get known 0 or known 1 bits for free by 'testing' them. Your 'test' instruction is reversible too. It must be possible to reconstruct the original memory state by simply running the logic in reverse. If this isn't obvious, remember that 'testing' a bit drains its energy, and the energy must be put somewhere. So the 'test' instruction operates by exchanging the tested bit with another bit - which can then be used to reverse the operation. Think Uncertainly Principle.
Once you get the hang of thermodynamic programming, you have a handle on understanding entropy and quantum mechanics. It makes you wonder: are entropy and the uncertainty principle necessary properties of any possible world? Or does the similarly between our mechanical model and our universe indicate that our universe is actually a gigantic reversible computation?
A practical device would probably not grind to a halt to set and clear a vast store of known bits. Instead, it would reuse bits as much as practical, but provide for a continuous supply of known 0s and known 1's (at the expense of adding energy and dissipating heat to do so).
Finally, when modelling physics, all computations should be reversible - because physical processes are reversible. An egg is difficult to unscramble without running time backward for the same reason that the memory of your reversible computer fills up with "garbage" bits. Enforcing reversibility provides a check for the correctness of the simulation.
We end up letting them relay outgoing mail through our server.
Saying "use a different ISP" is fine - when there is actually some competition.
Since all my MP3s are completely legal (from independent artists' websites radio broadcasts and church services my dad recorded on tape in the 60s, and now magnatune.com), I would be tempted to say exactly that. The only drawback would be that work is keeping me real busy. (So why am I on slashdot?)
No carb is *not* good for you. The Atkins diet simply corrects the way too much carb in a typical western diet.
I've been doing this every time we upgrade a customer since 1985. But on a private LAN. Is this a case of "do what people have been doing with computers for 20 years, but do it on the web!"? Or is migrating configuration via any kind of network covered by the patent?
To balance the dangers of high protein, 0 carb, consider the danger of a diet high in simple carbs: adult onset diabetes. That can cause permanent damage also - and is way too prevalent in America. (Throw away that Jolt.)
After the initial week, a typical Atkins regimine reintroduces fruits and grains - but in measured amounts to keep calories from carbs around 15%. After the desired weight loss is reached, carb percentage can be gradually increased to a stable ratio. Just make sure those carbs aren't "empty". You need those fruits and whole grains. You don't need that soda.
A decent CD-ROM is pretty cheap - I'd probably get a CD-RW while I was at it.
My dad wanted to try gthumb on RedHat 7.3 with KDE desktop. He just clicked on the rpm in RedCarpet, and it automatically downloaded an installed all 27 megs worth of gtk2 libraries needed to support that. It all just worked. He has a Gig of memory, so having both KDE and Gnome libraries loaded is not a problem :-)
When I fist saw the title, I thought, "Good news, consumers are getting back some control". Then I read the rest of the article and was confused for a moment.
Since both fuel cells and batteries are ultimately recharged via electricity, it doesn't really matter. Rather than focus on distributing hydrogen gas, the focus should be on small electric rechargers for fuel cells (taking water or hydrocarbons as input, for instance). Then there can be a mixture of fuel cell and battery powered vehicles - all refueled via electricity. Both technologies can compete and improve. Don't forget that fuel cells require weight and bulk to store the hydrogen. I can even imaging a standard "power pack" form factor that can contain either a fuel cell or batteries. We would switch powerpack technologies as easily as switching AA cell technologies.
I'd rather he get the money than Amazon, assuming I don't come across a more deserving link first.
If I have a closed source software, and use some open source "bits" that have been distributed under GPL, can't I just encapsulated the GPL stuff in a library and give the source to the library, and not the complete source to the software?
That works for LGPL. With GPL, you have to go a little farther and encapsulate the GPL code as a 'plugin', allowing the user to create their own derivative plugins for your proprietary application environment. For instance, a Windows application is a 'plugin' for the MS environment.
We have a Pentium I/200 and a Cyrix/233 with 64M RAM each of which make very nice LTSP terminals. The Pentium I is early 90s vintage. It is descended through a line of upgrades from a 256K IBM XT serial number 00100 with 10Meg disk running SCO Xenix. The old XT supported two users just fine, one on an ASCII terminal (which gave up the ghost just this year) and one on the console with the IBM MDA (text only) video adapter. I could never figure what people saw in DOS.
Finally, we have a ThinkNiC LTSP terminal from just a year or so ago.
The server is a $400 Dell 500SC with 384M ECC RAM and we have a Linksys 100BT switch. I bought RedHat 7.2 boxed retail set at MicroCenter and bought the Ximian Gnome CD (and keep both upgraded via cable modem).
We support 5 users for less money and better performance on word processing and web browsing than a single user Windoze machine. Caveats: The LTSP terminals can play "breakout" just fine on the 100BT network (except for the 486), but more intensive arcades require the console. Also, I suspect the reason our neighbors Windoze setups are so slow has more to do with Virii/Spyware/Adware than with Windows efficiency.
Yes, all terminals are in use quite often as our 4 daughters, my wife, and myself all try to work/play at the same time (we are still one short!)
While the neighbors are impressed, the line of 4 terminals on a long table (the fifth is in another room) makes them think it is some sort of special computer lab setup. They simply will not believe this is an ordinary consumer setup (or more likely they lose interest when they find out it won't run Windows games).
In the early days of public schools in America, each school was closely supervised by a relatively small number of parents with mostly compatible philosophy. Think Oklahoma! or Anne of Green Gables. This arrangement worked well. Public school today is a gigantic institution where parents are unwelcome nuisances. The huge NEA union is concerned about maintaining their cash flow and social engineering rather than education as most of us understand it.
Some who agree with me on the problem, think that the Public Schools can be fixed. I think they are too far gone.
I wonder how many incidents of Deep Vein Thrombosis there will be among those sitting through the 10 hour epic?
When setting up my home network, my first configuration had my 486-66DX acting as a firewall router. It was plenty fast enough for the job and was free. However, we pay 8 cents/kwhr for electricity (which is effectively 24 cents/kwhr in 2 months of the summer for the A/C to remove the heat). At 100W - 200W, that adds up. I soon replaced it with a Linksys NAT firewall/router/switch at 10W. I figured it would pay for itself in about a year (I paid $80 for it at the time) just in electricity savings.
The drawback is that the Linksys firewall is far less capable than iptables. However, I just run iptables on the server to complement the NAT firewall. Since the Linksys has so few options to configure, this is very little extra admin.
Any suggestions for making CD labels in Linux? I have been using glabels-0.4.3 with Memorex CD label kit. My labels have been strictly text for programming stuff, but an audio CD needs some pictures.
I think we may be finding some common ground. I have no objection to signal processing. The "music" I object to was designed to communicate rage and pain - which it does effectively. I accept the message of rage and pain, and will do my best to make things better, but I don't call it music. By "screaming", I don't mean any kind of signal processing - but specifically those kinds of distortion that make the instrument sound like it is screaming in pain. There are popular guitar effects that instead create the excitement and feeling of revving a motorcycle. I wouldn't call that screaming. I dislike motorcycles, but can understand why other people enjoy them (but I cringe when I see someone riding past on their motorbike in a T-shirt and shorts - I can't help imagining the result of the bike hitting a rock or swerving too sharp to avoid a car running a light). My daughter has lots of music of that sort. It is not conducive to studying, but is very conducive to aerobic exercise :-)
It also occurs to me that I don't mean screaming as in what people are sometimes said to do on a roller coaster. I would call that "squealing". "Screaming" to me has entirely negative connotations.
Not having had the argument before, I don't keep track of ugly music. But if I run into any in the next few days, I'll post it.
Actually, a few years back we were into country music. None of it involved physical "screaming", but there is a certain kind of country music that is obsessed with pain, infidelity, loneliness, depression, and suicide - screaming inside, if you will. I drew the line then at suicide, because of their young age. Now, we would only listen to such music with our full attention, paying attention to the words, talking about the situations that would make suicide seem attractive, not letting it poison our dreams.
Are there *any* sounds you would consider ugly? I don't mean ugly just to you, but objectively ugly? If not, you are a relativist. If so, then what if someone makes those sounds and calls it "music"?
There are forms of music which I don't personally like (e.g. abstract jazz), but which I can see how other people would like it and can perceive intellectually the beauty of it. Similarly, I dislike the looks of skinny women, but can see how many find them especially attractive. Personal likes and dislikes are not the measure of objective beauty.
When I claim that beauty (and ugliness) is objective, I am not claiming that I am the ultimate authority and can easily be wrong. But I can have reasonable certainty on judgements that I have carefully researched. I have listened to some forms of American music, empathized with the rage and pain, read stories written by those in the culture describing what it is like to live in that culture, but the music is ugly. Perhaps it is not the musicians fault, any more than the woman with the scarred face, but it is ugly.