No, the reactor was built *in* Mathews House, under the bed of one of the builders (Justin, because he lost the coin toss). I lived right on the other side of that wall for a year.
Furthermore, the reactor was *not* dismantled at the orders of the judges. Fred found it in the back of his truck, still running, a few months later. I don't know what happened to it after that.
The physics majors in question did not use the nuclear material to which they had access, because, as Fred said, it would be pretty silly to use plutonium (the Physics Dept's neutron howitzer) to make plutonium. Their original material was thorium, from the inside of some old vacuum tubes (although their first plan involved americium from ordinary hardware-store smoke detectors).
The one thing they had to borrow from the Dept was the equipment needed to prove plutonium production. *THAT* took a lot of begging, and was the hardest part of the whole thing.
The list item was inspired by a Reader's Digest article about the "Nuclear Boy Scout", who built a breeder reactor in a shed in hopes of making Eagle Scout (he made a Superfund site instead), so, really, any whacko with enough nerve and enough physics books could probably do the same.
When you have a cold, you should NOT take antibiotics to help your immune system fight off oppurtunistic bacteria. Unnecessary antibiotics will just kill off your symbiotic bacteria (the ones which are HELPing your immune system by competing with other germs) and increase the numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your system (endangering you and all the people around you).
No, everyone has 44 autosomal chromosomes and 2 sex chromosomes (either one X and one Y or two Xs).
X chromosomes are distinctly different from the autosomal chromosomes. No human being can live with a missing autosomal chromosome (e.g. only one chromosome 21 instead of two) -- embryos with this type of defect are miscarried so early that they are not even detected, even though embryos with three copies of an autosomal chromosome (a defect arising from the same mistake in meiosis which causes the loss of an autosomal chromosome in some embryos) are detected -- some even live to adulthood (Down syndrome). On the other hand, all human beings can be said (in general) to have only one X chromosome; in females, one X chromosome is almost completely inactivated in each cell.
I was a regular user of AvantGo (on my Macintosh) until this weekend, when I finally got my Visor and my Linux box talking to each other. I enjoyed the service very much, because I love being able to read the news or a short story while on the bus. I was never a fan of AvantGo, the company -- their website is annoying to use, they put ads onto your Palm, and now they are threatening to charge providers for AvantGo's right to slurp their content.
So, I'm trying to switch over to Plucker (and SiteSweeper). I find this approach to be much more flexible & customizable (and therefore more useful), in addition to being free (as in speech). Plus there is the advantage that Plucker downloads and parses the websites before I hotsync, rather than during, like AvantGo (which was murder on my handheld's batteries). Plucker is also faster, because my handheld does not have to do as much rendering.
However, I have had some trouble finding useable versions of many of the websites I want to use. For example, I have not been able to find good palm-ready Mac websites (like MacNN, MacCentral, and MacFixIt). There are rumors that this situation is due to AvantGo forcing channel providers to only make their channel available to AvantGo, not the general public.
All in all, I have found the AvantGo alternatives to be much more useful than AvantGo ever was. I am certainly no Linux hacker, but I have had no problems with Plucker, which is very well-documented. If I can find all of the content I want elsewhere, I will get rid of AvantGo entirely, and be happier for it.
I'm pretty sure that when the dust clears on this mess, there will have been some reason behind his leaving like he did than simple scam-greed.
At the end of the linked article (from msnbc), Richardson's wife says that his sudden grab for money and subsequent disappearance may have been due to hidden gambling debts:
Ms. Murray says she and her family have found evidence on Mr. Richardson's computer that her husband was gambling over the Internet. She says she thinks that he may have had gambling debts. "I didn't realize the man had it in him to be a criminal," she says.
Actually, Office X is a Carbon application. If it were Cocoa, there would be at least a chance of getting it running on OpenStep. But, even then, the proprietary nature of Aqua & Quartz, to which Office X is heavily tied, would cause problems.
I agree with what you've said about dual-booting; I really enjoy the general similarities between my Linux desktop and my MacOS X laptop.
"2nd Post!" was not talking about how Apple is directly helping him in that post. He was talking about how he won't "be screwed when [his laptop] get's stolen" because of tricks like this.
No insult meant, Kathleen. I certainly agree that it *did* take guts to post in front of these crazy Slashdotters. However, I think a lot of guys do similar things because they are wusses -- proposing over the radio, proposing on the jumbotron at the football game, proposing on their personal website. So, speaking as a geek girl, I just want to remind the geek guys that romance is still in. And anyway, do you think Taco's ever going to let anyone else propose on/.?
However, I would like to issue a plea to all of you geek guys out there: Don't take Taco as your example. Please propose in person, on one knee, and all that mushy stuff! Don't wimp out and propose in a public way because you're too scared to do it in person. That way, you can hold her when she cries like Kathleen did (which is, by the way, a true sign of love).
Kathleen and Rob, best of luck to both of you. Especially Kathleen
To sum up, it's a lot better business to sell millions of copies of the same thing than to go try to develop millions of one-off pieces of software. Right? And open source
software-development-as-a-service Cox is talking about sure seems to me to be the latter.
I haven't seen an open source advocate compellingly address this issue.
The reasoning goes something like this: proprietary software -- selling copies of bits you write once and keep a monopoly on through copyright law -- is certainly more profitable in the short term. Monopolies usually are. However, open source is a phenomenon that isn't going away, so the copyright monopoly isn't perpetual. Given sufficient time, any useful software functionality can and will be reproduced with open source. Once this happens, your software is abandoned by a free market in favor of the cheaper alternative, and you either write new software or sell support.
On its face, this only seems to imply that selling a particular item of proprietary software is unsustainable in the long term, which any dolt could have told me. MS doesn't make its money selling DOS, but by selling progressive upgrades from that original product. However, this means that you can only make money selling bits as long as you can code new useful features faster than the open source competition, and can maintain a large enough lead that people will pay you for earlier access to your innovations. One can perhaps argue that you then aren't in the software business so much as the R&D or predicting-the-future business, but I won't.
Instead, I'll point out the other big claim supporting this notion: open source breeds open source programmers. You don't have to be a master programmer to be a programmer any more, because you don't have to be good enough and dedicated enough to make it your living. It's vastly easier to add a missing feature to a program than to write the program from scratch -- and this lower barrier to entry becomes an incentive for more people to learn how to program. Therefore, the open source community grows, perhaps exponentially. Now, your software company has to hire more and smarter programmers to stay far enough ahead of the open source competition to keep your upgrades saleable. But the open source community, in theory, can continue to grow long after the resources of any particular company are exhausted on programmers' salaries.
This is what has MS worried: for the time being, their lead is comfortable. But the open source community has just started to really gain steam in the last four or five years, and MS already relies on creative stock option tricks to pay its armies of programmers.
In the end, this ever-accelerating race against open competition is supposed to kill proprietary software firms. Selling support is a perfectly viable business model in this environment -- not, mind you, a quick ticket to untold billions in profit. The support companies, in this model, are not the engines of open source so much as the axle grease; the community drives the software forward collectively and spontaneously. Almost nobody really wants to write documentation or do tech support full time, so that's a niche that somebody can get paid to fill. But even if all the Red Hats and Ximians were to fold tomorrow, the Debians and GNUs and volunteer kernel hackers would be essentially unaffected.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Cox's software-development-as-service model isn't necessarily a better business model than selling proprietary software. Just in the long run, it's the only one that will survive.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the reactor was built *in* Mathews House, under the bed of one of the builders (Justin, because he lost the coin toss). I lived right on the other side of that wall for a year.
Furthermore, the reactor was *not* dismantled at the orders of the judges. Fred found it in the back of his truck, still running, a few months later. I don't know what happened to it after that.
The physics majors in question did not use the nuclear material to which they had access, because, as Fred said, it would be pretty silly to use plutonium (the Physics Dept's neutron howitzer) to make plutonium. Their original material was thorium, from the inside of some old vacuum tubes (although their first plan involved americium from ordinary hardware-store smoke detectors).
The one thing they had to borrow from the Dept was the equipment needed to prove plutonium production. *THAT* took a lot of begging, and was the hardest part of the whole thing.
The list item was inspired by a Reader's Digest article about the "Nuclear Boy Scout", who built a breeder reactor in a shed in hopes of making Eagle Scout (he made a Superfund site instead), so, really, any whacko with enough nerve and enough physics books could probably do the same.
When you have a cold, you should NOT take antibiotics to help your immune system fight off oppurtunistic bacteria. Unnecessary antibiotics will just kill off your symbiotic bacteria (the ones which are HELPing your immune system by competing with other germs) and increase the numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your system (endangering you and all the people around you).
X chromosomes are distinctly different from the autosomal chromosomes. No human being can live with a missing autosomal chromosome (e.g. only one chromosome 21 instead of two) -- embryos with this type of defect are miscarried so early that they are not even detected, even though embryos with three copies of an autosomal chromosome (a defect arising from the same mistake in meiosis which causes the loss of an autosomal chromosome in some embryos) are detected -- some even live to adulthood (Down syndrome). On the other hand, all human beings can be said (in general) to have only one X chromosome; in females, one X chromosome is almost completely inactivated in each cell.
So, I'm trying to switch over to Plucker (and SiteSweeper). I find this approach to be much more flexible & customizable (and therefore more useful), in addition to being free (as in speech). Plus there is the advantage that Plucker downloads and parses the websites before I hotsync, rather than during, like AvantGo (which was murder on my handheld's batteries). Plucker is also faster, because my handheld does not have to do as much rendering.
However, I have had some trouble finding useable versions of many of the websites I want to use. For example, I have not been able to find good palm-ready Mac websites (like MacNN, MacCentral, and MacFixIt). There are rumors that this situation is due to AvantGo forcing channel providers to only make their channel available to AvantGo, not the general public.
All in all, I have found the AvantGo alternatives to be much more useful than AvantGo ever was. I am certainly no Linux hacker, but I have had no problems with Plucker, which is very well-documented. If I can find all of the content I want elsewhere, I will get rid of AvantGo entirely, and be happier for it.
I'm pretty sure that when the dust clears on this mess, there will have been some reason behind his leaving like he did than simple scam-greed.
At the end of the linked article (from msnbc), Richardson's wife says that his sudden grab for money and subsequent disappearance may have been due to hidden gambling debts:
Ms. Murray says she and her family have found evidence on Mr. Richardson's computer that her husband was gambling over the Internet. She says she thinks that he may have had gambling debts.
"I didn't realize the man had it in him to be a criminal," she says.
I think you may be right.
I agree with what you've said about dual-booting; I really enjoy the general similarities between my Linux desktop and my MacOS X laptop.
Learn before you post.
P.S. Happy Valentine's Day to CaptnPepe! ;-)
Kathleen and Rob, best of luck to both of you. Especially Kathleen
The reasoning goes something like this: proprietary software -- selling copies of bits you write once and keep a monopoly on through copyright law -- is certainly more profitable in the short term. Monopolies usually are. However, open source is a phenomenon that isn't going away, so the copyright monopoly isn't perpetual. Given sufficient time, any useful software functionality can and will be reproduced with open source. Once this happens, your software is abandoned by a free market in favor of the cheaper alternative, and you either write new software or sell support.
On its face, this only seems to imply that selling a particular item of proprietary software is unsustainable in the long term, which any dolt could have told me. MS doesn't make its money selling DOS, but by selling progressive upgrades from that original product. However, this means that you can only make money selling bits as long as you can code new useful features faster than the open source competition, and can maintain a large enough lead that people will pay you for earlier access to your innovations. One can perhaps argue that you then aren't in the software business so much as the R&D or predicting-the-future business, but I won't.
Instead, I'll point out the other big claim supporting this notion: open source breeds open source programmers. You don't have to be a master programmer to be a programmer any more, because you don't have to be good enough and dedicated enough to make it your living. It's vastly easier to add a missing feature to a program than to write the program from scratch -- and this lower barrier to entry becomes an incentive for more people to learn how to program. Therefore, the open source community grows, perhaps exponentially. Now, your software company has to hire more and smarter programmers to stay far enough ahead of the open source competition to keep your upgrades saleable. But the open source community, in theory, can continue to grow long after the resources of any particular company are exhausted on programmers' salaries.
This is what has MS worried: for the time being, their lead is comfortable. But the open source community has just started to really gain steam in the last four or five years, and MS already relies on creative stock option tricks to pay its armies of programmers.
In the end, this ever-accelerating race against open competition is supposed to kill proprietary software firms. Selling support is a perfectly viable business model in this environment -- not, mind you, a quick ticket to untold billions in profit. The support companies, in this model, are not the engines of open source so much as the axle grease; the community drives the software forward collectively and spontaneously. Almost nobody really wants to write documentation or do tech support full time, so that's a niche that somebody can get paid to fill. But even if all the Red Hats and Ximians were to fold tomorrow, the Debians and GNUs and volunteer kernel hackers would be essentially unaffected.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Cox's software-development-as-service model isn't necessarily a better business model than selling proprietary software. Just in the long run, it's the only one that will survive.