While I have seen a lot of technical problems with Blogger, from what I gather from the LiveJournal site the journal only appears on their website, not yours. As an aside, I think Blogger just looks better.
There's definitely a stigma attached to porn. And gay porn in particular has a lucrative position.
If you're gay in a conservative small town or hold some prominent/respectable position, there's little chance that you can physically access gay porn, much less come out of the closet. Phone sex and the net would pretty much be your only sources for erotic and social release. Hell, look at chat room/channel demographics. Gay-themed chat areas are packed around the clock. People need communities and there's an entire cosmos online for everyone and anyone.
A few consultants I've worked with deal in value management and sling the word around alot. Then I asked them for a definition of the word, and they couldn't come up with anything that made sense.
Well, I agree that Monsanto's tactics leave a lot to be desired, but remember that genetic engineering is an expensive and lengthy process. Drug and agricultural companies seem to charge a lot for their biological products, but these are typically the product of hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D and many years of research. It is hard manipulating biological systems, and most biotech companies have a hard time staying profitable.
Again, most genetically modified crops yield fertile crops which have replantable seeds. This issue is almost sacrosanct to farmers. Monsanto merely acquired a company which was developing a Terminator seed gene, which would prevent crops from having replantable seeds. The public furor was impressive and great.
The resistance of Monsanto brand canola to Monsanto brand Roundup pesticide is not a coincidence. Roundup was specifically developed to work well with Monsanto engineered crops, so much so that using any other broad spectrum pesticide would ruin the crop. Thus when farmers buy Monsanto engineered seed, they have to buy Monsanto engineered pesticides too.
Monsanto definitely has a bad rep. Although they didn't actually do anything with it, the Terminator seed debacle definitely tarnished their image. Here Monsanto had acquired a company which was developing seeds which would grow but yield crops which were infertile. That is, year after year, you'd have to buy seeds because you couldn't plant seeds from the previous crop. This was viewed as particularly galling in the case of Third World countries where they wouldn't have money to buy seeds year after year.
Yeah, I think it was Bill Cosby who said, "Who wants to be 300 years old and see your 200 year old kids coming up the front steps with 100 year old grand kids in tow?"
People are right and wrong about this. The gene already resides in our normal genetic material, the question is simply when it is activated, which relies on other biological timers. The danger of blocking this gene is that all of our cells would turn cancerous. We need to kill off some of our cells to live.
You *could* create a virus to target and damage this gene so that the victim goes all cancerous very quickly. Still, this seems so extreme that I doubt it would spread very far (assuming that this virus was transmittable) as it would kill the host too quick. The slow cancer option is possible, but that's hardly any fun, now is it?
I'd say you could view DeCSS academically and it would be an idea. Or you could use it to decode DVD's and it would be a tool. The same goes for the list of docs.
Naturally, we know there's a moral distinction here and a practical distinction. DeCSS won't end up killing people, no matter what the MPAA asserts. Still, our laws are funky like that.
So in order to put an mp3 of *anything* on Napster, you'd have to register it with RIAA first?! So much for a free-wheeling net. That'll be the death of Napster certainly! Napster-served, RIAA-approved!
Imagine the amount of cash RIAA will have to sink into both manpower and hardware to do this snooping effectively. Janelle Brown (the Salon writer) is correct; the music industry's efforts would be much better spent on innovation rather than trying to defend an out-dated business model. Little more needs to be said.
What about the folks over at Lucasarts for their Monkey Island games and other adventure games?
Or anybody over at Sierra for that early era of adventure games like the Kings Quest and Space Quest series? Or Sierra's impressive transformation into a financially viable publishing house?
And on a more personal note, I'd also nominate Jordan Mechner for games like the Prince of Persia and, later, The Last Express.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but being able to tell a story still seems important!
Seriously though, what's the pricing on these tablets going to be? I have a feeling it's going to be caught in a nasty place between palm-tops and laptops.
I know it's a taste issue, but 99% of TV sucks! I'd be happier if this data they aggregated ended up delivering better programming to me. But it still doesn't. In a sense, if they didn't anonymize the usage habits, I'd hope that it would result in better personalized content to me.
Nothing too earthshattering here..
on
Hacking Biology
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· Score: 1
It's just about the advances in DNA computing and a bunch of related cellular process simulation which accompanies it. Certainly having detailed cellular process simulators would be extremely useful in other branches of biology too. But this describes a computer that's made from biological compounds and has little to do with engineering existing organisms or animals.
Certainly the language describing biological components as computing hardware is fascinating. It leaves a lot of room to speculate about a cross-over between actual organisms and powerful DNA computing systems.
I know it's Verisign's fault, but it really doesn't make the consumer side of.NET sound very trustworthy. I understand they're going to be using Kerebos for the Hailstorm identity back-end, but clearly there's plenty of room for Microsoft to botch. They're well positioned (and well funded) to actually go head with it, but the question is how much will people trust Microsoft? Even paired up with AmEx?
Amazing how far things can go when you're not paying much attention. It seems like good ideas pop up when you let your conscious mind relax and just play around with a medium, be it geometry or sculpture or code. In drawing classes they try to get you to "loosen up", which doesn't mean crudely but simply without worrying about an end goal. I think this is definitely an example of that; just playing with the math.
"This TV will self-destruct if removed from the Indian sub-continent."
The whole thing is a pretty strange. How large of an impact is this gray market having? And what happens if the device can't get a good GPS signal? Does it err on the side of the corporation (shuts down) or the buyer (keeps working)?
Well, there's the common descent issue too. That all animals evolved from a common ancestor somewhere up the line and that closely related species share a recent common ancestor. Thus mammals descended from a group of furry, warm-blooded, nipply creatures way back when. Humans and monkeys descended from the same group of primative early proto-primates.
There's a line of reasoning here. Let's start with a young Earth, since I'm not really qualified about the Big Bang.
You've got warm puddles where various compounds are mixing together. Puddles beget some simple chemical reactions.
Simple reactions beget some more complex reactions (perhaps helped along by a clay matrix or some catalyst).
Complex reactions beget some self-sustaining reactions (a difficult jump that is still being explained.
Self-sustaining reactions beget simple blobs capable of segregating chemicals (always useful in reactions).
Simple blobs improve their chemical processes and beget simple proto-cells.
Proto-cells beget protocells with more complex reaction pathways.
Complex protocells beget simple bacteria. And so on.
Naturally, nobody was around there to see this. So it's all theory. We can show some of these things happening (basic organic compounds from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus, or the formation of basic blobs), but we can't really give it the billion years or so to have the whole thing happen. Thus areas of active research.
Introns are just junk DNA thrown in there. One idea is that they're good for evolution in that they provide raw material for new genes (activate or mutate an intron and you get some new characteristics). They aren't comments, as DNA has its own commenting scheme of sorts (stop and start codons and operator sequences).
Actually we see this in nature too. Retroviruses (like our friend HIV) will cut and paste their own genetic material into yours, thus making you their unsuspecting virus factory.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have seen a lot of technical problems with Blogger, from what I gather from the LiveJournal site the journal only appears on their website, not yours. As an aside, I think Blogger just looks better.
There's definitely a stigma attached to porn. And gay porn in particular has a lucrative position.
If you're gay in a conservative small town or hold some prominent/respectable position, there's little chance that you can physically access gay porn, much less come out of the closet. Phone sex and the net would pretty much be your only sources for erotic and social release. Hell, look at chat room/channel demographics. Gay-themed chat areas are packed around the clock. People need communities and there's an entire cosmos online for everyone and anyone.
Porn tends to be enjoyed privately, so there seems little advantage to accessing it on a street corner.
A few consultants I've worked with deal in value management and sling the word around alot. Then I asked them for a definition of the word, and they couldn't come up with anything that made sense.
Also known as, what a wonderful way to launder money!
Well, I agree that Monsanto's tactics leave a lot to be desired, but remember that genetic engineering is an expensive and lengthy process. Drug and agricultural companies seem to charge a lot for their biological products, but these are typically the product of hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D and many years of research. It is hard manipulating biological systems, and most biotech companies have a hard time staying profitable.
Again, most genetically modified crops yield fertile crops which have replantable seeds. This issue is almost sacrosanct to farmers. Monsanto merely acquired a company which was developing a Terminator seed gene, which would prevent crops from having replantable seeds. The public furor was impressive and great.
The resistance of Monsanto brand canola to Monsanto brand Roundup pesticide is not a coincidence. Roundup was specifically developed to work well with Monsanto engineered crops, so much so that using any other broad spectrum pesticide would ruin the crop. Thus when farmers buy Monsanto engineered seed, they have to buy Monsanto engineered pesticides too.
Monsanto definitely has a bad rep. Although they didn't actually do anything with it, the Terminator seed debacle definitely tarnished their image. Here Monsanto had acquired a company which was developing seeds which would grow but yield crops which were infertile. That is, year after year, you'd have to buy seeds because you couldn't plant seeds from the previous crop. This was viewed as particularly galling in the case of Third World countries where they wouldn't have money to buy seeds year after year.
Not a happy picture
For the record, they're not talking about marijuana. They're talking about canola, a legal crop.
Yeah, I think it was Bill Cosby who said, "Who wants to be 300 years old and see your 200 year old kids coming up the front steps with 100 year old grand kids in tow?"
People are right and wrong about this. The gene already resides in our normal genetic material, the question is simply when it is activated, which relies on other biological timers. The danger of blocking this gene is that all of our cells would turn cancerous. We need to kill off some of our cells to live.
You *could* create a virus to target and damage this gene so that the victim goes all cancerous very quickly. Still, this seems so extreme that I doubt it would spread very far (assuming that this virus was transmittable) as it would kill the host too quick. The slow cancer option is possible, but that's hardly any fun, now is it?
Which one is a tool and which one is an idea?
I'd say you could view DeCSS academically and it would be an idea. Or you could use it to decode DVD's and it would be a tool. The same goes for the list of docs.
Naturally, we know there's a moral distinction here and a practical distinction. DeCSS won't end up killing people, no matter what the MPAA asserts. Still, our laws are funky like that.
So in order to put an mp3 of *anything* on Napster, you'd have to register it with RIAA first?! So much for a free-wheeling net. That'll be the death of Napster certainly! Napster-served, RIAA-approved!
Imagine the amount of cash RIAA will have to sink into both manpower and hardware to do this snooping effectively. Janelle Brown (the Salon writer) is correct; the music industry's efforts would be much better spent on innovation rather than trying to defend an out-dated business model. Little more needs to be said.
What about the folks over at Lucasarts for their Monkey Island games and other adventure games?
Or anybody over at Sierra for that early era of adventure games like the Kings Quest and Space Quest series? Or Sierra's impressive transformation into a financially viable publishing house?
And on a more personal note, I'd also nominate Jordan Mechner for games like the Prince of Persia and, later, The Last Express.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but being able to tell a story still seems important!
2000? We going retro these days?
Seriously though, what's the pricing on these tablets going to be? I have a feeling it's going to be caught in a nasty place between palm-tops and laptops.
Oh and let's not forget battery life.
I know it's a taste issue, but 99% of TV sucks! I'd be happier if this data they aggregated ended up delivering better programming to me. But it still doesn't. In a sense, if they didn't anonymize the usage habits, I'd hope that it would result in better personalized content to me.
It's just about the advances in DNA computing and a bunch of related cellular process simulation which accompanies it. Certainly having detailed cellular process simulators would be extremely useful in other branches of biology too. But this describes a computer that's made from biological compounds and has little to do with engineering existing organisms or animals.
Certainly the language describing biological components as computing hardware is fascinating. It leaves a lot of room to speculate about a cross-over between actual organisms and powerful DNA computing systems.
I know it's Verisign's fault, but it really doesn't make the consumer side of .NET sound very trustworthy. I understand they're going to be using Kerebos for the Hailstorm identity back-end, but clearly there's plenty of room for Microsoft to botch. They're well positioned (and well funded) to actually go head with it, but the question is how much will people trust Microsoft? Even paired up with AmEx?
Amazing how far things can go when you're not paying much attention. It seems like good ideas pop up when you let your conscious mind relax and just play around with a medium, be it geometry or sculpture or code. In drawing classes they try to get you to "loosen up", which doesn't mean crudely but simply without worrying about an end goal. I think this is definitely an example of that; just playing with the math.
"This TV will self-destruct if removed from the Indian sub-continent."
The whole thing is a pretty strange. How large of an impact is this gray market having? And what happens if the device can't get a good GPS signal? Does it err on the side of the corporation (shuts down) or the buyer (keeps working)?
Well, there's the common descent issue too. That all animals evolved from a common ancestor somewhere up the line and that closely related species share a recent common ancestor. Thus mammals descended from a group of furry, warm-blooded, nipply creatures way back when. Humans and monkeys descended from the same group of primative early proto-primates.
There's a line of reasoning here. Let's start with a young Earth, since I'm not really qualified about the Big Bang.
You've got warm puddles where various compounds are mixing together. Puddles beget some simple chemical reactions.
Simple reactions beget some more complex reactions (perhaps helped along by a clay matrix or some catalyst).
Complex reactions beget some self-sustaining reactions (a difficult jump that is still being explained.
Self-sustaining reactions beget simple blobs capable of segregating chemicals (always useful in reactions).
Simple blobs improve their chemical processes and beget simple proto-cells.
Proto-cells beget protocells with more complex reaction pathways.
Complex protocells beget simple bacteria. And so on.
Naturally, nobody was around there to see this. So it's all theory. We can show some of these things happening (basic organic compounds from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus, or the formation of basic blobs), but we can't really give it the billion years or so to have the whole thing happen. Thus areas of active research.
Introns are just junk DNA thrown in there. One idea is that they're good for evolution in that they provide raw material for new genes (activate or mutate an intron and you get some new characteristics). They aren't comments, as DNA has its own commenting scheme of sorts (stop and start codons and operator sequences).
Actually we see this in nature too. Retroviruses (like our friend HIV) will cut and paste their own genetic material into yours, thus making you their unsuspecting virus factory.