It depends on how you define "geek factor." The point is clearly not this particular material - which, as the article stresses, is not a superior superconductor. The point is pushing the qualities of superconductivity into a whole new realm of materials, particularly one that has not been thought to be open to it.
Most superconductors and superconductor research is not at the application phase. It is about learning the secrets of electrical conductivity with an eye towards eventually applying them. This is an important milestone, but the fruits will probably not appear for another decade or so.
Welcome to a little process we call evolution, people. Ooh, but it's at such an accelerated scale! Ooh, but everything is in a delicate balance! Get over it. Human beings are screwing with the genome. We're not going back. This is not a "good" or a "bad" thing. It may be incredibly dangerous to us as individuals and a species, and to civilization in general, but once out there in the wild, these genetic modifications are subject to the same processes as to those resulting from "natural" processes, whatever that means.
Relax. Life has survived everything that's been thrown at it (and believe me, catastrophic comet impacts had about ten thousand times the impact on the oh-so-delicate "web of life" as any number of sterile moths) and it will survive genetic engineering. And as to the effects on the human species and human civilization? Hell, those'll take hundreds and thousands of years to show up -we'll all be dead by then.
Unless of course we manage to turn off the death genes...
This precedent is going to blow up in time. Napster deserves what it's getting because it obviously and knowingly facilitated piracy. It trusted the power of the consumer masses' desires to roll over any objections to clear violation of copyright law (silly Napster). But what happens when protected material starts getting traded over networks which, intentionally or not, have plausible deniability about the specific content what they're facilitating transfer of? Is anyone providing any kind of FTP support liable to identify the copyright status of what's being transferred? Such an imperative would make the continued existance of the internet impossible.
The unfortunate fact is that this type of conflict will lead inevitably to a the development of copyright identification/anti-copying protocols which will effectively pave the way for the content distribution industry to create a worlkd where pay-to-play is your only option for all media. ANybody have a better solution? (I do- check my most recent comment on a similar subject).
In response to a lot of people questioning the validity/purpose of such an action - Well one can't speak for anyone but offhand I'd say it's a valid response to an invalid question. There is no reasonable purpose for the government of a free and democratic nation to collect information on the religious beliefs of its inhabitants. Providing a nonsense answer is a valid response in the spirit of non-violent resistance.
In response to the issue of whether respondents could face legal repercussions to their response... isn't religion one of the basic issues of free choice? What makes espousing a religious belief fraudulent? That you aren't REALLY serious about that belief? Better start lining up the Christians for prosecution, then... plenty of people only practice that belief on Sunday morning, which doesn't strike me a particulalry serious. And this is coming from a practicing Christian, mind you. Anyone should have the right to claim whatever belief system they like. Wouldn't you think?
Usually if I dig in these slashdot world gone mad rights articles tends to be a bit more grayscale and ambiguous in the unabridged version. This one gets scarier when you read more. The magazine wants to sue if customers who disagree with the decision boycott the magazine? They want to prevent eReferree from publishing response to the court case? Good God. We're gonna sue you, you're going to take it, and like it, and if your customers (or OUR customers) complain, why, we'll sue you again!
Boycott this magazine.
It's ridiculous to have an openly available standard syntactic construction tool available to anyone. It's clear this will destroy the basis of intellectual property and stifle innovation in virtually all areas of communications.
What even a cursory (it deserves no better) read of this article reveals is that it is virtually free of content except a basic Linux=BAD message. Open Source threatens intellectual property - but no explanation of what the threat is. Open Source stifles innovation - but no explanation how. Legislators must be educated about Open Source... With a view towards acheiving what? What the hell do legislators have to say about how hackers choose to write their code? This is just smoke - basic propaganda with no intention other than to make stupid people (particularly investors) fearful of Linux. Look, this guy spends the whole article asserting that Open Source is a threat... and then insists that its recent inroads into business markets poses no threat to Microsoft. Bill Gates ain't the richest man on earth anymore, kids. Who smells fear?
I'm concerned about something that's already an issue with composite construction materials - outgassing of unreacted chemicals in the adhesive used in bonding. The most typical unreacted component is formaldehyde used in the manufacture of phenol-formaldehyde resins widely used in composites. While in conventional products these fumes sill dissipate over time, if encapsulated there could be an ever-renewed source of noxious and potentially dangerous fumes
Let's not forget the fact that Ricochet spent what must have been a small fortune on a national add campaign that quite simply stank. What is it about a pair of retro-outfitted, vaguely British Avenger-wannabes that's supposed to make me think "Wow, wireless internet." To make a product like this work you have to engage the business market and you're not going to do it with a bunch of ads that spend too much time on a dubious version of style to even adequately explain what the product is all about.
But picture this: All these spook applications get created in open source, then there's some kind of "security incident," the next thing you know all domestic applications of all relevant open source systems are made illegal for security reasons. The open source movement is set back decades, hackers get thrown in jail, linux proponents protest "with open source illegal only criminals will have open source!" (resulting in a nasty copyright lawsuit by the NRA). Two birds with one stone?
Just to be the Devil's advocate: What exactly is the problem with cloning a human being? I mean, ethically, what's the big deal? "Playing God?" I think we've already gone well past that point (recombo DNA, GMO orgtanisms, synthetic polymers that can mimic DNA). Robert McKinnell, a fellow Minnesotan who I believe was the first to sucessfully clone a vertabrate (a frog) once commented that what you get if you clone a frog is a baby frog. What we got when we cloned a sheep was a lamb. And when a human is inevitably cloned, we will have a baby on our hands and the ethical issues of what we do with that person will be exactly the same as they are with any human being. What threat is it that to any of us beyond freaking us out? So Bill Gates could make ten million copies of himself. BFD. He'd be broke, someone would have to pay to deliver and raise 10 Million kids (remember, valid or not that $50K pricetag is just the beginning. Have you seen the way college costs are going?!), and it'd still be a drop in the bucket of the world population. Anyone have genuine (not ridiculously speculative or merely based on population - those arguments are just as valid against screwing as they are against cloning) why human cloning shouldn't be legal? (Bonus points if you can clone Robert McKinnell's objection to human cloning!)
I agree with some points, not with others.
Not all coal-fired power plants are created equal, which is part of th dissonance of this discussion. Some are very dirty, but some are remarkably clean.
I originally read the report of epidemiological evidence of increased death rates due to air pollution's effects on respiratory disease in Chemical & Engineering News, the periodical of the American Chemical Society (my educational background is in chemistry). I'm afraid I don't have a reference though. Here's a link to an article on the subject that has a lot of relevant references. http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~an226vc/98newsltr.htm
But obviously I can't speak specifically to Jodster's town. To deny that air pollution increases mortality does not reflect current data. But I'm wrong to limit this argument solely to coal-generated power. Obviously there are lots of sources of dangerous air pollution. Still, coal-generated electricity has unquestionably generated an enormous amount of air pollution in the United States.
I may have misrepresented some of what Jodster said and if so I apologize. But this comment paints environmentalists with a very broad and unfair brush. Any "ism" represents a range of beliefs. To suggest that all environmentalists don't care about jobs, want all power plants shut down, support the government takeover of industry, and don't understand diminishing returns is clearly hyperbole on the same level environmentalists are accused of in this comment.
Jodster is completely correct about California emissions laws being stricter than CAA and CAA being irrelevant to the issue of California's current energy situation. This was muddy reasoning on my part.
There is also some muddy logic as regards the connection of coal, OPEC, and Natural gas. Of course, these issues are all connected, but it is a very complex picture while I painted a very simplistic one. But Jodster did bring coal generation into this discussion about CA in the first place, and I was responding to this original comment.
Nevertheless, in retrospect I regret the tone of my original comment and my reliance on melodramatic sentiment.
Am I the only person who thinks this is an appropriate model for content protection? Why screw around with more laws when you have technology? Hackers hack, companies counterattack, the rest of us (who haven't hacked code since dabbling in a little Pascal in college...I experimented a little but I never inhaled...)just grin and buy it. Everybody wins. Sure, Direct TV would prefer not to give away a bunch of free content in along the way, but screw 'em. Someone has to "test" their security.
In this age of "hire at will, fire at will" policies being the norm for employment, noone owes their employer the slightest bit of loyalty. But this poor soul is worried about his/her friends! It's a sign from God to go do your own thing and take them all with you when you go, pally! Screw those other offers and go start a business. But even if you can't read the writing on the wall, look at it this way: You do your friends no favors by encouraging them to hang around in a dead-end job.
I once worked in a microwavable french-fry factory, it doesn't mean I know fuck-all about the economics of microwaved french frys. Likewise, it's clear that you are completely ignorant of the economics of cleaner coal power. The reality is that, driven by Clean Air Act regulations, Scrubber technology has caused the cost per watt of much cleaner coal power to drop dramatically. If we keep the heat on this technology (and its costs)it will continue to improve. Anyone who thinks the industry would have had the initiative to discover cleaner coal power for less added cost without being forced by regulation is a naive fool.
This kind of knee-jerk reaction is very typical of conservative dogma. The idea that the Clean Air Act is responsible for the power crisis in Californias is ludicrous. The situation is much more complicated than that. One issue that seems to be completely ignored by most posters is that this is all also part of the fall-out of the current squeeze by OPEC.
Developing alternative power schemes is about more than cleaning up the environment. It's also about getting to a point where a group of robber barons an ocean away can't fuck our economy and energy stability through price-fixing. While these unfortunate and deluded tools of industry muddy the waters with right-wing rhetoric about the impossibility of cleaner power, countries like Denmark are simply making it happen by recognizing that pollution and fossil fuel dependence have real costs, and that when you start to consider those costs, things like wind and solar make a lot more sense.
By the way, "Jodster," as EPA statistics demonstrated very forcefully a few years ago, one of the costs of dirty air is a significant increase in mortality due to respiratory ailments, particularly among the elderly and the old. You make a nice image of us dumb-ass environmentalists sittin' on the porch but I have a hard time shaking the image of a child coughing themselves to death in sunny California. But God forbid we keep a power baron from making the payments on their summer house in Italy.
Roger W. Sant: Energy Baron: net worth 2.2 Billion
Dennis Bakke: Energy Baron: net worth 2 Billion
Robert C. McNair: Energy Baron: net worth 1.4 Billion
cough, cough, cough.
This is solid advice, but you do you not agree that open peer review is a valid and useful addition to other security audits? I mean, I would obviously hope that the NSA would not just trust the internet community to vet its software security. But just as the group can ignore what an expert might notice, the reverse can easily be true. The point others are making is that open source doesn't necessarily mean low security, not that open source guarantees high security.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on how you define "geek factor." The point is clearly not this particular material - which, as the article stresses, is not a superior superconductor. The point is pushing the qualities of superconductivity into a whole new realm of materials, particularly one that has not been thought to be open to it. Most superconductors and superconductor research is not at the application phase. It is about learning the secrets of electrical conductivity with an eye towards eventually applying them. This is an important milestone, but the fruits will probably not appear for another decade or so.
Welcome to a little process we call evolution, people. Ooh, but it's at such an accelerated scale! Ooh, but everything is in a delicate balance! Get over it. Human beings are screwing with the genome. We're not going back. This is not a "good" or a "bad" thing. It may be incredibly dangerous to us as individuals and a species, and to civilization in general, but once out there in the wild, these genetic modifications are subject to the same processes as to those resulting from "natural" processes, whatever that means. Relax. Life has survived everything that's been thrown at it (and believe me, catastrophic comet impacts had about ten thousand times the impact on the oh-so-delicate "web of life" as any number of sterile moths) and it will survive genetic engineering. And as to the effects on the human species and human civilization? Hell, those'll take hundreds and thousands of years to show up -we'll all be dead by then. Unless of course we manage to turn off the death genes...
This precedent is going to blow up in time. Napster deserves what it's getting because it obviously and knowingly facilitated piracy. It trusted the power of the consumer masses' desires to roll over any objections to clear violation of copyright law (silly Napster). But what happens when protected material starts getting traded over networks which, intentionally or not, have plausible deniability about the specific content what they're facilitating transfer of? Is anyone providing any kind of FTP support liable to identify the copyright status of what's being transferred? Such an imperative would make the continued existance of the internet impossible. The unfortunate fact is that this type of conflict will lead inevitably to a the development of copyright identification/anti-copying protocols which will effectively pave the way for the content distribution industry to create a worlkd where pay-to-play is your only option for all media. ANybody have a better solution? (I do- check my most recent comment on a similar subject).
In response to a lot of people questioning the validity/purpose of such an action - Well one can't speak for anyone but offhand I'd say it's a valid response to an invalid question. There is no reasonable purpose for the government of a free and democratic nation to collect information on the religious beliefs of its inhabitants. Providing a nonsense answer is a valid response in the spirit of non-violent resistance. In response to the issue of whether respondents could face legal repercussions to their response... isn't religion one of the basic issues of free choice? What makes espousing a religious belief fraudulent? That you aren't REALLY serious about that belief? Better start lining up the Christians for prosecution, then... plenty of people only practice that belief on Sunday morning, which doesn't strike me a particulalry serious. And this is coming from a practicing Christian, mind you. Anyone should have the right to claim whatever belief system they like. Wouldn't you think?
Why not drop them a line at questions@referee.com and rattle their cage a bit. C'mon- you know they deserve it!
Usually if I dig in these slashdot world gone mad rights articles tends to be a bit more grayscale and ambiguous in the unabridged version. This one gets scarier when you read more. The magazine wants to sue if customers who disagree with the decision boycott the magazine? They want to prevent eReferree from publishing response to the court case? Good God. We're gonna sue you, you're going to take it, and like it, and if your customers (or OUR customers) complain, why, we'll sue you again! Boycott this magazine.
It's ridiculous to have an openly available standard syntactic construction tool available to anyone. It's clear this will destroy the basis of intellectual property and stifle innovation in virtually all areas of communications. What even a cursory (it deserves no better) read of this article reveals is that it is virtually free of content except a basic Linux=BAD message. Open Source threatens intellectual property - but no explanation of what the threat is. Open Source stifles innovation - but no explanation how. Legislators must be educated about Open Source... With a view towards acheiving what? What the hell do legislators have to say about how hackers choose to write their code? This is just smoke - basic propaganda with no intention other than to make stupid people (particularly investors) fearful of Linux. Look, this guy spends the whole article asserting that Open Source is a threat... and then insists that its recent inroads into business markets poses no threat to Microsoft. Bill Gates ain't the richest man on earth anymore, kids. Who smells fear?
I'm concerned about something that's already an issue with composite construction materials - outgassing of unreacted chemicals in the adhesive used in bonding. The most typical unreacted component is formaldehyde used in the manufacture of phenol-formaldehyde resins widely used in composites. While in conventional products these fumes sill dissipate over time, if encapsulated there could be an ever-renewed source of noxious and potentially dangerous fumes
Let's not forget the fact that Ricochet spent what must have been a small fortune on a national add campaign that quite simply stank. What is it about a pair of retro-outfitted, vaguely British Avenger-wannabes that's supposed to make me think "Wow, wireless internet." To make a product like this work you have to engage the business market and you're not going to do it with a bunch of ads that spend too much time on a dubious version of style to even adequately explain what the product is all about.
You need to check your dictionary, smarty. Tho is an accepted if informal alternative spelling of though. But you're right about too.
But picture this: All these spook applications get created in open source, then there's some kind of "security incident," the next thing you know all domestic applications of all relevant open source systems are made illegal for security reasons. The open source movement is set back decades, hackers get thrown in jail, linux proponents protest "with open source illegal only criminals will have open source!" (resulting in a nasty copyright lawsuit by the NRA). Two birds with one stone?
Just to be the Devil's advocate: What exactly is the problem with cloning a human being? I mean, ethically, what's the big deal? "Playing God?" I think we've already gone well past that point (recombo DNA, GMO orgtanisms, synthetic polymers that can mimic DNA). Robert McKinnell, a fellow Minnesotan who I believe was the first to sucessfully clone a vertabrate (a frog) once commented that what you get if you clone a frog is a baby frog. What we got when we cloned a sheep was a lamb. And when a human is inevitably cloned, we will have a baby on our hands and the ethical issues of what we do with that person will be exactly the same as they are with any human being. What threat is it that to any of us beyond freaking us out? So Bill Gates could make ten million copies of himself. BFD. He'd be broke, someone would have to pay to deliver and raise 10 Million kids (remember, valid or not that $50K pricetag is just the beginning. Have you seen the way college costs are going?!), and it'd still be a drop in the bucket of the world population. Anyone have genuine (not ridiculously speculative or merely based on population - those arguments are just as valid against screwing as they are against cloning) why human cloning shouldn't be legal? (Bonus points if you can clone Robert McKinnell's objection to human cloning!)
I agree with some points, not with others. Not all coal-fired power plants are created equal, which is part of th dissonance of this discussion. Some are very dirty, but some are remarkably clean. I originally read the report of epidemiological evidence of increased death rates due to air pollution's effects on respiratory disease in Chemical & Engineering News, the periodical of the American Chemical Society (my educational background is in chemistry). I'm afraid I don't have a reference though. Here's a link to an article on the subject that has a lot of relevant references. http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~an226vc/98newsltr.htm But obviously I can't speak specifically to Jodster's town. To deny that air pollution increases mortality does not reflect current data. But I'm wrong to limit this argument solely to coal-generated power. Obviously there are lots of sources of dangerous air pollution. Still, coal-generated electricity has unquestionably generated an enormous amount of air pollution in the United States. I may have misrepresented some of what Jodster said and if so I apologize. But this comment paints environmentalists with a very broad and unfair brush. Any "ism" represents a range of beliefs. To suggest that all environmentalists don't care about jobs, want all power plants shut down, support the government takeover of industry, and don't understand diminishing returns is clearly hyperbole on the same level environmentalists are accused of in this comment. Jodster is completely correct about California emissions laws being stricter than CAA and CAA being irrelevant to the issue of California's current energy situation. This was muddy reasoning on my part. There is also some muddy logic as regards the connection of coal, OPEC, and Natural gas. Of course, these issues are all connected, but it is a very complex picture while I painted a very simplistic one. But Jodster did bring coal generation into this discussion about CA in the first place, and I was responding to this original comment. Nevertheless, in retrospect I regret the tone of my original comment and my reliance on melodramatic sentiment.
Am I the only person who thinks this is an appropriate model for content protection? Why screw around with more laws when you have technology? Hackers hack, companies counterattack, the rest of us (who haven't hacked code since dabbling in a little Pascal in college...I experimented a little but I never inhaled...)just grin and buy it. Everybody wins. Sure, Direct TV would prefer not to give away a bunch of free content in along the way, but screw 'em. Someone has to "test" their security.
In this age of "hire at will, fire at will" policies being the norm for employment, noone owes their employer the slightest bit of loyalty. But this poor soul is worried about his/her friends! It's a sign from God to go do your own thing and take them all with you when you go, pally! Screw those other offers and go start a business. But even if you can't read the writing on the wall, look at it this way: You do your friends no favors by encouraging them to hang around in a dead-end job.
I once worked in a microwavable french-fry factory, it doesn't mean I know fuck-all about the economics of microwaved french frys. Likewise, it's clear that you are completely ignorant of the economics of cleaner coal power. The reality is that, driven by Clean Air Act regulations, Scrubber technology has caused the cost per watt of much cleaner coal power to drop dramatically. If we keep the heat on this technology (and its costs)it will continue to improve. Anyone who thinks the industry would have had the initiative to discover cleaner coal power for less added cost without being forced by regulation is a naive fool. This kind of knee-jerk reaction is very typical of conservative dogma. The idea that the Clean Air Act is responsible for the power crisis in Californias is ludicrous. The situation is much more complicated than that. One issue that seems to be completely ignored by most posters is that this is all also part of the fall-out of the current squeeze by OPEC. Developing alternative power schemes is about more than cleaning up the environment. It's also about getting to a point where a group of robber barons an ocean away can't fuck our economy and energy stability through price-fixing. While these unfortunate and deluded tools of industry muddy the waters with right-wing rhetoric about the impossibility of cleaner power, countries like Denmark are simply making it happen by recognizing that pollution and fossil fuel dependence have real costs, and that when you start to consider those costs, things like wind and solar make a lot more sense. By the way, "Jodster," as EPA statistics demonstrated very forcefully a few years ago, one of the costs of dirty air is a significant increase in mortality due to respiratory ailments, particularly among the elderly and the old. You make a nice image of us dumb-ass environmentalists sittin' on the porch but I have a hard time shaking the image of a child coughing themselves to death in sunny California. But God forbid we keep a power baron from making the payments on their summer house in Italy. Roger W. Sant: Energy Baron: net worth 2.2 Billion Dennis Bakke: Energy Baron: net worth 2 Billion Robert C. McNair: Energy Baron: net worth 1.4 Billion cough, cough, cough.
This is solid advice, but you do you not agree that open peer review is a valid and useful addition to other security audits? I mean, I would obviously hope that the NSA would not just trust the internet community to vet its software security. But just as the group can ignore what an expert might notice, the reverse can easily be true. The point others are making is that open source doesn't necessarily mean low security, not that open source guarantees high security.