Everyone talks about how DST saves money. Fine then. Get rid of Standard Time instead. It is only for a few months every year anyway.
Imagine if we could actually have 24 hours in the day, all the days in the year, instead of one with 23 hours and one with 25. Imagine if every day had a 2:30AM, or if we never had one day with two 1:30 AMs. How I long for it.
Not only was Mosaic the foundation code for both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer (as well as a variety of other, now forgotten browsers), but the NCSA project at the University of Illinois also produced the NCSA HTTPd web server. This eventually morphed into the Apache web server. See http://www.apache.org/history/timeline.html.
Reminds me of a paper published by the Journal of Irreproducible Results on how different a second paper had to be from the first in order to be considered publishable.
So the problem is that the PHBs don't see a need to upgrade. This is a perception problem. We can fix this.
Let's start adding this to the top of every web page we have access to. If the public web gets flooded with these, the PHBs are going to believe their jobs are on the line if they don't insist on an upgrade:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<div id="ie6message">
<p id="ie6warning"><strong>Warning!</strong> The browser you are running is insecure and is putting your computer and network at risk. For more details, see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#Security_issues">this reference</a>.</p>
<p id="ie6replacements">We strongly recommend upgrading to <a href="http://www.getfirefox.com/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Google Chrome</a>, or a more recent version of <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx">Internet Explorer</a>.</p>
</div>
<![endif]-->
You are exactly right. A fantastic series conceived by Harlan Ellison and involving some of the greatest Science Fiction writers of the time, destroyed by bad acting, bad production, and bad pretty-well everything else. If you want a sense of how frustrating working on the series was, read Ben Bova's The Starcrossed. I especially like the early concept for the Internet, a booth where you can sit and ask a virtual person questions. Even his delivery was stuttering and with strange emphases in places, suggesting that his replies were composed of spliced together phonemes.
See this video for an introduction to the brilliant concept that was so ham-fistedly delivered in the original series.
Just make sure you get a converter box with Component Video out (also called YPbPr). Then you can use the Hauppauge HD PVR http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html to capture the hi-def video to a hard drive.
This is a solution that works for any HD settop box no matter what copy protection it provides, so long as it outputs component video.
If you live in North America, you have already seen Daylight Savings Time creep over more and more of the calendar. It is now the time used for 8 months of the year. So why every go back to Standard Time?
If we drop standard time, we can get rid of the ridiculous rule that says that one day a year there will be no time between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM. Something happened on the Second Sunday in March at 2:41 AM? Never happened.
We could also get rid of the even worse rule that on one day a year all times between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM will occur twice! Something happened at 1:24 AM on the first Sunday in November? Which 1:24 AM? The first one or the second one?
Eventually perhaps we could go to UTC and just have a different set of local business hours in each municipality. But somehow, "Noon" and "Midnight" seem to be too ingrained to get there just yet.
Does it look to anyone else that the business model for sellaband.com looks an awful lot like a scam? It reminded me of the movie Great World of Sound http://greatworldofsound.com/.
Maybe it is legit, but what band needs $50,000 to record a CD. Really? For that price they could fill their basement with recording equipment and do it themselves.
First, he is not the first to have two sets of DNA due to a bone marrow transplant (although he might be one of the first with 3 sets). Anyone who has had an allogeneic (as opposed to autologous) bone marrow transplant like his has that, as do any other transplant recipients.
In fact, the differences between those DNA is both one of the best things and one of the worst things about alloBMTs to treat blood cancers. The new blood system sets itself up and sees the cancer cells as "foreign" and attacks them, what would be called "rejecting" them in a solid organ transplant. This is called "Graft Versus Leukemic Effect" in leukemia patients, for example. That's the good part. The bad part is that the new blood system looks at the rest of the body and sees it as foreign as well. "All this has to go" is the reaction, also called "Graft Versus Host Effect", or GVHD. That can kill you. Cord blood stem cells make this less likely to happen, because the cord blood cells are not quite sure what the other cells are supposed to look like yet.
The second reason he is not the first man-made chimera is that he is not a chimera. A chimera is when the second set of DNA comes from another species. That has been done before (organ transplants from pigs, for example), but is not the case in this story.
The real story here is that he had a stem cell transplant using cord blood from two different donors.
I hope that you will reconsider and publish this in print. It needs to be read by a wider audience, particularly an audience that does not read things online.
People who complain that you need permission from the authors to publish this stuff are simply misguided. By submitting a comment to/., they are explicitly requesting you to publish the information. Whether you publish it online in a discussion forum or in a physical book with commentary surrounding their material is unimportant and people who see the distinction as being significant don't seem to understand what is involved in making a public statement on a public forum. Private emails are more problematic, though, and you should get permission on these or remove them from the book.
So you are right to publish this both online and in print based on need, you are right to publish based on the law, and you are right to publish it based on ethical and netiquette considerations. Please don't give in to those who scream loudly without being informed on the issues.
You may scoff, but us lichen and algae up here in Canada are fairly technologically advanced. We can post on Slashdot, for example.
Canada has a lot of climates as you go south to north, so I imagine they mean it will be like the climate of the high arctic. There is still a thriving ecosystem up there that goes beyond lichen and algae, though (Inuit need more than that to live on) so I'm still not sure why they limit the ecology of Mars to just those two.
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is a new cinematic rendition of the Patricia Highsmith novel which was filmed in French in 1960 as "Purple Noon". The obvious comparisons to make with this new movie are to the book and the previous film.
First, it helps to understand the attraction of the book and its sequels. Tom Ripley is a charming, lovable sociopath without a moral bone in his body. Incredibly clever and amazingly gutsy, he takes chances you wouldn't believe and usually gets away with them. Even when he gets caught, his smooth tongue and implausible but unprovable lies get him out of many jams. The amazing thing about his character in the books is that you can't help but feel sympathy for this person with his complete lack of morals.
"Purple Noon" ("Pleine Soleil") captures that amorality very well. As you follow the convoluted plots that Ripley lays out, you have to admire his audacity. It is a great movie, and the only trouble with it is that it doesn't leave you feeling all that sympathetic for the character, the way the books do. You admire the skill with which he escapes detection of his crimes, but that doesn't make you actually like the guy.
That brings us to the new movie directed by Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient") and starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cate Blanshett.
As anyone who saw "The English Patient" knows, Anthony Minghella has a love for showing scenery. Where "The English Patient" had the vastness of the desert, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" has the picturesque villages of Italy, and Minghella makes them one of the stars of the movie. That can be a good thing if you are a fan of travelogue, but is rather distracting from the subject matter being shown, I think to the movie's detriment.
Minghella apparently was aware of the problem I mentioned with "Purple Noon", because he goes to great lengths to make the audience sympathetic to the character. This Tom Ripley feels great guilt about his crimes. It is only circumstances that cause him to commit them in the first place, rather than a cold calculation as displayed in "Purple Noon".
Furthermore, in this movie Tom Ripley displays a lot more passion. Whereas in the books he was somewhat androgynous and adapted his sexuality to suit his environment, in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" there can be no doubt as to his true feelings.
By going for the sympathy vote, a believe that a vital part of the Ripley character has been torn away. If you haven't seen the previous film or read the books, you probably wouldn't even be aware that it was gone. But for those of us aware of it, the loss was a bitter disappointment. The loss also causes some odd moments in the script that are only really explained by knowing about the character from other sources.
Then there is the acting. Matt Damon just didn't have what it takes to get across the complexity of the character. Sure, the script had toned the complexity down a lot but he could have replaced some of it with some subtle acting. He doesn't. His Tom Ripley is a creature that is totally reactive rather than proactive, and lacking the sociopathic nature that is key to the character.
The rest of the cast varies from good to very good. Jude Law is outstanding as Dickie Greenleaf, conveying exactly the right combination of sincerity and decadence. Cate Blanshett does a very good job, and Gwyneth Paltrow is quite good for the first half, though in the latter half of the movie her acting is fairly simplistic. Philip Seymour Hoffman is also excellent as usual.
Overall, I walked out of the theatre having enjoyed it but disappointed about what could have been. I give the film 3 stars out of 5, where I gave Purple Noon 4 stars.
Several years ago it became clear that the net was growing too fast for search engines to be able to keep up. At that time I came up with a design to solve the problem of scaling that reflects the open-source solution: through volunteers.
You have two categories of volunteers, the Spinners and the Weavers. The Spinners each voluntarily search some small part of the web via a spider each night. The Weavers each publish to the Spinners a list of queries that they are interested in. When a Spinner's spider hits a new page that matches a query, or receives a new query that matches a previously indexed page, it sends an email to the Weaver. The Weaver can look over the web pages coming in and create web sites that provide easy access to those pages, as they apply to the particular subject the site.
I sent this suggestion to the Open Directory people, since I think it is a perfect tie-in to their concept. The editors in the Open Directory project would be the Weavers who could separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, I never heard from them and let the idea die.
I'd be willing to ressurect it if others are interested. Feel free to send me an email.
Mike Meyers makes a comment about the Peeing scene in the original Austin Powers (DVD Commentary) that he loves taking a mildly amusing joke and stretching it out until it is stupid, and then stretching it out even longer until it becomes hilarious.
The "That looks like a..." joke is a perfect example of how funny this can be, I think.
Apogee software received the threat of a lawsuit based on the fact that they were believed to be infringing a patent. I can't recall exactly what the patent was for. Something like having a simulated character that also uttered language phrases. Anyway, they challenged the patent by claiming there was prior art. In order to bolster their case, they asked the help of the Internet in providing examples that predated the patent. The lawyers for Apogee were blown away by the volume and quality of responses. They ended up winning their case.
So to all those naysayers that say it can't be done, all I can do is point out that it already has.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone talks about how DST saves money. Fine then. Get rid of Standard Time instead. It is only for a few months every year anyway.
Imagine if we could actually have 24 hours in the day, all the days in the year, instead of one with 23 hours and one with 25. Imagine if every day had a 2:30AM, or if we never had one day with two 1:30 AMs. How I long for it.
Not only was Mosaic the foundation code for both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer (as well as a variety of other, now forgotten browsers), but the NCSA project at the University of Illinois also produced the NCSA HTTPd web server. This eventually morphed into the Apache web server. See http://www.apache.org/history/timeline.html.
Here is a link to a post that provides the best explanation I've found so far about why this works.
http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/11/directly-downwind-faster-than-wind.html
Reminds me of a paper published by the Journal of Irreproducible Results on how different a second paper had to be from the first in order to be considered publishable.
So the problem is that the PHBs don't see a need to upgrade. This is a perception problem. We can fix this.
Let's start adding this to the top of every web page we have access to. If the public web gets flooded with these, the PHBs are going to believe their jobs are on the line if they don't insist on an upgrade:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<div id="ie6message">
<p id="ie6warning"><strong>Warning!</strong> The browser you are running is insecure and is putting your computer and network at risk. For more details, see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#Security_issues">this reference</a>.</p>
<p id="ie6replacements">We strongly recommend upgrading to <a href="http://www.getfirefox.com/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Google Chrome</a>, or a more recent version of <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx">Internet Explorer</a>.</p>
</div>
<![endif]-->
You are exactly right. A fantastic series conceived by Harlan Ellison and involving some of the greatest Science Fiction writers of the time, destroyed by bad acting, bad production, and bad pretty-well everything else. If you want a sense of how frustrating working on the series was, read Ben Bova's The Starcrossed. I especially like the early concept for the Internet, a booth where you can sit and ask a virtual person questions. Even his delivery was stuttering and with strange emphases in places, suggesting that his replies were composed of spliced together phonemes.
See this video for an introduction to the brilliant concept that was so ham-fistedly delivered in the original series.
Just make sure you get a converter box with Component Video out (also called YPbPr). Then you can use the Hauppauge HD PVR http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html to capture the hi-def video to a hard drive.
This is a solution that works for any HD settop box no matter what copy protection it provides, so long as it outputs component video.
If you live in North America, you have already seen Daylight Savings Time creep over more and more of the calendar. It is now the time used for 8 months of the year. So why every go back to Standard Time?
If we drop standard time, we can get rid of the ridiculous rule that says that one day a year there will be no time between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM. Something happened on the Second Sunday in March at 2:41 AM? Never happened.
We could also get rid of the even worse rule that on one day a year all times between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM will occur twice! Something happened at 1:24 AM on the first Sunday in November? Which 1:24 AM? The first one or the second one?
Eventually perhaps we could go to UTC and just have a different set of local business hours in each municipality. But somehow, "Noon" and "Midnight" seem to be too ingrained to get there just yet.
Does it look to anyone else that the business model for sellaband.com looks an awful lot like a scam? It reminded me of the movie Great World of Sound http://greatworldofsound.com/.
Maybe it is legit, but what band needs $50,000 to record a CD. Really? For that price they could fill their basement with recording equipment and do it themselves.
No he is not, for several reasons.
First, he is not the first to have two sets of DNA due to a bone marrow transplant (although he might be one of the first with 3 sets). Anyone who has had an allogeneic (as opposed to autologous) bone marrow transplant like his has that, as do any other transplant recipients.
In fact, the differences between those DNA is both one of the best things and one of the worst things about alloBMTs to treat blood cancers. The new blood system sets itself up and sees the cancer cells as "foreign" and attacks them, what would be called "rejecting" them in a solid organ transplant. This is called "Graft Versus Leukemic Effect" in leukemia patients, for example. That's the good part. The bad part is that the new blood system looks at the rest of the body and sees it as foreign as well. "All this has to go" is the reaction, also called "Graft Versus Host Effect", or GVHD. That can kill you. Cord blood stem cells make this less likely to happen, because the cord blood cells are not quite sure what the other cells are supposed to look like yet.
The second reason he is not the first man-made chimera is that he is not a chimera. A chimera is when the second set of DNA comes from another species. That has been done before (organ transplants from pigs, for example), but is not the case in this story.
The real story here is that he had a stem cell transplant using cord blood from two different donors.
I hope that you will reconsider and publish this in print. It needs to be read by a wider audience, particularly an audience that does not read things online.
/., they are explicitly requesting you to publish the information. Whether you publish it online in a discussion forum or in a physical book with commentary surrounding their material is unimportant and people who see the distinction as being significant don't seem to understand what is involved in making a public statement on a public forum. Private emails are more problematic, though, and you should get permission on these or remove them from the book.
People who complain that you need permission from the authors to publish this stuff are simply misguided. By submitting a comment to
So you are right to publish this both online and in print based on need, you are right to publish based on the law, and you are right to publish it based on ethical and netiquette considerations. Please don't give in to those who scream loudly without being informed on the issues.
Thanks.
You may scoff, but us lichen and algae up here in Canada are fairly technologically advanced. We can post on Slashdot, for example.
Canada has a lot of climates as you go south to north, so I imagine they mean it will be like the climate of the high arctic. There is still a thriving ecosystem up there that goes beyond lichen and algae, though (Inuit need more than that to live on) so I'm still not sure why they limit the ecology of Mars to just those two.
First, it helps to understand the attraction of the book and its sequels. Tom Ripley is a charming, lovable sociopath without a moral bone in his body. Incredibly clever and amazingly gutsy, he takes chances you wouldn't believe and usually gets away with them. Even when he gets caught, his smooth tongue and implausible but unprovable lies get him out of many jams. The amazing thing about his character in the books is that you can't help but feel sympathy for this person with his complete lack of morals.
"Purple Noon" ("Pleine Soleil") captures that amorality very well. As you follow the convoluted plots that Ripley lays out, you have to admire his audacity. It is a great movie, and the only trouble with it is that it doesn't leave you feeling all that sympathetic for the character, the way the books do. You admire the skill with which he escapes detection of his crimes, but that doesn't make you actually like the guy.
That brings us to the new movie directed by Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient") and starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cate Blanshett.
As anyone who saw "The English Patient" knows, Anthony Minghella has a love for showing scenery. Where "The English Patient" had the vastness of the desert, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" has the picturesque villages of Italy, and Minghella makes them one of the stars of the movie. That can be a good thing if you are a fan of travelogue, but is rather distracting from the subject matter being shown, I think to the movie's detriment.
Minghella apparently was aware of the problem I mentioned with "Purple Noon", because he goes to great lengths to make the audience sympathetic to the character. This Tom Ripley feels great guilt about his crimes. It is only circumstances that cause him to commit them in the first place, rather than a cold calculation as displayed in "Purple Noon".
Furthermore, in this movie Tom Ripley displays a lot more passion. Whereas in the books he was somewhat androgynous and adapted his sexuality to suit his environment, in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" there can be no doubt as to his true feelings.
By going for the sympathy vote, a believe that a vital part of the Ripley character has been torn away. If you haven't seen the previous film or read the books, you probably wouldn't even be aware that it was gone. But for those of us aware of it, the loss was a bitter disappointment. The loss also causes some odd moments in the script that are only really explained by knowing about the character from other sources.
Then there is the acting. Matt Damon just didn't have what it takes to get across the complexity of the character. Sure, the script had toned the complexity down a lot but he could have replaced some of it with some subtle acting. He doesn't. His Tom Ripley is a creature that is totally reactive rather than proactive, and lacking the sociopathic nature that is key to the character.
The rest of the cast varies from good to very good. Jude Law is outstanding as Dickie Greenleaf, conveying exactly the right combination of sincerity and decadence. Cate Blanshett does a very good job, and Gwyneth Paltrow is quite good for the first half, though in the latter half of the movie her acting is fairly simplistic. Philip Seymour Hoffman is also excellent as usual.
Overall, I walked out of the theatre having enjoyed it but disappointed about what could have been. I give the film 3 stars out of 5, where I gave Purple Noon 4 stars.
Several years ago it became clear that the net was growing too fast for search engines to be able to keep up. At that time I came up with a design to solve the problem of scaling that reflects the open-source solution: through volunteers.
You have two categories of volunteers, the Spinners and the Weavers. The Spinners each voluntarily search some small part of the web via a spider each night. The Weavers each publish to the Spinners a list of queries that they are interested in. When a Spinner's spider hits a new page that matches a query, or receives a new query that matches a previously indexed page, it sends an email to the Weaver. The Weaver can look over the web pages coming in and create web sites that provide easy access to those pages, as they apply to the particular subject the site.
I sent this suggestion to the Open Directory people, since I think it is a perfect tie-in to their concept. The editors in the Open Directory project would be the Weavers who could separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, I never heard from them and let the idea die.
I'd be willing to ressurect it if others are interested. Feel free to send me an email.
Mike Meyers makes a comment about the Peeing scene in the original Austin Powers (DVD Commentary) that he loves taking a mildly amusing joke and stretching it out until it is stupid, and then stretching it out even longer until it becomes hilarious.
The "That looks like a..." joke is a perfect example of how funny this can be, I think.
Apogee software received the threat of a lawsuit based on the fact that they were believed to be infringing a patent. I can't recall exactly what the patent was for. Something like having a simulated character that also uttered language phrases. Anyway, they challenged the patent by claiming there was prior art. In order to bolster their case, they asked the help of the Internet in providing examples that predated the patent. The lawyers for Apogee were blown away by the volume and quality of responses. They ended up winning their case.
So to all those naysayers that say it can't be done, all I can do is point out that it already has.