Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, this is an extreme example of how NOT to conduct a study. He started by chosing the 60 most popular channels - by definition they were not typical. There are 50,000 channels on undernet alone with an average of about 3 users each. Then he chose 4 keywords that are likely to be used much more for warez than legitimate conversation. The results would have been very different if the channels and keywords had been chosen randomly. Of course, if he had chosen a small number of keywords randomly, the results would probably have been 0.00% illegal traffic since the vast majority of the words used on IRC don't name products that are pirated, so the approach of examining the relative rates of legal and illegal use of particular keywords is itself flawed even if your choice of keywords isn't. Relative frequency of many different keywords in some cases could give some clues though there are statistical problems with this.
"ROFLMAO" is more likely to be found in legitimate messages whereas "systemworks" is more likely to be found in piracy or SPAM (though it can occur in many legitimate contexts as well).
A bayesian filter that looked at ALL keywords could have been used to
separate the legal from illegal traffic after extensive training and used to extend the study over more messages and channels than could be done by hand.
And of course, his statistics (or even much better ones) won't tell you if, for example, 37% of the bots offering downloads are run by BSA, RIAA, and MPAA so they can collect IP addresses of pirates and 87% of the download requests are dummy requests they generate to
make it look like everyone is doing it (to make it look like it is safe to download so they can entrap people as well as inflating statistics they can trot out later).
The article didn't say that it duplicated DNA but it didn't say that it didn't, either.
The orignal article failed to disclose that the duplication of cells themselves was not part of
the printing process. Cells contain DNA.
Other postings on slashdot at the time I read the article refered to prior art in printing proteins, the possibility of remote replication of entire human beings, and references to the fifth element. The original article refered to future potential replicating entire organs - organs contain
many types of cells
and complex structures such as nerves and blood vessels. Even hours later, the majority of the
comments seem to be based on the misperceptions I was questioning in the first place.
And your comment about gooey solutions of DNA was entirely unfounded as my comment specifically mentioned inserting the DNA into the nucleus of each cell.
I don't think this article means what most people reading it probably think it means.
How would such a machine replicate the DNA and RNA in the cells nucleus? There are 3 billion base pairs
in human DNA. At 1000hz (roughly the speed at
which an inkjet printer shoots ink drops) it would
take 833 hours to produce the DNA in a single cell.
Even if they are able to operate at 1mhz it would
take about an hour per cell.
So, do they clone the DNA using a separate process and then just squirt one set of chromosomes into each nucleus or do they produce zombie cells that have no dna?
Reading the
pre-lobotomized
version of the article, we see that it doesn't print proteins at all but instead prints already
duplicated cells into position. And the scaffold they refer to is not the flat substrate shown in the picture but is apparently a plastic lattice that holds the cells in position and then disolves in the body once the cells have joined to each other and the existing tissue.
None of my employers have granted time to work on personal projects or discretionary time. This is one of the reasons many of them went belly up.
This idea has many advantages besides just helping to attract better people. It can allow people to be more productive and innovative. At least for creative people like engineers, programmers, and scientists. Making it work for non-creative people is more difficult, though they can still benifit from things like learning how to use a spreadsheet or database or even how to program.
One implementation is simply to allow people 20% discretionary time that is exempt from management
control. With people who aren't goof offs, this has considerable benifit. The projects might not
necessarily be unrelated to work. The time could be used to solve problems that interfere with your productivity without having to justify it to micromanaging managers. Creating a database of parts in the company stock room that is actually useful to engineering. Instead of "RESISTOR", you
have "RESISTER VALUE=10ohms WATTAGE=1/4W PRECISION=1% PACKAGE=0805". Management thought this was a waste of time but the real waste of time was not having the database; Less than 1 man month of time is needed to build the database but not having it was wasting multiple man months every year. Another example was creating a program to handle purchase orders instead of writing them out by hand (this was adopted company wide). These projects aren't intellectually stimulating but they reduce aggravation and boost productivity.
Discretionary time would be easier to sell to management than purely personal projects. Discretinary time would be work related but
exempt from management control.
For over 20 years I have worked on a high tech haunted house. I take vacation time to do it although one of the participants did manage to get
some annual paid sabbatical leave. The primary participants all worked in major R&D labs. But ironically, the management in the R&D labs was afraid to try anything new. The halloween show, termed "frivolous activity" by one boss, actually had considerable benifits to our employers. All of our employers have benifitted from technology developed while working on the show. One of the
big benifits of doing halloween projects is that you can risk failure. If you try something new and it doesn't work, it is no big deal; in reality, the projects did work though some had to wait until the next year. Software waveform synthesizer techniques used for halloween laser shows were later used on industrial motor controls. A "frivolous" color organ using flourescent lights (traditionally considered undimmable) instead of incandescent lights led
to office lighting controllers that saved energy.
Halloween robotic projects led to bomb diffusing robots. And the junior people working on the show learned things like prototyping techniques and how to program microcontrollers.
In engineering, the shortest distance between two points (i.e. finishing a project) is rarely a straight line. This is a concept that most managers do not understand; sanctioned discretionary time is a way of letting engineers
manage their time more effectively.
The choice of personal projects is often influenced by the problems faced in the workplace.
Problems prototyping equipment leads to work on CNC machine tools. Problems cramming circuitry onto PC Boards leads to work with FPGAs. Utility programs are written to fill in the gaps in existing software.
The maximum benifit to the employer is likely to come from projects that are tangentially related to the companies products.
The employer should have a shop right in personal projects done on company time but it is a good policy to release the projects under a business friendly open source license (i.e. BSD style over GPL).
Paid sabbatical leave is institutionalized at many universities. For example, a professor may get one semester at full pay or two semesters at half pay every seven years.
Many companies give eductational benifits to employees. But for people with technical skills, working on personal projects can be much more effective than stuffing them in a classroom.
HOWEVER: this post brought up a problem with that theory, a big problem. The company is going to put a LOT of money into backing the 'idea' even if it is come up with by an employee. The company takes all of the risk, why should they not get all of the reward? Sure, a small fraction of the reward could go back to the inventor, but what if that product is a failure, can we honestly expect the company to ask the inventor for a fraction of the total cost of backing the idea? Say the company LOSES 3b on the idea, should they ask the employee for a couple million (or the equivelent of the reward the employee would have received for MAKING the company 3b instead of losing the company 3b?)
The company that cries foul there would be like the pot calling the kettle black.
The company is usually "incorporated" under laws that say that if the owners make money, they get to keep it but if they lose money the management is not liable. They may lose money from other sources of income but if they go belly up, they are not liable. And companies frequently create subsidiary companies to limit the the main company's liability from loses in a particular business unit. Employees are likely to lose their job if they lose the company money (or even if the company loses money in general) and unlike management, the employees don't have golden parachutes or receive compensation that is substantially higher to start with than their living expenses. Did the company take all the risk? Hardly.
Also interesting in this case is that the company apparently lost money on his previous inventions even though they were valuable. Yes, it is hard for a little fish to compete against the big fish in the pond. What is surprising is that they didn't cash in by licensing the rights to another big fish that could compete in the marketplace but lacked the technology to do so.
What we need is a good upgradeable PCI standard for desktops so that people can slide their cards in without opening the case.
If they slide in easily, presumably they would be just as easily removed. That's a good idea for home users perhaps, but can you imagine all the expansion cards that would so easily disappear at businesses and schools?
Just such a standard has existed for years, unfortunately desktop manufacturers did not adopt it so it remained expensive: CompactPCI.
If it had been adopted at the consumer level the price could have come way down. It would always be a little more expensive than regular PCI (for trivial cards, at least) for the simple reason that you can't practically chop off half the PCB to cut costs.
Physical card security is a trivial problem. All you need is an optional locking rail that covers the bottom retaining screw on all the cards.
The drive towards miniaturization is driven by two things: cost and portability. The cost side of things is driven by board area and connector and IC pin counts. Even though greater precision is needed, in mass production smaller board size tends to cost less. By going to a serial interface instead of a parallel interface, the pin count on both the connector and the IC on the other side of that connector are drastically reduced. Even on desktop machines, people are pushing for smaller sizes. On the other hand,
small volume specialty boards will be more expensive because of the space constraints (which hurts when you don't have chips that are almost a single chip solution) and packaging issues.
Looks like this stuff will be illegal in europe before it ever makes it out of the lab. The caption on the microscope image says you can make out the individual atoms of lead and sulfer.
Lead based house paint and lead clothing are likely to go over as well as lead balloons.
My friend, let me enlighten you. Everyone who has had an accident while using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing: that they were able to chat (and worse, SMS!!) on their phone and drive quite safely... right up until the point where they killed either themselves or someone else. Self-perceptions of risk are never reliable, and especially not in situations like this where other people get killed.
Those who are truly wrong in their assessment of the risk are liable. But not every accident that is blamed on distraction is in fact caused by distraction. And while some people are incorrect in assuming they can drive and do something else at the same time, other people do both together.
Also, let me tell you about a more serious source of distraction than cell phones: passengers, particularly kids.
Driving doesn't need to be your only priority but it does have to be your first priority. And I mean that in a very strict preemptive real time OS scheduling sense. If you can't enforce your priorities, do not multitask!
The prohibitionist view is that any risk is unacceptable. horsefeathers. Some level of
risk is reasonable. One must weight the risk/benefit ratio.
Consider, for comparison, the drunk driving witch hunt. Yes, some people really should not be driving and originally the compaign actually
did some social good; now the campaign is socially harmful.
Even the "drunk" with
0.10% BAC
who drives 1 home mile at 168% greater risk of having an accident is less of a threat to society
than the tetotaller who drives 10 miles to go to
a movie. The drunk has 3.68 risk adjusted miles
(1 getting to the bar, 2 going home) and the
tetotaller 10 risk miles. Both could have
stayed home. But the "drunk" at 0.10% BAC is the one who faces legal persecution (DUI), even if he doesn't get involved in an accident. Drinkers
usually choose bars close to their homes. In fact, if he drives home at 17 miles an hour instead of 35 (assuming it is late so he can do so without
blocking traffic), completely canceling out the risk of alcohol he greatly increases his chances of prosecution. Further,
NHTSA statistics
that cite
the percentage of accidents involving alcohol blame alcohol if the BAC was 0.01% or greater
(relative risk 1.03 vs. sober) whether or not
the person who consumed alcohol caused the accident in whole or in part. Ok, 45% of
fatal accidents "involved" alcohol. In what
percentage did alcohol cause the accident? In
what percentage were the people hurt not
the ones drinking? What percentage
of people who did not have accidents had
0.01% BAC or greater? Less than one third
of the fatalities in accidents "involving"
alcohol were third parties (i.e. not the
driver or someone who accepted the elevated
risk when they got into the car with them).
92% of accidents do not involve alcohol at all.
Two thirds of fatal crashes involve BAC greater
than 0.15% with an average of 0.17% (risk factor: 39.05), yet the witch
hunters keep trying to lower the legal limits.
There is no statistically significant improvement in fatality rates from lowering DWI limits from 0.10% and 0.08%,
according to a
former MADD chapter executive director
who reveals that MADD's priority is stopping
drinking, not saving lives. Not even MADD's
founder endorses their current policy:
"I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction. [.08 legislation] ignores the real core of the problem...If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road. --Candy Lightner, founder of MADD"
Back to driver distraction.
Better to mess up the inside of your car
than the outside of your car. In other
words, don't drink that 32 oz soda while
you drive unless you are willing to throw
it on t
When I was in high school one of my friends brought a real rifle to school -- so he could do a how-to speech about cleaning a gun. No one said a word about it.
When I was in high school (>20 years ago) we bought a spent "test missile" - inside the school building. It was a 3 inch wide, 12 inch long, steel projectile divided into propellant and payload compartments. What science geek could resist?
Of course, we were smart enough to keep it under wraps and would have arranged for the transaction
to take place somewhere else if the seller hadn't foolishly brought it.
But if we had wanted to use it for show and tell, we probably could have done so with little problem even though technically even a screwdriver might have violated the school weapons code as a stabbing weapon (never stopped me from openly carrying a mongo screwdriver, of course). Hell, either of us probably could have asked one of the principals to hold onto the missle for us till the end of the day without them going ballistic. Today, we
would get the death penalty.
The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time.
Close. It would not make sense to have two or more ROM chips on the motherboard to support different architectures. So, what you do is take 1-3 lines from the processor or jumpers and connect them to the high order address lines on a larger capcity rom CHIP. 1 Line gives you two
different architectures. 3 lines gives you 8 archs if you could ever get that many chip families in the same socket. Or take a chip
about twice the capacity and use 4 select lines.
Banks 0-8 of 16 would boot different processors and load microcode, chip specific code, and a java bytecode interpreter (not much in the BIOS needs
to be very fast, except maybe the memory test). Then the whole top half of the ROM would be used for bytecode, with the 4 select lines being re-multiplexed as regular address lines once the firmware got to a certain point.
Even better, a trivial change to the CPU cores
could make them each start at different addresses in a jump table at the top of the ROM. Reserve the top 256 bytes as 16 different 16 byte locations. That should be more than enough for a jump instruction in any architecture, even with 64 bit opcodes with separate 64 bit addresses.
It really would be nice to have an industry standard processor bus which you could plug an intel, AMD, SPARC, or PowerPC chip into. It could
be an interface with some optional pins. You could have a 128bit memory bus but only use half of it on some processors or motherboards. And you could have variable numbers of PCI-Express
channels.
Failure to support different memory widths has been a traditional failing in PC motherboard designs. To keep it simple, consider the old 8 bit wide 30 pin SIMMS. Populating 5,6, or 7 of your 8 memory slots should have worked. In the case of 7, you would have had, say, 4MB of fast 32 bit memory, 2MB of medium speed 16 bit memory, and 1MB of slow 8 bit memory; you would use 4MB for code and the slower 3MB for cache or least recently used code pages (half way between ram and swap). I remember the 68020 family of processors was pretty good at handling this, there were lines the processor used to signal the requested width of the transfer and lines the external peripherals used to signal the actual width. These days with synchronous transfers the CPU would probably want to know the bus width of different memory banks in advance. Newer systems have similar issues with
needing to install DIMMs in pairs to get full speed.
It would be nice for people on limited budgets to be able to upgrade memory one bank at a time and the processor and motherboard at separate times. And do things like mix slow
PC3200 RAM from your old motherboard and fast PC3200 RAM. Some minor OS improvements would be needed to allow the OS to recognize that not all memory is the same speed so slow memory shouldn't be used for speed critical pages. At some point, however, it is better to replace the whole CPU/memory/motherboard combination.
In general, the military doesn't certify code as secure until it's been around for a while, and most of what we think of as Linux and Open-Source is pretty new.
From a security standpoint, the newer code in Linux is an advantage. It means that a larger portion of the code was written AFTER the need for secure coding practices had been demonstrated. Particularly concerning buffer overruns.
What does this mean? Is help four times as efficient as any other form of biomass? Than some other form of biomass? Than some particularly common form, like, say corn?
Hemp reportedly grows four times as much usable biomass per acre of land per year as other plant sources considered good biomass candidates such as cornstalks, sugercane, kenaf, trees, etc. That also should mean it is roughly 4 times as effective against global warming if you were to plant hemp and not use
it as fuel instead of planting trees. To better
appreciate the factor of 4 improvement as biomass fuel source, consider that about 12% of US land
would be required to grow hemp in alternate years
(rotation with a nitrogen fixing crop eliminates need for fertilizer and reduces pest problems) to elminate the need for all domestic and imported petroleum. That 12% of land would become 24% or 48% for other popular biomass crops (depending on whether you need to rotate them or not). 12% of total land is viable, 48% would be impractical.
However, I did find
a study
which did not show hemp had higher yields.
Hemp as Biomass for Energy
is an interesting read; it indicates a yield of about 390 gallons of ethanol per acre (3.9 tons biomass) of hemp as opposed to the 1000 gallons of methanol quoted by Herrer and
lightparty. Lightparty, however, quotes 10 tons per acre. One reason for the discrepency might be that the hempfood study may have only harvested one crop per year. At 90-100 days per crop, 2-4 crops/year are probably possible depending on climate in the continental US.
van der Werf apparently grew his crops in the Netherlands where yeilds are likely to be significantly lower than in the American south.
It is hard to get good yield data because current laws prevent growing even test crops in the US (one has been planted in Hawaii, though).
The tales of marijuana's health risks, like tales of Mark Twain's death in 1897, are greatly exaggerated.
The relationship between cancer and marijuana seems to be a myth. Consider that the lung effects
apply only if you smoke it instead of eat it (people smoke it for maximum affect because of the inflated cost due to prohibition. Also, unlike tobacco,
marijuana enlarges rather than restricts passages
so the airways don't become clogged. It is particles that stick in the lungs for very long
periods of time that cause cancer. And while it was reported that marijuana was more carcinogenic than tobacco, people smoke less of it. Also, the claims of its carcinogenic properties are falsified. Marijuana was shown to be less irritating than tobacco to 28 out of 29 areas of the lung. The one area where it appeared more irritating (irritating != cancerous) was an area where tobacco has little effect (so, you have a division by zero problem here). After that, government funding was cut to all studies of those 28 areas of the lung. Oh, and pot doesn't need all the radioactive fertilizer used on tobacco
(you did know that one of the ways of disposing of certain types of radioactive waste is to scatter them by incorporating them into fertilizer).
"[...] not one single case of lung cancer in someone who only smoked cannabis, has ever been reported."
.
On the contrary, marijuana smoking has actually been shown to be benificial for emphysema, cancer patients with nausea, glacoma patients. And it has been shown that cigarette smokers are healthier if they also smoke pot. And one study
that was commissioned to show immunosuppression actually showed that marijuanna reduced tumers.
The DEA administration must have shit bricks sideways when their own agency Judge
concluded:
In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating ten raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. [...] Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.
Study after study commissioned by the government
has come out in favor of marijuana. The government has taken to commissioning bogus studies that do not specify the test methods used and it has taken years to sue for that information which once released is immediately ripped to shreds. For example a study that showed that
marijuana destroyed brain cells in monkeys actually proved that suffocation destroyed brain cells (equivalent of 63 joints administered in 15 minutes through a facemask).
They still also like to quote studies by Dr. Nahas who has 1) been renounced by his own university, 2) been declared ineligable for NIH funding, 3)
3) been subject to ridicule by other scientists, and 5) renounced his own studies in 1983.
"Study Finds No Association Between Marijuana Use And Incidence Of Oral Cancer"
. This study refutes a previous study that had shown a cancer link. However, the prior studies "control" group, which the marijuana smokers were compared to, consisted of blood doners; blood doners are a lower risk population than the population at large.
Next time you see a study mentioned in the press
about marijuana, get a copy of it and see who funded it, if
its conclusions were accurately reported, if the conclusions were supported by the results, and if the methodology is sound.
Most of the health information cited comes from the first link, since that is the source I read most recently. Sometimes I really do wonder why I don't use the stuff myself.
This vacination plan sounds like the plot for a Stephen King or Michael Creighton novel/movie.
If they want to prevent drug abuse, they are going about it all wrong. Blocking someones ability to feel euphoria? They are going to have twice as much reason to use drugs, they will just need to
use different (possibly newer) drugs.
Try partially blocking the receptors for depression, fear, anxiety, and other negative
states. Either way, though, this Dr. Moreau-ish plan of messing with peoples
brain chemistry this carelessly, permanently, and non-consensually on a national scale is not a good thing. The law of unintended consequences will undoubtably be proven once again if they follow through with this.
Seems like every jesus freak I know was a prior alcoholic, drug, sex, or gambling addict. I suppose it's good to switch your addiction to something "good", but gee, lets just live our lives with some common sense, comradery, and a quest for truth....This month's Popular Science has an interview with Arthur C. Clarke who looks at religion as a virus of the mind...
Yes, it seems that the purveyors of religion, the "opiate of the masses", are, just like many other drug dealers, trying to wipe out the competition
without regard to who is harmed. I have been around drug addicts and religion addicts - I much prefer the drug addicts. Someone once listed a list of things, such as religion, drugs, flogging, sensory deprivation, sex, piercing/tattoing, dancing, etc. - the proponents of one of those activities (at least christians) were trying to ban all the others. Other religions, and even christianity at one time, have incorporated many of those into the practices of the religious elite and sometimes even the populace. But they weren't always viewed as competition.
ALL of those practices are incorporated by various religions. Christianity apparently banned drugs and reading at about the same time (the beginning of the dark ages), to prevent the masses from participating except as obedient sheep.
Another reason behind the phenomenon you observed is that christianity preys on people in moments of weakness and tries to convert them. And 12 step programs all try to substitute the opiate of the
masses for the drug of choice.
12 step programs are like long distance carriers trying
to get you to trade one brand of addiction for another. And, of course, people with addictive personallities are not going to tend towards moderation in their new addiction so they become
bible thumping extremists. But their problem in the first place often wasn't their drug of choice, it was their inability to moderate. Those that were able to moderate in the first place and take up christianity may become the tolerant (and tolerable) christians.
Re:There is a reason some things are addictive
on
Vaccinated Against Vices?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Take away "sex" addiction and you might take away one of the foundations of pair bonding. Take away the "high" you get from opiates and you might remove the good feeling you get from exercise as well as the body's defense against pain. Remove the addiction of gambling and you might have people unwilling to take any chance at all.
You have a good point here. If people can't get high, they will find other addictions. And food addiction can be a very damaging one. Combine that with removing the incentive to exercise and you have a recipe for morbid obesity.
1. For 30+ years we have been wrestling with the consequences of simple Cigarettes! We have corporations hiding health info, playing with nicotine amounts, and a ton of cancer patients and billion dollar lawsuits. All for a drug which by all accounts is potentially deadly after long-term use but is comparatively benign. [...]
Now considering everything you know about the tobacco companies and all that has come out in the past 30+ years, you really want a "more enlightened" policy leading to [insert Cigarettes company] brand heroin, cocaine, or crack?
And would companies varying the potency be even as bad as the potentially fatal potency variations of hard street drugs? In Manchester, England, a while back drugs were manufactured to pharmaceutical standards (which includes uniform potency) by pharmaceutical companies not tobacco companies and maintenance doses were distributed
to adicts by prescription. The number of new drug users actually went down. Lowering the cost of cocaine from $2000 to $10, for example, pulled the financial rug out from under drug dealers. Violent crime decreased. And the vicious circle of addiction was at least partiallly broken once legal and economic stresses were removed.
That doesn't make any sense. You're saying that the government just decided to ban drugs because it was a way of oppressing minorities. Why would they do that? How do they stand to gain from preventing minorities from using their 'drug of choice'?
Blacks under the influence of marijuana committed such "heinous crimes" as stepping on a white mans shadow (which was actually prohibited), looking at a white woman twice (also prohibited), and laughing at white people. By outlawing activities people you don't like engage in, you
have the ability to have them thrown in jail, you discourage them from living where you do, reduce competition from jobs, open them to exploitation via blackmail, etc. In other words, you create significant power to be exploited against those people.
According to the second source,
banning hemp under the guise of banning marijuana also elimintated competition for 80% of DuPont's
products (by number of rail cars of product: plastic fibers and paper processing chemicals) and the owner of the bank
that financed dupont also appointed the head of
the federal bureau of narcotics and dangerous drugs. Hemp also threatened to compete with the timber industry and Mr. Yellow Journalism himself, William Randolf Hearst, had substantial timber holdings and a substantial financial stake in a new cheaper paper making process that could not
have competed with hemp since a new machine
had been introduced that drastically reduced
labor costs associated with hemp. Also, hemp
lended itself to decentralized economies whereas
patented paper and plastic manufacturing processes were more profitable for Robber Barrons. It also
competes with the oil industry and the pharmaceutical industry.
When marijuana was outlawed most Americans (even in the unlikely event they new it was up for vote), thought it was some dangerous exotic substance
from mexico that Hearsts newspapers railed about
and had no idea it was a form of the hemp plant
that had been a vital part of human civilization
for 10,000 years. At the time it was outlawed, however, hemp agriculture was at a low point in the US because it was very labor expensive
and rope was being imported from asia where labor
was cheaper. But a new
decorticator
had been invented
that reduced labor costs 100:1, just as the cotton gin had done for cotton, and the same month the federal law banning hemp went into effect, Popular Mechanics ran a story on the new machine calling hemp a billion dollar crop.
1 acre of hemp, which is 4 times as efficient as other forms of biomass, can produce
1000 gallons of fuel
for motor vehicles or other uses. Biomass fuel does not contribute to global warming since the carbon produced on burning came from the air in the first place.
Hemp products
are making a comeback even though you still
can't legally grow hemp in the US.
The fraunhoffer system requires 300-400 speakers. If you have that many speakers in a room, you don't need phased array techniques to make the sound come from a particular location... all you need is a glorified speaker switch.
If you look up the patent that supposedly proves that Gallo invented HIV,
you will see that it is NOT a patent on HIV,
it is a patent on a method of reproducing HIV
extracted from humans and it was filed after
public research on HIV. Reproducing a pathogen
is an important part of conducting research,
both as an amplifier for presence tests,
to make large numbers of identical samples to experiment on, to allow the American Type Culture Collection to archive the virus and
make copies of it, and to allow others to reproduce research. It is much better to
copy one virus particle than try to extract
lots of HIV, and only HIV, from blood.
Now, whether patenting
such a process rather than placing it
in the public domain is assinine is another
discussion.
All the Copyright notices by Zygote Media on many of the web sites that report this do not inspire confidence, either. "Media" in the name sure sounds more like a for-profit venture than an activist to me.
For a total of something like $1000, Boyd Graves will sell you copies of public domain government documents that supposedly support his claim.
But given that he misrepresents a patent for
reproducing HIV as a patent on HIV itself, your
money will not be well spent. And if he sent
the spams, you would be supporting a spammer.
Re:The way to solve the cartridge problem.
on
Dell CEO Tells All
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· Score: 1
All the non-HP companies have to do is to actually create a standard for the printing cartridges. A standard which allows backward compatibility. One which gets used by everyone (though HP will no doubt balk at first).
That would be nice. Advantages would be lower cost, fewer parts to keep on retail shelves (eventually), availiblility of open source printer models, and more innovation and lower cost for printers that don't print on 8-1/2x11 paper (large format printers, CD printers, direct to tshirt printers, cardbord box printers, PVC pipe printers, handheld time/date stampers, etc)
Unfortunately, it is my impression that the various practical inkjet
printing technologies are patented. Most
printers (HP, lexmark, cannon) use thermal inkjets (xerox owns patents?) but Epson uses
piezo inkjets. Besides patents on the basic technology, there are patents on methods of
reducing drop size or increasing speed. HP sued an HP compatible cartridge manufacturer and won on 5 out of 6 patents. Now, some of those patents may only affect making HP compatible cartridges
that have to be work exactly like existing HP
cartridges. Patents for gimmicks like REt
(Resolution Enhancement Technology) could be
avoided by just using higher resolution. Existing
big 4 printer manufacturers would not embrace the standard (they want lock in and the abilty to
artificially lower printer prices) so it would
smaller manufacturers who would have to adopt the
standard.
Be aware, however, that printer prices would rise. Inkjet printers are often loss leader items. The current model actually works well for people who have very low print volumes and people with high print volumes use laser printers. So, standardization would address more medium volumes. Also, there would still be a need for various different form factors
(vertical/horizontal printing) and large/small ink capacity to accomodate the range of printer types
(laptop, desktop, large format, specialty).
HP is also better about supporting open-source
drivers than many other manufacturers.
Bulk ink itself is more of a commodity item, though refilling cartridges can be a nuisance.
Another loophole might be if the system does not
install the software. If the system writes
or appends to a script with or without asking
the user to select packages which the user may or may not edit and may or may not execute and may
or may not copy and paste into a shell. The script file may be a new script or it may be
appended to. If appended to, the script could
even be run with a tool that "executes lines
from a script and comments out those that
were executed to prevent duplicate execution".
At which point, you put the script on the desktop,
associate it with the "run and comment" app, and
the monkey pushes the button.
cd/dist
rpm -i --replacefiles gcc-9.9.9.i386.rpm
rpm -i htmltidy-1.2.3.i386.rpm
This script method isn't convenient for technophobe users but it is preferable for real
geeks over typical gui systems that install
the selected software without making a log
of exactly what was done and when.
If you distribute full or partial update CD images
by jigdo and burn them to CD+RW and the user
manually runs an installer program off the CD,
that should also be exempt.
It appears to me that there are some ways for a
software update system to avoid this patent
if the courts screw up and let it stand.
IANAL and I haven't thoroughly studied the
patent.
If your update program does not ask the user
which programs to install until AFTER it has
downloaded the updates, the patent does not
apply. Yes it wastes some bandwidth but it
is much nicer from the users perspective (as
long as they have the bandwidth). Your computer
doesn't pester you to install updates until
it is in position to actually do it. Whether
it is based on downloading from mirrors of central server, bittorrent, or NNTP, it is not
"receiving from the remote computer system over the communications network software indicated by the selection" if it downloads all software in
a collection rather than software selected by
the user. Nor would it be infringing if the
user selects which software to delete.
Claims 271 and 362 might possibly affect this
(the wording is very vague) but all the other claims include or reference a claim that specifically indicates the system downloads
software selected by the user. If it downloads
the software before the user makes the selection,
then it isn't downloading "software selected by
the user".
apt-get like systems that just ask yes or no but don't present a selection menu are not covered.
RSS just needs better TCP stacks. Here's how it would work: when your RSS client connects to an RSS server, it would simply leave the connection open until the next time the RSS data got updated. Then you would receive a copy of the RSS content. You simply *couldn't* fetch data that hadn't been updated.
Happy anniversary, Russ! It looks like in 6 days it will be the 2^4th aniversity of your
first Packet Driver release
.
For those who are still a bit wet behind the ears or (like me) are terrible with names,
back in the MS-DOS days most DOS TCP/IP stacks
used Packet Drivers to talk to the network card
and Russ Nelson was the primary author of a large collection of public domain packet drivers.
Your suggestion is interesting and addresses
some long standing problems which affect other services besides RSS feeds. I see two variations of it:
Unmodified Client App., Unmodified Server App.,
Modified server TCP/IP stack. Unmodified client TCP/IP stack.
Client still
stupidly contacts the server every hour
on the hour but the server is free to
accept the connection and then blow the
client off until, say, 17 minutes after
the hour when it has finnished the
prior requests. As long as the client
doesn't time out and the client doesn't
hang until it gets a response, everything
is fine. To some extent,
the backlog parameter on listen() can
be used to give this effect but there
may be hard limits or practical maximums.
Modified client app, modified server, and modified server TCP/IP stack. Unmodified client
TCP/IP stack. This works as you describe and
seriously cuts down on unnecessary net traffic
and minimizes latency in headlines arriving
at client. Only TCP/IP keep alive packets
need to be sent every 20 minutes or so.
The first variation has the advantage that it would be immediately deployable by overburdened web sites, once a kernel patch is availible, and
the web sites are not at the mercy of many client developers doing the right thing in fixing their
software and far more users actually upgrading their software. The first variation would pave
the way for the second variation.
A more limited but useful version of the first variation is almost availible right now without
kernel mods: increase backlog to as high as possible and limit the number of server processes forked to prevent overloading the CPU to the
point where it can't perform other required tasks. Unfortunately, the kernel limit SOMAXCONN will
stop you at 128 connections backlogged.
In one sense, your suggestion is to hop out of the frying pan into the fire. Servers would experience the heavy load (TCP/IP connection-wise, not application-wise) they currently see at the top of the hour for the entire hour. But I am reminded of another metaphor from a submariner. I was once told
that all sea vessels can go underwater and the
speaker would rather be in a vessel that was at least designed to go underwater.
Another advantage to your approach of spiffing up the TCP/IP stack is that many other services could benefit. Forget HTTP Refresh bullshit; the browser will get new data as soon as it is availible and won't waste the servers time
when new data isn't availible. Back before
client pull, we had server push which was much
better in many ways; unfortunately,
OS limits on number of TCP connections/file handles severely affected the scalability of
this approach. And think of what an improved TCP
stack would do for IM servers such as Jabber where huge numbers of clients connect and yet many sit idle much of the time. POP, IMAP, and NNTP clients could also benefit from persist
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is an extreme example of how NOT to conduct a study. He started by chosing the 60 most popular channels - by definition they were not typical. There are 50,000 channels on undernet alone with an average of about 3 users each. Then he chose 4 keywords that are likely to be used much more for warez than legitimate conversation. The results would have been very different if the channels and keywords had been chosen randomly. Of course, if he had chosen a small number of keywords randomly, the results would probably have been 0.00% illegal traffic since the vast majority of the words used on IRC don't name products that are pirated, so the approach of examining the relative rates of legal and illegal use of particular keywords is itself flawed even if your choice of keywords isn't. Relative frequency of many different keywords in some cases could give some clues though there are statistical problems with this. "ROFLMAO" is more likely to be found in legitimate messages whereas "systemworks" is more likely to be found in piracy or SPAM (though it can occur in many legitimate contexts as well). A bayesian filter that looked at ALL keywords could have been used to separate the legal from illegal traffic after extensive training and used to extend the study over more messages and channels than could be done by hand.
And of course, his statistics (or even much better ones) won't tell you if, for example, 37% of the bots offering downloads are run by BSA, RIAA, and MPAA so they can collect IP addresses of pirates and 87% of the download requests are dummy requests they generate to make it look like everyone is doing it (to make it look like it is safe to download so they can entrap people as well as inflating statistics they can trot out later).
The article didn't say that it duplicated DNA but it didn't say that it didn't, either. The orignal article failed to disclose that the duplication of cells themselves was not part of the printing process. Cells contain DNA. Other postings on slashdot at the time I read the article refered to prior art in printing proteins, the possibility of remote replication of entire human beings, and references to the fifth element. The original article refered to future potential replicating entire organs - organs contain many types of cells and complex structures such as nerves and blood vessels. Even hours later, the majority of the comments seem to be based on the misperceptions I was questioning in the first place.
And your comment about gooey solutions of DNA was entirely unfounded as my comment specifically mentioned inserting the DNA into the nucleus of each cell.
I don't think this article means what most people reading it probably think it means.
How would such a machine replicate the DNA and RNA in the cells nucleus? There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA. At 1000hz (roughly the speed at which an inkjet printer shoots ink drops) it would take 833 hours to produce the DNA in a single cell. Even if they are able to operate at 1mhz it would take about an hour per cell.
So, do they clone the DNA using a separate process and then just squirt one set of chromosomes into each nucleus or do they produce zombie cells that have no dna?
Reading the pre-lobotomized version of the article, we see that it doesn't print proteins at all but instead prints already duplicated cells into position. And the scaffold they refer to is not the flat substrate shown in the picture but is apparently a plastic lattice that holds the cells in position and then disolves in the body once the cells have joined to each other and the existing tissue.
None of my employers have granted time to work on personal projects or discretionary time. This is one of the reasons many of them went belly up.
This idea has many advantages besides just helping to attract better people. It can allow people to be more productive and innovative. At least for creative people like engineers, programmers, and scientists. Making it work for non-creative people is more difficult, though they can still benifit from things like learning how to use a spreadsheet or database or even how to program.
One implementation is simply to allow people 20% discretionary time that is exempt from management control. With people who aren't goof offs, this has considerable benifit. The projects might not necessarily be unrelated to work. The time could be used to solve problems that interfere with your productivity without having to justify it to micromanaging managers. Creating a database of parts in the company stock room that is actually useful to engineering. Instead of "RESISTOR", you have "RESISTER VALUE=10ohms WATTAGE=1/4W PRECISION=1% PACKAGE=0805". Management thought this was a waste of time but the real waste of time was not having the database; Less than 1 man month of time is needed to build the database but not having it was wasting multiple man months every year. Another example was creating a program to handle purchase orders instead of writing them out by hand (this was adopted company wide). These projects aren't intellectually stimulating but they reduce aggravation and boost productivity.
Discretionary time would be easier to sell to management than purely personal projects. Discretinary time would be work related but exempt from management control.
For over 20 years I have worked on a high tech haunted house. I take vacation time to do it although one of the participants did manage to get some annual paid sabbatical leave. The primary participants all worked in major R&D labs. But ironically, the management in the R&D labs was afraid to try anything new. The halloween show, termed "frivolous activity" by one boss, actually had considerable benifits to our employers. All of our employers have benifitted from technology developed while working on the show. One of the big benifits of doing halloween projects is that you can risk failure. If you try something new and it doesn't work, it is no big deal; in reality, the projects did work though some had to wait until the next year. Software waveform synthesizer techniques used for halloween laser shows were later used on industrial motor controls. A "frivolous" color organ using flourescent lights (traditionally considered undimmable) instead of incandescent lights led to office lighting controllers that saved energy. Halloween robotic projects led to bomb diffusing robots. And the junior people working on the show learned things like prototyping techniques and how to program microcontrollers.
In engineering, the shortest distance between two points (i.e. finishing a project) is rarely a straight line. This is a concept that most managers do not understand; sanctioned discretionary time is a way of letting engineers manage their time more effectively.
The choice of personal projects is often influenced by the problems faced in the workplace. Problems prototyping equipment leads to work on CNC machine tools. Problems cramming circuitry onto PC Boards leads to work with FPGAs. Utility programs are written to fill in the gaps in existing software.
The maximum benifit to the employer is likely to come from projects that are tangentially related to the companies products.
The employer should have a shop right in personal projects done on company time but it is a good policy to release the projects under a business friendly open source license (i.e. BSD style over GPL).
Paid sabbatical leave is institutionalized at many universities. For example, a professor may get one semester at full pay or two semesters at half pay every seven years.
Many companies give eductational benifits to employees. But for people with technical skills, working on personal projects can be much more effective than stuffing them in a classroom.
HOWEVER: this post brought up a problem with that theory, a big problem. The company is going to put a LOT of money into backing the 'idea' even if it is come up with by an employee. The company takes all of the risk, why should they not get all of the reward? Sure, a small fraction of the reward could go back to the inventor, but what if that product is a failure, can we honestly expect the company to ask the inventor for a fraction of the total cost of backing the idea? Say the company LOSES 3b on the idea, should they ask the employee for a couple million (or the equivelent of the reward the employee would have received for MAKING the company 3b instead of losing the company 3b?)
The company that cries foul there would be like the pot calling the kettle black. The company is usually "incorporated" under laws that say that if the owners make money, they get to keep it but if they lose money the management is not liable. They may lose money from other sources of income but if they go belly up, they are not liable. And companies frequently create subsidiary companies to limit the the main company's liability from loses in a particular business unit. Employees are likely to lose their job if they lose the company money (or even if the company loses money in general) and unlike management, the employees don't have golden parachutes or receive compensation that is substantially higher to start with than their living expenses. Did the company take all the risk? Hardly.
Also interesting in this case is that the company apparently lost money on his previous inventions even though they were valuable. Yes, it is hard for a little fish to compete against the big fish in the pond. What is surprising is that they didn't cash in by licensing the rights to another big fish that could compete in the marketplace but lacked the technology to do so.
What we need is a good upgradeable PCI standard for desktops so that people can slide their cards in without opening the case.
If they slide in easily, presumably they would be just as easily removed. That's a good idea for home users perhaps, but can you imagine all the expansion cards that would so easily disappear at businesses and schools?
Just such a standard has existed for years, unfortunately desktop manufacturers did not adopt it so it remained expensive: CompactPCI. If it had been adopted at the consumer level the price could have come way down. It would always be a little more expensive than regular PCI (for trivial cards, at least) for the simple reason that you can't practically chop off half the PCB to cut costs.
Physical card security is a trivial problem. All you need is an optional locking rail that covers the bottom retaining screw on all the cards.
The drive towards miniaturization is driven by two things: cost and portability. The cost side of things is driven by board area and connector and IC pin counts. Even though greater precision is needed, in mass production smaller board size tends to cost less. By going to a serial interface instead of a parallel interface, the pin count on both the connector and the IC on the other side of that connector are drastically reduced. Even on desktop machines, people are pushing for smaller sizes. On the other hand, small volume specialty boards will be more expensive because of the space constraints (which hurts when you don't have chips that are almost a single chip solution) and packaging issues.
Looks like this stuff will be illegal in europe before it ever makes it out of the lab.
The caption on the microscope image says you can make out the individual atoms of lead and sulfer.
Lead based house paint and lead clothing are likely to go over as well as lead balloons.
My friend, let me enlighten you. Everyone who has had an accident while using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing: that they were able to chat (and worse, SMS!!) on their phone and drive quite safely ... right up until the point where they killed either themselves or someone else. Self-perceptions of risk are never reliable, and especially not in situations like this where other people get killed.
Those who are truly wrong in their assessment of the risk are liable. But not every accident that is blamed on distraction is in fact caused by distraction. And while some people are incorrect in assuming they can drive and do something else at the same time, other people do both together. Also, let me tell you about a more serious source of distraction than cell phones: passengers, particularly kids.
Driving doesn't need to be your only priority but it does have to be your first priority. And I mean that in a very strict preemptive real time OS scheduling sense. If you can't enforce your priorities, do not multitask!
The prohibitionist view is that any risk is unacceptable. horsefeathers. Some level of risk is reasonable. One must weight the risk/benefit ratio.
Consider, for comparison, the drunk driving witch hunt. Yes, some people really should not be driving and originally the compaign actually did some social good; now the campaign is socially harmful. Even the "drunk" with 0.10% BAC who drives 1 home mile at 168% greater risk of having an accident is less of a threat to society than the tetotaller who drives 10 miles to go to a movie. The drunk has 3.68 risk adjusted miles (1 getting to the bar, 2 going home) and the tetotaller 10 risk miles. Both could have stayed home. But the "drunk" at 0.10% BAC is the one who faces legal persecution (DUI), even if he doesn't get involved in an accident. Drinkers usually choose bars close to their homes. In fact, if he drives home at 17 miles an hour instead of 35 (assuming it is late so he can do so without blocking traffic), completely canceling out the risk of alcohol he greatly increases his chances of prosecution. Further, NHTSA statistics that cite the percentage of accidents involving alcohol blame alcohol if the BAC was 0.01% or greater (relative risk 1.03 vs. sober) whether or not the person who consumed alcohol caused the accident in whole or in part. Ok, 45% of fatal accidents "involved" alcohol. In what percentage did alcohol cause the accident? In what percentage were the people hurt not the ones drinking? What percentage of people who did not have accidents had 0.01% BAC or greater? Less than one third of the fatalities in accidents "involving" alcohol were third parties (i.e. not the driver or someone who accepted the elevated risk when they got into the car with them). 92% of accidents do not involve alcohol at all. Two thirds of fatal crashes involve BAC greater than 0.15% with an average of 0.17% (risk factor: 39.05), yet the witch hunters keep trying to lower the legal limits. There is no statistically significant improvement in fatality rates from lowering DWI limits from 0.10% and 0.08%, according to a former MADD chapter executive director who reveals that MADD's priority is stopping drinking, not saving lives. Not even MADD's founder endorses their current policy: "I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction. [.08 legislation] ignores the real core of the problem...If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road. --Candy Lightner, founder of MADD"
Back to driver distraction.
When I was in high school one of my friends brought a real rifle to school -- so he could do a how-to speech about cleaning a gun. No one said a word about it.
When I was in high school (>20 years ago) we bought a spent "test missile" - inside the school building. It was a 3 inch wide, 12 inch long, steel projectile divided into propellant and payload compartments. What science geek could resist? Of course, we were smart enough to keep it under wraps and would have arranged for the transaction to take place somewhere else if the seller hadn't foolishly brought it. But if we had wanted to use it for show and tell, we probably could have done so with little problem even though technically even a screwdriver might have violated the school weapons code as a stabbing weapon (never stopped me from openly carrying a mongo screwdriver, of course). Hell, either of us probably could have asked one of the principals to hold onto the missle for us till the end of the day without them going ballistic. Today, we would get the death penalty.
The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time.
Close. It would not make sense to have two or more ROM chips on the motherboard to support different architectures. So, what you do is take 1-3 lines from the processor or jumpers and connect them to the high order address lines on a larger capcity rom CHIP. 1 Line gives you two different architectures. 3 lines gives you 8 archs if you could ever get that many chip families in the same socket. Or take a chip about twice the capacity and use 4 select lines. Banks 0-8 of 16 would boot different processors and load microcode, chip specific code, and a java bytecode interpreter (not much in the BIOS needs to be very fast, except maybe the memory test). Then the whole top half of the ROM would be used for bytecode, with the 4 select lines being re-multiplexed as regular address lines once the firmware got to a certain point. Even better, a trivial change to the CPU cores could make them each start at different addresses in a jump table at the top of the ROM. Reserve the top 256 bytes as 16 different 16 byte locations. That should be more than enough for a jump instruction in any architecture, even with 64 bit opcodes with separate 64 bit addresses.
It really would be nice to have an industry standard processor bus which you could plug an intel, AMD, SPARC, or PowerPC chip into. It could be an interface with some optional pins. You could have a 128bit memory bus but only use half of it on some processors or motherboards. And you could have variable numbers of PCI-Express channels.
Failure to support different memory widths has been a traditional failing in PC motherboard designs. To keep it simple, consider the old 8 bit wide 30 pin SIMMS. Populating 5,6, or 7 of your 8 memory slots should have worked. In the case of 7, you would have had, say, 4MB of fast 32 bit memory, 2MB of medium speed 16 bit memory, and 1MB of slow 8 bit memory; you would use 4MB for code and the slower 3MB for cache or least recently used code pages (half way between ram and swap). I remember the 68020 family of processors was pretty good at handling this, there were lines the processor used to signal the requested width of the transfer and lines the external peripherals used to signal the actual width. These days with synchronous transfers the CPU would probably want to know the bus width of different memory banks in advance. Newer systems have similar issues with needing to install DIMMs in pairs to get full speed. It would be nice for people on limited budgets to be able to upgrade memory one bank at a time and the processor and motherboard at separate times. And do things like mix slow PC3200 RAM from your old motherboard and fast PC3200 RAM. Some minor OS improvements would be needed to allow the OS to recognize that not all memory is the same speed so slow memory shouldn't be used for speed critical pages. At some point, however, it is better to replace the whole CPU/memory/motherboard combination.
In general, the military doesn't certify code as secure until it's been around for a while, and most of what we think of as Linux and Open-Source is pretty new.
From a security standpoint, the newer code in Linux is an advantage. It means that a larger portion of the code was written AFTER the need for secure coding practices had been demonstrated. Particularly concerning buffer overruns.
It is when the copied files contain information on a Weapon of Mass Destruction . :-)
What does this mean? Is help four times as efficient as any other form of biomass? Than some other form of biomass? Than some particularly common form, like, say corn?
Hemp reportedly grows four times as much usable biomass per acre of land per year as other plant sources considered good biomass candidates such as cornstalks, sugercane, kenaf, trees, etc. That also should mean it is roughly 4 times as effective against global warming if you were to plant hemp and not use it as fuel instead of planting trees. To better appreciate the factor of 4 improvement as biomass fuel source, consider that about 12% of US land would be required to grow hemp in alternate years (rotation with a nitrogen fixing crop eliminates need for fertilizer and reduces pest problems) to elminate the need for all domestic and imported petroleum. That 12% of land would become 24% or 48% for other popular biomass crops (depending on whether you need to rotate them or not). 12% of total land is viable, 48% would be impractical.
However, I did find a study which did not show hemp had higher yields. Hemp as Biomass for Energy is an interesting read; it indicates a yield of about 390 gallons of ethanol per acre (3.9 tons biomass) of hemp as opposed to the 1000 gallons of methanol quoted by Herrer and lightparty. Lightparty, however, quotes 10 tons per acre. One reason for the discrepency might be that the hempfood study may have only harvested one crop per year. At 90-100 days per crop, 2-4 crops/year are probably possible depending on climate in the continental US. van der Werf apparently grew his crops in the Netherlands where yeilds are likely to be significantly lower than in the American south. It is hard to get good yield data because current laws prevent growing even test crops in the US (one has been planted in Hawaii, though).
The tales of marijuana's health risks, like tales of Mark Twain's death in 1897, are greatly exaggerated.
The relationship between cancer and marijuana seems to be a myth. Consider that the lung effects apply only if you smoke it instead of eat it (people smoke it for maximum affect because of the inflated cost due to prohibition. Also, unlike tobacco, marijuana enlarges rather than restricts passages so the airways don't become clogged. It is particles that stick in the lungs for very long periods of time that cause cancer. And while it was reported that marijuana was more carcinogenic than tobacco, people smoke less of it. Also, the claims of its carcinogenic properties are falsified. Marijuana was shown to be less irritating than tobacco to 28 out of 29 areas of the lung. The one area where it appeared more irritating (irritating != cancerous) was an area where tobacco has little effect (so, you have a division by zero problem here). After that, government funding was cut to all studies of those 28 areas of the lung. Oh, and pot doesn't need all the radioactive fertilizer used on tobacco (you did know that one of the ways of disposing of certain types of radioactive waste is to scatter them by incorporating them into fertilizer). "[...] not one single case of lung cancer in someone who only smoked cannabis, has ever been reported." . On the contrary, marijuana smoking has actually been shown to be benificial for emphysema, cancer patients with nausea, glacoma patients. And it has been shown that cigarette smokers are healthier if they also smoke pot. And one study that was commissioned to show immunosuppression actually showed that marijuanna reduced tumers.
The DEA administration must have shit bricks sideways when their own agency Judge concluded:
Study after study commissioned by the government has come out in favor of marijuana. The government has taken to commissioning bogus studies that do not specify the test methods used and it has taken years to sue for that information which once released is immediately ripped to shreds. For example a study that showed that marijuana destroyed brain cells in monkeys actually proved that suffocation destroyed brain cells (equivalent of 63 joints administered in 15 minutes through a facemask). They still also like to quote studies by Dr. Nahas who has 1) been renounced by his own university, 2) been declared ineligable for NIH funding, 3) 3) been subject to ridicule by other scientists, and 5) renounced his own studies in 1983. "Study Finds No Association Between Marijuana Use And Incidence Of Oral Cancer" . This study refutes a previous study that had shown a cancer link. However, the prior studies "control" group, which the marijuana smokers were compared to, consisted of blood doners; blood doners are a lower risk population than the population at large.
Next time you see a study mentioned in the press about marijuana, get a copy of it and see who funded it, if its conclusions were accurately reported, if the conclusions were supported by the results, and if the methodology is sound.
Most of the health information cited comes from the first link, since that is the source I read most recently. Sometimes I really do wonder why I don't use the stuff myself.
This vacination plan sounds like the plot for a Stephen King or Michael Creighton novel/movie. If they want to prevent drug abuse, they are going about it all wrong. Blocking someones ability to feel euphoria? They are going to have twice as much reason to use drugs, they will just need to use different (possibly newer) drugs. Try partially blocking the receptors for depression, fear, anxiety, and other negative states. Either way, though, this Dr. Moreau-ish plan of messing with peoples brain chemistry this carelessly, permanently, and non-consensually on a national scale is not a good thing. The law of unintended consequences will undoubtably be proven once again if they follow through with this.
Seems like every jesus freak I know was a prior alcoholic, drug, sex, or gambling addict. I suppose it's good to switch your addiction to something "good", but gee, lets just live our lives with some common sense, comradery, and a quest for truth....This month's Popular Science has an interview with Arthur C. Clarke who looks at religion as a virus of the mind...
Yes, it seems that the purveyors of religion, the "opiate of the masses", are, just like many other drug dealers, trying to wipe out the competition without regard to who is harmed. I have been around drug addicts and religion addicts - I much prefer the drug addicts. Someone once listed a list of things, such as religion, drugs, flogging, sensory deprivation, sex, piercing/tattoing, dancing, etc. - the proponents of one of those activities (at least christians) were trying to ban all the others. Other religions, and even christianity at one time, have incorporated many of those into the practices of the religious elite and sometimes even the populace. But they weren't always viewed as competition. ALL of those practices are incorporated by various religions. Christianity apparently banned drugs and reading at about the same time (the beginning of the dark ages), to prevent the masses from participating except as obedient sheep.
Another reason behind the phenomenon you observed is that christianity preys on people in moments of weakness and tries to convert them. And 12 step programs all try to substitute the opiate of the masses for the drug of choice. 12 step programs are like long distance carriers trying to get you to trade one brand of addiction for another. And, of course, people with addictive personallities are not going to tend towards moderation in their new addiction so they become bible thumping extremists. But their problem in the first place often wasn't their drug of choice, it was their inability to moderate. Those that were able to moderate in the first place and take up christianity may become the tolerant (and tolerable) christians.
Take away "sex" addiction and you might take away one of the foundations of pair bonding. Take away the "high" you get from opiates and you might remove the good feeling you get from exercise as well as the body's defense against pain. Remove the addiction of gambling and you might have people unwilling to take any chance at all.
You have a good point here. If people can't get high, they will find other addictions. And food addiction can be a very damaging one. Combine that with removing the incentive to exercise and you have a recipe for morbid obesity.
1. For 30+ years we have been wrestling with the consequences of simple Cigarettes! We have corporations hiding health info, playing with nicotine amounts, and a ton of cancer patients and billion dollar lawsuits. All for a drug which by all accounts is potentially deadly after long-term use but is comparatively benign. [...] Now considering everything you know about the tobacco companies and all that has come out in the past 30+ years, you really want a "more enlightened" policy leading to [insert Cigarettes company] brand heroin, cocaine, or crack?
And would companies varying the potency be even as bad as the potentially fatal potency variations of hard street drugs? In Manchester, England, a while back drugs were manufactured to pharmaceutical standards (which includes uniform potency) by pharmaceutical companies not tobacco companies and maintenance doses were distributed to adicts by prescription. The number of new drug users actually went down. Lowering the cost of cocaine from $2000 to $10, for example, pulled the financial rug out from under drug dealers. Violent crime decreased. And the vicious circle of addiction was at least partiallly broken once legal and economic stresses were removed.
That doesn't make any sense. You're saying that the government just decided to ban drugs because it was a way of oppressing minorities. Why would they do that? How do they stand to gain from preventing minorities from using their 'drug of choice'?
Blacks under the influence of marijuana committed such "heinous crimes" as stepping on a white mans shadow (which was actually prohibited), looking at a white woman twice (also prohibited), and laughing at white people. By outlawing activities people you don't like engage in, you have the ability to have them thrown in jail, you discourage them from living where you do, reduce competition from jobs, open them to exploitation via blackmail, etc. In other words, you create significant power to be exploited against those people.
Read the History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States (written by a law professor) and The Emperer Wears no Clothes .
According to the second source, banning hemp under the guise of banning marijuana also elimintated competition for 80% of DuPont's products (by number of rail cars of product: plastic fibers and paper processing chemicals) and the owner of the bank that financed dupont also appointed the head of the federal bureau of narcotics and dangerous drugs. Hemp also threatened to compete with the timber industry and Mr. Yellow Journalism himself, William Randolf Hearst, had substantial timber holdings and a substantial financial stake in a new cheaper paper making process that could not have competed with hemp since a new machine had been introduced that drastically reduced labor costs associated with hemp. Also, hemp lended itself to decentralized economies whereas patented paper and plastic manufacturing processes were more profitable for Robber Barrons. It also competes with the oil industry and the pharmaceutical industry. When marijuana was outlawed most Americans (even in the unlikely event they new it was up for vote), thought it was some dangerous exotic substance from mexico that Hearsts newspapers railed about and had no idea it was a form of the hemp plant that had been a vital part of human civilization for 10,000 years. At the time it was outlawed, however, hemp agriculture was at a low point in the US because it was very labor expensive and rope was being imported from asia where labor was cheaper. But a new decorticator had been invented that reduced labor costs 100:1, just as the cotton gin had done for cotton, and the same month the federal law banning hemp went into effect, Popular Mechanics ran a story on the new machine calling hemp a billion dollar crop.
1 acre of hemp, which is 4 times as efficient as other forms of biomass, can produce 1000 gallons of fuel for motor vehicles or other uses. Biomass fuel does not contribute to global warming since the carbon produced on burning came from the air in the first place.
Hemp products are making a comeback even though you still can't legally grow hemp in the US.
The fraunhoffer system requires 300-400 speakers. If you have that many speakers in a room, you don't need phased array techniques to make the sound come from a particular location ... all you need is a glorified speaker switch.
claiming that the HIV virus, the virus that causes AIDS, is a virus that was manufactured in American laboratories between 1962 and 1978.
The US government's claim to invention may be invalidated by prior art. HIV was around before 1959 (though there is some dispute ).
If you look up the patent that supposedly proves that Gallo invented HIV, you will see that it is NOT a patent on HIV, it is a patent on a method of reproducing HIV extracted from humans and it was filed after public research on HIV. Reproducing a pathogen is an important part of conducting research, both as an amplifier for presence tests, to make large numbers of identical samples to experiment on, to allow the American Type Culture Collection to archive the virus and make copies of it, and to allow others to reproduce research. It is much better to copy one virus particle than try to extract lots of HIV, and only HIV, from blood. Now, whether patenting such a process rather than placing it in the public domain is assinine is another discussion.
All the Copyright notices by Zygote Media on many of the web sites that report this do not inspire confidence, either. "Media" in the name sure sounds more like a for-profit venture than an activist to me.
For a total of something like $1000, Boyd Graves will sell you copies of public domain government documents that supposedly support his claim. But given that he misrepresents a patent for reproducing HIV as a patent on HIV itself, your money will not be well spent. And if he sent the spams, you would be supporting a spammer.
There are many urban legends about man made HIV.
All the non-HP companies have to do is to actually create a standard for the printing cartridges. A standard which allows backward compatibility. One which gets used by everyone (though HP will no doubt balk at first).
That would be nice. Advantages would be lower cost, fewer parts to keep on retail shelves (eventually), availiblility of open source printer models, and more innovation and lower cost for printers that don't print on 8-1/2x11 paper (large format printers, CD printers, direct to tshirt printers, cardbord box printers, PVC pipe printers, handheld time/date stampers, etc) Unfortunately, it is my impression that the various practical inkjet printing technologies are patented. Most printers (HP, lexmark, cannon) use thermal inkjets (xerox owns patents?) but Epson uses piezo inkjets. Besides patents on the basic technology, there are patents on methods of reducing drop size or increasing speed. HP sued an HP compatible cartridge manufacturer and won on 5 out of 6 patents. Now, some of those patents may only affect making HP compatible cartridges that have to be work exactly like existing HP cartridges. Patents for gimmicks like REt (Resolution Enhancement Technology) could be avoided by just using higher resolution. Existing big 4 printer manufacturers would not embrace the standard (they want lock in and the abilty to artificially lower printer prices) so it would smaller manufacturers who would have to adopt the standard.
Be aware, however, that printer prices would rise. Inkjet printers are often loss leader items. The current model actually works well for people who have very low print volumes and people with high print volumes use laser printers. So, standardization would address more medium volumes. Also, there would still be a need for various different form factors (vertical/horizontal printing) and large/small ink capacity to accomodate the range of printer types (laptop, desktop, large format, specialty). HP is also better about supporting open-source drivers than many other manufacturers.
Bulk ink itself is more of a commodity item, though refilling cartridges can be a nuisance.
Another loophole might be if the system does not install the software. If the system writes or appends to a script with or without asking the user to select packages which the user may or may not edit and may or may not execute and may or may not copy and paste into a shell. The script file may be a new script or it may be appended to. If appended to, the script could even be run with a tool that "executes lines from a script and comments out those that were executed to prevent duplicate execution". At which point, you put the script on the desktop, associate it with the "run and comment" app, and the monkey pushes the button. cd /dist
rpm -i --replacefiles gcc-9.9.9.i386.rpm
rpm -i htmltidy-1.2.3.i386.rpm
This script method isn't convenient for technophobe users but it is preferable for real
geeks over typical gui systems that install
the selected software without making a log
of exactly what was done and when.
If you distribute full or partial update CD images by jigdo and burn them to CD+RW and the user manually runs an installer program off the CD, that should also be exempt.
It appears to me that there are some ways for a software update system to avoid this patent if the courts screw up and let it stand. IANAL and I haven't thoroughly studied the patent.
If your update program does not ask the user which programs to install until AFTER it has downloaded the updates, the patent does not apply. Yes it wastes some bandwidth but it is much nicer from the users perspective (as long as they have the bandwidth). Your computer doesn't pester you to install updates until it is in position to actually do it. Whether it is based on downloading from mirrors of central server, bittorrent, or NNTP, it is not "receiving from the remote computer system over the communications network software indicated by the selection" if it downloads all software in a collection rather than software selected by the user. Nor would it be infringing if the user selects which software to delete. Claims 271 and 362 might possibly affect this (the wording is very vague) but all the other claims include or reference a claim that specifically indicates the system downloads software selected by the user. If it downloads the software before the user makes the selection, then it isn't downloading "software selected by the user".
apt-get like systems that just ask yes or no but don't present a selection menu are not covered.
RSS just needs better TCP stacks. Here's how it would work: when your RSS client connects to an RSS server, it would simply leave the connection open until the next time the RSS data got updated. Then you would receive a copy of the RSS content. You simply *couldn't* fetch data that hadn't been updated.
Happy anniversary, Russ! It looks like in 6 days it will be the 2^4th aniversity of your first Packet Driver release . For those who are still a bit wet behind the ears or (like me) are terrible with names, back in the MS-DOS days most DOS TCP/IP stacks used Packet Drivers to talk to the network card and Russ Nelson was the primary author of a large collection of public domain packet drivers.
Your suggestion is interesting and addresses some long standing problems which affect other services besides RSS feeds. I see two variations of it:
The first variation has the advantage that it would be immediately deployable by overburdened web sites, once a kernel patch is availible, and the web sites are not at the mercy of many client developers doing the right thing in fixing their software and far more users actually upgrading their software. The first variation would pave the way for the second variation. A more limited but useful version of the first variation is almost availible right now without kernel mods: increase backlog to as high as possible and limit the number of server processes forked to prevent overloading the CPU to the point where it can't perform other required tasks. Unfortunately, the kernel limit SOMAXCONN will stop you at 128 connections backlogged.
In one sense, your suggestion is to hop out of the frying pan into the fire. Servers would experience the heavy load (TCP/IP connection-wise, not application-wise) they currently see at the top of the hour for the entire hour. But I am reminded of another metaphor from a submariner. I was once told that all sea vessels can go underwater and the speaker would rather be in a vessel that was at least designed to go underwater.
Another advantage to your approach of spiffing up the TCP/IP stack is that many other services could benefit. Forget HTTP Refresh bullshit; the browser will get new data as soon as it is availible and won't waste the servers time when new data isn't availible. Back before client pull, we had server push which was much better in many ways; unfortunately, OS limits on number of TCP connections/file handles severely affected the scalability of this approach. And think of what an improved TCP stack would do for IM servers such as Jabber where huge numbers of clients connect and yet many sit idle much of the time. POP, IMAP, and NNTP clients could also benefit from persist