Maybe you can tell your daughter that if she wants to run MS Windows that she is welcome to get her own job and buy her own computer
Fine, you caught me.:) Where I come from blaming the kids for things you don't want to fess up to is a respected tradition. I love Linux, but on the other hand, they can have my Windoze gaming partition when they pry my cold, dead fingers away from the keyboard and type "fdisk/dev/hda" themselves.
Hmmm... I guess that must be my six-pack over there after all...
And if I knew the first thing about setting up a distro I'd help out too.
One more thing which would make it even better would be automated (and reliable!) re-partitioning and install of GRUB or something like it. Fact is, most people are not going to give up their Windows distros entirely because they want to be able to play Counterstrike/Solitaire/Arthur's Reading Adventure/Whatever and this needs to be recognized. My daughter would scream bloody murder if I told her we were going to Linux full time because, though she likes Tux Racer, she knows full well at six that Windows is the gaming OS.
At any rate if Joe Sixpack knew that he could install Schoolwork-Linux, get all that good stuff for free, and STILL not lose his Windows gaming machine, it would be a no-brainer. Put in a bit of easy automated network configuration for the schools and make sure Apache works as well, and this would be the ultimate way of capturing "Hearts and Minds".
I know what you mean. I'm sure I'm not going to find a use for all those 386 and 486 motherboards, the roughly 128 MB of 1 Meg 32-pin SIMMs, and stacks of old Trident video cards that are sitting in boxes in the basement. Some how I just can't bring myself to chuck them, however...
Funny how different people react to Stephenson's books. I found the first part of Snow Crash brilliant, the rest tedious, and wasn't really able to make it through the rest of his books - they seemed uninspired and arbitrary.
That being said, I read Cryptonomicon pretty much cover-to-cover in a week or so. I though the story hung together *much* better than in any of his previous works. The covergent story arcs were both pretty interesting (the WWII business, esp. with Goto Dengo, much more so), and although I could have done with maybe a couple fewer discussions of, well, wanking, it was by far his most interesting book.
I particularly liked that the book was a non-science fiction book structured and paced like a science-fiction book, with a few geeky heroes who were fighting World War II instead of piloting spaceships.
The transit is already over. Here is a direct link to the ESO site about it (with pictures). There's a Venus transit coming up next year, however, which is much rarer.
Very interesting. Welcome to the real New World Order. Turns out software coding is a skill which can be easily taken on by developing economies. Skills which earned six figures only a couple of years ago can be bought for $1 per hour. Now that's some unfettered free-market competition for you! LOL.
I caught one of these hacked-up Bugs Bunny cartoons a while back. I mean, one minute Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck are talking to one another, and suddenly (and with no explanation) Daff's beak is on upside down and backwards and he's screaming and trailing smoke all over the place.
Now personally I think that's WAY more disturbing than the original cartoon.
Well, I did a few halucinogens back in the day (never really anything stronger than mushrooms). I also had a single brief experience of synaesthesia once in my childhood - some kind of stink bug which, clearly and unambiguously, smelled green. It has stuck with me ever since as a crystal-clear memory. My few experiences with mind-altering substances were *nothing* like that. The synaesthesia experience was simply a sensory event, it had none of the subtle layering that is more typical of hallucinogenic events...
I had a look at the "BioBricks" site - anyone out there who does molecular biology work should do the same if you're looking for a laugh.
It reads rather like a treatise on basic cloning written by someone who had a look through Maniatis (Sambrook for the newbies) and pretty much understood most of it.
The plasmids with "ampecillin" resistance genes, and their MCS with an "Echo RI" site, good lord...
Absolute truth does exist, and when man's worldview and life choices contradict that, it leads to conflict within himself and with other people.
Even if a man is in sync with absolute truth in his worldview and life choices, he will be in conflict with those who reject the truth.
I'm quite certain that a moslem extremist, about to blow himself to bits and take a bunch of innocents with him, is also convinced that he is serving "absolute truth".
Unfortunately, his "absolute truth" and your "absolute truth" likely conflict significantly. Furthermore, there's billions more people all over the world who serve other entirely different "absolute truths".
The terrible certainty engendered by believing that you have unfettered and totally correct access to absolute truth (which, coincidentally, usually empowers the group you're a member of) is one (not the only, but one) of the prime motive forces behind nastiness ranging from intolerance to genocide.
As well, the virus is found (apparently) only in Amoeba. It may well cause disease in the amoebas - this would be of great concern in the amoeba world, of course, but less so in the human world.:)
Right on. Munchausen is a flawed but still utterly brilliant film - it remains one of my "inner child" favourites. It's a tough sell to the general public though; I find people (good, right-thinking people) either entirely get where the movie is coming from, or else just find the whole thing irritating.
"You see, this is precisely the sort of thing that nobody ever believes"
Re:Cheer up geeks of the world- YOU WILL GET LAID!
on
A 1974 Review of D&D
·
· Score: 1
Well put. Really outstanding and totally true. This or something like it should be a standard include at the start of every Deep Nerdliness-related story.
5. The shuttle loses aerodynamic control, and starts to tumble wildly. The tumbling at 12,500 mph results in too much physical stress on the rest of the shuttle, and the shuttle physically breaks up (that sudden bigger contrail was caused by the shuttle literally exploding from the initial breakup).
I agree with your model almost completely, but I rather thought that the final large-scale breakup of the shuttle is represented by the last "break" in the smoke trail before the separation into multiple objects. Whatever happens to the shuttle at that point is obviously violent enough to generate a large "puff" in the smoke trail followed by a small gap, after which multiple targets appear. That being said, there are (3 or 4?) smaller breaks in the smoke trail before this happens. Not sure what those are but I had thought originally that they represented violent swings and changes in the axis of rotation of the remains.
I'm not even clear on what the point of Karma is anymore.
Isn't this pretty much the death knell of any meaningful value being derived from a good Karma score?
First you can't watch your Karma Value climb to insanely high levels, and now you can't even let other people Check Out The Big Karma Value On Yourself with your bonus. Other people can even mod you down (in their own views) for having a decent karma score.
So what's the point? Why not get rid of it altogether?
Go ahead, mod me down as a troll or whatever, I don't see how it matters.
What a totally fucking pig-ignorant comment. I assume you're most likely about 14 years old to even consider that such a stupid position bears any relationship to reality.
Talk to some veterans sonny, talk to people who have some actual experience of what war really means, and of what the world is like beyond the borders of your own neighbourhood.
We're having a pretty cold winter where I am, and I've found myself gravitating towards the computer room for warmth lately. Our house isn't too bad - well insulated, double-paned etc but the 3 or 4 degrees extra in the computer room really makes it cozy.
The cat agrees with me too - she's often curled up near the CPU.
My favourite quote from the "construction" forums:
You can still use your garage as a instrument shack,
but a cinder block box filled with iron filings and borax laundry soap $2.99 / 4lb box would work... out in the yard. Under would be best.
And to think, people have been messing around with particle accellerators and superconducting magnets all this time! Now the true path has been revealed.
Geeks are nonconformists, although they tend to be nonconformist in the same sense that hippies and Japanese teens are "nonconformist." i.e., conform the same as me or you are "out."
Hippies and Japanese teens? That's a rather odd pairing. The same thing applies to teens/twenties in North America today. I was forced to ride the bus a couple of weeks ago and was stunned to realize that I was completely surrounded by Eminems.
I think the source of your confusion on this is the way Science chose to title the story. By "Small RNAs" they didn't actually mean snoRNA-sized things (for instance, go here and click on "Overview of snoRNAs"). They're talking about what have been referred to as "tiny RNAs" or most commonly "small interfering RNAs" (siRNAs) in the literature (for instance see here about siRNAs, and there's also a very good discussion of them here as well as a couple of other classes of really small RNA molecules. The sizes of all these things tend to intergrade a bit, so there's a little terminological confusion sometimes. The primary differences tend to be by definition of function.
Here's a quote from the Science article which illustrates their point:
Another crucial step came last year, when Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues identified an enzyme, appropriately dubbed Dicer, that generates the small RNA molecules by chopping double-stranded RNA into little pieces. These bits belong to one of two small RNA classes produced by different types of genes: microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). SiRNAs are considered to be the main players in RNAi, although miRNAs, which inhibit translation of RNA into protein, were recently implicated in this machinery as well.
The exciting part in all of this is that function is now being assigned to what people previously tended to refer to as "all that gunk at the bottom of the gel".
You're thinking of tRNAs - transfer RNAs, which are in the 70-100 nucleotide range. Small RNAs are generally below this - right down to a dozen or so nucleotides or less in some cases. I work in a lab that does a fair bit of small RNA work, and the tRNAs are right up at the top of all our gels as the "big" RNAs in the population.
There was a whole spate of "ancient organism revival" claims around the mid-1990's. I'm too lazy to go and look up the refs right now, but some of them even made the pages of Science and Nature, and they all made the mass media fer sure. What never makes the mass media is the followup a couple of months later where somebody clearly demonstrates that said organisms originated from contamination in the laboratory that claims to have "revived" the organisms. This happened on a regular basis and eventually it was recognized that there's a likely limit of some hundred thousand or so years on even being able to isolate tiny fragments of degraded DNA, let alone being able to "revive" ancient organisms.
Three thousand years is a drop in the bucket, however. No reason you couldn't revive dormant bacteria that old.
I really hate to spoil a thing like the lens-cap photo, but accuracy has always been more important to me than anything else.
For those who haven't already seen the link, here is a link to a site which describes night-vision binoculars of the type Bush is using in the photo. Executive Summary: The photo looks funny, but Bush is doing nothing wrong.
I like a good chance to mock Bush Jr. as much as the next guy, but it has to at least be fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah. Took me about ten seconds. Just try "Bruce Sterling pseudonym" (not that it's much of one).
Maybe you can tell your daughter that if she wants to run MS Windows that she is welcome to get her own job and buy her own computer
Fine, you caught me. :) Where I come from blaming the kids for things you don't want to fess up to is a respected tradition. I love Linux, but on the other hand, they can have my Windoze gaming partition when they pry my cold, dead fingers away from the keyboard and type "fdisk /dev/hda" themselves.
Hmmm... I guess that must be my six-pack over there after all...
And if I knew the first thing about setting up a distro I'd help out too.
One more thing which would make it even better would be automated (and reliable!) re-partitioning and install of GRUB or something like it. Fact is, most people are not going to give up their Windows distros entirely because they want to be able to play Counterstrike/Solitaire/Arthur's Reading Adventure/Whatever and this needs to be recognized. My daughter would scream bloody murder if I told her we were going to Linux full time because, though she likes Tux Racer, she knows full well at six that Windows is the gaming OS.
At any rate if Joe Sixpack knew that he could install Schoolwork-Linux, get all that good stuff for free, and STILL not lose his Windows gaming machine, it would be a no-brainer. Put in a bit of easy automated network configuration for the schools and make sure Apache works as well, and this would be the ultimate way of capturing "Hearts and Minds".
Too right. It's all about the story. Wish I had some mod points left, I'd give them to you.
I know what you mean. I'm sure I'm not going to find a use for all those 386 and 486 motherboards, the roughly 128 MB of 1 Meg 32-pin SIMMs, and stacks of old Trident video cards that are sitting in boxes in the basement. Some how I just can't bring myself to chuck them, however...
Funny how different people react to Stephenson's books. I found the first part of Snow Crash brilliant, the rest tedious, and wasn't really able to make it through the rest of his books - they seemed uninspired and arbitrary.
That being said, I read Cryptonomicon pretty much cover-to-cover in a week or so. I though the story hung together *much* better than in any of his previous works. The covergent story arcs were both pretty interesting (the WWII business, esp. with Goto Dengo, much more so), and although I could have done with maybe a couple fewer discussions of, well, wanking, it was by far his most interesting book.
I particularly liked that the book was a non-science fiction book structured and paced like a science-fiction book, with a few geeky heroes who were fighting World War II instead of piloting spaceships.
The transit is already over. Here is a direct link to the ESO site about it (with pictures). There's a Venus transit coming up next year, however, which is much rarer.
Very interesting. Welcome to the real New World Order. Turns out software coding is a skill which can be easily taken on by developing economies. Skills which earned six figures only a couple of years ago can be bought for $1 per hour. Now that's some unfettered free-market competition for you! LOL.
I caught one of these hacked-up Bugs Bunny cartoons a while back. I mean, one minute Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck are talking to one another, and suddenly (and with no explanation) Daff's beak is on upside down and backwards and he's screaming and trailing smoke all over the place.
Now personally I think that's WAY more disturbing than the original cartoon.
Well, I did a few halucinogens back in the day (never really anything stronger than mushrooms). I also had a single brief experience of synaesthesia once in my childhood - some kind of stink bug which, clearly and unambiguously, smelled green. It has stuck with me ever since as a crystal-clear memory. My few experiences with mind-altering substances were *nothing* like that. The synaesthesia experience was simply a sensory event, it had none of the subtle layering that is more typical of hallucinogenic events...
I had a look at the "BioBricks" site - anyone out there who does molecular biology work should do the same if you're looking for a laugh.
It reads rather like a treatise on basic cloning written by someone who had a look through Maniatis (Sambrook for the newbies) and pretty much understood most of it.
The plasmids with "ampecillin" resistance genes, and their MCS with an "Echo RI" site, good lord...
Absolute truth does exist, and when man's worldview and life choices contradict that, it leads to conflict within himself and with other people.
Even if a man is in sync with absolute truth in his worldview and life choices, he will be in conflict with those who reject the truth.
I'm quite certain that a moslem extremist, about to blow himself to bits and take a bunch of innocents with him, is also convinced that he is serving "absolute truth".
Unfortunately, his "absolute truth" and your "absolute truth" likely conflict significantly. Furthermore, there's billions more people all over the world who serve other entirely different "absolute truths".
The terrible certainty engendered by believing that you have unfettered and totally correct access to absolute truth (which, coincidentally, usually empowers the group you're a member of) is one (not the only, but one) of the prime motive forces behind nastiness ranging from intolerance to genocide.
As well, the virus is found (apparently) only in Amoeba. It may well cause disease in the amoebas - this would be of great concern in the amoeba world, of course, but less so in the human world. :)
Right on. Munchausen is a flawed but still utterly brilliant film - it remains one of my "inner child" favourites. It's a tough sell to the general public though; I find people (good, right-thinking people) either entirely get where the movie is coming from, or else just find the whole thing irritating.
"You see, this is precisely the sort of thing that nobody ever believes"
Well put. Really outstanding and totally true. This or something like it should be a standard include at the start of every Deep Nerdliness-related story.
5. The shuttle loses aerodynamic control, and starts to tumble wildly. The tumbling at 12,500 mph results in too much physical stress on the rest of the shuttle, and the shuttle physically breaks up (that sudden bigger contrail was caused by the shuttle literally exploding from the initial breakup).
I agree with your model almost completely, but I rather thought that the final large-scale breakup of the shuttle is represented by the last "break" in the smoke trail before the separation into multiple objects. Whatever happens to the shuttle at that point is obviously violent enough to generate a large "puff" in the smoke trail followed by a small gap, after which multiple targets appear. That being said, there are (3 or 4?) smaller breaks in the smoke trail before this happens. Not sure what those are but I had thought originally that they represented violent swings and changes in the axis of rotation of the remains.
I'm not even clear on what the point of Karma is anymore.
Isn't this pretty much the death knell of any meaningful value being derived from a good Karma score?
First you can't watch your Karma Value climb to insanely high levels, and now you can't even let other people Check Out The Big Karma Value On Yourself with your bonus. Other people can even mod you down (in their own views) for having a decent karma score.
So what's the point? Why not get rid of it altogether?
Go ahead, mod me down as a troll or whatever, I don't see how it matters.
Understand this. Humans like wars.
What a totally fucking pig-ignorant comment. I assume you're most likely about 14 years old to even consider that such a stupid position bears any relationship to reality.
Talk to some veterans sonny, talk to people who have some actual experience of what war really means, and of what the world is like beyond the borders of your own neighbourhood.
Then do some growing up.
We're having a pretty cold winter where I am, and I've found myself gravitating towards the computer room for warmth lately. Our house isn't too bad - well insulated, double-paned etc but the 3 or 4 degrees extra in the computer room really makes it cozy.
The cat agrees with me too - she's often curled up near the CPU.
My favourite quote from the "construction" forums:
You can still use your garage as a instrument shack, but a cinder block box filled with iron filings and borax laundry soap $2.99 / 4lb box would work... out in the yard. Under would be best.
And to think, people have been messing around with particle accellerators and superconducting magnets all this time! Now the true path has been revealed.
Geeks are nonconformists, although they tend to be nonconformist in the same sense that hippies and Japanese teens are "nonconformist." i.e., conform the same as me or you are "out."
Hippies and Japanese teens? That's a rather odd pairing. The same thing applies to teens/twenties in North America today. I was forced to ride the bus a couple of weeks ago and was stunned to realize that I was completely surrounded by Eminems.
I think the source of your confusion on this is the way Science chose to title the story. By "Small RNAs" they didn't actually mean snoRNA-sized things (for instance, go here and click on "Overview of snoRNAs"). They're talking about what have been referred to as "tiny RNAs" or most commonly "small interfering RNAs" (siRNAs) in the literature (for instance see here about siRNAs, and there's also a very good discussion of them here as well as a couple of other classes of really small RNA molecules. The sizes of all these things tend to intergrade a bit, so there's a little terminological confusion sometimes. The primary differences tend to be by definition of function.
Here's a quote from the Science article which illustrates their point:
Another crucial step came last year, when Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues identified an enzyme, appropriately dubbed Dicer, that generates the small RNA molecules by chopping double-stranded RNA into little pieces. These bits belong to one of two small RNA classes produced by different types of genes: microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). SiRNAs are considered to be the main players in RNAi, although miRNAs, which inhibit translation of RNA into protein, were recently implicated in this machinery as well.
The exciting part in all of this is that function is now being assigned to what people previously tended to refer to as "all that gunk at the bottom of the gel".
You're thinking of tRNAs - transfer RNAs, which are in the 70-100 nucleotide range. Small RNAs are generally below this - right down to a dozen or so nucleotides or less in some cases. I work in a lab that does a fair bit of small RNA work, and the tRNAs are right up at the top of all our gels as the "big" RNAs in the population.
There was a whole spate of "ancient organism revival" claims around the mid-1990's. I'm too lazy to go and look up the refs right now, but some of them even made the pages of Science and Nature, and they all made the mass media fer sure. What never makes the mass media is the followup a couple of months later where somebody clearly demonstrates that said organisms originated from contamination in the laboratory that claims to have "revived" the organisms. This happened on a regular basis and eventually it was recognized that there's a likely limit of some hundred thousand or so years on even being able to isolate tiny fragments of degraded DNA, let alone being able to "revive" ancient organisms.
Three thousand years is a drop in the bucket, however. No reason you couldn't revive dormant bacteria that old.
I really hate to spoil a thing like the lens-cap photo, but accuracy has always been more important to me than anything else.
For those who haven't already seen the link, here is a link to a site which describes night-vision binoculars of the type Bush is using in the photo. Executive Summary: The photo looks funny, but Bush is doing nothing wrong.
I like a good chance to mock Bush Jr. as much as the next guy, but it has to at least be fair.