Thanks for the link. I suspect that 20 to 30 pound weight considerably cuts into its usefulness.
On the other hand, other correspondents have suggested roller blades, skateboards, and spring loaded shoes... They sound like hard work too... Harder work than a bicycle, where you can use the proper gear for climbing hills.
Those other self-powered devices don't seem as safe as a bicycle either... Particularly the spring loaded shoes. If you used them on a regular sidewalk, at speed, how long before you creamed a pedestrian? And if you used them on the road how long before you were creamed?
How easy are these to ride? Do the smaller wheels give you less stability, because they serve as smaller gyroscopes? Inquiring minds want to know...
Slaughterhouses (used to?) employ a "judas goat". Slaughterhouses are new and frightening environments for the animals about to be slaughtered. So they would employ tame animals, used to the environment, who would fearlessly lead the animals about to be slaughtered into the holding pens. These were known as the "judas goat".
I have a friend, a very beautiful young woman, who likes to gamble. (I know, I know, maybe knowing her disqualifies me for slashdot. But we are just friends.) Anyhow, she is not only beautiful, but outgoing, charming, engaging. And she believes in psychic powers. She believes she is lucky, and believes that she can make useful guesses about when a slot machine will pay off.
According to her she does win. Is this possible? I watched a documentary, part of the "forbidden places" series, about the surviellance you subject yourself. Is it possible that she wins more than her share?
I tell her that the surviellance bosses may tune her machine to pay out more than normal because she is so talkative and charming, that they know she will talk the other guests into putting more into the machines...
Berners-Lee, Tim
Blinn, James F.
Demaine, Erik
Holland, John H.
Jurafsky, Daniel
Rus, Daniela
Shor, Peter
Sims, Karl
Stallman, Richard
Winfree, Erik
Wolfram, Stephen
The MacArthur Foundation site has the fellows sorted by field. These eleven were the ones they classed under "Computer Science".
Several of the grant receipients were University professors. So I assume you mean nursery, primary or secondary school teachers. Are you a teacher? Did you apply for a MacArthur grant? You have to apply.
The tasks teacher should be doing are important ones. My own experience was that most teachers do a very uninspired job.
I had some really good teachers. But they were the exceptions. Maybe the other teachers could have been inspiring and made a real connection to us, but lacked the strength of character to surmount the alienating nature of modern schools?
Politicians? You mention politicians. But the grants come from a private foundation. Do you have any reason to believe the awarding of the grants has anything to do with elected politicians?
And don't forget, no matter what brand of printer you eventually get, some office supply stores will give you free reams of paper or a small store credit for each empty cartridge you return, because most of these cartridges are specifically designed to be recycled and reused, to the point where the stores bank on making a profit returning these. PLEASE do this, not just for the free paper, but because of the environmental impact... which is another reason not to use Lexmark!
While it is important that people think they are making a worthwhile conservation effort I think it is important that those efforts are spent where they will do the most good.
Is there something you know about printer cartridges that I don't know? Are there are some aspect of printer cartridges that makes them particularly toxic waste?
I know that lexmark and HP embed electronics into the cartridge -- one factor that makes their cartridges more expensive. Epson cartridges have no embedded electronics.
Electronics are considered toxic waste. Is that why you
Yes, recycling is important. "Reduce, re-use, recycle." If possible it is better to reduce than re-use. If you can print 2-up, or in draft mode, that is better than re-using. Actually, returning the cartridges to be re-filled would be re-use -- not recycling.
However, what did you do with your old stereo, TV, computer, monitor, used batteries? The reason why monitors are so heavy is that the tube is made from leaded glass. And lead is considered quite toxic. Solder is considered quite toxic. Going to extremes to return your cartridges for recycling doesn't make sense if you just ditch these even more toxic items.
I do plan to re-fill my epson cartridges. There are self-serve kits to allow you refill your own cartridges. But if I didn't refill an epson cartridge, gram for gram, would throwing it out have more impact on the environment than throwing out a plastic bag, or styrofoam packing material?
Really, if it'd been a sysadmin job, I might agree with you. But what it boils down to is that it's a trivia question; the answer is in some book, and I just shouldn't need to care. Windows was rolling along anyway, and soon enough it wouldn't matter at all.
Maybe this question was asked of you because you being considered for a promotion to a systems programming position?
"Windows rolling along..." Hmmm. Actually, all versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 required a sensible value for this environment variable.
It was clear for years that 640K was not enough. Loading in little helper background tasks, like sidekick or doskey often meant a user wouldn't have enough conventional memory to run their main applications. Loading in a new mouse driver, cdrom driver, or sound card driver could do the same.
Instructions for how make every last scrap of conventional memory available to your applications were floating around. Sticking drivers and background tasks in the 384K reserved for the system was one solution. And reducing the system's maximum number of open files was another.
Users, who didn't know any better, were routinely screwing around with this environment variable. And this could break your application programs.
I continue to think that was a very reasonable thing for your boss to want to know if you knew. You wanted him to test your theoretical knowledge. He wanted to test your practical knowledge. And you got snotty with him.
As for whether the default was 3, or 8? It was ridiculously low. And if I am ever going to lead a team doing MS-DOS development I'll be sure to bone up on the exact value.
Sorry, meant millions -- wrote billions. Wishful thinking.
MS settled, after years of legal proceeding. The exact terms
of the settlement are confidential.
I believe what is known includes: Caldera paid Novell $400 000
for the rights to DR DOS. But, I believe, Novell reserved that
some portion of an eventual settlement would flow back to Novell.
I read that MS wrote down $150 000 000 that quarter, to pay
Caldera. I read some speculation that this $150 000 000 was
merely the first installment, and that the total amount may
have been $600 000 000. I'd like to believe this, but, again,
I want to guard against withful thinking.
I had been trying to follow the progress of this case. But the
settlement took me by surprise. I missed its coverage, and had
to go back to look for reporting on it... I read suggestions
that the whole thing was a grudge match between Ray Noorda, the
billionaire founder of Novell, and Bill Gates, the billionaire
founder of MS. The suggestion was that Gates resignation as
President of MS was one of the confidential clauses of the
settlement. Gates did resign within a few days of the settlement
being announced.
Tell you what, lets not count "research" whose goal is to screw up users disloyal enough to use non-MS software, OK?
Do you know the story of DR-DOS? Digital Research DOS? Microsoft wrote Windows so that it tested to see whether it was invoked under a version of MS-DOS. If it wasn't it purposely crashed itself, giving error messages that implied that DR-DOS was broken. Microsoft fought a long rear-guard battle with Caldera over this, eventually having to pay hundreds of billions of dollars.
Why should we allow politicians to award themselves golden pensions?
It raises the bar on corruption.
Vice President Spiro Agnew would normally have become President when Nixon resigned. But it came to light that he had been accepting bribes for ages. And the really shocking thing was not that he could be bought, but how cheaply he had been bought.
If politicians have really generous pensions to look forward to only the really greedy ones will accept bribes, or go back as lobbyists.
These golden pensions save us money in the long run...
...the ISS can only be staffed by a maximum three-person crew until another escape option is available...
They didn't maintain a lifeboat for Mir. Was that so bad? Sure, it was embarrassing when the USSR collapsed, and they left one cosmonaut stranded in Mir for six months.
I am not a Heinlein scholar. But I thought the explanation was that this book was so terrible because it was the first one he wrote following a stroke. In particular I thought he was having a slow recovery, and then tried a new drug, that helped him recover...
Everything after "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" kind of sucked, IMHO. Once he got so into the whole sex/polyamory thing as a constant focus, I just lost interest.
Agreed. I've wondered about this. Did success spoil him? Some of those earlier works were serialized for particular markets, like the boy scout magazine. Maybe when he got successful enough he could write the more pompous, idiosyncratic stuff, without worrying about paying the bills through serialization?
But then I liked the "voice-over" cut of Bladerunner...
What makes you so sure that kind of disparity wont still be around in another few hundred years?
Will disparity exist in future society? Maybe. I dunno. Through extrapolation it might seem likely. On the other hand it could be argued our technological society won't survive hundreds of years if disparity can't be addressed. So - I dunno.
But I also don't know how what you write addresses my points. Are you objecting to "bizarre 'Buck Rogers' mixture of technologies?"
Yes, there are people today who can only afford a hand-tool level of
technology. But we don't rely on them for our mining. This is unimaginative story writing. Are you asking me to forgive terrible story-writing because the writer's future isn't pretty, like that of the Star Trek Federation? Sorry. I won't...
Now consider the British show science fiction "Red Dwarf"... It had some really goofy fantasy elements. But I have enjoyed the episodes I watched anyhow, because the writers were trying to say something interesting and meaningful about our current society.
If you found something interesting and meaningful in this series, well good for you. I didn't.
I think the ideas were that a) Terraforming was automated, b) Once a colony was set up it got little to no assistance from home base, and c) there just was a massive civil war, and most of the series took place on planets which were on the losing side.
It still doesn't make complete sense, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making out.
Excuse me, why does the idea that the terraforming might be automated explain a bizarre "Buck Rogers" mixture of technologies? What does automation mean in the case anyhow. You remind me of story David Parnass told, of his time sitting on the SDI oversight committee. Whenever an unanswerable technical objection came up the senior General would fix the questioner with a steely gaze, and say, "Yes, but we will be using expert systems!
You say "planets" but IIRC the voice-over at the beginning said that hundreds, or maybe it was thousands, of asteroids had been terraformed.
So, what do you think it would cost to terraform even a single asteroid, the size of Eros?
If this stellar system was of comparable size and complexity to our own, hundreds of asteroids would get us down to Eros sized rocks, wouldn't it? A dome to retain the air... Magical gravity generators so our heroes aren't bouncing around like basketballs... How much would it cost? PLENTY! Somebody is going to make that investment, and then leave the colonists to rely on tools as primitive as shovels? And HOW does this make sense?
Maybe these absurdities didn't ruin this work for you. Well, it ruined it for me, and I make no apology for that...
I watched one episode, the first to be broadcast I believe. It had these amazingly poorly thought aspects...
The backstory had humans living on hundreds or thousands of terraformed asteroids. And this one was set on a terraformed asteroid with a cute little Olde West train that traveled at Olde West train speeds, even though it was suspended above the railbed with antigravity, mag-lev, or some other kind of unexplained magic.
At the other end of the train is a community of pick and shovel miners.
Excuse me?
They just terraformed this planet, did the writers have any idea what kinds of energy and work is required to terraform a planet? Moving a whole continent would be child's play, if you had the capability to terraform a planet. And yet miners are clawing buckets of minerals from the ground with picks and shovels?
An someone called the Fox management pointy-haird bosses for failing to appreciate the ideas behind this show...
I will tackle the innovative relationship in another comment...
Do you believe the domestication of wolves actually resulted in a subset of that species we call dogs?
Of course, there were no dogs until wild animals became domesticated. IIRC recent genetic studies show that the dog DNA derives from wolf DNA.
I thought this was common knowledge. Domesticated animals have neotonous features. Wolf pups are playful, like dog pups. But dogs retain playfulness into adulthood. Smaller canine teeth, smaller brow ridges? I read that these are a feature of all domesticated strains of animals -- including modern humans.
I don't know either, but if they're anything like the primitive cultures that still exist on our puny planet, they will have shown a deep respect for nature. Something that is lacking in most civilized culture today.
I know this is a common belief nowadays. Yet, I am somewhat skeptical. We must watch out that modern politics, in particular, the debate over environmental issues, may taint our understanding of what these primitive peoples were really like...
I am not trying to slander stone-age cultures. But should we be choosing environmental practices now because they are good ideas, or because we admire what we imagine the ethics of our stone age ancestors? I will expand on the danger of harnessing a bad ideas to bolster a good one in a followup article.
Domesticated animals are either by nature docile (cows) or become docile in their upbringing (cats & dogs) So, no, I make no distinction between wild and domesticated animals when it comes to genetic manipulation.
What I was trying to ask here is whether it might be considered that if there was an ethical compromise in manipulating the fate of wild animals that compromise was made thousands of years ago with domesticated animals.
The spidersilk-goatsmilk is not natural, the purpose for milk is to be consumed. Would you drink it, knowing it contained spidersilkprotein?
Sure, why not? I am sure it is a lot healthier than drinking coffee-mate, or a diet soft-drink.
Still, is it ethical to (mis)create beings into chemical factories? Surely we've been using animals for such purposes for a long time already (the musk of certain animals...)
But actually altering a species' genome even if by a few genes for the sake of producing spidersilk, is completely different thing!
Consider Rover.
Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated. We don't know how exactly. But some genius may have thrown a proto-dog a bone. The domestication may have taken dozens or hundreds of generations. Does dog DNA contain genes not found in Wolf DNA?
IIRC, some, but less than you might think...
Anyhow, if we were to ask the ancestors who took the first steps in domesticating the wolf whether they would accept some magical help that would
change the nature of the wolf to convert it from a danger and a competitor into a friendly and useful companion in just one generation, do you think they would tell us it was unethical?
Maybe. I don't know.
Let me ask you a different question. Do you feel there would more of an ethical problem with fiddling with the genome of a wild animal? Domesticated animals already have had lots of
manipulation, in addition to living in our artificial world...
Consider ourselves. We have domesticated ourselves. Our features are more neotonous than those of our ancestors, just as the process of domestication has made dogs and other of our creatures more neotonous...
I don't believe you are expressing this quite right...
I believe the goats were engineered so their mammary glands produced spidersilk protein along with the other proteins found in regular goat milk. The goats don't spurt spidersilk from the teats. Their milk is
liquid, just like regular milk.
IIRC the spidersilk protein can then be extracted from the milk.
This article addresses how to process spidersilk gel into actual silk...
how is it that these companies can bring in people from other countries to replace jobs for which there are TONS of unemployed people who want those same jobs?
It is called Free Trade. Your government and mine signe the NAFTA agreement because they felt more loyalty to big corporations than they did to their own citizens.
Edger Djikstra said the most important quality to be found in a good programmer was a mastery of one's mother tongue. He then added that this explained the generally poor quality of American programmers. LOL.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, other correspondents have suggested roller blades, skateboards, and spring loaded shoes... They sound like hard work too... Harder work than a bicycle, where you can use the proper gear for climbing hills.
Those other self-powered devices don't seem as safe as a bicycle either... Particularly the spring loaded shoes. If you used them on a regular sidewalk, at speed, how long before you creamed a pedestrian? And if you used them on the road how long before you were creamed?
How easy are these to ride? Do the smaller wheels give you less stability, because they serve as smaller gyroscopes? Inquiring minds want to know...
I have a friend, a very beautiful young woman, who likes to gamble. (I know, I know, maybe knowing her disqualifies me for slashdot. But we are just friends.) Anyhow, she is not only beautiful, but outgoing, charming, engaging. And she believes in psychic powers. She believes she is lucky, and believes that she can make useful guesses about when a slot machine will pay off.
According to her she does win. Is this possible? I watched a documentary, part of the "forbidden places" series, about the surviellance you subject yourself. Is it possible that she wins more than her share?
I tell her that the surviellance bosses may tune her machine to pay out more than normal because she is so talkative and charming, that they know she will talk the other guests into putting more into the machines...
And you trust them to faithfully observe the law because this industry has already impressed you with the ethical standards they have shown so far?
LOL.
Blinn, James F.
Demaine, Erik
Holland, John H.
Jurafsky, Daniel
Rus, Daniela
Shor, Peter
Sims, Karl
Stallman, Richard
Winfree, Erik
Wolfram, Stephen
The MacArthur Foundation site has the fellows sorted by field. These eleven were the ones they classed under "Computer Science".
Like Richard Stallman? Oh, wait a second, he already got one in 1990.
I had some really good teachers. But they were the exceptions. Maybe the other teachers could have been inspiring and made a real connection to us, but lacked the strength of character to surmount the alienating nature of modern schools?
Politicians? You mention politicians. But the grants come from a private foundation. Do you have any reason to believe the awarding of the grants has anything to do with elected politicians?
While it is important that people think they are making a worthwhile conservation effort I think it is important that those efforts are spent where they will do the most good.
Is there something you know about printer cartridges that I don't know? Are there are some aspect of printer cartridges that makes them particularly toxic waste?
I know that lexmark and HP embed electronics into the cartridge -- one factor that makes their cartridges more expensive. Epson cartridges have no embedded electronics.
Electronics are considered toxic waste. Is that why you Yes, recycling is important. " Reduce, re-use, recycle. " If possible it is better to reduce than re-use. If you can print 2-up, or in draft mode, that is better than re-using. Actually, returning the cartridges to be re-filled would be re-use -- not recycling.
However, what did you do with your old stereo, TV, computer, monitor, used batteries? The reason why monitors are so heavy is that the tube is made from leaded glass. And lead is considered quite toxic. Solder is considered quite toxic. Going to extremes to return your cartridges for recycling doesn't make sense if you just ditch these even more toxic items.
I do plan to re-fill my epson cartridges. There are self-serve kits to allow you refill your own cartridges. But if I didn't refill an epson cartridge, gram for gram, would throwing it out have more impact on the environment than throwing out a plastic bag, or styrofoam packing material?
Maybe this question was asked of you because you being considered for a promotion to a systems programming position?
"Windows rolling along..." Hmmm. Actually, all versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 required a sensible value for this environment variable.
It was clear for years that 640K was not enough. Loading in little helper background tasks, like sidekick or doskey often meant a user wouldn't have enough conventional memory to run their main applications. Loading in a new mouse driver, cdrom driver, or sound card driver could do the same.
Instructions for how make every last scrap of conventional memory available to your applications were floating around. Sticking drivers and background tasks in the 384K reserved for the system was one solution. And reducing the system's maximum number of open files was another.
Users, who didn't know any better, were routinely screwing around with this environment variable. And this could break your application programs.
I continue to think that was a very reasonable thing for your boss to want to know if you knew. You wanted him to test your theoretical knowledge. He wanted to test your practical knowledge. And you got snotty with him.
As for whether the default was 3, or 8? It was ridiculously low. And if I am ever going to lead a team doing MS-DOS development I'll be sure to bone up on the exact value.
MS settled, after years of legal proceeding. The exact terms of the settlement are confidential.
I believe what is known includes: Caldera paid Novell $400 000 for the rights to DR DOS. But, I believe, Novell reserved that some portion of an eventual settlement would flow back to Novell.
I read that MS wrote down $150 000 000 that quarter, to pay Caldera. I read some speculation that this $150 000 000 was merely the first installment, and that the total amount may have been $600 000 000. I'd like to believe this, but, again, I want to guard against withful thinking.
I had been trying to follow the progress of this case. But the settlement took me by surprise. I missed its coverage, and had to go back to look for reporting on it... I read suggestions that the whole thing was a grudge match between Ray Noorda, the billionaire founder of Novell, and Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of MS. The suggestion was that Gates resignation as President of MS was one of the confidential clauses of the settlement. Gates did resign within a few days of the settlement being announced.
What do you call the shenanigans of the Bush team as described in this recent NY Times editorial? Who's sordid now
LOL, LOL, LOL.
Tell you what, lets not count "research" whose goal is to screw up users disloyal enough to use non-MS software, OK?
Do you know the story of DR-DOS? Digital Research DOS? Microsoft wrote Windows so that it tested to see whether it was invoked under a version of MS-DOS. If it wasn't it purposely crashed itself, giving error messages that implied that DR-DOS was broken. Microsoft fought a long rear-guard battle with Caldera over this, eventually having to pay hundreds of billions of dollars.
The answer is "3". The environment variable was NFILES.
Frankly, I think it is a pretty reasonable question.
Why should we allow politicians to award themselves golden pensions?
It raises the bar on corruption.
Vice President Spiro Agnew would normally have become President when Nixon resigned. But it came to light that he had been accepting bribes for ages. And the really shocking thing was not that he could be bought, but how cheaply he had been bought.
If politicians have really generous pensions to look forward to only the really greedy ones will accept bribes, or go back as lobbyists.
These golden pensions save us money in the long run...
They didn't maintain a lifeboat for Mir. Was that so bad? Sure, it was embarrassing when the USSR collapsed, and they left one cosmonaut stranded in Mir for six months.
I am not a Heinlein scholar. But I thought the explanation was that this book was so terrible because it was the first one he wrote following a stroke. In particular I thought he was having a slow recovery, and then tried a new drug, that helped him recover...
Agreed. I've wondered about this. Did success spoil him? Some of those earlier works were serialized for particular markets, like the boy scout magazine. Maybe when he got successful enough he could write the more pompous, idiosyncratic stuff, without worrying about paying the bills through serialization?
But then I liked the "voice-over" cut of Bladerunner...
Will disparity exist in future society? Maybe. I dunno. Through extrapolation it might seem likely. On the other hand it could be argued our technological society won't survive hundreds of years if disparity can't be addressed. So - I dunno.
But I also don't know how what you write addresses my points. Are you objecting to "bizarre 'Buck Rogers' mixture of technologies?"
Yes, there are people today who can only afford a hand-tool level of technology. But we don't rely on them for our mining. This is unimaginative story writing. Are you asking me to forgive terrible story-writing because the writer's future isn't pretty, like that of the Star Trek Federation? Sorry. I won't...
Now consider the British show science fiction "Red Dwarf"... It had some really goofy fantasy elements. But I have enjoyed the episodes I watched anyhow, because the writers were trying to say something interesting and meaningful about our current society.
If you found something interesting and meaningful in this series, well good for you. I didn't.
Excuse me, why does the idea that the terraforming might be automated explain a bizarre "Buck Rogers" mixture of technologies? What does automation mean in the case anyhow. You remind me of story David Parnass told, of his time sitting on the SDI oversight committee. Whenever an unanswerable technical objection came up the senior General would fix the questioner with a steely gaze, and say, "Yes, but we will be using expert systems!
You say "planets" but IIRC the voice-over at the beginning said that hundreds, or maybe it was thousands, of asteroids had been terraformed.
So, what do you think it would cost to terraform even a single asteroid, the size of Eros? If this stellar system was of comparable size and complexity to our own, hundreds of asteroids would get us down to Eros sized rocks, wouldn't it? A dome to retain the air... Magical gravity generators so our heroes aren't bouncing around like basketballs... How much would it cost? PLENTY! Somebody is going to make that investment, and then leave the colonists to rely on tools as primitive as shovels? And HOW does this make sense?
Maybe these absurdities didn't ruin this work for you. Well, it ruined it for me, and I make no apology for that...
The backstory had humans living on hundreds or thousands of terraformed asteroids. And this one was set on a terraformed asteroid with a cute little Olde West train that traveled at Olde West train speeds, even though it was suspended above the railbed with antigravity, mag-lev, or some other kind of unexplained magic.
At the other end of the train is a community of pick and shovel miners.
Excuse me?
They just terraformed this planet, did the writers have any idea what kinds of energy and work is required to terraform a planet? Moving a whole continent would be child's play, if you had the capability to terraform a planet. And yet miners are clawing buckets of minerals from the ground with picks and shovels?
An someone called the Fox management pointy-haird bosses for failing to appreciate the ideas behind this show...
I will tackle the innovative relationship in another comment...
Of course, there were no dogs until wild animals became domesticated. IIRC recent genetic studies show that the dog DNA derives from wolf DNA. I thought this was common knowledge. Domesticated animals have neotonous features. Wolf pups are playful, like dog pups. But dogs retain playfulness into adulthood. Smaller canine teeth, smaller brow ridges? I read that these are a feature of all domesticated strains of animals -- including modern humans.
I know this is a common belief nowadays. Yet, I am somewhat skeptical. We must watch out that modern politics, in particular, the debate over environmental issues, may taint our understanding of what these primitive peoples were really like...
I am not trying to slander stone-age cultures. But should we be choosing environmental practices now because they are good ideas, or because we admire what we imagine the ethics of our stone age ancestors? I will expand on the danger of harnessing a bad ideas to bolster a good one in a followup article.
What I was trying to ask here is whether it might be considered that if there was an ethical compromise in manipulating the fate of wild animals that compromise was made thousands of years ago with domesticated animals.
Sure, why not? I am sure it is a lot healthier than drinking coffee-mate, or a diet soft-drink.
Consider Rover.
Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated. We don't know how exactly. But some genius may have thrown a proto-dog a bone. The domestication may have taken dozens or hundreds of generations. Does dog DNA contain genes not found in Wolf DNA? IIRC, some, but less than you might think...
Anyhow, if we were to ask the ancestors who took the first steps in domesticating the wolf whether they would accept some magical help that would change the nature of the wolf to convert it from a danger and a competitor into a friendly and useful companion in just one generation, do you think they would tell us it was unethical?
Maybe. I don't know.
Let me ask you a different question. Do you feel there would more of an ethical problem with fiddling with the genome of a wild animal? Domesticated animals already have had lots of manipulation, in addition to living in our artificial world...
Consider ourselves. We have domesticated ourselves. Our features are more neotonous than those of our ancestors, just as the process of domestication has made dogs and other of our creatures more neotonous...
I believe the goats were engineered so their mammary glands produced spidersilk protein along with the other proteins found in regular goat milk. The goats don't spurt spidersilk from the teats. Their milk is liquid, just like regular milk.
IIRC the spidersilk protein can then be extracted from the milk.
This article addresses how to process spidersilk gel into actual silk...
It is called Free Trade . Your government and mine signe the NAFTA agreement because they felt more loyalty to big corporations than they did to their own citizens.
Yeah, but did you ever try reading any of his stuff?
Shit he must have been the world's laziest writer. His stuff is just crammed full of over-used cliches.
LOL. Just kidding
Edger Djikstra said the most important quality to be found in a good programmer was a mastery of one's mother tongue. He then added that this explained the generally poor quality of American programmers. LOL.