...my college *major* was biochemistry and microbiology.
Ah. Good to have an expert.
...easily walk over to the next department and ask for lab time, and probably get it with no questions asked. All we had to do at my University was sign up during open hours.
You have probably heard this old aphorism: "Why is academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low." Is it possible that a professor, or department, that normally had a policy of allowing members of the University community to sign up for open lab time would prohibit someone who might cost them research grants from Monsanto?
Or maybe Dr Kurtz didn't think his dignity was consistent with sharing a lab with undergrads?
E. coli can be fatal in a wound? I didn't know that. I thought that meat contaminated with e. coli was a problem because it could cause food poisoning -- nausea and diarhea. What does e. coli do to your mouth?
So you walk over to the bio lab, and you sign up to use it during slack time. Or you enlist the help of some professor of biology. Of course, in that case you might not want to be performing experiments that are questionable either legally or ethically...
So you think he should have gone begging for permission from some biology professors to let them schedule you some time in their labs?
May I suggest it is possible that a Biology professor might object to giving away their lab resources for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics or legalisms?
What if their labs are busy? What if they said, "I may be able to find you some space, during the summer, if one of my grad student's experiments goes south."
What if they said, "Geez Kurtz, we don't like how your previous work tackled the bio-food industry. My colleagues and I count on grants from those guys. We can't piss them off."
What if they said, "Geez Kurtz, we are real scientists, and we think you are a kook. Fuck Off."
What if they said, "OK Kurtz, you can use my lab. But since you are not in the Biology department, regulations compel me to charge you a lab fee..."
People sometimes put disclaimers in their notes. Well, I took a micro-biology course. Mind you, it was a long time ago. I think the most important precaution, when working with e coli, is that one watch one's hands afterwards. It seems to me that using a corner of the rec room to incubate bacteria isn't necessarily any more dangerous than brewing beer, fermenting wine, or aging cheese.
I've read about fifty comments here, and no one has expressed any sympathy for the guy who has just lost his wife. She was an artist herself, and they worked together on their projects. I am going to assume he loved her.
Put yourself in his shoes. You lose your wife and you get your life turned upside down, at the same time, by the Justice department?
This reminds me of
that Oregon lawyer.
He had defended someone suspected of terrorist ties. He had converted to Islam. The FBI said there was a match between him and a fingerprint found at the Madrid bombing. But they were wildly wrong. They were told they were wrong.
Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police's science division, said he was also struck by the F.B.I.'s intense focus on Mr. Mayfield. "It seemed as though they had something against him," Mr. Corrales said, "and they wanted to involve us."
What is the point of patting yourself on the back for having a "free Country" if you let paranoia around security make you act like a Police State?
Hello! What is this Grand Jury you speak of? Not everyone lives in the USA you know. How is a
grand jury different than a
preliminary hearing?
Do you Americans have them as well as preliminary hearings?
Or are they instead of preliminary hearings?
Only the prosecutor gets to ask questions? Yipes! That doesn't sound fair! I thought the USA was supposed to be a democratic Country? Seriously, why have them? How often do you have them? Are the jurors for Grand Juries drawn from the same pool as jurors for regular trials? Is the prosecutor on his own, or does a judge preside?
There is another possible alternative other than headphones.
There are speakers that work kind of like a phased array radar.
Instead of one big speaker emitting big sound, there are a whole bunch of little emitters, emitting little sound.
A phased array radar can steer a beam across the sky without moving any mechanical parts by altering the phase of the signals sent out from the little emitters it is made up of. If the emitters are all in synch then they reinforce one another and emit a strong beam normal to the surface. Off to the sides the little speakers cancel one another out. Mind you, I imagine this works better with high frequencies than low frequencies.
Wasn't there a minivan that came with individual speakers, so each passenger could listen to a different audio source? I figured it used this technology.
Of course, unlike phased radar, these speakers would not have to be steerable. You would mount them in the headrest of your chair.
The strength of a roughly cylindrical limb is proportional to the square of its diameter.
And the mass of that limb is proportional to the product of all three of its dimensions. So the bigger the animal the thicker the limbs, to make them strong enough to support the mass.
That is why elephants have legs the size of tree trunks.
And that is why brontosaurs have legs the size of big tree trunks.
I think we should go farther than that. Minix was a big success. Even if he had never written his book and the only people who used it were his students I think we could fairly classify it as a success. But it was used by a great many more people than that. So it was a big success.
In terms of users, of course, Linux too was a big success. I think that it is only in comparison to Linux that Minix doesn't look like a success. But it is a success, a big success.
About 20 years ago Bardot flew to Labrador, for a photo-op, to protest the traditional hunt for baby seals. The babies have a white pelt, and are very easy to catch, because they don't know how to swim. The mothers give birth on ice floes, so they can be caught on foot. They are harvested by being clubbed on the head, so as not to damage the pelt.
Anyhow, the embarrassing moment came when Bardot said to the press who had accompanied her, something like, "This hunt is so cruel. I know, I held one of the little darlings in my arms."
What everyone was embarrassed to say was, "Um, excuse me. Miss Bardot, that wasn't a live baby seal, that was one that had been stuffed by a taxidermist."
So, if she can't tell a live seal from a stuffed one, it wouldn't surprise me if she couldn't tell a dog from a rat.
Well, since the speed of sound is 740 mph, and airliners are subsonic, maybe you mean 600 yo 800 kph? Lol.
Even with 4 airports in the State, do you think the round trip time is going to average less than 40 minutes? Toronto and Buffalo are about 100 miles apart. But flying there takes about 20 minutes, because the plane has to climb to cruising altitude. Then they have to descend again. Your 747 water bomber would have to descend too, in order to deposit a payload accurately. Plus there is still the loading up of the water payload...
The 12 seconds the water-bomber needs is hard to compete with.
The Canadian water-bomber may hold 1/15th as much as the modified 747, but, if there is a nearby body of water, it can deliver
half a dozen or more payloads per hour. Your 747 is not amphibious. It requires a big airport to land and get loaded up with water. Big airport == busy airport. And probably not that close to the fire. Would you care to estimate the round trip time, once you add in the time taken to taxi up to the pumps, pump in the payload, and wait in line for clearance to take off. I would be surprised if the 747 could get in three flights in two hours.
So a 747 wouldn't replace fifteen smaller craft. It might replace three or four...
If you didn't factor in the increased accuracy of the purpose-built water-bomber.
Here is a picture
showing the kind of purpose-built water-bombers we use in Canada filling up with water. Note, it is a float-plane. The pilot locates a lake or reservoir that is near the fire, flies low, and scoops up a cargo of water.
A 747, or even a C130, will have to land at a conventional airport, and use conventional pumps to take on a load of water.
Here is an
account of their use. They carry 1450 gallons. Those would be 160 ounce Imperial gallons, not your smaller 128 ounce American gallons.
Linus is a very gracious guy. About five years ago he was one of the speakers at a trade show here in Toronto. He gave a brief talk to allow for a long question period. Many of the questions, including my own, contained elements of hero worship.
I mentioned the disagreement he had with Tanenbaum, on kernel design. I quoted Tanenbaum's comment, that if Linus was one of his students, he would flunk him. And I asked him if Tanenbaum had ever apologized, or recanted.
It was a perfect opportunity for Linus to play at a rivalry, dump on Tanenbaum, and so on.
But he didn't do that. He gave a very gracious answer about where he expressed sympathy for Tanenbaum, who had put in years of work on Minix, feeling annoyed at people trying to use the minix newsgroups to discuss something else.
So I wonder exactly what Tanenbaum said to the clowns writing this report? I've read some of Tanenbaum's books. He is a funny, entertaining writer. I'd really like to believe that he too was gracious, and that the Microsoft shills unfairly used juxtaposition to imply he had criticized Linus. I know he knows Linus didn't rip off any of his code.
Without claiming to be any kind of kernel guru I believe that the Minix and Linux kernels are so different that it is not useful to call Minix the immediate ancestor of Linux.
The Linux kernel is a "monolithic" kernel. The Minix kernel is more like Hurd, or
QNX, with a "microkernel", and tasks communicate via message passing. Minix was written as a teaching tool, aimed to run on an 8088. So it had performance limiting bottle-necks. IIRC the file system task could only handle a single file system request at a time.
But it makes me wonder about Xenix - the one Microsoft owned, for a while. Guess that didn't exist, either.
Microsoft liscensed Xenix. They didn't own it. I used a version of Xenix in the early 80s. The Xenix I used was clearly just a rebranded version 7.
News articles at the time said that the agreement with Novell allowed Novell to get a cut of the settlement. So this was not completely secret.
News articles at the time said that Caldera paid $400,000 for DR-DOS, not $1,000,000 as this recent article says.
News articles at the time said that Microsoft's settlement was $150,000,000, or, at least $150,000,000. That much was listed in Microsoft's books, for the settlement. But some said this was just the first installment, and that the final amount might have been $600,000,000. This recent article said $250,000,000.
IIRC the original founders of Caldera were former Novell executives, and proteges of Ray Noorda.
One of the articles pointed out that Bill Gates stepped down from being President of Microsoft within days of the settlement. That article speculated that the suit was not really about money. That article suggested it was a grudge match between two billionaires, where the older one wanted to teach the younger one some manners, and that Gates resigning was one of the conditions of the settlement.
I don't like seeing this suit conflated with SCO's legal actions against linux users and firms that use of develop for linux. Caldera had an irrefutable case against Microsoft. Microsoft was guilty as sin.
I'd like to think that if the settlement hadn't suppressed Caldera's evidence against Microsoft that Microsoft would have ended up being taken apart by now.
...the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which is responsible for investigating most online-auction scams...
Higgins, 45, has worked for the U.S. Postal Service since he was in college, when he took a job as a letter carrier in the town of Andover, Massachusetts, north of Boston. He had always wanted to be a federal agent -- maybe in the Secret Service or the FBI -- but the path to becoming a postal inspector seemed a little clearer. Despite the dweeby title, postal inspectors are indeed feds: Higgins packs a 9-millimeter Beretta Centurion whenever he leaves the office. "We're not as well-known as the FBI," shrugs Higgins. "That doesn't bother me." He has a low-key personality, a spiky gray brush cut with a shock of white in front, and a reputation around the office as a tenacious investigator.
There was an article last summer, in a magazine called fastcompany, about a postal inspector who was specializing in busting ebay fraudsters. That web-page, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/kirsner.htm l, does not seem to be online right now. It described various dirty tricks crooked ebayers use. If Fast Company magazine has gone out of business it would be worth going to the library to read this article, which was entitled, "catch me if you can".
Twenty years or so ago I read a USENET post, by a guy who had made a couple of long visits to India, He wrote how he knew he couldn't count on the Indian electrical grid providing clean power. So he brought a UPS with him. It lasted him a short amount of time. I don't remember the details as to whether he went through several North American UPSes.
But he eventually bought a locally made UPS. He said it was noisy, making hissing and spitting noises. But it worked great.
Well, that was twenty years ago.
In urban areas at least, is the Indian electrical grid now able to provide clean power? I am guessing it can. Maybe your local geeks can provide you with better advice than slashdot?
...the Shuttle does do some things right, and failures of the Shuttle and Buran programs...
Buran had interesting improvements over the American shuttle.
If any builds further winged re-entry vehicles I will be interested in seeing whether it borrows more features from the American shuttle or from Buran.
Sharp horizontal or vertical lines you probably want to leave as is.
Anti-aliasing involves adjusting the brightness of the pixels on a line with stair steps. So, instead of:
MMM MMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
You would get something like.
MMMfo+- MMMMMMMMMfo+- MMMMMMMMMMMMMMfo+-
It will work best if you stand back from the monitor a few feet. This is called "ascii art". I wanted to put more lines in my examples, but it triggered slashdot's "lameness filter". Grrrr.
Digital scanners scan images into square, or rectangular, pixels.
So, wouldn't you get a more accurate scan of those portions of the recording where the general direction of the groove was tangent to, or normal to, the direction of the scan head?
We have all seen digital images, where some curved lines had a blobbly stair step effect. That is called aliasing. There are algorithms for anti-aliasing. But don't they lose precision?
Slashdot Mirror
How would this effect the famous plans for a space elevator?
Ah. Good to have an expert.
You have probably heard this old aphorism: "Why is academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low." Is it possible that a professor, or department, that normally had a policy of allowing members of the University community to sign up for open lab time would prohibit someone who might cost them research grants from Monsanto?
Or maybe Dr Kurtz didn't think his dignity was consistent with sharing a lab with undergrads?
E. coli can be fatal in a wound? I didn't know that. I thought that meat contaminated with e. coli was a problem because it could cause food poisoning -- nausea and diarhea. What does e. coli do to your mouth?
Secret? How often do some of the secret elements of the Grand Jury proceedings leak out?
Seriously, the secretiveness does seem to contradict the general openness people expect of the USA.
So you think he should have gone begging for permission from some biology professors to let them schedule you some time in their labs?
May I suggest it is possible that a Biology professor might object to giving away their lab resources for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics or legalisms?
What if their labs are busy? What if they said, "I may be able to find you some space, during the summer, if one of my grad student's experiments goes south."
What if they said, "Geez Kurtz, we don't like how your previous work tackled the bio-food industry. My colleagues and I count on grants from those guys. We can't piss them off."
What if they said, "Geez Kurtz, we are real scientists, and we think you are a kook. Fuck Off."
What if they said, "OK Kurtz, you can use my lab. But since you are not in the Biology department, regulations compel me to charge you a lab fee..."
People sometimes put disclaimers in their notes. Well, I took a micro-biology course. Mind you, it was a long time ago. I think the most important precaution, when working with e coli, is that one watch one's hands afterwards. It seems to me that using a corner of the rec room to incubate bacteria isn't necessarily any more dangerous than brewing beer, fermenting wine, or aging cheese.
I've read about fifty comments here, and no one has expressed any sympathy for the guy who has just lost his wife. She was an artist herself, and they worked together on their projects. I am going to assume he loved her.
Put yourself in his shoes. You lose your wife and you get your life turned upside down, at the same time, by the Justice department?
This reminds me of that Oregon lawyer. He had defended someone suspected of terrorist ties. He had converted to Islam. The FBI said there was a match between him and a fingerprint found at the Madrid bombing. But they were wildly wrong. They were told they were wrong.
What is the point of patting yourself on the back for having a "free Country" if you let paranoia around security make you act like a Police State?Only the prosecutor gets to ask questions? Yipes! That doesn't sound fair! I thought the USA was supposed to be a democratic Country? Seriously, why have them? How often do you have them? Are the jurors for Grand Juries drawn from the same pool as jurors for regular trials? Is the prosecutor on his own, or does a judge preside?
A phased array radar can steer a beam across the sky without moving any mechanical parts by altering the phase of the signals sent out from the little emitters it is made up of. If the emitters are all in synch then they reinforce one another and emit a strong beam normal to the surface. Off to the sides the little speakers cancel one another out. Mind you, I imagine this works better with high frequencies than low frequencies.
Wasn't there a minivan that came with individual speakers, so each passenger could listen to a different audio source? I figured it used this technology.
Of course, unlike phased radar, these speakers would not have to be steerable. You would mount them in the headrest of your chair.
Isaac Asimov wrote some essays on this.
I don't think he meant Linus hadn't credited him enough.
Is it possible he meant he thought Linus should give more credit to Ken Thompson? Or, lol, Richard Stallman?
In terms of users, of course, Linux too was a big success. I think that it is only in comparison to Linux that Minix doesn't look like a success. But it is a success, a big success.
Anyhow, the embarrassing moment came when Bardot said to the press who had accompanied her, something like, "This hunt is so cruel. I know, I held one of the little darlings in my arms."
What everyone was embarrassed to say was, "Um, excuse me. Miss Bardot, that wasn't a live baby seal, that was one that had been stuffed by a taxidermist."
So, if she can't tell a live seal from a stuffed one, it wouldn't surprise me if she couldn't tell a dog from a rat.
I googled for "speed of 747". About halfway down it says the cruising speed, at 35,000 feet, is 570 mph.
Even with 4 airports in the State, do you think the round trip time is going to average less than 40 minutes? Toronto and Buffalo are about 100 miles apart. But flying there takes about 20 minutes, because the plane has to climb to cruising altitude. Then they have to descend again. Your 747 water bomber would have to descend too, in order to deposit a payload accurately. Plus there is still the loading up of the water payload...
The 12 seconds the water-bomber needs is hard to compete with.
So a 747 wouldn't replace fifteen smaller craft. It might replace three or four... If you didn't factor in the increased accuracy of the purpose-built water-bomber.
A 747, or even a C130, will have to land at a conventional airport, and use conventional pumps to take on a load of water.
Here is an account of their use. They carry 1450 gallons. Those would be 160 ounce Imperial gallons, not your smaller 128 ounce American gallons.
I mentioned the disagreement he had with Tanenbaum, on kernel design. I quoted Tanenbaum's comment, that if Linus was one of his students, he would flunk him. And I asked him if Tanenbaum had ever apologized, or recanted.
It was a perfect opportunity for Linus to play at a rivalry, dump on Tanenbaum, and so on.
But he didn't do that. He gave a very gracious answer about where he expressed sympathy for Tanenbaum, who had put in years of work on Minix, feeling annoyed at people trying to use the minix newsgroups to discuss something else.
So I wonder exactly what Tanenbaum said to the clowns writing this report? I've read some of Tanenbaum's books. He is a funny, entertaining writer. I'd really like to believe that he too was gracious, and that the Microsoft shills unfairly used juxtaposition to imply he had criticized Linus. I know he knows Linus didn't rip off any of his code.
Or Idris or Coherent.
Without claiming to be any kind of kernel guru I believe that the Minix and Linux kernels are so different that it is not useful to call Minix the immediate ancestor of Linux.
The Linux kernel is a "monolithic" kernel. The Minix kernel is more like Hurd, or QNX, with a "microkernel", and tasks communicate via message passing. Minix was written as a teaching tool, aimed to run on an 8088. So it had performance limiting bottle-necks. IIRC the file system task could only handle a single file system request at a time.
Microsoft liscensed Xenix. They didn't own it. I used a version of Xenix in the early 80s. The Xenix I used was clearly just a rebranded version 7.
News articles at the time said that the agreement with Novell allowed Novell to get a cut of the settlement. So this was not completely secret.
News articles at the time said that Caldera paid $400,000 for DR-DOS, not $1,000,000 as this recent article says.
News articles at the time said that Microsoft's settlement was $150,000,000, or, at least $150,000,000. That much was listed in Microsoft's books, for the settlement. But some said this was just the first installment, and that the final amount might have been $600,000,000. This recent article said $250,000,000.
IIRC the original founders of Caldera were former Novell executives, and proteges of Ray Noorda.
One of the articles pointed out that Bill Gates stepped down from being President of Microsoft within days of the settlement. That article speculated that the suit was not really about money. That article suggested it was a grudge match between two billionaires, where the older one wanted to teach the younger one some manners, and that Gates resigning was one of the conditions of the settlement.
I don't like seeing this suit conflated with SCO's legal actions against linux users and firms that use of develop for linux. Caldera had an irrefutable case against Microsoft. Microsoft was guilty as sin.
I'd like to think that if the settlement hadn't suppressed Caldera's evidence against Microsoft that Microsoft would have ended up being taken apart by now.
There was an article last summer, in a magazine called fastcompany, about a postal inspector who was specializing in busting ebay fraudsters. That web-page, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/kirsner.htm l, does not seem to be online right now. It described various dirty tricks crooked ebayers use. If Fast Company magazine has gone out of business it would be worth going to the library to read this article, which was entitled, "catch me if you can".
But he eventually bought a locally made UPS. He said it was noisy, making hissing and spitting noises. But it worked great.
Well, that was twenty years ago.
In urban areas at least, is the Indian electrical grid now able to provide clean power? I am guessing it can. Maybe your local geeks can provide you with better advice than slashdot?
Buran had interesting improvements over the American shuttle.
If any builds further winged re-entry vehicles I will be interested in seeing whether it borrows more features from the American shuttle or from Buran.
You would get something like.It will work best if you stand back from the monitor a few feet. This is called "ascii art". I wanted to put more lines in my examples, but it triggered slashdot's "lameness filter". Grrrr.Anti-aliasing involves adjusting the brightness of the pixels on a line with stair steps. So, instead of:
We have all seen digital images, where some curved lines had a blobbly stair step effect. That is called aliasing. There are algorithms for anti-aliasing. But don't they lose precision?
Since it comes in a 12 pack sonic detection and EM detection will be even more difficult.