Lets face it, is MSN messenger really an essential service? Do you pay your bills with it? Inform friends & family of a bereavement? Tell your boss you will be late for work?
No, it is virtually allways used for leisure: Pretending to do work whilst actually swapping sweet-little-nothings with Jane in accounts, or arranging a Q3 duel with DukeQuakem. (if someone actually has an important, legit reason for using a messenger service, please correct me...).
Basically, if you cant us MSN messenger, you can us email, or pick up the phone. I'm sure, when MSN messenger breaks down, its not on MS top list of priorites.
Perhaps, er, they had better things to do? Or perhaps it got lost at the bottom of someones in-draw?
However, it probably wasn't a good idea for MS to leave it so long. So many bloody people use it, that it does send out a helluvalot of bad publicity (I'm not going to get that date with Jane this weekend and it is ALL Micro$ofts fault!! Bah!). However, I think if a important component of.NET where to fail, and adversely affect many critical services, MS might react a little quicker, with greater resources & assurance
Global warming has not yet provably hurt individual human beings; anyone they have direct contact with in their daily lives
I know the problem with the Ozone layer isn't strictly global warming (rather "global environmental change"), but it does strike me that this has caused real, physical harm to numerous people in australia/NZ. Someone else may have posted this (but ive been reading +3;-), But it also seems relevant to the argument "these scientists are making it up for polotical reasons blah FUD blah" or "I can't see it therefore it isnt real".
The scientists said, stop using CFCs, and we did. And now the ozone hole is getting smaller again. But alot of people still dont trust the climate scientists!
without the mess of Gel Electrophoresis would be HUGE
Hey, dont knock electrophoresis mate. It is the basis of PCR resolution,
Southerns, Northens, SSCP, conventional sequencing methods plus a multitude of
other applications. Furthermore, refinements to this approach (read:
capillary electrophoresis) have supplied one of the major advances to
sequencing methodology in recent years, unlike the technology we are (were?)
discussing.
Who's GNOME did we sequence anyway
Good Question. Apparantly, they took DNA from around 100 (i forget the exact
figures here) US citizens of various sex/ethnicity, picked 7 out of the hat,
and sequenced portions of each (most from a single, unidentified individual -
although if nanopore technology comes to fruition, i reckons we can track him)
down
p.s. thats one of my favourite all-time techno-typo's: the Human Gnome
Project. Almost as good as sequencing my ARS (a yeast thang....)
Also, DNA breaks very easily. No way are you going to be able to pull a whole chromosome through at once
Yeah. Sure, i agree with you. Once youve taken DNA out of the nucleus and stripped out the protein complement of chromatin, it is darn hard to get high-quality genomic DNA (for PFGE or whatever). Furthermore, yanking the DNA through that little hole is gonna probably cause problems.
However, you dont need unfragmented DNA. For example, you could fragment
genomic DNA, and pieces of this would randomly pass through the pore -
essentially a shotgun approach. This wouldn't be a bad way of doing it. This would also get round problems with the detection mechanism. For example, if they could only disringuish between C/T with 80% accuracy, multiple reads of the same sequence could clear this up.
The technology could also overcome problems such as cloning bias, problems with sequencing microsats (e.g. (AT)n), GC rich regions etc. Which the HGMP is still having problems with.
Firstly, this idea has been around a while (i.e. check the references on the
article), but it does appear to be getting there now. Perhaps 5-10 years
before we start seeing commercial sequencing machines based on this
technology???
It will not replace conventional sequencing technology, unless it can
beat the now pretty cheap cost.
Conventional sequencing is based on labelling the individual DNA bases
with a different flourescent dye, and running the DNA through a gel which
seperates the DNA according to size: As each base runs through the gel, it
goes past a laser/detector which can detect the specific DNA base (A,T,C or G)
at that position. Due to gradual impovements to this technique over the last
20 or so years (originally it employed radiation, rather then flourescence)
the speed, sensitivity and cost has decreased dramatically. For example, the
human genome project started in ernest about 10 yrs ago. Celera Genomics,
using modern technology (and alot of financial backing, and the fact they are
a subsidiary of the people who make sequencing machines,) competed the genome
in a matter of months. The increase in DNA sequencing capacity puts moore's
law to shame.
For example, our lab could process around 100kb (thats KiloBases guys!)
of data a day, but we never even touch this with our machine. No need, and the
same stands for many small-medium research labs. Alot of people like us will
probably stick with conventional sequencing technology for a long time (it
works well, is high enough throuput, cheap & easy).
However, the are some exciting applications with single strand sequencing. For
example forensics. Also, it allows the oppotunirty of sequencing RNA (this is
the "messenger" which passes the "important" part of the DNA message to the
ribosomes, which then "compile" a protein - the stuff which actually does
things, like an enzyme or structural component). Sequencing RNA is exciting,
as currently you have to convert the RNA back to DNA (which can cause
problems) and then sequence that.
Another obvious application for this would be very high throuput sequencing
which would be employed by the major sequencing centres. Yes, i know we
already have the Human Genome, but a fashionable idea at the moment is
comparative genomics. This is very much taking biology back to its
roots (i.e. like Darwin and Wallace comparing the morphological
characteristics of certain species and infering adaption), but at a
molecular level. This will yield amazing insights with discoveries having
important implications from medicine to evolution. In fact I think the
general public & media will soon be bored of this. Each week it will be a new
genome being announced; mouse, chicken, rat, pufferfish, rice, corn, dog, cat,
cow, chimp......
you've benfited from the space program -- where do you think all that nifty medical technology came from in the first place?
They come from space?? Jeezus man where have i been for all my life....
And biotech works very well in zero-gee for all kinds of reason
Give me one.
Is the cost/benifet ratio worthwhile?? Billions of pounds on space travel (which i do admit, does accelerate research in other fields) or billions of pounds on _existing_ drugs to 3rd world countries.
Lets admit it - sometimes money could be spent in better ways (millenium dome anyone?). But, alas, we are greedy: I like technology & science & exploration, and spend much money on it and encourage my government to do the same. But their are definately peoples out their who need it more.
Not necessarily offtopic. Valid to the whole is radioactivity a manmade evil? argument.
I don't know about India, but here in the UK alot of houses in Cornwall, which are made from granite, leak radiaoactive radon gas. A significant link has been shown between leukaemia rates and living in these houses.
I partially agree with you: Alot of people fear nuclear power because they dont understand it. Most of the protestors give absolutely no technically valid reason why they oppose nuclear power. However, there are a few who do understand the issues. Unfortunately, they get lost in all the noise....
Lets face it, Radioactive material, when not handled properly, is very dangerous. I work with some radioactive compounds (biological research), and I have a healthy respect for it.
However, some notable people do not. I dont know what the situation is in the states, but BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) have been involved in numerousscandalsover the last few years. This has not just affected the UK either. And that scares the shit out of me. And some anti-nuclear campagners.
Would it not be possible (and here i show my lack of knwoledge...) to do something akin to emulating a multiprocessor system, but within a single chip. I guess this is coming back to the explicit parallelism thing, but would it not be possible to have a specialised chipset to deal with it, so that you get round programming problems?
I felt it necessary to post some conclusions to the article, as the author completely failed to do this.
Otherwise the article was very well written - if you are fairly new to this stuff, don't be put off by
Taco's assertation that this is Not for the techie novice. I know very little about processor architecture,
but learnt allot from this article.
Some of the/.ers out there who are more au fai with this stuff than myself may want to correct me on some of the
following points.
Basically, the clever folks at the Intel marketing department realised that the only thing the General Public know about processors
is G/MHz. Therefore this is their only point of comparison between processors in the fragmented AT market (obviously, the G4 does not
suffer from this competition, which reflects in the differences in architecture). Therefore the techies at Intel were given the orders:
"make the clock speed as high as possible (and also make the processor fast!)".
Clearly, the architecture of P4 was thus designed to break up long instructions into many shorter instructions (over-simplification) which
which can each be completed in a shorter single clock cycle. This leads to a 'long-pipeline', of many instructions:
Since each stage always lasts exactly one clock cycle, shorter pipeline stages mean shorter clock cycles and higher clock frequencies. The P4, with a
whopping 20 stages in its basic pipeline, takes this tactic to the extreme
However, using this longer pipeline leads to problems - especially when the processor doesn't have any instructions - thus causing a "bubble" which has to propagate
right down the long pipeline, and also when the "branch prediction" (i.e. the prediction of what type of instruction to use on the data) is wrong - again causing a delay
as the 'bad' instructions propagate through the processor.
Of course the clever guys at Intel came up with some novel solutions to this. This includes:
-Using larger Branch History Table - which includes record information about the outcomes of branches that have already been executed, which helps in branch prediction.
-The trace cache - Which is used for storing translation or decoding logic for the L1 cache, which is particularly useful for blocks of code that are executed thousands and thousands of times.((this reminds me of MMX, although I think that worked in a different way. Any ideas why MMX isn't used anymore?????))...there's no delay associated with looking it up and hence no pipeline bubble
-A special microcode ROM that holds pre-packaged sequences of uops so that the regular hardware decoder can concentrate on decoding the smaller, faster instructions. This stops these longer instructions from polluting the trace cache.
-Some others that i forgot/understood even less well?????
This all seems to be an interesting case of the public's perversion for clock speed subverting processor architecture (although not necessarily in a bad way).
Would processors be faster "overall" (im sorry, that's terribly vague) if there wasn't such a push for faster clock speeds???
--The real Marcus Brody doesn't have a Slashdot ID
you see, this was advice given on slashdot, and i dont think many grandmothers read this site. Then again, i think most/,ers could figure for themselves. so, er yes. you got me. im stumped.
then again, i'm posting this so darn you aint gonna read it anyhow;-\
If you don't activate Windows within the specified period, it will cease functioning -- except to remind you to activate.
Therefore the XP reg. process doesnt "bring down your entire computer". Smoke doesnt start coming out of the back (maybe MS is planning this for XP2!) There is absolutley no reason whatsoever why you cant pop a linux boot disk in the floppy drive, and "re-activate" your licinse. If you miss cute little gui's, you clould even try a mandrake bootdisk...
GAC is the artificial personality being developed with the collaboration of nearly 40,000 Internet users.
And there giving this thing a psychological test??? Like, duh!
I mean, Surely the definition of a personality based on the experiences of 10 people is going to be considered ridiculously schizophrenic.
But 40,000?
Anyways, what are they gonna do when they find out the thing is a stupid, mindless psycopath?
Lock it up? Gas chamber? {electric chair should do the trick though}
I downloaded slack to windows 98 (now uninstalled;-). Easy CD creator automatically recognised the.iso extension (depends on the setup though) - all I has to do was double click that little icon and Easy CD creator new what to do! yipeee: bootable slack cd {you see... windows does have its uses;-)}
p.s. make sure your friends computer can boot from cd (may need to be enabled in BIOS), otherwise bootable floppy is straightfoward enough.
p.p.s slack isnt that difficult for newbies: I started with it 6 months back and am getting along just fine.
p.p.p.s Mac's dont deal with iso or rockbridge or whatever. Only there own proprietry format. which sucks.
Its interesting to see the difference in response between the Ossie and UK governments in response to online gambling. Australia, worried about losing tax revenue, have decided to outlaw it.
In contrast, the British government removed all gambling taxes during the last budget. This may seem a little strange, but there is some logic to it. Basically, the UK has a large gambling industry which generates alot of revenue both internally and from abroad. Online gambling was posing a huge threat to this industry. Some of the big players in gambling were threatining to move to offshore tax havens. Therefore: remove the taxes and keep the industry - and along with it keep the jobs and the taxes earned on corporate profits, wages etc.
I could have used those moderator points (i really do have some;-) against that C*** SpanishExtermination (scroll down and you will understand) . He just posted that message 37! times (and yes, i am sad). By the 2-minute repost rule that makes, er..... 74 minutes. The story has been up.... what? 15 minutes.
Linus is saying that MS was right in hiding bootup information from the user and masking it with a pretty picture?
Linus: "Let's make it policy that we _never_ print out annoying messages that have no useful purpose for debugging or running the system, ok?"
Dont worry - Linus isnt going all Mac on us! As ever he is making more sense than your average hacker. I know what OS I'm running - and which kernel version, and even what modules im using. but yes some of this information is occasionly useful, and these are the bits that should be left. Maybe then they might not scroll off the screen so fast that we never read them anyhow.
contacting host slashdot.org..... connected
slashdot.org contacted.... waiting for reply
downloading slashdot.org 10.5k/s
document:done
welcome marcus brody
congratulations! you have moderator satatus...
please go forth and moderate
words speak a thousand pictures. so much so, we often take the information they contain for granted.
what does some flying windows or clouds tell you exactly??
well... if they freeze you know your computer has crashed.
I still don't understand why there's so much cash spent on bio-engineering new strains of plants
The biotech/pharming companies are rich for a reason. I reckon they're pretty sure that there investment will reap rewards. (although i do agree... hemp is a great solution - for certain occasions!)
we DO NOT have any long-term data as to their effects on humans.
Genetic engineering has been going on since the early 70s. Although most of the research has been conducted on bacteria/viruses/yeast (and has therefore not entered the "food-chain"... at least purposefully) - you may expect that any inherant "nasty suprises" with genetic modification would have already occured with such potential pathogens.
Furthermore, human civilisation was founded in the middle-east around 10,000 yrs ago - when we began farming - i.e. modifying the environment to suit ourselves. None of the crops or animals we currently produce & consume are strictly "natural".
Personally, my concern is the control of crop production by multinational pharming companies. Their concern will allways be profits and share holders, rather than health concerns etc. Furthermore, the use of technology such as "terminator seeds" makes sure farmers have to buy new seed every generation, rather than using the natural process of sex. This could allow biotech companies to hold 3rd world farmers to ransom where they required an engineered crop which, for example, survived in arid conditions.
Scientific progress should be for the good of the world, not the rich elite
Slashdot Mirror
No, it is virtually allways used for leisure: Pretending to do work whilst actually swapping sweet-little-nothings with Jane in accounts, or arranging a Q3 duel with DukeQuakem. (if someone actually has an important, legit reason for using a messenger service, please correct me...).
Basically, if you cant us MSN messenger, you can us email, or pick up the phone. I'm sure, when MSN messenger breaks down, its not on MS top list of priorites.
Perhaps, er, they had better things to do? Or perhaps it got lost at the bottom of someones in-draw?
However, it probably wasn't a good idea for MS to leave it so long. So many bloody people use it, that it does send out a helluvalot of bad publicity (I'm not going to get that date with Jane this weekend and it is ALL Micro$ofts fault!! Bah!). However, I think if a important component of .NET where to fail, and adversely affect many critical services, MS might react a little quicker, with greater resources & assurance
I know the problem with the Ozone layer isn't strictly global warming (rather "global environmental change"), but it does strike me that this has caused real, physical harm to numerous people in australia/NZ. Someone else may have posted this (but ive been reading +3 ;-), But it also seems relevant to the argument "these scientists are making it up for polotical reasons blah FUD blah" or "I can't see it therefore it isnt real".
In the 1980's scientists warned of an increasing hole in the Ozone layer at the poles, which allowed increasing levels of UV light through. This vastly increased skin cancer rates, particularly in NZ/Australia.
The scientists said, stop using CFCs, and we did. And now the ozone hole is getting smaller again. But alot of people still dont trust the climate scientists!
echo "attack cat" > /dev/lego
check out this beauty
more engeneerabe bits & pieces than you could shake an erection-set at!
AND it teaches kids some (very) basic programming concepts
Man, i wish i was 8 again
Hey, dont knock electrophoresis mate. It is the basis of PCR resolution, Southerns, Northens, SSCP, conventional sequencing methods plus a multitude of other applications. Furthermore, refinements to this approach (read: capillary electrophoresis) have supplied one of the major advances to sequencing methodology in recent years, unlike the technology we are (were?) discussing.
Who's GNOME did we sequence anyway
Good Question. Apparantly, they took DNA from around 100 (i forget the exact figures here) US citizens of various sex/ethnicity, picked 7 out of the hat, and sequenced portions of each (most from a single, unidentified individual - although if nanopore technology comes to fruition, i reckons we can track him) down
p.s. thats one of my favourite all-time techno-typo's: the Human Gnome Project. Almost as good as sequencing my ARS (a yeast thang....)
Yeah. Sure, i agree with you. Once youve taken DNA out of the nucleus and stripped out the protein complement of chromatin, it is darn hard to get high-quality genomic DNA (for PFGE or whatever). Furthermore, yanking the DNA through that little hole is gonna probably cause problems.
However, you dont need unfragmented DNA. For example, you could fragment genomic DNA, and pieces of this would randomly pass through the pore - essentially a shotgun approach. This wouldn't be a bad way of doing it. This would also get round problems with the detection mechanism. For example, if they could only disringuish between C/T with 80% accuracy, multiple reads of the same sequence could clear this up.
The technology could also overcome problems such as cloning bias, problems with sequencing microsats (e.g. (AT)n), GC rich regions etc. Which the HGMP is still having problems with.
It will not replace conventional sequencing technology, unless it can beat the now pretty cheap cost. Conventional sequencing is based on labelling the individual DNA bases with a different flourescent dye, and running the DNA through a gel which seperates the DNA according to size: As each base runs through the gel, it goes past a laser/detector which can detect the specific DNA base (A,T,C or G) at that position. Due to gradual impovements to this technique over the last 20 or so years (originally it employed radiation, rather then flourescence) the speed, sensitivity and cost has decreased dramatically. For example, the human genome project started in ernest about 10 yrs ago. Celera Genomics, using modern technology (and alot of financial backing, and the fact they are a subsidiary of the people who make sequencing machines,) competed the genome in a matter of months. The increase in DNA sequencing capacity puts moore's law to shame.
For example, our lab could process around 100kb (thats KiloBases guys!) of data a day, but we never even touch this with our machine. No need, and the same stands for many small-medium research labs. Alot of people like us will probably stick with conventional sequencing technology for a long time (it works well, is high enough throuput, cheap & easy).
However, the are some exciting applications with single strand sequencing. For example forensics. Also, it allows the oppotunirty of sequencing RNA (this is the "messenger" which passes the "important" part of the DNA message to the ribosomes, which then "compile" a protein - the stuff which actually does things, like an enzyme or structural component). Sequencing RNA is exciting, as currently you have to convert the RNA back to DNA (which can cause problems) and then sequence that.
Another obvious application for this would be very high throuput sequencing which would be employed by the major sequencing centres. Yes, i know we already have the Human Genome, but a fashionable idea at the moment is comparative genomics. This is very much taking biology back to its roots (i.e. like Darwin and Wallace comparing the morphological characteristics of certain species and infering adaption), but at a molecular level. This will yield amazing insights with discoveries having important implications from medicine to evolution. In fact I think the general public & media will soon be bored of this. Each week it will be a new genome being announced; mouse, chicken, rat, pufferfish, rice, corn, dog, cat, cow, chimp......
They come from space?? Jeezus man where have i been for all my life....
And biotech works very well in zero-gee for all kinds of reason
Give me one.
Is the cost/benifet ratio worthwhile?? Billions of pounds on space travel (which i do admit, does accelerate research in other fields) or billions of pounds on _existing_ drugs to 3rd world countries.
Lets admit it - sometimes money could be spent in better ways (millenium dome anyone?). But, alas, we are greedy: I like technology & science & exploration, and spend much money on it and encourage my government to do the same. But their are definately peoples out their who need it more.
I don't know about India, but here in the UK alot of houses in Cornwall, which are made from granite, leak radiaoactive radon gas. A significant link has been shown between leukaemia rates and living in these houses.
Lets face it, Radioactive material, when not handled properly, is very dangerous. I work with some radioactive compounds (biological research), and I have a healthy respect for it.
However, some notable people do not. I dont know what the situation is in the states, but BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) have been involved in numerous scandals over the last few years. This has not just affected the UK either. And that scares the shit out of me. And some anti-nuclear campagners.
Would it not be possible (and here i show my lack of knwoledge...) to do something akin to emulating a multiprocessor system, but within a single chip. I guess this is coming back to the explicit parallelism thing, but would it not be possible to have a specialised chipset to deal with it, so that you get round programming problems?
Some of the /.ers out there who are more au fai with this stuff than myself may want to correct me on some of the
following points.
Basically, the clever folks at the Intel marketing department realised that the only thing the General Public know about processors is G/MHz. Therefore this is their only point of comparison between processors in the fragmented AT market (obviously, the G4 does not suffer from this competition, which reflects in the differences in architecture). Therefore the techies at Intel were given the orders: "make the clock speed as high as possible (and also make the processor fast!)".
Clearly, the architecture of P4 was thus designed to break up long instructions into many shorter instructions (over-simplification) which which can each be completed in a shorter single clock cycle. This leads to a 'long-pipeline', of many instructions:
Since each stage always lasts exactly one clock cycle, shorter pipeline stages mean shorter clock cycles and higher clock frequencies. The P4, with a whopping 20 stages in its basic pipeline, takes this tactic to the extreme
However, using this longer pipeline leads to problems - especially when the processor doesn't have any instructions - thus causing a "bubble" which has to propagate right down the long pipeline, and also when the "branch prediction" (i.e. the prediction of what type of instruction to use on the data) is wrong - again causing a delay as the 'bad' instructions propagate through the processor.
Of course the clever guys at Intel came up with some novel solutions to this. This includes:
-Using larger Branch History Table - which includes record information about the outcomes of branches that have already been executed, which helps in branch prediction.
-The trace cache - Which is used for storing translation or decoding logic for the L1 cache, which is particularly useful for blocks of code that are executed thousands and thousands of times.((this reminds me of MMX, although I think that worked in a different way. Any ideas why MMX isn't used anymore?????)) ...there's no delay associated with looking it up and hence no pipeline bubble
-A special microcode ROM that holds pre-packaged sequences of uops so that the regular hardware decoder can concentrate on decoding the smaller, faster instructions. This stops these longer instructions from polluting the trace cache.
-Some others that i forgot/understood even less well?????
This all seems to be an interesting case of the public's perversion for clock speed subverting processor architecture (although not necessarily in a bad way).
Would processors be faster "overall" (im sorry, that's terribly vague) if there wasn't such a push for faster clock speeds???
--The real Marcus Brody doesn't have a Slashdot ID
aha your vision is too shallow my dear friend:
/,ers could figure for themselves. so, er yes. you got me. im stumped.
;-\
you see, this was advice given on slashdot, and i dont think many grandmothers read this site. Then again, i think most
then again, i'm posting this so darn you aint gonna read it anyhow
If you don't activate Windows within the specified period, it will cease functioning -- except to remind you to activate.
Therefore the XP reg. process doesnt "bring down your entire computer". Smoke doesnt start coming out of the back (maybe MS is planning this for XP2!) There is absolutley no reason whatsoever why you cant pop a linux boot disk in the floppy drive, and "re-activate" your licinse. If you miss cute little gui's, you clould even try a mandrake bootdisk...
No other national holiday gives you an excuse to drink shite loadsa guiness...
Yeah and if you run that script whilst using the Mobile Internet Toolkit, M$ will sue the pants of ya!
And there giving this thing a psychological test??? Like, duh!
I mean, Surely the definition of a personality based on the experiences of 10 people is going to be considered ridiculously schizophrenic. But 40,000?
Anyways, what are they gonna do when they find out the thing is a stupid, mindless psycopath? Lock it up? Gas chamber? {electric chair should do the trick though}
All rather spooky, considering the year is 2001
Thanks for that. ;-)
looks like \. froze the webserver aswell
Yep.
;-). Easy CD creator automatically recognised the .iso extension (depends on the setup though) - all I has to do was double click that little icon and Easy CD creator new what to do! yipeee: bootable slack cd {you see... windows does have its uses ;-)}
I downloaded slack to windows 98 (now uninstalled
p.s. make sure your friends computer can boot from cd (may need to be enabled in BIOS), otherwise bootable floppy is straightfoward enough.
p.p.s slack isnt that difficult for newbies: I started with it 6 months back and am getting along just fine.
p.p.p.s Mac's dont deal with iso or rockbridge or whatever. Only there own proprietry format. which sucks.
p.p.p.p.s i'll shut up now
Its interesting to see the difference in response between the Ossie and UK governments in response to online gambling. Australia, worried about losing tax revenue, have decided to outlaw it.
In contrast, the British government removed all gambling taxes during the last budget. This may seem a little strange, but there is some logic to it. Basically, the UK has a large gambling industry which generates alot of revenue both internally and from abroad. Online gambling was posing a huge threat to this industry. Some of the big players in gambling were threatining to move to offshore tax havens. Therefore: remove the taxes and keep the industry - and along with it keep the jobs and the taxes earned on corporate profits, wages etc.
Man I wish i hadnt posted now.....
;-) against that C*** SpanishExtermination (scroll down and you will understand) . He just posted that message 37! times (and yes, i am sad). By the 2-minute repost rule that makes, er..... 74 minutes. The story has been up.... what? 15 minutes.
I could have used those moderator points (i really do have some
any ideas how he does that anyone?
Linus: "Let's make it policy that we _never_ print out annoying messages that have no useful purpose for debugging or running the system, ok?"
Dont worry - Linus isnt going all Mac on us! As ever he is making more sense than your average hacker. I know what OS I'm running - and which kernel version, and even what modules im using. but yes some of this information is occasionly useful, and these are the bits that should be left. Maybe then they might not scroll off the screen so fast that we never read them anyhow.
contacting host slashdot.org..... connected
slashdot.org contacted.... waiting for reply
downloading slashdot.org 10.5k/s
document:done
welcome marcus brody
congratulations! you have moderator satatus...
please go forth and moderate
words speak a thousand pictures. so much so, we often take the information they contain for granted.
what does some flying windows or clouds tell you exactly??
well... if they freeze you know your computer has crashed.
The biotech/pharming companies are rich for a reason. I reckon they're pretty sure that there investment will reap rewards. (although i do agree... hemp is a great solution - for certain occasions!)
we DO NOT have any long-term data as to their effects on humans.
Genetic engineering has been going on since the early 70s. Although most of the research has been conducted on bacteria/viruses/yeast (and has therefore not entered the "food-chain"... at least purposefully) - you may expect that any inherant "nasty suprises" with genetic modification would have already occured with such potential pathogens.
Furthermore, human civilisation was founded in the middle-east around 10,000 yrs ago - when we began farming - i.e. modifying the environment to suit ourselves. None of the crops or animals we currently produce & consume are strictly "natural".
Personally, my concern is the control of crop production by multinational pharming companies. Their concern will allways be profits and share holders, rather than health concerns etc. Furthermore, the use of technology such as "terminator seeds" makes sure farmers have to buy new seed every generation, rather than using the natural process of sex. This could allow biotech companies to hold 3rd world farmers to ransom where they required an engineered crop which, for example, survived in arid conditions.
Scientific progress should be for the good of the world, not the rich elite
more like $200 million, at best.
p.s I like the way you put the .00 cents at the end of that big number, just so it looks even bigger