what is really shocking here, is that these 'matches' were being found in arizona, which has less than 2% of the Us population, unless a lot of other places outsource DNA testing to arizona it suggests that DNA fingerprints are little better than regular fingerprints.
TFA isn't very clear, except that she was working for the state of arizona when she noticed 'identical' matches.
some might suggest that some of the DNA used to identify criminals may have impacts on that persons likelihood to turn to crime.. but we really don't understand much of how the brain works or the effects of slight variations in dna on that.
i have a FAT formatted usb drive, and windows XP refuses to format it as anything other than fat, or fat 32, sure i could go ext2/3, but then it would be significantly harder to use it with windows.
BTW fat file systems are very annoying, i have to format my USB about ever 3-4 months, or else there will be issues reading/writing to it from linux.
if you format a fat device often enough it's reliable... if you let it go more than 4 months without a format then you're asking for trouble.
"But I live in Sweden and is without one anyway so what's the big deal?"
but you post to slashdot, it's implied you lack a woman.
in china there are non slashdot posters who can't find women. in fact, for every 10 men who can find a woman, there is 1 man who can't.
it's not reducing their population growth though. 2 children born every year for every person who dies. japan is one of the few countries in the world where birth and death rates actually found parity, and since 2005 the death rate is starting to go up a bit.
AMD isn't hosed, loosing 1 Billion in a down economy is bad news, but it's hardly earth shattering. there are a lot of really cool new technology like using lasers to 'correct' errors in microprocessors, that neither AMD nor intel are using yet. a big problem with moore's law has been that as you shrink all the parts, minor flaws are rendering parts of the chip defective, simply because the size of the flaw relative to the size of the part is growing as part sizes shrink to keep moore's law going. one of the reasons why intel was floundering around a few years back, when AMD had the lead, was because the continued die shrinks were preventing them from getting the clock speeds they desired from parts...
but now, if you can use a 'laser' to fix flaws, not only do the fixed parts perform faster, you also get higher die yields.
now, it might not make sense to use correction on every part but performance parts are a minority of the market, you can also use the technique on low power chips, to cause them to waste less power, because they don't have power draining defects..
if AMD licenses and uses the laser correction tech before intel does, they could temporarily exceed what intel is capable of doing, while hoping their R&D can catch up to intel when they need to.
worst case scenario is that there is a global depression, in that case AMD might well be hosed, since Intel can just wait the depression out, by laying off a lot of people and moth balling plants. But there are a lot of billionaires out there that seriously don't want to see a depression cycle, the world is completely different from how it was in the 1930's
you suggest nano-tech, and frankly a self-repairing robot with nanotech is the only way for a machine to survive for hundreds of years let alone millions, or billions. the problem is metal whiskers, even lead, although lead whiskers are rare, tin is the worst offender... and this is within human life spans... without constant nanotech repairing all the robotic and data processing parts, while recycling end of life cycle nanobots, is the only way a machine can last that long, even if it's not being used... but this ups the energy requirements significantly, realistically the only way to go is to have a completely wireless power transfer station, but wireless power even in space has numerous problems. heat dissipation is the first that comes to mind. the life cycle of the components a second problem... a solar system with a dyson or partial dyson are realistically the only places where life is going to go extra solar.
escaping a dying star system is even more problematic, unless you leave millions of years before the power systems fail. but if you're tethered to a solar system for power, then you can't go near light speeds, since you'd out race your power source... so that means non robotic life needs to be synthesized as the destination is approached...
ah well. we haven't even produced a ship that theoretically could reach the next star system with working electronics, we're a long way away from real extra solar missions.
worse still, we haven't even gotten to the point where we can deploy a truly sustainable modern world where humans don't wind up filling the oceans with toxic household cleaners... much less all the other problems, like unstoppable population growth, corruption and exploitation of our own kind...
well, you claim your system is clean, but the fact is, polymorphic rootkits are absolutely undetectable from within the operating system. do you really know it's clean? or do you just know, they're not running a bot on your system?
and being able to send a packet in, isn't the same as being able to infect a machine. In my case the hacker knew what software i was running, and was able to send the packet in, and take advantage of a known vulnerability.
here's the upshot, once he hacked my windows system he hacked my linksys with a custom firmware. I could immediately tell because it powered up the lights differently after he hacked it. (i didn't have a really secure password on the linksys, i thought 'it can only be flashed from the inside, so i don't need a good password')
whoops, small mistake, my 2.5" hdd had a screw 'hidden' by the labels, at the time just forced the drive open, because i didn't care. and none of the bottom needed to be removed, ah well, always look for a hidden screw if you can't open a 2.5" laptop drive that dead..
the real question, is does covering the fluid with silver, after it's shaped really make a practical liquid mirror? or are there some ferro liquids that would provide as good a mirror as mercury?
it seems that some of the advantages of a liquid mirror, are lost if the reflective surface is not the portion that's controlled with magnets.
on that note, every time i've opened a HDD platter, i've always noted how the polished shine is as reflective as a mirror... is that a protective layer? or is the magnetic layer of HDDs just such a highly polished iron that it becomes reflective? as a side, a defunct 2'5" hdd platter makes the ultimate geek girl compact, once you make the top hinged. (some 2.5" hdd's can't be opened without removing the screws on the bottom as well as the top)
"Drilling in ANWR will not destroy a wildlife preserve, or even be noticed by the wildlife"
except for every time the pipeline shifts as the melting permafrost becomes unstable and gallons of the stuff leaks out and starts contaminating the ground water.
"Remember that first time you fired up Linux? How much stumbling around did you have to do?"
actually yeah i do, that's why i switched to FreeBSD right away in 96, where there was usually useful help on how to do what, easily, but nowadays we have ubuntu, everything there, and it just works, and gnome works almost exactly like windows in just about every way.. considering the state of slashdot today, there are probably a lot of people who never stumbled around configuring FOSS. I/'m one of the few people who remembers stumbling around on tech support hot-lines trying to get around IRQ conflicts.
one of my systems still has the old style IRQ systems, they're a pain. especially when the motherboard is wasting all the IRQs on useless serial and printer ports i don't even use. slashdot geek cred has gone down since i first posted. we've got people who Admit to buying Dell (and not just for work.)
I've used FOSS since 1996 (ironically, because my ISP kept breaking my 10mbit* BNC LAN between my windows 95 laptop, and windows 3.11 desktop) i looked at slackware, and then picked FreeBSD. I've used a lot of different FOSS programs in the interim, but i've never been able to break my windows Gaming addiction. FOSS will always be my primary choice for both firewalls and servers, and even for internet downloading(torrents)/web browsing, but the gaming scene for linux, is still lacking. yeah i've heard of people using wine, i've heard of cedega, but a nice locked down windows box, behind a FOSS firewall always seems to support more of those 'must play' games.
I'm not knocking FOSS games, try freeciv, try boswars, try wesnoth, all good, but then i look at civ4, which i've been told works under wine, or better yet, look at steam! tons of older games! thousands of them! i bet quite a few don't work under wine. heck, i've had trouble getting older games running on a real windows install with a 64-bit processor... they work just fine on my older 32-bit processor system though.
windows has a rich gaming history, linux even though it has good projects, FOSS projects just don't have the same feel as commercial games, freeciv for example took forever to implement the current tilesets, it was lack of artists, concern by developers that not every linux machine would run the code fast enough... by the time freeciv gets a civ3/4 style engine, civ 5 or maybe even 6 will be out. in fact from their site "Little or no work is being done on implementing features from other similar games, such as SMAC, CTP or Civilization III." no mention of civ 4, hah.
my favorite vista line for game tech support is "you need to go into properties, compatibility, and 'run as administrator'"
WTF, a video game, that has to patch itself over the net, can download custom maps to a map folder in it's program group, needs to always run as administrator, just to play?
gimme a break, it's only modifying files in a single folder, it's not installing new applications, just patches... yet it 'needs' to run as administrator, in vista. most likely, it's the copy protection making sure you didn't illegally install the program from some internet dl site. which is bogus in and of itself... absolutely crazy, the fact that these games are on internet download sites suggests that the copy protection didn't stop pirates.
besides, with 'steam' nowadays making online distribution simple and cheap, maybe you'd be better off getting rid of monolithic copy protection schemes... that don't stop pirates.
Do slashdot readers really buy Dell PCs? WTF I can grab an oem copy of XP home. pro, heck i can still get OEM windows 2000 if i really want to. I have been building from parts every PC I've used except laptops, and for a laptop, I'd rather go with Apple products than dell. heck, there are even places that sell linux laptopshttp://www.google.com/products?q=linux+laptop&btnG=Search+Products&show=dd, WTF, why would i want to buy a bloated, OS like vista, or a older than the hills XP when i can put a nice linux, or apple based laptop on my network.
"The thing I am wondering though is how would they maintain quality with such an uncontrollable system."
the same way any bittorent maintains quality, by hashing the sums of data, before writing to disc, even if you have 12 'poison' seeders, who give you corrupt data every time, the client eventually learns to blacklist poison seeders, by their ips, the only downside, is it takes longer to download when a chunk of data gets barfed in transit. hey, bittorrent is easy to specify downloading from the start first , rather than any random block, so it's not like it's impossible to use p2p, and have good quality control.
rather than destroy a wildlife preserve, and contribute to global warming, why not come up with affordable ways to mass produce algae for bio fuels, and create a sustainable profitable renewable carbon neutral energy source, that especially benefits from the use of human sewage for it's mass production...
drill, and drill now, do you only think of how much it costs you to fill up on gas? do you realize that bio-diesel and bio-ethanol from algae feed stocks could easily be produced BELOW the cost of oil, if it were mass produced like corn is..
it also takes care of what to do with human sewage, in part.
and here's the upshot, we knew about algae in the 70's when carter wanted to go green, but greedy energy companies aren't about 'building up' new only partially government tested alternative energy sources, especially ones they can't 'artificially' inflate, because just as the price of corn is always abysmally low, if there were 1000 companies all making as much algae as they can the price of algae energy would be very hard to control.
"REUSE? I'll never drink coffee at the space centre any more!"
i hate to break it to you, but you already drink someone's piss, in america we treat the water on both ends of the process, but that piss still goes into a the aquifer sometime, and then a wee bit later into your faucet.
"A hardware firewall (think: $40 Linksys router) is 100% effective at blocking the inbound threats during download of SP2."
another myth. I was pwned in 2006 behind a linksys with current firmware by hackers.
if you want a real firewall, one that is half-open, for free, get smoothwall.
the problem with linksys firewalls is that a single forged packet can penetrate, it tells the firewall it is a 'response' (aka an ack) to a mythical outbound packet, because linksys fire walls are 'full open' a simple ack will open any port inbound, the same problem affects 'windows firewall' with SP2 only a half open firewall denies non-allowed ports (using a pure whitelist of approved ports.)
did i mention the hackers in 2006 that pwned me used a polymorphic rootkit, with bios level infection, that is also capable of corrupting writable DVD and CD media? yeah i spent about 9 months trying to recover from the problem.
the new broadcast HD tv signals are directional as well, you might want to hook it up to a HD tv or converter box to see if it's powerful enough to get far off cities.
Slashdot Mirror
what is really shocking here, is that these 'matches' were being found in arizona, which has less than 2% of the Us population, unless a lot of other places outsource DNA testing to arizona it suggests that DNA fingerprints are little better than regular fingerprints.
TFA isn't very clear, except that she was working for the state of arizona when she noticed 'identical' matches.
some might suggest that some of the DNA used to identify criminals may have impacts on that persons likelihood to turn to crime.. but we really don't understand much of how the brain works or the effects of slight variations in dna on that.
i have a FAT formatted usb drive, and windows XP refuses to format it as anything other than fat, or fat 32, sure i could go ext2/3, but then it would be significantly harder to use it with windows.
BTW fat file systems are very annoying, i have to format my USB about ever 3-4 months, or else there will be issues reading/writing to it from linux.
if you format a fat device often enough it's reliable... if you let it go more than 4 months without a format then you're asking for trouble.
"They just now and just barely reached first place out of three."
perhaps because the DS is just too popular...
"In 2007, the Wii was the second best-selling game console (behind the Nintendo DS) in the US and Japan"
considering they were number 2 to themselves, the numbers take on a different light.
"But I live in Sweden and is without one anyway so what's the big deal?"
but you post to slashdot, it's implied you lack a woman.
in china there are non slashdot posters who can't find women. in fact, for every 10 men who can find a woman, there is 1 man who can't.
it's not reducing their population growth though. 2 children born every year for every person who dies. japan is one of the few countries in the world where birth and death rates actually found parity, and since 2005 the death rate is starting to go up a bit.
AMD isn't hosed, loosing 1 Billion in a down economy is bad news, but it's hardly earth shattering. there are a lot of really cool new technology like using lasers to 'correct' errors in microprocessors, that neither AMD nor intel are using yet. a big problem with moore's law has been that as you shrink all the parts, minor flaws are rendering parts of the chip defective, simply because the size of the flaw relative to the size of the part is growing as part sizes shrink to keep moore's law going. one of the reasons why intel was floundering around a few years back, when AMD had the lead, was because the continued die shrinks were preventing them from getting the clock speeds they desired from parts...
but now, if you can use a 'laser' to fix flaws, not only do the fixed parts perform faster, you also get higher die yields.
now, it might not make sense to use correction on every part but performance parts are a minority of the market, you can also use the technique on low power chips, to cause them to waste less power, because they don't have power draining defects..
if AMD licenses and uses the laser correction tech before intel does, they could temporarily exceed what intel is capable of doing, while hoping their R&D can catch up to intel when they need to.
worst case scenario is that there is a global depression, in that case AMD might well be hosed, since Intel can just wait the depression out, by laying off a lot of people and moth balling plants. But there are a lot of billionaires out there that seriously don't want to see a depression cycle, the world is completely different from how it was in the 1930's
you suggest nano-tech, and frankly a self-repairing robot with nanotech is the only way for a machine to survive for hundreds of years let alone millions, or billions. the problem is metal whiskers, even lead, although lead whiskers are rare, tin is the worst offender... and this is within human life spans... without constant nanotech repairing all the robotic and data processing parts, while recycling end of life cycle nanobots, is the only way a machine can last that long, even if it's not being used... but this ups the energy requirements significantly, realistically the only way to go is to have a completely wireless power transfer station, but wireless power even in space has numerous problems. heat dissipation is the first that comes to mind. the life cycle of the components a second problem... a solar system with a dyson or partial dyson are realistically the only places where life is going to go extra solar.
escaping a dying star system is even more problematic, unless you leave millions of years before the power systems fail. but if you're tethered to a solar system for power, then you can't go near light speeds, since you'd out race your power source... so that means non robotic life needs to be synthesized as the destination is approached...
ah well. we haven't even produced a ship that theoretically could reach the next star system with working electronics, we're a long way away from real extra solar missions.
worse still, we haven't even gotten to the point where we can deploy a truly sustainable modern world where humans don't wind up filling the oceans with toxic household cleaners... much less all the other problems, like unstoppable population growth, corruption and exploitation of our own kind...
well, you claim your system is clean, but the fact is, polymorphic rootkits are absolutely undetectable from within the operating system. do you really know it's clean? or do you just know, they're not running a bot on your system?
and being able to send a packet in, isn't the same as being able to infect a machine. In my case the hacker knew what software i was running, and was able to send the packet in, and take advantage of a known vulnerability.
here's the upshot, once he hacked my windows system he hacked my linksys with a custom firmware. I could immediately tell because it powered up the lights differently after he hacked it. (i didn't have a really secure password on the linksys, i thought 'it can only be flashed from the inside, so i don't need a good password')
whoops, small mistake, my 2.5" hdd had a screw 'hidden' by the labels, at the time just forced the drive open, because i didn't care. and none of the bottom needed to be removed, ah well, always look for a hidden screw if you can't open a 2.5" laptop drive that dead..
the real question, is does covering the fluid with silver, after it's shaped really make a practical liquid mirror? or are there some ferro liquids that would provide as good a mirror as mercury?
it seems that some of the advantages of a liquid mirror, are lost if the reflective surface is not the portion that's controlled with magnets.
on that note, every time i've opened a HDD platter, i've always noted how the polished shine is as reflective as a mirror... is that a protective layer? or is the magnetic layer of HDDs just such a highly polished iron that it becomes reflective? as a side, a defunct 2'5" hdd platter makes the ultimate geek girl compact, once you make the top hinged. (some 2.5" hdd's can't be opened without removing the screws on the bottom as well as the top)
in a word: Yes.
do not underestimate my laziness.
but if you type 'co.' it shows all the co.uk co.jp or whatever you've been going to... is typing '.' after co such a pain?
i've been using firefox 3 since ubuntu went 8.04 LTS, i waited a wile to upgrade windows to FF3 ubuntu simply didn't leave me any choice.
"Drilling in ANWR will not destroy a wildlife preserve, or even be noticed by the wildlife"
except for every time the pipeline shifts as the melting permafrost becomes unstable and gallons of the stuff leaks out and starts contaminating the ground water.
"Remember that first time you fired up Linux? How much stumbling around did you have to do?"
actually yeah i do, that's why i switched to FreeBSD right away in 96, where there was usually useful help on how to do what, easily, but nowadays we have ubuntu, everything there, and it just works, and gnome works almost exactly like windows in just about every way.. considering the state of slashdot today, there are probably a lot of people who never stumbled around configuring FOSS. I/'m one of the few people who remembers stumbling around on tech support hot-lines trying to get around IRQ conflicts.
one of my systems still has the old style IRQ systems, they're a pain. especially when the motherboard is wasting all the IRQs on useless serial and printer ports i don't even use. slashdot geek cred has gone down since i first posted. we've got people who Admit to buying Dell (and not just for work.)
I've used FOSS since 1996 (ironically, because my ISP kept breaking my 10mbit* BNC LAN between my windows 95 laptop, and windows 3.11 desktop) i looked at slackware, and then picked FreeBSD. I've used a lot of different FOSS programs in the interim, but i've never been able to break my windows Gaming addiction. FOSS will always be my primary choice for both firewalls and servers, and even for internet downloading(torrents)/web browsing, but the gaming scene for linux, is still lacking. yeah i've heard of people using wine, i've heard of cedega, but a nice locked down windows box, behind a FOSS firewall always seems to support more of those 'must play' games.
I'm not knocking FOSS games, try freeciv, try boswars, try wesnoth, all good, but then i look at civ4, which i've been told works under wine, or better yet, look at steam! tons of older games! thousands of them! i bet quite a few don't work under wine. heck, i've had trouble getting older games running on a real windows install with a 64-bit processor... they work just fine on my older 32-bit processor system though.
windows has a rich gaming history, linux even though it has good projects, FOSS projects just don't have the same feel as commercial games, freeciv for example took forever to implement the current tilesets, it was lack of artists, concern by developers that not every linux machine would run the code fast enough... by the time freeciv gets a civ3/4 style engine, civ 5 or maybe even 6 will be out. in fact from their site "Little or no work is being done on implementing features from other similar games, such as SMAC, CTP or Civilization III." no mention of civ 4, hah.
*= i think it was 10 mbit, anyways.
my favorite vista line for game tech support is "you need to go into properties, compatibility, and 'run as administrator'"
WTF, a video game, that has to patch itself over the net, can download custom maps to a map folder in it's program group, needs to always run as administrator, just to play?
gimme a break, it's only modifying files in a single folder, it's not installing new applications, just patches... yet it 'needs' to run as administrator, in vista. most likely, it's the copy protection making sure you didn't illegally install the program from some internet dl site. which is bogus in and of itself... absolutely crazy, the fact that these games are on internet download sites suggests that the copy protection didn't stop pirates.
besides, with 'steam' nowadays making online distribution simple and cheap, maybe you'd be better off getting rid of monolithic copy protection schemes... that don't stop pirates.
I am sad this article made front page.
Do slashdot readers really buy Dell PCs? WTF I can grab an oem copy of XP home. pro, heck i can still get OEM windows 2000 if i really want to. I have been building from parts every PC I've used except laptops, and for a laptop, I'd rather go with Apple products than dell. heck, there are even places that sell linux laptopshttp://www.google.com/products?q=linux+laptop&btnG=Search+Products&show=dd, WTF, why would i want to buy a bloated, OS like vista, or a older than the hills XP when i can put a nice linux, or apple based laptop on my network.
"The thing I am wondering though is how would they maintain quality with such an uncontrollable system."
the same way any bittorent maintains quality, by hashing the sums of data, before writing to disc, even if you have 12 'poison' seeders, who give you corrupt data every time, the client eventually learns to blacklist poison seeders, by their ips, the only downside, is it takes longer to download when a chunk of data gets barfed in transit. hey, bittorrent is easy to specify downloading from the start first , rather than any random block, so it's not like it's impossible to use p2p, and have good quality control.
rather than destroy a wildlife preserve, and contribute to global warming, why not come up with affordable ways to mass produce algae for bio fuels, and create a sustainable profitable renewable carbon neutral energy source, that especially benefits from the use of human sewage for it's mass production...
drill, and drill now, do you only think of how much it costs you to fill up on gas? do you realize that bio-diesel and bio-ethanol from algae feed stocks could easily be produced BELOW the cost of oil, if it were mass produced like corn is..
it also takes care of what to do with human sewage, in part.
and here's the upshot, we knew about algae in the 70's when carter wanted to go green, but greedy energy companies aren't about 'building up' new only partially government tested alternative energy sources, especially ones they can't 'artificially' inflate, because just as the price of corn is always abysmally low, if there were 1000 companies all making as much algae as they can the price of algae energy would be very hard to control.
"REUSE? I'll never drink coffee at the space centre any more!"
i hate to break it to you, but you already drink someone's piss, in america we treat the water on both ends of the process, but that piss still goes into a the aquifer sometime, and then a wee bit later into your faucet.
a while back they even had a article about how many drugs are in our drinking water, http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/09/2121249 proof positive you're drinking someone's piss.
"It's just a wee amount to ask for."
at 30 liters a day for 6 months, they'll be drowning in piss. makes me wonder what they give astronauts to drink, beer?
I guess we'll just have to pirate internet radio with VLC
"A hardware firewall (think: $40 Linksys router) is 100% effective at blocking the inbound threats during download of SP2."
another myth. I was pwned in 2006 behind a linksys with current firmware by hackers.
if you want a real firewall, one that is half-open, for free, get smoothwall.
the problem with linksys firewalls is that a single forged packet can penetrate, it tells the firewall it is a 'response' (aka an ack) to a mythical outbound packet, because linksys fire walls are 'full open' a simple ack will open any port inbound, the same problem affects 'windows firewall' with SP2 only a half open firewall denies non-allowed ports (using a pure whitelist of approved ports.)
did i mention the hackers in 2006 that pwned me used a polymorphic rootkit, with bios level infection, that is also capable of corrupting writable DVD and CD media? yeah i spent about 9 months trying to recover from the problem.
the new broadcast HD tv signals are directional as well, you might want to hook it up to a HD tv or converter box to see if it's powerful enough to get far off cities.
at the end of that article another use comes to mind
"He also said that Team PAD may use the same gear to attempt smashing our old Bluetooth record of 1.08 miles."
i don't even have a bluetooth device, ah fun.