I don't it should be possible to patent 'information' that is by its own existence 'prior art'. Processes to extract, create, manipulate this information should be patentable.
It isn't. What biotech patents are all about is "using information x to do y", for example: "using a breast-cancer gene to detect patient suspectibility to breast-cancer".. etc
The problem with biotech patents is that these claims are vague, and the application in question is often obvious. That's where the problem is
when that excess iron enters the food chain? People talk about GM crops, but things like this are where the danger lies.
Oh, please.. get a clue. This is IRON we're talking about, one of the most well-known substances around. (our knowledge goes back to.. well, the iron age..)
Iron does *not* bioaccumulate.
Iron has a low level of toxicity, almost all cases of iron-poisoning are due to children swallowing large amounts of iron tablets.
Also, the risk of this bacteria spreading is minimal. Being able to eat asbestos does not provide you with any evolutionary advantages.
You might as well propose a ban on cast-iron skillets.
"I don't know whether I am an operating system dreaming that I am a programming language, or a programming language dreaming that I am an operating system!"
Re:I'd rather have a jacuzi in my car
on
SAUNAAB
·
· Score: 1
Who wants a sauna, honestly? You might as well just get a car without air conditioning.
Actually, since air-conditioning is not standard equipment on cars sold in Scandinavia (duh!) having AC has become a bit of a status symbol..
"Look, I have so much money I even spend it on AC for my car, which I have the pleasure of using two days a year."
Given that anything that can even remotely be construed as bragging is frowned upon in these countries, that's about as extravagant as people get.
Pariffin is one of the higher fractions of petroleum cracking -- asphalt at the bottom, pariffin near the top. You can bias your output from a barrel of oil a bit, but it still comes out of the ground.
That's petroleum destillation you're referring to.
Cracking is the process to "bias your output", where you break (or "crack") the heavy hydrocarbons (such as asphalt) into smaller ones (such as paraffin).
is that really true of the GNU project? I doubt it. I know that there is a practice of giving your copyright over to GNU but that's voluntary. I read so on their website. If i recall it's so that they can pursue violations for you etc.
Scientists are prone to this fallacy, perhaps because they are temperamentally uncomfortable with uncertainty. That's why they became scientists in the first place. That's also why saying "I don't know" is considered, among scientists, so virtuous; it's hard to bring themselves to say it.
That's one of the worst pieces of BS I've heard in a long time! Nothing could be farther from the truth.
To quote Richard Feynman (a bona-fide, real scientist(TM), and a Nobel laureate at that..)
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing - I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about such as whether it means anything to ask "why are we here?" But I don't have to know an answer - I don't feel frightened by not knowing things.
This the view most scientists share, although most did not put it as well as ol' RPF.
Knowledge is fractal, and domain specific. Can something be in two places at once? Well, yes-no. It depends on the domain. If it's an electron, the answer seems to be sort-of "yes, if you can't see it in mid process".
That doesn't mean the "knowledge" is domain-specific, it means that our model of reality is. Knowledge is, for example, the fact that small particles can behave in this manner.
And what the heck do you mean by "fractal"? It doesn't fit in with any definition of the word I've heard.
People who are certain are a large part of the problem. WHENEVER you are certain, you've made a mistake. You may have mistaken a high probability value for truth (which usually works quite well), but you've made a mistake.
This is just ridiculous. You probably felt very confident, probably even "certain" that people reading your post would understand it. Your actions contradict you point.
In the strictest sense of the word, nothing is "certain". However, spoken language is not logic. They use the same terms (as does science) but the words of everyday speech are always less rigid. (compare everyday usages of "work", "energy", "resistance" with their more strict scientific definitions)
If something contradicts experience, then it may be either wrong, or misunderstood. Don't doubt your experience
True, but our memories are error-prone. We forget things, we remember badly, etc. Also, we make observational mistakes, imagine we see things, etc..
Science deals with this by repeating their observations, preferably in different manners, and by different people.
If the experience of a single person contradicts the observations of thousands of others, it is wise do distrust the former.
Telepathy... I have not seen either a proof or a disproof that met my standards.
Naturally, you need something to disprove to disprove it. As for proofs, they fall into two categories: a) The design of the experiment was flawed (i.e. double-blinding, etc..)
b) The experiment could not be repeated by independent researchers (and no, I don't consider a "fellow-believer" to be independent. And that goes for all science.)
Of course, Newton's mechanics are exactly bogus..
No, Newton's mechanics are not bogus. They are a fully adequate model for most physical phenomena at an everyday scale.
"Flim-flam!" or just about anything by James Randi (the guy who exposed Uri Geller), he's a magician, not a scientist and has a good sense of humor.
(Also don't miss out on his $1 million dollar prize or his weekly newsletter on what the kranks are up to..)
Re:Is "Content Ownership" Backed by Law?
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 2
A DRM is supposed to manage copy-rights. Precedent has established that those rights (to copy the stuff) can be owned, but not the content itself.
Good point!
Another thing that tends to get lost in the debate is that copyright is not a right in the "inalienable moral axiom" sense of the word, but rather a provision created by society to encourage creativity through giving the creator the opportunity to monetary return on his works during a limited time.
Listening to the MPAA et al. today, one would easily be lead to believe that copyright was on par with freedom of speech and religion.
So mixing analogies from the original post, the delay is so that the Nobel commitee does not give an award to the physics equivalent of Toto or Milli Vanilli.
Be careful of hyperbole, and that 'never' word, especially when it comes to computing power. Chances are you'll eventually get a laugh-o-gram from Mr. Moore's Law Offices...
Ok. Please turn to chapter ten in your high-school math textbooks: "Exponentials"
Um, we're talking about numbers in the range of 2^50 times the age of the universe here..
Make all the computers in the world a billion times faster.. One billion is slightly less than 2^30, so that brings us down to 2^20 times the age of the universe, a nice round number, a number of million times.
Of course, if Moores law holds forever (making it more fundamental than the laws of physics) we might just make it with this approach just before the human race gets killed off when the sun dies out.
With current methods, you are not going to make it.
Perhaps a quantum computer with Shor's factoring algorithm will be able to do it some day, but that is a completly different technology. (to which Moores law cannot be applied either)
Being smart-alecky in the face of common sense is very silly.
"waste of resources" is an understatement, we're talking about something that the combined computer power of the world cannot achive in the currently known age of the universe.
Get it kids? We are more likely to suffer human mass-extinction due to an asteroid hitting the earth in the next few years than seeing this public key brute-forced.. ok?
Blame the funding model. For scientists to get money, they have to justify their existance--and that means saying "we know" when all they should be saying is "we think."
What, you don't think the people granting funding have a basic conception of the principles of science? Get a clue!
The nature of science, the philosophy of the thing is at the heart of the matter.
Science is performed by induction from observations. This means that you make observations and try to draw a general conclusion.
The fallacy of this method is obvious; Yet it has proved very useful (=science!) And the problem of induction has largly been dealt with by the philosophers of science. (The logical positivists and Vienna circle coming the closest to an adequate theory, IMHO)
Anyway, what is to be considered "known" has an arbitrary limit. You "know" that when you drop an object, it will fall to the ground. You know this due to experience, i.e. you have induced it from observations. Most knowledge is aquired in this fashion, yet when it reaches a certain level of certainty we use the term "we know" in lieu of "we think". Scientific knowledge is no exception.
However, you are right in critisicing the press for exaggerating the certainty of some scientific discovery. They do. However, good scientists rarely do so.
As for atheism, it is not a religion and it is. (Read the FAQ.) Atheism as "the categorical denial of any and all gods", or "strong" atheism can be considered a religious doctrine. However, "weak" atheism is disbelief in the existance of god, meaning that you do not belive in the existance of god, for one or another reason. This is not the same as denying the existance of god.
Many scientists belong to the latter category, as it follows the sceptical approach of science in general.
What do you mean by saying that atheism should not be given greater "scientific or political respect" than any other "religion"?
In a secular society with seperation of church and state, religious matters should not be political. Nor should scientific matters be religious, and they are not. However all this depends on your definition of "religious matters".
If I start a religion which claims that objects do not fall to the ground when I drop them, and scientists claim the opposite, does this mean that science is giving more respect to atheism than to my religion?
Science pays respect to observable facts, and observable facts only. If these contradict some religion, it is the problem of the religion, not a scientific one. For example, Galileo and Copernicus were religious men, and atheism had nothing to do with their motives. However, the church considered them heretic.
And as for quantum physics: if you limit objects to 'non-quantum levels of mass', then you are by definition outside of the realm where quantum effects have a significant inpact, so the question is really redundant. (the "force"-part I don't even understand..)
A better question is why you would want to save classical mechanics? Quantum mechanics is based on 6 postulates, all laws of QM follow from these, and all laws of ordinary mechanics can be deduced from QM. Classical mechanics OTOH, was much more of an ad hoc hodgepodge of laws until QM explained why they take the form that they do.
Of course, the 6 postulates are rather ad hoc laws themselves, but they are fewer, and explain more.
As a student starting my PhD studies, I once asked a researcher at the department about a paper. He told me he hadn't read it. The next day, I saw that he had indeed quoted that paper in one of his.
However, it usually isn't such a big problem, when papers are cited without being read, since it usually only happens with papers periferial to the subject. (For example to justify a certain method or procedure that is common practice)
Also, sometimes the relevant portion of an paper can be summed up in one sentence, or in the abstract.
While I find the idea of being able to change charges in mid-stream a little. ..slimy, it's their court of law. What I do find chilling is that it seems the burden of proving that the change shouldn't be done is on the defense, rather than having the prosecution provide the burden of proof that the change should be done. Any/.ers for Norway care to comment?
No, the burden of proof is indeed on the procecution's side. However, the proof may scrutinized by the defense. If the defense objects, the court will rule on the issue.
In this case, the defense must have felt that the court would rule in favor of the prosecution, and/or that it wasn't worth fighting over.
Note that the Norwegian legal system is not like the anglo-saxon tradition, where a defense and prosecution fight eachother over two different versions of events, it's more like the german tradition where the defense and prosecution work from two different viewpoints towards finding a single truth.
Hell, maybe MS's plan is to buy them and keep them funded and alive to prove to the courts they are interested in competition. Its just as likely.
No, it's not. Showing interest in competition means staying away and letting the products compete in the marketplace. The courts know this.
Given the choice of interpreting this as: a) MS killing off some weaker competitors b) MS liking competition so much that they'll buy competitors and lose money to keep them afloat.
I have a very hard time seeing anyone, viewing both options as "just as likely",
especially not a court in an anti-trust case.
People point out plastic as an environmental problem because it is a cheap material, often used in cheap (and sometimes, unneccesary) products.
Simply put: Plastic has low status and appeal. And that's why it is an ideal target as an environmental problem.
Now I'm not denying that plastic *is* a problem, especially in landfills, where it degrades slowly. However, if you burn it, that is a different matter. Burning plastic gives you somewhere around 80-90% of the energy that burning the oil that it took to make plastic, in the meanwhile the plastic has had an entire lifetime of practical use.
Somewhere around 1% of the worlds oil is used to make plastic, the rest? It just gets burned up.
As I said, it is a problem, but it is NOT a major concern, not when we still have oil power plants. (and SUV:s!)
(And if you ask me, this bad understanding of priority is one of the enviromentalists' big problems)
in the words of my father (a mainframe guy for 30 years). I asked him if he'd ever seen a mainframe crash. "What do you mean by 'crash'?" "I mean go down completely. No activity." "Nope." but he did know a guy who had once..
Does anyone know if Synchrotrons, like the one in Saskatoon, SK, Canada play a part in researching molecular computers? No, not at all.
The article mentions a magnetic imaging device. Is that like a synchrotron? No, not at all.
Syncrotrons produce gamma/X-rays. Expose a polymer to some of those, and it won't stay a polymer for long.. NMR instruments (and MRI devices) use radio waves. Much longer wavelength, much lower energy. The only similarity I can think of is that both use big magnetic fields, but for different reasons. (syncrotrons use them to accelerate particles, NMR machines use them to split the spin energy levels)
I've done NMR, it takes ages. Preparing the sample takes about 30 minutes. Running the NMR takes between 1 and 20 minutes depending on what you're measuring. Analysing the results depends on how good you are.
That's a bit silly. The actual pulse sequence doesn't take anywhere near 1 to 20 minutes, more like microseconds. You repeat the thing to get better resolution, which may not be necessary with better equipment in the future. Not to mention that analysis can be automated as well. (It already is when it comes to protein-NMR)
But, if we get something going from LA -> Sacramento, I'm hoping that it will present enough of an incentive to go to the larger Oregonian cities on the way to Seattle.
Who wants to go to Oregon? and wants to go to Sacramento, anyway?
We forced software manufacurers to give up copy protection in the Commodore 64 days by not buying the crap
Oh, 'we' did, did we? As far as I remember, copy protection on games continued way past the C64 era. In fact, nearly all games had some kind of protection until CD-ROMs came along, which people couldn't copy because of the sheer size.
With todays large harddrives and CD-burners everywhere, copy protection is back in.
I wasn't referring to this machine, but to my home computer- where I do have a full linux install.
My point was- why get a DVR if you already own a computer? Get a vidcap card and a big harddrive and you have a machine with all the capabilities of a DVR and more flexibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't it should be possible to patent 'information' that is by its own existence 'prior art'. Processes to extract, create, manipulate this information should be patentable.
It isn't.
What biotech patents are all about is "using information x to do y",
for example: "using a breast-cancer gene to detect patient suspectibility to breast-cancer".. etc
The problem with biotech patents is that these claims are vague, and the application in question is often obvious.
That's where the problem is
when that excess iron enters the food chain? People talk about GM crops, but things like this are where the danger lies.
Oh, please.. get a clue. This is IRON we're talking about,
one of the most well-known substances around.
(our knowledge goes back to.. well, the iron age..)
Iron does *not* bioaccumulate.
Iron has a low level of toxicity, almost all cases of iron-poisoning are
due to children swallowing large amounts of iron tablets.
Also, the risk of this bacteria spreading is minimal. Being able to eat asbestos does not provide you with any evolutionary advantages.
You might as well propose a ban on cast-iron skillets.
To paraphrase "the tao of programming":
"I don't know whether I am an operating system dreaming that I am a programming language,
or a programming language dreaming that I am an operating system!"
Who wants a sauna, honestly? You might as well just get a car without air conditioning.
Actually, since air-conditioning is not standard
equipment on cars sold in Scandinavia (duh!) having AC has become a bit of a status symbol..
"Look, I have so much money I even spend it on AC for my car, which I have the pleasure of using two days a year."
Given that anything that can even remotely be construed as bragging is frowned upon in these countries,
that's about as extravagant as people get.
Pariffin is one of the higher fractions of petroleum cracking -- asphalt at the bottom, pariffin near the top. You can bias your output from a barrel of oil a bit, but it still comes out of the ground.
That's petroleum destillation you're referring to.
Cracking is the process to "bias your output", where you break (or "crack") the heavy hydrocarbons (such as asphalt) into smaller ones (such as paraffin).
is that really true of the GNU project? I doubt it. I know that there is a practice of giving your copyright over to GNU but that's voluntary. I read so on their website. If i recall it's so that they can pursue violations for you etc.
Yes it is true, see this or just read about why Xemacs was forked.
Scientists are prone to this fallacy, perhaps because they are temperamentally uncomfortable with uncertainty. That's why they became scientists in
the first place. That's also why saying "I don't know" is considered, among scientists, so virtuous; it's hard to bring themselves to say it.
That's one of the worst pieces of BS I've heard in a long time!
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
To quote Richard Feynman (a bona-fide, real scientist(TM), and a Nobel laureate at that..)
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing - I think it's much
more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be
wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees
of certainty about different things but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and
there are many things I don't know anything about such as whether it means
anything to ask "why are we here?" But I don't have to know an answer -
I don't feel frightened by not knowing things.
This the view most scientists share, although most did not put it as well as ol' RPF.
Knowledge is fractal, and domain specific. Can something be in two places at once? Well, yes-no. It depends on the domain. If it's an electron, the
answer seems to be sort-of "yes, if you can't see it in mid process".
That doesn't mean the "knowledge" is domain-specific,
it means that our model of reality is.
Knowledge is, for example, the fact that small particles can behave in this manner.
And what the heck do you mean by "fractal"?
It doesn't fit in with any definition of the word I've heard.
People who are certain are a large part of the problem. WHENEVER you are certain, you've made a mistake. You may have mistaken a high probability value for truth (which usually works quite well), but you've made a mistake.
This is just ridiculous. You probably felt very confident, probably even "certain" that people reading your post would understand it.
Your actions contradict you point.
In the strictest sense of the word, nothing is "certain".
However, spoken language is not logic.
They use the same terms (as does science) but the words of everyday speech are always less rigid.
(compare everyday usages of "work", "energy", "resistance" with their more strict scientific definitions)
If something contradicts experience, then it may be either wrong, or misunderstood. Don't doubt your experience
True, but our memories are error-prone. We forget things, we remember badly, etc.
Also, we make observational mistakes, imagine we see things, etc..
Science deals with this by repeating their observations,
preferably in different manners, and by different people.
If the experience of a single person contradicts the observations of thousands of others,
it is wise do distrust the former.
Telepathy... I have not seen either a proof or a disproof that met my standards.
Naturally, you need something to disprove to disprove it.
As for proofs, they fall into two categories:
a) The design of the experiment was flawed
(i.e. double-blinding, etc..)
b) The experiment could not be repeated by independent researchers
(and no, I don't consider a "fellow-believer" to be independent. And that goes for all science.)
Of course, Newton's mechanics are exactly bogus..
No, Newton's mechanics are not bogus.
They are a fully adequate model for most physical phenomena at an everyday scale.
"Flim-flam!" or just about anything by James Randi (the guy who exposed Uri Geller),
he's a magician, not a scientist and has a good sense of humor.
(Also don't miss out on his $1 million dollar prize or his weekly newsletter on what the kranks are up to..)
A DRM is supposed to manage copy-rights. Precedent has established that those rights (to copy the stuff) can be owned, but not the content itself.
Good point!
Another thing that tends to get lost in the debate is that copyright is not a right
in the "inalienable moral axiom" sense of the word,
but rather a provision created by society to encourage creativity through giving the
creator the opportunity to monetary return on his works during a limited time.
Listening to the MPAA et al. today, one would easily be lead to believe that copyright
was on par with freedom of speech and religion.
So mixing analogies from the original post, the delay is so that the Nobel commitee does not give an award to the physics equivalent of Toto or Milli Vanilli.
The latter, of course, being Jan Hendrik Schön.
Be careful of hyperbole, and that 'never' word, especially when it comes to computing power. Chances are you'll eventually get a laugh-o-gram from Mr. Moore's Law Offices...
Ok. Please turn to chapter ten in your high-school
math textbooks: "Exponentials"
Um, we're talking about numbers in the range of 2^50 times the age of the universe here..
Make all the computers in the world a billion times faster..
One billion is slightly less than 2^30, so
that brings us down to 2^20 times the age of the universe, a nice round number,
a number of million times.
Of course, if Moores law holds forever (making it more fundamental than the laws of physics)
we might just make it with this approach just before the human race gets killed off when the sun dies out.
With current methods, you are not going to make it.
Perhaps a quantum computer with Shor's factoring algorithm will be able to do it some day,
but that is a completly different technology.
(to which Moores law cannot be applied either)
Being smart-alecky in the face of common sense is very silly.
"waste of resources" is an understatement,
we're talking about something that the combined computer power of the world cannot achive in the currently known age of the universe.
Get it kids? We are more likely to suffer human mass-extinction due to an asteroid
hitting the earth in the next few years than seeing this public key brute-forced.. ok?
Blame the funding model. For scientists to get money, they have to justify their existance--and that means saying "we know" when all they should be saying is "we think."
What, you don't think the people granting funding have a basic conception of the principles of science? Get a clue!
The nature of science, the philosophy of the thing is at the heart of the matter.
Science is performed by induction from observations.
This means that you make observations and try to draw a general conclusion.
The fallacy of this method is obvious; Yet it has proved very useful (=science!)
And the problem of induction has largly been dealt with by the philosophers of science.
(The logical positivists and Vienna circle coming the closest to an adequate theory, IMHO)
Anyway, what is to be considered "known" has an arbitrary limit. You "know" that when you drop an object, it will fall to the ground.
You know this due to experience, i.e. you have induced it from observations. Most knowledge is aquired in this fashion,
yet when it reaches a certain level of certainty we use the term "we know" in lieu of "we think".
Scientific knowledge is no exception.
However, you are right in critisicing the press for exaggerating the certainty of some scientific discovery. They do.
However, good scientists rarely do so.
As for atheism, it is not a religion and it is.
(Read the FAQ.)
Atheism as "the categorical denial of any and all gods", or "strong" atheism can be considered a religious doctrine.
However, "weak" atheism is disbelief in the existance of god, meaning that you do not belive in the existance of god, for one or another reason. This is not the same as denying the existance of god.
Many scientists belong to the latter category, as it follows the sceptical approach of science in general.
What do you mean by saying that atheism should not be
given greater "scientific or political respect" than any other "religion"?
In a secular society with seperation of church and state, religious matters should not be political.
Nor should scientific matters be religious, and they are not.
However all this depends on your definition of "religious matters".
If I start a religion which claims that objects do not fall to the ground when I drop them, and scientists claim the opposite,
does this mean that science is giving more respect to atheism than to my religion?
Science pays respect to observable facts, and observable facts only. If these contradict some religion, it is the problem of the religion, not a scientific one.
For example, Galileo and Copernicus were religious men, and atheism had nothing to do with their motives. However, the church considered them heretic.
And as for quantum physics: if you limit objects to 'non-quantum levels of mass',
then you are by definition outside of the realm where quantum effects have a significant inpact, so the question is really redundant. (the "force"-part I don't even understand..)
A better question is why you would want to save classical mechanics?
Quantum mechanics is based on 6 postulates, all laws of QM follow from these, and all laws of ordinary mechanics can be deduced from QM.
Classical mechanics OTOH, was much more of an ad hoc hodgepodge of laws until QM explained why they take the form that they do.
Of course, the 6 postulates are rather ad hoc laws themselves, but they are fewer, and explain more.
This doesn't come as news for me..
As a student starting my PhD studies, I once asked a researcher at the department about a paper. He told me he hadn't read it.
The next day, I saw that he had indeed quoted that paper in one of his.
However, it usually isn't such a big problem,
when papers are cited without being read, since it usually only happens with papers periferial to the subject.
(For example to justify a certain method or procedure that is common practice)
Also, sometimes the relevant portion of an paper can be summed up in one sentence, or in the abstract.
While I find the idea of being able to change .slimy, it's their court of law. /.ers for Norway care to comment?
charges in mid-stream a little. .
What I do find chilling is that it seems the burden of proving that the change shouldn't be done is on the defense, rather than having the prosecution provide
the burden of proof that the change should be done. Any
No, the burden of proof is indeed on the procecution's side. However, the proof may scrutinized by the defense. If the defense objects, the court will rule on the issue.
In this case, the defense must have felt that the court would rule in favor of the prosecution, and/or that it wasn't worth fighting over.
Note that the Norwegian legal system is not like the anglo-saxon tradition, where a defense and prosecution fight eachother over two different versions of events,
it's more like the german tradition where the defense and prosecution work from two different viewpoints towards finding a single truth.
Hell, maybe MS's plan is to buy them and keep them funded and alive to prove to the courts they are interested in competition. Its just as likely.
No, it's not. Showing interest in competition means staying away
and letting the products compete in the marketplace. The courts know this.
Given the choice of interpreting this as:
a) MS killing off some weaker competitors
b) MS liking competition so much that they'll buy competitors and
lose money to keep them afloat.
I have a very hard time seeing anyone, viewing both options as "just as likely",
especially not a court in an anti-trust case.
People point out plastic as an environmental problem because it is a cheap material,
often used in cheap (and sometimes, unneccesary) products.
Simply put: Plastic has low status and appeal.
And that's why it is an ideal target as an environmental problem.
Now I'm not denying that plastic *is* a problem, especially in landfills, where it degrades slowly.
However, if you burn it, that is a different matter.
Burning plastic gives you somewhere around 80-90% of the energy that burning the oil that it
took to make plastic, in the meanwhile the plastic has had an entire lifetime of practical use.
Somewhere around 1% of the worlds oil is used to make plastic, the rest?
It just gets burned up.
As I said, it is a problem, but it is NOT a major concern,
not when we still have oil power plants. (and SUV:s!)
(And if you ask me, this bad understanding of priority is one of
the enviromentalists' big problems)
in the words of my father (a mainframe guy for 30 years).
I asked him if he'd ever seen a mainframe crash.
"What do you mean by 'crash'?"
"I mean go down completely. No activity."
"Nope." but he did know a guy who had once..
THAT is why the dino ain't dead.
Does anyone know if Synchrotrons, like the one in Saskatoon, SK, Canada play a part in researching molecular computers?
No, not at all.
The article mentions a magnetic imaging device.
Is that like a synchrotron?
No, not at all.
Syncrotrons produce gamma/X-rays. Expose a polymer to some of those, and it won't stay a polymer for long..
NMR instruments (and MRI devices) use radio waves. Much longer wavelength, much lower energy.
The only similarity I can think of is that both use big magnetic fields, but for different reasons.
(syncrotrons use them to accelerate particles, NMR machines use them to split the spin energy levels)
I've done NMR, it takes ages. Preparing the sample takes about 30 minutes. Running the NMR takes between 1 and 20 minutes depending on what you're measuring.
Analysing the results depends on how good you are.
That's a bit silly. The actual pulse sequence doesn't take anywhere near 1 to 20 minutes, more like microseconds.
You repeat the thing to get better resolution, which may not be necessary with better equipment in the future.
Not to mention that analysis can be automated as well. (It already is when it comes to protein-NMR)
But, if we get something going from LA -> Sacramento, I'm hoping that it will present enough of an incentive to go to the larger Oregonian cities on the way to Seattle.
Who wants to go to Oregon?
and wants to go to Sacramento, anyway?
LASF is fine with me.
We forced software manufacurers to give up copy protection in the Commodore 64 days by not buying the crap
Oh, 'we' did, did we?
As far as I remember, copy protection on games
continued way past the C64 era.
In fact, nearly all games had some kind of protection until CD-ROMs came along, which people
couldn't copy because of the sheer size.
With todays large harddrives and CD-burners everywhere, copy protection is back in.
Consumer power never came into the equation.
I wasn't referring to this machine, but to my home computer- where I do have a full linux install.
My point was- why get a DVR if you already own a computer? Get a vidcap card and a big harddrive and you have a machine with all the capabilities of a DVR and more flexibility.
Yup. Video4Linux!
I have a TV/vidcap card and since then, I've thrown out my VCR.
If I want to record something, I can do a remote login from work and start the thing,
or schedule it with a script. Very practical.