Minor correction: "najis" is a singular term, not a plural, so you should say "is najis". Actually, that's not quite true; you can say "najis are...", since it's really singular and plural. But in particular, it is NOT the plural of "naji", which is a common and honorable name.
Somebody becomes najis by coming into contact with an unclean thing, such as a pig or alcohol, or a person who is najis.
That's actually a good question. It sounds to me like such a thing would not be "libre" in the same sense that binary compiled code isn't. Arguably, minified code isn't really the "source", since that's not what you wrote.
That doesn't reflect one way or the other on this case, but it's an interesting point.
Hey, thanks! I literally walked out the door without reading the dead-tree edition of the paper I get delivered every morning, in part so that I can read Dilbert over breakfast.
The problem comes at the first step, "cool article". Replace it with "exaggerated scientific puffery via press release", and you'll find it far less disappointing.
I'm sure this is brilliant research and an important tool in our toolbox, but you only need to repeat the "free solar energy here tomorrow/actually, never" cycle a few dozen times before deciding to shortcut the process. Treat it as a minor advance that's of interest primarily to other people in the field, i.e. just like every other bit of normal science, and you'll be happier. Ignore science by press release, especially the kind that promises to solve all of your problems.
What Venter is doing is trying to solve the problem from the other end, trying to replicate something very much like existing life forms, using DNA, but made entirely from non-living materials. The first replicators would be far, far simpler than what he wants to do.
Both are important work, but the latter is what people have in mind when they talk about creating life from scratch. Venter's experiment will prove that an intelligent designer can create a complex life form, but it doesn't prove that it can arise without one.
What you really want is to start with Miller-Urey and keep going until you've got bacteria, but that's a lot harder. We have guesses as to what the intermediate steps are, but nobody has a complete picture yet.
It has been repeated many times, in a variety of ways. This is more "history" than "science". The original experimenters for some reason didn't analyze the data, so it's like completing the experiment, a half-century later. Think of it as "closure".
There are some moderately novel results from this. There are so many variables in the experiment that there's hardly any reason to do the same one twice. In this case, the inputs had some more sulfur than other experiments, and they got out some different amino acids.
But it's more interesting, if not scientifically important, solely because of the origin of these data. The actual conclusions are less relevant than the fact that they finally got around to this piece of history.
I published a computing book through a conventional publisher (Addison Wesley), and the amounts of money we made were roughly comparable. It's considerably sub minimum wage, given the years I put into writing it (including months full-time, away from a paying job writing software at a wage substantially higher than minimum.)
Which was, in fact, the point. It wasn't going to make me rich; it was going to make me famous. (You've heard of me and my book Programming for the Java Virtual Machine, right? Right?) I wanted to write a book, so I did. The publisher put it in a lot of bookstores and even translated it into Korean. (I've always wanted to lay my hands on a copy of the Korean translation.) It helped that this was a major Java publisher; my book is shelved next to big-name authors, some of whom were involved in reviewing it. That's a kind of expertise I couldn't have purchased.
At the time, it wasn't really practical to self-publish on the web; the print-on-demand services didn't exist and a real printing run had a high overhead. There's literally something buried in my contract about buying the printing plates once it went out of print, but it's still in print, and they send me a small but welcome check twice year.
My book had a limited target market, and even if I kept 100% of the gross it would still have been less money than I would have made at the job. But it's proving useful as an introduction: I'm now working on a different book in a completely unrelated field and can tell potential interview subjects that I wrote a book when I cold-call them.
They do care: if they're going to take the time to talk with me, they want to know that the book is likely to be published. They'd be even happier if I had a contract, but it's getting me into doors I need so that I can write the submission. Some of them might have turned me down if I told them I was going to self-publish.
That may change. The fame-producing aspects of a major publisher are less and less relevant. The money won't get any better, and may get worse, but if you're in it for the money you really should go back to writing code anyway.
You certainly could do that, but as far as I know none of the brokers force you to or even go out of their way to recommend it. There are lots of ways to mitigate your risk, and you need to have a strategy thought out before playing leverage games.
They actually gave everybody a bit less than two years notice for the last time change in 2007. The law was signed in August 2005; the first effect was in March 2007.
I thought it was pretty stupid at the time, and still do. DST is an idea whose time is past, if it ever had one. The only reason to keep it is that we're already used to it and devices are already programmed with it. Changing it without eliminating it seemed like worst of both worlds, especially when changing it in such a way that we now spend more time on "daylight time" than off.
It's still pretty amazing to me that the memory of Troy was preserved with such astonishing accuracy over the space of centuries. It's chock-full of details, and while many are unverifiable, so many have been verified that it's easy to believe that there really were exactly 1186 ships, for example.
400 years ago was Shakespeare's day, and even with writing we've lost a lot of important information. They managed to preserve an astonishing amount of information in the oral history. I don't think we've managed to lose any major cities (though things were pretty damn vague in the early days of the Age of Exploration), but we've lost so much else.
BoA is down today, but not substantially more than the market as a whole.
If you have an account with a major broker, shorting is trivial: you just sell the stock. It doesn't matter that you don't own it; you just click the box labeled "short sale". You'll need some money in the account to start with, but you actually get to sell it today and enjoy the cash you get from it.
Note that if the price goes back up, though, your liability is unlimited. Today it's at $14. If it hits $20, your broker is going to be making a polite but very firm phone call that you need to pony up. If it hits $200, you get deeply screwed. I advise against playing this game until you're very aware of how it's played, and are well insulated against the risks.
And you didn't even try to google the $126 million figure I gave? Nothing? Not even an instant's query as to why I might have said this? No curiosity whatsoever? Just "Hey, they said something negative about Republicans, they must be stupid"?
Try this one, from that bastion of flaming liberalism, the Associated Press:
I agree about DST, though I don't see the point in being a half-hour out of synch with GMT. It just makes the mental math harder.
I'd say just do away with daylight savings time the next time it comes around. You'd need to give everybody at least a year's notice anyway, so that devices can be updated and gotten into the retail channels.
If you install the Release Candidate, does it automatically update itself to be the real thing when it comes out? Or to the next RC?
If not, it seems like you'll be on the hook for yet another install and upgrade. I know that there will be plenty of people who need to get on that, so that they can be ready with products, but as a browser user rather than developer it seems like this is the sort of thing that should be in a specialized forum rather than the front page every few days.
Damn, I hate those "dumb laws" lists. Usually, it starts with an innocuous law like "No having sex with animals". Then some genius says, "No animals? Does that include porcupines? Hey, everybody, Florida says you can't have sex with porcupines!" knowing that everybody else is dumb enough not to go looking for the actual law. Instead, they go with "Gosh, those Floridians are stupid. One of 'em must have tried to have sex with a porcupine, and their legislators tried to ban that, rather than writing a nice, sensible law about sex with animals."
In other words, everybody involved is stupid, including me for having taken the effort to be irritated by that fact.
The thing with DNA is that you have a tendency to scatter it around. That's the whole point of testing: not the DNA that has to be taken from you, but the DNA that somebody left voluntarily at the crime scene.
Your face is already not particularly private. If the cops are looking for you, and they see your face, they're going to say, "Hey, it's that guy", and nobody is going to bring up privacy concerns. A very few people make a point of hiding their faces all the time, but it's inconvenient and unpleasant. You could probably keep your DNA private, too, as long as you didn't mind wearing a stilsuit whenever you went out.
Our intuitive notions of "privacy" simply don't apply to DNA. Obviously nobody supports arrests simply for the purpose of harassment, but that's already illegal (and hard to prove). But this is a brave new world: the cops can get their hands on my DNA if they want to. Adding a procedure less difficult than taking fingerprints to an already (presumably valid) arrest just doesn't seem like it's any more a violation of my rights than I was already doing.
(And yes, I said "presumably valid". Conviction is not the same as grounds for arrest, but they're not allowed to go arresting people just because they feel like it. Invalid arrests remain invalid, and conflating the two issues just makes it more complicated.)
Yeah, my first thought was "1? I thought they were up to 10."
Then, oh, right, we've moved from beta to RC. For pete's sake, I'm going to wait for the actual release because the existing browser works well enough and I don't want to be a bug-tester. Do I have to hear about each and every point-point-point release?
Especially since the relative measures of the small amounts are mostly subjective. A little more cinnamon, a little less nutmeg than called for... nobody really cares.
The key exception to this is the baking powder, where you'll add grams of leavener to kilos of flour. For most home kitchens it still doesn't make too much difference, as the oven itself is sufficiently variable to overwhelm it.
I definitely feel the fact that my cheap scale has 5g precision. I'd be happier with 1g, but it's more expensive. So as you say, I tend to switch to volume for small amounts like baking powder (though I've also been known to interpolate: "18g is 15g plus a bit more").
Which is why one of my treasured possessions is a set of cups with 2/3 and 3/4 measures. These are surprisingly common amounts in recipes, and not only can I measure them in one operation, it keeps my 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 cups clean.
Not that I'm averse to measuring sugar and flour with the same cup, for convenience, but other things do make them genuinely dirty.
For years, only Tupperware made such cups. Now, Oxo does as well, and I've also seen some very expensive metal ones.
The rant about wind and solar power has absolutely nothing to do with power engineering and everything to do with politics. It's something environmentalists want, and therefore it must be bad.
Right next to this there was an article on trolling. I treat these rants as being in precisely the same category. They exist to get a rise out of people, and all I can do is ignore them. Refuting them is pointless: they've victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect and their ignorance only strengthens their conviction that you're trying to put one over on them.
The only way to win is the way engineers and scientists always win: by producing something of value. Unfortunately, the idiots always make that ten times harder than it needs to be. It reads like something out of Ayn Rand, though ironically they tend to be the ones who imagine themselves her followers.
It's one of those problems with no solution. If you can't rehabilitate a criminal, and you don't want to have a bloodsport, what do you do with him? Letting him go practically guarantees the crime will happen again; death strikes people as disproportionate and unfair.
So, you do something nominally rehabilitative, which occasionally works, and sufficiently punitive as to at least nod to those who want revenge. And then... and then you probably do it again in a few years. Sucks, but it's humanity. Welcome to it.
It wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that bad applied over a great many individuals.
To be willing to irritate, effectively, EVERYBODY requires a certain kind of sociopathy. Maybe he learned not to do that, or at least to realize self-interestedly that it's not going to turn out well for him. But I expect that you don't get that kind of behavior without being a troll, i.e. enjoying the irritation for its own sake. If he were capable of his own self-interest, he wouldn't have gone to jail.
Slashdot Mirror
Minor correction: "najis" is a singular term, not a plural, so you should say "is najis". Actually, that's not quite true; you can say "najis are...", since it's really singular and plural. But in particular, it is NOT the plural of "naji", which is a common and honorable name.
Somebody becomes najis by coming into contact with an unclean thing, such as a pig or alcohol, or a person who is najis.
That's actually a good question. It sounds to me like such a thing would not be "libre" in the same sense that binary compiled code isn't. Arguably, minified code isn't really the "source", since that's not what you wrote.
That doesn't reflect one way or the other on this case, but it's an interesting point.
Hey, thanks! I literally walked out the door without reading the dead-tree edition of the paper I get delivered every morning, in part so that I can read Dilbert over breakfast.
The problem comes at the first step, "cool article". Replace it with "exaggerated scientific puffery via press release", and you'll find it far less disappointing.
I'm sure this is brilliant research and an important tool in our toolbox, but you only need to repeat the "free solar energy here tomorrow/actually, never" cycle a few dozen times before deciding to shortcut the process. Treat it as a minor advance that's of interest primarily to other people in the field, i.e. just like every other bit of normal science, and you'll be happier. Ignore science by press release, especially the kind that promises to solve all of your problems.
What Venter is doing is trying to solve the problem from the other end, trying to replicate something very much like existing life forms, using DNA, but made entirely from non-living materials. The first replicators would be far, far simpler than what he wants to do.
Both are important work, but the latter is what people have in mind when they talk about creating life from scratch. Venter's experiment will prove that an intelligent designer can create a complex life form, but it doesn't prove that it can arise without one.
What you really want is to start with Miller-Urey and keep going until you've got bacteria, but that's a lot harder. We have guesses as to what the intermediate steps are, but nobody has a complete picture yet.
It has been repeated many times, in a variety of ways. This is more "history" than "science". The original experimenters for some reason didn't analyze the data, so it's like completing the experiment, a half-century later. Think of it as "closure".
There are some moderately novel results from this. There are so many variables in the experiment that there's hardly any reason to do the same one twice. In this case, the inputs had some more sulfur than other experiments, and they got out some different amino acids.
But it's more interesting, if not scientifically important, solely because of the origin of these data. The actual conclusions are less relevant than the fact that they finally got around to this piece of history.
[[citation needed]]
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
I published a computing book through a conventional publisher (Addison Wesley), and the amounts of money we made were roughly comparable. It's considerably sub minimum wage, given the years I put into writing it (including months full-time, away from a paying job writing software at a wage substantially higher than minimum.)
Which was, in fact, the point. It wasn't going to make me rich; it was going to make me famous. (You've heard of me and my book Programming for the Java Virtual Machine, right? Right?) I wanted to write a book, so I did. The publisher put it in a lot of bookstores and even translated it into Korean. (I've always wanted to lay my hands on a copy of the Korean translation.) It helped that this was a major Java publisher; my book is shelved next to big-name authors, some of whom were involved in reviewing it. That's a kind of expertise I couldn't have purchased.
At the time, it wasn't really practical to self-publish on the web; the print-on-demand services didn't exist and a real printing run had a high overhead. There's literally something buried in my contract about buying the printing plates once it went out of print, but it's still in print, and they send me a small but welcome check twice year.
My book had a limited target market, and even if I kept 100% of the gross it would still have been less money than I would have made at the job. But it's proving useful as an introduction: I'm now working on a different book in a completely unrelated field and can tell potential interview subjects that I wrote a book when I cold-call them.
They do care: if they're going to take the time to talk with me, they want to know that the book is likely to be published. They'd be even happier if I had a contract, but it's getting me into doors I need so that I can write the submission. Some of them might have turned me down if I told them I was going to self-publish.
That may change. The fame-producing aspects of a major publisher are less and less relevant. The money won't get any better, and may get worse, but if you're in it for the money you really should go back to writing code anyway.
You certainly could do that, but as far as I know none of the brokers force you to or even go out of their way to recommend it. There are lots of ways to mitigate your risk, and you need to have a strategy thought out before playing leverage games.
They actually gave everybody a bit less than two years notice for the last time change in 2007. The law was signed in August 2005; the first effect was in March 2007.
I thought it was pretty stupid at the time, and still do. DST is an idea whose time is past, if it ever had one. The only reason to keep it is that we're already used to it and devices are already programmed with it. Changing it without eliminating it seemed like worst of both worlds, especially when changing it in such a way that we now spend more time on "daylight time" than off.
It's still pretty amazing to me that the memory of Troy was preserved with such astonishing accuracy over the space of centuries. It's chock-full of details, and while many are unverifiable, so many have been verified that it's easy to believe that there really were exactly 1186 ships, for example.
400 years ago was Shakespeare's day, and even with writing we've lost a lot of important information. They managed to preserve an astonishing amount of information in the oral history. I don't think we've managed to lose any major cities (though things were pretty damn vague in the early days of the Age of Exploration), but we've lost so much else.
BoA is down today, but not substantially more than the market as a whole.
If you have an account with a major broker, shorting is trivial: you just sell the stock. It doesn't matter that you don't own it; you just click the box labeled "short sale". You'll need some money in the account to start with, but you actually get to sell it today and enjoy the cash you get from it.
Note that if the price goes back up, though, your liability is unlimited. Today it's at $14. If it hits $20, your broker is going to be making a polite but very firm phone call that you need to pony up. If it hits $200, you get deeply screwed. I advise against playing this game until you're very aware of how it's played, and are well insulated against the risks.
And you didn't even try to google the $126 million figure I gave? Nothing? Not even an instant's query as to why I might have said this? No curiosity whatsoever? Just "Hey, they said something negative about Republicans, they must be stupid"?
Try this one, from that bastion of flaming liberalism, the Associated Press:
http://wvgazette.com/ap/ApTopStories/201103120884
I agree about DST, though I don't see the point in being a half-hour out of synch with GMT. It just makes the mental math harder.
I'd say just do away with daylight savings time the next time it comes around. You'd need to give everybody at least a year's notice anyway, so that devices can be updated and gotten into the retail channels.
Fortunately, we decided that we could do without fripperies like the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20042264-503544.html
saving $126 million, fully .01% of this year's deficit. Now all we need to do is find 10,000 other equally useful programs to cut.
If you install the Release Candidate, does it automatically update itself to be the real thing when it comes out? Or to the next RC?
If not, it seems like you'll be on the hook for yet another install and upgrade. I know that there will be plenty of people who need to get on that, so that they can be ready with products, but as a browser user rather than developer it seems like this is the sort of thing that should be in a specialized forum rather than the front page every few days.
Damn, I hate those "dumb laws" lists. Usually, it starts with an innocuous law like "No having sex with animals". Then some genius says, "No animals? Does that include porcupines? Hey, everybody, Florida says you can't have sex with porcupines!" knowing that everybody else is dumb enough not to go looking for the actual law. Instead, they go with "Gosh, those Floridians are stupid. One of 'em must have tried to have sex with a porcupine, and their legislators tried to ban that, rather than writing a nice, sensible law about sex with animals."
In other words, everybody involved is stupid, including me for having taken the effort to be irritated by that fact.
The thing with DNA is that you have a tendency to scatter it around. That's the whole point of testing: not the DNA that has to be taken from you, but the DNA that somebody left voluntarily at the crime scene.
Your face is already not particularly private. If the cops are looking for you, and they see your face, they're going to say, "Hey, it's that guy", and nobody is going to bring up privacy concerns. A very few people make a point of hiding their faces all the time, but it's inconvenient and unpleasant. You could probably keep your DNA private, too, as long as you didn't mind wearing a stilsuit whenever you went out.
Our intuitive notions of "privacy" simply don't apply to DNA. Obviously nobody supports arrests simply for the purpose of harassment, but that's already illegal (and hard to prove). But this is a brave new world: the cops can get their hands on my DNA if they want to. Adding a procedure less difficult than taking fingerprints to an already (presumably valid) arrest just doesn't seem like it's any more a violation of my rights than I was already doing.
(And yes, I said "presumably valid". Conviction is not the same as grounds for arrest, but they're not allowed to go arresting people just because they feel like it. Invalid arrests remain invalid, and conflating the two issues just makes it more complicated.)
Yeah, my first thought was "1? I thought they were up to 10."
Then, oh, right, we've moved from beta to RC. For pete's sake, I'm going to wait for the actual release because the existing browser works well enough and I don't want to be a bug-tester. Do I have to hear about each and every point-point-point release?
Especially since the relative measures of the small amounts are mostly subjective. A little more cinnamon, a little less nutmeg than called for... nobody really cares.
The key exception to this is the baking powder, where you'll add grams of leavener to kilos of flour. For most home kitchens it still doesn't make too much difference, as the oven itself is sufficiently variable to overwhelm it.
I definitely feel the fact that my cheap scale has 5g precision. I'd be happier with 1g, but it's more expensive. So as you say, I tend to switch to volume for small amounts like baking powder (though I've also been known to interpolate: "18g is 15g plus a bit more").
Which is why one of my treasured possessions is a set of cups with 2/3 and 3/4 measures. These are surprisingly common amounts in recipes, and not only can I measure them in one operation, it keeps my 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 cups clean.
Not that I'm averse to measuring sugar and flour with the same cup, for convenience, but other things do make them genuinely dirty.
For years, only Tupperware made such cups. Now, Oxo does as well, and I've also seen some very expensive metal ones.
The rant about wind and solar power has absolutely nothing to do with power engineering and everything to do with politics. It's something environmentalists want, and therefore it must be bad.
Right next to this there was an article on trolling. I treat these rants as being in precisely the same category. They exist to get a rise out of people, and all I can do is ignore them. Refuting them is pointless: they've victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect and their ignorance only strengthens their conviction that you're trying to put one over on them.
The only way to win is the way engineers and scientists always win: by producing something of value. Unfortunately, the idiots always make that ten times harder than it needs to be. It reads like something out of Ayn Rand, though ironically they tend to be the ones who imagine themselves her followers.
It's one of those problems with no solution. If you can't rehabilitate a criminal, and you don't want to have a bloodsport, what do you do with him? Letting him go practically guarantees the crime will happen again; death strikes people as disproportionate and unfair.
So, you do something nominally rehabilitative, which occasionally works, and sufficiently punitive as to at least nod to those who want revenge. And then... and then you probably do it again in a few years. Sucks, but it's humanity. Welcome to it.
It wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that bad applied over a great many individuals.
To be willing to irritate, effectively, EVERYBODY requires a certain kind of sociopathy. Maybe he learned not to do that, or at least to realize self-interestedly that it's not going to turn out well for him. But I expect that you don't get that kind of behavior without being a troll, i.e. enjoying the irritation for its own sake. If he were capable of his own self-interest, he wouldn't have gone to jail.