'Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill?'
'...most likely an expendable pawn'
This is what's called a 'metaphor', and is meant to suggest one under the control of another, more powerful entity. You may be confusing 'pawn' with 'porn', a common mistake often thought to be responsible for the (frequently observed) sharp decline in chess club attendance after the first week, when the terminology is explained. To illustrate:
'The guy who wrote this insane piece is at best a troll, most likely an expendable pawn.'
Yes, his cover goes so deep his sinister paymasters have even instructed him to write several books about Ubuntu, and even give one of them away for free, presumably as part of a machiavellian plot to undermine other Linux distributions and deprive genuine FOSS-supporting authors of their livelihoods:
Back in 2006, his evil campaign of dangerous misinformation apparently managed to subvert a popular technology blog, which went so far as to describe one of his poisonous publications as 'a good book which is both informative and entertaining at the same time':
I can't even hint at the shocking details of the plot that led to this guy being awarded an Editors' Choice Award by the hopelessly compromised 'Linux Journal' - I have a family to think about, and They know here I live...
And while they're there, they could work towards drafting some sort of legal framework that guarantees 'consumers' of the European Commission's policies the same basic rights as those expected under other responsible authorities - e.g., the right not to have harmful copyright extension legislation imposed by an organization that 'wilfully ignores scientific analysis and evidence in its policy making process':
'The red means that it's "in the future" and being seen by a subscriber. For some reason they've been showing up for a few seconds to normal users too.'
That gives me a great idea! Why not devise some sort of complex financial instrument that nobody understands, which effectively bets the entire economy on the future colour of Slashdot articles? It would be no sillier than what happened over the last decade, and pretty easy to implement if we can come up with a single neat formula that seems to give correct predictions if you don't look too hard. Speaking of which, I thought we were still blaming this guy:
The nuclear powers helpfully performed a gigantic pulse labelling experiment on the DNA of the entire biosphere back in the 50s, which allows the cell 'birthdays' in various tissues of people born in that era to be determined. The measurements can be calibrated by the C-14 content in tree rings, so you can work out if the cells are (e.g.) as old as the person (certain brain cells) or renewed more recently (like heart muscle).
the various segments were most closely related to sequences previously (and recently) detected in pig viruses, though the particular strain had not been found before in any animal:
It's actually quite possible, however, that pigs originally picked up a distant ancestor of the current strain from humans. Pig flu was first described in 1918, coinciding with the last human H1N1 pandemic, and when the virus was isolated from pigs in the 1930s, it was also found to have the H1N1 serotype.
'IPTV has been ready to go for years and years...the content providers are the ones holding it back. If you think TV on the internet will be the next big thing...well... I think it will be too, but magically it will still cost the same as cable TV is today.'
Here in the UK, where Cable has much less of the market, all the major content providers (with the obvious exception of Satellite-based Sky) are pushing free to view on demand IP TV pretty hard. After a false start with a dreadfully clunky Kontiki-based system, The BBC is some way ahead of the competition with their (now very slick) iPlayer. A few days ago they started offering some HD content as 720p H.264 (nearly 1.5 Gb for an hour!), which is certainly going to upset a lot of ISPs, and seriously test the definition of 'unlimited' broadband deals. It's a shame the idiots at the BBC Trust have insisted on a 7-day DRM timebomb for downloaded programs, and that their Flash-based player is pretty resource-intensive; luckily the get_iplayer script from the linuxcentre site provides a neat cross-platform way of capturing the streamed version as an unencumbered mp4, which even a netbook can play using CoreAVC...
Some very interesting experiments using hybrid viruses created by inserting genes from the 1918 pandemic strain into current less virulent strains have shown that multiple mechanisms act to make the 'Spanish flu' so deadly. It turns out that the 1918 variant of the viral 'RNA polymerase complex' (a set of genes that the virus uses to copy itself) allows replication to occur directly in the lungs, as well as the upper respiratory tract where most flu viruses grow. The 1918 versions of various other genes modulate the host immune system in particularly nasty ways, simultaneously inhibiting the antiviral response that would normally clear the virus within a few days, and over-stimulating another part of the immune system so that the host's own tissue is damaged. So it's an especially vicious combination of factors, rather than a single mechanism at work. It's too early to say if anything like this is happening with the Mexican strain, but human to human transmission of any influenza virus that causes significant mortality in healthy young adults is a cause for very serious concern.
'Because Apache helicopters are prohibitively expensive even for patients with the best insurance, aside from being illegal for civilians to own.'
It would probably be much cheaper to pick up a surplus thought-guided control system from the Soviet Mig-31 project on ebay. The only downside (and this is very important) is that you must think in Russian. You can't think in English and transpose it - you must think in Russian.
though of course a similar concept is there. Gibson actually names the 'Cyberspace Seven' matrix simulator in 'Burning Chrome', a couple of years before 'Neuromancer':
Rumours that Station X at Bletchley Park is to be re-opened in order to decrypt 'important data received on disk-based media from a high level US government source' remain unconfirmed. In other news, the Obama Administration has not yet commented on the suggestion that all gifts intended for European dignitaries for the duration of the recession were bulk-purchased in the Circuit City closing down sale.
is as much a swipe at the BBC as at Google, etc. The 'BBC Trust', installed by the current government a couple of years ago to oversee the Beeb's activities, has shown a worrying tendency to bend over backwards to placate commercial competitors when they start whining about this sort of thing (the Trust are the guys who blocked BBC Radio 3 from releasing any more mp3s after a highly successful experiment with the Beethoven Symphonies, who mandated a 7-day expiry on DRM'd iPlayer content, and who are responsible for junking a range of popular BBC websites). I'm sure the Guardian group would love some pressure to be exerted to further reduce the activities of their main competitor in UK news...
In other news, Irish police, working on the theory that such a well-travelled criminal may have been been provided with transport by an accomplice, have apparently identified her driver:
'Couldn't you make the argument that Athena is the actual genetic Eve? Is Hera actually important?'
Since maternal mitochondrial DNA is passed on unchanged to the children(barring mutations) then Hera's should be identical to Athena's. Actually, since all the Eights presumably have the same mitochondria, if any of the others turned out to be fertile, they'd also have kids with the same mitochondria as Hera...
"You'll see things here that look odd, even antiquated, to modern eyes, like phones with cords, awkward manual valves, media codecs that, well, barely deserve the name..."
'I even remember one early commentator saying that text-only web pages were actually *better* for people on 14.4k baud modems.'
As I recall (Get Off My Lawn, etc.) if you were on a slow connection the web pretty much became a text-only medium initially. I used Lynx rather a lot back then (for speed), while Mosaic tended to be a rather frustrating experience. One of the cool new features that got everyone excited about one of the early versions of Netscape was its ability to show you the text (and of course active clickable links to other pages) without having to wait for every single image on the page to load (assuming you had image loading turned on at all). Suddenly the web started to look like a useable medium rather than an over-ambitious experiment crippled by slow networks and unresponsive software.
According to The Register, the calacademy guys who set the quiz originally got this 'wrong' too, basically because the 61-70% and 71-80% ranges they presented split too close to the generally accepted answer:
Picking 71-80% would give a 'wrong' answer, even though (e.g.) NOAA gives 71% as the current estimate. The site now seems to have been changed to include a 66-75% range...
This actually goes one 'better' than 1984, where a pub was one of the few public places without a camera, though entering one would be considered a highly suspicious act for a non-prole ('It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.').
Slashdot Mirror
'Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill?'
'...most likely an expendable pawn'
This is what's called a 'metaphor', and is meant to suggest one under the control of another, more powerful entity. You may be confusing 'pawn' with 'porn', a common mistake often thought to be responsible for the (frequently observed) sharp decline in chess club attendance after the first week, when the terminology is explained. To illustrate:
Expendable pawn:
http://www.darlmcbride.com/
Expendable porn:
http://membres.lycos.fr/fredrichung/forum/nerd%20porn.jpg
'The guy who wrote this insane piece is at best a troll, most likely an expendable pawn.'
Yes, his cover goes so deep his sinister paymasters have even instructed him to write several books about Ubuntu, and even give one of them away for free, presumably as part of a machiavellian plot to undermine other Linux distributions and deprive genuine FOSS-supporting authors of their livelihoods:
http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/download_main.html
Back in 2006, his evil campaign of dangerous misinformation apparently managed to subvert a popular technology blog, which went so far as to describe one of his poisonous publications as 'a good book which is both informative and entertaining at the same time':
http://books.slashdot.org/books/06/03/29/1437217.shtml
I can't even hint at the shocking details of the plot that led to this guy being awarded an Editors' Choice Award by the hopelessly compromised 'Linux Journal' - I have a family to think about, and They know here I live...
'Going to medical school.'
Going to law school?
And while they're there, they could work towards drafting some sort of legal framework that guarantees 'consumers' of the European Commission's policies the same basic rights as those expected under other responsible authorities - e.g., the right not to have harmful copyright extension legislation imposed by an organization that 'wilfully ignores scientific analysis and evidence in its policy making process':
http://www.out-law.com/page-9378
'The red means that it's "in the future" and being seen by a subscriber. For some reason they've been showing up for a few seconds to normal users too.'
That gives me a great idea! Why not devise some sort of complex financial instrument that nobody understands, which effectively bets the entire economy on the future colour of Slashdot articles? It would be no sillier than what happened over the last decade, and pretty easy to implement if we can come up with a single neat formula that seems to give correct predictions if you don't look too hard. Speaking of which, I thought we were still blaming this guy:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Yes, the 'real' applications for this technique are much more interesting, possibly even to whisky drinkers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html
The nuclear powers helpfully performed a gigantic pulse labelling experiment on the DNA of the entire biosphere back in the 50s, which allows the cell 'birthdays' in various tissues of people born in that era to be determined. The measurements can be calibrated by the C-14 content in tree rings, so you can work out if the cells are (e.g.) as old as the person (certain brain cells) or renewed more recently (like heart muscle).
The reason it's thought to be swine influenza is that when its genome was examined and compared with other flu genomes:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/SwineFlu.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/Database/select.cgi
the various segments were most closely related to sequences previously (and recently) detected in pig viruses, though the particular strain had not been found before in any animal:
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/swineflu/biofacts/swinefluoverview.html
It's actually quite possible, however, that pigs originally picked up a distant ancestor of the current strain from humans. Pig flu was first described in 1918, coinciding with the last human H1N1 pandemic, and when the virus was isolated from pigs in the 1930s, it was also found to have the H1N1 serotype.
No, silly, they mean DOCTOR Who. Apparently he's already located Patient Zero:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/gallery/s3_04-05gallery/800/51.jpg
It's much worse than that. Last year the NIH cracked down on scientists found to have indulged in 'Brain Doping!'
'IPTV has been ready to go for years and years...the content providers are the ones holding it back. If you think TV on the internet will be the next big thing...well... I think it will be too, but magically it will still cost the same as cable TV is today.'
Here in the UK, where Cable has much less of the market, all the major content providers (with the obvious exception of Satellite-based Sky) are pushing free to view on demand IP TV pretty hard. After a false start with a dreadfully clunky Kontiki-based system, The BBC is some way ahead of the competition with their (now very slick) iPlayer. A few days ago they started offering some HD content as 720p H.264 (nearly 1.5 Gb for an hour!), which is certainly going to upset a lot of ISPs, and seriously test the definition of 'unlimited' broadband deals. It's a shame the idiots at the BBC Trust have insisted on a 7-day DRM timebomb for downloaded programs, and that their Flash-based player is pretty resource-intensive; luckily the get_iplayer script from the linuxcentre site provides a neat cross-platform way of capturing the streamed version as an unencumbered mp4, which even a netbook can play using CoreAVC...
Some very interesting experiments using hybrid viruses created by inserting genes from the 1918 pandemic strain into current less virulent strains have shown that multiple mechanisms act to make the 'Spanish flu' so deadly. It turns out that the 1918 variant of the viral 'RNA polymerase complex' (a set of genes that the virus uses to copy itself) allows replication to occur directly in the lungs, as well as the upper respiratory tract where most flu viruses grow. The 1918 versions of various other genes modulate the host immune system in particularly nasty ways, simultaneously inhibiting the antiviral response that would normally clear the virus within a few days, and over-stimulating another part of the immune system so that the host's own tissue is damaged. So it's an especially vicious combination of factors, rather than a single mechanism at work. It's too early to say if anything like this is happening with the Mexican strain, but human to human transmission of any influenza virus that causes significant mortality in healthy young adults is a cause for very serious concern.
'Because Apache helicopters are prohibitively expensive even for patients with the best insurance, aside from being illegal for civilians to own.'
It would probably be much cheaper to pick up a surplus thought-guided control system from the Soviet Mig-31 project on ebay. The only downside (and this is very important) is that you must think in Russian. You can't think in English and transpose it - you must think in Russian.
This term isn't in 'True Names' as far as I can tell:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051127010734/http://home.comcast.net/~kngjon/truename/truename.html
though of course a similar concept is there. Gibson actually names the 'Cyberspace Seven' matrix simulator in 'Burning Chrome', a couple of years before 'Neuromancer':
http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/courses/350s96/gibson.html
Rumours that Station X at Bletchley Park is to be re-opened in order to decrypt 'important data received on disk-based media from a high level US government source' remain unconfirmed. In other news, the Obama Administration has not yet commented on the suggestion that all gifts intended for European dignitaries for the duration of the recession were bulk-purchased in the Circuit City closing down sale.
'They don't have to ask government to intervene in an area it has neither knowledge, skill nor particular legitimacy.'
The full response, which you can read here:
http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/GMG_DBIRResponse.pdf
is as much a swipe at the BBC as at Google, etc. The 'BBC Trust', installed by the current government a couple of years ago to oversee the Beeb's activities, has shown a worrying tendency to bend over backwards to placate commercial competitors when they start whining about this sort of thing (the Trust are the guys who blocked BBC Radio 3 from releasing any more mp3s after a highly successful experiment with the Beethoven Symphonies, who mandated a 7-day expiry on DRM'd iPlayer content, and who are responsible for junking a range of popular BBC websites). I'm sure the Guardian group would love some pressure to be exerted to further reduce the activities of their main competitor in UK news...
In other news, Irish police, working on the theory that such a well-travelled criminal may have been been provided with transport by an accomplice, have apparently identified her driver:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/0219/1224241418104.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
The last time I was on a plane, the remote control for the entertainment system had a built-in phone. In your face, smartphone companies!
I like the voice recognition idea, though. Right now I just shout at the servants until the channel is changed.
'Couldn't you make the argument that Athena is the actual genetic Eve? Is Hera actually important?'
Since maternal mitochondrial DNA is passed on unchanged to the children(barring mutations) then Hera's should be identical to Athena's. Actually, since all the Eights presumably have the same mitochondria, if any of the others turned out to be fertile, they'd also have kids with the same mitochondria as Hera...
'RealMedia? People still use RealMedia?'
"You'll see things here that look odd, even antiquated, to modern eyes, like phones with cords, awkward manual valves, media codecs that, well, barely deserve the name..."
'I even remember one early commentator saying that text-only web pages were actually *better* for people on 14.4k baud modems.'
As I recall (Get Off My Lawn, etc.) if you were on a slow connection the web pretty much became a text-only medium initially. I used Lynx rather a lot back then (for speed), while Mosaic tended to be a rather frustrating experience. One of the cool new features that got everyone excited about one of the early versions of Netscape was its ability to show you the text (and of course active clickable links to other pages) without having to wait for every single image on the page to load (assuming you had image loading turned on at all). Suddenly the web started to look like a useable medium rather than an over-ambitious experiment crippled by slow networks and unresponsive software.
According to The Register, the calacademy guys who set the quiz originally got this 'wrong' too, basically because the 61-70% and 71-80% ranges they presented split too close to the generally accepted answer:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/12/californian_science_dunces
Picking 71-80% would give a 'wrong' answer, even though (e.g.) NOAA gives 71% as the current estimate. The site now seems to have been changed to include a 66-75% range...
'Who are you going to email your legal arguments to once your internet is shut off?'
Well, that hardly matters in Korea, where Email is Only For Old People...
Apparently Heston Blumenthal has already been experimenting with it in the Fat Duck's ill-advised 'Fogbank and Plutonium porridge':
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/7927715.stm
I want the Cylon water interface (for my toaster, obviously), but this is the closest thing I can find:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1650
This actually goes one 'better' than 1984, where a pub was one of the few public places without a camera, though entering one would be considered a highly suspicious act for a non-prole ('It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.').
More details on the affected European router here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRmxXp62O8g