>I pity people in England who live in Essex or Sussex and try to find local information!
Not to mention Scunthorpe...
The Websense site blocking policy is often at the whim of your system administrators or their PHB, and there may well be no particular logic behind it; a single mouse click that excludes a specific 'category' can wipe out vast tracts of the net without any thought having gone into why this particular block is in place. The administrators may well have been told to get some sort of filtering in place, and are then just left to fill in the details. Many sites that use Websense probably block categories like 'Adult Material', 'Drugs', 'Racism' and 'Violence', but some of the other choices can be fairly random ('Advocacy Groups' is blocked at one site I know for no readily apparent reason).
Luckily the technically inclined can generally find ways to circumvent the system, including a well known https proxy, Google's cache, and some more elegant solutions. Routing your web traffic through an ssh tunnel to an external system that has access to an unrestricted proxy works rather well, and can be implemented with Mozilla and PuTTY under Windows - neither program requires 'installation' to work, which can be a bonus on 'locked down' systems.
I suppose that depends on how many lawyers and politicians you can afford! I guess (IANAL) VLC has the same legal status as any other program that removes CSS encryption, including most of the Linux players (VLC's region independence is a bonus that depends on the program's ability to decrypt DVD movies in general). What this status is may vary with where you live. The Videolan FAQ states that "The use and distribution of the libdvdcss library is controversial in a few countries such as the United States because of a law called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). If you are unsure about the legality of using and distributing this library in your country, please consult your lawyer."
>Doesn't the firmware lock the drive if it thinks that the maximum region change count has been reached?
If you use player software like the Videolan client (vlc), the region counter is never incremented and playback is not dependent on region status, even with RPC2 (firmware-locked) drives. Playing region-mismatched DVDs by normal mechanisms (i.e. using an officially licensed player program, which depends on decryption key exchange with the co-operation of the drive) is prevented by RPC2 firmware, but nothing stops raw data being read from the drive. And since vlc knows how to decrypt DVD movie data all by itself...
Luckily, Windows users can now also take advantage of ported libdvdcss-based players (like Videolan vlc) that can crack the DVD encryption by a plaintext attack without the co-operation of the drive, irrespective of region. This doesn't require an RPC1 drive firmware hack (RPC2 drives are usually fine), and happens very rapidly on recent PCs.
"I think considering Debian to be anything less than pristine free
software is vaguely silly."
---
Especially as GNU/LinEx is simply a modified
version of Debian and presumably allows the installation of the same
(separate, clearly labelled and completely optional) non-free packages
as any other Debian-derived system (even if such packages are not part
of the base distribution). And why is their domain name 'linex.org, not
'gnulinex.org'?:-)
Actually, I believe GTK is licensed under the LGPL (which has less strict linking criteria than the GPL), and wxWindows is LGPL with additional exceptions specifically designed to facilitate proprietary development.
"And, golly, why break the talk up into 11
"pages" in the first place? For better advertising for O'Reilly,
perhaps? Or do the webmasters think that we can't handle a long
vertical scroll bar? Give it to me straight up!"
Well, you could always click on the link to the single page printable
version.
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that
Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up
by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which
the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There
was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged
in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that
they watched everybody all the time."
Actually they are GM - the plant cells (in the form of a 'callus') weren't just treated with RNAi, they were modified by permanently inserting a construct that expresses the appropriate RNAi (designed to repress a gene necessary for caffeine synthesis). They then used these cells to produce seedlings with reduced caffeine content which (assuming the insert is stable) will pass this property on to their offspring (even though, as you say, the original gene is still intact).
Here's something I came across that may be of interest to Slashdot readers:
http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/issues/Comsci98/comps ci9801.html
It's an account of how the DNA code was 'cracked', the next major problem
after the structure was solved, from the point of view of a computer science
writer ( "What fascinated me about the code-breaking effort was how quickly
a biochemical puzzle--the relation between DNA structure and protein structure--was
reduced to an abstract problem in symbol manipulation.").
This was never true. All bacteria have DNA genomes. Some viruses
have RNA genomes. However, the extremely distant ancestors of cellular life
may have had RNA genomes:
It's a little more complicated than you were taught in high school. There
are viruses with genes made from DNA, viruses with genes made from RNA that
go through a DNA stage in their 'life' cycle, and viruses with genes made
from RNA that never go through a DNA stage:
These viruses hijack cellular components to make the proteins they require
to copy themselves and protect their genetic material. 'Sub-viral' agents
also exist that do not encode any proteins:
One thing missing from your list is the actual discovery of DNA by Miescher,
which happened around the same time as Mendel's work (the significance of
neither study was realised at the time). Don't read these links over breakfast!:
The text in the second link claims that the 'actual metal plates used by [Crick & Watson]' (i.e. the crucial pieces representing the heterocyclic bases, which would have been specially machined) are included in the model. So perhaps it has been re-assembled from their unique components and standard lab stuff like the retort clamps (which wouldn't have been thought to have any particular historical significance, especially in the 50s).
If you're in London you can see the original structural model of DNA (retort
clamps and all), models of several other significant molecules, some early
computers, and the Apollo 10 command module (!) all in one gallery at the
Science Museum:
Dana Carvey? LUXURY! When I were a lad we had to make do with watching Monty Python on a 3 inch oscilloscope while we paid IBM 6 shillings an hour to let us debug their punch cards for 26 hours a day with a blunt knitting needle underwater in total darkness! And when you tell young people that today, they don't believe you...
Re:An Interesting Alternate Universe Idea
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Kim Newman's short story Ubermensch has a brown-shirted Superhero
(alter ego 'Curt Kessler') fighting the villains of Fritz Lang and other
Expressionist movies in an alternate nazi Germany (the capital is, of course,
Metropolis). He survives the war, but is imprisoned for decades like Rudolph
Hess, while Rotwang (the villain of Metropolis) goes to work on a
US weapons program that eventually produces a 'K-bomb'. Spoilers and
notes here:
"I can't honestly say that I believe everyone at the show will be happy to see us," Houston said. "But I think most people will take our presence at LinuxWorld in the spirit in which it's intended -- a sincere attempt to open a positive dialog between Microsoft and the open-source development community."
They have a freezer full of them in the Gibson orbital villa. The family AI just releases another clone from hibernation as required, and sends him down on the next JAL shuttle. I believe the current Gibson is 3Bill.
Slashdot Mirror
>I pity people in England who live in Essex or Sussex and try to find local information!
Not to mention Scunthorpe...
The Websense site blocking policy is often at the whim of your system administrators or their PHB, and there may well be no particular logic behind it; a single mouse click that excludes a specific 'category' can wipe out vast tracts of the net without any thought having gone into why this particular block is in place. The administrators may well have been told to get some sort of filtering in place, and are then just left to fill in the details. Many sites that use Websense probably block categories like 'Adult Material', 'Drugs', 'Racism' and 'Violence', but some of the other choices can be fairly random ('Advocacy Groups' is blocked at one site I know for no readily apparent reason).
Luckily the technically inclined can generally find ways to circumvent the system, including a well known https proxy, Google's cache, and some more elegant solutions. Routing your web traffic through an ssh tunnel to an external system that has access to an unrestricted proxy works rather well, and can be implemented with Mozilla and PuTTY under Windows - neither program requires 'installation' to work, which can be a bonus on 'locked down' systems.
I suppose that depends on how many lawyers and politicians you can afford! I guess (IANAL) VLC has the same legal status as any other program that removes CSS encryption, including most of the Linux players (VLC's region independence is a bonus that depends on the program's ability to decrypt DVD movies in general). What this status is may vary with where you live. The Videolan FAQ states that "The use and distribution of the libdvdcss library is controversial in a few countries such as the United States because of a law called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). If you are unsure about the legality of using and distributing this library in your country, please consult your lawyer."
>Doesn't the firmware lock the drive if it thinks that the maximum region change count has been reached?
If you use player software like the Videolan client (vlc), the region counter is never incremented and playback is not dependent on region status, even with RPC2 (firmware-locked) drives. Playing region-mismatched DVDs by normal mechanisms (i.e. using an officially licensed player program, which depends on decryption key exchange with the co-operation of the drive) is prevented by RPC2 firmware, but nothing stops raw data being read from the drive. And since vlc knows how to decrypt DVD movie data all by itself...
Luckily, Windows users can now also take advantage of ported libdvdcss-based players (like Videolan vlc) that can crack the DVD encryption by a plaintext attack without the co-operation of the drive, irrespective of region. This doesn't require an RPC1 drive firmware hack (RPC2 drives are usually fine), and happens very rapidly on recent PCs.
"I think considering Debian to be anything less than pristine free software is vaguely silly." :-)
---
Especially as GNU/LinEx is simply a modified version of Debian and presumably allows the installation of the same (separate, clearly labelled and completely optional) non-free packages as any other Debian-derived system (even if such packages are not part of the base distribution). And why is their domain name 'linex.org, not 'gnulinex.org'?
Actually, I believe GTK is licensed under the LGPL (which has less strict linking criteria than the GPL), and wxWindows is LGPL with additional exceptions specifically designed to facilitate proprietary development.
"And, golly, why break the talk up into 11 "pages" in the first place? For better advertising for O'Reilly, perhaps? Or do the webmasters think that we can't handle a long vertical scroll bar? Give it to me straight up!"
Well, you could always click on the link to the single page printable version.
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time."
Now it really _is_ conceivable...
Of course in the UK we are already Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes.
Actually they are GM - the plant cells (in the form of a 'callus') weren't just treated with RNAi, they were modified by permanently inserting a construct that expresses the appropriate RNAi (designed to repress a gene necessary for caffeine synthesis). They then used these cells to produce seedlings with reduced caffeine content which (assuming the insert is stable) will pass this property on to their offspring (even though, as you say, the original gene is still intact).
Or the office IT guy can install this...
http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/issues/Comsci98/comp
It's an account of how the DNA code was 'cracked', the next major problem after the structure was solved, from the point of view of a computer science writer ( "What fascinated me about the code-breaking effort was how quickly a biochemical puzzle--the relation between DNA structure and protein structure--was reduced to an abstract problem in symbol manipulation.").
This was never true. All bacteria have DNA genomes. Some viruses have RNA genomes. However, the extremely distant ancestors of cellular life may have had RNA genomes:
s
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesi
It's a little more complicated than you were taught in high school. There are viruses with genes made from DNA, viruses with genes made from RNA that go through a DNA stage in their 'life' cycle, and viruses with genes made from RNA that never go through a DNA stage:
p .html
http://www.web-books.com/MoBio/Free/Ch1Et.htm
http://www.virology.net/Big_Virology/BVFamilyGrou
These viruses hijack cellular components to make the proteins they require to copy themselves and protect their genetic material. 'Sub-viral' agents also exist that do not encode any proteins:
http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/Viroids.html
One thing missing from your list is the actual discovery of DNA by Miescher, which happened around the same time as Mendel's work (the significance of neither study was realised at the time). Don't read these links over breakfast!:
c overy.html d ex2.html
http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/ahp/LAD/C4/C4_Dis
http://www.fmi.ch/members/marilyn.vaccaro/ewww/in
The text in the second link claims that the 'actual metal plates used by [Crick & Watson]' (i.e. the crucial pieces representing the heterocyclic bases, which would have been specially machined) are included in the model. So perhaps it has been re-assembled from their unique components and standard lab stuff like the retort clamps (which wouldn't have been thought to have any particular historical significance, especially in the 50s).
If you're in London you can see the original structural model of DNA (retort clamps and all), models of several other significant molecules, some early computers, and the Apollo 10 command module (!) all in one gallery at the Science Museum:
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/
DNA structure
Anyone know of any projects to compile JVM bytecode from other languages?
One or two...
Of course, a superior Top Secret heavy-duty vehicle with interchangeable mission 'nodules' has already been developed.
Dana Carvey? LUXURY! When I were a lad we had to make do with watching Monty Python on a 3 inch oscilloscope while we paid IBM 6 shillings an hour to let us debug their punch cards for 26 hours a day with a blunt knitting needle underwater in total darkness! And when you tell young people that today, they don't believe you...
Kim Newman's short story Ubermensch has a brown-shirted Superhero (alter ego 'Curt Kessler') fighting the villains of Fritz Lang and other Expressionist movies in an alternate nazi Germany (the capital is, of course, Metropolis). He survives the war, but is imprisoned for decades like Rudolph Hess, while Rotwang (the villain of Metropolis) goes to work on a US weapons program that eventually produces a 'K-bomb'. Spoilers and notes here:
http://blaklion.best.vwh.net/ubermensch.html
(According to that link, a (secretly Jewish) German 'Batman' has also been done).
Ubermensch doesn't seem to be available online, but another of Kim Newman's short stories with an interesting take on the superhero genre is:
http://www.johnnyalucard.com/coastal.html
Here's a good companion piece, from the second issue of the Linux Journal way back in 1994:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2750
Read the shocking truth about Patrick's Grateful Dead tape collection, and the possibility of a Slackware/Debian merger!
"I can't honestly say that I believe everyone at the show will be happy to see us," Houston said. "But I think most people will take our presence at LinuxWorld in the spirit in which it's intended -- a sincere attempt to open a positive dialog between Microsoft and the open-source development community."
Houston, we have a problem...
They have a freezer full of them in the Gibson orbital villa. The family AI just releases another clone from hibernation as required, and sends him down on the next JAL shuttle. I believe the current Gibson is 3Bill.
It has lots of Linux, Perl and SF - what more could you want?
Looks like he may well have been one of these people:
http://www.hipiers.com/97dec.html
"I remember when I started with CP/M..."
I also vaguely recall him mentioning his preference for CP/M over MS-DOS in the Afterword to some paperback or other.