Your kid is no more of a freak than I am [g] -- I can tell the difference between MP3s made from vinyl (richer sound, more ambiance) and from CD (flatter sound, no ambiance). I find classical music on CD *unlistenable* because of this lack.
We were making initial stabs at this very subject with the relatively primitive equipment my university's biochem dept. had back in the early 1970s (tho the protein separation hardware was the size of a 1960s mainframe). Biochem has come a LONG ways since then.
And just because something is not YET a mass-market product doesn't mean it won't be in the future. Consider that 40 years ago, PCs being the portable and disposable commodity they are today was unthinkable, outside of SF.
Something more mass-marketable in the future than snooping on your neighbour's drug habits: a kit that can identify, by DNA, what batches of wheat that bag of flour came from -- American? Chinese?? given the recent spate of contaminated imported foodstuffs and its public backlash, if you could bring a cheap home test kit to market, you'd speedily become a millionaire.
That's why you'd want to look for very specific digestive byproducts, that would prove that the drug was bound to the DNA while still in the body, not after entering the sewer.
Nasty conspiracy-theory type thought: street drugs contaminated with purposeful DNA-binding chemicals, designed to do so while definitively still within the digestive or urinary tract.
Damn, now I've got to get my tinfoil hat refitted!!
That's actually not too farfetched, if sampling stations were installed at suitable intervals along the sewer lines.
Now that you mention it, sewer-based sensor stations could pick up all sorts of illicit activity, such as meth labs dumping their used chemicals down the toilet.
Crap, I think I'll go wash my mind out with soap -- it's gotten contaminated by a bad dystopia novel!:(
That would be great, thanks! hopefully the BW source can be salvaged. As I recall there was a nice BW mail door, too. Do you recall what language it was written in?
What format are your tapes? I can get as ancient as QIC40/80 (Colorado or Conner formats); and I have an antique 10mb Mountain reel-type tape drive that powers on, but that's all I know about it! I'm not sure how durable those old tapes really were. I do know that with QIC, Sony tapes kept really well, and the rest were a crapshoot.
Sounds like you've got an ideal job -- enough real work to get paid, enough free time to get creative. Hard to beat that! -- Don't let those newfangled languages corrupt you too badly:)
Anyway, I'll send you an email; it'll come from rividh at earthlink dot net.
I'm reminded that there have been murderers caught by similar methodology: I recall hearing of one some years ago, tracked by identifiable DNA from blood traces in the sewage main (well away from the perp's house), after the perp had flushed the drippy bits down the sink.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I also recall reading about how mass-spec has gotten reliable enough that feeding your victim to the chickens will no longer save you from a murder rap, because human DNA can be distinguished from the rest of the chicken shit.
That goes to refute what an AC said in another reply: "Any tests like that would be considered contaminated the second it entered the sewer, if not the toilet. Any chemicals found on/near your DNA could easily be attributed to the chemical entering the waste during the long voyage to the sewer treatment plant."
It's rather a lot like how massive databases documenting everyone's behaviour presently seem ridiculous and overkill, but consider that today vast amounts of data are recorded and mined that were not recorded at all as little as 5-10 years ago...
And while it presently seems like overkill to bother chasing mere drug offenders through the sewage, our growing culture of thought crime makes the eventual prospect seem not entirely outlandish, even if one's tinfoil hat is properly fitted.
... if any of the, uh, extruded chemicals are bound to DNA, say from cells shed from the drug user's intestinal wall. Yeah, it's not practical (yet) to DNA-scan the entire populace, but I can foresee this being used to catch probation/parole violations (given that discontinuing drug use is often a condition of remaining loose on parole), where the perp's DNA is already on file.
Take it one step further: insurance companies who don't want druggie-risks in their system, who might start requiring DNA on file as a condition of being insured.
This has disturbing implications re privacy -- not now, but quite possibly a decade or two from now, especially given the direction the world is headed.
Even if nothing untoward is happening now, I think in a couple more years, those traffic logs will be, uh, "interesting" every time any copyright*able* media passes through a modern system...
Good points. Yes, I've heard about some of the Mormon Church's assets, such as major grocery store chains. And Thrivent is more like an everyday broker.
Still, it's an awful lot of money regardless of how it's held. Wonder how much of the GNP is either directly or indirectly influenced by church-related holdings of any species? as you say, it's hard to know where to draw the line.
Oh yes, I remember that... "CDROMs, via BBS, are you insane?! Do you see the flames coming out of this modem?? who the hell can afford a hard disk THAT big?!!" I remember when HD space hit $40/meg and we all thought it was a bargain. Tho I'm not sure we spend our 40 cents/gig HD space any more wisely. Junk doth verily fill the space allotted.;)
Wow indeed!! There are still a few of us BBS diehards using BlueWave, albeit with a 3rd party Y2K fix (BW has a fatal Y2K bug that mangles outgoing message headers... well, actually it was a Year1999 bug).
Would you kindly consider opensourcing it? what remains of the BBS community would surely appreciate it.
So what are you up to nowadays? I see you came rather late to the slashdot rio^H^H^H party:)
And small potatoes compared to Lutheran Brotherhood, er, Thrivent (I hate these marketroid name changes) -- it's referenced in that same article you linked:
[Mormon] Beneficial Financial Group - An insurance and financial services company with assets of $3.1 billion.[16][1]
This is 5% of the size of Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a religious-oriented nonprofit investment company for Lutherans of any denomination in the United States, which has holdings of over $60 billion and some 3 million participants.[10][17]
Just for reference, if you bought $1000 worth of Lutheran Brotherhood funds in 1970, and set it to reinvest, your investment is now worth about $17,000, with no effort on your part and effectively zero risk. In its best year that I can recall offhand, it grew 17%. (What's with all the 17's here?? Must be the Lutheran lucky number!)
No, no, no.... you just gotta reduce religion to its basics. Here are a few examples:
CATHOLICISM: Shit happens because you are bad. JUDAISM: Why does shit always happen to US? ISLAM: Shit happens if it is the will of Allah. BUDDHISM: Shit happens, but pay no mind. SCIENTOLOGY: Shit happens if you're on our shit list.
"He writes on a very intensively studied branch of science, and proposes a number of theories which are blantantly contrary to well established and observed fact, on no better grounds than an active imagination."
Oh, I see; it's Science Fiction. That explains the 10-legged spiders!
It's Tuesday, Jan.1st, 1980. Welcome to the world of Amish computing. Would you like to take a spin on my XT? It's really souped up, even has VGA!!:)
Considering the huge archives Out There of Amiga-made music from back before PCs ever heard of anything beyond the basic system beep... yeah, it's clear they were doing *something* right in the nascent field of computer multimedia.
Also, some of the early PC sound cards must have had way worse lag than we thought at the time -- frex, my 486 had an original SoundBlaster 16 (the 3/4-length ISA card with ports for CDROMs); that card is now in my P3-550 for use with DOS games, and it sometimes makes said games run slower than they do on my P233 that's only about 10% as fast overall.
So... how much is CPU horsepower and OS issues, and how much is inefficient sound subsystem... well, historically the latter is a huge culprit. And that brings us to the present and Vista's problems. (And here you thought we were off-topic.:)
Oh man, another BlueWave user! (Tho I hacked mine to call itself variously "Heat Wave", "Cold Wave" and "CrimeWave":) Haul it out and join us at Techware BBS -- telnet://techware.dynip.com In ILink-Windows, we just had an argu^H^H^H^H discussion about M$'s future motivations, now that they've got that advertising-in-the-OS patent.
Anyway... while it's probably reasonable that the proximate culprit is (as several here postulate) crappy scheduling, you gotta ask yourself *why* it's affecting scheduling that way, and... running through the layer of thou-shalt-nots may indeed be the root of the problem, or at least a bug in how the scheduler handles same, or possibly a conflict with the network driver... Considering that many folks do stream across networks at their place of business, seems like a great way for Vista to get right unpopular in a hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
[laughing] So you probably grok why I've always insisted that punk rock is the modern Beethoven. :)
(Actually, that's why I like both.)
Your kid is no more of a freak than I am [g] -- I can tell the difference between MP3s made from vinyl (richer sound, more ambiance) and from CD (flatter sound, no ambiance). I find classical music on CD *unlistenable* because of this lack.
Also, I'm reminded that the decline of the empires of the past generally started with foreign borrowing.
I'm wondering if it could reach a point where our best course would be nationalization of foreign-owned assets.
We were making initial stabs at this very subject with the relatively primitive equipment my university's biochem dept. had back in the early 1970s (tho the protein separation hardware was the size of a 1960s mainframe). Biochem has come a LONG ways since then.
And just because something is not YET a mass-market product doesn't mean it won't be in the future. Consider that 40 years ago, PCs being the portable and disposable commodity they are today was unthinkable, outside of SF.
Something more mass-marketable in the future than snooping on your neighbour's drug habits: a kit that can identify, by DNA, what batches of wheat that bag of flour came from -- American? Chinese?? given the recent spate of contaminated imported foodstuffs and its public backlash, if you could bring a cheap home test kit to market, you'd speedily become a millionaire.
Yep... and the OS that went on that first computer must have taken up all of 5mb of space. Vista wants what, 5GB? See the power of the Dark Side!!
That's why you'd want to look for very specific digestive byproducts, that would prove that the drug was bound to the DNA while still in the body, not after entering the sewer.
Nasty conspiracy-theory type thought: street drugs contaminated with purposeful DNA-binding chemicals, designed to do so while definitively still within the digestive or urinary tract.
Damn, now I've got to get my tinfoil hat refitted!!
That's actually not too farfetched, if sampling stations were installed at suitable intervals along the sewer lines.
:(
Now that you mention it, sewer-based sensor stations could pick up all sorts of illicit activity, such as meth labs dumping their used chemicals down the toilet.
Crap, I think I'll go wash my mind out with soap -- it's gotten contaminated by a bad dystopia novel!
That would be great, thanks! hopefully the BW source can be salvaged. As I recall there was a nice BW mail door, too. Do you recall what language it was written in?
:)
What format are your tapes? I can get as ancient as QIC40/80 (Colorado or Conner formats); and I have an antique 10mb Mountain reel-type tape drive that powers on, but that's all I know about it! I'm not sure how durable those old tapes really were. I do know that with QIC, Sony tapes kept really well, and the rest were a crapshoot.
Sounds like you've got an ideal job -- enough real work to get paid, enough free time to get creative. Hard to beat that! -- Don't let those newfangled languages corrupt you too badly
Anyway, I'll send you an email; it'll come from rividh at earthlink dot net.
Exactly so.
I'm reminded that there have been murderers caught by similar methodology: I recall hearing of one some years ago, tracked by identifiable DNA from blood traces in the sewage main (well away from the perp's house), after the perp had flushed the drippy bits down the sink.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I also recall reading about how mass-spec has gotten reliable enough that feeding your victim to the chickens will no longer save you from a murder rap, because human DNA can be distinguished from the rest of the chicken shit.
That goes to refute what an AC said in another reply: "Any tests like that would be considered contaminated the second it entered the sewer, if not the toilet. Any chemicals found on/near your DNA could easily be attributed to the chemical entering the waste during the long voyage to the sewer treatment plant."
It's rather a lot like how massive databases documenting everyone's behaviour presently seem ridiculous and overkill, but consider that today vast amounts of data are recorded and mined that were not recorded at all as little as 5-10 years ago...
And while it presently seems like overkill to bother chasing mere drug offenders through the sewage, our growing culture of thought crime makes the eventual prospect seem not entirely outlandish, even if one's tinfoil hat is properly fitted.
... if any of the, uh, extruded chemicals are bound to DNA, say from cells shed from the drug user's intestinal wall. Yeah, it's not practical (yet) to DNA-scan the entire populace, but I can foresee this being used to catch probation/parole violations (given that discontinuing drug use is often a condition of remaining loose on parole), where the perp's DNA is already on file.
Take it one step further: insurance companies who don't want druggie-risks in their system, who might start requiring DNA on file as a condition of being insured.
This has disturbing implications re privacy -- not now, but quite possibly a decade or two from now, especially given the direction the world is headed.
Even if nothing untoward is happening now, I think in a couple more years, those traffic logs will be, uh, "interesting" every time any copyright*able* media passes through a modern system...
I think it was actually about $17,500 or so as of last December, so about equivalent. Nothing to complain about, regardless. :)
Good points. Yes, I've heard about some of the Mormon Church's assets, such as major grocery store chains. And Thrivent is more like an everyday broker.
Still, it's an awful lot of money regardless of how it's held. Wonder how much of the GNP is either directly or indirectly influenced by church-related holdings of any species? as you say, it's hard to know where to draw the line.
Oh yes, I remember that... "CDROMs, via BBS, are you insane?! Do you see the flames coming out of this modem?? who the hell can afford a hard disk THAT big?!!" I remember when HD space hit $40/meg and we all thought it was a bargain. Tho I'm not sure we spend our 40 cents/gig HD space any more wisely. Junk doth verily fill the space allotted. ;)
Wow indeed!! There are still a few of us BBS diehards using BlueWave, albeit with a 3rd party Y2K fix (BW has a fatal Y2K bug that mangles outgoing message headers... well, actually it was a Year1999 bug).
:)
Would you kindly consider opensourcing it? what remains of the BBS community would surely appreciate it.
So what are you up to nowadays? I see you came rather late to the slashdot rio^H^H^H party
Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
-- Henry Brooks Adams
And small potatoes compared to Lutheran Brotherhood, er, Thrivent (I hate these marketroid name changes) -- it's referenced in that same article you linked:
[Mormon] Beneficial Financial Group - An insurance and financial services company with assets of $3.1 billion.[16][1]
This is 5% of the size of Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a religious-oriented nonprofit investment company for Lutherans of any denomination in the United States, which has holdings of over $60 billion and some 3 million
participants.[10][17]
Just for reference, if you bought $1000 worth of Lutheran Brotherhood funds in 1970, and set it to reinvest, your investment is now worth about $17,000, with no effort on your part and effectively zero risk. In its best year that I can recall offhand, it grew 17%. (What's with all the 17's here?? Must be the Lutheran lucky number!)
No, no, no.... you just gotta reduce religion to its basics. Here are a few examples:
CATHOLICISM: Shit happens because you are bad.
JUDAISM: Why does shit always happen to US?
ISLAM: Shit happens if it is the will of Allah.
BUDDHISM: Shit happens, but pay no mind.
SCIENTOLOGY: Shit happens if you're on our shit list.
"He writes on a very intensively studied branch of science, and proposes a number of theories which are blantantly contrary to well established and observed fact, on no better grounds than an active imagination."
Oh, I see; it's Science Fiction. That explains the 10-legged spiders!
We gotta get you off that 1200 baud modem :)
Hey, take a trip thru BBSmates.com, a lot of the old BBS crowd are still floating around out here.
It's Tuesday, Jan.1st, 1980. Welcome to the world of Amish computing. Would you like to take a spin on my XT? It's really souped up, even has VGA!! :)
:)
Considering the huge archives Out There of Amiga-made music from back before PCs ever heard of anything beyond the basic system beep... yeah, it's clear they were doing *something* right in the nascent field of computer multimedia.
Also, some of the early PC sound cards must have had way worse lag than we thought at the time -- frex, my 486 had an original SoundBlaster 16 (the 3/4-length ISA card with ports for CDROMs); that card is now in my P3-550 for use with DOS games, and it sometimes makes said games run slower than they do on my P233 that's only about 10% as fast overall.
So... how much is CPU horsepower and OS issues, and how much is inefficient sound subsystem... well, historically the latter is a huge culprit. And that brings us to the present and Vista's problems. (And here you thought we were off-topic.
[goes off, roots thru preferences]
[Why on earth is it on the homepage set, not the comments set??!]
Thanks for the heads-up -- I'd not looked in prefs in years, since 99% of what goes on in there doesn't affect us low-bandwidth/no-CSS users anyway!
Oh man, another BlueWave user! :)
... running through the layer of thou-shalt-nots may indeed be the root of the problem, or at least a bug in how the scheduler handles same, or possibly a conflict with the network driver... Considering that many folks do stream across networks at their place of business, seems like a great way for Vista to get right unpopular in a hurry.
(Tho I hacked mine to call itself variously "Heat Wave", "Cold Wave" and "CrimeWave"
Haul it out and join us at Techware BBS -- telnet://techware.dynip.com
In ILink-Windows, we just had an argu^H^H^H^H discussion about M$'s future motivations, now that they've got that advertising-in-the-OS patent.
Anyway... while it's probably reasonable that the proximate culprit is (as several here postulate) crappy scheduling, you gotta ask yourself *why* it's affecting scheduling that way, and
Dear Starfleet: Hate you, Hate Alpha Quadrant. Took Voyager. --Janeway :)
.
.
.
.
.
.
(Thanks, BlueWave
LOL! I had the same thought -- What? It's just a prop? he's not really frozen?? Bah!