Ironic. Or maybe just short-sighted. By using pirated MS products, they deny MS revenue, but MS doesn't need their money...yet. Meanwhile, they're locking themsleves into Windows and smothering the potential of local alternatives. When they get rich enough, and more integrated into the world economy, they'll (as a society) start paying more and more to MS in legit licenses.
In MS's eyes, it's surely much prefered that they use pirated MS products instead of home-grown OSS/FS, or even commercial, alternatives. Choice is the enemy, not pirates.
This is an automated troll reply, people. I saw it attached to an article last week, and had you read this article, you might have noticed that frogs are mentioned nowhere.
Every Mac with an Airport card already is a WAP. Laptop, desktop, whatever. Plug in the ethernet cable and share your connection via WiFi. Or create a stand-alone wireless LAN. All with a couple of click-clicks.
Who knows where we would have been if it had not been for the black plague.
I've read interesting suggestions from historians that the black death is responsible for modern Western civilzation, with its consumer-driven, middle-class dominated industrial capitalism. By killing so many people so quickly, the plague increased the value of labor and decreased the value of land. For about the first time in history, labor became the most significant cost of doing business. As a result, movable wealth began to be distributed more widely to non-landed folks, and that freed wealth could be used to improve labor effeciency (productivity) and create more wealth through trade and industry. Thanks to the ever-growing economy, the demand for labor kept outpacing supply even after the population recovered, so the trends held - and our modern society was born.
I think your perception of the defense budget is off by an order of magnitude. This year, counting the Iraq war, we'll spend close to $600 Billion on defense. All federally funded basic science put together probably doesn't total $60B. And I doubt even if alternative energy research spending reaches $5B. Most of what we spend on "energy research" is really subsidies to car manufacturers to develop fuel cell and hybrid cars, and giveaways to coal mining companies to develop NotQuiteSoDirtyCoal(tm). Very little is spent developing renewable energy resources or performing basic research into new sources of energy. I mean, the entire NSF budget is only a few billion, and DoE doesn't add much to that in terms of basic research.
Hate to burst your bubble, but this has next-to-nothing to do with growing replacement organs. These good folks are builidng semi-synthetic signaling pathways, nothing more (or less). They seem to use natural proteins and natural DNA, suitably modified to make the "circuit" they're looking for. These aren't nano-bots, or synthetic life. It's just signaling pathways "by design". Some signal in, glowing protein out.
Other groups are mentioned as trying to re-create complex metabolic pathways in a bacteria, in order to eat nerve gas or make drugs. In most cases, this is just a matter of understanding how the molecule is made in one organism (usually a plant) and copying those necessary genes into another organism (a bacteria). We do it all the time for drugs that require only one or a handful of genes. Re-creating a complex pathway is much more difficult (mostly because you need to understand it first) but is still a natural, conventional extension of today's work.
As for new organs, look to cloning. The easiest way to "synthesize" something as complex as an organ is to let nature do it for you. Scrape a cell off your skin, use it to make a cloned embryo, then convince part of that embryo to grow into liver cells, and eventually a whole liver. Without stem cell research we'll never understand how the last part works, and without therapeutic cloning we'll never make any organ that can survive your own immune response.
Strange...my perception is that the smallest dimension is what matters most. The iPod slips right into my pocket, and people comfortably wear it on their belt or their arm. Something almost twice as thick (1.1" vs. 0.62") might fit more securely in my hand, but would feel way too bulky anywhere else.
Although maybe one of these days I'll be proven wrong. I look forward to that day.
Ah, belief in God as cosmic soul insurance, surely one of the more cynical rationales. "Yeah, I may be wrong, but better I'm wrong to believe than wrong to not believe [shrug]."
Larry Rosin, the president of Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Media Research, said...
"Anybody who says that the Internet has not affected sales is just not paying attention to what is going on out there," he said. "It's had an effect on everything else in life, why wouldn't it have an effect on this?"
I can't believe this guy runs a research organization. Or, I see why he runs a "research" organization and didn't make it in academia. I mean, everyone knows that HRT is good for women. Everyone knows that stress causes ulcers. Everyone knows that proteins can't transmit disease. Everyone knows that the sun revolves around the earth. Everyone knows that file sharing hurts CD sales.
If you don't think so, you're just not paying attention to what is going on out there. Serious, credible, peer-reviewed science be damned.
All the replies so far, at those that got modded up, are along the lines of either "the world would still be just like it was before Microsoft came along" or "the world would be just about the same as it is today, maybe with different names here and there". Are Slashdotters just that unimaginative, or is there something of a Stockholm syndrome going on here, with even the most flamingly anti-MS folks feeling required to grudgingly admit that MS is, really, the driver of innovation that it's always said it was?
I think that without MS, the world would be different. Not just like pre-MS 1984, not just like with-MS 2004. Different. Very different. Take a step back for a minute. Look at computing in 1964. Compare to 1984. Is it even recognizable? Compare 1984 to 2004. Is it really all that different? The same paradigms rule, everything has gotten faster and cheaper and better, but it's all still fundamentally the same (yeah, the internet existed in 1984). The PC of today would be instantly recognizable to a person in 1984; show a Lisa to someone in the early 60s and it would seem like magic.
Why is that? I think it's because the world of 1984 was created by (people like) Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They were kids in the 70s and early 80s, they started in garages and built empires, and they really did change the world. Problem is, we still live in Steve Jobs' and BIll Gates' world. WindowsXP is, well, Windows1.0 done right, and OSX is NeXT done right, with Amiga-done-right media apps thrown in. Everything is better, but nothing is really new. We still live in their future, when we should be living in the next hotshot kid's garage-built, world-changing future. But that next kid never arrived. The world never changed. And I think we have MS to thank for that.
Without MS, I think the world (of technology, anyway) would be a lot looser, and a lot more open, still, to real innovation and change. I have no idea what it would look like, but it would certainly look different.
We're all right, we're just talking about slightly different things. At the moment, Big Brother doesn't know or care what's on my computer (or yours, or 99.9% of anyone's). If I were the head of a foreign intelligence agency, however, US Big Brother would almost certainly care about what's on my PC and would make it his business to find out. Ditto for your foreign government cabinet minsters and such, less so for rank and file, etc. Thus the appeal of "rolling your own" for those people.
US (and probably all Western) intelligence agencies did this sort of thing over and over again during the Cold War. And why shouldn't they have? The USSR badly needed and wanted technology, and the West was the only place to get it. The pipeline story is just one of the more dramatic ones that's gotten out. A subtler one is that the CIA managed to plant tiny cameras in the Kremlin's Xerox photocopiers. They would swap film out when Xerox technicians went in to service them. Managed to do that for several years before the Kremlin caught on. The backdoors in AT&T's phone equipment were legendary (still are...maybe that story will come out in full one day).
We obviously did a lot of this sort of thing in the past, and unless the CIA really is run by idiots, we still do. If I were a foreign intelligence agency, I absolutely wouldn't run any software I didn't build myself, and if I were a foreign government I'd think about generally doing the same.
In America, no it won't resonate. But we're not the center of the world, and those who
be against us dwarf the number that be for us. So I think Bush should be playing nicer, but that's a flame for another time.
Mr. T says, "I pity the fools who
be against us!"
(An otherwise eloquent post...that last bit stands out like Mr. T in "Mr. T Goes to Japan")
Amen to that. It would be great to have a toggle to show only Artists with complete albums, or only Albums that are complete, in those lists. Actually, it would be even better to be able to make heirachical playlists: a meta-playlist with a group of sub-playlists, or even sub-sub-playlists. Then, for example, you could have your "80s" playlist, containing a bunch of mix playlists and complete artist/album playlists.
My wish is that I could program a button chord to toggle through the shuffling options. I always shufle my playlists, but never albums - so everything I switch from one to another, I have to navigate back to the root menu to change shuffle. It would be great to hold down "menu + play" for a few seconds instead.
First, my sleeping iBook has been through X-ray machines more times than I can count. I really can't imagine, in a purely theoretical sense, how low-dose X-rays could sizzle-fry a laptop. In a practical sense, why haven't we seen an epidemic of, for example, dead Palms (which are never "off")?
Second, what the heck was your friend thinking, putting his TiBook in the microwave? Everyone knows you shouldn't microwave metal! If only he had tried it with an iBook instead...
You can't beat the laws of physics; I doubt they'll develop any digestable food more energy dense than a stick of butter.
What they ARE looking for, though, are ways for the body to cope better with hunger. So you or the soldiers will still burn your own fat stores for sustenance, but without the usual negative side effects of that, like hunger and loss of higher brain functions. As long as you can beat the side effects, it doesn't matter too much if you burn more than you take in for a few days.
Wish I had a few mod points to burn.:) The psuedo-scientific moralistic pontificating of the grandparent shouldn't get +5 insightful while the rebuttal which reveals it as pure nonsense fueled by pure ignorance languishes at 1.
Biology is beautiful, especially human biology. I wish those who believe it is all God's creation would take the time to learn a little more about it. Seems only logical to take the time to understand and appreciate the inner workings of what a religious nut must believe is God's most perfect creation.
Now research into making my own cells turn into stem cells - that's where I'd like to see the money spent.
That's exactly what this is about - making your own stem cells via therapeutic cloning. It's the only conceivable way to do it - the theoretical and practical obstacles to directly de-differentiaiting a terminally differentiated cell are mind-bogglingly enormous.
If it were possible to grow single organs from stem cells, or to inject stem cells where they were needed and effect a cure, then I might be persuaded that the sacrifice of an egg to be injected with my DNA and then grown on for a few generations is justified. But it isn't - and this research adds little if anything to the sum of human knowledge.
So because the research isn't done yet, that justifies banning the research so it will never be done? Beware circular logic. That's like saying "well, if NASA could send a colony ship to Europa, I might support its manned space program - but since we can't, it's not worth the money." Well, duh, you gotta get there first!
Moreover, what you suggest may well be possible - it's what every scientist sees as the untilate goal. But if the research isn't done, we will never know. Let the work go on. If it really goes nowhere, it will die of its own accord - grants won't fund it and bright scientists won't waste their careers on it. If it does go somewhere, it could be the greatest revolution in human health since clean water and sewers.
True, but I can't think of any precedent for the "I Have a Scream" coverage. For such a miniscule (2-second?) sound bite being taken so completely out of context, for sheer volume of repetition, and for pure motive of character assasination. Dean may have had other problems, like you say, but the media killed him. The gun is still smoking.
Instantly, from the throngs of tech analysts all singing in chorus that the end of Mac Office will surely spell The End of Apple, For Real This Time(tm).
I really don't think it would bother end users much, because I strongly suspect there's an alpha version of a productivity suite up and running in Cupertino, and it would surely be polished up nicer then Keynote and Safari long before v.X.2004 became obselete.
But it would be a huge PR hit, and an enormous blow to Apple's mainstream credibility as a serious, viable alternative platform, as opposed to being just a toy for running iMovie and iTunes/iPod.
Interesting info... makes sense, since my most recent logic board, installed in September, has lasted very nicely, much better than the previous two. I suspected that Apple had done something to mitigate the problem.
But this issue definitely predates this past fall. Every Mac message board has been screaming with owners of dead iBooks since late 2002. When my first failure happened, around then, there were already plenty of horror stories of people on their third or fourth repair.
In my experience (three of them), the problem was always heat-related, or at least heat-exacerbated. Symptoms got better if you let the computer cool don (I even put it by the open window once) and got progressively worse as you used it. So doing a whole bunch of intensive activities might hasten the onset of the failure.
Give them a break. When there's an issue like this, it takes several weeks just to get engineering and manufacturing to help the customer support side of the Apple world chase down, isolate, and put in place a fix for a problem like this.
This has been a strongly-suspected (if not "known") issue among users since late 2002. All you had to do was surf ANY Mac message board (including, but not only, Apple support) to find scads of iBook owners complaining about their brand-new iBooks all dying in exactly the same way, over and over again.
Yeah, it probably took them several weeks to track down the problem once they decided to try. But it's crazy to me that they would wait a YEAR after the problem was obvious to anyone who chose to look to even begin trying to track it down.
I'm glad they're finally doing the right thing (though I wish they'd at least give me a discount on my APP), but it's really inexcusable that it took them so long, and that it was only the threat of a lawsuit and the bad-mouthing of a few high-profile bloggers that finally, finally convinced them to acknowledge the problem.
If I didn't love my beautiful, wonderful iBook so much, and if my three repairs didn't have an average turn-around time of 4 days (door to door, including weekends), this issue might have really gotten me upset at Apple.
In Mozilla 1.1 it only spoofs the status bar - URL shows up complete and nonsensical in the location bar. So if there was a patch to fix this, it happened a long, long time ago.
Yes, 1.1. On an ancient clone, no less. A Mac clone.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic. Or maybe just short-sighted. By using pirated MS products, they deny MS revenue, but MS doesn't need their money...yet. Meanwhile, they're locking themsleves into Windows and smothering the potential of local alternatives. When they get rich enough, and more integrated into the world economy, they'll (as a society) start paying more and more to MS in legit licenses.
In MS's eyes, it's surely much prefered that they use pirated MS products instead of home-grown OSS/FS, or even commercial, alternatives. Choice is the enemy, not pirates.
This is an automated troll reply, people. I saw it attached to an article last week, and had you read this article, you might have noticed that frogs are mentioned nowhere.
Bad mods. Bad bad mods.
Every Mac with an Airport card already is a WAP. Laptop, desktop, whatever. Plug in the ethernet cable and share your connection via WiFi. Or create a stand-alone wireless LAN. All with a couple of click-clicks.
I think your perception of the defense budget is off by an order of magnitude. This year, counting the Iraq war, we'll spend close to $600 Billion on defense. All federally funded basic science put together probably doesn't total $60B. And I doubt even if alternative energy research spending reaches $5B. Most of what we spend on "energy research" is really subsidies to car manufacturers to develop fuel cell and hybrid cars, and giveaways to coal mining companies to develop NotQuiteSoDirtyCoal(tm). Very little is spent developing renewable energy resources or performing basic research into new sources of energy. I mean, the entire NSF budget is only a few billion, and DoE doesn't add much to that in terms of basic research.
Hate to burst your bubble, but this has next-to-nothing to do with growing replacement organs. These good folks are builidng semi-synthetic signaling pathways, nothing more (or less). They seem to use natural proteins and natural DNA, suitably modified to make the "circuit" they're looking for. These aren't nano-bots, or synthetic life. It's just signaling pathways "by design". Some signal in, glowing protein out.
Other groups are mentioned as trying to re-create complex metabolic pathways in a bacteria, in order to eat nerve gas or make drugs. In most cases, this is just a matter of understanding how the molecule is made in one organism (usually a plant) and copying those necessary genes into another organism (a bacteria). We do it all the time for drugs that require only one or a handful of genes. Re-creating a complex pathway is much more difficult (mostly because you need to understand it first) but is still a natural, conventional extension of today's work.
As for new organs, look to cloning. The easiest way to "synthesize" something as complex as an organ is to let nature do it for you. Scrape a cell off your skin, use it to make a cloned embryo, then convince part of that embryo to grow into liver cells, and eventually a whole liver. Without stem cell research we'll never understand how the last part works, and without therapeutic cloning we'll never make any organ that can survive your own immune response.
Strange...my perception is that the smallest dimension is what matters most. The iPod slips right into my pocket, and people comfortably wear it on their belt or their arm. Something almost twice as thick (1.1" vs. 0.62") might fit more securely in my hand, but would feel way too bulky anywhere else.
Is that a Karma in your pocket, or....
If you don't think so, you're just not paying attention to what is going on out there. Serious, credible, peer-reviewed science be damned.
All the replies so far, at those that got modded up, are along the lines of either "the world would still be just like it was before Microsoft came along" or "the world would be just about the same as it is today, maybe with different names here and there". Are Slashdotters just that unimaginative, or is there something of a Stockholm syndrome going on here, with even the most flamingly anti-MS folks feeling required to grudgingly admit that MS is, really, the driver of innovation that it's always said it was?
I think that without MS, the world would be different. Not just like pre-MS 1984, not just like with-MS 2004. Different. Very different. Take a step back for a minute. Look at computing in 1964. Compare to 1984. Is it even recognizable? Compare 1984 to 2004. Is it really all that different? The same paradigms rule, everything has gotten faster and cheaper and better, but it's all still fundamentally the same (yeah, the internet existed in 1984). The PC of today would be instantly recognizable to a person in 1984; show a Lisa to someone in the early 60s and it would seem like magic.
Why is that? I think it's because the world of 1984 was created by (people like) Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They were kids in the 70s and early 80s, they started in garages and built empires, and they really did change the world. Problem is, we still live in Steve Jobs' and BIll Gates' world. WindowsXP is, well, Windows1.0 done right, and OSX is NeXT done right, with Amiga-done-right media apps thrown in. Everything is better, but nothing is really new. We still live in their future, when we should be living in the next hotshot kid's garage-built, world-changing future. But that next kid never arrived. The world never changed. And I think we have MS to thank for that.
Without MS, I think the world (of technology, anyway) would be a lot looser, and a lot more open, still, to real innovation and change. I have no idea what it would look like, but it would certainly look different.
We're all right, we're just talking about slightly different things. At the moment, Big Brother doesn't know or care what's on my computer (or yours, or 99.9% of anyone's). If I were the head of a foreign intelligence agency, however, US Big Brother would almost certainly care about what's on my PC and would make it his business to find out. Ditto for your foreign government cabinet minsters and such, less so for rank and file, etc. Thus the appeal of "rolling your own" for those people.
I think that's an unfair tinfoil hat reference.
US (and probably all Western) intelligence agencies did this sort of thing over and over again during the Cold War. And why shouldn't they have? The USSR badly needed and wanted technology, and the West was the only place to get it. The pipeline story is just one of the more dramatic ones that's gotten out. A subtler one is that the CIA managed to plant tiny cameras in the Kremlin's Xerox photocopiers. They would swap film out when Xerox technicians went in to service them. Managed to do that for several years before the Kremlin caught on. The backdoors in AT&T's phone equipment were legendary (still are...maybe that story will come out in full one day).
We obviously did a lot of this sort of thing in the past, and unless the CIA really is run by idiots, we still do. If I were a foreign intelligence agency, I absolutely wouldn't run any software I didn't build myself, and if I were a foreign government I'd think about generally doing the same.
Amen to that. It would be great to have a toggle to show only Artists with complete albums, or only Albums that are complete, in those lists. Actually, it would be even better to be able to make heirachical playlists: a meta-playlist with a group of sub-playlists, or even sub-sub-playlists. Then, for example, you could have your "80s" playlist, containing a bunch of mix playlists and complete artist/album playlists.
My wish is that I could program a button chord to toggle through the shuffling options. I always shufle my playlists, but never albums - so everything I switch from one to another, I have to navigate back to the root menu to change shuffle. It would be great to hold down "menu + play" for a few seconds instead.
First, my sleeping iBook has been through X-ray machines more times than I can count. I really can't imagine, in a purely theoretical sense, how low-dose X-rays could sizzle-fry a laptop. In a practical sense, why haven't we seen an epidemic of, for example, dead Palms (which are never "off")?
Second, what the heck was your friend thinking, putting his TiBook in the microwave? Everyone knows you shouldn't microwave metal! If only he had tried it with an iBook instead...
You can't beat the laws of physics; I doubt they'll develop any digestable food more energy dense than a stick of butter.
What they ARE looking for, though, are ways for the body to cope better with hunger. So you or the soldiers will still burn your own fat stores for sustenance, but without the usual negative side effects of that, like hunger and loss of higher brain functions. As long as you can beat the side effects, it doesn't matter too much if you burn more than you take in for a few days.
Wish I had a few mod points to burn. :) The psuedo-scientific moralistic pontificating of the grandparent shouldn't get +5 insightful while the rebuttal which reveals it as pure nonsense fueled by pure ignorance languishes at 1.
Biology is beautiful, especially human biology. I wish those who believe it is all God's creation would take the time to learn a little more about it. Seems only logical to take the time to understand and appreciate the inner workings of what a religious nut must believe is God's most perfect creation.
Am I the only scientist getting thoroughly tired of hearing from Dr. Kass?
One suspects if he were better known in the 70s recombinant DNA technology would have been banned before it een got started.
So because the research isn't done yet, that justifies banning the research so it will never be done? Beware circular logic. That's like saying "well, if NASA could send a colony ship to Europa, I might support its manned space program - but since we can't, it's not worth the money." Well, duh, you gotta get there first!
Moreover, what you suggest may well be possible - it's what every scientist sees as the untilate goal. But if the research isn't done, we will never know. Let the work go on. If it really goes nowhere, it will die of its own accord - grants won't fund it and bright scientists won't waste their careers on it. If it does go somewhere, it could be the greatest revolution in human health since clean water and sewers.
Instantly, from the throngs of tech analysts all singing in chorus that the end of Mac Office will surely spell The End of Apple, For Real This Time(tm).
I really don't think it would bother end users much, because I strongly suspect there's an alpha version of a productivity suite up and running in Cupertino, and it would surely be polished up nicer then Keynote and Safari long before v.X.2004 became obselete.
But it would be a huge PR hit, and an enormous blow to Apple's mainstream credibility as a serious, viable alternative platform, as opposed to being just a toy for running iMovie and iTunes/iPod.
Interesting info... makes sense, since my most recent logic board, installed in September, has lasted very nicely, much better than the previous two. I suspected that Apple had done something to mitigate the problem.
But this issue definitely predates this past fall. Every Mac message board has been screaming with owners of dead iBooks since late 2002. When my first failure happened, around then, there were already plenty of horror stories of people on their third or fourth repair.
In my experience (three of them), the problem was always heat-related, or at least heat-exacerbated. Symptoms got better if you let the computer cool don (I even put it by the open window once) and got progressively worse as you used it. So doing a whole bunch of intensive activities might hasten the onset of the failure.
This has been a strongly-suspected (if not "known") issue among users since late 2002. All you had to do was surf ANY Mac message board (including, but not only, Apple support) to find scads of iBook owners complaining about their brand-new iBooks all dying in exactly the same way, over and over again.
Yeah, it probably took them several weeks to track down the problem once they decided to try. But it's crazy to me that they would wait a YEAR after the problem was obvious to anyone who chose to look to even begin trying to track it down.
I'm glad they're finally doing the right thing (though I wish they'd at least give me a discount on my APP), but it's really inexcusable that it took them so long, and that it was only the threat of a lawsuit and the bad-mouthing of a few high-profile bloggers that finally, finally convinced them to acknowledge the problem.
If I didn't love my beautiful, wonderful iBook so much, and if my three repairs didn't have an average turn-around time of 4 days (door to door, including weekends), this issue might have really gotten me upset at Apple.
In Mozilla 1.1 it only spoofs the status bar - URL shows up complete and nonsensical in the location bar. So if there was a patch to fix this, it happened a long, long time ago.
Yes, 1.1. On an ancient clone, no less. A Mac clone.