HIV is a retrovirus, a kind of virus that a broad-spectrum "cure all" treatment would be least likely to affect. Sure it'd be worth trying at some point, but it really wouldn't be at the top of the list based on having any expectation of success.
This is a sad day for me. I was an early adopter and huge fan of SIBO and EPOC, the predecessors to Symbian, when they were developed by Psion UK. Aside from the lack of a phone and wireless networking, the Series 3 family of devices were essentially the smartphones of the 1990s, a bit like like the Sharp Wizard or Casio Boss of their day... only much more useful. They were handheld computers that didn't even crash, which was something handheld OSes had a lot of trouble with in those days.
But Psion's inability to get a marketing beachhead in North America (thanks in part to the barrier tactics which 1990s Microsoft is so well known for), followed by a whole bunch of missteps in their partnering with Nokia and other companies in getting the OS into the phone market.... well, this is the result. It was really good software. I held onto my 1999-vintage Psion Series 3a, nursing it along with battery replacements and epoxy, until the iPod Touch came along, which was the first handheld computer I'd seen that I could switch it. It wasn't the same, but at least it wasn't a huge step backward in one way or another (yes, I'm looking at you, Palm and Microsoft).
Who cares about "popular"; the key word is "profitable". Getting 5% of the market at low, low prices isn't worth much. 10% of the market (which is where Apple actually is these days) at mid-to-high prices, is a very attractive niche.
These are the specs for a non-Apple-brand MacBook Air. Now that Apple has the price point right, this has become a popular piece of hardware, and Intel is explaining to the other companies they sell chips to how to build their own, with the same basic specs for the same basic price. It's a "how to jump on the bandwagon" instruction sheet.
It's important to remember that the Fox network also airs (among other things) The Simpsons, whose writers rather effectively get away with inviting Rupert Murdoch and his ilk to eat their shorts and other speaking-of-truth on a recurring basis. Murdoch seems content to run the Fox entertainment network as a money-making system regardless of what they say, and only requires that his news operations remain free of informative and objective information.
I probably first saw the Web around 1993 or 1994. It was Mosaic on Windows 3.1 using Trumpet Winsock.
I hosted my first Web server on the same platform, using ZBserver, in 1994. I had no administrative access to any *n*x boxes at the time, just Netware servers and VAXen, and I wasn't about to mess around with those, so I ran the web service on my desktop. I switched that to Windows 95 and the corresponding version of ZBserver fairly quickly, of course. I used to keep the log window open, so I could see when/if someone was hitting it.
In addition to the obligatory "about myself" page, that server ran a small site dedicated to reviewing comic books and graphic novels; I'm pretty sure it was the first such site on the Web. I didn't have my own domain at the time, so I simply used the machine's public *.edu name... which got me fired over the fact that I was including fair-use images from the comics I was reviewing, which meant I was "publishing" naughty drawings with the college's name in the URL. Admittedly a foolish thing to do, but in my defense, I didn't have the cautionary exhibit of a million sexting teens and drunken facetards to learn from. And just try explaining it to potential employers who ask why you left your previous position. My first taste of unemployment. So yeah, the Web changed my life pretty "quickly and profoundly".:/
This doesn't meet the specs of the question, due to the particular devices you wish to support, and the fact that many of them are deliberately incompatible with it.... but there is a technology that I've used successfully many times in the past to overcome the problems inherent and unavoidable in any electromagnetic wireless communication system. This technology dramatically reduces signal attenuation due to distance, it reduces interference from external devices that use the same frequencies, it allows for dramatically higher data rates, and as a bonus it even adds a level of security/privacy: requiring extremely close physical proximity to sniff the signals. These features come standard with the tech itself, or can be enhanced with a special "shielded" version. There are even varieties capable of actually powering the devices. This technology is, of course: Wire.
One of these days I'm going to patent it, clean up on license fees for a few months before the patent gets invalidated, and retire to Mackinac Island.
"Wales said the typical profile of a contributor is 'a 26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website."
The problem with Wikipedia's contributor decay isn't the 26-year-old geeky males who move on a get a life. It's the ones who stay and make Wikipedia theirs.
Wikipedia doesn't need a better [[editor (software)|]]; it needs better [[editor (person)|]]s.
But the point still stands that more of them do it, and they do it more when their names are not attached,
Around 15 years ago, it was pretty uncommon for me to hear an openly maliciously racist remark. Not that racism was gone, but it was taboo, and I was starting to think (perhaps naively) that maybe in a generation or two, as the down-to-their-soul racists died off, and the casual racists learned to shut up about it, it would be possible for kids to grow up without being exposed to it. These days, with anonymous communication being so common, the taboo no longer "works", and the racism is out in the open again. So much for my optimism.
Yes it is. Glad you got the joke. I have another one about how my other degree (a BFA from an arts college) counts as my "artistic license". I'm a real laugh riot at parties.
Almost anyone can call themselves a "scientist". There's even a religious denomination that applies the title to Jesus Christ, even though I'm pretty sure he didn't conduct any double-blind experiments in his career.
Though in all sincerity, I do consider myself a "scientist" in the sense of using the scientific method to learn about the world I live in.
I am a scientist (B.A. in Comp Sci at a small liberal arts school) and I speculate that it is a highly improbable series of single-bit errors in their image-processing software. Either that a relic of the Grand Disc Tossing tournaments held circa 17,500 years ago by the Methane Frost Giants of Titan.
When you say they "guarantee to follow our rules to the tiniest detail", you're talking about infallibility. Machines make mistakes, no matter how hard we try to prevent that; only a naive child believes otherwise. Mechanisms wear out; materials corrode, transmission errors occur, sometimes the cat lives/sometimes the cat dies.
And as for your comment about me not caring about reality, I have three words for you: pot, kettle, black.:)
Good questions. But I'd rather we (as a society) did the work of figuring out answers rather than just saying "that's too hard" and living with the problems.
It affects "us down here" for the same reason that everything else that huge companies do affects us.
When companies get large enough, their size alone makes them too big for anyone's good. They become too influential. They become unable to adapt and change. They become "too big to fail". They become too powerful to punish for misdeeds. They become too entrenched for new competitors to enter the market.
Anything that counteracts some of that, even if only partially, counts as a Good Thing in my book.
Sounds to me like somebody hasn't read enough cautionary SF stories about handing control over to those "infallible" but human-designed machines.
Seriously, I remember when I was 15, thirty years ago, lecturing someone about how "computers don't make mistakes". I believe I can be forgiven my naivete on account of: I was 15, and it was thirty years ago. What's your excuse?
If I had a dollar for every item of spam sent to postmaster, webmaster, and yes even abuse @ every domain for which I host e-mail, I probably could buy a seat in the US Senate. At least in the House. Sorry, but those addresses go to/dev/null; I am humanly unable to comply.
I wish it were still the 1980s, when "the RFC states" meant something, a mostly-benign cabal held sway over the backbone, and a person or company could conceivably get kicked off the internet (and make it stick for a while) if it was clear enough that they were Evil. Plus, I still looked hot in tight leather pants and could get into a U2 concert for the price of a couple of their LPs. Those days are gone.
Human societies do not scale well. Athenian democracy worked with voters measured in the thousands. The internet worked well with nodes on the same order of magnitude. (And both had enforceable standards to be in that number.) But expecting democracies (or even republics) with populations in the hundreds of millions, and an Internet where the IPv4 address space is not enough, to continue to function the way those systems were intended to work, is naive.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither of them will ever be more important than happiness.
Though a bit of oil and a mobile computer can contribute. :)
Oh, please! HIV is "clever" and adaptable. But it's hard to kill only in the body. Airborne? It dies. Quickly, and without a struggle.
HIV is a retrovirus, a kind of virus that a broad-spectrum "cure all" treatment would be least likely to affect. Sure it'd be worth trying at some point, but it really wouldn't be at the top of the list based on having any expectation of success.
When the Cloud takes over, Linux will "win" the desktop because the desktop won't matter, and Linux will be the cheapest one.
Which will be a bit like "winning" a war in which the territory conquered turns out to be a worthless expanse of sand (and no oil).
This is a sad day for me. I was an early adopter and huge fan of SIBO and EPOC, the predecessors to Symbian, when they were developed by Psion UK. Aside from the lack of a phone and wireless networking, the Series 3 family of devices were essentially the smartphones of the 1990s, a bit like like the Sharp Wizard or Casio Boss of their day... only much more useful. They were handheld computers that didn't even crash, which was something handheld OSes had a lot of trouble with in those days.
But Psion's inability to get a marketing beachhead in North America (thanks in part to the barrier tactics which 1990s Microsoft is so well known for), followed by a whole bunch of missteps in their partnering with Nokia and other companies in getting the OS into the phone market.... well, this is the result. It was really good software. I held onto my 1999-vintage Psion Series 3a, nursing it along with battery replacements and epoxy, until the iPod Touch came along, which was the first handheld computer I'd seen that I could switch it. It wasn't the same, but at least it wasn't a huge step backward in one way or another (yes, I'm looking at you, Palm and Microsoft).
Who cares about "popular"; the key word is "profitable". Getting 5% of the market at low, low prices isn't worth much. 10% of the market (which is where Apple actually is these days) at mid-to-high prices, is a very attractive niche.
These are the specs for a non-Apple-brand MacBook Air. Now that Apple has the price point right, this has become a popular piece of hardware, and Intel is explaining to the other companies they sell chips to how to build their own, with the same basic specs for the same basic price. It's a "how to jump on the bandwagon" instruction sheet.
It will be pretty good.
It's important to remember that the Fox network also airs (among other things) The Simpsons, whose writers rather effectively get away with inviting Rupert Murdoch and his ilk to eat their shorts and other speaking-of-truth on a recurring basis. Murdoch seems content to run the Fox entertainment network as a money-making system regardless of what they say, and only requires that his news operations remain free of informative and objective information.
I look forward to this show.
The Wheel took longer than the Web to get around to everyone. Likewise, Fire didn't catch on as quickly.
I probably first saw the Web around 1993 or 1994. It was Mosaic on Windows 3.1 using Trumpet Winsock.
I hosted my first Web server on the same platform, using ZBserver, in 1994. I had no administrative access to any *n*x boxes at the time, just Netware servers and VAXen, and I wasn't about to mess around with those, so I ran the web service on my desktop. I switched that to Windows 95 and the corresponding version of ZBserver fairly quickly, of course. I used to keep the log window open, so I could see when/if someone was hitting it.
In addition to the obligatory "about myself" page, that server ran a small site dedicated to reviewing comic books and graphic novels; I'm pretty sure it was the first such site on the Web. I didn't have my own domain at the time, so I simply used the machine's public *.edu name... which got me fired over the fact that I was including fair-use images from the comics I was reviewing, which meant I was "publishing" naughty drawings with the college's name in the URL. Admittedly a foolish thing to do, but in my defense, I didn't have the cautionary exhibit of a million sexting teens and drunken facetards to learn from. And just try explaining it to potential employers who ask why you left your previous position. My first taste of unemployment. So yeah, the Web changed my life pretty "quickly and profoundly". :/
This doesn't meet the specs of the question, due to the particular devices you wish to support, and the fact that many of them are deliberately incompatible with it.... but there is a technology that I've used successfully many times in the past to overcome the problems inherent and unavoidable in any electromagnetic wireless communication system. This technology dramatically reduces signal attenuation due to distance, it reduces interference from external devices that use the same frequencies, it allows for dramatically higher data rates, and as a bonus it even adds a level of security/privacy: requiring extremely close physical proximity to sniff the signals. These features come standard with the tech itself, or can be enhanced with a special "shielded" version. There are even varieties capable of actually powering the devices. This technology is, of course: Wire.
One of these days I'm going to patent it, clean up on license fees for a few months before the patent gets invalidated, and retire to Mackinac Island.
"Wales said the typical profile of a contributor is 'a 26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website."
The problem with Wikipedia's contributor decay isn't the 26-year-old geeky males who move on a get a life. It's the ones who stay and make Wikipedia theirs.
Wikipedia doesn't need a better [[editor (software)|]]; it needs better [[editor (person)|]]s.
That's because people usually meet my twin first.
But the point still stands that more of them do it, and they do it more when their names are not attached,
Around 15 years ago, it was pretty uncommon for me to hear an openly maliciously racist remark. Not that racism was gone, but it was taboo, and I was starting to think (perhaps naively) that maybe in a generation or two, as the down-to-their-soul racists died off, and the casual racists learned to shut up about it, it would be possible for kids to grow up without being exposed to it. These days, with anonymous communication being so common, the taboo no longer "works", and the racism is out in the open again. So much for my optimism.
Yes it is. Glad you got the joke. I have another one about how my other degree (a BFA from an arts college) counts as my "artistic license". I'm a real laugh riot at parties.
Almost anyone can call themselves a "scientist". There's even a religious denomination that applies the title to Jesus Christ, even though I'm pretty sure he didn't conduct any double-blind experiments in his career.
Though in all sincerity, I do consider myself a "scientist" in the sense of using the scientific method to learn about the world I live in.
I am a scientist (B.A. in Comp Sci at a small liberal arts school) and I speculate that it is a highly improbable series of single-bit errors in their image-processing software. Either that a relic of the Grand Disc Tossing tournaments held circa 17,500 years ago by the Methane Frost Giants of Titan.
When you say they "guarantee to follow our rules to the tiniest detail", you're talking about infallibility. Machines make mistakes, no matter how hard we try to prevent that; only a naive child believes otherwise. Mechanisms wear out; materials corrode, transmission errors occur, sometimes the cat lives/sometimes the cat dies.
And as for your comment about me not caring about reality, I have three words for you: pot, kettle, black. :)
Anyone who builds a business based on a loophole in the law really shouldn't quit their day job.
"Where do you draw the line?"
Good questions. But I'd rather we (as a society) did the work of figuring out answers rather than just saying "that's too hard" and living with the problems.
Big Oil's non-evil twin.
Why do people always assume the twin that gets introduced later is the evil one?
It affects "us down here" for the same reason that everything else that huge companies do affects us.
When companies get large enough, their size alone makes them too big for anyone's good. They become too influential. They become unable to adapt and change. They become "too big to fail". They become too powerful to punish for misdeeds. They become too entrenched for new competitors to enter the market.
Anything that counteracts some of that, even if only partially, counts as a Good Thing in my book.
Sounds to me like somebody hasn't read enough cautionary SF stories about handing control over to those "infallible" but human-designed machines.
Seriously, I remember when I was 15, thirty years ago, lecturing someone about how "computers don't make mistakes". I believe I can be forgiven my naivete on account of: I was 15, and it was thirty years ago. What's your excuse?
If I had a dollar for every item of spam sent to postmaster, webmaster, and yes even abuse @ every domain for which I host e-mail, I probably could buy a seat in the US Senate. At least in the House. Sorry, but those addresses go to /dev/null; I am humanly unable to comply.
I wish it were still the 1980s, when "the RFC states" meant something, a mostly-benign cabal held sway over the backbone, and a person or company could conceivably get kicked off the internet (and make it stick for a while) if it was clear enough that they were Evil. Plus, I still looked hot in tight leather pants and could get into a U2 concert for the price of a couple of their LPs. Those days are gone.
Human societies do not scale well. Athenian democracy worked with voters measured in the thousands. The internet worked well with nodes on the same order of magnitude. (And both had enforceable standards to be in that number.) But expecting democracies (or even republics) with populations in the hundreds of millions, and an Internet where the IPv4 address space is not enough, to continue to function the way those systems were intended to work, is naive.
(I wasn't talking about Google+. I was answering the question.)