A couple of years ago, when huge numbers of similarities were spotted between Da Vinci Code and my previous books, Da Vinci Legacy and Daughter of God, there was a blizzard of Amazon reviews trashing my books. It was determined that most of these came from a handful of people who were logging in with numerous fake accounts. Amazon,to their credit, investigated and removed all of the reviews where they could determine that the reviewers were fake. Some suspect reviews remained, but they could not be conclusively determined to be fake. It was the best Amazon could do then, but they have better tools now.
This sort of situation (not just mine) is one of the key reasons that Amazon started the "Real Name" system.
With this existing system, Amazon could eliminate or curtail fake review flames by:
(a) Restricting reviews only to those with Real Name badges, or
(b) Allowing reviews by all, but only allowing ratings by Real Name reviewers to count toward the star ratings.
Obviously this is no guarantee against bad reviews, but it does help assure that the reviewers are real people and not robo-trashes and people with a grudge and no life.
Their megabuck legal team convinced the judge to throw out the case before it could come to trial (by refusing to admit expert testimony). I'm appealing, but meanwhile they are suing me to make me pay more than $300,000 in legal fees to their lawyers
Sony and Random House assert in their legal filings that my blogging about the Da Vinci Code case, my posting of legal documents, expert witness analysis and a discussion of my own books as the originals in the genre constitutes evidence of "improper motivation" which they say justifies me being forced to pay .
Outclassed in the "all the justice you can pay for" category, I first wrote them a non-threatening letter intending to ask that they give me credit. I had no lawyer, no intention to sue then -- as now -- never any demand for settlement money.
Despite my private and non-threatening approach, Random House launched a thermonuclear "fuck off" fax at me threatening me with financial ruin should I pursue the issue. Their fax was so extreme that it was a big clue that some sort infringement may have happened and that they knew it.
Random House slammed the door on private and civil discussion. But, lacking the megabucks to buy the same measure of justice available to large global corporations, I turned to public disclosure and what better way than blogs, one of which was The Da Vinci Crock
I did this because a couple of years ago, before blogs were so common, I created an online forum called PatheticBell.Com (http://www.patheticbell.com/) concerning the misleading ads and promises of Pacific Bell (now SBC) DSL service. That forum collected enough information from angry users to support several class action lawsuits that brought fines and better service.
Because I had successfully used the Web to bring issues to the public's attention then, I saw no reason not to do so again. The public scrutiny obviously generated more heat than Random House could take, so they filed suit against me in New York where the judges are more friendly toward publishers than here in California.
The judge in question refused to allow my expert witnesses to submit their testimony then ruled in favor of Random House's request to deny a trial on the issues. I am appealing.
BIG APOLOGY: I am sorry for all the badly produced.pdf documents above!
The court filings are only available as CRAPPY.pdfs are scanned from printed pages.
Lawyers do this (instead of creating normal, CPU-sucking Acrobat documents) to make it impossible to text search their filings or to cut and paste from them despite the fact that they are public domain documents.
There's not a unique SINGLE set of characteristics... which is how things can go wrong. Despite the moderator's screwy, off-base comments, the science in Slatewiper is solidly based in molecular genetics and anticipates this thread parenbt post by nearly 20 years.
I've been trying to use Google Earth to produce a decent "fly through" of the areas and settings in my next novel, Perfect Killer but the interface is a total kludge.
I shelled out $600 for the Pro version of Google Earth and the MovieMaker functions... but it's more of a navigation dog than the first DOS version of Flight Simulator.
The hack that's really needed is a driver to interface something like the CH Products Flight Sim yoke to the directional and altitude controls in Google Earth so that smooth changes could be made.
Given that my programming experience is mostly Fortran and Perl, writing drivers is out of the question.
All very well said to defend the orthodox. The same things were said about Schroedinger, Heisenberg and the rest of those whose ideas on quantum physics were ridiculed.
If the classical physicists were correct we wouldn't have semiconductors... and no/.
And the claim that there is no data to support Penrose can only be made if you have NOT read the research.
This experiment is based totally on the wrong architecture. The reductionist approach to neuroscience is stuck in a classical physics mode and does not take into account the newest theories of Sir Roger Penrose and others that human consciousness may arise from quantum phenomena.
As the author of 20 published books (actually 19 with #20 scheduled for release this fall) I can testify that this simply confirms what writers have long known about publishers.
It also adheres to the axiom that it is impossible to underestimate the intelligence or overestimate the arrogance of publishers.
The fact that some of my best writing is still UNpublished while some of my worst have hit the bestseller lists (like The Da Vinci Legacy) offers a corrollary that it's impossible to go broke underestimating the taste of the average editor.
Like so many of these, the people involved are stuck in the world of classical physics and are not looking deeply enough into what may very well be a quantum phenomenon.
While it's still controversial and in an early stage of development, Mathematician/cosmologist Roger Penrose has presented some intriguing hypotheses that consciousness (and thus memory) may be quantum phenomena. His viewpoint is pretty well carried out by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
I wrote a book about this which was published in 1992. The entire contents of that book are available for free at french-paradox.net/
I have not updated the book since I wrote it, but since its first publication, scores of well-conducted, peer-reviewed studies in the top scientific and medical publications have continued to conform the earlier evidence and -- like this one in Nature -- have found even more healthy results from moderate consumption.
Like so many other technologies, BayTSP's was born in porn as I detailed in my book, EroticaBiz: How Sex Shaped the Internet (available for free at: eroticabiz.com.
BayTSP is in Chapter Nine.
Please note: the full-text search works, but the aautomatic links do not... you can search, but tthen need to go back to the index page and click oin the appropriate chapter. (sorry! And apologies for the MSWord thing... since offering it for free, I have not had the time to go back and change the search program code or get rid of the microsoft evil-format. Open with OpenOffice.
Synthetic biology is not as new as/.ers think it is,but it is clearly pre-critical mass -- something like Linux was before Linus.
The critical thing to understand is that this is OPEN SOURCE BIOLOGY... bringing the same resources, intellectual curiosity and viewpoint fostered by the open source software community. There's not a biological GPL yet, but I believe there will be.
On the Dark Side, open source software's Darth Vader -- Bill Gates -- is an early player in synthetic biology. Check out that, the MIT story and a lot of other information at: taqdot. taqdot proudly runs Slash Code.
There is more to this whole thing than just open source biology. There is a huge effort to create synthetic biological forms using standard open source modules.
Some of these are using synthetic DNA with five and six bases (encoding a lot more information).
I wrote a book on this back in 1992 and all the research shows that ETHANOL in MODERATE quantities accounts for the maximum health benefit.
There are now several hundred, NONconflicting, peer-reviewed studies that show that moderate alcohol consumers live longer than either heavy drinkers or abstainers.
As the author of 19 published books and arguably the FIRST eBook ever sold on the Internet Slatewiper, see this previous post for details on that) I can say that publishers are clueless and just as big an obstacle as the RIAA is to music. It's also incorrect to say that all authors demand DRM just as it's incorrect to say all musicians support the RIAA.
There are any number of ways to protect against widespread piracy without screwing the user and crippling the interface and the ruining the reading experience.
One variation on this is Amazon's "Search Inside" function for books which allows full-text searching and the viewing of a limited number of pages for free.
This concept could be expanded to allow the purchaser to read everything and to print a limited number of complete hard copies and to cut and paste a reasonable percentage --say 5% of the entire book -- to be e-mailed, saved to a file etc.
Sure, this can be abused and it WILL be abused, but there are no 100% solutions and a compromise between reasonable DRM and the reader's rights and experience would more than please me and many other authors.
In fact, universal formats with flexible DRM rules have been created. In a previous life as CTO and founder of an Internet micropayments company, Pocketpass (I am no longer associated with that company), I invented just such a system called Tibanna
Tibanna integrated the MediaForgerun-time environment with the Pocketpass payment system.
Tibanna was free software that any individual could download and use. It took the content, the "digital wrapper" and the Pocketpass payment system and combined them into a single file that could be copied, shared and set free on the Internet without all the hassles still associated with premium content.
Tibanna even had a built in affiliate system that allowed fans of the content (book, music, any other digital deliverable) to "sign" the file, distribute it to a million of their closest friends then get a small percentage of the sale price -- set by the content creator -- if anybody bought it.
With Tibanna, the file became the store and I designed it to fit my needs as an author and creator with my needs as a reader and digital content consumer.
My intent was also to put control over the process in the hands of the individual musician, writer, digital creator and free it from the clutches of technological complication and corporate greediness that controls the sale and distribution of digital content. Tibanna would work just fine for corporate and mass wrapping of content, but I believe the independent creator deserves something to level the playing field.
Thanks to a group of untrustworthy investors, Pocketpass underwenta questionable reverse merger with a public shell, changed its name and -- as far as I can determine -- mucked everything up in the process.
I still believe in Tibanna and have just started a tribute site to keep the idea alive because it represents the middle ground that allows a creator to make money from their work without screwing the user in the process.
I have also started the Tibanna Blog to talk about the company, the product and how good ideas can go down the tubes when money guys with no vision take control.
I wrote a book -- Slatewiper -- about this back in 1994 based on some information shared with me by a Pentagon source who I had relied upon back in the mid-1970s when I was an investigative reporter in D.C.
The issue that makes this most terrifying is the work done on synthetic DNA bases, including 6-base DNA. Some of this has been conducted in order to increase the information-storage capacity of DNA with an eye to biocomputers.
But like many technological advances, this one has a double edge that cuts where we'd prefer it not.
The idea that experiments on synthetic life can be licensed is unrealistic because there are already so many places to buy the starting ingredients and because the availability of instruments and apparatus for producing DNA with synthetic bases is migrating toward the kitchen table.
The concept of bio-script kiddies is not as far off as other posters here would like to think.
For what it's worth, Slatewiper was first published as an eBook in 1994 because despite having had more than a dozen books and novels in print back then, editors thought the idea was too far-fetched. Current events caught up with it and Slatewiper was published in hardcover in the fall of 2003. http://www.slatewiper.com for more.
Kind of absurd for them to take this step when they can't even handle some basic mail operations. This announcement needs to be read in the context of a company that has demonstrated its technical incompetence with simple, straight-forward technology (SMTP).
In that light, this SBC announcement needs to be received with a grain of salt. It looks like a way to pump up their stock price. If they can't handle SMTP, why should we think they can competently handle a big data pipe?
What SMTP problems? You may ask: At the end of this post are the headers from AOL today indicating that SBC's SMTP servers have been placed on the AOHell Black Hole list.
This happens relatively frequently.
SBC has a particular problem with SMTP servers... either having long periods when the servers are inoperative, or alternately wide open to spammers who hack into them... some of the problem probably lies with SBC DSL users who have no firewalls or virus protection... however, if SBC is going to flog their service then they have some duty to advise TCUs (Totally Clueless Users) on these things.
To introduce the latest, slickest, fastest version of their service does nothing to fix the intolerable problems that have plagued SBC DSL users from the very beginning.
I'm in an area with no DSL competitors and no line-of-sight for wireless broadband and no cable broadband yet either... so I've had to put up with these folks for years.
I got so fed up a few years ago, I created a Pathetic Bell website (http://www.patheticbell.com, this was before SBC bought them).
There were so many complaints on the message board (including frequent, documented SMTP issues) that the board became a trolling ground for lawyers and as a result, the board posters managed play a key role in two successful class-action lawsuits. Unfortunately, the amounts they had to pay were so low nothing changed.
AOL banishment of SBC e-mail
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:14:05 -0400 From: Mail Delivery Subsystem To: Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
The original message was received at Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:14:03 -0400 from adsl-63-200-154-57.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [63.200.154.57]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
(reason: 554-(RLY:B1) The information presently available to AOL indicates this)
----- Transcript of session follows ----- 451 4.4.1 reply: read error from mailin-02.mx.aol.com. while talking to mailin-01.mx.aol.com.: 554-(RLY:B1) The information presently available to AOL indicates this 554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's 554-member base. Based on AOL's Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at 554-http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL may not accept further 554-e-mail transactions from this server or domain. For more information, 554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com. while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com.: QUIT
First of all, the use of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer will help close some of these holes, although it often gives contradictory or redundant device.
But what would really be useful is a sort of personal packet sniffer built into firewall software.
Yes, I know the following is not technically a packet-sniffer... Anyway, this would offer a behavior-based analysis of outgoing traffic looking for the tell-tale signs of spam broadcasting. The software would block the outgoing broadcast until the user either approved or stopped it entirely.
With virus software increasingly embedded with firewalls, it would be a trivial task to offer a suggestion on the cause of the unauthorized broadcast and to suggest a fix.
This behavior-based system would allow diagnosis and treatment even if a virus definition update had not been developed yet.
Sorry, I misinterpreted your comments. I agree with you that the heat shield idea is pretty short-sighted,lame and probably shortens laptop life.
However, my post was also intended to look at laptop cooling in the context of the larger issue of what happens to the heat since, as we know from thermodynamics it doesn't just disappear.
In general, our choices for moving heat around are radiation, convection, evaporation and conduction. In reality, there are usually a combination of these in any given situation.
In a laptop, we can't radiate it away (just heats up case and other components) and convection just means the fan has to work harder to such out hot air. Evaporation's not an option, so conduction is the only real choice.
But conducting heat out of the case via some sort of liquid -- whether pumped or self-powered -- is large, expensive, a hassle.
So, despite the efficiency losses in the Peltier junction process, we can recover some of the heat and use it effectively.
But just putting a pad on it is asking for overheating.
The temperature difference is the key, along with the conversion efficiency of the two metals forming the junction of the device.
Given the increasing temperatures of CPU operation, it should be feasible to use a Peltier device to generate enough electricity to trickle charge the laptop battery or power an auxiliary cooling fan (the hotter the CPU, the more cooling is needed and the more electricity gtenerated by the junction to power cooling.)
Anybody not using MAC filtering is asking for trouble. With MAC filtering, you exclude ALL users except for the ones you have previous allowed. By using WEP, MAC filtering and religiously following your router's documentation, you operate your router in "stealth" mode so that you don't even show up on a war driver's unit.
Yes, the instructions vary from makerto maker, but they ALL have the directions you need. All you have to do is follow it.
Whoever modded my previous post (reprinted below) as "Offtopic" failed to connect just how on topic it is.
The original post was about the economics and cost-effectiveness of executing virus writers.
My post directly addressed this by pointing out that if cost-effectiveness was the only criterion, then we'd have a whole world of atrocities (see repeated post, below).
The ultimate point is that the very things that make us human also motivate us to do things that we see as "right" or "moral" but which are not efficient.
Thus the problem with executing virus writers and how this ties directly into the topic.
----- ORIGINAL POST -------
If cost-effectiveness ruled us, we'd quickly euthanize all with Alzheimers, mental and emotional disabilities not to mention those with chronic addictions like tobacco, heroin etc. -- they just COST too much.
Because casualties tie up needed resources on the battlefield, all wounded (both sides) would be killed.
This would be cognitive Darwinism at its most extreme -- eliminate the ineffective and inefficient. So what if we lose a Hawking here or there.
OTOH, this has been tried before: By the Third Reich and through the sterilization of "mental defectives" in the U.S. in the first few decades of the last century.
The decision to extend MERCY, to make a decision to be compassionate in the face of raw efficiency is the essence of what makes us human.
Society has a right to protect itself, but there are better ways of doing it than checking our humanity at the door
If cost-effectiveness ruled us, we'd quickly euthanize all with Alzheimers, mental and emotional disabilities not to mention those with chronic addictions like tobacco, heroin etc. -- they just COST too much.
Because casualties tie up needed resources on the battlefield, all wounded (both sides) would be killed.
This would be cognitive Darwinism at its most extreme -- eliminate the ineffective and inefficient. So what if we lose a Hawking here or there.
OTOH, this has been tried before: By the Third Reich and through the sterilization of "mental defectives" in the U.S. in the first few decades of the last century.
The decision to extend MERCY, to make a decision to be compassionate in the face of raw efficiency is the essence of what makes us human.
Society has a right to protect itself, but there are better ways of doing it than checking our humanity at the door.
More than the number of rooms in the building, you should ask how many people you're gonna have to serve and what your ultimate connection is to the Internet. THAT is going to determine what sort of router/hub arrangement you'll need.
Also is this a wood-frame building or steel and concrete? You may find it cheaper and more reliable to run Cat 5 to each apartment given the signal attenuation problems you might have with wireless.
If you're determined to do wireless, you might want to check into many of the do-it-yourself community WAP antenna configurations.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of situation (not just mine) is one of the key reasons that Amazon started the "Real Name" system.
With this existing system, Amazon could eliminate or curtail fake review flames by:
(a) Restricting reviews only to those with Real Name badges, or
(b) Allowing reviews by all, but only allowing ratings by Real Name reviewers to count toward the star ratings.
Obviously this is no guarantee against bad reviews, but it does help assure that the reviewers are real people and not robo-trashes and people with a grudge and no life.
Their megabuck legal team convinced the judge to throw out the case before it could come to trial (by refusing to admit expert testimony). I'm appealing, but meanwhile they are suing me to make me pay more than $300,000 in legal fees to their lawyers
Sony and Random House assert in their legal filings that my blogging about the Da Vinci Code case, my posting of legal documents, expert witness analysis and a discussion of my own books as the originals in the genre constitutes evidence of "improper motivation" which they say justifies me being forced to pay .
Why didn't I sue them first?
As already mentioned on this thread, it's all about megabucks. Random House/Bertelsmann is the world's largest, multibillion-dollar publishing company.
Outclassed in the "all the justice you can pay for" category, I first wrote them a non-threatening letter intending to ask that they give me credit. I had no lawyer, no intention to sue then -- as now -- never any demand for settlement money.
Despite my private and non-threatening approach, Random House launched a thermonuclear "fuck off" fax at me threatening me with financial ruin should I pursue the issue. Their fax was so extreme that it was a big clue that some sort infringement may have happened and that they knew it.
Random House slammed the door on private and civil discussion. But, lacking the megabucks to buy the same measure of justice available to large global corporations, I turned to public disclosure and what better way than blogs, one of which was The Da Vinci Crock
I did this because a couple of years ago, before blogs were so common, I created an online forum called PatheticBell.Com (http://www.patheticbell.com/) concerning the misleading ads and promises of Pacific Bell (now SBC) DSL service. That forum collected enough information from angry users to support several class action lawsuits that brought fines and better service.
Because I had successfully used the Web to bring issues to the public's attention then, I saw no reason not to do so again. The public scrutiny obviously generated more heat than Random House could take, so they filed suit against me in New York where the judges are more friendly toward publishers than here in California.
The judge in question refused to allow my expert witnesses to submit their testimony then ruled in favor of Random House's request to deny a trial on the issues. I am appealing.
BIG APOLOGY: I am sorry for all the badly produced .pdf documents above!
The court filings are only available as CRAPPY .pdfs are scanned from printed pages.
Lawyers do this (instead of creating normal, CPU-sucking Acrobat documents) to make it impossible to text search their filings or to cut and paste from them despite the fact that they are public domain documents.
This
There's not a unique SINGLE set of characteristics ... which is how things can go wrong. Despite the moderator's screwy, off-base comments, the science in Slatewiper is solidly based in molecular genetics and anticipates this thread parenbt post by nearly 20 years.
This is precisely the process the bioweapons arms merchants needed to perfect in order to make their "ethnic bomb" work in my book Slatewiper.
I've been trying to use Google Earth to produce a decent "fly through" of the areas and settings in my next novel, Perfect Killer but the interface is a total kludge.
... but it's more of a navigation dog than the first DOS version of Flight Simulator.
I shelled out $600 for the Pro version of Google Earth and the MovieMaker functions
The hack that's really needed is a driver to interface something like the CH Products Flight Sim yoke to the directional and altitude controls in Google Earth so that smooth changes could be made.
Given that my programming experience is mostly Fortran and Perl, writing drivers is out of the question.
Is anyone working on a hack like this?
All very well said to defend the orthodox. The same things were said about Schroedinger, Heisenberg and the rest of those whose ideas on quantum physics were ridiculed.
... and no /.
If the classical physicists were correct we wouldn't have semiconductors
And the claim that there is no data to support Penrose can only be made if you have NOT read the research.
For more details, see
It also adheres to the axiom that it is impossible to underestimate the intelligence or overestimate the arrogance of publishers.
The fact that some of my best writing is still UNpublished while some of my worst have hit the bestseller lists (like The Da Vinci Legacy) offers a corrollary that it's impossible to go broke underestimating the taste of the average editor.
While it's still controversial and in an early stage of development, Mathematician/cosmologist Roger Penrose has presented some intriguing hypotheses that consciousness (and thus memory) may be quantum phenomena. His viewpoint is pretty well carried out by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
I have not updated the book since I wrote it, but since its first publication, scores of well-conducted, peer-reviewed studies in the top scientific and medical publications have continued to conform the earlier evidence and -- like this one in Nature -- have found even more healthy results from moderate consumption.
BayTSP is in Chapter Nine.
Please note: the full-text search works, but the aautomatic links do not ... you can search, but tthen need to go back to the index page and click oin the appropriate chapter. (sorry! And apologies for the MSWord thing ... since offering it for free, I have not had the time to go back and change the search program code or get rid of the microsoft evil-format. Open with OpenOffice.
The critical thing to understand is that this is OPEN SOURCE BIOLOGY ... bringing the same resources, intellectual curiosity and viewpoint fostered by the open source software community. There's not a biological GPL yet, but I believe there will be.
On the Dark Side, open source software's Darth Vader -- Bill Gates -- is an early player in synthetic biology. Check out that, the MIT story and a lot of other information at: taqdot. taqdot proudly runs Slash Code.
There is more to this whole thing than just open source biology. There is a huge effort to create synthetic biological forms using standard open source modules.
Some of these are using synthetic DNA with five and six bases (encoding a lot more information).
Links to how this works at: taqdot.org.
This is a new site using Slashcode.
There are now several hundred, NONconflicting, peer-reviewed studies that show that moderate alcohol consumers live longer than either heavy drinkers or abstainers.
My book is out of print now, but it's free to read and share at: http://www.french-paradox.net
There are any number of ways to protect against widespread piracy without screwing the user and crippling the interface and the ruining the reading experience.
One variation on this is Amazon's "Search Inside" function for books which allows full-text searching and the viewing of a limited number of pages for free.
This concept could be expanded to allow the purchaser to read everything and to print a limited number of complete hard copies and to cut and paste a reasonable percentage --say 5% of the entire book -- to be e-mailed, saved to a file etc.
Sure, this can be abused and it WILL be abused, but there are no 100% solutions and a compromise between reasonable DRM and the reader's rights and experience would more than please me and many other authors.
In fact, universal formats with flexible DRM rules have been created. In a previous life as CTO and founder of an Internet micropayments company, Pocketpass (I am no longer associated with that company), I invented just such a system called Tibanna
Tibanna integrated the MediaForgerun-time environment with the Pocketpass payment system.
Tibanna was free software that any individual could download and use. It took the content, the "digital wrapper" and the Pocketpass payment system and combined them into a single file that could be copied, shared and set free on the Internet without all the hassles still associated with premium content.
Tibanna even had a built in affiliate system that allowed fans of the content (book, music, any other digital deliverable) to "sign" the file, distribute it to a million of their closest friends then get a small percentage of the sale price -- set by the content creator -- if anybody bought it.
With Tibanna, the file became the store and I designed it to fit my needs as an author and creator with my needs as a reader and digital content consumer.
My intent was also to put control over the process in the hands of the individual musician, writer, digital creator and free it from the clutches of technological complication and corporate greediness that controls the sale and distribution of digital content. Tibanna would work just fine for corporate and mass wrapping of content, but I believe the independent creator deserves something to level the playing field.
Thanks to a group of untrustworthy investors, Pocketpass underwenta questionable reverse merger with a public shell, changed its name and -- as far as I can determine -- mucked everything up in the process.
I still believe in Tibanna and have just started a tribute site to keep the idea alive because it represents the middle ground that allows a creator to make money from their work without screwing the user in the process.
I have also started the Tibanna Blog to talk about the company, the product and how good ideas can go down the tubes when money guys with no vision take control.
I wrote a book -- Slatewiper -- about this back in 1994 based on some information shared with me by a Pentagon source who I had relied upon back in the mid-1970s when I was an investigative reporter in D.C.
The issue that makes this most terrifying is the work done on synthetic DNA bases, including 6-base DNA. Some of this has been conducted in order to increase the information-storage capacity of DNA with an eye to biocomputers.
But like many technological advances, this one has a double edge that cuts where we'd prefer it not.
The idea that experiments on synthetic life can be licensed is unrealistic because there are already so many places to buy the starting ingredients and because the availability of instruments and apparatus for producing DNA with synthetic bases is migrating toward the kitchen table.
The concept of bio-script kiddies is not as far off as other posters here would like to think.
For what it's worth, Slatewiper was first published as an eBook in 1994 because despite having had more than a dozen books and novels in print back then, editors thought the idea was too far-fetched. Current events caught up with it and Slatewiper was published in hardcover in the fall of 2003. http://www.slatewiper.com for more.
Kind of absurd for them to take this step when they can't even handle some basic mail operations. This announcement needs to be read in the context of a company that has demonstrated its technical incompetence with simple, straight-forward technology (SMTP).
... either having long periods when the servers are inoperative, or alternately wide open to spammers who hack into them... some of the problem probably lies with SBC DSL users who have no firewalls or virus protection ... however, if SBC is going to flog their service then they have some duty to advise TCUs (Totally Clueless Users) on these things.
... so I've had to put up with these folks for years.
In that light, this SBC announcement needs to be received with a grain of salt. It looks like a way to pump up their stock price. If they can't handle SMTP, why should we think they can competently handle a big data pipe?
What SMTP problems? You may ask: At the end of this post are the headers from AOL today indicating that SBC's SMTP servers have been placed on the AOHell Black Hole list.
This happens relatively frequently.
SBC has a particular problem with SMTP servers
To introduce the latest, slickest, fastest version of their service does nothing to fix the intolerable problems that have plagued SBC DSL users from the very beginning.
I'm in an area with no DSL competitors and no line-of-sight for wireless broadband and no cable broadband yet either
I got so fed up a few years ago, I created a Pathetic Bell website (http://www.patheticbell.com, this was before SBC bought them).
There were so many complaints on the message board (including frequent, documented SMTP issues) that the board became a trolling ground for lawyers and as a result, the board posters managed play a key role in two successful class-action lawsuits. Unfortunately, the amounts they had to pay were so low nothing changed.
AOL banishment of SBC e-mail
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:14:05 -0400
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem
To:
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
The original message was received at Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:14:03 -0400
from adsl-63-200-154-57.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net [63.200.154.57]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
(reason: 554-(RLY:B1) The information presently available to AOL indicates this)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
451 4.4.1 reply: read error from mailin-02.mx.aol.com.
while talking to mailin-01.mx.aol.com.:
554-(RLY:B1) The information presently available to AOL indicates this
554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's
554-member base. Based on AOL's Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at
554-http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL may not accept further
554-e-mail transactions from this server or domain. For more information,
554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com.:
QUIT
But what would really be useful is a sort of personal packet sniffer built into firewall software.
Yes, I know the following is not technically a packet-sniffer ... Anyway, this would offer a behavior-based analysis of outgoing traffic looking for the tell-tale signs of spam broadcasting. The software would block the outgoing broadcast until the user either approved or stopped it entirely.
With virus software increasingly embedded with firewalls, it would be a trivial task to offer a suggestion on the cause of the unauthorized broadcast and to suggest a fix.
This behavior-based system would allow diagnosis and treatment even if a virus definition update had not been developed yet.
Sorry, I misinterpreted your comments. I agree with you that the heat shield idea is pretty short-sighted,lame and probably shortens laptop life.
However, my post was also intended to look at laptop cooling in the context of the larger issue of what happens to the heat since, as we know from thermodynamics it doesn't just disappear.
In general, our choices for moving heat around are radiation, convection, evaporation and conduction. In reality, there are usually a combination of these in any given situation.
In a laptop, we can't radiate it away (just heats up case and other components) and convection just means the fan has to work harder to such out hot air. Evaporation's not an option, so conduction is the only real choice.
But conducting heat out of the case via some sort of liquid -- whether pumped or self-powered -- is large, expensive, a hassle.
So, despite the efficiency losses in the Peltier junction process, we can recover some of the heat and use it effectively.
But just putting a pad on it is asking for overheating.
Given the increasing temperatures of CPU operation, it should be feasible to use a Peltier device to generate enough electricity to trickle charge the laptop battery or power an auxiliary cooling fan (the hotter the CPU, the more cooling is needed and the more electricity gtenerated by the junction to power cooling.)
This site http://www.peltier-info.com/ offers a pretty good survey of devices already in process for this.
Anybody not using MAC filtering is asking for trouble. With MAC filtering, you exclude ALL users except for the ones you have previous allowed. By using WEP, MAC filtering and religiously following your router's documentation, you operate your router in "stealth" mode so that you don't even show up on a war driver's unit.
Yes, the instructions vary from makerto maker, but they ALL have the directions you need. All you have to do is follow it.
The original post was about the economics and cost-effectiveness of executing virus writers.
My post directly addressed this by pointing out that if cost-effectiveness was the only criterion, then we'd have a whole world of atrocities (see repeated post, below).
The ultimate point is that the very things that make us human also motivate us to do things that we see as "right" or "moral" but which are not efficient.
Thus the problem with executing virus writers and how this ties directly into the topic.
----- ORIGINAL POST -------
If cost-effectiveness ruled us, we'd quickly euthanize all with Alzheimers, mental and emotional disabilities not to mention those with chronic addictions like tobacco, heroin etc. -- they just COST too much.
Because casualties tie up needed resources on the battlefield, all wounded (both sides) would be killed.
This would be cognitive Darwinism at its most extreme -- eliminate the ineffective and inefficient. So what if we lose a Hawking here or there.
OTOH, this has been tried before: By the Third Reich and through the sterilization of "mental defectives" in the U.S. in the first few decades of the last century.
The decision to extend MERCY, to make a decision to be compassionate in the face of raw efficiency is the essence of what makes us human.
Society has a right to protect itself, but there are better ways of doing it than checking our humanity at the door
If cost-effectiveness ruled us, we'd quickly euthanize all with Alzheimers, mental and emotional disabilities not to mention those with chronic addictions like tobacco, heroin etc. -- they just COST too much.
Because casualties tie up needed resources on the battlefield, all wounded (both sides) would be killed.
This would be cognitive Darwinism at its most extreme -- eliminate the ineffective and inefficient. So what if we lose a Hawking here or there.
OTOH, this has been tried before: By the Third Reich and through the sterilization of "mental defectives" in the U.S. in the first few decades of the last century.
The decision to extend MERCY, to make a decision to be compassionate in the face of raw efficiency is the essence of what makes us human.
Society has a right to protect itself, but there are better ways of doing it than checking our humanity at the door.
More than the number of rooms in the building, you should ask how many people you're gonna have to serve and what your ultimate connection is to the Internet. THAT is going to determine what sort of router/hub arrangement you'll need.
Also is this a wood-frame building or steel and concrete? You may find it cheaper and more reliable to run Cat 5 to each apartment given the signal attenuation problems you might have with wireless.
If you're determined to do wireless, you might want to check into many of the do-it-yourself community WAP antenna configurations.
I know we're not supposed to gripe about rejected stories, but I posted ALL of this including the Google beta links more than 10 days ago.
2003-12-17 23:47:32 Move Over Amazon, Make way for Google (articles,news) (rejected)