December 31, 2003: Philosophers have long sought to "see a world in a grain of sand," as William Blake famously put it. Now scientists are attempting to see the solar system in a grain of dust--comet dust, that is.
If successful, NASA's Stardust probe will be the first ever to carry matter from a comet back to Earth for examination by scientists. It would also be the first time that any material has been deliberately returned to Earth from deep space.
And one wouldn't merely wax poetic to say that in those tiny grains of comet dust, one could find clues to the origin of our world and perhaps to the beginning of life itself.
Comets are like frozen time capsules from the time when our solar system formed. Drifting in the cold outer solar system for billions of years, these asteroid-sized "dirty snowballs" have undergone little change relative to the more dynamic planets. Looking at comets is a bit like studying the bowl of leftover batter to understand how a wedding cake came to be.
Indeed, evidence suggests that comets may have played a role in the emergence of life on our planet. The steady bombardment of the young Earth by icy comets over millions of years brought some of the water that makes our brown planet blue. And comets contain complex carbon compounds that might be the building blocks for life.
Launched in 1999, Stardust will rendezvous with comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt" after its Swiss discoverer) on January 2, 2004. A rendezvous with a comet is a little like a rendezvous with a Gatling gun on a foggy night. As Stardust plunges through the hazy clouds of gas surrounding Wild 2's core, dust grains will fly by the spacecraft at about 13,000 mph, or six times faster than a speeding bullet. The "eyes" of Stardust, an onboard camera, will peek out from the body of the craft through a periscope to avoid damage. A Whipple Shield--a stack of five sheets of carbon filament and ceramic cloths each spaced 2 inches apart--protects the rest of the spacecraft.
Stardust will use a material called aerogel to capture some of the fast-moving grains. Aerogel is a foam-like solid so tenuous that it's hardly even there: 99 percent of its volume is just air. The ethereal lightness of aerogel minimizes damage to the grains as they're caught. Mission planners hope to catch more than one thousand grains larger than 15 microns in the aerogel.
Wild 2 orbited the sun beyond Jupiter until 1974, when it was nudged by Jupiter's gravity into a Sun-approaching orbit--within reach of probes from Earth. Since then the comet has passed by the Sun only five times, so its ice and dust ought to be little altered by solar heating. Pristine dust from Wild 2 can tell us what the solar system was like before it was baked by 4.5 billion years of sunshine and radiation.
After the encounter, Stardust will loop around the Sun on a two-year journey back to Earth. In January 2006, home again, the spacecraft will eject the Sample Return Capsule (SRC), which looks like a miniature Apollo capsule. The SRC will parachute to Earth and, if all goes as planned, land in Utah where scientists will be waiting...
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour William Blake (from Auguries of Innocence, c.1800)
In the sci-fi thriller Paycheck, an engineer has his memory erased after completing a sensitive job. Scientific American.com spoke with a leading neurobiologist to find out just how close scientists are to controlling recall.
By JR Minkel
In the movie Paycheck, opening Christmas Day, a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals, then has his memory of the time he spent working for them erased. The story, based on Philip K. Dick's sci-fi thriller of the same name, is set in the near future, but such selective memory erasure is still highly speculative at best. ScientificAmerican.com asked neurobiologist James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine, who studies learning and memory, to explain what kinds of memory erasure are currently possible. For more information, see his book Memory and Emotion: The Making of Lasting Memories, released in 2003.
Scientific American.com: Early in Paycheck we see the main character get several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?
JM: No. First of all there is no evidence of memories being stored individually. And even if they were stored in individual neurons, no one would know where they were. What we know an awful lot about are the brain systems that are involved in storing memories. Your memories of this conversation, for example, are stored rather diffusely in the brain. They're not going to be stored in a couple of neurons someplace that anybody could easily identify.
SA: But haven't surgeons poked people's brains in certain spots and made them recall specific things?
JM: [In the 1950s] Wilder Penfield up at the Montreal Neurological Institute was doing surgery for people who had brain seizures, and he had to stimulate the brain and have people talk to make sure that he wouldn't eliminate speech areas, for example. He found that he could evoke some things that appeared to be like memories, but it's more likely that he was just evoking [an impression of] something, not a specific memory.
SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?
JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
SA: Are there any more selective ways to erase memory?
JM: If one work with the hippocampus, one can selectively remove animals' memories of places where they have received training. In the Morris water maze, for example, animals are trained to swim from a variety of regions [in] a six-foot tank to an invisible platform located about two centimeters below the surface of the water. That kind of learning requires the hippocampus. If the hippocampus is blocked electrically or chemically within a few hours after animals have been trained to go that spot, they will not remember it the next day. So that would be an example of a place memory that could be influenced by discrete stimulation of a specific region of the brain. This doesn't mean the memory is permanently stored there. It means that the hippocampus is involved in the processing of that information, which is ultimately stored someplace else. And it's not something that could be done by electrical stimulation applied outside of the brain except for electro-convulsive shock, which activates the entire brain.
SA: How do we know memories aren't stored in the hippocampus?
JM: If subjects are taught something and then the hippocampus is removed s
Mountain View, Calif. - Sun Microsystems is inviting competitors IBM Corp. and Cray Inc. to collaborate on defining a new computer language it claims could bolster performance and productivity for scientific and technical computing. The effort is part of a government-sponsored program under which the three companies are competing to design a petascale-class computer by 2010.
Sun's goal is to apply its expertise in Java to defining an architecture-independent, low-level software standard - like Java bytecodes - that a language could present to any computer's run-time environment. Sun wants the so-called Portable Intermediate Language and Run-Time Environment to become an open industry standard.
The low-level software would have some support for existing computer languages. But users would gain maximum benefit when they generated the low-level code based on the new technical computing language Sun has asked IBM and Cray to help define.
Whether IBM and Cray will agree to collaborate on the effort is unclear. Both companies have their own software plans that include developing new languages and operating systems as part of their competing work on the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
"We think languages are one area where the three of us should cooperate, not compete," said Jim Mitchell, who took on leadership of Sun's HPCS effort in August.
Last week Sun proposed to IBM's HPCS researchers they pool separate efforts on such a software language, an idea Sun said Darpa officials back. Sun also plans to invite Cray into the effort. Representatives from IBM and Cray were not available at press time.
The language could be used not just for the petascale systems in the project, but for a broader class of scientific and technical computers.
"Java has made it easy to program using a small number of threads. But in this [technical computing] world you have to handle thousands or hundreds of thousands of threads. We need the right language constructs to do that," Mitchell said.
What I'd really like to see is a system setup where you have a network of clients, any of whom can dispatch an agent across the system that consumes resources to accomplish some goal.
Actually, I'm building an operating system that does act like that, it contacts agents running locally on each machine within their own sandbox.
Growing pains. We're like birds shitting in our nests before we're big enough to leave it. We're going back to the moon and we have sent probes to Mars. Hopefully it won't be too long before we go to Mars in person.
The technologies necessary will help us process environmental damage and recycle our ecosystem.
In my case it was on the left side of my face, which is the area responsible for language and emotions. I should explain that I knew how to speak other languages pretty well before the accident.
This happened while I was just getting involved with someone while I started my studies at university, but I was more fortunate to find a more compassionate Lady in a more distant location. So the second year of my cellphone, I was calling this Lady for about half an hour a time and slowly losing my ability to be recognise the problem until the relationship finished and I had this year to recover.
There is no family history of leukemia, however I found the right method of exercise, diet and personal disinterest in TV as soon as I could. The worst thing is that I have to say that I can't do what other people expect me to do and I simply won't risk my life for that.
I should explain that I had a 2 year term of leukemia caused by cellphone radiation, fortunately it has cleared up over this year. However if my previous relationship hadn't finished due to the side-effects screwing up my firend's life, then I wouldn't had had this year alone to recover everything.
That depends, if you're talking something like a 50's era watch or a smoke detector then the ill-effects are lower than a microwave. However, I suggest you'll find the smallest nuclear source is a 50's antique in the USA, of course it's not safe, useful or viable. However, you will find that both sides were completely silly then, and needed small pacific island countries like new zealand & australia to tell them to grow up, get a real life & a sense of humor.
Here's the deal, shields are needed with layers to protect yourself enough. However, anyone who wants to spend that much time away from the opposite sex is either gay or stupid enough to worship the flag.
Apparently there will be an election this year and who knows what may happen, there's the usual level of controversy that goes around. Let's just say that my project is something that has been severely interfered and interrupted with the orwell's service. I'd rather do exactly what I believe is possible than accept blind fate or accept a political message as being as fixed as an actor's position. On my resume, it would appear that I am extremely loyal, but I think it's just residual aspects of my personal and family life that doesn't happen to be entirely my life online. I'm just a young scientist doing exactly what I've always believed in, with a real life that is being followed about by the media and misread because I make a lot of flippant remarks when I'm supposed to be off the record. I'm just a well-prepared individual and I'm certainly not an actor or a politician who has no better thing to do than come with the usual economic games.
I suppose it's been just long enough for slashdot readers to have forgotten, but my project continues offline where the monopoly culture can't see the work being done.
This is perhaps for the best because there is a strong amount of dependance on the monopoly game that is making the economy very inefficient. There is another way, but I just can't leak it into the orwell's internet.
You know what the worst thing is about patents, a large amount of a sucker system that I designed is actually running certain critical companies.
The worst part is, I don't actually care about it that much, but it's got so many deliberate holes that any secondary school student could find a weak point.
Personally, I'd just like to get paid at the fair rate for design work and actually get off the welfare trap.
It would be good to actually feel free to continue with the important work which I have always wished to do and not have to worry about monopoly patents based on my previous ideas preventing my competive copyrighted work.
I think you'll find that the artist has the right to earn enough to support themself, not some free-loading company or government.
With all that said though, the artist deserves 20 to 25 years of income based on their work and it should not have to be registered at some bureacrat's office to be considered a work of art.
Finally, the most important thing about the work is that it should actually last for a generation, not for the benefit of the client.
There is a simple balance, you've just got to remember that there are brand new US patents being issued on things which were done about 100 years ago.
I know I'm not popular here for being in the "Slashdot party line" of Linux against Capitalism, but I think just about anyone can find name just at least a dozen patents which are plain old corporate recycling of ideas that were well known before the "innovative party" was even born or their company was set up.
Personally, I'd rather see some amount of responsibility taken by the Civil Service and the corporations because I know exactly how much damage playing monopoly with Geneticically Modifified Food causes.
Has anybody wondered why they have been addicted to junkfood, and exactly why nothing is being done about it ? This wouldn't have anything to do with creative science tampering with life just for the bottom line ?
How the heck are you supposed to run a network at all if there is severe interference in the way of the information ?
Is it really true that the US patent office is dumb enough to not even do any safety checking procedures at all ?
I thought the one-button online click was pretty bad, but anyone who doesn't even bother to go through all the safety steps involved in the counter-checking has definately wasted too much time sleeping in the office.
This takes the cake, what a pack of ignorant fools they are.
Sure, I'm in a lot of crap with those people for merely wishing to maintain the illusion of privacy of private information, but if this isn't straight out of "Planet of the Apes", then I don't know what is.
Are these people in contact with their inner monkey, or just shaking about with it ?
A really fantastic job, first time I go back to check and all the web's down on that site. [Not going to run a promo-troll on my stuff yet.] Sorry I haven't been able to catch up with latest stories, have been very busy on several things.
I offer you the greatest congrats for finally getting there, It's a great day for competition with the umbrella corporation.
The sacked chief executive of the Maori Television Service, John Davy, has admitted forging his resume to get the job. He pleaded guilty in the Auckland District Court this morning to one charge of using a document, his CV fraudulently...
It should be noted that John Davy claimed his MBA was from 'Denver State University' and is a Canadian who does most of his paperwork by cut and paste.
I've climbed several mountains: Mt Victoria, Mt Tongariro to name the famous ones. I've flown in a plane almost every winter to queensland. I have no need, nor inclination to fly over the atlantic. Here's a clue: what country has the kiwi as a national bird?
All of those are far more important than posting messages on a severely biased website or bothering to read them.
Going to antartica is useful, you can see how much global warming has affected the glaciers. It's a place where my country has the most useful science experiments done. Wrong. it's not a question of liking what you do to be good at it. I've worked as a waiter and at a supermarket before, I was great at the job but I didn't like it. I never stop people from expressing there opionion, and I only meta moderate fairly. However, you aren't being modded down for expressing a point of view in contrast to the opionion of the slashdot herd.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I love the work that the GNAA does. Your people have been held down by the white man for too long.
Isn't that the prefferred sexual position of gay niggers? being held down? lol !
December 31, 2003: Philosophers have long sought to "see a world in a grain of sand," as William Blake famously put it. Now scientists are attempting to see the solar system in a grain of dust--comet dust, that is.
If successful, NASA's Stardust probe will be the first ever to carry matter from a comet back to Earth for examination by scientists. It would also be the first time that any material has been deliberately returned to Earth from deep space.
And one wouldn't merely wax poetic to say that in those tiny grains of comet dust, one could find clues to the origin of our world and perhaps to the beginning of life itself.
Comets are like frozen time capsules from the time when our solar system formed. Drifting in the cold outer solar system for billions of years, these asteroid-sized "dirty snowballs" have undergone little change relative to the more dynamic planets. Looking at comets is a bit like studying the bowl of leftover batter to understand how a wedding cake came to be.
Indeed, evidence suggests that comets may have played a role in the emergence of life on our planet. The steady bombardment of the young Earth by icy comets over millions of years brought some of the water that makes our brown planet blue. And comets contain complex carbon compounds that might be the building blocks for life.
Launched in 1999, Stardust will rendezvous with comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt" after its Swiss discoverer) on January 2, 2004. A rendezvous with a comet is a little like a rendezvous with a Gatling gun on a foggy night. As Stardust plunges through the hazy clouds of gas surrounding Wild 2's core, dust grains will fly by the spacecraft at about 13,000 mph, or six times faster than a speeding bullet. The "eyes" of Stardust, an onboard camera, will peek out from the body of the craft through a periscope to avoid damage. A Whipple Shield--a stack of five sheets of carbon filament and ceramic cloths each spaced 2 inches apart--protects the rest of the spacecraft.
Stardust will use a material called aerogel to capture some of the fast-moving grains. Aerogel is a foam-like solid so tenuous that it's hardly even there: 99 percent of its volume is just air. The ethereal lightness of aerogel minimizes damage to the grains as they're caught. Mission planners hope to catch more than one thousand grains larger than 15 microns in the aerogel.
Wild 2 orbited the sun beyond Jupiter until 1974, when it was nudged by Jupiter's gravity into a Sun-approaching orbit--within reach of probes from Earth. Since then the comet has passed by the Sun only five times, so its ice and dust ought to be little altered by solar heating. Pristine dust from Wild 2 can tell us what the solar system was like before it was baked by 4.5 billion years of sunshine and radiation.
After the encounter, Stardust will loop around the Sun on a two-year journey back to Earth. In January 2006, home again, the spacecraft will eject the Sample Return Capsule (SRC), which looks like a miniature Apollo capsule. The SRC will parachute to Earth and, if all goes as planned, land in Utah where scientists will be waiting...
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
William Blake (from Auguries of Innocence, c.1800)
In the sci-fi thriller Paycheck, an engineer has his memory erased after completing a sensitive job. Scientific American.com spoke with a leading neurobiologist to find out just how close scientists are to controlling recall.
By JR Minkel
In the movie Paycheck, opening Christmas Day, a crack reverse engineer helps companies steal and improve upon the technology of their rivals, then has his memory of the time he spent working for them erased. The story, based on Philip K. Dick's sci-fi thriller of the same name, is set in the near future, but such selective memory erasure is still highly speculative at best. ScientificAmerican.com asked neurobiologist James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine, who studies learning and memory, to explain what kinds of memory erasure are currently possible. For more information, see his book Memory and Emotion: The Making of Lasting Memories, released in 2003.
Scientific American.com: Early in Paycheck we see the main character get several months' worth of his memories erased by having individual neurons zapped. Is that possible?
JM: No. First of all there is no evidence of memories being stored individually. And even if they were stored in individual neurons, no one would know where they were. What we know an awful lot about are the brain systems that are involved in storing memories. Your memories of this conversation, for example, are stored rather diffusely in the brain. They're not going to be stored in a couple of neurons someplace that anybody could easily identify.
SA: But haven't surgeons poked people's brains in certain spots and made them recall specific things?
JM: [In the 1950s] Wilder Penfield up at the Montreal Neurological Institute was doing surgery for people who had brain seizures, and he had to stimulate the brain and have people talk to make sure that he wouldn't eliminate speech areas, for example. He found that he could evoke some things that appeared to be like memories, but it's more likely that he was just evoking [an impression of] something, not a specific memory.
SA: Are there any ways to erase memories by stimulating the brain?
JM: The dominant evidence that goes back over 50 years is that one can block or certainly reduce memories formed within the past several hours by treating human or animal subjects with electro-convulsive shock. But it's nonselective; whatever happened in that past several hours will be gone. And that's rather gross stimulation applied to the skull. What Larry Squire at UC San Diego has shown is that if human subjects are repeatedly given electro-convulsive shocks (several times a week for several weeks), they will have impaired global memory that goes back many months, but that memory will gradually recover. He did this in the late 1980s.
SA: Are there any more selective ways to erase memory?
JM: If one work with the hippocampus, one can selectively remove animals' memories of places where they have received training. In the Morris water maze, for example, animals are trained to swim from a variety of regions [in] a six-foot tank to an invisible platform located about two centimeters below the surface of the water. That kind of learning requires the hippocampus. If the hippocampus is blocked electrically or chemically within a few hours after animals have been trained to go that spot, they will not remember it the next day. So that would be an example of a place memory that could be influenced by discrete stimulation of a specific region of the brain. This doesn't mean the memory is permanently stored there. It means that the hippocampus is involved in the processing of that information, which is ultimately stored someplace else. And it's not something that could be done by electrical stimulation applied outside of the brain except for electro-convulsive shock, which activates the entire brain.
SA: How do we know memories aren't stored in the hippocampus?
JM: If subjects are taught something and then the hippocampus is removed s
Mountain View, Calif. - Sun Microsystems is inviting competitors IBM Corp. and Cray Inc. to collaborate on defining a new computer language it claims could bolster performance and productivity for scientific and technical computing. The effort is part of a government-sponsored program under which the three companies are competing to design a petascale-class computer by 2010.
Sun's goal is to apply its expertise in Java to defining an architecture-independent, low-level software standard - like Java bytecodes - that a language could present to any computer's run-time environment. Sun wants the so-called Portable Intermediate Language and Run-Time Environment to become an open industry standard.
The low-level software would have some support for existing computer languages. But users would gain maximum benefit when they generated the low-level code based on the new technical computing language Sun has asked IBM and Cray to help define.
Whether IBM and Cray will agree to collaborate on the effort is unclear. Both companies have their own software plans that include developing new languages and operating systems as part of their competing work on the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
"We think languages are one area where the three of us should cooperate, not compete," said Jim Mitchell, who took on leadership of Sun's HPCS effort in August.
Last week Sun proposed to IBM's HPCS researchers they pool separate efforts on such a software language, an idea Sun said Darpa officials back. Sun also plans to invite Cray into the effort. Representatives from IBM and Cray were not available at press time.
The language could be used not just for the petascale systems in the project, but for a broader class of scientific and technical computers.
"Java has made it easy to program using a small number of threads. But in this [technical computing] world you have to handle thousands or hundreds of thousands of threads. We need the right language constructs to do that," Mitchell said.
What I'd really like to see is a system setup where you have a network of clients, any of whom can dispatch an agent across the system that consumes resources to accomplish some goal.
Actually, I'm building an operating system that does act like that, it contacts agents running locally on each machine within their own sandbox.
actually, it's Boxing Day and you're the target for my boxing.
/. readers are not virgins they have their hands.
Seriously, most
Too bad Beagle 2 is down without a trace, I actually thought it had a chance.
Growing pains. We're like birds shitting in our nests before we're big enough to leave it.
We're going back to the moon and we have sent probes to Mars.
Hopefully it won't be too long before we go to Mars in person.
The technologies necessary will help us process environmental damage and recycle our ecosystem.
sceptical environmentalist rocks
Mars Attacks is based on the 1960's collecting cards set.
You can see the whole set at 1 to 66
actually, it was Arthur C. Clake who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.
And if you knew anything about physics, you'd realise that anti-hydrogen tends to anhiliate within nanoseconds.
Yeah, they are : The Vatican.
However, I still don't give a shit what they have to say.
Hey biatches, VOIP rocks.
Especialliy in IChat Av.
In my case it was on the left side of my face, which is the area responsible for language and emotions. I should explain that I knew how to speak other languages pretty well before the accident.
This happened while I was just getting involved with someone while I started my studies at university, but I was more fortunate to find a more compassionate Lady in a more distant location. So the second year of my cellphone, I was calling this Lady for about half an hour a time and slowly losing my ability to be recognise the problem until the relationship finished and I had this year to recover.
There is no family history of leukemia, however I found the right method of exercise, diet and personal disinterest in TV as soon as I could.
The worst thing is that I have to say that I can't do what other people expect me to do and I simply won't risk my life for that.
I should explain that I had a 2 year term of leukemia caused by cellphone radiation, fortunately it has cleared up over this year. However if my previous relationship hadn't finished due to the side-effects screwing up my firend's life, then I wouldn't had had this year alone to recover everything.
That depends, if you're talking something like a 50's era watch or a smoke detector then the ill-effects are lower than a microwave. However, I suggest you'll find the smallest nuclear source is a 50's antique in the USA, of course it's not safe, useful or viable.
However, you will find that both sides were completely silly then, and needed small pacific island countries like new zealand & australia to tell them to grow up, get a real life & a sense of humor.
Here's the deal, shields are needed with layers to protect yourself enough. However, anyone who wants to spend that much time away from the opposite sex is either gay or stupid enough to worship the flag.
Apparently there will be an election this year and who knows what may happen, there's the usual level of controversy that goes around.
Let's just say that my project is something that has been severely interfered and interrupted with the orwell's service.
I'd rather do exactly what I believe is possible than accept blind fate or accept a political message as being as fixed as an actor's position.
On my resume, it would appear that I am extremely loyal, but I think it's just residual aspects of my personal and family life that doesn't happen to be entirely my life online.
I'm just a young scientist doing exactly what I've always believed in, with a real life that is being followed about by the media and misread because I make a lot of flippant remarks when I'm supposed to be off the record.
I'm just a well-prepared individual and I'm certainly not an actor or a politician who has no better thing to do than come with the usual economic games.
I suppose it's been just long enough for slashdot readers to have forgotten, but my project continues offline where the monopoly culture can't see the work being done.
This is perhaps for the best because there is a strong amount of dependance on the monopoly game that is making the economy very inefficient.
There is another way, but I just can't leak it into the orwell's internet.
Please stand by for the next few months.
You know what the worst thing is about patents, a large amount of a sucker system that I designed is actually running certain critical companies.
The worst part is, I don't actually care about it that much, but it's got so many deliberate holes that any secondary school student could find a weak point.
Personally, I'd just like to get paid at the fair rate for design work and actually get off the welfare trap.
It would be good to actually feel free to continue with the important work which I have always wished to do and not have to worry about monopoly patents based on my previous ideas preventing my competive copyrighted work.
I think you'll find that the artist has the right to earn enough to support themself, not some free-loading company or government.
With all that said though, the artist deserves 20 to 25 years of income based on their work and it should not have to be registered at some bureacrat's office to be considered a work of art.
Finally, the most important thing about the work is that it should actually last for a generation, not for the benefit of the client.
There is a simple balance, you've just got to remember that there are brand new US patents being issued on things which were done about 100 years ago.
I know I'm not popular here for being in the "Slashdot party line" of Linux against Capitalism, but I think just about anyone can find name just at least a dozen patents which are plain old corporate recycling of ideas that were well known before the "innovative party" was even born or their company was set up.
Personally, I'd rather see some amount of responsibility taken by the Civil Service and the corporations because I know exactly how much damage playing monopoly with Geneticically Modifified Food causes.
Has anybody wondered why they have been addicted to junkfood, and exactly why nothing is being done about it ?
This wouldn't have anything to do with creative science tampering with life just for the bottom line ?
How the heck are you supposed to run a network at all if there is severe interference in the way of the information ?
Is it really true that the US patent office is dumb enough to not even do any safety checking procedures at all ?
I thought the one-button online click was pretty bad, but anyone who doesn't even bother to go through all the safety steps involved in the counter-checking has definately wasted too much time sleeping in the office.
I'm off to have tea and sleep it off now.
This takes the cake, what a pack of ignorant fools they are.
Sure, I'm in a lot of crap with those people for merely wishing to maintain the illusion of privacy of private information, but if this isn't straight out of "Planet of the Apes", then I don't know what is.
Are these people in contact with their inner monkey, or just shaking about with it ?
A really fantastic job, first time I go back to check and all the web's down on that site.
[Not going to run a promo-troll on my stuff yet.]
Sorry I haven't been able to catch up with latest stories, have been very busy on several things.
I offer you the greatest congrats for finally getting there, It's a great day for competition with the umbrella corporation.
ANy Lone Inventor can outthink an organisation!
I should know, I have already outwitted several governments already!
If you need proof, I suggest you check the recent episode of Star Trek entitled "Conspiracy"
Those Lying sons of bitches!
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?thesect ion=news&thesubsection=&storyID=1992520&reportID=4 62584
The sacked chief executive of the Maori Television Service, John Davy, has admitted forging his resume to get the job. He pleaded guilty in the Auckland District Court this morning to one charge of using a document, his CV fraudulently...
It should be noted that John Davy claimed his MBA was from 'Denver State University' and is a Canadian who does most of his paperwork by cut and paste.
I've climbed several mountains: Mt Victoria, Mt Tongariro to name the famous ones. I've flown in a plane almost every winter to queensland.
I have no need, nor inclination to fly over the atlantic. Here's a clue: what country has the kiwi as a national bird?
All of those are far more important than posting messages on a severely biased website or bothering to read them.
Going to antartica is useful, you can see how much global warming has affected the glaciers. It's a place where my country has the most useful science experiments done.
Wrong. it's not a question of liking what you do to be good at it.
I've worked as a waiter and at a supermarket before, I was great at the job but I didn't like it.
I never stop people from expressing there opionion, and I only meta moderate fairly. However, you aren't being modded down for expressing a point of view in contrast to the opionion of the slashdot herd.