I'm going to go out on a limb here and take a guess at the nature of the new experiment being proposed.
If you read the description of Gil Levin's other work, you will see that he is the man responsible for discovering a magic indigestible sugar (tagatose). This sugar is indigestible because it is the mirror image of normal sugar (or certain interesting parts of it are). The enzymes that digest sugar are asymmetric and won't fit together with the tagatose properly. This asymmetry is a fundamental property of life.
If the agent in the soil which produces the carbon-dioxide reacts with one nutrient, but not it's mirror-image, then the agent must be asymmetric. There is no known natrual, non-biological process on Earth that can produce an asymmetric molecule.
If this experiment provides a positive result, it will not prove the existence of life, but it is a very strong indicator. Even if there is no life, the discovery of a naturally-occuring, non-biological process for producing these molecules will have a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe
Phthalidomide is a safe drug. It does not cause birth defects. However, it has an enantiomer (mirror image) that does. The pharma companies making the drug commercially were negligent in their purification process.
I believe that a pure form is now available under a different name.
In case you are unaware, Tonga is an extremely poor country.
The "autocratic monarchy" derided in other posts are really not the uncaring sycophants that people might think. I happen to know someone related to the Tongan royal family (who lives in Australia) and he is one of the kindest, most honest and genuine men that I have met. He regularly involves himself in fund-raising activities to better the lives of the people in his home village in Tonga.
I believe that the sale of a TLD, and some anonymous scientific data is a very wise revenue-raising decision for a developing nation to make.
With an OS that refuses to use unsigned drivers, it will be a lot harder to make dummy sound and video drivers that write their output to a file.
Say goodbye to taking future-proof backups of proprietary-format data.
We had a mercaptan spill in the chemistry lab when I was studying. It was not fun. First we though we would all be blown to hell, then (when we realised what was going on) it was just nausiating. The smell changes from "gas" to dead rat to garlic as the concentration goes up. Worse, if you breathe it long enough it oozes out your pores for the rest of the day and YOU stink like a dead rat!
methane doesn't stink!
It's all suphurous impurities that makes farts pong. The smell of propane (regular "gas" gas) comes from additives designed to make it easily detectable.
They were about as close to the computer equivalent to the Chrysler Slant-6 as anything I've ever seen.
Man, I used to drive one of those. Sweet machine. So much room under the hood, not like cars these days.
Only problem was, when you hit the brakes it pulled onto the wrong side of the road if you didn't correct a bit with the steering. My mother told me I was going to get myself killed and made me get rid of it.
Tru64 is pretty easy to install (Well, Digital Unix 4.0d was easy to install -- I haven't touched an alpha in a while, more's the pitty).
I guess if you have some strange hardware it might get cross (doing the autodetect so it can relink a custom kernel).
I don't understand why Tru64 has such a tiny market share. It is a sweet Unix to work with, and comes with a CD full of Free Software sources and precompiled binaries (Hooray for bash!).
Slackware 7.0 and 7.1 have this (at least if you buy the 4-CD set). You can also get zipslack and bigslack for installing over FAT filesystem or on removeable devices. Is is a fantastic thing.
I use the Slack 7.0 CD to boot my machine all the time (when I bust LILO).
Considering that you can buy Melbourne Bitter in Victoria as well, I doubt that this is true. They might have started bringing it to Sydney to combat Tooheys "Sydney Bitter" (which was a nice beer, but they kept changing the recipe until it ended up tasting of sump-oil).
"What are the standard keyboard shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste?"
Don't know about you, but I use the left mouse button and the middle mouse button most of the time. If I'm using the keyboard it's 'y' or 'p' -- every text-based app has vi keybinding doesn't it?
To recapitulate: The rumours about Crypto AG originated from a former staff member of Crypto AG who had to be dismissed. When sued in court by the company, he had to withdraw this claim. The Swiss federal police carried out its own investigations about Crypto AG and its products in this connection and subsequently announced that no proof whatsoever had been found concerning these allegations.
Don't be too hasty to condemn people. Do the NSA own the Swiss Feds also? I doubt it.
This post provoked some interesting thoughts for me.
Q. How is cuecat different from an alarm clock? Or Why can I not redistribute the software on a free sampler CD?
A. cuecat contains software, which are covered by different laws (i.e. copyright) to those covering the working of an alarm clock (i.e. patents). I own the device, I don't own the software.
Q. Why did the MPAA win their case against 2600?
A. Because machine-readable code is a "device" and hence deCSS is a "circumvention device" under the DMCA.
Q. Why can't e-commerce sites offer a shopping method that involves a single click to purchase?
A. Because this software method is patented.
Is it just me, or do the answers to these questions all seem to contradict themselves? Big business seems to want to keep their cake and eat it too. In the first case the software is protected like a literary text. The person in possession of a copy (like a book or a CD) can use it, but not reproduce it, translate it or whatever without permission from the owner.
In the latter two, software is exactly like a physical device. Any instance of deCSS is a "circumvention device" and therefore illegal, just like illicit drugs or firearms (in some parts of the world). Similarly, development of work-alikes of "one-click shopping" infringes a patent just like making an unlicensed "Sex aid device for males".
They can't have it both ways, and the courts (all over the world) will have to decide which is the correct view or, better still, come up with a completely new model for software. The truth is that software is expression and the result of significant work, so it should be protected by copyright. The GPL relies on copyright law. However, software is also an integral part of many modern devices and we must protect the inventors of truly innovative things.
Is there any legal precedent in any jurisdiction that covers this dilema?
The limited company will have exactly one asset -- the house, and a bunch of liabilities, mainly the mortgage (also council tax/rates/standing charges for gas,elec.,etc.) Take the net value of these and divide by the number of shares gives the value per share.
The company board (the residents) may elect to sell the shares at a discount (e.g. not take the increase in value of the house into account), but they should always be bought back from people who want to sell out at their true value.
This way, everyone involved benefits from the amount of capital gain that they are entitled to.
The only way to solve the bandwidth issue is by aggressive caching of search results.
I had an idea the other day, after reading the "Gnutella is dead" article -- why don't we build a multi-rooted tree system like the DNS, with information classified by content type and topic? Each category and sub-category could have autoritative servers that keep lists of filename/type/description -> URI mappings and pointers to authorities on more specific topics. All server on the way down (right down to the one running on your PC) can cache results until the TTL expires.
Lists of "root" servers must, of course, be reasonably large and (geopolitically) diverse, and it must be relatively simple for anyone to express their intention to become an authoritative server for a given tpoic, otherwise the system becomes susceptible to censorship and regulation (as the DNS is at the moment).
Anyone have any thoughts on this? It's only a rought idea and there are techical details that I haven't taken the time to think through (e.g. what would be the mechanism for registering your content with the authoritative servers?, how would the system defend against "polution"?, etc.)
As we said, computers like mathematical simplicity, so the
palette has to have consistent spacing. We need to find the
largest number that can be cubed (to accommodate the three
root colors RGB) without its cubed value exceeding 256. That
number is 6 (6 * 6 * 6 = 216).
Bollocks. What about the 6-7-6 palette that was a common "standard" for GIFs back in the old days? IIRC, the palette choice for "undithered" colours was made fairly arbitrarily by Netscape, and was not based on what the application could allocate at run-time.
If you need six points on a scale,
you need five spaces. Since we started our scale on 0, not 1,
we can divide 255 by 5 and get the result of 51. Therefore, our
values are 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, and 255. Any combination of
these in the R, G, or B positions results in a valid color for an
8-bit display.
More pish. They already said that the palette for
256-colour displays was drawn from a pool of 16,776,216 colour.
In theory, an operating system can display any 256 colors, but
your machine would take a real performance hit if it had to
redraw its palette every time you toggled between applications.In theory, an operating system can display any 256 colors, but
your machine would take a real performance hit if it had to
redraw its palette every time you toggled between applications.
Well, I used to run "netscape -install" on my 8bit X server and that's exactly what it did.
If the authors felt the need to dumb-down the technical side, they could at least get it right. The article is otherwise very intersting and informative.
If the XBox (or any of the next generation of games consoles) succeeds in killing PC gaming, then at least we will never again have to hear or see the dreaded FUD "Linux has no games" because it won't be an issue.
I think that if SUN choose GNOME as the new destop environment for Solaris then a lot of sysadmins will not be happy.
KDE is much closer to the current CDE in the look and feel area. I would have thought it would be the next generation desktop environment of choice for a traditional Unix.
Is SUN trying to push into the desktop market (via network computing, I guess)? Or is there some other factor at work in this selection?
Indeed. This chap is a raving fascist. If it were not wildly off-topic, I would launch into a detailed discussion of social-contract theory, and why the arguments presented are sadly over-simplistic. Instead, I would just like to add to the list of inherent rights the right to split the infinitive;) (look out GrammarNazi, here I come!)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go out on a limb here and take a guess at the nature of the new experiment being proposed.
If you read the description of Gil Levin's other work, you will see that he is the man responsible for discovering a magic indigestible sugar (tagatose). This sugar is indigestible because it is the mirror image of normal sugar (or certain interesting parts of it are). The enzymes that digest sugar are asymmetric and won't fit together with the tagatose properly. This asymmetry is a fundamental property of life.
If the agent in the soil which produces the carbon-dioxide reacts with one nutrient, but not it's mirror-image, then the agent must be asymmetric. There is no known natrual, non-biological process on Earth that can produce an asymmetric molecule.
If this experiment provides a positive result, it will not prove the existence of life, but it is a very strong indicator. Even if there is no life, the discovery of a naturally-occuring, non-biological process for producing these molecules will have a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
Phthalidomide is a safe drug. It does not cause birth defects. However, it has an enantiomer (mirror image) that does. The pharma companies making the drug commercially were negligent in their purification process.
I believe that a pure form is now available under a different name.
They have a browser plugin for Linux/x86/glibc2 available for download here
Yes, I know that link is broken becauseIn case you are unaware, Tonga is an extremely poor country.
The "autocratic monarchy" derided in other posts are really not the uncaring sycophants that people might think. I happen to know someone related to the Tongan royal family (who lives in Australia) and he is one of the kindest, most honest and genuine men that I have met. He regularly involves himself in fund-raising activities to better the lives of the people in his home village in Tonga.
I believe that the sale of a TLD, and some anonymous scientific data is a very wise revenue-raising decision for a developing nation to make.
With an OS that refuses to use unsigned drivers, it will be a lot harder to make dummy sound and video drivers that write their output to a file.
Say goodbye to taking future-proof backups of proprietary-format data.
We had a mercaptan spill in the chemistry lab when I was studying. It was not fun. First we though we would all be blown to hell, then (when we realised what was going on) it was just nausiating. The smell changes from "gas" to dead rat to garlic as the concentration goes up. Worse, if you breathe it long enough it oozes out your pores for the rest of the day and YOU stink like a dead rat!
methane doesn't stink!
It's all suphurous impurities that makes farts pong. The smell of propane (regular "gas" gas) comes from additives designed to make it easily detectable.
Only problem was, when you hit the brakes it pulled onto the wrong side of the road if you didn't correct a bit with the steering. My mother told me I was going to get myself killed and made me get rid of it.
Tru64 is pretty easy to install (Well, Digital Unix 4.0d was easy to install -- I haven't touched an alpha in a while, more's the pitty).
I guess if you have some strange hardware it might get cross (doing the autodetect so it can relink a custom kernel).
I don't understand why Tru64 has such a tiny market share. It is a sweet Unix to work with, and comes with a CD full of Free Software sources and precompiled binaries (Hooray for bash!).
I don't know what planet you live on. I use (used to use!) RedHat RPMs on my Slackware boxes regularly without a problem.
Slackware 7.0 and 7.1 have this (at least if you buy the 4-CD set). You can also get zipslack and bigslack for installing over FAT filesystem or on removeable devices. Is is a fantastic thing.
I use the Slack 7.0 CD to boot my machine all the time (when I bust LILO).
If Canberra is too cold for you, go stand in front of one of these 2.4GHz dishes :)
Considering that you can buy Melbourne Bitter in Victoria as well, I doubt that this is true. They might have started bringing it to Sydney to combat Tooheys "Sydney Bitter" (which was a nice beer, but they kept changing the recipe until it ended up tasting of sump-oil).
four-ecks
And they are using Apache. The cheek!
This post provoked some interesting thoughts for me.
Q. How is cuecat different from an alarm clock? Or Why can I not redistribute the software on a free sampler CD?A. cuecat contains software, which are covered by different laws (i.e. copyright) to those covering the working of an alarm clock (i.e. patents). I own the device, I don't own the software.
Q. Why did the MPAA win their case against 2600? A. Because machine-readable code is a "device" and hence deCSS is a "circumvention device" under the DMCA.
Q. Why can't e-commerce sites offer a shopping method that involves a single click to purchase? A. Because this software method is patented.
Is it just me, or do the answers to these questions all seem to contradict themselves? Big business seems to want to keep their cake and eat it too. In the first case the software is protected like a literary text. The person in possession of a copy (like a book or a CD) can use it, but not reproduce it, translate it or whatever without permission from the owner.
In the latter two, software is exactly like a physical device. Any instance of deCSS is a "circumvention device" and therefore illegal, just like illicit drugs or firearms (in some parts of the world). Similarly, development of work-alikes of "one-click shopping" infringes a patent just like making an unlicensed "Sex aid device for males".
They can't have it both ways, and the courts (all over the world) will have to decide which is the correct view or, better still, come up with a completely new model for software. The truth is that software is expression and the result of significant work, so it should be protected by copyright. The GPL relies on copyright law. However, software is also an integral part of many modern devices and we must protect the inventors of truly innovative things.
Is there any legal precedent in any jurisdiction that covers this dilema?
The shares should change in value with time.
The limited company will have exactly one asset -- the house, and a bunch of liabilities, mainly the mortgage (also council tax/rates/standing charges for gas,elec.,etc.) Take the net value of these and divide by the number of shares gives the value per share.
The company board (the residents) may elect to sell the shares at a discount (e.g. not take the increase in value of the house into account), but they should always be bought back from people who want to sell out at their true value.
This way, everyone involved benefits from the amount of capital gain that they are entitled to.
Wrong.
Scotch is whisky.
Bourbon is whiskey.
The only way to solve the bandwidth issue is by aggressive caching of search results.
I had an idea the other day, after reading the "Gnutella is dead" article -- why don't we build a multi-rooted tree system like the DNS, with information classified by content type and topic?
Each category and sub-category could have autoritative servers that keep lists of filename/type/description -> URI mappings and pointers to authorities on more specific topics. All server on the way down (right down to the one running on your PC) can cache results until the TTL expires.
Lists of "root" servers must, of course, be reasonably large and (geopolitically) diverse, and it must be relatively simple for anyone to express their intention to become an authoritative server for a given tpoic, otherwise the system becomes susceptible to censorship and regulation (as the DNS is at the moment).
Anyone have any thoughts on this? It's only a rought idea and there are techical details that I haven't taken the time to think through (e.g. what would be the mechanism for registering your content with the authoritative servers?, how would the system defend against "polution"?, etc.)
Bollocks. What about the 6-7-6 palette that was a common "standard" for GIFs back in the old days? IIRC, the palette choice for "undithered" colours was made fairly arbitrarily by Netscape, and was not based on what the application could allocate at run-time.
More pish. They already said that the palette for 256-colour displays was drawn from a pool of 16,776,216 colour.
Well, I used to run "netscape -install" on my 8bit X server and that's exactly what it did.
If the authors felt the need to dumb-down the technical side, they could at least get it right. The article is otherwise very intersting and informative.
If the XBox (or any of the next generation of games consoles) succeeds in killing PC gaming, then at least we will never again have to hear or see the dreaded FUD "Linux has no games" because it won't be an issue.
I think that if SUN choose GNOME as the new destop environment for Solaris then a lot of sysadmins will not be happy.
KDE is much closer to the current CDE in the look and feel area. I would have thought it would be the next generation desktop environment of choice for a traditional Unix.
Is SUN trying to push into the desktop market (via network computing, I guess)? Or is there some other factor at work in this selection?
Indeed. This chap is a raving fascist. ;)
If it were not wildly off-topic, I would launch into a detailed discussion of social-contract theory, and why the arguments presented are sadly over-simplistic.
Instead, I would just like to add to the list of inherent rights the right to split the infinitive
(look out GrammarNazi, here I come!)