My point is that expensive top of the line hardware does not necessarily a good hack make. Clever hacks are done with old, cheap, "worthless" hardware all the time.
I don't take issue with the ethical ramifications (hey, it'd be great if we could produce animal-like foods, without having to kill actual animals), but with the technical aspect. For a T-bone to grow in a vat, it still needs all the nutrients and environment of a T-bone on a real animal. We'd have to collect all those resources ourselves, and then make them available in the vat. On the other hand, animals them selves are virtually autonomous meat factories. I mean, they have legs and walk around and obtain all the resources they want all by themselves. We don't have to do it for them, which is very convenient. My question is just whether growing animal substances in vats is even ultimately thermodynamically feasible. I mean, we'd ultimately have to be doing the analogue of grazing and basking in the sun for that T-bone, whereas it could do it itself if it were attached to an animal;)
To answer your concerns though - If everybody raised animals in an ethical manner, I wouldn't see much fault in using them for food. After all, people, not to mention plenty of other animals, have been doing that very thing for millenia. But the issue is respect and care for the animals. If my eating of chickens is promoting an industry which takes chickens, rips their beaks off, stuffs a tube in their face, and cages them up in racks and racks, and squeezes as many eggs out of them until they die, or are killed for meat, I don't want to participate in that. If it means boxing up meat cattle in a space they can't even move in, for their entire premature lives, separating offspring at birth, etc, I don't want to participate in that. It is impractical, and in many cases impossible, to buy completely ethically raised animal food, simply because economies of scale make it much more economical to raise animals in an unethical manner. So I abstain. The secondary reason is that we eat proportionally way too much meat than we were designed to anyway, and a mostly, or totally vegetarian diet (that is with high quality vegetarian food) is a better diet anyway (less risk of cancer, food poisening, wierd hormones, blah blah blah). The third reason, I suppose, is that after a while I've become sort of sicked by the idea of eating some thing that was living and running around before, although that is not really a practical reason.
So if either 1) everybody starts ethically raising animals, so that I can be assured that the meat I'm stuffing in my face at least came from something that had a decent life, or 2) we come up with some neato technology that allows us to grow artificial animal meat, I can see un-vegetarianizing (especially for the omega-3 in fish, etc.).
early versions of UNIX had an even more elusive name for this command: dsw, an abbreviation for "do swedanya", Russian for goodbye, transliterated into Polish or perhaps German; this is not the only place where the censor has been at work... Current "standard" versions of UNIX do not have a "help" command, but in earlier releases, a help command was provided which declared simply, "UNIX helps those who help themselves"
plus a set of powerful text manipulation utilities like sed, grep, awk, lex, and yacc, whose functions should be obvious from their names.
I find it sort of ironic to read this coming from people who worked on mainframes, etc. (real iron men) Sure, Unix has come a ways from 1988, but for all those hard-core super-31337 CLI hackers, I think this is some evidence that even to people working with card-reading machines, and programming their own mainframe system utilities in assembly, that Unix was still user-unfriendly.
Is there something I missed in the article? It seems to me there is a world of difference between being able to coerce some animal cells back into stem cells, and being able to mass produce animal-like food. We already have ways of obtaining all the nutrients we need. But people don't *want* do pop food pills, or eat human kibble. Our bodies *want* to bite into a steak or a leg of chicken. Hell, even my poor body does, and I'm a vegetarian. Unless we can exactly reproduce the entire physiology of an animal in a little vat, I don't see how we could grow mass quantities of this type of food. At least animals come with the machinary to go out and grab grass, and sun, and water, and all the things it needs to live (until we kill it)...we'd simply be having to do that *ourselves*.
I hear ya. Why, the other day I just threw away a gold-plated Cray. Not much I could do with, being old hardware and all. I'm just about to throw out my Beowolf cluster too.
When will all these loser learn that to be a 1337 h4x0r you must waste and throw away a lot of expensive hardware. Sheesh, I bet they're working on wearable computing right now, dorks.
Yes, which IMHO, is why the government should be aggressively funding public transit, etc., instead of letting it rot away. Go to any European country and you will see many many more people riding bicycles or taking buses. The price of gas dictates its. There is no real reason that the US could not have a better public transportation system.
But yeah, if you're stuck out in the boonies, you're SOL no matter what you try to do.
The title immediately conjured an image of internet worms, self-replicating, and using host machines to number crunch (in the distributed.net case, "crack"). Imagine a Seti@home or distributed.net worm.
Now *that* would be a decent worm.;)
"Why are these processes eating up all the CPU! Why are they talking to setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu!"
Where have you been? Did we *ever* have a browser-neutral web? Did I miss something? This is what Mozilla is hopefully trying to accomplish. Full standards compliance. What is the big deal? There are all sorts of stupid sites claiming allegiance to a particular browser that will not allow you to view the site if you use a different one. It's just immature, and they get what they deserve - less traffic. This is a non-issue. Or at least an issue that has been around since the first browsers were created.
The poster talks as if Linux already *has* the desktop. It doesn't. If Mac OS X is actually a better desktop system, so be it. This is supposed to be a meritocracy, right? Why do we have to fight OS X? Sure, we can borrow ideas from it if and where it is better...but if Linux is technically the wrong solution, why do you assume we need to push it? I don't like Apple as a company, but I applaud their work with OS X, BSD, and Open Source.
For a long time now I've been thinking about filesystem-as-database concept. We've passed the point where computing is about optimizing hardware resources. It is now about optimizing *user* and *information* resources. If your hardware is blazingly fast, but you are lost in a sea of irrelevant information, you can't do anything. I think that's where the database/meta-filesystem comes in.
With all this rich content around, we should not be searching for files based on some arbitrary linear categorical name. We should be searching on *attributes*. We should be searching on *association*. E.g., "List all files relating to my work that I have store on my home computer", "Now, of those, show me all files that pertain to status reports". Or "List all data I have on the artists and bands in my music collection". etc.
This is where plain, flat, hierarchical file systems fail. We need basically a data "repository", and various ways of obtaining information from that repository, based on attributes, categories, mime types, relation to *other* files, etc.
The irony is that their target audience is the new computer user, or the artsy type who just wants to record or digitize or publish something, somebody who wants to get a Mac so they can just plug it into the wall and access the internet (as described in commercials)...the catch-22 is, of course, that *these* people aren't going to be buying Macs (with which they need to get online) online. Although I'm not one of these people, I'd make a wild guess that it would be easier and give them a higher warm-fuzzy factor, to go into a real store, and talk to a real person.
I think the author *does* know a bit about the Internet. Do you even know who he is, or ever seen his site?
"Yeah, right, how was Internet funded before the web, then?" Um, magically, by little elves. Duh, by federal grants to scientific research, educational institutions, etc., that have since dried up. Ever heard of DARPA?
"No, anonymity on the net is a relatively recent idea." If anonymity is a "relatively recent idea" it is because it went without saying before. Only after the internet was commercialized, and privacy started being invaded, did people start buzzing about anonymity.
"On the other hand, television promotes one way interaction between consumer and business." Yeah, from *them* to *you*; they're pushing. The internet is usually the reverse one way: from *you* to *them*; you're pulling. The internet *has* always been a medium that promotes anonymity and faceless interaction, because it was originally designed as a hypertext transfer protocol, not some neato human interaction mechanism. Short of signatures in packets, and cookies in a browser you're pretty much anonymous. Which is why he says the ad agencies are in such trouble...they can't survey their market.
"Also, the tone through the article was that the Internet needs better targeting of ads. It doesn't." I for one wouldn't mind no ads at all! However, *if* we have to have ads (say, to support worthy sites like the author's), I'd rather have them be relavent. Not some stupid blaring BUY-THIS-WEB-CAM-NOW!, HIT-THE-GODDAMN-MONKEY! in-your-face ads.
"Now what would happen to the web if the.coms died?" I am sure you would be glad to provide hosting services for every disowned site out there? There are plenty of worthy sites that survive on advertising. It sure would suck if Wired.com, or TheRegister.co.uk, or ArsTechnica.com, or TomsHardware.com, or AnandTech.com (etc., etc.) just disappeared.
1) Advertising sucks
2) Advertising pays money (when it works)
3) There are many worthwhile sites that need ad money
therefore, it is in their interest to have some sort of advertising business model that actually works (or some other business model that works, but one is yet to be found), and in our interest to endure some less-sucky advertising to be able to view said sites.
Wow, this sounds really cool. Since we've pretty much explored the earth, it seems like there's nowhere "new" to go, nothing new to discover. Adventure has sort of died. I think that's why we see people getting all excited about going out into space, or climbing mountains, or participating in extreme sports. There just isn't much that hasn't already been done. Nobody will ever open Tuts tomb for the first time, or scale Everest for the first time, or find an isolated culture in some remote mountain range. But this "infiltration" seems like a revival of exploration, adventure and discovery...but instead, you aren't exploring new things, you're exploring, old, forgotten things, relics from the past. All of a sudden history is not just something you read about in a book, or watch on TV. It's real, it's here, you've discovered it, your touching and seeing things that people in past lives created or worked with. Really cool stuff. I wonder if there is a group around where I live.
HA! I laugh! Amazon is hemorraging...it can't even turn a profit. Monopoly? Not by a long shot. And I actually find Amazon a whole lot *less* evil than gigantic publishers/distributers (*cough* Barnes and Nobles *cough*).
Well, since people are always posting "hey the election is over, are you st00pid" about my sig, I changed it to a gem I found on the AntiTrust movie site. How true;)
There was just a guy on the Lehrer show the other day who is part of a non-profit organization who helps promote democracy in other countries around the world. When asked what he would do about the US, he said he wouldn't even consider it because for their organazation to get involved they insist that the government have a standardized voting system. I find it sad that the US falls below the standards of an organization which helps promote democracy in third world countries.
How can they prevent you from saying what you want to say? Well, I suppose they can't stop you from going out on the street and yelling. But they *CAN* stop others from *HEARING* it. Want to sell some music? You're at their mercy. Want to write an expose magazine article? At their mercy. Want to write a comic? At their mercy. Want to decide for yourself what to watch? Tough, you don't decide, they do. Want to slam them with a scathing website? Oops, sorry, you do not conform to their terms of service, bye bye.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, they have *virtual* VMware now?
My point is that expensive top of the line hardware does not necessarily a good hack make. Clever hacks are done with old, cheap, "worthless" hardware all the time.
I don't take issue with the ethical ramifications (hey, it'd be great if we could produce animal-like foods, without having to kill actual animals), but with the technical aspect. For a T-bone to grow in a vat, it still needs all the nutrients and environment of a T-bone on a real animal. We'd have to collect all those resources ourselves, and then make them available in the vat. On the other hand, animals them selves are virtually autonomous meat factories. I mean, they have legs and walk around and obtain all the resources they want all by themselves. We don't have to do it for them, which is very convenient. My question is just whether growing animal substances in vats is even ultimately thermodynamically feasible. I mean, we'd ultimately have to be doing the analogue of grazing and basking in the sun for that T-bone, whereas it could do it itself if it were attached to an animal ;)
To answer your concerns though - If everybody raised animals in an ethical manner, I wouldn't see much fault in using them for food. After all, people, not to mention plenty of other animals, have been doing that very thing for millenia. But the issue is respect and care for the animals. If my eating of chickens is promoting an industry which takes chickens, rips their beaks off, stuffs a tube in their face, and cages them up in racks and racks, and squeezes as many eggs out of them until they die, or are killed for meat, I don't want to participate in that. If it means boxing up meat cattle in a space they can't even move in, for their entire premature lives, separating offspring at birth, etc, I don't want to participate in that. It is impractical, and in many cases impossible, to buy completely ethically raised animal food, simply because economies of scale make it much more economical to raise animals in an unethical manner. So I abstain. The secondary reason is that we eat proportionally way too much meat than we were designed to anyway, and a mostly, or totally vegetarian diet (that is with high quality vegetarian food) is a better diet anyway (less risk of cancer, food poisening, wierd hormones, blah blah blah). The third reason, I suppose, is that after a while I've become sort of sicked by the idea of eating some thing that was living and running around before, although that is not really a practical reason.
So if either 1) everybody starts ethically raising animals, so that I can be assured that the meat I'm stuffing in my face at least came from something that had a decent life, or 2) we come up with some neato technology that allows us to grow artificial animal meat, I can see un-vegetarianizing (especially for the omega-3 in fish, etc.).
Also, look for a beta of the Urethra newsreader which complements Aethera, to be coming out soon.
early versions of UNIX had an even more elusive name for this command: dsw, an abbreviation for "do swedanya", Russian for goodbye, transliterated into Polish or perhaps German; this is not the only place where the censor has been at work... Current "standard" versions of UNIX do not have a "help" command, but in earlier releases, a help command was provided which declared simply, "UNIX helps those who help themselves"
plus a set of powerful text manipulation utilities like sed, grep, awk, lex, and yacc, whose functions should be obvious from their names.
I find it sort of ironic to read this coming from people who worked on mainframes, etc. (real iron men) Sure, Unix has come a ways from 1988, but for all those hard-core super-31337 CLI hackers, I think this is some evidence that even to people working with card-reading machines, and programming their own mainframe system utilities in assembly, that Unix was still user-unfriendly.
Is there something I missed in the article? It seems to me there is a world of difference between being able to coerce some animal cells back into stem cells, and being able to mass produce animal-like food. We already have ways of obtaining all the nutrients we need. But people don't *want* do pop food pills, or eat human kibble. Our bodies *want* to bite into a steak or a leg of chicken. Hell, even my poor body does, and I'm a vegetarian. Unless we can exactly reproduce the entire physiology of an animal in a little vat, I don't see how we could grow mass quantities of this type of food. At least animals come with the machinary to go out and grab grass, and sun, and water, and all the things it needs to live (until we kill it)...we'd simply be having to do that *ourselves*.
I hear ya. Why, the other day I just threw away a gold-plated Cray. Not much I could do with, being old hardware and all. I'm just about to throw out my Beowolf cluster too.
When will all these loser learn that to be a 1337 h4x0r you must waste and throw away a lot of expensive hardware. Sheesh, I bet they're working on wearable computing right now, dorks.
Yes, which IMHO, is why the government should be aggressively funding public transit, etc., instead of letting it rot away. Go to any European country and you will see many many more people riding bicycles or taking buses. The price of gas dictates its. There is no real reason that the US could not have a better public transportation system.
But yeah, if you're stuck out in the boonies, you're SOL no matter what you try to do.
Cracking All The Live Long Day & RH6/7 Worms
;)
The title immediately conjured an image of internet worms, self-replicating, and using host machines to number crunch (in the distributed.net case, "crack"). Imagine a Seti@home or distributed.net worm.
Now *that* would be a decent worm.
"Why are these processes eating up all the CPU! Why are they talking to setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu!"
Where have you been? Did we *ever* have a browser-neutral web? Did I miss something? This is what Mozilla is hopefully trying to accomplish. Full standards compliance. What is the big deal? There are all sorts of stupid sites claiming allegiance to a particular browser that will not allow you to view the site if you use a different one. It's just immature, and they get what they deserve - less traffic. This is a non-issue. Or at least an issue that has been around since the first browsers were created.
The poster talks as if Linux already *has* the desktop. It doesn't. If Mac OS X is actually a better desktop system, so be it. This is supposed to be a meritocracy, right? Why do we have to fight OS X? Sure, we can borrow ideas from it if and where it is better...but if Linux is technically the wrong solution, why do you assume we need to push it? I don't like Apple as a company, but I applaud their work with OS X, BSD, and Open Source.
Damn, you...both of you stole *my* idea! ;)
For a long time now I've been thinking about filesystem-as-database concept. We've passed the point where computing is about optimizing hardware resources. It is now about optimizing *user* and *information* resources. If your hardware is blazingly fast, but you are lost in a sea of irrelevant information, you can't do anything. I think that's where the database/meta-filesystem comes in.
With all this rich content around, we should not be searching for files based on some arbitrary linear categorical name. We should be searching on *attributes*. We should be searching on *association*. E.g., "List all files relating to my work that I have store on my home computer", "Now, of those, show me all files that pertain to status reports". Or "List all data I have on the artists and bands in my music collection". etc.
This is where plain, flat, hierarchical file systems fail. We need basically a data "repository", and various ways of obtaining information from that repository, based on attributes, categories, mime types, relation to *other* files, etc.
"If PacMan had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to electronic music"
I think it's called "raving"...
I think we've all heard the MP3 of that routine...
Actually fuck is very flexible; it can be used as a noun in both the "fuck" and "fucker" form. Example:
1) "Bob is a stupid fuck"
2) "Bob is a stupid fucker"
So, you see, the jeep could indeed be refered to as a "fuck".
However, a typo is more probable.
The irony is that their target audience is the new computer user, or the artsy type who just wants to record or digitize or publish something, somebody who wants to get a Mac so they can just plug it into the wall and access the internet (as described in commercials)...the catch-22 is, of course, that *these* people aren't going to be buying Macs (with which they need to get online) online. Although I'm not one of these people, I'd make a wild guess that it would be easier and give them a higher warm-fuzzy factor, to go into a real store, and talk to a real person.
I think the author *does* know a bit about the Internet. Do you even know who he is, or ever seen his site?
.coms died?"
"Yeah, right, how was Internet funded before the web, then?"
Um, magically, by little elves. Duh, by federal grants to scientific research, educational institutions, etc., that have since dried up. Ever heard of DARPA?
"No, anonymity on the net is a relatively recent idea."
If anonymity is a "relatively recent idea" it is because it went without saying before. Only after the internet was commercialized, and privacy started being invaded, did people start buzzing about anonymity.
"On the other hand, television promotes one way interaction between consumer and business."
Yeah, from *them* to *you*; they're pushing. The internet is usually the reverse one way: from *you* to *them*; you're pulling. The internet *has* always been a medium that promotes anonymity and faceless interaction, because it was originally designed as a hypertext transfer protocol, not some neato human interaction mechanism. Short of signatures in packets, and cookies in a browser you're pretty much anonymous. Which is why he says the ad agencies are in such trouble...they can't survey their market.
"Also, the tone through the article was that the Internet needs better targeting of ads. It doesn't."
I for one wouldn't mind no ads at all! However, *if* we have to have ads (say, to support worthy sites like the author's), I'd rather have them be relavent. Not some stupid blaring BUY-THIS-WEB-CAM-NOW!, HIT-THE-GODDAMN-MONKEY! in-your-face ads.
"Now what would happen to the web if the
I am sure you would be glad to provide hosting services for every disowned site out there? There are plenty of worthy sites that survive on advertising. It sure would suck if Wired.com, or TheRegister.co.uk, or ArsTechnica.com, or TomsHardware.com, or AnandTech.com (etc., etc.) just disappeared.
1) Advertising sucks
2) Advertising pays money (when it works)
3) There are many worthwhile sites that need ad money
therefore, it is in their interest to have some sort of advertising business model that actually works (or some other business model that works, but one is yet to be found), and in our interest to endure some less-sucky advertising to be able to view said sites.
Wow, this sounds really cool. Since we've pretty much explored the earth, it seems like there's nowhere "new" to go, nothing new to discover. Adventure has sort of died. I think that's why we see people getting all excited about going out into space, or climbing mountains, or participating in extreme sports. There just isn't much that hasn't already been done. Nobody will ever open Tuts tomb for the first time, or scale Everest for the first time, or find an isolated culture in some remote mountain range. But this "infiltration" seems like a revival of exploration, adventure and discovery...but instead, you aren't exploring new things, you're exploring, old, forgotten things, relics from the past. All of a sudden history is not just something you read about in a book, or watch on TV. It's real, it's here, you've discovered it, your touching and seeing things that people in past lives created or worked with. Really cool stuff. I wonder if there is a group around where I live.
Wow, that's about as funny as The Ultimate Poseur Sport Utility Page ;)
"evil monopolists like Amazon.com."
HA! I laugh! Amazon is hemorraging...it can't even turn a profit. Monopoly? Not by a long shot. And I actually find Amazon a whole lot *less* evil than gigantic publishers/distributers (*cough* Barnes and Nobles *cough*).
Man, with one of these we could hold the world hostage for
<pinky>one *million* dollars</pinky>
Well, since people are always posting "hey the election is over, are you st00pid" about my sig, I changed it to a gem I found on the AntiTrust movie site. How true ;)
There was just a guy on the Lehrer show the other day who is part of a non-profit organization who helps promote democracy in other countries around the world. When asked what he would do about the US, he said he wouldn't even consider it because for their organazation to get involved they insist that the government have a standardized voting system. I find it sad that the US falls below the standards of an organization which helps promote democracy in third world countries.
So who'd you vote for peasant?
How can they prevent you from saying what you want to say? Well, I suppose they can't stop you from going out on the street and yelling. But they *CAN* stop others from *HEARING* it. Want to sell some music? You're at their mercy. Want to write an expose magazine article? At their mercy. Want to write a comic? At their mercy. Want to decide for yourself what to watch? Tough, you don't decide, they do. Want to slam them with a scathing website? Oops, sorry, you do not conform to their terms of service, bye bye.
Yes this is very scary.