... history tells us over and over again that the masses would prefer to buy a broken dysfunctional Windows system, even knowing it to be so, over ANY clearly superior product, so long as they can get the Windows system cheaper.
And think about the likelihood that Microsoft, if it were actually faced with sales defections, would not sell Vista below cost in order to retain market share -- and then consider your answer in the light of what they have done with the Xbox (and will do with Zune).
Look back at the demise of OS/2, which had only a modest price premium over Windows 95 or Windows 3.1, and was snuffed into oblivion largely by the disdain of the consumer -- both public and corporate. While factors like Microsoft's forcing Windows to be the default install and squeezing the competition off the store shelves was a big factor, those things did not prevent users from purchasing a copy of OS/2 and installing it. The herd mentality was what killed OS/2.
Same thing with the promise of Linux taking the corporate world by storm. Here we have a situation where companies could skip a hardware upgrade, saving millions just by that alone, and avoid forever the annual or biannual Windows refresh and site licensing fees, which is an even larger amount over the long haul -- and how many have done just that?
For Macs to be successful in this devoutly desired "perfect storm" of sales, a large chunk of the herd will have to convert both hardware and software to something different and unfamiliar to them, forsaking the familiar comfort of viruses, worms and malware for clean simple straightforward apps that operate a bit differently.
How many corporations are capable of changing to a Mac platform, even one that runs Windows via either Boot Camp or Parallels, when they have entire support organizations dedicated to the premise of a seamless Windows world as far as the eye can see?
They will cheerfully pony up the ginormous amounts of cash to replace their entire hardware install bases in order to upgrade to Vista, based on the premise that they are "saving money" by not having to purchase 3rd-party anti-virus programs, or some other similarly vacuous concept. And John and Jane Publicus will merrily follow in kind with their home systems, because "that's what they run at work". The notion of needing only software that can read and write the same format documents is just beyond them.
I say this as a long-time Mac owner, so I know whereof I speak. A "Perfect Storm" of Mac sales is a marketing fantasy, nothing more. Ripples in the sales picture between 3% and 6% (or 8% or 9%) are just that -- ripples in the sales picture. For Macs to re-gain a market share in the double digits would require a substantial fraction of the herd to break away, and for herd animals, that just doesn't happen. They get concerned and agitated at the thought of leaving the herd, and most that do will eventually return to it.
Free will and rational thought are illusory concepts that have no place in human societies. Just take a look at the front pages (via pixels or atoms) of any major newspaper and ask if this is the logical, rational way in which the world seems to work.
Beam me up Scotty -- there's no intelligent life on this world.
Perhaps being "so bad" is not so bad from an evolutionary standpoint -- after one has passed the age where one can pass on one's genome, it's considered a success from the point of view of the genome. Maybe removing the organism that competes with its offspring for resources is considered beneficial from a genome's perspective.
Another possibility is that these proteins may be produced by any of several common mutations of the genome, so that it will spontaneously reoccur in organisms that have managed to lose it in the DNA lottery. But so long as it does not seriously reduce the possibility of its being passed on, it will be carried along.
I imagine that, prior to the technology of eyeglasses, the incidence of nearsightedness in humans was much less than it is today. Eyeglasses have reduced the impact of being nearsighted so that people live long enough to pass along that tendency, whereas nearsighted cave-kids probably tended to get eaten on a regular basis by whatever carnivore was lurking outside their range of visual acuity. But even so, the tendency to become nearsighted did not get permanently removed from our DNA.
The first thought that springs to mind is to protect airlines from a van full of terrorists armed with the portable surface-to-air missiles that the CIA so cheerfully provided to Al Qaeda back when the Russians were mired down in Afghanistan.
Personally, I'm skeptical that we actually have lasers that could deal with such a threat, which would involve recognizing, targeting, and destroying approaching missiles/RPGs even when they are launched only a few hundred feet from their target. My guess is that such defensive systems would have to come with their own nuclear reactor to power the lasers. Otherwise, the first time they try to power up to shoot down a threat, some circuit breaker will trip and... for want of a nail...
The second thought that springs to mind is that this is an attempt to cash in on the hoopla surrounding the North Koreans' inability to successfully launch a ballistic missile. But surely THAT's too cynical to be true...
... in place of flash memory to provide that speedy boot-up. At least MRAM would not have an upper limit on cycles of use as flash memory does. There's also the possibility that MRAMs could be used in a memory hierarchy in place of power-hungry SRAMs, providing a faster layer of memory than DRAMs for a lot less power consumption. And finally, there is the possibility of re-designing an OS to take advantage of this new form of non-volatile memory, putting most-frequently referenced objects or objects that are essential to running the system in MRAM to take advantage of either the speed or non-volatile aspects of it.
I think Freescale has produced this because they don't know how to market it, and are willing to listen and see how what marketplace does with a device having these unique characteristics.
It will, of course, get smaller, cheaper, faster over time. Whether it gets cheaper fast enough to open new markets remains an open question.
Just because a moral code dictates that some course of action be taken does not necessarily make the case for doing so.
Moral codes can be wrong.
The radical Islamists believe that it is their moral duty to try and convert an unbeliever to their faith, up to and including killing them. Should we infidels (and non-radical Islamists) either convert or die to conform to their moral code? Is there no other possibility?
If you want to defend your moral code, be prepared to argue the case for it, and to consider changing your beliefs if you cannot adequately defend them.
People who oppose doing research with embryonic stem cells, yet support military conflict that kills many times more "people", haven't an ethical leg to stand on. I'm not saying that you fall into this group, but a great many people do.
People who revere all "life" and yet merrily chow down on meats and vegetables, seem to forget that meats and veggies were once "life" -- or are some forms of life somehow different from others? Or is "life" something less than all-important? I only ask these questions -- I do not propose to have the answers.
There is a great deal of difference between a non-sentient bundle of cells that have the potential to develop into a sentient human being and a living, breathing child -- just as there is a great deal of difference between a year-old infant and a 30-year-old adult. People insist on treating them as equivalent, while no one would ever think of allowing a year-old infant to vote or drive a car, and no one would expect a 30-year-old adult to learn at the rate of a year-old infant.
By treating an embryo as equivalent to an adult, you are equating potential with realization, and that's simply not true. Ask anyone's grade school teachers. The question of whether to use embryonic stem cells in order to advance medical technology is a complex and difficult one, with no clear answers. To answer that question means resolving the difference between "potential" and "realization", and comparing the difference in the realization of life's potential in those crippled or killed by injuries to the difference between the potential of an embryo and its realization, with the probability of successful realization taken into account for each case.
Of course this does not end with the embryo. Suppose we decide or agree that an embryo's potentiality should be preserved. What if we arrive at a means to duplicate the structure of an embryo from the raw DNA, proteins, etc? So far as I know, there is nothing in physics that prevents this from eventually being achieved -- and we already routinely assemble DNA sequences from the constituent amino acids. Are these also to be considered "protected organizations of matter"? After all, they have the potential to be assembled into an embryo, which has the potential to be assembled into a full human being. Where does it stop, and why?
Simplistic answers will not yield ethical results. The likely progress from here is that some people will fight tooth and nail to prevent research using embryonic stem cells, and other people will be hell-bent to advance the art of medical science as far and fast as possible, whatever the consequences. Ethical considerations are likely to be left behind in favor of whatever meme makes people feel good about themselves.
Then you should take the time to understand exactly what it is that this company is doing.
They are cloning embryonic progenitor stem cells, and while you might at first glance think they are killing babies or mothers to obtain those initial cells, they might not be. I'd be exceedingly surprised if they were, because there are laws against that sort of thing.
How about if they obtained the initial cells from umbilical cord blood? I don't believe that there is any way to turn unbilical cord blood into a human being, and it is material that might otherwise be discarded -- and usually is.
How about if they were using discarded unfertilized eggs to process and obtain a souce of cloneable material?
How about if they took stem cells from bone marrow and used those as the basis to produce cloneable embryonic progenitor cells?
Because IANAMB (I Am Not A Molecular Biologist), some of the possibilities I have suggested above are either not possible or not practical. But I suspect that more than one of those approaches is.
I do doubt very much that they are taking fertilized eggs from a viable womb to clone their embryonic progenitor cells.
I wonder, do you also oppose organ donors? It seems to me that is exactly what you are describing. An organ donor is life that has been created and destroyed, and then the useful parts reclaimed to allow someone else to continue to live. Granted, they were (probably) not killed in order to harvest the organs (unless you believe that living corpses like Terry Schiavo were "killed" when their life support hardware was turned off), but it seems to me that people in your line of belief oppose more the harvesting than the killing, as they are content to allow fertilized egges to be destroyed by natural means rather than harvested to save the lives of others.
Please research exactly what it is that this company is doing before you leap forward to oppose it.
These are not your garden variety electrolytic caps. Check TFA where it says "storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery's electrodes". Here's another reference to the technology they're taking about.
The use of nanotubes increases the surface area gazillions of times beyond what a conventional capacitor has, and becomes competitive with batteries for energy storage -- without the attendant performace decline over time. The points made elsewhere in the forum about practical all-electric vehicles being limited by the ability to safely transfer lightning bolts is valid, but for lesser uses -- cameras, phones, notebook computers -- these ultracapacitors have genuine promise. Give me an ultracapacitor-powered notebook over a fuel cell powered one any day.
And if we are willing to re-think our paradigms for re-fueling vehicles, we might still be able to have all-electric vehicles (commuter vehicles anyway), with pre-charged ultracapacitors available at gas stations. Just drop one into a loading chute, and return the "empty" for credit and recharging amd you're good to go. I figure something about the size of a bank drive-up tube cannister might work (no calculations, just a SWAG). Maybe it would take several of these to completely "fill the tank" (no fuel tank involved, they ARE the 'fuel tank'), but (I think) such devices could be made reasonably safe to handle in a limited way -- at least as safe as pumping gasoline. Idiots that would extract them from the vehicle and try to take them apart would only improve the gene pool, just like people that smoke while pumping gas.
... is for spreadsheet vendors to offer a "compiled spreadsheet" option that would not allow any changes of content, only format (font/style/size). It would not eliminate logic errors in the spreadsheet -- although some level of increased error detection could be employed in the compilation process -- but such an option would eliminate errors due to user meddling with the internals, since they would not be able to delete/add rows, columns or individual cells.
The same effects can be obtained through password-protecting sheets, but having a "compiled" spreadsheet option makes for a more idiot-proof way of accomplishing this result.
Another thing that could be done by the spreadsheet vendors is to create an "assertion" sheet, where formulas listing groups of cells that should always be identical, or non-zero, or positive, or negative -- or any relationships between critical cells can be listed, generating an error indication should the any of the assertions be violated. Again, this can be manually coded in today's spreadsheets, but having the spreadsheet program prompt to create an assertion sheet would help make this a part of every spreadsheet. Answering "no" to the prompt to create an assertion sheet would result in a visible indicator that assertion-checking was disabled (maybe a custom color in the title bar).
The same approaches that are used to improve error detection in traditional compiled programs can be also employed in the creation of spreadsheets -- all that is required is taking the belt + suspenders approach to coding.
... a statistically significant correlation between certain DNA sequences and the tendency for a person to become a lawyer is discovered amongst the accumulated DNA criminal data -- or any other pool of DNA sequences containing a subset associated with lawyers.
THEN we'll see whether the lawyer community is as eager to be profiled via DNA as they are to have others profiled that way.
Just imagine, a crime is committed, and the latent DNA evidence at the scene (which may or may not have anything to do with the crime) is determined to include the previously identified "LAWYER SEQUENCE". The list of suspects is automatically expanded to include any members of the legal profession known to be in the vicinity (via NSA phone tracking and TIA data mining of credit card transactions), and they are all hauled in and subjected to mandatory DNA matching with the "evidence".
I suppose they would feel that their rights had not been infringed upon when none of them happened to match the subset of markers chosen for comparison. Or, pity the poor sod(s) who happened to match more closely than anyone else.
There is a fundamental problem with using an indicator such as a DNA match as the primary evidence of guilt instead of as a datum providing additional correlation to other evidence such as motive and method.
Lest the possibility of a correlation of DNA with aptitude for a profession seem far-fetched, there is the (admittedly highly controversial -- so much so that it is difficult/impossible to get a fair assessment of the claims amidst the furor) statistical study that purports to show a linkage between many factors (including profession) to one's zodiacal sign (or season of one's birth).
It would seem to be a trivial thing to confirm at least some of these results by using birth dates of those passing the bar exams as compared to the distribution of birth dates in the population at large. But I suspect that the legal community might have qualms about allowing a substantial body of data about them to be plumbed for arcane inexplicable correlations.
Just in case these opinions are widely shared in the legal community, and not just the property of the nutcase quoted, it would go a long way toward building a public trust if all the bar associations would make DNA typing and registration part and parcel of the process of becoming a lawyer.
Odd, how bad managers do not write a single line of code, but establish policies and practices virtually guaranteed to provide the fertile ground necessary for bad code to spring forth, and to extinguish the capability to make secure code, buried under the management "fertilizer" to produce bad code.
It's pretty easy to see how this motif extends into other aspects of software quality as well.
How much proprietary software makes use of a tool like Bugzilla to manage bug-tracking? And how much merely uses a spreadsheet to track bugs during development, testing, and production support?
But if indeed that is the case, that bad management is the cause of poor software, then the open source movement should, over time, produce truly superior products, if only because open source has less management overall.
Certainly we should see superior security in open source products, as they are, after all, "open" for review by anyone who cares to take a peek, and can comprehend what he/she is looking at. This culture of development effectively removes managers and makes for a ton of Quality Control folks, actively scrutinizing the product at every stage of software development.
Oracle has a lot to worry about from the likes of MySQL and PostgreSQL, and not from the fact that they have better performance per unit cost. If things continue along the paths they are currently tracking, then in a few years Oracle's customers will be flocking to open source products because they cannot stand the cost of Oracle failures.
... that treats today's limitations as if they extend into the future indefinitely.
So far as I can see, all the objections mean is that a space elevator cannot be built with the technologies we currently have -- and all of them seem to be of an engineering bent, as opposed to some fundamental theoretical problem. Engineering problems tend to get solved over the long haul.
And even if the problems presented do turn out to be too difficult to construct an Earth-based space elevator, the technology could still be used on the Moon, which presents a much smaller challenge. I suspect that we already have the capabilities required to construct a lunar space elevator -- all that we lack is a permanent lunar base.
Two companies that produce superconducting materials are Intermagnetics General (IMGC) and American Superconductor (AMSC).
AMSC in particular sells high temperature (relatively speaking, these things still need to be cooled by liquid nitrogen) superconducting wire, and has managed to produce it in lengths far too short for long distance power transmission, but more than adequate for use within power generation facilities, and in devices like motors and generators.
This is the only post I have seen (I filter so as not to have to hold my nose too much) that deigns to hint that a computer user ought not to be considered "computer literate" if they know nothing about the difference between volatile memory (RAM) and non-volatile memory (disk). Indeed, it would seem that many Slashdotters are unaware that there are different forms of memory.
The only notion I would add to your list is the recognition that information within a computer is made up of bits, and interpretations of various groupings of bits into different things (characters, numbers, assorted program codes) is why we call it "code". A user need not be able to translate between these interpretations of the bits, but knowing they are present is mandatory if one is to be considered "literate" in this area.
A similar type sun, an asteroid belt, and three Neptune-sized planets.
Assuming that Bode's Law applies there, it's a reasonable assumption that a planet resides within the habitable zone around that star.
However, unless it has through some miracle of coincidence a large moon to provide the environment of constant change via tides and crustal flexing, I doubt that Darwinian processes would have had the time to produce an ecosphere like ours. Maybe something along the lines of the Paleozoic era might be possible.
But then, with an asteroid belt comes catastrophic encounters, and maybe that would be the larger driving influence for Darwinian change.
But in any case, I doubt that the coincidence would be strong enough to extend to a similarity of geography that would support an ecological mechanism similar to ours, that regulates climate change between two quasi-stable regimes.
Quite possibly, once life developed on such a world it might quickly drive it into a greenhouse state like Venus, without the mechanisms that switch us between greenhouse and icehouse that we have.
At last! Finally we found some terrorists... at an address on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Let's check the historical precedent -- when Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, it was due to using the CIA to spy on the Democrats.
While there aren't many Democrats around anymore, messing with the folks who buy ink by the barrel is not terribly bright... but then...
Dubya's got a stubborn streak a mile wide and a mile deep -- he won't go quietly. And with his approval ratings, I could see a number of Republicans deciding they might be better off without him. So we might actually get to see what happens when a President is removed from the protections of the Executive Office.
Even if President Cheney would be inclined to pardon him (as I'm sure he would be), I suspect that he has his own skeletons in the closet to be wary of, and we might just get to see what kind of subsequent criminal charges could be brought against a President impeached and then removed from office by means of a trial for "High Crimes and Misdemeanors".
... would be OK with me, so long as there were reasonable safeguards that it would not be used for anything else. Possibly using a one-way hash based on it would be OK, if someone could devise one.
In any event, for the time being it is unlikely that they would be using the entire genome, only a sampling of key markers, just as fingerprints are matched not by the entire fingerprint, but only upon a set of matching points. But as costs of full DNA decoding continue to fall, more and more of our genome will be available at reasonable prices in years to come.
The problem with using DNA as an identifier, is that it (the entire genome) can be used for many other things. If there were some legal safeguards limiting its use to identification only, I would have no objections -- EXCEPT THAT OUR GOVERNMENT CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO OBEY THE LAW.
So, to err on the side of safety, I would have to resist use of DNA as an identifier -- of course, this is pretty meaningless, as DNA is already used as an identifier in courts across the USofA.
Also, there are powerful positive feedback loops (e.g., the millions of square miles of thawing/decomposing tundra, and the rising levels of global humidity) that will shortly eclipse the carbon emissions of humankind.
It seems likely that these powerful positive feedback loops are responsible for the sharp swings between hothouse and icehouse climates -- the most we have done is to have shifted the knee of the curve by a tiny amount, and as these powerful natural mechanisms eclipse civilization as a source of greenhouse gases, it will not matter whether we produce carbon emissions or not -- we're too small a contributor in the larger scheme of things.
Global warming will persist in the absence of human civilization -- as it has repeatedly done in the planet's past -- and human civilization will not die out as oil is used up, we have plenty of coal, and nuclear power as well. There are lots of alternatives available to power our civlization (such as it is).
Silly me -- I had failed to consider the possibility of simply removing the Himalayas, and thus truncating this path for greenhouse gas migration into the stratosphere.
Removing the Himalayas is something we can certainly do (tunnel into the base and detonate several gigatons of thermonuclear warheads deep inside the mountains), and even manage to disperse much of the mountain range into the upper atmosphere as radioactive dust to immediately reduce global temperature, as was done in 1816 (the Year Without a Summer) when the Earth was blanketed with dust from volcanic eruptions.
For that matter, a well-placed nuke could probably trigger Mt St Helens as well, and if things get really hot, we might be able to activate the Yellowstone caldera for some real fireworks. In addition to ejecting many cubic miles of dust, smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, this would have the side benefit of silencing millions of noisy American environmentalists (and their counterparts as well).
Of course, we need to be pretty sure about this, as I'm not at all sure we are capable of replacing the Himalayas if it turned out we had to.
This global warming thing is looking easier and easier to manage.
... is not to stockpile the radioactive wastes, but to recycle them!
Bury them in a subduction zone, deep in the ocean. As geologic time marches on, they will be pulled down into the earth, where they will be safe and secure until they emerge from some volcano (hint, lava is mildly radioactive from just this sort of thing occuring naturally -- it's one reason the Earth has a molten core).
These materials will resurface hundreds of thousands of years from now, at which point most of their radioactive decay will be completed.
And it's hard to think of a storage place more secure than at the bottom of a deep ocean trench where tectonic plates are being recycled. Once buried (by robots or teleoperated mechanisms) beneath a few meters of muck, they aren't going anywhere, and I believe they would be secure from pilfering.
Yeah, in the locality of where they are buried, things might get pretty toxic, just as they will inside Yucca Mountain or other similar repositories. But after a few tens of thousands of years, the irradiated part of the environment would be pulled into the earth, with no human involvement needed or practical.
... if you wanted to do something with a computer, it was usually easier to write to code or modify some other code to get it to happen. Sometimes, you had to code your own BIOS to get the motley assortment of hardware that you called a computer to work at all.
There was no ocean of open source software, or even an internet to search for the tools you wanted. You dialed up the local BBS and looked in their very meager libraries of programs, which were contained on a few tens of megabytes of disk space. You pretty much had to know what you were looking for to find it -- by name. No Googling of keywords or attributes.
That's why, In the Beginning, everyone who used computers wrote Code. As the internet became widely available, and acres of software -- more than anyone would ever be able to use -- sprouted out on the 'Net, the search for Tools became more of a... search for Tools.
Much easier to find the software than create the software yourself. If a kid can download and use software that is far, far better than anything they would be able to create on their own, where's the motivation to learn to code?
The availability of well-crafted programs to do virtually anything is a major impediment to budding coders deciding that they can create the program to do what they want.
That, and the fact that the younger generation is a buncha slackers who lack the ambition to add one and one to get 10. Learning the game cheats is about as far as their ambition takes them.
So? Whether it's "physical packaging" or "download expenses", there's no way that accounts for the amount of money being deducted as a cost of doing business, in the manner stated. I cannot see a download expense of 20 cents per track being charged, and I'm pretty sure that some portion, if not all of it, is paid by iTMS and not Sony -- but I could be wrong.
There has to be some defensible connection to reality here, or companies would simply claim ridiculous levels of expenses in the production of their products, reducing their taxable income to zero.
Possibly the contracts with the recording artists bear no resemblence whatsoever to the tax returns that Sony files.
Slashdot Mirror
... history tells us over and over again that the masses would prefer to buy a broken dysfunctional Windows system, even knowing it to be so, over ANY clearly superior product, so long as they can get the Windows system cheaper.
And think about the likelihood that Microsoft, if it were actually faced with sales defections, would not sell Vista below cost in order to retain market share -- and then consider your answer in the light of what they have done with the Xbox (and will do with Zune).
Look back at the demise of OS/2, which had only a modest price premium over Windows 95 or Windows 3.1, and was snuffed into oblivion largely by the disdain of the consumer -- both public and corporate. While factors like Microsoft's forcing Windows to be the default install and squeezing the competition off the store shelves was a big factor, those things did not prevent users from purchasing a copy of OS/2 and installing it. The herd mentality was what killed OS/2.
Same thing with the promise of Linux taking the corporate world by storm. Here we have a situation where companies could skip a hardware upgrade, saving millions just by that alone, and avoid forever the annual or biannual Windows refresh and site licensing fees, which is an even larger amount over the long haul -- and how many have done just that?
For Macs to be successful in this devoutly desired "perfect storm" of sales, a large chunk of the herd will have to convert both hardware and software to something different and unfamiliar to them, forsaking the familiar comfort of viruses, worms and malware for clean simple straightforward apps that operate a bit differently.
How many corporations are capable of changing to a Mac platform, even one that runs Windows via either Boot Camp or Parallels, when they have entire support organizations dedicated to the premise of a seamless Windows world as far as the eye can see?
They will cheerfully pony up the ginormous amounts of cash to replace their entire hardware install bases in order to upgrade to Vista, based on the premise that they are "saving money" by not having to purchase 3rd-party anti-virus programs, or some other similarly vacuous concept. And John and Jane Publicus will merrily follow in kind with their home systems, because "that's what they run at work". The notion of needing only software that can read and write the same format documents is just beyond them.
I say this as a long-time Mac owner, so I know whereof I speak. A "Perfect Storm" of Mac sales is a marketing fantasy, nothing more. Ripples in the sales picture between 3% and 6% (or 8% or 9%) are just that -- ripples in the sales picture. For Macs to re-gain a market share in the double digits would require a substantial fraction of the herd to break away, and for herd animals, that just doesn't happen. They get concerned and agitated at the thought of leaving the herd, and most that do will eventually return to it.
Free will and rational thought are illusory concepts that have no place in human societies. Just take a look at the front pages (via pixels or atoms) of any major newspaper and ask if this is the logical, rational way in which the world seems to work.
Beam me up Scotty -- there's no intelligent life on this world.
Perhaps being "so bad" is not so bad from an evolutionary standpoint -- after one has passed the age where one can pass on one's genome, it's considered a success from the point of view of the genome. Maybe removing the organism that competes with its offspring for resources is considered beneficial from a genome's perspective.
Another possibility is that these proteins may be produced by any of several common mutations of the genome, so that it will spontaneously reoccur in organisms that have managed to lose it in the DNA lottery. But so long as it does not seriously reduce the possibility of its being passed on, it will be carried along.
I imagine that, prior to the technology of eyeglasses, the incidence of nearsightedness in humans was much less than it is today. Eyeglasses have reduced the impact of being nearsighted so that people live long enough to pass along that tendency, whereas nearsighted cave-kids probably tended to get eaten on a regular basis by whatever carnivore was lurking outside their range of visual acuity. But even so, the tendency to become nearsighted did not get permanently removed from our DNA.
Why?
... for want of a nail ...
...
The first thought that springs to mind is to protect airlines from a van full of terrorists armed with the portable surface-to-air missiles that the CIA so cheerfully provided to Al Qaeda back when the Russians were mired down in Afghanistan.
Personally, I'm skeptical that we actually have lasers that could deal with such a threat, which would involve recognizing, targeting, and destroying approaching missiles/RPGs even when they are launched only a few hundred feet from their target. My guess is that such defensive systems would have to come with their own nuclear reactor to power the lasers. Otherwise, the first time they try to power up to shoot down a threat, some circuit breaker will trip and
The second thought that springs to mind is that this is an attempt to cash in on the hoopla surrounding the North Koreans' inability to successfully launch a ballistic missile. But surely THAT's too cynical to be true
... in place of flash memory to provide that speedy boot-up. At least MRAM would not have an upper limit on cycles of use as flash memory does. There's also the possibility that MRAMs could be used in a memory hierarchy in place of power-hungry SRAMs, providing a faster layer of memory than DRAMs for a lot less power consumption. And finally, there is the possibility of re-designing an OS to take advantage of this new form of non-volatile memory, putting most-frequently referenced objects or objects that are essential to running the system in MRAM to take advantage of either the speed or non-volatile aspects of it.
I think Freescale has produced this because they don't know how to market it, and are willing to listen and see how what marketplace does with a device having these unique characteristics.
It will, of course, get smaller, cheaper, faster over time. Whether it gets cheaper fast enough to open new markets remains an open question.
Just because a moral code dictates that some course of action be taken does not necessarily make the case for doing so.
Moral codes can be wrong.
The radical Islamists believe that it is their moral duty to try and convert an unbeliever to their faith, up to and including killing them. Should we infidels (and non-radical Islamists) either convert or die to conform to their moral code? Is there no other possibility?
If you want to defend your moral code, be prepared to argue the case for it, and to consider changing your beliefs if you cannot adequately defend them.
People who oppose doing research with embryonic stem cells, yet support military conflict that kills many times more "people", haven't an ethical leg to stand on. I'm not saying that you fall into this group, but a great many people do.
People who revere all "life" and yet merrily chow down on meats and vegetables, seem to forget that meats and veggies were once "life" -- or are some forms of life somehow different from others? Or is "life" something less than all-important? I only ask these questions -- I do not propose to have the answers.
There is a great deal of difference between a non-sentient bundle of cells that have the potential to develop into a sentient human being and a living, breathing child -- just as there is a great deal of difference between a year-old infant and a 30-year-old adult. People insist on treating them as equivalent, while no one would ever think of allowing a year-old infant to vote or drive a car, and no one would expect a 30-year-old adult to learn at the rate of a year-old infant.
By treating an embryo as equivalent to an adult, you are equating potential with realization, and that's simply not true. Ask anyone's grade school teachers. The question of whether to use embryonic stem cells in order to advance medical technology is a complex and difficult one, with no clear answers. To answer that question means resolving the difference between "potential" and "realization", and comparing the difference in the realization of life's potential in those crippled or killed by injuries to the difference between the potential of an embryo and its realization, with the probability of successful realization taken into account for each case.
Of course this does not end with the embryo. Suppose we decide or agree that an embryo's potentiality should be preserved. What if we arrive at a means to duplicate the structure of an embryo from the raw DNA, proteins, etc? So far as I know, there is nothing in physics that prevents this from eventually being achieved -- and we already routinely assemble DNA sequences from the constituent amino acids. Are these also to be considered "protected organizations of matter"? After all, they have the potential to be assembled into an embryo, which has the potential to be assembled into a full human being. Where does it stop, and why?
Simplistic answers will not yield ethical results. The likely progress from here is that some people will fight tooth and nail to prevent research using embryonic stem cells, and other people will be hell-bent to advance the art of medical science as far and fast as possible, whatever the consequences. Ethical considerations are likely to be left behind in favor of whatever meme makes people feel good about themselves.
Then you should take the time to understand exactly what it is that this company is doing.
They are cloning embryonic progenitor stem cells, and while you might at first glance think they are killing babies or mothers to obtain those initial cells, they might not be. I'd be exceedingly surprised if they were, because there are laws against that sort of thing.
How about if they obtained the initial cells from umbilical cord blood? I don't believe that there is any way to turn unbilical cord blood into a human being, and it is material that might otherwise be discarded -- and usually is.
How about if they were using discarded unfertilized eggs to process and obtain a souce of cloneable material?
How about if they took stem cells from bone marrow and used those as the basis to produce cloneable embryonic progenitor cells?
Because IANAMB (I Am Not A Molecular Biologist), some of the possibilities I have suggested above are either not possible or not practical. But I suspect that more than one of those approaches is.
I do doubt very much that they are taking fertilized eggs from a viable womb to clone their embryonic progenitor cells.
I wonder, do you also oppose organ donors? It seems to me that is exactly what you are describing. An organ donor is life that has been created and destroyed, and then the useful parts reclaimed to allow someone else to continue to live. Granted, they were (probably) not killed in order to harvest the organs (unless you believe that living corpses like Terry Schiavo were "killed" when their life support hardware was turned off), but it seems to me that people in your line of belief oppose more the harvesting than the killing, as they are content to allow fertilized egges to be destroyed by natural means rather than harvested to save the lives of others.
Please research exactly what it is that this company is doing before you leap forward to oppose it.
These are not your garden variety electrolytic caps. Check TFA where it says "storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery's electrodes". Here's another reference to the technology they're taking about.
The use of nanotubes increases the surface area gazillions of times beyond what a conventional capacitor has, and becomes competitive with batteries for energy storage -- without the attendant performace decline over time. The points made elsewhere in the forum about practical all-electric vehicles being limited by the ability to safely transfer lightning bolts is valid, but for lesser uses -- cameras, phones, notebook computers -- these ultracapacitors have genuine promise. Give me an ultracapacitor-powered notebook over a fuel cell powered one any day.
And if we are willing to re-think our paradigms for re-fueling vehicles, we might still be able to have all-electric vehicles (commuter vehicles anyway), with pre-charged ultracapacitors available at gas stations. Just drop one into a loading chute, and return the "empty" for credit and recharging amd you're good to go. I figure something about the size of a bank drive-up tube cannister might work (no calculations, just a SWAG). Maybe it would take several of these to completely "fill the tank" (no fuel tank involved, they ARE the 'fuel tank'), but (I think) such devices could be made reasonably safe to handle in a limited way -- at least as safe as pumping gasoline. Idiots that would extract them from the vehicle and try to take them apart would only improve the gene pool, just like people that smoke while pumping gas.
... is for spreadsheet vendors to offer a "compiled spreadsheet" option that would not allow any changes of content, only format (font/style/size). It would not eliminate logic errors in the spreadsheet -- although some level of increased error detection could be employed in the compilation process -- but such an option would eliminate errors due to user meddling with the internals, since they would not be able to delete/add rows, columns or individual cells.
The same effects can be obtained through password-protecting sheets, but having a "compiled" spreadsheet option makes for a more idiot-proof way of accomplishing this result.
Another thing that could be done by the spreadsheet vendors is to create an "assertion" sheet, where formulas listing groups of cells that should always be identical, or non-zero, or positive, or negative -- or any relationships between critical cells can be listed, generating an error indication should the any of the assertions be violated. Again, this can be manually coded in today's spreadsheets, but having the spreadsheet program prompt to create an assertion sheet would help make this a part of every spreadsheet. Answering "no" to the prompt to create an assertion sheet would result in a visible indicator that assertion-checking was disabled (maybe a custom color in the title bar).
The same approaches that are used to improve error detection in traditional compiled programs can be also employed in the creation of spreadsheets -- all that is required is taking the belt + suspenders approach to coding.
... time to wind up the more extreme elements of the Congress' support base.
Don't worry, on November 8 it will be as if nothing ever happened -- because nothing will happen.
Lobbyists from EA, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc will see to that.
Think I am cynical? Look at the kind of sleaze that occupies Washington and say that with a straight face.
THEN we'll see whether the lawyer community is as eager to be profiled via DNA as they are to have others profiled that way.
Just imagine, a crime is committed, and the latent DNA evidence at the scene (which may or may not have anything to do with the crime) is determined to include the previously identified "LAWYER SEQUENCE". The list of suspects is automatically expanded to include any members of the legal profession known to be in the vicinity (via NSA phone tracking and TIA data mining of credit card transactions), and they are all hauled in and subjected to mandatory DNA matching with the "evidence".
I suppose they would feel that their rights had not been infringed upon when none of them happened to match the subset of markers chosen for comparison. Or, pity the poor sod(s) who happened to match more closely than anyone else.
There is a fundamental problem with using an indicator such as a DNA match as the primary evidence of guilt instead of as a datum providing additional correlation to other evidence such as motive and method.
Lest the possibility of a correlation of DNA with aptitude for a profession seem far-fetched, there is the (admittedly highly controversial -- so much so that it is difficult/impossible to get a fair assessment of the claims amidst the furor) statistical study that purports to show a linkage between many factors (including profession) to one's zodiacal sign (or season of one's birth).
It would seem to be a trivial thing to confirm at least some of these results by using birth dates of those passing the bar exams as compared to the distribution of birth dates in the population at large. But I suspect that the legal community might have qualms about allowing a substantial body of data about them to be plumbed for arcane inexplicable correlations.
Just in case these opinions are widely shared in the legal community, and not just the property of the nutcase quoted, it would go a long way toward building a public trust if all the bar associations would make DNA typing and registration part and parcel of the process of becoming a lawyer.
They could actually DO that fairly easily.
... appears to be bad management.
Odd, how bad managers do not write a single line of code, but establish policies and practices virtually guaranteed to provide the fertile ground necessary for bad code to spring forth, and to extinguish the capability to make secure code, buried under the management "fertilizer" to produce bad code.
It's pretty easy to see how this motif extends into other aspects of software quality as well.
How much proprietary software makes use of a tool like Bugzilla to manage bug-tracking? And how much merely uses a spreadsheet to track bugs during development, testing, and production support?
But if indeed that is the case, that bad management is the cause of poor software, then the open source movement should, over time, produce truly superior products, if only because open source has less management overall.
Certainly we should see superior security in open source products, as they are, after all, "open" for review by anyone who cares to take a peek, and can comprehend what he/she is looking at. This culture of development effectively removes managers and makes for a ton of Quality Control folks, actively scrutinizing the product at every stage of software development.
Oracle has a lot to worry about from the likes of MySQL and PostgreSQL, and not from the fact that they have better performance per unit cost. If things continue along the paths they are currently tracking, then in a few years Oracle's customers will be flocking to open source products because they cannot stand the cost of Oracle failures.
... that treats today's limitations as if they extend into the future indefinitely.
So far as I can see, all the objections mean is that a space elevator cannot be built with the technologies we currently have -- and all of them seem to be of an engineering bent, as opposed to some fundamental theoretical problem. Engineering problems tend to get solved over the long haul.
And even if the problems presented do turn out to be too difficult to construct an Earth-based space elevator, the technology could still be used on the Moon, which presents a much smaller challenge. I suspect that we already have the capabilities required to construct a lunar space elevator -- all that we lack is a permanent lunar base.
AMSC in particular sells high temperature (relatively speaking, these things still need to be cooled by liquid nitrogen) superconducting wire, and has managed to produce it in lengths far too short for long distance power transmission, but more than adequate for use within power generation facilities, and in devices like motors and generators.
BRAVO!
This is the only post I have seen (I filter so as not to have to hold my nose too much) that deigns to hint that a computer user ought not to be considered "computer literate" if they know nothing about the difference between volatile memory (RAM) and non-volatile memory (disk). Indeed, it would seem that many Slashdotters are unaware that there are different forms of memory.
The only notion I would add to your list is the recognition that information within a computer is made up of bits, and interpretations of various groupings of bits into different things (characters, numbers, assorted program codes) is why we call it "code". A user need not be able to translate between these interpretations of the bits, but knowing they are present is mandatory if one is to be considered "literate" in this area.
Assuming that Bode's Law applies there, it's a reasonable assumption that a planet resides within the habitable zone around that star.
However, unless it has through some miracle of coincidence a large moon to provide the environment of constant change via tides and crustal flexing, I doubt that Darwinian processes would have had the time to produce an ecosphere like ours. Maybe something along the lines of the Paleozoic era might be possible.
But then, with an asteroid belt comes catastrophic encounters, and maybe that would be the larger driving influence for Darwinian change.
But in any case, I doubt that the coincidence would be strong enough to extend to a similarity of geography that would support an ecological mechanism similar to ours, that regulates climate change between two quasi-stable regimes.
Quite possibly, once life developed on such a world it might quickly drive it into a greenhouse state like Venus, without the mechanisms that switch us between greenhouse and icehouse that we have.
... this story is sooooo 2003! ... or was that 2002?
At last! Finally we found some terrorists ... at an address on Pennsylvania Avenue.
... but then ...
Let's check the historical precedent -- when Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, it was due to using the CIA to spy on the Democrats.
While there aren't many Democrats around anymore, messing with the folks who buy ink by the barrel is not terribly bright
Dubya's got a stubborn streak a mile wide and a mile deep -- he won't go quietly. And with his approval ratings, I could see a number of Republicans deciding they might be better off without him. So we might actually get to see what happens when a President is removed from the protections of the Executive Office.
Even if President Cheney would be inclined to pardon him (as I'm sure he would be), I suspect that he has his own skeletons in the closet to be wary of, and we might just get to see what kind of subsequent criminal charges could be brought against a President impeached and then removed from office by means of a trial for "High Crimes and Misdemeanors".
We definitely live in interesting times.
... would be OK with me, so long as there were reasonable safeguards that it would not be used for anything else. Possibly using a one-way hash based on it would be OK, if someone could devise one.
In any event, for the time being it is unlikely that they would be using the entire genome, only a sampling of key markers, just as fingerprints are matched not by the entire fingerprint, but only upon a set of matching points. But as costs of full DNA decoding continue to fall, more and more of our genome will be available at reasonable prices in years to come.
The problem with using DNA as an identifier, is that it (the entire genome) can be used for many other things. If there were some legal safeguards limiting its use to identification only, I would have no objections -- EXCEPT THAT OUR GOVERNMENT CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO OBEY THE LAW.
So, to err on the side of safety, I would have to resist use of DNA as an identifier -- of course, this is pretty meaningless, as DNA is already used as an identifier in courts across the USofA.
This assumes that widespread use of fossil fuels is the primary cause and driving force behind global warming.
That is unlikely, considering that the current global warming trend started over 10,000 years ago.
Also, there are powerful positive feedback loops (e.g., the millions of square miles of thawing/decomposing tundra, and the rising levels of global humidity) that will shortly eclipse the carbon emissions of humankind.
It seems likely that these powerful positive feedback loops are responsible for the sharp swings between hothouse and icehouse climates -- the most we have done is to have shifted the knee of the curve by a tiny amount, and as these powerful natural mechanisms eclipse civilization as a source of greenhouse gases, it will not matter whether we produce carbon emissions or not -- we're too small a contributor in the larger scheme of things.
Global warming will persist in the absence of human civilization -- as it has repeatedly done in the planet's past -- and human civilization will not die out as oil is used up, we have plenty of coal, and nuclear power as well. There are lots of alternatives available to power our civlization (such as it is).
Removing the Himalayas is something we can certainly do (tunnel into the base and detonate several gigatons of thermonuclear warheads deep inside the mountains), and even manage to disperse much of the mountain range into the upper atmosphere as radioactive dust to immediately reduce global temperature, as was done in 1816 (the Year Without a Summer) when the Earth was blanketed with dust from volcanic eruptions.
For that matter, a well-placed nuke could probably trigger Mt St Helens as well, and if things get really hot, we might be able to activate the Yellowstone caldera for some real fireworks. In addition to ejecting many cubic miles of dust, smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, this would have the side benefit of silencing millions of noisy American environmentalists (and their counterparts as well).
Of course, we need to be pretty sure about this, as I'm not at all sure we are capable of replacing the Himalayas if it turned out we had to.
This global warming thing is looking easier and easier to manage.
... is not to stockpile the radioactive wastes, but to recycle them!
Bury them in a subduction zone, deep in the ocean. As geologic time marches on, they will be pulled down into the earth, where they will be safe and secure until they emerge from some volcano (hint, lava is mildly radioactive from just this sort of thing occuring naturally -- it's one reason the Earth has a molten core).
These materials will resurface hundreds of thousands of years from now, at which point most of their radioactive decay will be completed.
And it's hard to think of a storage place more secure than at the bottom of a deep ocean trench where tectonic plates are being recycled. Once buried (by robots or teleoperated mechanisms) beneath a few meters of muck, they aren't going anywhere, and I believe they would be secure from pilfering.
Yeah, in the locality of where they are buried, things might get pretty toxic, just as they will inside Yucca Mountain or other similar repositories. But after a few tens of thousands of years, the irradiated part of the environment would be pulled into the earth, with no human involvement needed or practical.
... if you wanted to do something with a computer, it was usually easier to write to code or modify some other code to get it to happen. Sometimes, you had to code your own BIOS to get the motley assortment of hardware that you called a computer to work at all.
... search for Tools.
There was no ocean of open source software, or even an internet to search for the tools you wanted. You dialed up the local BBS and looked in their very meager libraries of programs, which were contained on a few tens of megabytes of disk space. You pretty much had to know what you were looking for to find it -- by name. No Googling of keywords or attributes.
That's why, In the Beginning, everyone who used computers wrote Code. As the internet became widely available, and acres of software -- more than anyone would ever be able to use -- sprouted out on the 'Net, the search for Tools became more of a
Much easier to find the software than create the software yourself. If a kid can download and use software that is far, far better than anything they would be able to create on their own, where's the motivation to learn to code?
The availability of well-crafted programs to do virtually anything is a major impediment to budding coders deciding that they can create the program to do what they want.
That, and the fact that the younger generation is a buncha slackers who lack the ambition to add one and one to get 10. Learning the game cheats is about as far as their ambition takes them.
So? Whether it's "physical packaging" or "download expenses", there's no way that accounts for the amount of money being deducted as a cost of doing business, in the manner stated. I cannot see a download expense of 20 cents per track being charged, and I'm pretty sure that some portion, if not all of it, is paid by iTMS and not Sony -- but I could be wrong.
There has to be some defensible connection to reality here, or companies would simply claim ridiculous levels of expenses in the production of their products, reducing their taxable income to zero.
Possibly the contracts with the recording artists bear no resemblence whatsoever to the tax returns that Sony files.
It would seem to me that inflating such "expenses" would reduce the reported profits considerably.
I would expect the IRS to be going all medieval on them, but for the satanic protection of lobbyists.
I would also hazard a guess that such exaggerated "expenses" are a standard practive in the music distribution business, not just a practice at Sony.
... the Chinese do not respond when asked nicely?
... exactly who are these "People" being referred to?
The forces of law and (dis)order in these United States promptly legislate solutions to the Chinese lack of respect for IP.
What? This isn't aimed at the Chinese?!?
This is an anti-terrorism bill?????
Somehow, I just can't see Osama sitting in the caves in Pakistan churning out bootleg copies of Charlies Angels DVDs.
There must be some mistake -- this appears to be a bill SUPPORTING consumer terrorism on the part of the media monopolies.
Where it says "Of the People, By the People, For the People"