SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A type of person so common that practically every American who ever attended grade school has probably harassed one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism.
San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using computer geeks -- also known as computer nerds or slashdotters -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard the internet.
Small numbers of the geeks are kept in cubicles supplied with Mountain Dew and a broadband internet connection from local internet service providers (ISPs), and sensors in each cubicle work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and browsing patterns of the geeks that occur in the presence of internet attacks.
"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the geek monitoring system. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the computer nerd."
Since September 11, the government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on the U.S. internet. Federal law requires nearly all internet service providers to assess their vulnerability to terrorism.
Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But protection systems for electronic networks can trace only the hacks they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.
Computer geeks -- a hardy species about the size of a normal human being, but thinner and paler -- are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to internet integrity, and when exposed to even brief internet outages, they experience the geek version of coughing, compulsively reloading browser windows and pinging gateways to determine the source of the congestion.
The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the geek's vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong.
While Tom is a relevant character, he also doesn't fit terribly well into the world Tolkien has created.
It's sad but its definitely true. Bombadil was actually the subject of a poem by Tolkien, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which was written before he even started work on Lord of the Rings. I think Tolkien just liked the character so much that he gave him a cameo in Lord of the Rings, simultaneously using him to solve two problems: how to get the hobbits out of the Shire, and how to deliver the barrow-blades to the hobbits.
IAASB (structural biologist), and while I can't verify their findings, I can back up the premise in the article that generating diffraction-quality protein crystals is one of the two major bottlenecks to X-ray crystallography (the other being purification).
It's pretty easy to understand why. Not only do you need pure protein, but one must find conditions under which that protein forms relatively large, single crystals. The chief variables, aside from the homogeneity of the protein you're starting off with, include temperature, pH, protein concentration, choice of and concentration of precipitant (generally a chemical that drives the protein out of solution), choice of and concentration of additive compounds, in some cases detergents... The researcher must traverse this multidemensional search space by trial and error, with a limited quantity of protein, looking for the optimal conditions. On top of that, the conditions that confer the ideal level of nucleation may not be ideal for crystal growth...
We have developed shortcuts over the past 20 years, or so. Kits are available that allow one to screen through frequently successful crystallization conditions. The number of conditions one can test in one go is gradually increasing, as things miniturize somewhat.
The ease-of-crystallization varies amazingly from one protein to another, and tricks that improve one do not necessarily work for another, but anything that simplifies the process will be greatly appreciated by the field.
The clock looks like ThinkGeek could sell quite a lot of them, it may be a little on the expensive side.
For you geeks on a fixed income, I hear ThinkGeek will be running an installment plan with payments as low as $5 a month for 1,000 years. Best of all, the first two months are free.
why doesn't it find fault with the fact that job isn't pluralized in agreement with the noun?
I think that's a logical issue, not a grammatical one.
"Gates do good marketing job"
"The plumbers on South Street do good work"
"Bananas make a good snack"
"The plural objects act on a singular subject"
I agree that in that particular case "jobs" sounds better, but I don't know if it is something I would expect a grammar checker to pick up on based on a generalized parsing of subject, object, verb, tense agreement, number agreement, etc.
Re:What could firefox hacks possibly cover?
on
Firefox In Print
·
· Score: 1
No no - This is the novelization. It tells how the scrappy underdog, Firefox, through street smarts and perserverence overcomes great odds and topples the evil giant, IE.
Dreamworks has picked up the film rights. Will Smith is slated to star.
2. Instead of asking, "Why waste the leather after the slaughter?", how about asking, why not use this process to *replace* the need for slaughter, i.e. why not work toward making this process an economically feasible substitute for producing meat?
Ok, the cruelty to animals argument I can see. I don't particularly like the idea of slaughtering animals, but I can live with myself and still eat meat.
The argument that is more moving for me is the one of sutstainability. We often hear quoted figures on how many lbs of a given plant crop go into producing each lb of beef you buy at the store, or a comparison of how much energy goes into producing a lb of beef versus a lb of, say, soy. I don't have numbers in front of me, but suffice it to say that meat is an extremely inefficient food source- a fact that is very important in a hungry world with limited resources.
What I would like to see is a comparison between the amount of energy/resources that goes into producing normal beef (or leather) and the amount that would go into producing those products by this sort of ex-vivo method. Culturing tissue is generally very expensive and wasteful. Growth medium must be provided, which usually includes ingredients from animals. Cultured tissue doesn't have an immune system, so everything must be kept sterile, which requires a lot of energy and water... And so on.
Its great if we can produce animal products in a humane way, but if it means using an insane amount of energy and resources in the process, maybe that creativity should be used to develop better ways to grow soy.
If it's not good enough, why didn't we all complain during the last 14 or so months when it was still in development.
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Centrino - or even just the Pentium M alone - makes for pretty impressive battery usage.
I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1.7 Pentium M and beautiful 15.4" 1920x1200 screen. Playing a DVD, I can get through the extended edition of LotR:FotR on a single charge - that's, what, over 3 hours? It easily gets four hours at full screen brightness, wireless enabled, when used for word processing or web browsing. And if I swallow my pride and dim down the LCD brightness to the minimum - on a train at night, lets say - I can squeeze out over 6 hours of word processing.
The big caveat I'm not factoring in here is the video card. Graphics heavy applications suck the juice out pretty fast. Fortunately I have a desktop for gaming.
...whereas on slashdot, supporting the appropriation of novel technology by Big Brother is sufficient to guarantee entanglement in lengthy conflicts by/.ers of poor intelligence.
According to the group of ball male honorary professors same university Noguchi, you say that the globefish eats the living thing which has poison such as asteroid and the shellfish which are in the seabed accumulates that poison to internal.
Perhaps NASA should consider employing a fleet of fugu to protect earth from rogue asteroids that accumulate that poison to internal.
I for one am a staunch supporter of the undemocratic influence on politics, the wholesale environmental damage, and the pronounced socio-economic striation resulting from overreliance on non-renewable resources controlled by massive corporate monopolies.
By continuing to allow petro-chemical interests to dominate political policy, we ensure that the natural, capitalist, laissez faire stagnation of innovation maintains the status quo, so I can buy another yacht, and poor children in cities around the world may continue to suffer from debilitating asthma.
It's always a good time to release a good game (by "good," I mean fun to play and judged by many to be worth their hard-earned money)... It's also never a good time to release a crappy game that nobody will want to play, no matter how hot the market for games if its ilk might be.
That's a good point. Look at Blizzard: their releases consistently get pushed back past the target holiday season and their games sell just fine.
That being said, just becase the prospective game was a Sam & Max sequel doesn't guarantee it to have been a "good" game. (Does anyone remember the dismal Sam & Max: Freelance Police cartoon?) Hit the Road was super, but its been 10 years since I've looked to LucasArts for that kind of innovation.
From the article: "Prepubescent boys undergoing treatment for cancer that will render them sterile could benefit, Professor Dobrinski suggest."
"Billy, the doctors have good news. The cancer is in remission, and you're going to make a complete recovery! And guess what else? The doctors have given you a pet immunodeficient mouse! Take good care of him Mr. Fuzzy if you ever want to have kids of your own."
Last time I checked, that isn't the case. Silver has the best thermal conductivity of all elemental metals (at least all common ones - I don't actually have an extensive list in front of me). Slightly, but not drastically, better than that of copper. And with respect to other to other responses to the parent, the conductivity of aluminum, while better than, say, steel, pales in comparison to that of copper or silver.
The use of aluminum is a consequence of price and of system requirements. You can cool a Pentium II, for instance, adequately with an aluminum heatsink because it doesn't put out as much heat. Modern processors, on the other hand, put out more watts of energy which needs to be rapidly sucked away from the cpu and dissipated, so a heatsink with a copper core at the very least tends to be the norm.
Why don't we see more silver heatsinks? Price, of course. Copper is already relatively expensive, but a big block of high purity silver is out of the price range of most people. At that point water cooling probably has a better price performance ratio.
There really are lots of ways to respond to that statement. I think the first thing to point out, though, is the difference between the Moon and Antarctica. The Moon hosts a wealth of potential resources that a colonizing nation or corporation could exploit, irrespective of any vague agreements and conceptions regarding its international status.
The technical challenge of sending spacecraft and humans to the Moon may necessetate advances in engineering and material science. The Lunar surface would provide an excellent base of scientific exploration for a number of fields (meteorology, astronomy, astrobiology, etc). A Moon colony could prove to be an economic resource (if you don't like the idea of mining minerals through the gravity well, then consider the potential as a communications center or an energy source.
Also, not to be forgotten are the political ramifications of a successful Chinese base on the Lunar surface. Space and lunar exploration in the US is often funded according to political sentiment. The Apollo missions were fueled by anti-Soviet Cold War mentality. Aside from the possibility of a Chinese Lunar military base, watching China successfully execute a moonshot and construct a colony is a blow to US technological and military superiority - and that is something US citizens and politicians don't like to see.
So, in light of all this, whether you view a non-US Moon mission as a problem is a matter of opinion. But the Moon is a much more valuable prize than Antarctica, so it is easy to see how the US's nationalistic desire to claim political, military, economic, and moral superiority over everyone else will lead many people to conclude that a non-US plan to get to the Moon is decidedly unsettling.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of a similar article:
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A type of person so common that practically every American who ever attended grade school has probably harassed one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism.
San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using computer geeks -- also known as computer nerds or slashdotters -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard the internet.
Small numbers of the geeks are kept in cubicles supplied with Mountain Dew and a broadband internet connection from local internet service providers (ISPs), and sensors in each cubicle work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and browsing patterns of the geeks that occur in the presence of internet attacks.
"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the geek monitoring system. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the computer nerd."
Since September 11, the government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on the U.S. internet. Federal law requires nearly all internet service providers to assess their vulnerability to terrorism.
Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But protection systems for electronic networks can trace only the hacks they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.
Computer geeks -- a hardy species about the size of a normal human being, but thinner and paler -- are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to internet integrity, and when exposed to even brief internet outages, they experience the geek version of coughing, compulsively reloading browser windows and pinging gateways to determine the source of the congestion.
The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the geek's vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong.
While Tom is a relevant character, he also doesn't fit terribly well into the world Tolkien has created.
It's sad but its definitely true. Bombadil was actually the subject of a poem by Tolkien, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which was written before he even started work on Lord of the Rings. I think Tolkien just liked the character so much that he gave him a cameo in Lord of the Rings, simultaneously using him to solve two problems: how to get the hobbits out of the Shire, and how to deliver the barrow-blades to the hobbits.
IAASB (structural biologist), and while I can't verify their findings, I can back up the premise in the article that generating diffraction-quality protein crystals is one of the two major bottlenecks to X-ray crystallography (the other being purification).
It's pretty easy to understand why. Not only do you need pure protein, but one must find conditions under which that protein forms relatively large, single crystals. The chief variables, aside from the homogeneity of the protein you're starting off with, include temperature, pH, protein concentration, choice of and concentration of precipitant (generally a chemical that drives the protein out of solution), choice of and concentration of additive compounds, in some cases detergents... The researcher must traverse this multidemensional search space by trial and error, with a limited quantity of protein, looking for the optimal conditions. On top of that, the conditions that confer the ideal level of nucleation may not be ideal for crystal growth...
We have developed shortcuts over the past 20 years, or so. Kits are available that allow one to screen through frequently successful crystallization conditions. The number of conditions one can test in one go is gradually increasing, as things miniturize somewhat.
The ease-of-crystallization varies amazingly from one protein to another, and tricks that improve one do not necessarily work for another, but anything that simplifies the process will be greatly appreciated by the field.
The clock looks like ThinkGeek could sell quite a lot of them, it may be a little on the expensive side.
For you geeks on a fixed income, I hear ThinkGeek will be running an installment plan with payments as low as $5 a month for 1,000 years. Best of all, the first two months are free.
"My God, it's full of stars!"
While the poster successfully pimps hothardware.com, let us even things out by linking to some other reivews.
Anandtech:
P4 670
PD 820
Tom's Hardware on the PD 840s and such
why doesn't it find fault with the fact that job isn't pluralized in agreement with the noun?
I think that's a logical issue, not a grammatical one.
"Gates do good marketing job"
"The plumbers on South Street do good work"
"Bananas make a good snack"
"The plural objects act on a singular subject"
I agree that in that particular case "jobs" sounds better, but I don't know if it is something I would expect a grammar checker to pick up on based on a generalized parsing of subject, object, verb, tense agreement, number agreement, etc.
No no - This is the novelization. It tells how the scrappy underdog, Firefox, through street smarts and perserverence overcomes great odds and topples the evil giant, IE.
Dreamworks has picked up the film rights. Will Smith is slated to star.
2. Instead of asking, "Why waste the leather after the slaughter?", how about asking, why not use this process to *replace* the need for slaughter, i.e. why not work toward making this process an economically feasible substitute for producing meat?
Ok, the cruelty to animals argument I can see. I don't particularly like the idea of slaughtering animals, but I can live with myself and still eat meat.
The argument that is more moving for me is the one of sutstainability. We often hear quoted figures on how many lbs of a given plant crop go into producing each lb of beef you buy at the store, or a comparison of how much energy goes into producing a lb of beef versus a lb of, say, soy. I don't have numbers in front of me, but suffice it to say that meat is an extremely inefficient food source- a fact that is very important in a hungry world with limited resources.
What I would like to see is a comparison between the amount of energy/resources that goes into producing normal beef (or leather) and the amount that would go into producing those products by this sort of ex-vivo method. Culturing tissue is generally very expensive and wasteful. Growth medium must be provided, which usually includes ingredients from animals. Cultured tissue doesn't have an immune system, so everything must be kept sterile, which requires a lot of energy and water... And so on.
Its great if we can produce animal products in a humane way, but if it means using an insane amount of energy and resources in the process, maybe that creativity should be used to develop better ways to grow soy.
We are Human. Resistance is futile.
If it's not good enough, why didn't we all complain during the last 14 or so months when it was still in development.
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Centrino - or even just the Pentium M alone - makes for pretty impressive battery usage.
I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1.7 Pentium M and beautiful 15.4" 1920x1200 screen. Playing a DVD, I can get through the extended edition of LotR:FotR on a single charge - that's, what, over 3 hours? It easily gets four hours at full screen brightness, wireless enabled, when used for word processing or web browsing. And if I swallow my pride and dim down the LCD brightness to the minimum - on a train at night, lets say - I can squeeze out over 6 hours of word processing.
The big caveat I'm not factoring in here is the video card. Graphics heavy applications suck the juice out pretty fast. Fortunately I have a desktop for gaming.
Just as important, overall costs could fall, because defective chips could be removed like Scrabble tiles.
With my luck I'll get a dead Pentium Z or Q that I just can't get rid of.
...whereas on slashdot, supporting the appropriation of novel technology by Big Brother is sufficient to guarantee entanglement in lengthy conflicts by /.ers of poor intelligence.
I heard that people without pulse get a sense of disorientation and un-equilibrium. Especially those with screw drive hearts.
All things considered, I'd say those people with no pulse who can attribute it to an artificial heart are the lucky ones.
Alas, some poor soul might not meet the primary requirement for our nation's great vocational colleges.
According to the group of ball male honorary professors same university Noguchi, you say that the globefish eats the living thing which has poison such as asteroid and the shellfish which are in the seabed accumulates that poison to internal.
Perhaps NASA should consider employing a fleet of fugu to protect earth from rogue asteroids that accumulate that poison to internal.
Well said, chum.
I for one am a staunch supporter of the undemocratic influence on politics, the wholesale environmental damage, and the pronounced socio-economic striation resulting from overreliance on non-renewable resources controlled by massive corporate monopolies.
By continuing to allow petro-chemical interests to dominate political policy, we ensure that the natural, capitalist, laissez faire stagnation of innovation maintains the status quo, so I can buy another yacht, and poor children in cities around the world may continue to suffer from debilitating asthma.
Hurrah!
Sweet, now I can bake myself a celebratory EZ hamster cake, because it looks like HL2, Halo 2, and Doom3 are shipping!!!
Woohoo!
"...agressive transexual boss"
"...had to be frisked before i went to my office..."
"...my boss would threaten to 'fuck our asses'"
You actually bought the old "people are stealing stuff" line, huh? I'll bet Big Gay Al lists that job as one of his favorites.
It's always a good time to release a good game (by "good," I mean fun to play and judged by many to be worth their hard-earned money)... It's also never a good time to release a crappy game that nobody will want to play, no matter how hot the market for games if its ilk might be.
That's a good point. Look at Blizzard: their releases consistently get pushed back past the target holiday season and their games sell just fine.
That being said, just becase the prospective game was a Sam & Max sequel doesn't guarantee it to have been a "good" game. (Does anyone remember the dismal Sam & Max: Freelance Police cartoon?) Hit the Road was super, but its been 10 years since I've looked to LucasArts for that kind of innovation.
From the article: "Prepubescent boys undergoing treatment for cancer that will render them sterile could benefit, Professor Dobrinski suggest."
"Billy, the doctors have good news. The cancer is in remission, and you're going to make a complete recovery! And guess what else? The doctors have given you a pet immunodeficient mouse! Take good care of him Mr. Fuzzy if you ever want to have kids of your own."
IRC, copper conducts heat better than silver...
Last time I checked, that isn't the case. Silver has the best thermal conductivity of all elemental metals (at least all common ones - I don't actually have an extensive list in front of me). Slightly, but not drastically, better than that of copper. And with respect to other to other responses to the parent, the conductivity of aluminum, while better than, say, steel, pales in comparison to that of copper or silver.
See FrostyTech, or Tom's Hardware if you don't believe me.
The use of aluminum is a consequence of price and of system requirements. You can cool a Pentium II, for instance, adequately with an aluminum heatsink because it doesn't put out as much heat. Modern processors, on the other hand, put out more watts of energy which needs to be rapidly sucked away from the cpu and dissipated, so a heatsink with a copper core at the very least tends to be the norm.
Why don't we see more silver heatsinks? Price, of course. Copper is already relatively expensive, but a big block of high purity silver is out of the price range of most people. At that point water cooling probably has a better price performance ratio.
There really are lots of ways to respond to that statement. I think the first thing to point out, though, is the difference between the Moon and Antarctica. The Moon hosts a wealth of potential resources that a colonizing nation or corporation could exploit, irrespective of any vague agreements and conceptions regarding its international status.
The technical challenge of sending spacecraft and humans to the Moon may necessetate advances in engineering and material science. The Lunar surface would provide an excellent base of scientific exploration for a number of fields (meteorology, astronomy, astrobiology, etc). A Moon colony could prove to be an economic resource (if you don't like the idea of mining minerals through the gravity well, then consider the potential as a communications center or an energy source.
Also, not to be forgotten are the political ramifications of a successful Chinese base on the Lunar surface. Space and lunar exploration in the US is often funded according to political sentiment. The Apollo missions were fueled by anti-Soviet Cold War mentality. Aside from the possibility of a Chinese Lunar military base, watching China successfully execute a moonshot and construct a colony is a blow to US technological and military superiority - and that is something US citizens and politicians don't like to see.
So, in light of all this, whether you view a non-US Moon mission as a problem is a matter of opinion. But the Moon is a much more valuable prize than Antarctica, so it is easy to see how the US's nationalistic desire to claim political, military, economic, and moral superiority over everyone else will lead many people to conclude that a non-US plan to get to the Moon is decidedly unsettling.
The military has a policy about this already:
Don't ask, don't tell