The only way, and I do mean the only way, to successfully implement recycling of anything is to require manufacturers to use recycled components.
If you did that, the private sector would find a way to get old computers. If they had to buy them from you, they'd do it. You'd see the same fee of about $25 per computer (since this would raise costs) but you'd know where your money was going.
Unfortunately, in the new global economy, this is not possible, since the US guvmint hasn't the power (well, it has the power to crush anybody, economicaly if not militarily, but not the wherewithal) to enforce such a requirement on foreign manufacturers (it'd be restraint of trade, or somesuch.)
We end up dumping the stuff in Asia where it's manufactured, anyway. From whence it came, it returns. The best we can hope for is that the governments in Asia will do the sensible thing and start recycling it. Unfortunately, the PRC doesn't seem to be moving in that direction.
Anything we do in the states, that doesn't effect what happens during the actual manufacturing process (which happens over there) is just to make ourselves feel better (except in this case it is a cynical ploy to avoid regulation) it accomplishes nothing.
I'm having trouble believing that you really wrote that.
The US government is not supposed to be in the business of "labeling" or "dealing with" cults; or small, emerging religions, to use an unbiased term. I like to think that the government shouldn't be "labeling" or "dealing with" anybody.
Scientology, which is no more of a scam than many well established religions, is as entitled to exist without government persecution as any other group. I may not like them, in fact, I despise them, but a line has to be drawn - the government has no business applying any other investigative standard to the Scientology cult than has been applied to the Roman Catholic church.
In Russia, and in much of Europe, where controls on government intervention in the religious/ideological sector of the economy are not so stringent, the government is free to oppress scientologists, and does so. Read about it at the OCRT website. Other governments use these same powers to quell political dissent, which is why in our society we have had the good sense to deny the government these powers.
There is no way to grant the government the right to protect scientologists from themselves without granting the government the right to offer the same "protection" to other dissidents or nonconformers.
If the DoJ where inclined to go after people for making them look bad (do they even know it makes them look bad?) they could claim that releasing even general carnivore usage statistics was obstruction of justice. On that count, they would (I hope to god) have no real legal basis, but they could sure scare people.
I'm pretty sure that all of these ISPs got instructions from the Feds not to tell anyone about these requests. I know they wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on, but I'd worry about being harassed by the justice department for talking about this stuff to the press, which someone has obviously been doing. This is especially true if the CIA gets involved; they can be pretty vindictive.
The proposal, made by Albert Gidari (An "expert" on technology law who represents people? There are names for experts who represent people. To call them an "expert" implies a certain nonbias.) that ISPs need to be held indemnified for violating your privacy if the government asks them too, is an insult.
Way to go, Herb. If I could sell out for the kinda cash you must be raking in (suggestions - build giant bin, go swimming) I'd do it in a second. 99% of the personal criticsm is (already apparent) personal jealousy. This isn't a sinister plot to somehow subvert ANSI C++ to MS' evil ends. It's a good career move on his part.
from MS web site: "Herb's involvement in the C++ community will allow Microsoft to better work with developers building great applications in C++ and ultimately help drive the direction of our Visual C++.NET tool," said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft.
i.e. he's a PR figurehead. MS seems to think people will care. Jokes on them. This is too bad, b/c some people are going to be forced to work on C++@.NET, and Herb writes good; if they put him in documentation I'd actually be pleased.
global open society that could ensure a greater degree of freedom than individual states can or will. Is it already too late for that?
In response to this "Linux myth", Microsoft chairman Bill Gates issued the following press release: My minions are already in a position to topple all world government and make me supreme leader. Your pathetic open source movement is powerless to stop me! Bwah ha ha ha ha!
You can find more information at the new homepage for world domination, www.wehaveyouunderourthumb.com.
Seriously, Jon, please. Open Source is an anticorporate movement; to the extent that the excessive power of corporations makes the lives of people who like to muck around with computers difficult, open source can help. Open source can even help to make technology cheaper, and reduce the economic clout of certain, particular, monopolistic corporations.
However, the high price of technology is not the root cause of most of the evil in the world. The profits from selling software are not what props up the international corporations and allows them to subvert the political process around the world to their own ends. Even if the techno anarchists succeed in destroying not just Big Software, but Big Music and Big Media as well, how will that benefit some teenage girl making a nickel a day manufacturing CD player components while she's exposed to heavy metals and drinks cholera contaminated water in a ghetto in the philippines? Oh, the CD player will have Linux embedded in it! AND no big mean corporation will be able to make you embed DRM in the firmware!
Free software advocates have argued for years now that open software could help create wealth and promote open societies in once-repressive, impoverished and technologically-primitive regimes.
Like Rock music was going to? There is a certain truth to the argument that open source software is such a cool idea that it changes people on a philosophical level. So does la musica rock. I like Rock Music, and I like Open Source. Both of them have a highly positive impact on my quality of life, personally.
However, when you're talking about injustice on a global scale, call me when Richard Stallman storms the bastille, okay?
I'm a liberal, not a revolutionary by preference or inclination. I'm not looking for an excuse to promote armed struggle. However, when the institutions for moderate change, which is less disruptive to people's lives and welfare, if that is what you really care about and I do, have been co-opted so completely by reactionary forces, you're not left with a lot of options.
Recall, global corporations have a serious weakness vis a vis nation-states. Evil megacorps do not engender real loyalty. They try, and you can envisage a (nightmarish) future, where they do, but I don't think that it's likely. They depend for their existence on loyalty to the institutions of law and government which we have erected for the public benefit, and which they are subverting to support their own agendas. There comes a point where significant numbers of people - smart, able, well organised people - begin to lose loyalty to those institutions. This enables conglomerates to seize more control of those institutions; see cycle, vicious.
Now that the USSR is gone, people forget how close they came to winning, in how many ways and on how many fronts and at how many times. The institutions that protect our civil society, which seem to us so powerful exist purely in our heads; our society is not so different from the USSR is that it could collapse spontaneously based on the fickleness of the public mind; a fortress built of paper burns down in a day. I'm not just worried about the rise of corporate republics, as dystopic as such might be. I'm worried about the backlash from the other side of the political spectrum, which can be very, very ugly, and which threatened to stamp out civil society world wide as recently as 20 years ago. That is less than a generation. If you think that such sentiments are not simmering world wide just b/c the USSR is no longer helping them with their pamphletry, you are not paying attention.
Can free (as in speech) software help stem the rage of 65% of the world's population against those implicated in their impoverishment? No, it can't. Sorry.
The obvious issue is, what about those without anything to lose?
We need smaller, more agile nuclear weapons in order to counteract the threat of enemy boxcutters?
there's a good bit of question if the weapons built in the late 60s and 70s would even be functional today.
That is true. However, I'm certain that the Bush administration, which, if you'll recall, is not entirely in favor of the test ban treaty anyway wants to build new toys. It is my belief, which I failed to explain in my original post, that this is the real goal of the technology that they're developing.
i.e. even if you can blow them up and don't strictly need computer models to test them, as anyone who's ever worked on an airplane design will tell you, the computers are a helpful first step. I wouldn't expect even this administration would be dumb enough to field something without first setting a few off underground (though they might try and get us to fork over the cash regardless), so this obviously isn't a substitute for backing out of the test ban treaty, but merely an attempt to move in that direction.
You could also say that this is intended to abrogate an argument put forward by those who want to pull out of the CTBT, if you were inclined to ascribe good will or good sense to anyone who works with nuclear weapons.
The fact that this was the sane option says a lot about the US, and little of it is good.
There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!
There are sound engineering/technical reasons, which military tech buffs are fond of pointing out, why it would be safe/acceptable to make controlled use of nuclear weapons. The military tech buffs are probably right as far as that goes, which isn't very far. If we're serious about controlling the proliferation of suitcase nukes we have to act multilaterally.
Improving our nuke arsenal - especially after the foreign press has been filled with ill conceived threats/discussions of the possibility that we might use it - is shameful and stupid. We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.
What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.
Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
Medicine needs to be more callous
on
Hospital Robots
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· Score: 2
All this touchy feely crap gets on my nerves. Medicine needs Daleks.
This thing is halfway there. It rolls around, it talks, if you push it over it can't get up again. It just needs some cool deelybobs glued onto it, a bad attitude, and a laser cannon. Instead of "I am about to move, please get out of the way," it should say "RESISTANCE IS USELESS! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" or, in a hospital setting "DESTROY THE DOCTOR!"
Some obstruction shows up in the hallway, and bam!, the ornery old man is reduced to cinders by a cheezy special effect.
As such, all three proposed usages: Secure and secret storage, secure and secret computation, and secure content delivery, are all inherently flawed.
This is all to true. Therefore, given Brilliant digital's wicked corporate pedigree, we conclude that they must have a secret, sinister master plan that they're not telling us about.
They've been clever enough to use evil plans as a smokescreen - the plans they've described are just wicked enough that you might believe that they really are brilliant digital's brilliant evil plan. This means that the real evil plan must be extra... brilliant.
Basically, we can divide the possible real evil plans into three categories: 1) Defense related. They're going to hack into NORAD, and hold the world hostage from skull island. The fact that this is physically impossible (because NORAD isn't connected to the public 'net, and so on) never stops Dr. Evil, so it shouldn't be a hindrance for Brilliant Digital.
2) Biblical. Enumerate the billion secret names of god, conjure forth their lord and master, Satan himself. You all saw Warlock, right? Like that.
3) Astrononomical. I know that if I had the computing power of fiteen million consumer level CPU's at my disposal, I'd use it to pull the moon into the earth. 'nuff said.
Either way, we're talking countdown to doomsday, here, and only one man can stop them. I hope Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister's mistress is played by Zhang Ziyi; she is so hot.
Thirdly, R&D, while more expensive for the military than for any other enterprise, is still a better deal than buying enough old-tech hardware and manpower to do what we expect out military to do: win quickly (preferably within weeks) and suffer no losses.
Firstly, military technology has had many beneficial spinoffs - such as the Internet. It can be argued that other publically funded research is a better investment of our dollars, and produces more beneficial spinoffs per dollar spent. However, the spinoffs of military technology definitely improve human society.
Secondly, it is not true that we will remain militarily invincible forever. It would be *more* true if we stopped exporting our best, or next-to best, military technology to whichever fascist regime we wanted to prop up today, but nonetheless, if we stopped improving our military the rest of the world would eventually catch up. Bribing our defense sector with huge amounts of cash money helps to prevent our existing defense technology from percolating into the rest of the world - espionage against US defense contractors would be hugely easier if they were not flush with cash. Obviously, this doesn't prevent all bribery of the defense industry (the two things that human beings possess in potentially infinite amounts being greed and stupidity) but it helps.
Thirdly, R&D, while more expensive for the military than for any other
so after 8 weeks, chances are good that the baby is healthy and will get to term
Chances still aren't "good" that the baby will go to term. If success is only 1% likely (according to the BBC interview someone posted), then even if 75% of the embryos terminate in the first eight weeks (which is just what I recall), that means that only 1%/25% = 4% of the remaining embryos go to term. I wouldn't call those odds "good".
As far as being healthy; of the animals cloned so far I believe the healthy total - Dolly was about as healthy as they come - is more like 0%.
That said, it's entirely possible that they have an eight-week old clonal embryo; for one thing, the success rate in humans may be higher than in other species; everyone is keen to point out that it might be lower but we don't know. If the baby is brought to term I'd want to see genetic tests to prove it was really a clone, of course.
In any case, this is monstrous. The babies are likely to be deformed, and this should be stopped immediately.
First, wander around the building until you feel the ground beneath your feet vibrate.
Then, reach over to your keyboard (a wireless is best, use a stick if necesarry, but don't move from that spot!) and do the following in exactly this order. You will need to have already downloaded any files mentioned below-
1) copy seven different.cnd files into Windows\Candelabra.
2) Go to your sounds control panel and change your error message to "Opening." Cause the error message to be played.
3) You now have five seconds to execute Windows\Candelabra\Light.bat, read Windows\Bookdead.txt and click "Accept."
4) A new button, marked with a double quote (") will appear on your explorer toolbar; this is a shortcut to \Windows\Yendor.exe. Open each and every folder on your hard drive, and click this button. While you're doing this, Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister, whom you thought you killed when you got Bookdead.txt, will periodically teleport into your room, and try and seize your keyboard in order to hide the button, delete or rename \Windows\Yendor.exe. You're going to have to kill him several times during this process, so keep a firearm handy.
5) Restart your computer.
6) Dedicate your desk as an altar to Anhur (or some other god, but Anhur is easiest.) Take your desk to the astral plane. Pile your computer on your desk and make of it an offering unto him.
Congratulations, you have now uninstalled brilliant digital's software.
As an extra challenge, try uninstalling the software without depending on divine intervention or commiting genocide.
I have evaluated a hit as relevant if it contains information related to the question asked. General information about Greece, or about the nutrient value of artichokes (but not containing specific info as to their vitamin content), I did not count as relevant. Pretty subjective, of course.
Query (relevant hits of top 5) Google Teoma Religious Intolerance by the Greek Orthodox Church 5 2(1) Nethack 3.4 Spoilers 5 0 Vitamin Content of Artichokes 4 0 Average Velocity of Asteroids 4 0 Who won the peloponnesian war?(2) 5 5 Samuel Handelman Columbia University(5) 2 0 Harry Noller University of California Santa Cruz 4 4 Edward Dratz University of Montana Bozeman 5 3 Dangers associated with mercury thermometers 2 0 Did Turing have any children? 0 0 okay Autobiography of Alen Turing(3) 5 2 Isaac Asimov's Middle Name(4) 3 2
Anyway, my time is up. avg. 50 seconds to run and squint at each query.
Subjectively, to all of these querries, the #1 hit on google contained the answer to my question (the EXACT vitamin content of artichokes, the NAME of the side that won the war,) while Tacoma, even though the hits were relevant to the question, it was not clear if the information I sought was actually in the returned result; except for my former faculty advisor and his colleague, which Teoma found just fine.
(1) I'm counting the Scientology hit as relevant. (2) Google corrected my spelling, which Tacoma did not. I'll accept that from a Beta. (3) Turing didn't write one. It was a trick question. Any link to a review, specifically, of either any of three (that I found) biographies of Alan Turing I counted as a hit. (4) I didn't get his middle name, but it turns out he wrote a story called "Middle Name" which swamped the results. Google found specific references to the story, whilest Teoma returned links to lists of Asimov's fiction, but I generously scored both as hits. (5) when I put my name in quotes Tacoma University either a) cannot find any matches or b) doesn't understand what the quotes mean. I assume b since none of the hits it finds without quotes mention me.
Anyway, I'm satisfied in calling that statistical signifance (95% chance) that google is better.
Dr. Stemmer argued that it would also aid other researchers by making more DNA sequences available. With the current uncertainty about patents, some companies have refused to reveal sequences they have deciphered out of fear that they will lose the rights to them.
Feh. Let them keep their secrets. As sequencing technology improves (I work in crystallography, a related field. Sequencing is improving rapidly in both accuracy and speed.) More and more sequences will be deciphered in an academic context and released into the public domain. Public science will suffer far more from companies trying to exert some kind of intellectual property rights over this genetic information that it will from academics having to do the work of sequencing.
Secondly, the whole concept is an insult. The company that copyrights the music (or, whoever owns the copyright on the music - another poster was keen to raise this as a question) owns only the music, not the sequence the music was derived from. If I'm going to use that sequence in any kind of peer-reviewed publication, I will have to make it available to other scientists, free of charge. Now, I presumably purchased some kind of access rights to the sequence, which included (a probably unenforceable) clause not to redistribute the sequence itself; this will likely prevent me from publishing in any reputable journal. Such non-redistribution agreements are common when scientists acquire physical research tools from industry - if I purchase a plasmid (that's a tiny piece of DNA that replicates in bacteria; most antibiotic resistance in bacteria is conferred from plasmids) I have to agree not to take that plasmid, copy it myself, and sell it or give it away. I'm free to talk about the sequence of the plasmid, however. So, any scientist who purchased access to your digital music would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding the DNA the music converted into, since that DNA sequence itself is not subject to copyright. If, however, someone else (who hadn't signed such an agreement) acquired the DNA sequence, and dumped it in SwisProt, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to tell where it came from originally; unless you "watermarked" each DNA sequence you distributed with errors of some kind.
Of course, this raises fundamental questions of the validity of digital copyright law, which amounts to copyrighting integers. I can write a program (which I copyright) that converts some particular string of babble (which I also copyright) into the text of War and Peace. Do I now own the copyright to War and Peace? Obviously not! I can distribute, and charge money for "wnpcmake.exe", but I have no claims on the OUTPUT that wnpcmake.exe always produces. If wnpcmake.exe happens to produce content owned by someone else, say, "The Ground Beneath her Feet" by Salman Rushdie, then I'm in violation of Rushdie's copyright. I have no claims of my own.
The copyright is on some real world thing, not on any particular digital representation. So, Amgen might own "Human liver fatty acid binding protein cancer-prone allele in C minor," which happens to map somehow to the sequence of that allele (an allele is a particular sequence/variant of a gene); they own the right to perform that piece of music, they own the right to distribute recordings of that music (digital or otherwise) and so forth. But, they can't write some program that converts War and Peace INTO this piece of music (or vice versa) and claim that they own War and Peace. Likewise, just because a DNA sequence HAPPENS to convert to their music, under some set of rules THEY have devised, cannot reasonably be expected to grant them rights over the sequence.
Note that I am not a lawyer, and can speak only for what is logical and sensible. To the extent that law may deviate from sanity, I cannot comment. Since patenting DNA sequences flies in the face of all reason anyway, I pretty much expect to be unpleasantly surprised.
Because their investors, which generally include the upper management, don't intend to hold onto their stock for the long run. They want to make a quick buck selling it, or recover a quick profit from destroying the company. Obviously, this isn't always true - Microsoft looks to the long run, for example:(.
Personally, I think this is a really stupid ad campaign on MS' part. The only thing I can think is they've deluded themselves into believing their product is somehow superior. I suppose there are a few people, who think (or hell, maybe they can) that they could maintain an MS server themselves but couldn't maintain a Unix server, who might fall for the line, but not very many.
I don't disagree with you philosophically, but just b/c artists will keep making music if they make less money does NOT mean that protecting the artist's cash flow is not a form of protecting the artists. Personally, I don't think copyright law serves to protect the finances of most artists.
The reason that the MPAA/RIAA wants to crush filesharing is NOT b/c it will undercut CD sales - it will undercut CD *prices*. The existence of filesharing prevents the MPAA/RIAA from exponentially increasing the prices of CDs, like they do in Japan. As filesharing (or whatever content on demand you care to name) becomes easier, it will, sooner or later, have a downward pressure on content prices.
Personally, I think the MPAA/RIAA is a racket, and that p2p is a legitimate means of tilting the economics back in our (consumers) favor.
Also, never forget that the MPAA/RIAA also hates/fears the legitimate uses of p2p, which Ebert was insightful enough to mention in his last column (also on slashdot.)
So, the professors/administrators, who cannot be bothered to do the work of maintaining the campus computer network, come in and say "MS has offered us platinum chains and underwater blowjobs if we teach all courses in the.NET environment, so go ye forth and set it up."
Whereupon the five guys in the basement of the engineering building (all campuses have such a building, with such a basement, with five slashdot readers in it - you know who you are) who actually maintain the campus computers say, depending on the rank of the personage and other political concerns-
1) "Run it by the chair of the department" (who is a crank with a zany axe to grind, 100% guaranteed.) Surprisingly, this works even if it has been run by the chair of the department three times already.
2) "Sir, we would start if we could, but these orders haven't been approved yet." (Have him sign some stuff, making the pompous blowhard think things will be "expedited" with his signature, then throw them away.) This is always the response if the prof. or admin. has officious looking documents with him.
3) "Fuck you, Dan." At a public university.
Regardless of what these five guys SAY, they DO the following set of things: {}.
And the students keep working on SPARCs, b/c the faculty don't have the wherewithal to push through an upgrade of the computers actually used for instruction.
The people that this.NET initiative is going to net (ahyuck, I made a funny) are the people in watered-down sorta-computing pre-business-school majors (Information Management, whatever) who don't actually do any programming or use the campus network. These schmucks, god how I despise them, are going to be all about.NET, and perhaps some poor fool is going to end up working for them. However, this is in-no-way going to alleviate MS' problem where the students who can actually code are using some UNIX derivative.
You can find the exact text of the original "research", such as it is, here. Google dwells in the sky and rules us.
The thing is a glossy advertising sheet which motorala purchased - NOT a research paper. The word "Data" DOES NOT EVEN APPEAR. Likewise, the words power, mean and measurement, and the letter n, are nowhere used in any statistical sense. The "research" seems to involve no hard numbers WHATSOEVER. The report has no references, although the author has peppered it with the names of her friends, along with vague, sweeping claims about the results of their "research" (if you can find evidence anywhere of where this supposed work was reported, by all means, post!) If there was ever any primary data associated with this report, it is not here and I cannot find it, although Dr. Plant includes a dozen glossy photographs she took herself. Dr. Sophie Plant, the author of the article, has quit her job at the University of Warwick's cybernetic culture research unit (a fact reuters also glosses over) in order, supposedly, to write full time.
Incidentally, the cybernetic culture research unit, established by Dr. Sadie Plant (author of the report), seems to do a lot of, yes I will keep the quotes, "research" into the experiences of people abducted by UFOs. Their homepage reads like the ravings of a new age schizophrenic.
This paper is absolute vapor; even in the field of Sociology is stands out for it's lack of substance.
Because yeast tastes wrong, and mushrooms are cheaper. When quoting bad science from movies, the thing that goes after the close-quote is [sic]. Yeast, incidentally, is eukaryotic (big cells, like what we're made of). Blue-green algae, an even faster growing variety of slime, is prokaryotic/bacterial (little cells, such as cause diptheria and the beubonic plague.) Although we (almost entirely) share our genetic code with bacteria, after the code is used to generate protein sequences, the proteins undergo post-processing which is very different, so a given gene (a sequence of DNA that codes for a particular protein) from, say, a Cow, may not "work" in yeast and probably will not "work" in blue-green algae; i.e. the gene will not produce the same result-protein as in Bessy.
Actual meat has blood cells and blood vessels; it has proteins (with distinctive scents/tastes) which are unique not only to animals, but to animal muscle tissues (likewise liver or kidney, if that's your taste). It contains a highly distinctive mix of small molecules. It has a texture which it is difficult to duplicate (even ground), especially if you start out with powder or ooze. If you want to know the state of meat-texture duplication technology, from powder, buy a can of Hormel chili and see if you can differentiate the meat and the textured vegetable.
Anyway, you could clone the proteins into a yeast or a mushroom (see above). You'd have approximately the same chance of success either way. However, mushroom's already form tissues, which single celled organisms (yeast, pond scum) don't. Ground, textured, flavored mushroom products don't taste a whole lot like meat, but the approximation of the texture is pretty good.
Now, Yeast or Algae is easier to cultivate in (say) hydroponics. So, if you wanted to duplicate the (much derided, unfairly to my mind) nutritional properties of meat, and did not concern yourself with taste or texture, it would be the way to go. However, the post-processing to texture it into something meat like (instead of a slime, powder or slurry) would, almost certainly, take up more space than the extra support facilities to grow a mushroom.
The best solution, from a synthetic meat standpoint, would be a cube of fillet minion that just kept growing forever in a nutrient bath, complete with blood vessels and whatever components you throught your meat needed (not, for example, nerves). Tumor, it's what's for dinner. This is a (probably) technologically easier proposition that churns out beef grown in tanks. I presume that this is what the group in the article is moving towards.
Of course, trying to do any of this in space is pretty silly. It seems like a frivolous thing to use up weight/space on; unless the beef industry is willing to pay for the space program as an advertising stunt.
When I was a kid, I used to play around with Concertware a lot - it was (as far as I know) the first software that let someone with only the most minimal knowledge of music write something down and hear what it sounded like. This is really neat, I'll grant, and I happily churned out hours and hours of bad chamber music.
However, after I started really playing with other people (band in school doesn't count) I concluded that computers were not really capable of producing music on their own. The computer plays whatever you type in perfectly, which is not what you want. The other musicians, if they're any good, adapt to what you play (this is particularly true of more improvised sorts of music, of course) which is a very "resource intensive" (in terms of your nervous system) proposition. Even if the players are producing exactly what the composer tells them, they're providing subtle variations in the sound (I don't want to mire myself in music-speak) that Concertware's great-grandchildren still cannot duplicate, at least that I've ever heard (although, to be fair, they can do a lot better than concertware.)
This is one of the reasons I don't like most electronic music - you can take a recording of tuvan chanting and sing/play along with it, remix it, what have you, but the technology does not successfully duplicate what the monks would do if they were in the room playing with you. When and if it can, I'll call whatever device an AI.
I suppose the people who actually operate cameras and draw cartoons have the same reservations about CG. As much as they I may love computer assisted editing (which is what most of the toys in the article are about), truely computer generated music still sounds like the stuff that plonked out of my Mac SE30.
At the moment it is literally an open standard - WoTC introduced some kind of license to use their basic rules in your own products (it is at the back of the 3rd edition PHB.) A number of other companies are churning out 3rd edition supplements under this license.
A long, long answer to your question:
The early history of RPGs is somewhat convoluted and murky - very little was actually published and it is not certain that Gary Gygax really invented the roleplaying game and he certainly didn't invent table top miniature gaming, although he popularised both - but many of the early xeroxed rules sets mentioned in the article were not, in fact, xeroxes of Gygax' rules, but xeroxes of other rules sets (Warlock and a pre-publication version of Arduin are two of these early RPGs which I have actually played - these days, you'd think of them as just house rules for D&D, not seperate games) some of which were eventually printed in small commercial releases and said things like "Major D&D variant" or the like, on the cover. Many of the rules appearing in subsequent editions of Greyhawk/D&D actually first appeared in these house rules sets that were floating about, and TSR/Gygax earned a certain amount of emnity from people for failing to credit them with their ideas (to be fair, some of them were somewhat obvious and Gygax could've come up with them on his own, or encountered them via third parties who didn't know who had invented a particular rule, making it impossible to give proper credit.)
At one point, TSR initialised some sort of legal action against the people who printed Warlock, claiming a combination of infringement on the Dungeons and Dragons trademark (which I'll grant) as well as some malarky about owning the concept of the roleplaying game. After that, and some other similar events, there was a certain movement among people who printed roleplaying games to avoid using TSR's game mechanics.
In the mid 1980s, Palladium (among other game companies) starting getting away with more-or-less duplicating TSR's game mechanics, without any repurcussions or legal trouble to my knowledge. Also, I think Dave Hargrave (Arduin) had been doing it all this time.
All of this is based on interviews I did with older gamers as part of an abortive anthro project (I dropped the course and never finished it,) most of whom do not like Gary Gygax AT ALL (about a third of the interview material, which I haven't saved, consisted of reasons he's a jerk), so take them with a grain of salt. Don't accept them as gospel like you would any other slashdot post:)
Nowadays, if you wanted to print a game and copy any number of rules-as-ideas (as opposed to verbatim text) from 3rd edition D&D, or any of a number of other games, you could certainly get away with it. You can get an idea of this by looking in the back of a Vampire rulebook, which (at least used to) credit all of the games it had "borrowed" ideas from.
Most of these games, or information about them, can be found on the net, except for Warlock (Warlock: The Black Spiral, which I found doing a search just now, is not related to the 1970s Warlock D&D Variant in any way.)
Slashdot Mirror
The only way, and I do mean the only way, to successfully implement recycling of anything is to require manufacturers to use recycled components.
If you did that, the private sector would find a way to get old computers. If they had to buy them from you, they'd do it. You'd see the same fee of about $25 per computer (since this would raise costs) but you'd know where your money was going.
Unfortunately, in the new global economy, this is not possible, since the US guvmint hasn't the power (well, it has the power to crush anybody, economicaly if not militarily, but not the wherewithal) to enforce such a requirement on foreign manufacturers (it'd be restraint of trade, or somesuch.)
We end up dumping the stuff in Asia where it's manufactured, anyway. From whence it came, it returns. The best we can hope for is that the governments in Asia will do the sensible thing and start recycling it. Unfortunately, the PRC doesn't seem to be moving in that direction.
Anything we do in the states, that doesn't effect what happens during the actual manufacturing process (which happens over there) is just to make ourselves feel better (except in this case it is a cynical ploy to avoid regulation) it accomplishes nothing.
I'm having trouble believing that you really wrote that.
The US government is not supposed to be in the business of "labeling" or "dealing with" cults; or small, emerging religions, to use an unbiased term. I like to think that the government shouldn't be "labeling" or "dealing with" anybody.
Scientology, which is no more of a scam than many well established religions, is as entitled to exist without government persecution as any other group. I may not like them, in fact, I despise them, but a line has to be drawn - the government has no business applying any other investigative standard to the Scientology cult than has been applied to the Roman Catholic church.
In Russia, and in much of Europe, where controls on government intervention in the religious/ideological sector of the economy are not so stringent, the government is free to oppress scientologists, and does so. Read about it at the OCRT website. Other governments use these same powers to quell political dissent, which is why in our society we have had the good sense to deny the government these powers.
There is no way to grant the government the right to protect scientologists from themselves without granting the government the right to offer the same "protection" to other dissidents or nonconformers.
If the DoJ where inclined to go after people for making them look bad (do they even know it makes them look bad?) they could claim that releasing even general carnivore usage statistics was obstruction of justice. On that count, they would (I hope to god) have no real legal basis, but they could sure scare people.
I'm pretty sure that all of these ISPs got instructions from the Feds not to tell anyone about these requests. I know they wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on, but I'd worry about being harassed by the justice department for talking about this stuff to the press, which someone has obviously been doing. This is especially true if the CIA gets involved; they can be pretty vindictive.
The proposal, made by Albert Gidari (An "expert" on technology law who represents people? There are names for experts who represent people. To call them an "expert" implies a certain nonbias.) that ISPs need to be held indemnified for violating your privacy if the government asks them too, is an insult.
Penny Arcade reveals eternal thruths.
.NET tool," said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft.
Way to go, Herb. If I could sell out for the kinda cash you must be raking in (suggestions - build giant bin, go swimming) I'd do it in a second. 99% of the personal criticsm is (already apparent) personal jealousy. This isn't a sinister plot to somehow subvert ANSI C++ to MS' evil ends. It's a good career move on his part.
from MS web site:
"Herb's involvement in the C++ community will allow Microsoft to better work with developers building great applications in C++ and ultimately help drive the direction of our Visual C++
i.e. he's a PR figurehead. MS seems to think people will care. Jokes on them. This is too bad, b/c some people are going to be forced to work on C++@.NET, and Herb writes good; if they put him in documentation I'd actually be pleased.
Can be found here. It is the most convincing argument I've yet read that the RIAA is doing the right thing.
Things that come from cows are inherently funny. I'm capped; feel free to disagree.
(-1, Dadaist)
global open society that could ensure a greater degree of freedom than individual states can or will. Is it already too late for that?
In response to this "Linux myth", Microsoft chairman Bill Gates issued the following press release:
My minions are already in a position to topple all world government and make me supreme leader. Your pathetic open source movement is powerless to stop me! Bwah ha ha ha ha!
You can find more information at the new homepage for world domination, www.wehaveyouunderourthumb.com.
Seriously, Jon, please. Open Source is an anticorporate movement; to the extent that the excessive power of corporations makes the lives of people who like to muck around with computers difficult, open source can help. Open source can even help to make technology cheaper, and reduce the economic clout of certain, particular, monopolistic corporations.
However, the high price of technology is not the root cause of most of the evil in the world. The profits from selling software are not what props up the international corporations and allows them to subvert the political process around the world to their own ends. Even if the techno anarchists succeed in destroying not just Big Software, but Big Music and Big Media as well, how will that benefit some teenage girl making a nickel a day manufacturing CD player components while she's exposed to heavy metals and drinks cholera contaminated water in a ghetto in the philippines? Oh, the CD player will have Linux embedded in it! AND no big mean corporation will be able to make you embed DRM in the firmware!
Free software advocates have argued for years now that open software could help create wealth and promote open societies in once-repressive, impoverished and technologically-primitive regimes.
Like Rock music was going to?
There is a certain truth to the argument that open source software is such a cool idea that it changes people on a philosophical level. So does la musica rock. I like Rock Music, and I like Open Source. Both of them have a highly positive impact on my quality of life, personally.
However, when you're talking about injustice on a global scale, call me when Richard Stallman storms the bastille, okay?
I'm a liberal, not a revolutionary by preference or inclination. I'm not looking for an excuse to promote armed struggle. However, when the institutions for moderate change, which is less disruptive to people's lives and welfare, if that is what you really care about and I do, have been co-opted so completely by reactionary forces, you're not left with a lot of options.
Recall, global corporations have a serious weakness vis a vis nation-states. Evil megacorps do not engender real loyalty. They try, and you can envisage a (nightmarish) future, where they do, but I don't think that it's likely. They depend for their existence on loyalty to the institutions of law and government which we have erected for the public benefit, and which they are subverting to support their own agendas. There comes a point where significant numbers of people - smart, able, well organised people - begin to lose loyalty to those institutions. This enables conglomerates to seize more control of those institutions; see cycle, vicious.
Now that the USSR is gone, people forget how close they came to winning, in how many ways and on how many fronts and at how many times. The institutions that protect our civil society, which seem to us so powerful exist purely in our heads; our society is not so different from the USSR is that it could collapse spontaneously based on the fickleness of the public mind; a fortress built of paper burns down in a day. I'm not just worried about the rise of corporate republics, as dystopic as such might be. I'm worried about the backlash from the other side of the political spectrum, which can be very, very ugly, and which threatened to stamp out civil society world wide as recently as 20 years ago. That is less than a generation. If you think that such sentiments are not simmering world wide just b/c the USSR is no longer helping them with their pamphletry, you are not paying attention.
Can free (as in speech) software help stem the rage of 65% of the world's population against those implicated in their impoverishment? No, it can't. Sorry.
The obvious issue is, what about those without anything to lose?
We need smaller, more agile nuclear weapons in order to counteract the threat of enemy boxcutters?
there's a good bit of question if the weapons built in the late 60s and 70s would even be functional today.
That is true. However, I'm certain that the Bush administration, which, if you'll recall, is not entirely in favor of the test ban treaty anyway wants to build new toys. It is my belief, which I failed to explain in my original post, that this is the real goal of the technology that they're developing.
i.e. even if you can blow them up and don't strictly need computer models to test them, as anyone who's ever worked on an airplane design will tell you, the computers are a helpful first step. I wouldn't expect even this administration would be dumb enough to field something without first setting a few off underground (though they might try and get us to fork over the cash regardless), so this obviously isn't a substitute for backing out of the test ban treaty, but merely an attempt to move in that direction.
You could also say that this is intended to abrogate an argument put forward by those who want to pull out of the CTBT, if you were inclined to ascribe good will or good sense to anyone who works with nuclear weapons.
The fact that this was the sane option says a lot about the US, and little of it is good.
There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!
There are sound engineering/technical reasons, which military tech buffs are fond of pointing out, why it would be safe/acceptable to make controlled use of nuclear weapons. The military tech buffs are probably right as far as that goes, which isn't very far. If we're serious about controlling the proliferation of suitcase nukes we have to act multilaterally.
Improving our nuke arsenal - especially after the foreign press has been filled with ill conceived threats/discussions of the possibility that we might use it - is shameful and stupid. We can intimidate the rest of the world into going along with us in public; we don't even need our military might to do that (although it does help), our economic clout is sufficient to scare the pants off of anyone with anything to lose.
What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.
Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
All this touchy feely crap gets on my nerves. Medicine needs Daleks.
This thing is halfway there. It rolls around, it talks, if you push it over it can't get up again. It just needs some cool deelybobs glued onto it, a bad attitude, and a laser cannon. Instead of "I am about to move, please get out of the way," it should say "RESISTANCE IS USELESS! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" or, in a hospital setting "DESTROY THE DOCTOR!"
Some obstruction shows up in the hallway, and bam!, the ornery old man is reduced to cinders by a cheezy special effect.
As such, all three proposed usages: Secure and secret storage, secure and secret computation, and secure content delivery, are all inherently flawed.
This is all to true. Therefore, given Brilliant digital's wicked corporate pedigree, we conclude that they must have a secret, sinister master plan that they're not telling us about.
They've been clever enough to use evil plans as a smokescreen - the plans they've described are just wicked enough that you might believe that they really are brilliant digital's brilliant evil plan. This means that the real evil plan must be extra... brilliant.
Basically, we can divide the possible real evil plans into three categories:
1) Defense related. They're going to hack into NORAD, and hold the world hostage from skull island. The fact that this is physically impossible (because NORAD isn't connected to the public 'net, and so on) never stops Dr. Evil, so it shouldn't be a hindrance for Brilliant Digital.
2) Biblical. Enumerate the billion secret names of god, conjure forth their lord and master, Satan himself. You all saw Warlock, right? Like that.
3) Astrononomical. I know that if I had the computing power of fiteen million consumer level CPU's at my disposal, I'd use it to pull the moon into the earth. 'nuff said.
Either way, we're talking countdown to doomsday, here, and only one man can stop them. I hope Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister's mistress is played by Zhang Ziyi; she is so hot.
Thirdly, R&D, while more expensive for the military than for any other enterprise, is still a better deal than buying enough old-tech hardware and manpower to do what we expect out military to do: win quickly (preferably within weeks) and suffer no losses.
I'll play devil's advocate.
Firstly, military technology has had many beneficial spinoffs - such as the Internet. It can be argued that other publically funded research is a better investment of our dollars, and produces more beneficial spinoffs per dollar spent. However, the spinoffs of military technology definitely improve human society.
Secondly, it is not true that we will remain militarily invincible forever. It would be *more* true if we stopped exporting our best, or next-to best, military technology to whichever fascist regime we wanted to prop up today, but nonetheless, if we stopped improving our military the rest of the world would eventually catch up. Bribing our defense sector with huge amounts of cash money helps to prevent our existing defense technology from percolating into the rest of the world - espionage against US defense contractors would be hugely easier if they were not flush with cash. Obviously, this doesn't prevent all bribery of the defense industry (the two things that human beings possess in potentially infinite amounts being greed and stupidity) but it helps.
Thirdly, R&D, while more expensive for the military than for any other
so after 8 weeks, chances are good that the baby is healthy and will get to term
Chances still aren't "good" that the baby will go to term. If success is only 1% likely (according to the BBC interview someone posted), then even if 75% of the embryos terminate in the first eight weeks (which is just what I recall), that means that only 1%/25% = 4% of the remaining embryos go to term. I wouldn't call those odds "good".
As far as being healthy; of the animals cloned so far I believe the healthy total - Dolly was about as healthy as they come - is more like 0%.
That said, it's entirely possible that they have an eight-week old clonal embryo; for one thing, the success rate in humans may be higher than in other species; everyone is keen to point out that it might be lower but we don't know. If the baby is brought to term I'd want to see genetic tests to prove it was really a clone, of course.
In any case, this is monstrous. The babies are likely to be deformed, and this should be stopped immediately.
I'll summarise the instructions.
.cnd files into Windows\Candelabra.
First, wander around the building until you feel the ground beneath your feet vibrate.
Then, reach over to your keyboard (a wireless is best, use a stick if necesarry, but don't move from that spot!) and do the following in exactly this order. You will need to have already downloaded any files mentioned below-
1) copy seven different
2) Go to your sounds control panel and change your error message to "Opening." Cause the error message to be played.
3) You now have five seconds to execute Windows\Candelabra\Light.bat, read Windows\Bookdead.txt and click "Accept."
4) A new button, marked with a double quote (") will appear on your explorer toolbar; this is a shortcut to \Windows\Yendor.exe. Open each and every folder on your hard drive, and click this button. While you're doing this, Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister, whom you thought you killed when you got Bookdead.txt, will periodically teleport into your room, and try and seize your keyboard in order to hide the button, delete or rename \Windows\Yendor.exe. You're going to have to kill him several times during this process, so keep a firearm handy.
5) Restart your computer.
6) Dedicate your desk as an altar to Anhur (or some other god, but Anhur is easiest.) Take your desk to the astral plane. Pile your computer on your desk and make of it an offering unto him.
Congratulations, you have now uninstalled brilliant digital's software.
As an extra challenge, try uninstalling the software without depending on divine intervention or commiting genocide.
I have evaluated a hit as relevant if it contains information related to the question asked. General information about Greece, or about the nutrient value of artichokes (but not containing specific info as to their vitamin content), I did not count as relevant. Pretty subjective, of course.
Query (relevant hits of top 5)
Google Teoma
Religious Intolerance by the Greek Orthodox Church
5 2(1)
Nethack 3.4 Spoilers
5 0
Vitamin Content of Artichokes
4 0
Average Velocity of Asteroids
4 0
Who won the peloponnesian war?(2)
5 5
Samuel Handelman Columbia University(5)
2 0
Harry Noller University of California Santa Cruz
4 4
Edward Dratz University of Montana Bozeman
5 3
Dangers associated with mercury thermometers
2 0
Did Turing have any children?
0 0
okay
Autobiography of Alen Turing(3)
5 2
Isaac Asimov's Middle Name(4)
3 2
Anyway, my time is up. avg. 50 seconds to run and squint at each query.
Subjectively, to all of these querries, the #1 hit on google contained the answer to my question (the EXACT vitamin content of artichokes, the NAME of the side that won the war,) while Tacoma, even though the hits were relevant to the question, it was not clear if the information I sought was actually in the returned result; except for my former faculty advisor and his colleague, which Teoma found just fine.
(1) I'm counting the Scientology hit as relevant.
(2) Google corrected my spelling, which Tacoma did not. I'll accept that from a Beta.
(3) Turing didn't write one. It was a trick question. Any link to a review, specifically, of either any of three (that I found) biographies of Alan Turing I counted as a hit.
(4) I didn't get his middle name, but it turns out he wrote a story called "Middle Name" which swamped the results. Google found specific references to the story, whilest Teoma returned links to lists of Asimov's fiction, but I generously scored both as hits.
(5) when I put my name in quotes Tacoma University either a) cannot find any matches or b) doesn't understand what the quotes mean. I assume b since none of the hits it finds without quotes mention me.
Anyway, I'm satisfied in calling that statistical signifance (95% chance) that google is better.
Dr. Stemmer argued that it would also aid other researchers by making more DNA sequences available. With the current uncertainty about patents, some companies have refused to reveal sequences they have deciphered out of fear that they will lose the rights to them.
Feh. Let them keep their secrets. As sequencing technology improves (I work in crystallography, a related field. Sequencing is improving rapidly in both accuracy and speed.) More and more sequences will be deciphered in an academic context and released into the public domain. Public science will suffer far more from companies trying to exert some kind of intellectual property rights over this genetic information that it will from academics having to do the work of sequencing.
Secondly, the whole concept is an insult. The company that copyrights the music (or, whoever owns the copyright on the music - another poster was keen to raise this as a question) owns only the music, not the sequence the music was derived from. If I'm going to use that sequence in any kind of peer-reviewed publication, I will have to make it available to other scientists, free of charge. Now, I presumably purchased some kind of access rights to the sequence, which included (a probably unenforceable) clause not to redistribute the sequence itself; this will likely prevent me from publishing in any reputable journal. Such non-redistribution agreements are common when scientists acquire physical research tools from industry - if I purchase a plasmid (that's a tiny piece of DNA that replicates in bacteria; most antibiotic resistance in bacteria is conferred from plasmids) I have to agree not to take that plasmid, copy it myself, and sell it or give it away. I'm free to talk about the sequence of the plasmid, however. So, any scientist who purchased access to your digital music would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding the DNA the music converted into, since that DNA sequence itself is not subject to copyright. If, however, someone else (who hadn't signed such an agreement) acquired the DNA sequence, and dumped it in SwisProt, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to tell where it came from originally; unless you "watermarked" each DNA sequence you distributed with errors of some kind.
Of course, this raises fundamental questions of the validity of digital copyright law, which amounts to copyrighting integers. I can write a program (which I copyright) that converts some particular string of babble (which I also copyright) into the text of War and Peace. Do I now own the copyright to War and Peace? Obviously not! I can distribute, and charge money for "wnpcmake.exe", but I have no claims on the OUTPUT that wnpcmake.exe always produces. If wnpcmake.exe happens to produce content owned by someone else, say, "The Ground Beneath her Feet" by Salman Rushdie, then I'm in violation of Rushdie's copyright. I have no claims of my own.
The copyright is on some real world thing, not on any particular digital representation. So, Amgen might own "Human liver fatty acid binding protein cancer-prone allele in C minor," which happens to map somehow to the sequence of that allele (an allele is a particular sequence/variant of a gene); they own the right to perform that piece of music, they own the right to distribute recordings of that music (digital or otherwise) and so forth. But, they can't write some program that converts War and Peace INTO this piece of music (or vice versa) and claim that they own War and Peace. Likewise, just because a DNA sequence HAPPENS to convert to their music, under some set of rules THEY have devised, cannot reasonably be expected to grant them rights over the sequence.
Note that I am not a lawyer, and can speak only for what is logical and sensible. To the extent that law may deviate from sanity, I cannot comment. Since patenting DNA sequences flies in the face of all reason anyway, I pretty much expect to be unpleasantly surprised.
Because their investors, which generally include the upper management, don't intend to hold onto their stock for the long run. They want to make a quick buck selling it, or recover a quick profit from destroying the company. Obviously, this isn't always true - Microsoft looks to the long run, for example :(.
Personally, I think this is a really stupid ad campaign on MS' part. The only thing I can think is they've deluded themselves into believing their product is somehow superior. I suppose there are a few people, who think (or hell, maybe they can) that they could maintain an MS server themselves but couldn't maintain a Unix server, who might fall for the line, but not very many.
I don't disagree with you philosophically, but just b/c artists will keep making music if they make less money does NOT mean that protecting the artist's cash flow is not a form of protecting the artists. Personally, I don't think copyright law serves to protect the finances of most artists.
The reason that the MPAA/RIAA wants to crush filesharing is NOT b/c it will undercut CD sales - it will undercut CD *prices*. The existence of filesharing prevents the MPAA/RIAA from exponentially increasing the prices of CDs, like they do in Japan. As filesharing (or whatever content on demand you care to name) becomes easier, it will, sooner or later, have a downward pressure on content prices.
Personally, I think the MPAA/RIAA is a racket, and that p2p is a legitimate means of tilting the economics back in our (consumers) favor.
Also, never forget that the MPAA/RIAA also hates/fears the legitimate uses of p2p, which Ebert was insightful enough to mention in his last column (also on slashdot.)
So, the professors/administrators, who cannot be bothered to do the work of maintaining the campus computer network, come in and say "MS has offered us platinum chains and underwater blowjobs if we teach all courses in the .NET environment, so go ye forth and set it up."
.NET initiative is going to net (ahyuck, I made a funny) are the people in watered-down sorta-computing pre-business-school majors (Information Management, whatever) who don't actually do any programming or use the campus network. These schmucks, god how I despise them, are going to be all about .NET, and perhaps some poor fool is going to end up working for them. However, this is in-no-way going to alleviate MS' problem where the students who can actually code are using some UNIX derivative.
Whereupon the five guys in the basement of the engineering building (all campuses have such a building, with such a basement, with five slashdot readers in it - you know who you are) who actually maintain the campus computers say, depending on the rank of the personage and other political concerns-
1) "Run it by the chair of the department" (who is a crank with a zany axe to grind, 100% guaranteed.) Surprisingly, this works even if it has been run by the chair of the department three times already.
2) "Sir, we would start if we could, but these orders haven't been approved yet." (Have him sign some stuff, making the pompous blowhard think things will be "expedited" with his signature, then throw them away.) This is always the response if the prof. or admin. has officious looking documents with him.
3) "Fuck you, Dan." At a public university.
Regardless of what these five guys SAY, they DO the following set of things: {}.
And the students keep working on SPARCs, b/c the faculty don't have the wherewithal to push through an upgrade of the computers actually used for instruction.
The people that this
Just my $0.02 US ($3.00 Canadian)
You can find the exact text of the original "research", such as it is, here. Google dwells in the sky and rules us.
The thing is a glossy advertising sheet which motorala purchased - NOT a research paper. The word "Data" DOES NOT EVEN APPEAR. Likewise, the words power, mean and measurement, and the letter n, are nowhere used in any statistical sense. The "research" seems to involve no hard numbers WHATSOEVER. The report has no references, although the author has peppered it with the names of her friends, along with vague, sweeping claims about the results of their "research" (if you can find evidence anywhere of where this supposed work was reported, by all means, post!) If there was ever any primary data associated with this report, it is not here and I cannot find it, although Dr. Plant includes a dozen glossy photographs she took herself. Dr. Sophie Plant, the author of the article, has quit her job at the University of Warwick's cybernetic culture research unit (a fact reuters also glosses over) in order, supposedly, to write full time.
Incidentally, the cybernetic culture research unit, established by Dr. Sadie Plant (author of the report), seems to do a lot of, yes I will keep the quotes, "research" into the experiences of people abducted by UFOs. Their homepage reads like the ravings of a new age schizophrenic.
This paper is absolute vapor; even in the field of Sociology is stands out for it's lack of substance.
Because yeast tastes wrong, and mushrooms are cheaper. When quoting bad science from movies, the thing that goes after the close-quote is [sic]. Yeast, incidentally, is eukaryotic (big cells, like what we're made of). Blue-green algae, an even faster growing variety of slime, is prokaryotic/bacterial (little cells, such as cause diptheria and the beubonic plague.) Although we (almost entirely) share our genetic code with bacteria, after the code is used to generate protein sequences, the proteins undergo post-processing which is very different, so a given gene (a sequence of DNA that codes for a particular protein) from, say, a Cow, may not "work" in yeast and probably will not "work" in blue-green algae; i.e. the gene will not produce the same result-protein as in Bessy.
Actual meat has blood cells and blood vessels; it has proteins (with distinctive scents/tastes) which are unique not only to animals, but to animal muscle tissues (likewise liver or kidney, if that's your taste). It contains a highly distinctive mix of small molecules. It has a texture which it is difficult to duplicate (even ground), especially if you start out with powder or ooze. If you want to know the state of meat-texture duplication technology, from powder, buy a can of Hormel chili and see if you can differentiate the meat and the textured vegetable.
Anyway, you could clone the proteins into a yeast or a mushroom (see above). You'd have approximately the same chance of success either way. However, mushroom's already form tissues, which single celled organisms (yeast, pond scum) don't. Ground, textured, flavored mushroom products don't taste a whole lot like meat, but the approximation of the texture is pretty good.
Now, Yeast or Algae is easier to cultivate in (say) hydroponics. So, if you wanted to duplicate the (much derided, unfairly to my mind) nutritional properties of meat, and did not concern yourself with taste or texture, it would be the way to go. However, the post-processing to texture it into something meat like (instead of a slime, powder or slurry) would, almost certainly, take up more space than the extra support facilities to grow a mushroom.
The best solution, from a synthetic meat standpoint, would be a cube of fillet minion that just kept growing forever in a nutrient bath, complete with blood vessels and whatever components you throught your meat needed (not, for example, nerves). Tumor, it's what's for dinner. This is a (probably) technologically easier proposition that churns out beef grown in tanks. I presume that this is what the group in the article is moving towards.
Of course, trying to do any of this in space is pretty silly. It seems like a frivolous thing to use up weight/space on; unless the beef industry is willing to pay for the space program as an advertising stunt.
When I was a kid, I used to play around with Concertware a lot - it was (as far as I know) the first software that let someone with only the most minimal knowledge of music write something down and hear what it sounded like. This is really neat, I'll grant, and I happily churned out hours and hours of bad chamber music.
However, after I started really playing with other people (band in school doesn't count) I concluded that computers were not really capable of producing music on their own. The computer plays whatever you type in perfectly, which is not what you want. The other musicians, if they're any good, adapt to what you play (this is particularly true of more improvised sorts of music, of course) which is a very "resource intensive" (in terms of your nervous system) proposition. Even if the players are producing exactly what the composer tells them, they're providing subtle variations in the sound (I don't want to mire myself in music-speak) that Concertware's great-grandchildren still cannot duplicate, at least that I've ever heard (although, to be fair, they can do a lot better than concertware.)
This is one of the reasons I don't like most electronic music - you can take a recording of tuvan chanting and sing/play along with it, remix it, what have you, but the technology does not successfully duplicate what the monks would do if they were in the room playing with you. When and if it can, I'll call whatever device an AI.
I suppose the people who actually operate cameras and draw cartoons have the same reservations about CG. As much as they I may love computer assisted editing (which is what most of the toys in the article are about), truely computer generated music still sounds like the stuff that plonked out of my Mac SE30.
Silence! This is slashdot! You will not speak of analog media here!
.NET is neat.
Make a DivX out of it and distribute it on Gnutella, Kazaa, OpenNap etc.
Anyone who mails a VHS tape will be consigned to the same hell as people who think
At the moment it is literally an open standard - WoTC introduced some kind of license to use their basic rules in your own products (it is at the back of the 3rd edition PHB.) A number of other companies are churning out 3rd edition supplements under this license.
:)
A long, long answer to your question:
The early history of RPGs is somewhat convoluted and murky - very little was actually published and it is not certain that Gary Gygax really invented the roleplaying game and he certainly didn't invent table top miniature gaming, although he popularised both - but many of the early xeroxed rules sets mentioned in the article were not, in fact, xeroxes of Gygax' rules, but xeroxes of other rules sets (Warlock and a pre-publication version of Arduin are two of these early RPGs which I have actually played - these days, you'd think of them as just house rules for D&D, not seperate games) some of which were eventually printed in small commercial releases and said things like "Major D&D variant" or the like, on the cover. Many of the rules appearing in subsequent editions of Greyhawk/D&D actually first appeared in these house rules sets that were floating about, and TSR/Gygax earned a certain amount of emnity from people for failing to credit them with their ideas (to be fair, some of them were somewhat obvious and Gygax could've come up with them on his own, or encountered them via third parties who didn't know who had invented a particular rule, making it impossible to give proper credit.)
At one point, TSR initialised some sort of legal action against the people who printed Warlock, claiming a combination of infringement on the Dungeons and Dragons trademark (which I'll grant) as well as some malarky about owning the concept of the roleplaying game. After that, and some other similar events, there was a certain movement among people who printed roleplaying games to avoid using TSR's game mechanics.
In the mid 1980s, Palladium (among other game companies) starting getting away with more-or-less duplicating TSR's game mechanics, without any repurcussions or legal trouble to my knowledge. Also, I think Dave Hargrave (Arduin) had been doing it all this time.
All of this is based on interviews I did with older gamers as part of an abortive anthro project (I dropped the course and never finished it,) most of whom do not like Gary Gygax AT ALL (about a third of the interview material, which I haven't saved, consisted of reasons he's a jerk), so take them with a grain of salt. Don't accept them as gospel like you would any other slashdot post
Nowadays, if you wanted to print a game and copy any number of rules-as-ideas (as opposed to verbatim text) from 3rd edition D&D, or any of a number of other games, you could certainly get away with it. You can get an idea of this by looking in the back of a Vampire rulebook, which (at least used to) credit all of the games it had "borrowed" ideas from.
Most of these games, or information about them, can be found on the net, except for Warlock (Warlock: The Black Spiral, which I found doing a search just now, is not related to the 1970s Warlock D&D Variant in any way.)