You'd better know that a road sign shaped like that pentagon (in the US) means school, unless you want a ticket!
Ignorance of the non-obvious is no defense!
There was an interesting 'Top Gear' episode two weeks ago that had an interview with one of the two designers of all British road signs - she was a graduate student at the time and worked with her professor, and their designs are now ubiquitous in the country. (Google 'school road sign' if you want to see how incorrigible the US' sign is.)
The British signs do have their failings though - the 'men working' sign has been compared to a man struggling with a parasol in the wind.... (http://rosenblumtv.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/men_at_work_sign2.gif)
I made sure that I was collecting accurate statistics at my firewall (potential contradictory evidence) when I heard about Comcast kicking subscribers with arbitrary undisclosed limits. Let's see where I'm at now:
Looks like I've got to start hitting the internet a lot harder since I'm barely at the 10% mark so far this month, and now they've set the bar!
It's like when Comcast decided to 'discontinue' Usenet (their paltry 2gb/month service from Giganews, after already cutting it back several times). After you would pass 2gb, you'd be refused connection at the next login until the month elapsed, and any overage would come out of the following month's quota. Well, with no following month's quota to jeopardize, I made sure that I stayed connected without interruption for about 26 hours, and pulled about three years worth of 2gb/month off Comcast's Giganews. They set the rules, I play within them.
Another thing - no battery needed - camera stabilization gyros take about 10 minutes to get up to full speed (which is insanely fast), and then you can unplug the battery for another 20 minutes of spinning.
Yup, my roommate wanted to cash a $25000 check, the bank had to order the money and call him when it came in. Money is much more profitable when it is imaginary numbers in computers earning interest than paper in vaults in bank branches.
I'll upgrade/downgrade when they have a version without the ridiculous dumbing down of the 'launch' menu and the windows explorer with no opt-out. I tried it and it is impossible, it takes a whole bunch more clicks on non-obvious buttons to get anywhere, and when you just want to see drives and directories, they have idiot icons. Every version of Windows since 95 has had more 'idiot' features to turn off. Even making XP useable is to turn off themes, classic start menu, classic folder view, unhide system folders and put it on detalied view, turn off simple file sharing, security center, firewall, redonkulous services for idiots (uPNP, system restore, firewall service, zero config wireless, web publishing, etc). Install tweakUI and disable animated doggy idiot search, change the IE cache to something less than 100gb, etc.Then the real hacking starts, turn off the 'zip for dummies', image shell extensions, etc. Then after several update reboot cycles, remove the crapware they install in Firefox without your consent. Vista took this to extremes with it's idiot's control panel and useless UI control - and with it's nanny need for signed drivers thanks to DRM, it is Windows ME for the 2000's. Just like Vista, you'll be buying it whether you like it or not though. So many paid-for Vista's have been immediately wiped, it's near criminal to have a monopoly forced it onto computers in the first place.
Now they truly have made an OS for idiots, that only idiots can use.
RAID 10 would offer them the ability to lose 1/2 the drives for a smaller performance penalty than losing 2 drives in a RAID 6.
No, two dead drives in the same pair and the array is toast on raid 10. Two drives and the RAID 6 they described survives.
One of these rack units can survive at least two drive failures, but can survive zero power supply failures. I've pitched many more dead power supplies than hard drives. If the power supply dies during a write (RAID + no battery backup + two parity drives), consider the array corrupted.
>> After this last charge is throw out, Mr. Childs will undoubtedly counter-sue
And that's why they can't just let him go and drop the charges. How much would you have to be paid to willingly give up your career, have your name smeared, and be put in jail with criminals for over a year. That is at least what this man is owed, in addition to punitive damages.
While he is awaiting trial and 'not innocent' it is hard to counter-sue. In that interim those involved may have moved to different positions, retire, lose their election, etc. Even if he wins a multi-million dollar countersuit, do you think anyone will be held personally responsible? What needs to happen but won't is that every single person involved in prosecuting him needs to be disbarred, removed from their employ, and after being put in jail for a similar period and slapped with a criminal record, be unable to get a job running the city's street sweepers.
An advertising company wants to install software on your computer. They profit by data aggregation and accumulation by seeing where on the map you are interested in going, what friends you chat with, what all the files on your computer are and how you search for them, and oh, everything you look at on the internet. Click here to install.
It seems like ALL science museums are children's museums. Go to their websites and look at all the stock art pictures of six-year-olds. There is not much entertaining or educating to a scientifically trained adult except IMAX movies. The only thing I found interesting in the local museum was the sparse actual 'museum' part that had some early prototypes from Edison's lab. Otherwise everything is child-oriented, and not even that scientific, just a kindergarten with bubble wands and blocks, and if you are lucky some lab coat wearing 'scientist' will mix two unexplained solutions together that change color or make foam.
Just a survey of summer 'featured exhibits' (match the institution to the exhibit...):
Animal Grossology
Harry Potter: The Exhibit
CSI: The Experience
Another mentioned-on-here museum has this as their lead exhibit (touting the bond measure that paid for it):
Come visit, and check out many of your favorite hands-on activities for very young visitors and their families:
Put together a puzzle
Dance to music from around the world
Build with blocks
Make a craft to take home
Explore activities about dinosaurs, animals, magnets, and more
Listen to a story, try a science experiment, or walk like an animalPut together a puzzle
Dance to music from around the world
Build with blocks
Make a craft to take home
Explore activities about dinosaurs, animals, magnets, and more
Listen to a story, try a science experiment, or walk like an animal
Not only that, but anyone who has a problem with the price is free to download the code and put it up for a lower price, free, whatever they want. Which is, of course, the spirit of the GPL.
Unfortunately Apple has made it so that even if you want to give away your software for free (beer) they still have a revenue stream.
Drop the deci prefix? Like meter: right to centimeter, and millimeter? Are you advocating we go right to centibels?
Some prefixes have just become more commonly used, as they lay within the range of human perception and usefulness, and translating to another SI unit is a mental step. Like your lay person wouldn't grasp that the speed of light is 300 megameters per second, since we stop at kilometers in our normal usage. The logarithmic measure of energy keeps the size of the number comfortable, and makes it match human perception (which perceives energy non-linearly). The deci- prefix scales the measure to human perception since the smallest perceivable change in sound level is about 1dB (instead of.1B)
A decasecond with Google shows me that deci has been a metric (now SI) unit since 1795.
Before this, maybe you should advocate get kilocalores properly identified as such, or replaced by joules in common usage.
It's a technology to be avoided because it is from Sony. The same people that installed root kits on it's customer's computers. We shall not forget that they despise their customers.
The fate of the marbles is not changed by looking in the bag.
Unless I'm one of the marbles and you don't pick me, you insensitive clod!
I see someone hasn't been studying their quantum mechanics...
Quantum mechanics is only statistically relevant if the marbles are really really really really small... (or if the fate of the marbles relies on quantum mechanical effects, but that's not as funny).
One problem with the approach in the article, is they are just doing reasonable things like screening embryos. Women only have so many eggs so it's really only feasible to screen for big genetic problems from a few fertilized eggs to implant.
What you really want to develop the 'master race' is pre-screen the millions of sperm that men spray everywhere, and when you've found a winner in that half of the DNA, then fertilize the egg and see what you get.
All in all, it sounds like too much trouble. It would be much easier to open a 'clone' bank (like a sperm bank, except the donors have donated all their dna instead of just half). Pick a normal individual (maybe with the eye color you want your kid to have), completely sequence the DNA of the donor so you know what else you are getting, and have that DNA stuck into your egg.
In this light, human cloning: good. Much better than the awkward natural system we humans have of stirring our genetics together into random mash-up remixes of good and bad with a mutation thrown in here and there, that doesn't have any intelligent design behind it.
Re:Are you catholic?
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Thank you, o lone sane voice...The non-viable fetuses you had to terminate are more likely due to bad luck and environmental factors than due to the genetics of the rugrats-to-be (and we have a lot more toxic environmental factors now then ever before). Miscarriages can often happen from the smallest chemical imbalances during the first week or two after fertilization that may affect the development - we've perhaps even evolved the 'miscarriage' gene because it is evolutionarily costly to deliver young'uns who won't make it to reproduction age. However, you do raise a good point.
The problem is that in modern times we can't apparently let an infant die, no matter how hideously deformed or mis-developed (since 'belief' still trumps 'logic' it seems). If you don't let the surgeon put the heart back in the body and put the misfit in an incubator, you go to jail. The solution is to 'pick a good egg'.
Consider two parents who both have the recessive gene for cystic fibrosis. Is it wrong to select an embryo that doesn't have cystic fibrosis (25% chance of a child getting the disease), or even ensure that the child won't be a carrier (50% chance the child won't be affected, but will carry the recessive gene). This is not genetic engineering, this is removing a mutation that has the distinction of being recessive, so it can continue through the generations to destroy lives. I had two elementary schoolmates, brother and sister, both with cystic fibrosis (the parents won the lottery with a 1 in 16 chance both would get it). They are both dead now, but at least they sure did suffer.
Now if you could cull a crop of eggs from your own seed, and pick the unlikely match-up that didn't have bad vision, wicked crooked teeth, asthma, predisposition to depression, addiction, or murder, or maybe even mental retardation, why not? Maybe even pick the pretty one. I wouldn't mind being made of better genetic stuff. Natural selection doesn't work anymore, since we can't leave the bad ones behind when the tribe moves on (and the 'most fit' are the ones who aren't reproducing).
If we were really curious, we could hyperlink to what knives this associate's new bride Ewelina owns, but providing the public with organized access to information freely available on the internet might get you sued (?). Fortunately, weddingchannel.com isn't going to be suing slashdot anytime soon...
Mastercard has a web form where you can report merchants who require checking ID. It is not allowed by the merchant agreements they signed with Mastercard. I would record and report the date and the salesperson at the store, and ask who told them they have to ask for ID, if it is the store policy, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Install GIMPS on an OLPC computer before it's sent? "6 year old Ethiopian girl discovers largest prime number"
Install SETI@home on the special ed computer? "12 year down's syndrome child discovers extra-terrestrial intelligence"
Skinhead punk thinks folding@home makes a cool screensaver? "Neo-Nazi discovers cure to sickle-cell anemia"
Secretary is PWNED installing 'wallpapers' off the net? "Woman cracks DOD database in league with Chinese comrades"
It is too bad Spot the dog doesn't have a computer, but then again he does get offers saying that he may already be a winner...
You'd better know that a road sign shaped like that pentagon (in the US) means school, unless you want a ticket! Ignorance of the non-obvious is no defense!
There was an interesting 'Top Gear' episode two weeks ago that had an interview with one of the two designers of all British road signs - she was a graduate student at the time and worked with her professor, and their designs are now ubiquitous in the country. (Google 'school road sign' if you want to see how incorrigible the US' sign is.)
The British signs do have their failings though - the 'men working' sign has been compared to a man struggling with a parasol in the wind.... (http://rosenblumtv.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/men_at_work_sign2.gif)
I made sure that I was collecting accurate statistics at my firewall (potential contradictory evidence) when I heard about Comcast kicking subscribers with arbitrary undisclosed limits. Let's see where I'm at now:
Date Input Output Input Output
2010-01-01 251.870 2115.767 2116.783 251.558
2010-01-02 4057.632 3177.647 3178.459 4057.909
2010-01-03 38.004 1477.193 1476.422 39.027
2010-01-04 338.429 765.487 764.031 339.051
2010-01-05 7080.921 5497.791 5497.078 7081.385
2010-01-06 3106.979 1227.276 1232.928 3107.854
2010-01-07 3157.551 2625.572 2624.544 3159.966
2010-01-08 254.441 2537.142 2531.232 251.970
2010-01-09 35.455 1239.041 1240.122 36.826
2010-01-10 993.526 1655.382 1655.324 993.645
2010-01-11 4745.444 2715.261 2718.403 4745.090
2010-01-12 4450.554 2291.770 2294.454 4450.166
2010-01-13 283.387 47.536 47.747 283.328
Total 28794.19 MB 27372.87 MB 27377.53 MB 28797.77 MB
Looks like I've got to start hitting the internet a lot harder since I'm barely at the 10% mark so far this month, and now they've set the bar!
It's like when Comcast decided to 'discontinue' Usenet (their paltry 2gb/month service from Giganews, after already cutting it back several times). After you would pass 2gb, you'd be refused connection at the next login until the month elapsed, and any overage would come out of the following month's quota. Well, with no following month's quota to jeopardize, I made sure that I stayed connected without interruption for about 26 hours, and pulled about three years worth of 2gb/month off Comcast's Giganews. They set the rules, I play within them.
The whole thread about Ultrasurf being malware - so you can decide... http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=237184
Another thing - no battery needed - camera stabilization gyros take about 10 minutes to get up to full speed (which is insanely fast), and then you can unplug the battery for another 20 minutes of spinning.
Yup, my roommate wanted to cash a $25000 check, the bank had to order the money and call him when it came in. Money is much more profitable when it is imaginary numbers in computers earning interest than paper in vaults in bank branches.
I'll upgrade/downgrade when they have a version without the ridiculous dumbing down of the 'launch' menu and the windows explorer with no opt-out. I tried it and it is impossible, it takes a whole bunch more clicks on non-obvious buttons to get anywhere, and when you just want to see drives and directories, they have idiot icons. Every version of Windows since 95 has had more 'idiot' features to turn off. Even making XP useable is to turn off themes, classic start menu, classic folder view, unhide system folders and put it on detalied view, turn off simple file sharing, security center, firewall, redonkulous services for idiots (uPNP, system restore, firewall service, zero config wireless, web publishing, etc). Install tweakUI and disable animated doggy idiot search, change the IE cache to something less than 100gb, etc.Then the real hacking starts, turn off the 'zip for dummies', image shell extensions, etc. Then after several update reboot cycles, remove the crapware they install in Firefox without your consent. Vista took this to extremes with it's idiot's control panel and useless UI control - and with it's nanny need for signed drivers thanks to DRM, it is Windows ME for the 2000's. Just like Vista, you'll be buying it whether you like it or not though. So many paid-for Vista's have been immediately wiped, it's near criminal to have a monopoly forced it onto computers in the first place.
Now they truly have made an OS for idiots, that only idiots can use.
RAID 10 would offer them the ability to lose 1/2 the drives for a smaller performance penalty than losing 2 drives in a RAID 6.
No, two dead drives in the same pair and the array is toast on raid 10. Two drives and the RAID 6 they described survives.
One of these rack units can survive at least two drive failures, but can survive zero power supply failures. I've pitched many more dead power supplies than hard drives. If the power supply dies during a write (RAID + no battery backup + two parity drives), consider the array corrupted.
And that's why they can't just let him go and drop the charges. How much would you have to be paid to willingly give up your career, have your name smeared, and be put in jail with criminals for over a year. That is at least what this man is owed, in addition to punitive damages.
While he is awaiting trial and 'not innocent' it is hard to counter-sue. In that interim those involved may have moved to different positions, retire, lose their election, etc. Even if he wins a multi-million dollar countersuit, do you think anyone will be held personally responsible? What needs to happen but won't is that every single person involved in prosecuting him needs to be disbarred, removed from their employ, and after being put in jail for a similar period and slapped with a criminal record, be unable to get a job running the city's street sweepers.
An advertising company wants to install software on your computer. They profit by data aggregation and accumulation by seeing where on the map you are interested in going, what friends you chat with, what all the files on your computer are and how you search for them, and oh, everything you look at on the internet. Click here to install.
It seems like ALL science museums are children's museums. Go to their websites and look at all the stock art pictures of six-year-olds. There is not much entertaining or educating to a scientifically trained adult except IMAX movies. The only thing I found interesting in the local museum was the sparse actual 'museum' part that had some early prototypes from Edison's lab. Otherwise everything is child-oriented, and not even that scientific, just a kindergarten with bubble wands and blocks, and if you are lucky some lab coat wearing 'scientist' will mix two unexplained solutions together that change color or make foam.
Just a survey of summer 'featured exhibits' (match the institution to the exhibit...):
Another mentioned-on-here museum has this as their lead exhibit (touting the bond measure that paid for it):
Come visit, and check out many of your favorite hands-on activities for very young visitors and their families:
I had to Google to find out what evony is: Successfully blocked!
The T-Rex in Jurassic Park goes right after the lawyer!
Not only that, but anyone who has a problem with the price is free to download the code and put it up for a lower price, free, whatever they want. Which is, of course, the spirit of the GPL.
Unfortunately Apple has made it so that even if you want to give away your software for free (beer) they still have a revenue stream.
Drop the deci prefix? Like meter: right to centimeter, and millimeter? Are you advocating we go right to centibels?
.1B)
Some prefixes have just become more commonly used, as they lay within the range of human perception and usefulness, and translating to another SI unit is a mental step. Like your lay person wouldn't grasp that the speed of light is 300 megameters per second, since we stop at kilometers in our normal usage. The logarithmic measure of energy keeps the size of the number comfortable, and makes it match human perception (which perceives energy non-linearly). The deci- prefix scales the measure to human perception since the smallest perceivable change in sound level is about 1dB (instead of
A decasecond with Google shows me that deci has been a metric (now SI) unit since 1795.
Before this, maybe you should advocate get kilocalores properly identified as such, or replaced by joules in common usage.
Sansa Clip, very good sound quality, ogg and flac support, starting at below $50, sold at every WalMart (although you should buy it ANYWHERE else.)
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=8466133
- $29.88 This might say it's not in stores near you, because the stores have 4GB ones that aren't on the web site..)
Stop the whiny douchebaggery.
Divide that in half again. You can break an 8 character password in to two 4 character passwords and crack them in parallel
This is simply not true. If it were, you could divide each of those into two 2-character passwords, each of those into two 1-character passwords.
You clearly have not played Global Thermonuclear War recently.
It's a technology to be avoided because it is from Sony. The same people that installed root kits on it's customer's computers. We shall not forget that they despise their customers.
The fate of the marbles is not changed by looking in the bag.
Unless I'm one of the marbles and you don't pick me, you insensitive clod!
I see someone hasn't been studying their quantum mechanics...
Quantum mechanics is only statistically relevant if the marbles are really really really really small... (or if the fate of the marbles relies on quantum mechanical effects, but that's not as funny).
One problem with the approach in the article, is they are just doing reasonable things like screening embryos. Women only have so many eggs so it's really only feasible to screen for big genetic problems from a few fertilized eggs to implant.
What you really want to develop the 'master race' is pre-screen the millions of sperm that men spray everywhere, and when you've found a winner in that half of the DNA, then fertilize the egg and see what you get.
All in all, it sounds like too much trouble. It would be much easier to open a 'clone' bank (like a sperm bank, except the donors have donated all their dna instead of just half). Pick a normal individual (maybe with the eye color you want your kid to have), completely sequence the DNA of the donor so you know what else you are getting, and have that DNA stuck into your egg.
In this light, human cloning: good. Much better than the awkward natural system we humans have of stirring our genetics together into random mash-up remixes of good and bad with a mutation thrown in here and there, that doesn't have any intelligent design behind it.
Thank you, o lone sane voice...The non-viable fetuses you had to terminate are more likely due to bad luck and environmental factors than due to the genetics of the rugrats-to-be (and we have a lot more toxic environmental factors now then ever before). Miscarriages can often happen from the smallest chemical imbalances during the first week or two after fertilization that may affect the development - we've perhaps even evolved the 'miscarriage' gene because it is evolutionarily costly to deliver young'uns who won't make it to reproduction age. However, you do raise a good point.
The problem is that in modern times we can't apparently let an infant die, no matter how hideously deformed or mis-developed (since 'belief' still trumps 'logic' it seems). If you don't let the surgeon put the heart back in the body and put the misfit in an incubator, you go to jail. The solution is to 'pick a good egg'.
Consider two parents who both have the recessive gene for cystic fibrosis. Is it wrong to select an embryo that doesn't have cystic fibrosis (25% chance of a child getting the disease), or even ensure that the child won't be a carrier (50% chance the child won't be affected, but will carry the recessive gene). This is not genetic engineering, this is removing a mutation that has the distinction of being recessive, so it can continue through the generations to destroy lives. I had two elementary schoolmates, brother and sister, both with cystic fibrosis (the parents won the lottery with a 1 in 16 chance both would get it). They are both dead now, but at least they sure did suffer.
Now if you could cull a crop of eggs from your own seed, and pick the unlikely match-up that didn't have bad vision, wicked crooked teeth, asthma, predisposition to depression, addiction, or murder, or maybe even mental retardation, why not? Maybe even pick the pretty one. I wouldn't mind being made of better genetic stuff. Natural selection doesn't work anymore, since we can't leave the bad ones behind when the tribe moves on (and the 'most fit' are the ones who aren't reproducing).
Even more laughable, the original blockshopper listing for the property bought by senior associate Konrad A. Salaber for $455,000 now just hyperlinks to another site with the same information about the associate.
If we were really curious, we could hyperlink to what knives this associate's new bride Ewelina owns, but providing the public with organized access to information freely available on the internet might get you sued (?). Fortunately, weddingchannel.com isn't going to be suing slashdot anytime soon...
For the slashdot effect to work people need to be interested in going to the link.
Maybe instead you should link them to, say, Natilie Portman, naked, petrified, and covered with hot grits. :-)
Hot grits??? You've been around here too long... What we need is a beowulf cluster of these slimeballs from Chicago at the bottom of the sea.
No, that Ain't an MP3 Encoder...
Mastercard has a web form where you can report merchants who require checking ID. It is not allowed by the merchant agreements they signed with Mastercard. I would record and report the date and the salesperson at the store, and ask who told them they have to ask for ID, if it is the store policy, etc.
http://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/contactus/merchantviolations.html