they couldn't possibly exist in real life. The Klingons are basically at the level of space bikers, or the Taliban, that is, they're mainly interested in what they can squeeze out of situations at this moment using whatever violent methods are at hand now.
Yeah, they couldn't possibly have a huge, successful empire similar to what we have on Earth, like say the Mongols. I mean, any empire based on conquest, rape, and pillage couldn't possibly last!
Oh wait, you mean the Mongols also had that kind of empire and they ruled a good part of Asia and Europe for over 200 years? Hmm, maybe the Klingon empire is not so far-fetched...
Hmm, I will have to try this. I have done very similar things and have never had them reset the Open Firmware. From what I know, resetting the PRAM is not supposed to affect the Open Firmware. I've never seen any references to this method in any of the Apple Tech Info Library articles but there are a lot of articles, I'll have to do a search in them for this.
Well, if this works if will be method number four that I know. Regardless, most people will not think of resetting the Open Firmware. Again, every little block you can put in their way is good even if it's not perfect.
Microsoft distributes the base true type fonts at no cost, in fact they either invented or popularized the (usually inexpensive) true type font system to compete with expensive fonts from other vendors.
Well, actually Microsoft only agreed to use TrueType when it came out. It was actually developed by Apple. They developed it for Windows and Macintosh in order to combat Adobe's strangle hold on the market. Here's an intresting quote on Microsoft's site on TrueType:
The TrueType digital font format was originally designed by Apple Computer, Inc. It was a means of avoiding per-font royalty payments to the owners of other font technologies, and a solution to some of the technical limitations of Adobe's Type 1 format.
You can see a pretty detailed history of TrueType on this web page.
Obscure like this?
* change total amount of RAM in machine (ie, pull out a DIMM)
* Zap PRAM three times. (Cmd-Opt-P-R)
That procedure will not change the Open Firmware. Obviously it is more obscure than you think!:)
I can think of about 3 different ways to bypass the modified Open Firmware. The point I'm trying to make is that even a power user would have to do some digging to figure out that the Open Firmware has been changed to log the computers location over the internet, or similar security modifications. It would probably be the last item on a list of things to try.
While security-through-obscurity is not true security, it can raise the bar high enough that most people would simply give up before they find out how to access the computer. Every little bit helps...
Any material relating to a crime must not be destroyed or you will be guilty of obstructing justice and other related crimes. This is true as long as the statute of limitations has not run out on the crime committed. Some crimes, such as murder, have no statute of limitations and therefore the materials relating to the crime can never be destroyed without committing another crime.
That being said, if the penalties for obstruction of justice are less than that of the crime being committed then of course it's a good idea to destroy them immediately. It's just not legal to.
So, if you commit a crime and it's minor then save the evidence until the statue of limitations is up. If it's a major crime then you will possibly get in less trouble if all the evidence is destroyed immediately. Just remember that crimes tend to be cumulative so, for example, you could be convicted of both robbery and obstruction of justice and get a longer jail time or more penalties than if you never destroyed the evidence.
Now if only I could have it run in the BIOS. Imagine if on the bios level, without a proper key or password or whatever, if the hard drive was removed and replaced, it would then call a panic number whenever connected. That'd be neat.
Actually you can most likely do that on a Mac. All of the Macs in the past 5 - 8 years use a BIOS-like system called called Open Firmware. Open Firmware basically sets up the machine to load up the operating system and it does other initialization tasks. It is also used by some other computer manufacturers as it is an open standard.
The neat thing about Open Firmware is that it is programmable. It is written in Forth and you can write additions to it and install them. These additions are persistent across power-downs and can be password protected. So it is possible that you can write some sort of network notification into Open Firmware, I do know that it is aware of TCP and such because you can remotely operate the machine if it crashes in open firmware and you can also use Open Firmware to network boot the machine.
The other cool thing about Open Firmware is that you can set it to require a password at boot. If the password is not entered then the machine will not load ANY drive. This password is much harder to disable than an operating system password or hard drive password lock, although there are a few obscure and involved ways of bypassing it if you are extremely familiar with the system.
This page has some good links on Open Firmware. This site is hosted by Sun and has a ton of very specific and detailed information on Open Firmware. And lastly, Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song!
Until such a time as they can put someone in a radio isolated room, and test how they feel with and without a transmitter turned on, with a positive correlation
Another Wired article linked on that page,
Wireless Harmless, More or Less?, talks about research doing just what you have suggested. I didn't search around for the references to the research, but here is what the article said:
Swedish researchers found that people who claim they suffer from electrical sensitivity failed to detect the presence of electromagnetic fields in double-blind tests.
A double-blind test, properly run, should be able to eliminate any psychosomatic effects which would bias the testing of "electronic sensitives".
Re:Ahh yes. More newsbites
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 2
I read half way through the second sentence, then looked up at the submitter. Yup, another JonKatz diatribe. As sensational as it is empty calories.
I totally agree with you. I never thought I'd have to do this but I think I am at the point where I'm going to filter his postings out. I can find sensational fluff just about everywhere I look, I don't need to come to Slashdot to find more of it.
Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]
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Non-MP3 Codecs?
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If you were to by the LOTR DVD, would you consider that distribution format lossy?
Absolutely, DVD is lossy. If I took a DVD, decoded the content (which I think is always encoded with MPEG-2), re-encoded it with MPEG-2, and burned it to a DVD I would most likely have a worse copy than the original DVD. The process of encoding MPEG-2 is lossy.
Now it is true that I do not have to decode and encode every time I want to copy a DVD. I can use a non-lossy method of copying the digital data directly. This still does not change the fact that DVDs are lossy because the MPEG-2 codec is a lossy codec.
As for the "older and more established" definition, I could only find the following definition at dictionary.com:
lossy
A term describing a data compression algorithm which actually reduces the amount of information in the data, rather than just the number of bits used to represent that information. The lost information is usually removed because it is subjectively less important to the quality of the data (usually an image or sound) or because it can be recovered reasonably by interpolation from the remaining data.
4. Musician with Internet only distro:
Packaged MP3 -> Copy to HD -> Copy to HD
There has been NO loss of quality.
This is not exactly right. To keep in line of the rest of your examples it would have to look like this:
4. Musician with Internet only distro:
MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3
2 generations of lossy copying
MP3 is definitely a lossy encoding method in that every time it is decoded there is a good chance that you will not get out EXACTLY what you encoded in the first place. You will instead get something that sounds close enough that the human ear can effectively treat them as the same. The problem is that artifacts tend to crop up with each encoding and you will most likely end up with garbage after a few encoding/decoding cycles.
You are correct in that you don't need to encode/decode and then encode again to copy, however that is true of your options 2 and 3 also. Once your data is in digital form you never need to encode it again, just do a lossless digital copy and it is likely that you will never lose quality. This has nothing to do with codecs, but rather with the nature of digital data.
A little light on the specs, although the headmounted screen is 640x480 and it runs WinCE.
Actually the display looks to be 800 x 600, according to the link you posted:
A better view of the world
Forget about trying to view graphics on a tiny PDA screen. Poma's headmount display is built for optimum comfort and functionality. The one-inch full color 800 x 600 SVGA viewing screen sits below your eye, weighs approximately 3 ounces and provides a viewing area resolution similar to that of a desktop monitor from two feet away.
Do these, and MP3 players in general, have any moving parts, and are they very resistance to shock, vibration and continuous movement?
Most MP3 players have no moving parts at all and are thus very shock-resistant by their very nature. Many of these use some internal memory, and some can use external flash cards to add to that memory.
Some MP3 players can use the IBM MicroDrive, which is a very small hard drive in a card form, in place of a flash card. The MicroDrive has moving parts and probably will have some problems with tons of movement and shock.
Other players, like Apple's iPod, use a small hard drive contained within them. These have varying levels of shock protection, although all of them are shock protected to some degree. In the case of the iPod it has a 20 minute skip buffer which means it only needs to access the hard drive once every 20 minutes, the rest of the time the drive's head is parked and it is shockproof. These drives are also built for laptop use and are more rugged to start with.
So for the best shock protection I would go for a MP3 player with some sort of flash card. These usually only hold about a CD's worth of songs but that is still a good amount. The MicroDrives and the hard drive players hold a lot more songs and are still fairly shock resistant. I don't know how good they would last under a sustained pounding however.
You know, I thought that I agreed on Slashdots stance on article submissions and public moderation of them:
I'm sure a very cool website could be developed based on the concept of allowing public voting to determine the content of the homepage, but that website wouldn't be "Slashdot". If we tried to do it "by committee" it would suffer from the same problem that most projects done by committee suffer from: it would get bland.
How about allowing readers to directly administer the submissions bin?
Then I saw this submission. While I value the fact that everyone has an opinion and has the right to voice it, I may not want to see that opinion if I think it is hopelessly biased or inflammatory. That's pretty much the purpose behind the comment moderation system. This article has changed my mind totally and I'm now thinking that some sort of article moderation might be a good thing.
I'm not saying that articles like this should or should not be posted, that is up to the people who run Slashdot. I just think that when you have an article posted like this and then you have a large majority of the comments stating that the article is all wet, perhaps there is something wrong with the article and it should be moderated down in some way so new visitors can filter it out.
I do understand that I can filter out certain topics or authors, but this is something different. I haven't had a huge problem with JonKatz in the past and I'd hate to just filter out his postings, although it may come to that if that is my only option.
Maybe the best system may be some sort of "rate the author" system. Whenever the author posts an article, then people can give that posting a simple rating. If an author posts great stuff he gets highly rated and that can be taken into consideration when deciding if the posting goes on the page. If, however, the author is rated very low, then it would be tougher for the author to get a article post approved.
At any rate, my argument was not Utilitarian; it was Judeo-Christian, specifically Catholic. It is not good, according to God's will, to try to design your own bacteria, cat, dog, or child, as it shows a grave disrespect for life and for God.
I understand these are your beliefs and you believe them for your own reasons, so don't take this as an attack or a flame war - I'm just throwing in an observation.
How do we know what God's mind is (assuming that he does exist)? According to the Bible, God created us in his image and he did give us a brain. In other words, he made it so that we are thinking beings. Who is to say that he didn't intend us to manipulate nature any way we choose? I don't think that we should even start to pretend we understand anything about the mind or the will of God, again working on the assumption that he exists.
That being said, I feel we should always work on the principle of our own good, since that is a tangible ideal we can work toward. Is it good to ruin our environment? Is it good to make people sick? No, obviously not. That's why every choice we make and every idea which science comes up with should be evaluated as much as possible.
In the case of the bacteria strain which I and others helped to develop, it was fairly obvious that it was as harmless as possible. Bacterial strains similar to the one we "evolved" are found everywhere, they naturally form on their own in nature. When we attempted to "reverse-evolve" the strain we had developed, we found that the bacteria returned to be almost exactly what they had started out from. They didn't gain super mutant powers, they didn't gain resistance to antibiotics. To be sure, we even added a UV light final stage to our scrubbers, along with a biodegradable scrubber material. This assured that all traces of the bacteria were removed from the treated waste stream.
Not all scientists are evil, power-hungry tyrants, just the ones you see in the cartoons and the movies!:)
" Perhaps use preditors that require some nutrient only you can provide, that way you can pull back this nutrient if the experiment fails and you can eliminate the introduced animals."
> Just like the book, Jurasic Park?
Right, it's actually an old idea but an extremely valid one. The point is to choose something that can't be found naturally and can be controlled easily. The substance might not even actually kill the animal if it is withheld, but might instead interfere with its breeding habits, thus preventing it from reproducing.
Now we just have to make sure we don't use frog DNA...:)
Hmm, what if you took that belly-button lint, knitted a pair of socks from it, and washed them in the laundry. Would you set up some sort of odd sock-belly-button lint matter feed-back loop? Inquiring minds want to know!
I smell an experiment brewing here, or maybe that's just April Fresh Downy I'm smelling...
I'm not an expert in morality (I'm still trying to figure right V wrong out myself) but I can't see the creation of custom lifeforms as a Good Thing under any circumstances.
Scientists creating custom lifeforms is really no different than what happens in nature, it is just on a different time-scale.
As an example: I am a chemist who has worked with water treatment systems for industrial use. One of the projects I worked on involved bacteriological treatment. We had a waste stream which was loaded with organic compounds, some of which were pretty nasty. It was going to be horribly expensive to chemically or mechanically treat the water, and we couldn't just release the stuff out to the environment. It's not only illegal, it's also immoral.
What we did was to take a sample of bacteria found in sewer sludge (we bought it, we didn't have to go into the manholes for it!). We put these normal, everyday bacteria into bottles which had a very low concentration of our waste. Most of the bacteria were killed, but some tough ones survived. We took those and added in a stronger mixture of our waste and the same thing happened. After doing this dozens of times, we not only ended up with bacteria that could live in our waste, but also used it as a source of food.
These bacteria "evolved" into being the perfect waste treatment system. They would break down a complex soup of organic compounds into carbon dioxide and other non-toxic wastes. They had no negative impact on the environment because they would die without our waste food. We tested them exhaustively and found the water coming out of our pilot treatment plant to be as clean as the water outside the facility.
So just like anything else out there, science can be used in a responsible manner that does good. The key is to spend a ton of time testing your ideas to make sure that the risks are minimized. Accidents will happen, but they will happen with anything, not just with science.
> Just look at Australia and all the fuzz about
> how they import natural predators to
> (imported) rabbits that cause so much trouble.
Oh, I think that importing creatures in to fix a problem is a heavy-handed approach that often results in disaster. By piling one bad idea on top of the other you often compound the problem. You are better off trying to find some way to encourage natural predation to evolve. Perhaps find a native species that could be taught to prey on the rabbits. Another idea is to change the non-native species in some way, perhaps by cross-breeding to a native species that is similar. The resulting animal may be able to breed with the non-native ones and convert them into something less dangerous to the environment.
If you absolutely have no recourse but to introduce another non-native species, do so in as controlled of a setting as possible. Perhaps use preditors that require some nutrient only you can provide, that way you can pull back this nutrient if the experiment fails and you can eliminate the introduced animals.
As with any move, evaluate it to death before it is implemented. Once the genie is out of the bottle it is almost impossible to put back in.
I'm not that big on the mechanical nanotech, we have a long way yet to go before we can duplicate some of the most perfect nanotech systems out there: microorganisms.
We have the ability right now to craft custom virii and bacteria which can replicate and destroy other creatures. If we want to kill cryptosporidium and giardia (two common water-bourne parasites) then we should find the natural predators of such creatures and turn them to our needs.
It's similar to the chemical spraying of crops to prevent insects and other pests from destroying harvests. For years we have been laying on the pesticides in order to stop crops from being ruined. Instead of relying on chemicals, we should instead be investing in natural methods of reducing pests, such as the use of preying mantis, ladybugs, egg-laying wasps, and other natural predators.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that all chemicals are evil and should be eliminated. I'm a chemist myself. I do believe that we can be much more effective if we cut back on the more toxic chemicals and replace them with more gentle alternatives. Many of the harsher chemicals build up and end up destroying the producing potential of our farmlands.
On one hand I love technology and the ways it frees me to do what I want with what I have. I can rip CDs to mp3s and listen to them on my iPod or computer without lugging around tons of discs. I love short movie files of stuff I can find on the internet, like movie trailers. I love the fact that I can record TV shows to a hard drive or a DVD to play back later. I have a lot of fun playing the latest games, but I hate to have to jump through hoops to play them when they require passwords and other forms of protection.
On the other hand I hate the abuses these technologies open up. I firmly believe that artists, songwriters, performers, and programmers should get paid for their hard work. I have no problems with companies charging for a good product. The problem is that all of the things I like about technology can be used to subvert the process of compensating all of these people for their work. Eventually piracy can lead us down the road to crippling the free movement of data and the ease-of-use that comes with it.
So my question is how do we balance things? How can we ensure that the Fair-Use laws are upheld, yet still prevent the pirates from having free reign? Can a balance be struck between fair compensation and freedom to use a product? Does anyone here have any ideas that don't go to the one extreme of no protection of copyright or the other extreme of total lock-down of data?
But to do all that, very often they used non-standard components. They had wacky partitions on the hard drives that for extra management functions. I believe they even had special "Compaq memory"
Although Apple does sell closed boxes on the iMac line, Apple's general trend is to use standard components. Almost everything in the towers are standard off-the-self pc parts, with the exception of the motherboard and processor. The iMacs use standard memory and hard drives, among other parts, but they are more akin to laptops for the rest of the internals.
Whether or not the iMac uses proprietary parts is really not a concern because they will really only be opened and serviced by certified techs. Adding memory or an Airport card is about the only thing a normal user will do with them.
he beautiful thing about PCs is everytime i built a new one, i used about half the hardware from the old one. PC replacement hardware is cheap and easy to install. I can't say the same for Macs
Again, here we are talking about 2 different design philosophies. Apple builds stuff that generally lasts for a long time. It builds machines that come with everything you are likely to ever need over the life of the machine and pushes external additions via USB and Firewire. Most Apple users never have a need to open their computers for anything other than to add memory.
Aside from a few manufacturing defects which were noticeable out of the box or shortly thereafter, it has been very rare that I've seen a Macintosh have any problems in under 5 years. By that time it is generally better to replace the entire computer rather than upgrade, due to advances in all aspects of computer technology. Sure I could add a new hard drive or processor, but what good is it when the bus and memory of new computers have doubled in speed.
Of course most of this doesn't apply to those of us who prefer to upgrade our computers constantly, to the point where we essentially have a new computer every 2 years through incremental upgrades. The bulk of Apple's users do not do this, however, and Apple knows this. They are very successful at providing what their users want and making those users happy to buy their products.
As far as the LCD goes, I wouldn't worry about it having problems. Apple has a very good repair service and you can get an extended warranty if you need it. Apple also has very good quality LCDs and over the years have had very few problems with their laptop displays, which certainly will get a lot more abuse than an LCD on a desktop.
What was your reaction when you first heard about the Wired article where a Belgian designer suggests Apple copied him becase he had sketches that match the new iMac online last year?
If you look hard enough I'm sure that you can find something similar to any new idea somewhere. There are billions of people with trillions of ideas, it's not hard to imagine that two people could have a similar idea on the same topic and even have the ideas appear in similar forums.
Also, lets look at it this way. People have been talking about an LCD iMac for a long time. It's pretty standard for an LCD to have a long neck attached to a base. It is not hard to make the leap that it will be a lot easier to put the internals of the computer in a larger base, leaving the panel free to swing around. The hard part is the design and engineering of all the critical parts so that they work well together.
Making a quick sketch of what this product will be is very easy and I bet that there are many people who came up with a similar design on the back of napkins. The fact is that Apple went out, did it, and are now selling it before anyone else did so.
The "SpaceWalker" [tomshardware.com] is no way as cute as the Apple iMac
I totally have to agree. As inexpensive as the SpaceWalker might be, it is just a small, rectangular, grey box as opposed to a large, rectangular, grey box. There may be some people who might like that but even they have to admit that the iMac in all its incarnations has much more style than a simple grey or beige box.
I won't even begin to argue value or which one is better, that is up to each person to decide.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, you mean the Mongols also had that kind of empire and they ruled a good part of Asia and Europe for over 200 years? Hmm, maybe the Klingon empire is not so far-fetched...
Hmm, I will have to try this. I have done very similar things and have never had them reset the Open Firmware. From what I know, resetting the PRAM is not supposed to affect the Open Firmware. I've never seen any references to this method in any of the Apple Tech Info Library articles but there are a lot of articles, I'll have to do a search in them for this.
Well, if this works if will be method number four that I know. Regardless, most people will not think of resetting the Open Firmware. Again, every little block you can put in their way is good even if it's not perfect.
Well, actually Microsoft only agreed to use TrueType when it came out. It was actually developed by Apple. They developed it for Windows and Macintosh in order to combat Adobe's strangle hold on the market. Here's an intresting quote on Microsoft's site on TrueType:
You can see a pretty detailed history of TrueType on this web page.
That procedure will not change the Open Firmware. Obviously it is more obscure than you think!
I can think of about 3 different ways to bypass the modified Open Firmware. The point I'm trying to make is that even a power user would have to do some digging to figure out that the Open Firmware has been changed to log the computers location over the internet, or similar security modifications. It would probably be the last item on a list of things to try.
While security-through-obscurity is not true security, it can raise the bar high enough that most people would simply give up before they find out how to access the computer. Every little bit helps...
Any material relating to a crime must not be destroyed or you will be guilty of obstructing justice and other related crimes. This is true as long as the statute of limitations has not run out on the crime committed. Some crimes, such as murder, have no statute of limitations and therefore the materials relating to the crime can never be destroyed without committing another crime.
That being said, if the penalties for obstruction of justice are less than that of the crime being committed then of course it's a good idea to destroy them immediately. It's just not legal to.
So, if you commit a crime and it's minor then save the evidence until the statue of limitations is up. If it's a major crime then you will possibly get in less trouble if all the evidence is destroyed immediately. Just remember that crimes tend to be cumulative so, for example, you could be convicted of both robbery and obstruction of justice and get a longer jail time or more penalties than if you never destroyed the evidence.
Actually you can most likely do that on a Mac. All of the Macs in the past 5 - 8 years use a BIOS-like system called called Open Firmware. Open Firmware basically sets up the machine to load up the operating system and it does other initialization tasks. It is also used by some other computer manufacturers as it is an open standard.
The neat thing about Open Firmware is that it is programmable. It is written in Forth and you can write additions to it and install them. These additions are persistent across power-downs and can be password protected. So it is possible that you can write some sort of network notification into Open Firmware, I do know that it is aware of TCP and such because you can remotely operate the machine if it crashes in open firmware and you can also use Open Firmware to network boot the machine.
The other cool thing about Open Firmware is that you can set it to require a password at boot. If the password is not entered then the machine will not load ANY drive. This password is much harder to disable than an operating system password or hard drive password lock, although there are a few obscure and involved ways of bypassing it if you are extremely familiar with the system.
This page has some good links on Open Firmware. This site is hosted by Sun and has a ton of very specific and detailed information on Open Firmware. And lastly, Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song!
Another Wired article linked on that page, Wireless Harmless, More or Less?, talks about research doing just what you have suggested. I didn't search around for the references to the research, but here is what the article said:
A double-blind test, properly run, should be able to eliminate any psychosomatic effects which would bias the testing of "electronic sensitives".
I totally agree with you. I never thought I'd have to do this but I think I am at the point where I'm going to filter his postings out. I can find sensational fluff just about everywhere I look, I don't need to come to Slashdot to find more of it.
Absolutely, DVD is lossy. If I took a DVD, decoded the content (which I think is always encoded with MPEG-2), re-encoded it with MPEG-2, and burned it to a DVD I would most likely have a worse copy than the original DVD. The process of encoding MPEG-2 is lossy.
Now it is true that I do not have to decode and encode every time I want to copy a DVD. I can use a non-lossy method of copying the digital data directly. This still does not change the fact that DVDs are lossy because the MPEG-2 codec is a lossy codec.
As for the "older and more established" definition, I could only find the following definition at dictionary.com:
This is not exactly right. To keep in line of the rest of your examples it would have to look like this:
4. Musician with Internet only distro:
MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3
2 generations of lossy copying
MP3 is definitely a lossy encoding method in that every time it is decoded there is a good chance that you will not get out EXACTLY what you encoded in the first place. You will instead get something that sounds close enough that the human ear can effectively treat them as the same. The problem is that artifacts tend to crop up with each encoding and you will most likely end up with garbage after a few encoding/decoding cycles.
You are correct in that you don't need to encode/decode and then encode again to copy, however that is true of your options 2 and 3 also. Once your data is in digital form you never need to encode it again, just do a lossless digital copy and it is likely that you will never lose quality. This has nothing to do with codecs, but rather with the nature of digital data.
Actually the display looks to be 800 x 600, according to the link you posted:
Most MP3 players have no moving parts at all and are thus very shock-resistant by their very nature. Many of these use some internal memory, and some can use external flash cards to add to that memory.
Some MP3 players can use the IBM MicroDrive, which is a very small hard drive in a card form, in place of a flash card. The MicroDrive has moving parts and probably will have some problems with tons of movement and shock.
Other players, like Apple's iPod, use a small hard drive contained within them. These have varying levels of shock protection, although all of them are shock protected to some degree. In the case of the iPod it has a 20 minute skip buffer which means it only needs to access the hard drive once every 20 minutes, the rest of the time the drive's head is parked and it is shockproof. These drives are also built for laptop use and are more rugged to start with.
So for the best shock protection I would go for a MP3 player with some sort of flash card. These usually only hold about a CD's worth of songs but that is still a good amount. The MicroDrives and the hard drive players hold a lot more songs and are still fairly shock resistant. I don't know how good they would last under a sustained pounding however.
You know, I thought that I agreed on Slashdots stance on article submissions and public moderation of them:
Then I saw this submission. While I value the fact that everyone has an opinion and has the right to voice it, I may not want to see that opinion if I think it is hopelessly biased or inflammatory. That's pretty much the purpose behind the comment moderation system. This article has changed my mind totally and I'm now thinking that some sort of article moderation might be a good thing.
I'm not saying that articles like this should or should not be posted, that is up to the people who run Slashdot. I just think that when you have an article posted like this and then you have a large majority of the comments stating that the article is all wet, perhaps there is something wrong with the article and it should be moderated down in some way so new visitors can filter it out.
I do understand that I can filter out certain topics or authors, but this is something different. I haven't had a huge problem with JonKatz in the past and I'd hate to just filter out his postings, although it may come to that if that is my only option.
Maybe the best system may be some sort of "rate the author" system. Whenever the author posts an article, then people can give that posting a simple rating. If an author posts great stuff he gets highly rated and that can be taken into consideration when deciding if the posting goes on the page. If, however, the author is rated very low, then it would be tougher for the author to get a article post approved.
I understand these are your beliefs and you believe them for your own reasons, so don't take this as an attack or a flame war - I'm just throwing in an observation.
How do we know what God's mind is (assuming that he does exist)? According to the Bible, God created us in his image and he did give us a brain. In other words, he made it so that we are thinking beings. Who is to say that he didn't intend us to manipulate nature any way we choose? I don't think that we should even start to pretend we understand anything about the mind or the will of God, again working on the assumption that he exists.
That being said, I feel we should always work on the principle of our own good, since that is a tangible ideal we can work toward. Is it good to ruin our environment? Is it good to make people sick? No, obviously not. That's why every choice we make and every idea which science comes up with should be evaluated as much as possible.
In the case of the bacteria strain which I and others helped to develop, it was fairly obvious that it was as harmless as possible. Bacterial strains similar to the one we "evolved" are found everywhere, they naturally form on their own in nature. When we attempted to "reverse-evolve" the strain we had developed, we found that the bacteria returned to be almost exactly what they had started out from. They didn't gain super mutant powers, they didn't gain resistance to antibiotics. To be sure, we even added a UV light final stage to our scrubbers, along with a biodegradable scrubber material. This assured that all traces of the bacteria were removed from the treated waste stream.
Not all scientists are evil, power-hungry tyrants, just the ones you see in the cartoons and the movies! :)
" Perhaps use preditors that require some nutrient only you can provide, that way you can pull back this nutrient if the experiment fails and you can eliminate the introduced animals."
:)
> Just like the book, Jurasic Park?
Right, it's actually an old idea but an extremely valid one. The point is to choose something that can't be found naturally and can be controlled easily. The substance might not even actually kill the animal if it is withheld, but might instead interfere with its breeding habits, thus preventing it from reproducing.
Now we just have to make sure we don't use frog DNA...
Hmm, what if you took that belly-button lint, knitted a pair of socks from it, and washed them in the laundry. Would you set up some sort of odd sock-belly-button lint matter feed-back loop? Inquiring minds want to know!
I smell an experiment brewing here, or maybe that's just April Fresh Downy I'm smelling...
Of course there are extra, invisible dimensions! Where else do you think all those socks go when you wash them in the laundry?
Scientists creating custom lifeforms is really no different than what happens in nature, it is just on a different time-scale.
As an example: I am a chemist who has worked with water treatment systems for industrial use. One of the projects I worked on involved bacteriological treatment. We had a waste stream which was loaded with organic compounds, some of which were pretty nasty. It was going to be horribly expensive to chemically or mechanically treat the water, and we couldn't just release the stuff out to the environment. It's not only illegal, it's also immoral.
What we did was to take a sample of bacteria found in sewer sludge (we bought it, we didn't have to go into the manholes for it!). We put these normal, everyday bacteria into bottles which had a very low concentration of our waste. Most of the bacteria were killed, but some tough ones survived. We took those and added in a stronger mixture of our waste and the same thing happened. After doing this dozens of times, we not only ended up with bacteria that could live in our waste, but also used it as a source of food.
These bacteria "evolved" into being the perfect waste treatment system. They would break down a complex soup of organic compounds into carbon dioxide and other non-toxic wastes. They had no negative impact on the environment because they would die without our waste food. We tested them exhaustively and found the water coming out of our pilot treatment plant to be as clean as the water outside the facility.
So just like anything else out there, science can be used in a responsible manner that does good. The key is to spend a ton of time testing your ideas to make sure that the risks are minimized. Accidents will happen, but they will happen with anything, not just with science.
> Just look at Australia and all the fuzz about
> how they import natural predators to
> (imported) rabbits that cause so much trouble.
Oh, I think that importing creatures in to fix a problem is a heavy-handed approach that often results in disaster. By piling one bad idea on top of the other you often compound the problem. You are better off trying to find some way to encourage natural predation to evolve. Perhaps find a native species that could be taught to prey on the rabbits. Another idea is to change the non-native species in some way, perhaps by cross-breeding to a native species that is similar. The resulting animal may be able to breed with the non-native ones and convert them into something less dangerous to the environment.
If you absolutely have no recourse but to introduce another non-native species, do so in as controlled of a setting as possible. Perhaps use preditors that require some nutrient only you can provide, that way you can pull back this nutrient if the experiment fails and you can eliminate the introduced animals.
As with any move, evaluate it to death before it is implemented. Once the genie is out of the bottle it is almost impossible to put back in.
I'm not that big on the mechanical nanotech, we have a long way yet to go before we can duplicate some of the most perfect nanotech systems out there: microorganisms.
We have the ability right now to craft custom virii and bacteria which can replicate and destroy other creatures. If we want to kill cryptosporidium and giardia (two common water-bourne parasites) then we should find the natural predators of such creatures and turn them to our needs.
It's similar to the chemical spraying of crops to prevent insects and other pests from destroying harvests. For years we have been laying on the pesticides in order to stop crops from being ruined. Instead of relying on chemicals, we should instead be investing in natural methods of reducing pests, such as the use of preying mantis, ladybugs, egg-laying wasps, and other natural predators.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that all chemicals are evil and should be eliminated. I'm a chemist myself. I do believe that we can be much more effective if we cut back on the more toxic chemicals and replace them with more gentle alternatives. Many of the harsher chemicals build up and end up destroying the producing potential of our farmlands.
I must admit, I find myself in a quandary.
On one hand I love technology and the ways it frees me to do what I want with what I have. I can rip CDs to mp3s and listen to them on my iPod or computer without lugging around tons of discs. I love short movie files of stuff I can find on the internet, like movie trailers. I love the fact that I can record TV shows to a hard drive or a DVD to play back later. I have a lot of fun playing the latest games, but I hate to have to jump through hoops to play them when they require passwords and other forms of protection.
On the other hand I hate the abuses these technologies open up. I firmly believe that artists, songwriters, performers, and programmers should get paid for their hard work. I have no problems with companies charging for a good product. The problem is that all of the things I like about technology can be used to subvert the process of compensating all of these people for their work. Eventually piracy can lead us down the road to crippling the free movement of data and the ease-of-use that comes with it.
So my question is how do we balance things? How can we ensure that the Fair-Use laws are upheld, yet still prevent the pirates from having free reign? Can a balance be struck between fair compensation and freedom to use a product? Does anyone here have any ideas that don't go to the one extreme of no protection of copyright or the other extreme of total lock-down of data?
Although Apple does sell closed boxes on the iMac line, Apple's general trend is to use standard components. Almost everything in the towers are standard off-the-self pc parts, with the exception of the motherboard and processor. The iMacs use standard memory and hard drives, among other parts, but they are more akin to laptops for the rest of the internals.
Whether or not the iMac uses proprietary parts is really not a concern because they will really only be opened and serviced by certified techs. Adding memory or an Airport card is about the only thing a normal user will do with them.
Again, here we are talking about 2 different design philosophies. Apple builds stuff that generally lasts for a long time. It builds machines that come with everything you are likely to ever need over the life of the machine and pushes external additions via USB and Firewire. Most Apple users never have a need to open their computers for anything other than to add memory.
Aside from a few manufacturing defects which were noticeable out of the box or shortly thereafter, it has been very rare that I've seen a Macintosh have any problems in under 5 years. By that time it is generally better to replace the entire computer rather than upgrade, due to advances in all aspects of computer technology. Sure I could add a new hard drive or processor, but what good is it when the bus and memory of new computers have doubled in speed.
Of course most of this doesn't apply to those of us who prefer to upgrade our computers constantly, to the point where we essentially have a new computer every 2 years through incremental upgrades. The bulk of Apple's users do not do this, however, and Apple knows this. They are very successful at providing what their users want and making those users happy to buy their products.
As far as the LCD goes, I wouldn't worry about it having problems. Apple has a very good repair service and you can get an extended warranty if you need it. Apple also has very good quality LCDs and over the years have had very few problems with their laptop displays, which certainly will get a lot more abuse than an LCD on a desktop.
If you look hard enough I'm sure that you can find something similar to any new idea somewhere. There are billions of people with trillions of ideas, it's not hard to imagine that two people could have a similar idea on the same topic and even have the ideas appear in similar forums.
Also, lets look at it this way. People have been talking about an LCD iMac for a long time. It's pretty standard for an LCD to have a long neck attached to a base. It is not hard to make the leap that it will be a lot easier to put the internals of the computer in a larger base, leaving the panel free to swing around. The hard part is the design and engineering of all the critical parts so that they work well together.
Making a quick sketch of what this product will be is very easy and I bet that there are many people who came up with a similar design on the back of napkins. The fact is that Apple went out, did it, and are now selling it before anyone else did so.
I won't even begin to argue value or which one is better, that is up to each person to decide.