This email makes some pretty drastic insinuations.
I wonder if this guy crossed the legal limit.
Classifying it as a piracy site could be an issue, but the one I really wonder about is the very clear accusation that they offer emulators to get people to buy copiers. Of course, if it is more or less true then they may not have a case.... Of course, they may not have a case anyway - what do I know?
1.) It prevents people from making backups of works which they purchased for the purpose of preserving their investment. You really should have the right install/run your software from a backup copy and and keep your master copy locked away in your firesafe.
2.) Their should be encouragement to preserve these works (some of them, anyway) for the future, especially since we haven't established the life span of these new media.
On top of this, increases in copyright duration, can remove the incentive to preserve a work for long enough to enter the public domain (so more stuff gets lost forever).
I believe that something should really be done about the "sign your life away or we don't give you a job" phenomenon.
This means that any law aimed at increasing the scope and power of copyrights and patents ends up supporting the corporation against the individual.
Engineers as employees lose their intellectual property by virtue of being employees and moreso by signing blanket nondisclosure/noncompetition/IP theft contracts, and are prohibited from using their IP in future projects with different companies. This reduces the value of the engineer when applying for the next job (or asking for a raise).
Independent engineers are much more likely to face a lawsuit if the copyright holder is a corporation. If they infringe upon another human's copright, the issue is more likely to be resolved between the two individuals.
I have been lucky enough to have landed most of my jobs in situations where I had enough clout to make the changes I wanted to make to such agreements, but it has not and will not always be that way.
My father lost a number of patents to such agreements at a time when engineers had very little clout. He never saw a dime beyond his paycheck for inventions which made his companies real money. Furthermore, he got no recognition for his work (actually, I think his name is somewhere on the patent application - whoopee!).
It would be nice if patents and copyrights could only be held by individuals (of course, I have no idea what the actual ramifications of that would be), but the companies that own the government would never let us have that much control.
First of all, please do excuse the stereotypes. They are only used for convenience. Technically, being young, urban, and professional (sometimes), I would classify as a yuppie.
As far as your question goes, although I do not feel that it is my business to tell others what to do, I reserve the right to comment on it when it affects me.
There are a few ways in which it affects me.
There is the obvious point about emissions and overconsumption of resources. But also, when money is needlessly spent on an overly expensive car, it empowers the auto industry, whose vision of the future is contrary to mine. When people run out and buy the latest version of MS's entire line of vomitware, that empowers MS to even more effectively hold back the entire computer industry.
I really wish that all of the MS-haters out there would boycott the XBox. The only way to defend ourselves is to make their revenue stream dependant on their behavior.
Not to be too cynical about this, but I wonder how much processing time you end up giving to the companies who refuse to lower their drug prices for third world countries because they think that profit is more important than the lives of people suffering the AIDS pandemic (as well as ripping off Americans and bribing doctors and pharmacists).
I remember a book called Writing Bug Free Code (yes, you all scoff, but this is for real) written by a Russian computer scientist.
The basic premise was that he was using punch cards, and the actual computer on which he was compiling and testing his programs was in a relatively distant city.
He would punch up a set of cards and mail them to where the computer was, which would take a week or two. When they got around to it, they would compile his program and print out a test run using input he gave them. This would take another week. The week or two return trip made the average round trip take a month.
Now if you had to wait one month to find out that you had missed a semicolon, wouldn't you be more careful?
It would be cool if you could operate it by walking.
How about shoes which generate power from your step? That way you can be charging while you are getting someplace.
If you are foot-pumping, you have to pay attention in order to keep pumping, and it can really get tedious. Walking is second nature, so you can ignore the fact that you are charging your laptop and it seems like less of a chore.
For a lesson in how to disagree with someone without coming across as needlessly contentious and vain, see the other reply to my post.
The poster disagrees with my interpretation of the quote (the jury is still out for me on which interpretation is more accurate), and says so in a polite enough manner.
My response was to think about what he said and consider it seriously.
I agree with some of your points, and disagree with others; however, I have little emotional incentive to seriously consider your points or respond to them since your post comes across as arrogant and offensive.
Perhaps sometime you will not be perfectly and unambiguously correct about something, and someone else will point it out. Will you be more likely to listen to them if their comment begins by calling you an idiot?
Anyway, it would be nice to have a stimulating discussion in which we potentially learn something from each other rather than a pissing contest where we assert our egos. In response to my misstatements, I would much rather hear, "here's the real scoop" than "shut up because you don't know what you're talking about."
I agree, but we are in the early part of the information gathering stage. We are not at the point in our understanding of the ramifications to start acting on what little we undertand about genetic engineering.
We are certainly not at a point in our understanding where we are ready to let any of this stuff out of the lab yet (although much of it has been released into the wild and has now contaminated other crops which were supposed to be safe).
One problem is that the more arrogant scientists out there believe that they can learn to avoid major screwups while committing them.
Take the mission critical computer programming analogy. You do not test out a new bake of software on a machine which is performing life support on a patient, or operating part of the power grid. You make absolutely sure that the software is going to behave as expected in an isolated environment before installing it in an environment where it is capable of killing people if it fails.
The fact that synthetic DNA codes have propagated in the wild in ways which the GE scientists never expected is very strong evidence that at least some of those scientists failed to complete the testing process.
DNA is the ultimate mission critical system in the sense that if it suffers total failure, all life on Earth bites the dust. It only takes one sloppy engineer/scientist shortcutting the process to break the system in a way which is devastating to the system; however, scientists are currently free to release genetic sequences into the wild which are not properly tested (as evidenced by the fact that they behave differently than expected).
Again, it only takes one of these scientists screwing up (think of how often some engineer in a team breaks the build by throwing in some last-minute bugs) to cause major damage. Like software companies, some scientists are going to be more careful than others (for many different reasons - compare Windows to QNX), and some scientists are bound to do crappy work and try to get it released.
As long as scientists around the world are releasing under-tested DNA sequences (which at this point in our understanding means just about anything that we have come up with), we have a very dangerous situation on our hands.
Here is some reference:
Professor Hans-Heinrich Kaatz of the Institute for Bee Research at the University of Jena found that genes used to modify oilseed rape (canola) were transferred to bacteria in the guts of bees. He experimented with honey bees and GM oilseed rape, which had been modified to resist a specific herbicide; he removed oilseed rape pollen from legs of bees and fed the pollen to young bees. When he examined the intestines of the young bees he found that some carried the gene that resisted the herbicide.
In Mexico, tailored DNA sequences have contaminated native varieties of corn - even those growing in remote areas (100km from the nearest industrial farm). Read the BBC article.
In Canada, they recently discovered that the minimum distance required between fields of GM crops and fields of 'elite' crops is almost an order of magnitude smaller than the distance that is actually necessary to prevent 'unacceptable' levels of contamination (because they found that earlier assumptions about how far pollen would spread were false). Too bad they didn't bother to find this out in the lab... Here's the New Scientist article.
In some states, the blood alcohol level for considering a minor to be under the influence is.02%. I have heard that breath freshening chewing gum can make your mouth "alcoholly" enough to fail the test (only if you are a minor - so they probably think you were only chewing the Dentyne to hide the marijuana smell, anyway).
I think that the poster is referring to the CO2 emitted by decomposing plant matter, not the CO2 intake from living plant respiration.
I think that by definition, plant CO2 intake from living plants should roughly equal the CO2 emitted from decomposing plant material (ignoring any gain or reduction in the quantity of living plant matter now vs. the quantity of living plant matter which existed when the plants which are decomposing now were still alive), so both statements may be accurate.
This is the idea behind biomass. When you burn biomass (assuming the biomass was grown in one season) you release no more CO2 into the air than was consumed by said biomass in the previous growing season.
I agree. Whether or not Einstein's gravity is more accurate, to the common man Newton's gravity is more usefull. And Einstein's gravity model is probably not the ultimate truth either, it is just a model which more accurately fits the evidence at hand.
My point was that often things which seem absurd turn out to be true (or at least potentially closer to the truth). There was a time that Newton's gravity model was considered to be the unquestionable truth. Now we are not so sure. There was also a point when it was the unquestionable truth that matter could not travel between point A and point B without passing through a contiguous line of points in between. Now, thanks to quantum mechanics and tunneling, we are not so sure. If we reject something as being absurd because it is inconsistent with things that we "know" to be true, we are favoring our assumptions over the evidence.
Each time we think that we have "proven" the "truth" about something, our certainty should be a warning to us that we are making assumptions which will probably eventually turn out to be invalid. If we think that we may have a model which more accurately represents our observations then we will have a better chance of breaking our minds out of that model when a new, more accurate one comes along.
Science as a field of discovery is a bit different than science for real-world applications. The applied scientist favors the simple, less accurate model because it is easier to use and gives the same result in a real-world situation ("it don't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows"). The research scientist who is seeking the ultimate truth favors a process of constantly updating, refining, and maybe completely redesigning the model in order to account for every bit of observable evidence, no matter how minor its effect on the result.
1.) When a farmer or a hillbilly buys a pickup truck, they look at the horsepower, the size of the bed, etc.. If they get a bed liner it is because they are actually trying to extend the usefull life of their equipment (it is about keeping the bed in good condition as opposed to keeping it nice-looking). They are buying the truck because it is a usefull tool which they will use to move large things around.
When a yuppie buys a pickup, they look at the color, the stylish lines, the power windows. They have to get a bed liner because, even though they are never going to put anything in the back ecxept maybe groceries (which would fit in the trunk of the Lexus, anyway), the main objective is not to scratch the paint.
In all honesty, does the yuppie come across looking as "outdoorsy" as the farmer/hillbilly? No, the yuppie looks like they are trying to look outdoorsy, and failing miserably because they have a pickup truck with no mud or scratches on it.
This is analogous to the difference between a geek who buys something he/she will use and a pseudo-geek who buys something because they think it makes them look like a geek.
2.) At a former job, I went out to lunch (as if I am not always out to lunch) with about 10 engineers and QA folk. Someone had to get back for a meeting and asked if anyone knew what time it was. Between the 10 of us there was not not one person who was wearing a wristwatch. I felt a deep sense of pride in my team that day. And it led to a great conversation about why no one in the team wore a watch.
It seems like I spend enough time being influenced by the clock as it is. There is one on the wall, one on your computer, one on my car radio, one on the wrist of the guy sitting next to me (who will gladly tell me what time it is if I ask - I might actually benefit from the human contact, too).
When I am out and about, finally away from those stupid timepieces everywhere telling me to rush to and from here and there, the last thing I need to know is how many minutes have gone by since the last time I looked at my watch.
People seem to be in too much of a hurry these days. If you are going someplace, remember that you will get there when you get there, no matter how many times you look at your watch, and often hurrying will only slow you down (a car accident is much more time-consuming than stopping at a yellow light). Also, hurrying is no fun. You don't enjoy yourself along the way (mmm, stress), and you fail to pay attention to all of the neat stuff you would otherwise notice - you can really enjoy yourself on the train ride to work if you are not stressing about whether the boss will notice that you came in 5 min. late.
In other news, it seems to me that a 'geek' would spend more time thinking about what he or she needs, and buy it when it is really time. The true geeks run their old computer untill there is a real need to upgrade, thereby saving LOTS of money without taking a performance hit.
You seem to just want a really expensive watch with a bunch of useless crap on it. You don't seem to care which features it has - it is not like you have identified some vacancy in your life which needs to be fulfilled with device X or Y (except maybe, "I don't feel smart enough - I need a watch that makes me look like a geek"). To me, that is not geeky, it is just wastefull and vain. In fact, given that you will probably end up wasting a whole bunch of money that you could use to get some usefull technology for which you have actually identified a need (or at least a more substantial desire), it is downright anti-geeky.
There is a constant stream of input/stimulus coming in from the outside world. I think that a lot of these devices are just there to keep us entertained because we have forgotten how to look out the window without getting bored. Do we really need to be constantly entertained by our mp3 player (ever hear a bird singing?), or always in touch with our social circle (maybe we could make new friends if we weren't always on the cell phone) or in touch with our job which is so much more important than our sanity or health.
For me, objects which are only usefull if you carry them around constantly (like PDA's, beepers, etc.) are not worth it. My wallet is already enough crap for me to carry around. If I want to remember someone's phone number, I write it on a paper phone list I keep in my wallet. When I get home, I enter it into a text file and re-print it when I need to (no issues of compatibility - I don't ever have to re-type my address book into another program).
And in the meantime, I can walk around relatively unencumbered. I never have to worry about breaking my PDA by sitting on it, or dropping my cell phone into a toilet. I don't even have to make sure I have battery power before I leave the house.
At my second-to-last job, it was the first time I had ever worked somewhere that didn't make hardware and software (they just made software).
I realized while getting stuff ready to bring in on my first day (dictionary, real keyboard and trackball, etc.) that I did not need my trusty computer toolkit, as the only person who would be playing with hardware there would be the IT guy. I was pretty dissapointed (I have really refined my computer toolkit over the years to include everything I could possibly need while tearing apart some box, while still being small enough to fit in my back pocket (can't sit down, though)).
You could throw a real sound card in the PCMCIA slot in the laptop (even run two sound cards if that helps), but the trade-offs are price and power. The decent audio cards for laptops tend to be expensive (Digigram - $500), and adding a PCMCIA card definately sucks down some juice.
As far as power goes, The Register has this article about a foot powered laptop charger (5 min. of vigorous pumping runs a laptop for 20 min.). They are currently selling a hand operated version for $60. The foot powered one will be $150 when it comes out.
I wouldn't use this as a primary source, but it seems like it might be a very usefull device for the emergency communications volunteer group.
On the other hand, if the aliens are invading and you run down into the basement to your radio bench and find that your 12v batteries have all exploded in some freak accident, 5min. of pumping may be way too much latency for an emergency notification.
I think I remember hearing that in the last test of the amateur radio emergency notification system (all volunteers?) they got the test message spread throughout the country in something like 2min.. That's pretty cool. Keep up the good work.
When they run a test like that, what are the criteria for the message being effectively spread - in other words, how do you know when the test is complete?
Actually, It might be nice for you to post a little explanation of how emergency notification using amateur radio volunteer groups works. I think that a lot of people do not even know there is such a system in place. It would also be enlightening from the point of view of how information can be intentionally propogated acroos a wireless human network.... Just a thought.
If you beleive what you see on Discovery, then you should check out this article on New Scientist. It disputes the idea that was "proved" about all human life originating in Africa.
I don't claim that this article is correct and I don't claim that the Discovery episode is incorrect. I am just saying that you should not adopt the information contained in one documentary as your new world view. Keep in mind that there are other explanations for everything. Newton's gravity model was once unquestionable.
Basically, as far as I can tell, the first paragraph is saying, "I heard about one study that contradicts another study."
Any time some study conclusively "proves" that blah de blah is true or false, it just smacks of scientific arrogance to me. You never have proof. Only evidence.
I wonder what the effects are of long term exposure to the amount of alcohol that these bacteria would produce. Would it be enough to gradually harden the cell membranes in the mouth?
These bacteria would survive in the same way the current ones do. Either the Listerene doesn't kill them all, and they just repopulate from what survives, or the population gets replaced from outside (like from putting your fingers in your mouth).
Either way, if the new bacteria outcompete the old bacteria (which is the requirment for ensuring that they will take over your mouth), then the new bacteria will probably be better able to survive a Listerene attack than the old one.
Because applying our (typically nearsighted) intelligence skips the testing process.
By intentionally creating something which is viable in the short term, we give a huge (and arbitrary) survival bonus to the changes we have introduced. When something evolves in the wild, it is given many more survival tests along the way as it gradually changes.
These survival tests are also test exposures for other organisms. If you are exposed to a totally new bacteria to which no human has been exposed before, you have no defences tailored to fight that bacteria, even though that bacteria may have been given (intentionally or accidentally) specific weapons to attack you. Humans are likely to have developed a resistance to any non-modified bacteria which they have been in contact with over the generations while it was mutating.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this guy crossed the legal limit.
Classifying it as a piracy site could be an issue, but the one I really wonder about is the very clear accusation that they offer emulators to get people to buy copiers. Of course, if it is more or less true then they may not have a case.... Of course, they may not have a case anyway - what do I know?
1.) It prevents people from making backups of works which they purchased for the purpose of preserving their investment. You really should have the right install/run your software from a backup copy and and keep your master copy locked away in your firesafe.
2.) Their should be encouragement to preserve these works (some of them, anyway) for the future, especially since we haven't established the life span of these new media.
On top of this, increases in copyright duration, can remove the incentive to preserve a work for long enough to enter the public domain (so more stuff gets lost forever).
"The XBox is yours, but if you want to play any of the new games, you will have to rent a chip from us."
This means that any law aimed at increasing the scope and power of copyrights and patents ends up supporting the corporation against the individual.
Engineers as employees lose their intellectual property by virtue of being employees and moreso by signing blanket nondisclosure/noncompetition/IP theft contracts, and are prohibited from using their IP in future projects with different companies. This reduces the value of the engineer when applying for the next job (or asking for a raise).
Independent engineers are much more likely to face a lawsuit if the copyright holder is a corporation. If they infringe upon another human's copright, the issue is more likely to be resolved between the two individuals.
I have been lucky enough to have landed most of my jobs in situations where I had enough clout to make the changes I wanted to make to such agreements, but it has not and will not always be that way.
My father lost a number of patents to such agreements at a time when engineers had very little clout. He never saw a dime beyond his paycheck for inventions which made his companies real money. Furthermore, he got no recognition for his work (actually, I think his name is somewhere on the patent application - whoopee!).
It would be nice if patents and copyrights could only be held by individuals (of course, I have no idea what the actual ramifications of that would be), but the companies that own the government would never let us have that much control.
As far as your question goes, although I do not feel that it is my business to tell others what to do, I reserve the right to comment on it when it affects me.
There are a few ways in which it affects me.
There is the obvious point about emissions and overconsumption of resources. But also, when money is needlessly spent on an overly expensive car, it empowers the auto industry, whose vision of the future is contrary to mine. When people run out and buy the latest version of MS's entire line of vomitware, that empowers MS to even more effectively hold back the entire computer industry.
I really wish that all of the MS-haters out there would boycott the XBox. The only way to defend ourselves is to make their revenue stream dependant on their behavior.
It's just a whole flapping lot of them.
Never trust lawyers to do math...
Managers either.
Not to be too cynical about this, but I wonder how much processing time you end up giving to the companies who refuse to lower their drug prices for third world countries because they think that profit is more important than the lives of people suffering the AIDS pandemic (as well as ripping off Americans and bribing doctors and pharmacists).
His brain has been washed so many times that it is starting to fade...
The basic premise was that he was using punch cards, and the actual computer on which he was compiling and testing his programs was in a relatively distant city.
He would punch up a set of cards and mail them to where the computer was, which would take a week or two. When they got around to it, they would compile his program and print out a test run using input he gave them. This would take another week. The week or two return trip made the average round trip take a month.
Now if you had to wait one month to find out that you had missed a semicolon, wouldn't you be more careful?
New Gold Bond Foot Powdered Laptop!
How about shoes which generate power from your step? That way you can be charging while you are getting someplace.
If you are foot-pumping, you have to pay attention in order to keep pumping, and it can really get tedious. Walking is second nature, so you can ignore the fact that you are charging your laptop and it seems like less of a chore.
The poster disagrees with my interpretation of the quote (the jury is still out for me on which interpretation is more accurate), and says so in a polite enough manner.
My response was to think about what he said and consider it seriously.
I agree with some of your points, and disagree with others; however, I have little emotional incentive to seriously consider your points or respond to them since your post comes across as arrogant and offensive.
Perhaps sometime you will not be perfectly and unambiguously correct about something, and someone else will point it out. Will you be more likely to listen to them if their comment begins by calling you an idiot?
Anyway, it would be nice to have a stimulating discussion in which we potentially learn something from each other rather than a pissing contest where we assert our egos. In response to my misstatements, I would much rather hear, "here's the real scoop" than "shut up because you don't know what you're talking about."
We are certainly not at a point in our understanding where we are ready to let any of this stuff out of the lab yet (although much of it has been released into the wild and has now contaminated other crops which were supposed to be safe).
One problem is that the more arrogant scientists out there believe that they can learn to avoid major screwups while committing them.
Take the mission critical computer programming analogy. You do not test out a new bake of software on a machine which is performing life support on a patient, or operating part of the power grid. You make absolutely sure that the software is going to behave as expected in an isolated environment before installing it in an environment where it is capable of killing people if it fails.
The fact that synthetic DNA codes have propagated in the wild in ways which the GE scientists never expected is very strong evidence that at least some of those scientists failed to complete the testing process.
DNA is the ultimate mission critical system in the sense that if it suffers total failure, all life on Earth bites the dust. It only takes one sloppy engineer/scientist shortcutting the process to break the system in a way which is devastating to the system; however, scientists are currently free to release genetic sequences into the wild which are not properly tested (as evidenced by the fact that they behave differently than expected).
Again, it only takes one of these scientists screwing up (think of how often some engineer in a team breaks the build by throwing in some last-minute bugs) to cause major damage. Like software companies, some scientists are going to be more careful than others (for many different reasons - compare Windows to QNX), and some scientists are bound to do crappy work and try to get it released.
As long as scientists around the world are releasing under-tested DNA sequences (which at this point in our understanding means just about anything that we have come up with), we have a very dangerous situation on our hands.
Here is some reference:
Professor Hans-Heinrich Kaatz of the Institute for Bee Research at the University of Jena found that genes used to modify oilseed rape (canola) were transferred to bacteria in the guts of bees. He experimented with honey bees and GM oilseed rape, which had been modified to resist a specific herbicide; he removed oilseed rape pollen from legs of bees and fed the pollen to young bees. When he examined the intestines of the young bees he found that some carried the gene that resisted the herbicide.
In Mexico, tailored DNA sequences have contaminated native varieties of corn - even those growing in remote areas (100km from the nearest industrial farm). Read the BBC article.
In Canada, they recently discovered that the minimum distance required between fields of GM crops and fields of 'elite' crops is almost an order of magnitude smaller than the distance that is actually necessary to prevent 'unacceptable' levels of contamination (because they found that earlier assumptions about how far pollen would spread were false). Too bad they didn't bother to find this out in the lab... Here's the New Scientist article.
In some states, the blood alcohol level for considering a minor to be under the influence is .02%. I have heard that breath freshening chewing gum can make your mouth "alcoholly" enough to fail the test (only if you are a minor - so they probably think you were only chewing the Dentyne to hide the marijuana smell, anyway).
I think that by definition, plant CO2 intake from living plants should roughly equal the CO2 emitted from decomposing plant material (ignoring any gain or reduction in the quantity of living plant matter now vs. the quantity of living plant matter which existed when the plants which are decomposing now were still alive), so both statements may be accurate.
This is the idea behind biomass. When you burn biomass (assuming the biomass was grown in one season) you release no more CO2 into the air than was consumed by said biomass in the previous growing season.
My point was that often things which seem absurd turn out to be true (or at least potentially closer to the truth). There was a time that Newton's gravity model was considered to be the unquestionable truth. Now we are not so sure. There was also a point when it was the unquestionable truth that matter could not travel between point A and point B without passing through a contiguous line of points in between. Now, thanks to quantum mechanics and tunneling, we are not so sure. If we reject something as being absurd because it is inconsistent with things that we "know" to be true, we are favoring our assumptions over the evidence.
Each time we think that we have "proven" the "truth" about something, our certainty should be a warning to us that we are making assumptions which will probably eventually turn out to be invalid. If we think that we may have a model which more accurately represents our observations then we will have a better chance of breaking our minds out of that model when a new, more accurate one comes along.
Science as a field of discovery is a bit different than science for real-world applications. The applied scientist favors the simple, less accurate model because it is easier to use and gives the same result in a real-world situation ("it don't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows"). The research scientist who is seeking the ultimate truth favors a process of constantly updating, refining, and maybe completely redesigning the model in order to account for every bit of observable evidence, no matter how minor its effect on the result.
1.) When a farmer or a hillbilly buys a pickup truck, they look at the horsepower, the size of the bed, etc.. If they get a bed liner it is because they are actually trying to extend the usefull life of their equipment (it is about keeping the bed in good condition as opposed to keeping it nice-looking). They are buying the truck because it is a usefull tool which they will use to move large things around.
When a yuppie buys a pickup, they look at the color, the stylish lines, the power windows. They have to get a bed liner because, even though they are never going to put anything in the back ecxept maybe groceries (which would fit in the trunk of the Lexus, anyway), the main objective is not to scratch the paint.
In all honesty, does the yuppie come across looking as "outdoorsy" as the farmer/hillbilly? No, the yuppie looks like they are trying to look outdoorsy, and failing miserably because they have a pickup truck with no mud or scratches on it.
This is analogous to the difference between a geek who buys something he/she will use and a pseudo-geek who buys something because they think it makes them look like a geek.
2.) At a former job, I went out to lunch (as if I am not always out to lunch) with about 10 engineers and QA folk. Someone had to get back for a meeting and asked if anyone knew what time it was. Between the 10 of us there was not not one person who was wearing a wristwatch. I felt a deep sense of pride in my team that day. And it led to a great conversation about why no one in the team wore a watch.
When I am out and about, finally away from those stupid timepieces everywhere telling me to rush to and from here and there, the last thing I need to know is how many minutes have gone by since the last time I looked at my watch.
People seem to be in too much of a hurry these days. If you are going someplace, remember that you will get there when you get there, no matter how many times you look at your watch, and often hurrying will only slow you down (a car accident is much more time-consuming than stopping at a yellow light). Also, hurrying is no fun. You don't enjoy yourself along the way (mmm, stress), and you fail to pay attention to all of the neat stuff you would otherwise notice - you can really enjoy yourself on the train ride to work if you are not stressing about whether the boss will notice that you came in 5 min. late.
In other news, it seems to me that a 'geek' would spend more time thinking about what he or she needs, and buy it when it is really time. The true geeks run their old computer untill there is a real need to upgrade, thereby saving LOTS of money without taking a performance hit.
You seem to just want a really expensive watch with a bunch of useless crap on it. You don't seem to care which features it has - it is not like you have identified some vacancy in your life which needs to be fulfilled with device X or Y (except maybe, "I don't feel smart enough - I need a watch that makes me look like a geek"). To me, that is not geeky, it is just wastefull and vain. In fact, given that you will probably end up wasting a whole bunch of money that you could use to get some usefull technology for which you have actually identified a need (or at least a more substantial desire), it is downright anti-geeky.
There is a constant stream of input/stimulus coming in from the outside world. I think that a lot of these devices are just there to keep us entertained because we have forgotten how to look out the window without getting bored. Do we really need to be constantly entertained by our mp3 player (ever hear a bird singing?), or always in touch with our social circle (maybe we could make new friends if we weren't always on the cell phone) or in touch with our job which is so much more important than our sanity or health.
For me, objects which are only usefull if you carry them around constantly (like PDA's, beepers, etc.) are not worth it. My wallet is already enough crap for me to carry around. If I want to remember someone's phone number, I write it on a paper phone list I keep in my wallet. When I get home, I enter it into a text file and re-print it when I need to (no issues of compatibility - I don't ever have to re-type my address book into another program).
And in the meantime, I can walk around relatively unencumbered. I never have to worry about breaking my PDA by sitting on it, or dropping my cell phone into a toilet. I don't even have to make sure I have battery power before I leave the house.
I realized while getting stuff ready to bring in on my first day (dictionary, real keyboard and trackball, etc.) that I did not need my trusty computer toolkit, as the only person who would be playing with hardware there would be the IT guy. I was pretty dissapointed (I have really refined my computer toolkit over the years to include everything I could possibly need while tearing apart some box, while still being small enough to fit in my back pocket (can't sit down, though)).
As far as power goes, The Register has this article about a foot powered laptop charger (5 min. of vigorous pumping runs a laptop for 20 min.). They are currently selling a hand operated version for $60. The foot powered one will be $150 when it comes out.
I wouldn't use this as a primary source, but it seems like it might be a very usefull device for the emergency communications volunteer group.
On the other hand, if the aliens are invading and you run down into the basement to your radio bench and find that your 12v batteries have all exploded in some freak accident, 5min. of pumping may be way too much latency for an emergency notification.
I think I remember hearing that in the last test of the amateur radio emergency notification system (all volunteers?) they got the test message spread throughout the country in something like 2min.. That's pretty cool. Keep up the good work.
When they run a test like that, what are the criteria for the message being effectively spread - in other words, how do you know when the test is complete?
Actually, It might be nice for you to post a little explanation of how emergency notification using amateur radio volunteer groups works. I think that a lot of people do not even know there is such a system in place. It would also be enlightening from the point of view of how information can be intentionally propogated acroos a wireless human network.... Just a thought.
I don't claim that this article is correct and I don't claim that the Discovery episode is incorrect. I am just saying that you should not adopt the information contained in one documentary as your new world view. Keep in mind that there are other explanations for everything. Newton's gravity model was once unquestionable.
Basically, as far as I can tell, the first paragraph is saying, "I heard about one study that contradicts another study."
Any time some study conclusively "proves" that blah de blah is true or false, it just smacks of scientific arrogance to me. You never have proof. Only evidence.
I wonder what the effects are of long term exposure to the amount of alcohol that these bacteria would produce. Would it be enough to gradually harden the cell membranes in the mouth?
Either way, if the new bacteria outcompete the old bacteria (which is the requirment for ensuring that they will take over your mouth), then the new bacteria will probably be better able to survive a Listerene attack than the old one.
By intentionally creating something which is viable in the short term, we give a huge (and arbitrary) survival bonus to the changes we have introduced. When something evolves in the wild, it is given many more survival tests along the way as it gradually changes.
These survival tests are also test exposures for other organisms. If you are exposed to a totally new bacteria to which no human has been exposed before, you have no defences tailored to fight that bacteria, even though that bacteria may have been given (intentionally or accidentally) specific weapons to attack you. Humans are likely to have developed a resistance to any non-modified bacteria which they have been in contact with over the generations while it was mutating.