Will the US suffer from geek emigration?
on
GeekPAC
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Just a small point, but it stuck me that the more things like the DMCA and other stupid ideas render it difficult or impossible for people to do what they want/need to do to make a living, the greater the chance of them deciding to go somewhere with more sensible laws.
The closest parallel I can think of is researchers working on Human Stem Cells, several prominent researchers have commented, mostly off-the-record, as they don't want hassle from idiotic pro-life religious lunatics, that any ban on human stem cell research will simply lead to them emigrating to a country where such research is allowed.
My point is, what would it take to persuade geeks in the US that their government has gone too far and it's not worth trying to change things?
hand built vs. off the shelf
on
PC Prices to Rise?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
t's only a personal thing, but as far as my own personal machines go, hand built is the only option. The advantages from having carefully chosen each and every component, exactly as required to do the job in hand are worth the few hours (good components/knowledge/luck permitting) it takes to build the thing. Even if I buy a system, the first thing I do is wipe the disks and start from scratch.
Also, I'm probably not alone in being a serial upgrader, I replace something in one of my machines about once a month, funds permitting. So, I haven't actually built a whole new machine for myself in 4 years, though the only original parts left from that machine are the keyboard and case (currently home to my Linux dev box).
However, I'd always go the way of prebuilt machines, preferably from one of a few big firms (I'm not going to plug ANYBODY) if I were putting a network together for people (something I do regularly), it's more for tech support and a good warranty than anything else.
This would indicate that pre-WW2 submarine evacuation was possible, and part of submariners' training:
Connecticut
ACTIVITY NAME: Naval Submarine Base New London
MAJOR CLAIMANT: CINCLANTFLT
TOWN: Groton
COUNTY: New London
...
Property Name: Escape Training Tank
Alternate Name: Building #70
Status: L
Date: 2/7/84
Description: The former Building #70, constructed in 1929, was the primary facility at the base for training sailors in submarine evacuation procedures. It was decommissioned in 1982 and subjected to an exhaustive engineering survey prior to demolition in 1988.
...
This came from here:
https://www.denix.osd.mil/denix/Public/ES-Programs / onservation/Legacy/Ref-Guide/refguide.html
I'm not sure how early submarine evacuation procedures were developed, but I seem to remember it was possible from WW1 submarines as well, I'd need to do some further reseach to back that up though.
You are assuming that the infertility is genetic in origin. A large proportion of fertility problems are not due to genetics (for fairly obvious reasons) but due to mechanical or chemical damage to the relevant organs, or ageing-related degeneration.
I have no intention of trying to support Dr. Antinori, I think he is exceptionally misguided in trying to press ahead so quickly with human cloning when there is no compelling reason for such haste. Whilst techniques for mammalian cloning are continuing to be developed and yields are still variable at best, there is no justification for bringing potentially seriously genetically damaged people into the world.
I don't like to rain on your parade, but as urine is generally sterile (at least before it hits anything on the way out), he probably won't ever notice (though you do get the satisfaction of watching him for weeks and weeks).
A better idea is one carried out by a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. He took a syringe full of urine and injected it into his flatmate's lump of mature blue Stilton cheese, apparently his flatmate ate the cheese quite oblivious to it's modified state.
I'm unsure what exactly my friend's flatmate had done to deserve this act of creative revenge, but I am assured that he definitely deserved it.
I should begin by pointing out my status as a former M$ certification drone (I saw the light and stopped short of selling my entire soul to Bill, I'm in remission now and feeling much better).
As far as I can remember from my NT courses (I believe it's still the case with 2000, but don't quote me) NT had big problems running with 0 virtual memory set, no matter how much RAM you're running it on. Apparently Windows expects to see a virtual memory file and gets very confused if it can't find one.
I've generally found that 128MB is enough for basic productivity running Win 2000 but it quickly fills up with bloatware (all that crap in your system tray that's a pain to get rid of/ stay rid of).
From that site, it seems worth a look. I heard somebody was working on a live action/cgi version a la Star Wars, now that could really be something spectacular.
It could be coming. I heard a rumour (don't ask me where, I can't remember) that somebody had got hold of the film rights for E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series.
Seven books of epic space combat on the same sort of scale or larger (planet sized balls of antimatter enough for you?) If it gets anywhere it should be worth a look, the books are way cool if a little dated these days.
As far as the article I saw was saying, the methanol was going to be sold in 120ml sealed cartridges, no more dangerous than a sealed battery unit. This was specifically to ensure safety in situations like planes/trains/hazerdous environments. (Also to provide a revenue stream on cartridge sales at $3-5 a shot.)
As far as water and carbon dioxide being greenhouse gases, that's true, I'm not going to dispute this. However, methanol is normally produced in bulk by the fermentation of vegetable matter, the carbon in question having been absorbed by that vegetable matter during it's lifetime. Consequentially methanol from vegetable sources is carbon-neutral, it's use does not increase global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Somewhere at my Mum's house I still have something that may qualify as an older laptop (though it could equally be described as a very large calculator.)
It's an Epson machine (can't remember the model off the top of my head) with a 4-line calculator style display and a built in till roll printer. I rescued it from the pharmacy I used to work in complete with plastic briefcase to carry it in and sales note from 1985. I may post up details in case anyone has any more info on it.
BTW I didn't get the power supply and the battery is dead (no surprise there) so I've not been able to check if it actually works.
I can't find the exact article, but a few weeks ago I was reading about a German company who were at the prototype stage with methanol fuel cells for laptops.
They seemed to think that 120ml of methanol could power a laptop for about 10 hours, not bad going. The only waste products are water and carbon dioxide and the amount of energy released as heat is quite small due to the much greater efficiency of fuel cells as compared to burning methanol.
As a techie at a college with close to 250 lab PCs I can state with authority that a lab monitor will be so close to burnt out after 3 or 4 years as to be unusable.
I should know, last month I stacked up close to 200 of them for recycling (the joys of being part of a small team, we all get the crap jobs, lol!)
Ghost has it's uses, but it's not perfect and takes time. It's far better to look for a system that won't fall over in the first place. We've just gone over to Zenworks on our Netware 5.1 server, it seems to be good for the job it does but looks a PITA to configure properly.
I imagine it would be fairly trivial to have the black box encode the registration number of the car as part of each transmission. You could then equip traffic wardens (UK parking/traffic laws enforcement) with a handheld receiver/decoder and they could check each car as they walked past.
I should add that UK traffic wardens were recently moved from the control of the police to that of the local council (Birmingham in my case). The city council receives the proceeds of all fixed penalty fines, consequentially, there is a big incentive to employ enough traffic wardens to catch everyone they can.
As far as the TV detector vans go, they did work, but they only ever had 4 or 5 real ones and about 100 dummies going round the country to scare people into buying a license. They now have a more simple system, they have a database of UK addresses, so if you don't have a license they know exactly where you are and come around to check.
The BBC also does v.high quality radio, which is free to air.
I think you're confusing the issue with antibiotic or pesticide resistence, where resistance is conferred through a gene or genes. When a population is dosed with antibiotics, any resistant organisms survive and will therefore be in a much higher proportion of the gene pool. So in that case, yes, resistance is a significant problem (with many potential solutions, but that's definitely going off-topic).
However, radiation directly damages DNA, mainly as has been said before by deleting bases or sequences of bases (literally breaking apart strands of DNA beyond the ability of the bodies mechanisms to repair it). Any benificial mutations (unlikely due to the nature of the damage) occur at random, they are not neccessarily linked to the ability to reproduce.
This means that if the chances of getting a superfly were one in ten thousand (wild guess for the sake of easy maths) and the chances of getting a fly able to reproduce from the irradiated population were also one in ten thousand, the chances of geting a superfly capable of passing it's genes on to the next generation of flies is one in 100,000,000. It then has to find a mate, as they're only releasing irradiated males the mate will not have mutant superfly genes, immediately diluting the superfly gene pool (as well as this, the chances are that any mutations would be different for each copy of a gene, further reducing it's chances of being passed on). The only way this exceptionally small proportion of superflys can become at all dominant is if enough of them have a big adavantage over the competition, and can mate with each other to produce more offspring. Otherwise they will just be absorbed back into the general population and the superfly genes diluted. As far as I can tell there is no way that the flys can tell which males are either fertile or mutated, so they have no way to select for any mutations, benificial or otherwise.
One last note, I re-read the IAAA factsheet on their Ethiopian Rift valley project, at:
http://www-tc.iaea.org/tcweb/publications/factsh ee ts/ethiopia.pdf
It is good to note that they're:
a) going to cull the fly population down to 5% with pesticides first (this technique is a lot more effective with small populations where it's easier to outnumber wild, fertile males).
b)Those pesticides are going to be contained in traps baited using tsetse fly pheromones to reduce to a minimum the collateral damage to other insects (a technique I was lectured on about 7 years ago).
Mandrake also does this
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A slight correction, Mandrake 7.2 (and I presume later versions)does this as well (it uses the Redhat hardware detection program, if it works, why invent something different?)
It worked for me going from a Duron 900, Iwill Mobo, Geforce 2 MX400, Realtek 8139 NIC to an old P166MMX, Intel mobo, Ati Rage IIc and Intel nic flawlessly, only asking for the disk when it came to reconfiguring Xfree86 at the end of the process.
Against this, a Windows 2000 Pro installation gave me nothing but blue screen hell after swapping from Abit KT7 RAID to Iwill KT266(I think) mobo with no other hardware changes.
It's taken a while, but now I find I have fewer hardware configuration issues in Linux than I have with any version of Windows I've used.(still not used XP and thankful for small mercies!)
am I alone in recieving almost no spam? I admit I'm very selective about who gets my email address but it it posted in a few places online. Maybe I'm just lucky.
There seems to be a more obvious solution, take SPDIF or optical output from a decent amp into a decent sound card (SoundBlaster Live! with Livedrive springs to mind) and rip to MP3 from there. As far as I can see, if it plays then recording the sound should remove the copy protection.
I realise that strictly speaking you have to go digital --> analogue --> digital but this way should minimise loss of quality, especially since MP3 is lossy anyway. (I can't tell the difference between WAV and MP3 but I know someone who claims to be able to. He's a professional music producer, engineer and DJ so if he says that he can, I believe him).
And remember, it only takes a few people doing this to get a track out to the downloading public and the nature of file sharing will result in it being copied and made available many times.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a small point, but it stuck me that the more things like the DMCA and other stupid ideas render it difficult or impossible for people to do what they want/need to do to make a living, the greater the chance of them deciding to go somewhere with more sensible laws.
The closest parallel I can think of is researchers working on Human Stem Cells, several prominent researchers have commented, mostly off-the-record, as they don't want hassle from idiotic pro-life religious lunatics, that any ban on human stem cell research will simply lead to them emigrating to a country where such research is allowed.
My point is, what would it take to persuade geeks in the US that their government has gone too far and it's not worth trying to change things?
t's only a personal thing, but as far as my own personal machines go, hand built is the only option. The advantages from having carefully chosen each and every component, exactly as required to do the job in hand are worth the few hours (good components/knowledge/luck permitting) it takes to build the thing. Even if I buy a system, the first thing I do is wipe the disks and start from scratch.
Also, I'm probably not alone in being a serial upgrader, I replace something in one of my machines about once a month, funds permitting. So, I haven't actually built a whole new machine for myself in 4 years, though the only original parts left from that machine are the keyboard and case (currently home to my Linux dev box).
However, I'd always go the way of prebuilt machines, preferably from one of a few big firms (I'm not going to plug ANYBODY) if I were putting a network together for people (something I do regularly), it's more for tech support and a good warranty than anything else.
This would indicate that pre-WW2 submarine evacuation was possible, and part of submariners' training:
This came from here: https://www.denix.osd.mil/denix/Public/ES-Programs / onservation/Legacy/Ref-Guide/refguide.html
I'm not sure how early submarine evacuation procedures were developed, but I seem to remember it was possible from WW1 submarines as well, I'd need to do some further reseach to back that up though.
You are assuming that the infertility is genetic in origin. A large proportion of fertility problems are not due to genetics (for fairly obvious reasons) but due to mechanical or chemical damage to the relevant organs, or ageing-related degeneration.
I have no intention of trying to support Dr. Antinori, I think he is exceptionally misguided in trying to press ahead so quickly with human cloning when there is no compelling reason for such haste. Whilst techniques for mammalian cloning are continuing to be developed and yields are still variable at best, there is no justification for bringing potentially seriously genetically damaged people into the world.
I don't like to rain on your parade, but as urine is generally sterile (at least before it hits anything on the way out), he probably won't ever notice (though you do get the satisfaction of watching him for weeks and weeks).
A better idea is one carried out by a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. He took a syringe full of urine and injected it into his flatmate's lump of mature blue Stilton cheese, apparently his flatmate ate the cheese quite oblivious to it's modified state.
I'm unsure what exactly my friend's flatmate had done to deserve this act of creative revenge, but I am assured that he definitely deserved it.
Hey a woman who can sing and dreams of 2 CPUs, I want to meet her!
I should begin by pointing out my status as a former M$ certification drone (I saw the light and stopped short of selling my entire soul to Bill, I'm in remission now and feeling much better).
As far as I can remember from my NT courses (I believe it's still the case with 2000, but don't quote me) NT had big problems running with 0 virtual memory set, no matter how much RAM you're running it on. Apparently Windows expects to see a virtual memory file and gets very confused if it can't find one.
I've generally found that 128MB is enough for basic productivity running Win 2000 but it quickly fills up with bloatware (all that crap in your system tray that's a pain to get rid of/ stay rid of).
From that site, it seems worth a look. I heard somebody was working on a live action/cgi version a la Star Wars, now that could really be something spectacular.
One other fairly collectible one is the Fiend Folio, never made it past 1st edition.
All my collectible stuff suffered from five years of constant travel in my school bag, but at least it got used.
As for the magic items, I preferred MERP, home of the +40 Bus Pass of Travelling.
It could be coming. I heard a rumour (don't ask me where, I can't remember) that somebody had got hold of the film rights for E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series.
Seven books of epic space combat on the same sort of scale or larger (planet sized balls of antimatter enough for you?) If it gets anywhere it should be worth a look, the books are way cool if a little dated these days.
As far as the article I saw was saying, the methanol was going to be sold in 120ml sealed cartridges, no more dangerous than a sealed battery unit. This was specifically to ensure safety in situations like planes/trains/hazerdous environments. (Also to provide a revenue stream on cartridge sales at $3-5 a shot.) As far as water and carbon dioxide being greenhouse gases, that's true, I'm not going to dispute this. However, methanol is normally produced in bulk by the fermentation of vegetable matter, the carbon in question having been absorbed by that vegetable matter during it's lifetime. Consequentially methanol from vegetable sources is carbon-neutral, it's use does not increase global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Somewhere at my Mum's house I still have something that may qualify as an older laptop (though it could equally be described as a very large calculator.)
It's an Epson machine (can't remember the model off the top of my head) with a 4-line calculator style display and a built in till roll printer. I rescued it from the pharmacy I used to work in complete with plastic briefcase to carry it in and sales note from 1985. I may post up details in case anyone has any more info on it.
BTW I didn't get the power supply and the battery is dead (no surprise there) so I've not been able to check if it actually works.
I can't find the exact article, but a few weeks ago I was reading about a German company who were at the prototype stage with methanol fuel cells for laptops.
They seemed to think that 120ml of methanol could power a laptop for about 10 hours, not bad going. The only waste products are water and carbon dioxide and the amount of energy released as heat is quite small due to the much greater efficiency of fuel cells as compared to burning methanol.
As a techie at a college with close to 250 lab PCs I can state with authority that a lab monitor will be so close to burnt out after 3 or 4 years as to be unusable.
I should know, last month I stacked up close to 200 of them for recycling (the joys of being part of a small team, we all get the crap jobs, lol!)
Ghost has it's uses, but it's not perfect and takes time. It's far better to look for a system that won't fall over in the first place. We've just gone over to Zenworks on our Netware 5.1 server, it seems to be good for the job it does but looks a PITA to configure properly.
I imagine it would be fairly trivial to have the black box encode the registration number of the car as part of each transmission. You could then equip traffic wardens (UK parking/traffic laws enforcement) with a handheld receiver/decoder and they could check each car as they walked past.
I should add that UK traffic wardens were recently moved from the control of the police to that of the local council (Birmingham in my case). The city council receives the proceeds of all fixed penalty fines, consequentially, there is a big incentive to employ enough traffic wardens to catch everyone they can.
As far as the TV detector vans go, they did work, but they only ever had 4 or 5 real ones and about 100 dummies going round the country to scare people into buying a license. They now have a more simple system, they have a database of UK addresses, so if you don't have a license they know exactly where you are and come around to check.
The BBC also does v.high quality radio, which is free to air.
I think you're confusing the issue with antibiotic or pesticide resistence, where resistance is conferred through a gene or genes. When a population is dosed with antibiotics, any resistant organisms survive and will therefore be in a much higher proportion of the gene pool. So in that case, yes, resistance is a significant problem (with many potential solutions, but that's definitely going off-topic).
h ee ts/ethiopia.pdf
However, radiation directly damages DNA, mainly as has been said before by deleting bases or sequences of bases (literally breaking apart strands of DNA beyond the ability of the bodies mechanisms to repair it). Any benificial mutations (unlikely due to the nature of the damage) occur at random, they are not neccessarily linked to the ability to reproduce.
This means that if the chances of getting a superfly were one in ten thousand (wild guess for the sake of easy maths) and the chances of getting a fly able to reproduce from the irradiated population were also one in ten thousand, the chances of geting a superfly capable of passing it's genes on to the next generation of flies is one in 100,000,000. It then has to find a mate, as they're only releasing irradiated males the mate will not have mutant superfly genes, immediately diluting the superfly gene pool (as well as this, the chances are that any mutations would be different for each copy of a gene, further reducing it's chances of being passed on). The only way this exceptionally small proportion of superflys can become at all dominant is if enough of them have a big adavantage over the competition, and can mate with each other to produce more offspring. Otherwise they will just be absorbed back into the general population and the superfly genes diluted. As far as I can tell there is no way that the flys can tell which males are either fertile or mutated, so they have no way to select for any mutations, benificial or otherwise.
One last note, I re-read the IAAA factsheet on their Ethiopian Rift valley project, at:
http://www-tc.iaea.org/tcweb/publications/facts
It is good to note that they're:
a) going to cull the fly population down to 5% with pesticides first (this technique is a lot more effective with small populations where it's easier to outnumber wild, fertile males).
b)Those pesticides are going to be contained in traps baited using tsetse fly pheromones to reduce to a minimum the collateral damage to other insects (a technique I was lectured on about 7 years ago).
A slight correction, Mandrake 7.2 (and I presume later versions)does this as well (it uses the Redhat hardware detection program, if it works, why invent something different?)
It worked for me going from a Duron 900, Iwill Mobo, Geforce 2 MX400, Realtek 8139 NIC to an old P166MMX, Intel mobo, Ati Rage IIc and Intel nic flawlessly, only asking for the disk when it came to reconfiguring Xfree86 at the end of the process.
Against this, a Windows 2000 Pro installation gave me nothing but blue screen hell after swapping from Abit KT7 RAID to Iwill KT266(I think) mobo with no other hardware changes.
It's taken a while, but now I find I have fewer hardware configuration issues in Linux than I have with any version of Windows I've used.(still not used XP and thankful for small mercies!)
am I alone in recieving almost no spam? I admit I'm very selective about who gets my email address but it it posted in a few places online. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Sounds like a good idea to me. I'd be happy to scare a few of those idiots into requiring a new set of underwear.
There seems to be a more obvious solution, take SPDIF or optical output from a decent amp into a decent sound card (SoundBlaster Live! with Livedrive springs to mind) and rip to MP3 from there. As far as I can see, if it plays then recording the sound should remove the copy protection. I realise that strictly speaking you have to go digital --> analogue --> digital but this way should minimise loss of quality, especially since MP3 is lossy anyway. (I can't tell the difference between WAV and MP3 but I know someone who claims to be able to. He's a professional music producer, engineer and DJ so if he says that he can, I believe him). And remember, it only takes a few people doing this to get a track out to the downloading public and the nature of file sharing will result in it being copied and made available many times.