imho, there is no good use for a terminator gene. granted monsanto invented it to be evil and charge more for their seeds. and granted you gave a good possible use for the terminator gene. however, my problem with a terminator gene is not that it helps monsanto make gobs of money, it's that what happens if there is an accidental cross polination of a plant with the terminator gene and normal everyday plants. that's when you run into issues. if enough plants get polinated (or the gene is introduced some other way in nature) then it can be possible that all the plants will quit producing seeds, that's a problem! the best thing is to never ever introduce a terminator gene into the wild.
something's wrong in that calculation. i have 3 desktops, pentium, dual pentium mmx, pentium 2, and 4 laptops, pentium, celeron, pentium 3, pentium 4. all are on 24/7 and my electricity bill is about $16/month. i don't know my exact energy usage, or my cost per KWh, but there's quite a discrepancy between your estimation and my actual values.
you could also get easy fake upload credits too. i had a 2400 bps modem that had built in compression, so i'd always pkzip my uploads with no compression. that way, the modem could do the work and then when the bbs got it, they'd give me the credits on the zip file size which was pretty big. also helped to include a rather large text file of all 0's in the zip file too. ah, the good ol' days.
I do agree with your point about the *nix file system needing a bit of updating/orginization. I've read all the arguments about the wonderfulness of having/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin,/sbin, and such. And some of it agree with, but some of it is just arcane, and a nice/config,/system,/programs would be cool, but i'm not going to argue that right now.
what i am going to argue is your point about the dificulty of removing imagemagick. I am willing to be that removing imagemagick would be just has hard if it were in windows. after removing the binaries, you'd have to find the dlls in \winnt\system, or \winnt\system32, or \windows\sytem32, or wherever they are. then you'd have to edit the registry and remove all the configuration options. where would they be? HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/software/imagemagick, HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/imagemagick (these may not be valid resistry locations, it's been years since i've looked at the windows registry). anyway, you can argue, that you would just go to control panel and tell it to uninstall imagemagick. but for that to work, you'd have had to install imagemagick as a package that windows recognises. if you're willing to do that, then an imagemagick rpm (or apt - never used that though) would be just fine. and 'rpm -e imagemagick' would take care of all of your problems eaily under linux.
I think you are mostly correct. Say sony did steal a song from EMI and distribute it, they should be fined $100K or $150K or whatever the current law it. But if sony "stole" 100 songs from EMI and only distributed one of them, they should still only be fined the $100K or so.
If billy steals 1000 songs from P2P but distributes none, he should not be fined. But if billy steals 1000 songs from P2P and distributes them, he should be fined for the number of songs he distributes.
I think the laws were written to prevent the distribution of material. The person on the receiving end should not be fined, it should be the distributer. Even in the P2P world, the distributer and receiver are easily defined.
a town i drove through in western colorado was pretty bad too. usually when you see north 3rd street or something, and are trying to get to south 3rd street, you just stay on the same road and go south because the north/south designation means north end or south end of the SAME road. well in this town (unfortunately i forgot the name) the north/south designation was for different roads. the road through center of town was 1st street. then on each side of 1st street was north 2nd and south 2nd, and then north 3rd and south 3rd, this continued to extend this way out of town.
if you don't think his lectures are very deep then you haven't read them well enough. my research group took an hour each week to discuss each of the lectures in volume 1 (we just haven't gotten to vol 2 yet). it's amazing how much you can learn from so called 'freshman lectures' even when you're a 5th year student in chemical physics. there's so much packed in there, it's just so elgantly written that you don't realize how much you just learned. if you sit back and analyze the lectures, you get a ton out of them.
6 easy pieces is cut from the full "feynman lectures on physics." this is a great series of books. unfortunately they're quite expensive, but they are lectures that feynman gave to an incoming group of physics majors at cal tech, so they start of very basic. if you're looking to get just a basic understanding of physics and a little chemistry and biology thrown in for fun, try reading volume 1 of the lectures. volumes 2 and 3, while great references for physists are probably not great if you're just trying to understand concepts. but if you have the money, there's no reason not to buy the whole set. and as the parent said, all of feynman's books are great (beware, some of them are high level graduate level books). i also recommend the feynman lectures on computing.
Re:More range is better
on
Is Louder Better?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
my bose lifestyle 28 does compression on dvd audio output. so yes, they do offer that on consumer stereos. it's great for watching aciton movies without shaking the house down.
yes, but you don't email the fire station when your house is burning down. email is good for non-critical (or at least non-immediate) forms of communications.
i'm not going to argue with you on how stupid it is to use the phone number as the primary key (i know it is). but this wouldn't make the number portability harder would it? either you leave verison and go to a new service and keep your number, so all they need is a
delete * from all_the_tables where phone_number=123-456-7890
or you come to verizon with your own phone number and all they have to do is
insert new_user_info into customer_tables
so my guess is that they'd rather not have the added competition.
I think you're wrong about boulder. Boulder has done a great job of solving the driving problem. The bus system is absolutely wonderful and I'm a big fan of the bike paths (it's kinda funny, they seem to get plowed first in the winter before the streets). And the roads are definately big enough for suv (just think of all the stupid freshman girls that almost run you over everyday in their range rover while talking on their cellphone). Boudler about an equal split of suv-driving yuppies and peace-loving hippies, so you have both the honda civics and the ford excursions - and they seem to get along for the most part (at least better than other cities that i've seen).
The one thing that has always bothered me about this quote is that it's not necessarly true. The monkeys could just keep typing 's' all the time forever. Here's an example that I once read about in an astrophysics book, I found it quite interesting:
Assuming that the universe is infinitely big and there are an infinite number of planets, does there necessarly have to be a planet like Earth that exists.
Initially I thought that it makes sence that given an infiniately large universe, there has to be a planet like Earth, but this is not true. The example given to me was the set of odd numbers. This set is infinite, but no matter how hard you look in that set you'll never find the number 2.
I always think about that when someone says that give an infinite amount of time something will definately happen.
yeah, but in central pa you get the monday after thanksgiving off of work because it's the first day of deer season and every good pa citizen has to go out hunting then:)
Re:Nothing happens to your privacy...
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 1
nope, rfid is item-specific. why else would companies be ordering a half a billion tags (near the bottom of the first page of the article)? that's what's scary about rfid. i'm not sure how many bits a rfid tag can store, but it could easily be 256 (that'd only be 32 bytes). 2^256 is about 10^77, there are only 10^80 particles in the universe, so it would be easy with rfid to tag every possible thing.
don't mean to be nitpicky, but you don't ionize water into O2 and H2. ionize means to remove an electron..so to ionize water you'd turn it into H2O+ by removing an electron. what you did was elecrolyze water. that is, induce a chemical reaction (2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2) with electricity.
oh, i don't know. maybe because the H2 is nothing special. it's build on a GM (i think surburban, or maybe tahoe) frame, and shares a number of parts from the stock GM parts bin. You're basically paying like $50,000 for an suv that you can get for around $30,000 if it didn't look like a hummer. The real hummers are cool, but the new H2 is just another way to get people to drop money on SUVs they don't need.
i don't think you can get an ibm without windows, but you may be able to make up for it other ways. i had a dell ispiron 8000 laptop that i hated, some of the keys broke in less than a year and the display hinge got loose real quick and the display wouldn't stay up unless it was perpendicular. so anyway, last week i just got my ibm thinkpad r32. it's nice and light. the screen does max 1024x768 which is kinda small for me, but that's what you get with a small light laptop. now back to the windows problem...the oem xp licence on the thinkpad is $90 and there was no way i could convince ibm to sell me the laptop without it. but i did get a 10% student discount which more than covered the $90. now i know my money still went to the evil empire, but i did get a kick ass laptop. now, i am actually a graduate student, so that's why i asked for the student discount. but i had to do no verification at all. when i called the customer service, i told them i wanted a laptop and that i was a student and they gave me a 10% discount with no questions asked. you could always do the same (even if you're not a student) and you'd make up more than the difference that you'd pay for xp.
btw - redhat 8.0 installed on the laptop with no issues at all.
Re:I had one...
on
Potato Bazookas
·
· Score: 4, Informative
even better, acetylene. any hobby store sells calcium carbide (the stuff in old miner's helmets to make the light). just put a little calcium carbide in water and you have instant acetylene (used for welding). ignite that with a gas grill ignitor and you can easily have potatoes going 150mph. when i was little my brother and i experimented with many different style guns. the best we came up with was using acetylene as the propellant and using a 1 inch pvc barrel (rahter than the traditional 2 inch). you couldn't shoot a whole potato with it, but the part you did shoot went about 150mph. (we figured that out by timing how long the potato stayed in the air when shot vertically).
i think you'll have a very hard time finding a good alcohol free beer. Above 5% or so alcohol content the alcohol becomes part of the flavor of the beer. if you notice (at least from my perspective) the best beer that you get at a brew pub and such are also the ones with high alcohol content. especially the 10-14% imperial stouts (just my opinion there). so i think it'll be impossible to find a beer that has no alcohol, yet still has a good flavor like all the other high alcohol beers.
your cryomagnet is cooled because the magnet itself is a superconductor. that way, all you need to do is pump a bunch of electricity into the magnet, cool it, and turn off the electricity and the current runs forever and you have a permanent magnet. the ones in this artilce are switched to allow for the tide (and to allow the ship to undock), so they can't be permanent supercondicint magnets, so they are probably not cooled to liquid helium temperatures. but this does bring up an interesting point, without the supercondicing magnet, these are going require a whole bunch of power to run, don't know if it's giong to be economical in the long run.
I'm confused on how the use of nuclear power will help us get to mars quicker. I understand the benefits of using nuclear power to generate electricity, or create steam to drive an engine, and such. But these type of engines only work on earth. Once you're in outer space, the only way to move is by conservation of momentum. That it to move forward, you have to throw something out the back (e.g. rocket engines). So to get to mars or anywhere else, you need to have enough fuel that can be thown out the back. I don't see nuclear power helping here. Does anyone know how nuclear power will help us get to mars faster. I can see how nuclear power will help generate electricity on the shuttle to help sustain human life, but I don't see how it helps propulsion?
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imho, there is no good use for a terminator gene. granted monsanto invented it to be evil and charge more for their seeds. and granted you gave a good possible use for the terminator gene. however, my problem with a terminator gene is not that it helps monsanto make gobs of money, it's that what happens if there is an accidental cross polination of a plant with the terminator gene and normal everyday plants. that's when you run into issues. if enough plants get polinated (or the gene is introduced some other way in nature) then it can be possible that all the plants will quit producing seeds, that's a problem! the best thing is to never ever introduce a terminator gene into the wild.
something's wrong in that calculation. i have 3 desktops, pentium, dual pentium mmx, pentium 2, and 4 laptops, pentium, celeron, pentium 3, pentium 4. all are on 24/7 and my electricity bill is about $16/month. i don't know my exact energy usage, or my cost per KWh, but there's quite a discrepancy between your estimation and my actual values.
you could also get easy fake upload credits too. i had a 2400 bps modem that had built in compression, so i'd always pkzip my uploads with no compression. that way, the modem could do the work and then when the bbs got it, they'd give me the credits on the zip file size which was pretty big. also helped to include a rather large text file of all 0's in the zip file too. ah, the good ol' days.
65 light years :)
I do agree with your point about the *nix file system needing a bit of updating/orginization. I've read all the arguments about the wonderfulness of having /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /sbin, and such. And some of it agree with, but some of it is just arcane, and a nice /config, /system, /programs would be cool, but i'm not going to argue that right now.
what i am going to argue is your point about the dificulty of removing imagemagick. I am willing to be that removing imagemagick would be just has hard if it were in windows. after removing the binaries, you'd have to find the dlls in \winnt\system, or \winnt\system32, or \windows\sytem32, or wherever they are. then you'd have to edit the registry and remove all the configuration options. where would they be? HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/software/imagemagick, HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/imagemagick (these may not be valid resistry locations, it's been years since i've looked at the windows registry). anyway, you can argue, that you would just go to control panel and tell it to uninstall imagemagick. but for that to work, you'd have had to install imagemagick as a package that windows recognises. if you're willing to do that, then an imagemagick rpm (or apt - never used that though) would be just fine. and 'rpm -e imagemagick' would take care of all of your problems eaily under linux.
I think you are mostly correct. Say sony did steal a song from EMI and distribute it, they should be fined $100K or $150K or whatever the current law it. But if sony "stole" 100 songs from EMI and only distributed one of them, they should still only be fined the $100K or so.
If billy steals 1000 songs from P2P but distributes none, he should not be fined. But if billy steals 1000 songs from P2P and distributes them, he should be fined for the number of songs he distributes.
I think the laws were written to prevent the distribution of material. The person on the receiving end should not be fined, it should be the distributer. Even in the P2P world, the distributer and receiver are easily defined.
a town i drove through in western colorado was pretty bad too. usually when you see north 3rd street or something, and are trying to get to south 3rd street, you just stay on the same road and go south because the north/south designation means north end or south end of the SAME road. well in this town (unfortunately i forgot the name) the north/south designation was for different roads. the road through center of town was 1st street. then on each side of 1st street was north 2nd and south 2nd, and then north 3rd and south 3rd, this continued to extend this way out of town.
:)
------N 3rd st-----
------N 2nd st-----
--------1st st-----
------S 2nd st-----
------S 3rd st-----
i was lost in that town for quite a while
if you don't think his lectures are very deep then you haven't read them well enough. my research group took an hour each week to discuss each of the lectures in volume 1 (we just haven't gotten to vol 2 yet). it's amazing how much you can learn from so called 'freshman lectures' even when you're a 5th year student in chemical physics. there's so much packed in there, it's just so elgantly written that you don't realize how much you just learned. if you sit back and analyze the lectures, you get a ton out of them.
6 easy pieces is cut from the full "feynman lectures on physics." this is a great series of books. unfortunately they're quite expensive, but they are lectures that feynman gave to an incoming group of physics majors at cal tech, so they start of very basic. if you're looking to get just a basic understanding of physics and a little chemistry and biology thrown in for fun, try reading volume 1 of the lectures. volumes 2 and 3, while great references for physists are probably not great if you're just trying to understand concepts. but if you have the money, there's no reason not to buy the whole set. and as the parent said, all of feynman's books are great (beware, some of them are high level graduate level books). i also recommend the feynman lectures on computing.
my bose lifestyle 28 does compression on dvd audio output. so yes, they do offer that on consumer stereos. it's great for watching aciton movies without shaking the house down.
yes, but you don't email the fire station when your house is burning down. email is good for non-critical (or at least non-immediate) forms of communications.
i'm not going to argue with you on how stupid it is to use the phone number as the primary key (i know it is). but this wouldn't make the number portability harder would it? either you leave verison and go to a new service and keep your number, so all they need is a
delete * from all_the_tables where phone_number=123-456-7890
or you come to verizon with your own phone number and all they have to do is
insert new_user_info into customer_tables
so my guess is that they'd rather not have the added competition.
I think you're wrong about boulder. Boulder has done a great job of solving the driving problem. The bus system is absolutely wonderful and I'm a big fan of the bike paths (it's kinda funny, they seem to get plowed first in the winter before the streets). And the roads are definately big enough for suv (just think of all the stupid freshman girls that almost run you over everyday in their range rover while talking on their cellphone). Boudler about an equal split of suv-driving yuppies and peace-loving hippies, so you have both the honda civics and the ford excursions - and they seem to get along for the most part (at least better than other cities that i've seen).
The one thing that has always bothered me about this quote is that it's not necessarly true. The monkeys could just keep typing 's' all the time forever. Here's an example that I once read about in an astrophysics book, I found it quite interesting:
Assuming that the universe is infinitely big and there are an infinite number of planets, does there necessarly have to be a planet like Earth that exists.
Initially I thought that it makes sence that given an infiniately large universe, there has to be a planet like Earth, but this is not true. The example given to me was the set of odd numbers. This set is infinite, but no matter how hard you look in that set you'll never find the number 2.
I always think about that when someone says that give an infinite amount of time something will definately happen.
yeah, but in central pa you get the monday after thanksgiving off of work because it's the first day of deer season and every good pa citizen has to go out hunting then :)
nope, rfid is item-specific. why else would companies be ordering a half a billion tags (near the bottom of the first page of the article)? that's what's scary about rfid. i'm not sure how many bits a rfid tag can store, but it could easily be 256 (that'd only be 32 bytes). 2^256 is about 10^77, there are only 10^80 particles in the universe, so it would be easy with rfid to tag every possible thing.
don't mean to be nitpicky, but you don't ionize water into O2 and H2. ionize means to remove an electron..so to ionize water you'd turn it into H2O+ by removing an electron. what you did was elecrolyze water. that is, induce a chemical reaction (2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2) with electricity.
oh, i don't know. maybe because the H2 is nothing special. it's build on a GM (i think surburban, or maybe tahoe) frame, and shares a number of parts from the stock GM parts bin. You're basically paying like $50,000 for an suv that you can get for around $30,000 if it didn't look like a hummer. The real hummers are cool, but the new H2 is just another way to get people to drop money on SUVs they don't need.
i don't think you can get an ibm without windows, but you may be able to make up for it other ways. i had a dell ispiron 8000 laptop that i hated, some of the keys broke in less than a year and the display hinge got loose real quick and the display wouldn't stay up unless it was perpendicular. so anyway, last week i just got my ibm thinkpad r32. it's nice and light. the screen does max 1024x768 which is kinda small for me, but that's what you get with a small light laptop. now back to the windows problem...the oem xp licence on the thinkpad is $90 and there was no way i could convince ibm to sell me the laptop without it. but i did get a 10% student discount which more than covered the $90. now i know my money still went to the evil empire, but i did get a kick ass laptop. now, i am actually a graduate student, so that's why i asked for the student discount. but i had to do no verification at all. when i called the customer service, i told them i wanted a laptop and that i was a student and they gave me a 10% discount with no questions asked. you could always do the same (even if you're not a student) and you'd make up more than the difference that you'd pay for xp.
btw - redhat 8.0 installed on the laptop with no issues at all.
even better, acetylene. any hobby store sells calcium carbide (the stuff in old miner's helmets to make the light). just put a little calcium carbide in water and you have instant acetylene (used for welding). ignite that with a gas grill ignitor and you can easily have potatoes going 150mph. when i was little my brother and i experimented with many different style guns. the best we came up with was using acetylene as the propellant and using a 1 inch pvc barrel (rahter than the traditional 2 inch). you couldn't shoot a whole potato with it, but the part you did shoot went about 150mph. (we figured that out by timing how long the potato stayed in the air when shot vertically).
i think you'll have a very hard time finding a good alcohol free beer. Above 5% or so alcohol content the alcohol becomes part of the flavor of the beer. if you notice (at least from my perspective) the best beer that you get at a brew pub and such are also the ones with high alcohol content. especially the 10-14% imperial stouts (just my opinion there). so i think it'll be impossible to find a beer that has no alcohol, yet still has a good flavor like all the other high alcohol beers.
your cryomagnet is cooled because the magnet itself is a superconductor. that way, all you need to do is pump a bunch of electricity into the magnet, cool it, and turn off the electricity and the current runs forever and you have a permanent magnet. the ones in this artilce are switched to allow for the tide (and to allow the ship to undock), so they can't be permanent supercondicint magnets, so they are probably not cooled to liquid helium temperatures. but this does bring up an interesting point, without the supercondicing magnet, these are going require a whole bunch of power to run, don't know if it's giong to be economical in the long run.
I'm confused on how the use of nuclear power will help us get to mars quicker. I understand the benefits of using nuclear power to generate electricity, or create steam to drive an engine, and such. But these type of engines only work on earth. Once you're in outer space, the only way to move is by conservation of momentum. That it to move forward, you have to throw something out the back (e.g. rocket engines). So to get to mars or anywhere else, you need to have enough fuel that can be thown out the back. I don't see nuclear power helping here. Does anyone know how nuclear power will help us get to mars faster. I can see how nuclear power will help generate electricity on the shuttle to help sustain human life, but I don't see how it helps propulsion?