Though I'm a seed saver myself, and thus am at odds with Monsanto's terminator technology (and GM in general), terminator seeds are probably quite a useful way to stop GM seeds spreading into the rest of the environment. I mean, that's one of the main arguments against GM: that GM crops may breed with other crops and weeds, creating unwanted effects, or exposing effects that might not have been apparent in the short period of testing available. Making GM crops sterile reduces the validity of this argument.
I guess I should been more specific. While there are other options than Adobe and you can make pretty small pdf files, most Windows users are ignorant of those options. And, Adobe's free product is a viewer. It does not give you the ability to create. Have you ever been to a local, state, or government site that has documents available in pdf? Why should a two page text file be two megabytes? Why should a fifty page legal brief be fifteen megabytes? Portable my ass unless you are one of the tech savvy. Perhaps a two page file taking two megabytes is a scanned file? Thus making it quite a large bitmap graphic? A lot of pdf files out there are scanned documents. They are big. I just created a four page text file from openoffice that weighed in at 69kb. I've done much of the same in windows using acrobat. Mostly, in my experience, pdfs end up being smaller than the source docs they come from. Using the default options.
The current consequences probably include getting a tow truck to pull the truck out from between two ridiculously spaces stone walls, then repairing the damage to the truck and the walls. Probably paid for by the driver, or truck company. But still a great inconvenience to the village even if the damage is eventually paid for.
Have you actually been on some of those countryside roads in the UK? It's hard enough fitting a small car on some of them, let alone a truck.
Google Body: Users Find Asses with Both Hands August 18, 2022
MOUNTAIN VIEW--Information search giant Google, Inc. announced Thursday the release of Google Body, a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet. "Google has long been dedicated to making information both useful and universally accessible," notes Google VP of Product Development Eric Hind. "We're happy now to extend search to information about human bodies, mine and yours, inside and out, from the number of follicles on my head to the length of the President's toenails."
The project, known as Google Body, sees the company partnering with public transportation systems, libraries, and motor vehicle departments to place scanning equipment in high-traffic doorways and public thoroughfares. Though details of the agreements are scarce and reportedly subject participating city and state officials to strict non-disclosure terms, Google's announcement confirmed that the project is active in several major U.S. population centers, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, with agreements with at least 16 other cities in late-stage negotiation. "We've passed proof-of-concept at this point," adds Hind, "and now our focus is scalability and rolling this thing out nationwide."
The service, which has been available for some three months to invitation-only beta testers, enables users to search for aggregate information about the anatomy of user-defined groups. "The service is a boon to the medical research community," says Dr. Jennifer Guns of the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Specialism. "Nothing will replace truly controlled trials, but the ability to get a snapshot of, say, the blood pressure of men between 50 and 65 on New York's Upper East Side, can certainly give companies an idea of where they might best spend their research dollars."
Early testers have remarked upon a fuzzy-logic "match my organ" feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor for multiple organ systems. "We think of Body as way to bring people together," remarks Google's Hind. The most common searches among testers, however, exploited the service's ability to produce three-dimensional images of the bodies of individual subjects. "I was shocked when I saw it," exclaims Larry Blender of Carson City. "I mean, one, where did they get a 3-D rendering of my ass, and, two, does my ass really look like that? I admit that I satisfied some of my curiosity about a few of my neighbors and co-workers before I thought to search for myself, but I was still really shocked to see it up there."
The service has understandably raised concerns among privacy activists, who point to reports that early users include some well-known insurance companies and two prominent executive recruiting firms. "You know what the top two search terms are, after 'ass'?" asks David Deerfield of People and Privacy, a privacy-focused community outreach group. "They're 'aorta' and 'arterial plaque.' Who do you think is conducting those searches? There's no doubt in my mind that there are insurance company bots scouring this thing and we think it should stop."
Responding to criticism from privacy groups, Google's Hind pointed to the program's opt-out policy. "We are very concerned about user privacy, and that's why we will not make publicly available any information about anybody who let's us know they do not want to participate by wearing an Opt-Out headband when in public. Google archives information about those individuals, but does not make it searchable." The yellow and black vinyl headbands can be requested free of charge by writing to the company at its Mountain View headquarters.
Actually, you can import old mail quite easily. I can't exactly remember how (I've only needed to do this once), but I think it involved creating a filter in thunderbird or some other such 'e-mail' client, applied to * or all the messages you want to import, and adding a 'forward' or 'bounce' rule to it or something like that. It all comes into gmail as new messages, which you subsequently label (or set up a temporary filter in gmail to label all incoming mail during the import). Google it for more info.
In fact, you can do this with any webmail provider. And as long as the webmail provider provides POP or IMAP as well, you can go the other way.
Debian isn't aimed at grannies or the average corporate joe. Its primary user base is geeks and sysadmins who need rock-solid systems.
The title of www.debian.org: "Debian -- The Universal Operating System". Touche. My comment about the primary user base stands. And in time, it probably will be the universal OS. In the meantime, it serves as a rock-solid reference platform for other to build on top of.
This is debian, and there is a simple command-line based solution. Debian isn't aimed at grannies or the average corporate joe. Its primary user base is geeks and sysadmins who need rock-solid systems. And it does a damn good job of that. It also servers as a great reference implementation for others (ubuntu, et al) to customise and optimise for more specific uses.
Actually a true filter would be way too costly and slow to work on this scale. Rather than blocking the actual connections, when a user tries to connect to a 'banned' website (or banned words/phrases are detected), the firewall sends a reset packet to both sides of the TCP connection, which effectively closes the channel. Unless of course both client and server know to ignore reset packets.
What you say is true. But in the case of Pakistan, they (the US & co) were looking for that single solitary nuclear device, as a test had been expected (due to other intelligence and India's recent tests). So I guess my point is that they did it invisibly despite being looked at the whole time.
If I recall correctly, the US didn't know where or when Pakistan (or was it India?) was about to detonate its first test nuke because the satellites didn't see the materials being moved in or out of the expected sites. They didn't see it because the Pakistanis (or Indians) were keeping track of satellites and not moving anything when there were unknown ones overhead. It's quite easy to do; it just requires a lot of manpower (which there is plenty of in the subcontinent)
Why not use the type of versioning scheme TeX and co use: asymptotically approaching pi (or some other irrational number, such as e)? That really seems to be more in line with what Linus was talking about, there will always be improvements, but they will get smaller and smaller as time progresses.
There was a story only a couple of days ago on slashdot about how digital compression is less important than earphone or speaker quality. In the study, people found the 128kbps compressed audio through high quality earphones (shure) better than uncompressed PCM through original ipod earphones.
And we see that Wi-Fi and laptop hibernation STILL do not work properly? What is this, rocket science? Linux finally got the printer problem licked so that now you just select the printer and everything works with CUPS. Why can't the distros get a straightforward, automated way of installing WiFi support? It's not even a driver issue, since the drivers (if only through NDISWrapper) are there. It's the setup problem again - nothing is detected, the user isn't asked, so nothing works! This is ridiculous! Um, I'm running edgy and hibernation and wifi worked on my laptop straight up without any problems. For wifi, I had to install network-manager (now included in feisty by default). But I didn't have to do anything fancy at all, and now it autodetects my home network and my work network and connects automatically. Hell, wifi doesn't work properly in xp on the same machine (I had to switch to some IBM provided tool to get it working recently).
You can prototype networks build linux servers windows servers and your grandma can still get to her email without tech support telling her to disable her firewall. This is *the* ultimate desktop, windows should be deployed where best, linux should be deployed where it's best suited and the human interface should be Mac OS X. Call me a tight-arse, but a kernel + GUI shouldn't need 512 Megs of RAM to run. That was my (brief) experience with a MacBook. Real nice, but it crawled as soon as you started actually _doing_ anything with it (apart from looking at it's niceness). Of course you could always add more RAM, but I contend 512 megabytes ought to be enough for anybody.:)
True; though the first option is useless if the USB ports aren't working due to lack of a driver. But the greater problem was the problems in installing the drivers (yes, I did try burning them to CD eventually) - they just refused to install. This was due to IBMs driver install system requiring.NET framework 2, while XP ships with version 1. No useful error message or anything to notify the user of this...
I got an IBM r52 recently; I tried installing XP on it - initially with the supposed foolproof system restore image, then from scratch, and three or four hours later, still had no usable system. The drivers just wouldn't install or download and I couldn't find a way to transport them from my other machine. Then I put an ubuntu 6.10 disc in, and bout half an hour later, without little to no interaction, had a perfectly working system. Even wifi worked out of the box. (WPA authentication took a little bit more digging, but was surprisingly easy once I found the package to use).
The solution is simple. A default gnome desktop install package that just works, and an additional power-users tweak package. Like Windows has with TweakUI (only more powerful). The extra step involved in installing the extra package would prevent accidental stuff-ups by grandma and grandpa, while being easy enough for l337 h4x0rz to install and configure.
Slashdot Mirror
no
I really don't know; one would assume that it would be at the pollen stage (if the biotech companies have any clue at all), but then again...
One of the main concerns would be that not quite 100% of the GM seeds would be sterile in the second generation.
Though I'm a seed saver myself, and thus am at odds with Monsanto's terminator technology (and GM in general), terminator seeds are probably quite a useful way to stop GM seeds spreading into the rest of the environment. I mean, that's one of the main arguments against GM: that GM crops may breed with other crops and weeds, creating unwanted effects, or exposing effects that might not have been apparent in the short period of testing available. Making GM crops sterile reduces the validity of this argument.
Uh, large file size?
[snip]
I guess I should been more specific. While there are other options than Adobe and you can make pretty small pdf files, most Windows users are ignorant of those options. And, Adobe's free product is a viewer. It does not give you the ability to create. Have you ever been to a local, state, or government site that has documents available in pdf? Why should a two page text file be two megabytes? Why should a fifty page legal brief be fifteen megabytes? Portable my ass unless you are one of the tech savvy. Perhaps a two page file taking two megabytes is a scanned file? Thus making it quite a large bitmap graphic? A lot of pdf files out there are scanned documents. They are big. I just created a four page text file from openoffice that weighed in at 69kb. I've done much of the same in windows using acrobat. Mostly, in my experience, pdfs end up being smaller than the source docs they come from. Using the default options.
The current consequences probably include getting a tow truck to pull the truck out from between two ridiculously spaces stone walls, then repairing the damage to the truck and the walls. Probably paid for by the driver, or truck company. But still a great inconvenience to the village even if the damage is eventually paid for.
Have you actually been on some of those countryside roads in the UK? It's hard enough fitting a small car on some of them, let alone a truck.
I just got this in my inbox yesterday:
(blatantly ripped from http://futurefeedforward.com/front.php?fid=104 )
Google Body: Users Find Asses with Both Hands
August 18, 2022
MOUNTAIN VIEW--Information search giant Google, Inc. announced Thursday the release of Google Body, a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet. "Google has long been dedicated to making information both useful and universally accessible," notes Google VP of Product Development Eric Hind. "We're happy now to extend search to information about human bodies, mine and yours, inside and out, from the number of follicles on my head to the length of the President's toenails."
The project, known as Google Body, sees the company partnering with public transportation systems, libraries, and motor vehicle departments to place scanning equipment in high-traffic doorways and public thoroughfares. Though details of the agreements are scarce and reportedly subject participating city and state officials to strict non-disclosure terms, Google's announcement confirmed that the project is active in several major U.S. population centers, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, with agreements with at least 16 other cities in late-stage negotiation. "We've passed proof-of-concept at this point," adds Hind, "and now our focus is scalability and rolling this thing out nationwide."
The service, which has been available for some three months to invitation-only beta testers, enables users to search for aggregate information about the anatomy of user-defined groups. "The service is a boon to the medical research community," says Dr. Jennifer Guns of the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Specialism. "Nothing will replace truly controlled trials, but the ability to get a snapshot of, say, the blood pressure of men between 50 and 65 on New York's Upper East Side, can certainly give companies an idea of where they might best spend their research dollars."
Early testers have remarked upon a fuzzy-logic "match my organ" feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor for multiple organ systems. "We think of Body as way to bring people together," remarks Google's Hind. The most common searches among testers, however, exploited the service's ability to produce three-dimensional images of the bodies of individual subjects. "I was shocked when I saw it," exclaims Larry Blender of Carson City. "I mean, one, where did they get a 3-D rendering of my ass, and, two, does my ass really look like that? I admit that I satisfied some of my curiosity about a few of my neighbors and co-workers before I thought to search for myself, but I was still really shocked to see it up there."
The service has understandably raised concerns among privacy activists, who point to reports that early users include some well-known insurance companies and two prominent executive recruiting firms. "You know what the top two search terms are, after 'ass'?" asks David Deerfield of People and Privacy, a privacy-focused community outreach group. "They're 'aorta' and 'arterial plaque.' Who do you think is conducting those searches? There's no doubt in my mind that there are insurance company bots scouring this thing and we think it should stop."
Responding to criticism from privacy groups, Google's Hind pointed to the program's opt-out policy. "We are very concerned about user privacy, and that's why we will not make publicly available any information about anybody who let's us know they do not want to participate by wearing an Opt-Out headband when in public. Google archives information about those individuals, but does not make it searchable." The yellow and black vinyl headbands can be requested free of charge by writing to the company at its Mountain View headquarters.
What about drink-addled over-50 year olds?
Actually, you can import old mail quite easily. I can't exactly remember how (I've only needed to do this once), but I think it involved creating a filter in thunderbird or some other such 'e-mail' client, applied to * or all the messages you want to import, and adding a 'forward' or 'bounce' rule to it or something like that. It all comes into gmail as new messages, which you subsequently label (or set up a temporary filter in gmail to label all incoming mail during the import). Google it for more info.
In fact, you can do this with any webmail provider. And as long as the webmail provider provides POP or IMAP as well, you can go the other way.
Actually, the tonsils have for some time been known to provide an immune function.
The title of www.debian.org: "Debian -- The Universal Operating System". Touche. My comment about the primary user base stands. And in time, it probably will be the universal OS. In the meantime, it serves as a rock-solid reference platform for other to build on top of.
This is debian, and there is a simple command-line based solution. Debian isn't aimed at grannies or the average corporate joe. Its primary user base is geeks and sysadmins who need rock-solid systems. And it does a damn good job of that. It also servers as a great reference implementation for others (ubuntu, et al) to customise and optimise for more specific uses.
Actually a true filter would be way too costly and slow to work on this scale. Rather than blocking the actual connections, when a user tries to connect to a 'banned' website (or banned words/phrases are detected), the firewall sends a reset packet to both sides of the TCP connection, which effectively closes the channel. Unless of course both client and server know to ignore reset packets.
What you say is true. But in the case of Pakistan, they (the US & co) were looking for that single solitary nuclear device, as a test had been expected (due to other intelligence and India's recent tests). So I guess my point is that they did it invisibly despite being looked at the whole time.
If I recall correctly, the US didn't know where or when Pakistan (or was it India?) was about to detonate its first test nuke because the satellites didn't see the materials being moved in or out of the expected sites. They didn't see it because the Pakistanis (or Indians) were keeping track of satellites and not moving anything when there were unknown ones overhead. It's quite easy to do; it just requires a lot of manpower (which there is plenty of in the subcontinent)
vik
Or that most meth users do have jobs, and the drug is not debilitating enough to stop them going to work (truckies being a good example).
Why not use the type of versioning scheme TeX and co use: asymptotically approaching pi (or some other irrational number, such as e)? That really seems to be more in line with what Linus was talking about, there will always be improvements, but they will get smaller and smaller as time progresses.
vik
There was a story only a couple of days ago on slashdot about how digital compression is less important than earphone or speaker quality. In the study, people found the 128kbps compressed audio through high quality earphones (shure) better than uncompressed PCM through original ipod earphones.
1 percent is 1/100. One thousandth of that is 1/1000 * 1/100 = 1/100000
Or one out of a hundred thousand. Your argument still stands, though.
Anyone else notice that the firefox included is version 1.5?
True; though the first option is useless if the USB ports aren't working due to lack of a driver. But the greater problem was the problems in installing the drivers (yes, I did try burning them to CD eventually) - they just refused to install. This was due to IBMs driver install system requiring .NET framework 2, while XP ships with version 1. No useful error message or anything to notify the user of this...
I got an IBM r52 recently; I tried installing XP on it - initially with the supposed foolproof system restore image, then from scratch, and three or four hours later, still had no usable system. The drivers just wouldn't install or download and I couldn't find a way to transport them from my other machine. Then I put an ubuntu 6.10 disc in, and bout half an hour later, without little to no interaction, had a perfectly working system. Even wifi worked out of the box. (WPA authentication took a little bit more digging, but was surprisingly easy once I found the package to use).
It's more that they don't _want_ new cars - the old ones are just too damn classy to get rid of.
The solution is simple. A default gnome desktop install package that just works, and an additional power-users tweak package. Like Windows has with TweakUI (only more powerful). The extra step involved in installing the extra package would prevent accidental stuff-ups by grandma and grandpa, while being easy enough for l337 h4x0rz to install and configure.