Discovery.com provides a few more details but since the scientists themselves are still baffled, I don't think we will find any lengthy explanations of the phenomenom except perhaps by reading the article in Nature itself which is not available except by subscription.
The thing new in the Discovery article I found significant was that they performed the movements with "millimetric" precision.
I wonder if the dragonfly's 3 foot long ancestors were also capable of such precision, or whether the need to remain so precise led to their reduced current size.
Actually from what I can tell it is essentially the same as the Picard Maneuver or at least has the same effect - that the bogey (be it predator or prey) thinks you are stationary when in fact you are moving.
And it does have military implications thought I would think they are limited in that fooling a biological eye is now of little concern - its fooling electronic eyes that is the current challenge, and I can't see how this can be applied to foil them.
This opens up the oppertunity for investors to sue SCO for misinformation.
Not just investors. If the Nike case recently argued before the Supreme Court goes against Nike, then the California law under which they were sued could easily be used to sue SCO for making false commercial pronouncements.
The question is, while they evolved, did their genome evolve in a direction similar enough to our own to warrant including them in the genus homo?
Actually I think the real question was the species we both forked from in family Homo? I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure the Lucy is sometimes considered the earliest or one the ealiest members of the family Homo, but some consider her as part of family Austropithicenae either way, these families only date back 2.5 - 4 Million years, well past the split from our common ancester with chimps/bonobos. If you now reclassify chimps/bonobos as being family Homo, you would I presume have to consider all species since the split with our commmon ancester to also be family Homo.
That sounds like it would having a sweeping impact on the human ancester timeline more significant than on our modern connection with chimps & bonobos.
Obviously neither the submitter nor editor have a basic grasp of chemistry as demonstrated by this line:
reduce the costs of making silicon -- and other elements, (emph. added)
This proccess is not making any silicon, and can't be used to make any other elements either. To make an element you need to employ either fission or fusion at the nuclear level - not at the molecular level as this process is described.
Re:Cyveillance in a nutshell
on
Meet Cyveillancebot
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Cyveillance runs a web robot. That web robot has one purpose, and one purpose only: to scour the web looking for "copyrighted material" owned by its clients. What happens when such material is found, I don't know; it's probably reported back to the Mother Ship for C&D processing.
What I don't understand is why scouring the web for Copyrighted material is considered being violated. If you are depending on the copyright laws, then you must abide by the limitations on those rights. Once the copyright owner has made the document publicly accessibly without encryption, fair-use would dictate that anyone that comes across it can at least read and index the text. They may not be able to keep a complete copy, but they would be able to keep their index, and even profit from the sale/rental of access to that index. If they are caching the page ala Google, then persue them under the copyright laws. If they are merely scouring and indexing and you don't want that done, then don't allow public access to the document. As noted elsewhere robots.txt is not the method for denying public access - some combination of userid/password and/or encryption where you control the encryption key is.
ARACHNE Fully Graphical Browser (& Internet Su
on
Who Needs XFree86?
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· Score: 1
Any discussion of making the console a user friendly environment for the mouse wielding masses must take a look at the Arachne Web Browser and Internet Suite. Originally developed for DOS, and included with the FreeDOS distro, Arachne's creator has been working on a Linux port (based on SVGAlib & GGI lib) for a while now - but it is still a beta release. You can also of course run the DOS version in an emulator from the Linux console.
In addition to Web browsing and email, it can also be used as a front end for a media player capable of handling MP3's and some video. And ist can be used as a handy directory tool for browsing your own local files.
One criticism of it is the licensing it is released under - though this is partly due to tools created by others that were incorporated into it. But the author is a SlashDot fan so is aware of the concerns. The standard download is cripple-ware and free for personal use.
Water is the most siginificant and most abundant greenhouse gas. It is also one we have the least control over. We do have some control over CO2 and Methane, and so that has been the primary focus of greenhouse gas reduction planning - but were a mechanism found to control water vapor, we might not have to bother much with controlling carbon based greenhouse gases.
For our engagement ring we bought a second hand ring and had it re-sized, and the stone adjusted to sit lower. Much cheaper, and yet in a way more personalized than a jewelry store ring - especially since similar antique styles are no longer found at jewelry stores.
For our wedding bands we worked with a friend of a friend who is a jeweler to design and create custom rings that combined two standard jeweler's "blanks" in a unique way.
As to using you're own gems & metal, I second another recomendation here to find an artist who makes jewelry. Your typical jeweler probably doesn't even do their own re-sizing let alone know how to recast metal into a lasting emblem of your love. I would no sooner walk into a Zales or similar type chain jeweler and ask them to hand craft my wedding ring than I would walk into CompUSA with a box of silicon, plastic, solder, and wire and ask them to handcraft my new PC from "scratch".
Wow, this is one of the most negative threads I've ever read on SlashDot, and that is saying a lot. Yes, it does seem trivial. And Yes, he shouldn't have patented it. But let let me put my analysis into terms the the typical SlashDot reader should be able to appreciate:
Using one formula to produce shapes will make graphics programs much more efficient,
That means faster and more realistic video games and Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies folks, what could be bad about that?
Well actually, most local bookstores that want to stay in business have stopped trying to beat Amazon and bn.com and decided to join them by offering used & hard to find books via their affiliated dealers programs.
Unfortunately, just one copy of the hardback version was (sold within the last few minutes while I was writing this post) available through bn's affilliate system, and none of either edition are available through Amazon's affiliates. Though the paper back version is available through Amazon.
If there are local stores out there that have the book available, they might want to consider selling the book through Amazon or bn.com. After all, listing (at least on Amazon) is free.
Actually, its a little more complicated than that. Amazon has the paper back edition (ISBN 0957921810), but they too are out of the hardback edition (ISBN 0957921802) which is the edition identified in the book's stats part of the review.
bn.com doesn't even acknowledge the paperback exists, let alone having it in stock - but if you dig you will find they do have a copy of the hardback available through an affiliate dealer. Amazon's affiliated sellers don't have any of the hardback available and in fact have a buyer waiting for copy to go up for sale.
It would seem that the same approach could be used to distinguish potential intelligent radio signals from those of random or astronomical origin. Though perhaps you would want a pattern to be present resulting in a more compressible file? I think it would depend whether the signal that is picked up is a deliberate simple pattern meant to be a "hello, are you out there?" broadcast by an E.T, or if it is normal communications between E.T.'s not realizing (or not concerned) that they are being overheard.
What no one here has mentioned, and what doesn't appear in the reviews is whether or not it comes with a Distro on CD-ROM. I'm assuming from the low price that it doesn't, which is a shame, as it would seem the perfect vehicle for distributing a copy of DemoLinux or Knoppix. Without an included disk, I can only assume the guidance is kept very distro-independent, which is good if you are technically oriented, but I think the people that consider themselves technically oriented and that are interested in Linux don't consider themselves part of "the rest of us". The people that I would put in the category of "the rest of us" are people that would love to try linux, as long as they can do so without downloading an ISO image, burning it to a cd, and then partitioning their harddrive - or alternatively shelling out $20 - $99 for a commercial shrink-wrapped distro.
Try to find colleagues gor exchanging ideas and build your own "center of excellence".
Here are some ideas that could be pursued intead of layoffs.
assign some of the staff the task of developing house training for the rest of the staff.
assign some of the staff to thoroughly debug the the current release of your software (or all currently supported releases if it is commercial product) - cut their base pay but give them the opportunity to increase their pay for each bug they find - stupid mistake bugs will be funded in part by having the bonus paid by the coder who made the mistakes and any reviewers who failed to catch it if they are stillon full pay.
for each one planned layoff - instead put 4 staff on 3/4 time & pay. Then let them use their work PC and Internet connection for some "good" cause - like coding for an OSS project - during the 10 hours they have been laid off for.
Did anyone elase read the full article? There are some very scary statements regarding user privacy. Your userid will be you REAL name, plus a uniques identifying number. And your password is your fingerprint. And advertisiers will be able to to directly target their advertising on a user by user basis.
While the box pulls together a couple of cool technologies, I don't think there is anything innovative enough here to make this product worth the hype given the privacy concerns. The big innovation is the cited remaining challenge of getting a network connection to each building (then presumably wiring each household in the building, or not if wireless is used within each site). If that could be accomplished, then about $300 could assemble a Linux based set-top box using off the shelf parts (TV tuner card, PAL/NTSC video out instead of XGA, CD-RW drive, 500 Mhz processor, 128M ram, ethernet, and maybe a 20G HD).
I'd love to have one, but for the 800 bucks I'd shell out for a decent 15" LCD...
$800? You can get a SONY SDM-M51 15.1" Monitor for $335, and their "professional quality" Sony SDMX52 15" Flat Panel LCD (with additional input jack for DVI-D, and integrated speakers) is around $379 after rebate.
If you've got $800 to spend you could one of SONY's higher end 18" LCD monitors such as the Sony SDMX82 18" Flat Panel LCD (also with additional input jack for DVI-D, and integrated speakers) which is only $737 after rebate.
Where do you shop that you pay List Price on electronics?
Well it "supports" Linux (at least in a way). It was one of the free Polaroid style (uses the same flat battery technology Polaroind uses to power their film packs) lights Sun was giving out a Linux conference they were sponsoring.
we'd need to set up a new email/micropayment infrastucture to make it possible
I think the micro payment's issue isn't there. You just buy $5 worth of stamps from the charity or OS project or your choice. You wouldn't have to buy the stamps one at a time.
As far as changing the servers, that too wouldn't be needed since the whole process could be handled on the client side. If PGP for email (and unfortunately webbugs) can be implemented without altering the email servers, then certainly this kind of system could as well.
As for me, I recently started using the Bayesian filters in Mozilla 1.3's email client. I can't say enough good things about how well this has worked--I've reclaimed my email box. It used to take me ten minutes or more a day to delete spam. But Mozilla does it with uncanny accuracy,
Thanks for the tip, I will try it out one of my accounts I have abbandoned due to too much spammage.
This patent seems to be mostly about selling space for ads via an automated market process.
Well, SPAM selling banner ad space was being sent out at least as early as February 1996. I love how the text of the spam says the site displaying the ad the gets two - three hundred hits per day.
(Note the 'patented' process for having an ad embedded in my/. sig below)
My Latest Family Tech Support 'Adventure'
on
Family Tech Support
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My Brother-in-Law is a victim of the tech-support provided by his own brother who has instead of giving up the ghost and making him buy a new PC for a couple hundred bucks, kept upgrading his box, but keeping the same hardrive (at one point adding first a zip drive, and then a second HD for storage). As a result he had sort of a mismash of hardware with a 16-bit soundcard, and other legacy cards running on a Pentium II system with the original Windows 95 (and no remaining install disks).
Well eventually it was suffering from serious problems (in fact it still is having problems - but is generally working), and then stopped booting into Windows altogether.
Of course this had to happen just days after our most recent visit and likely many weeks before either his brother or I could make a "housecall". Over two hours (free long-distance on weekends is definately a mixed blessing) I carefully walked him through the process of (using only the Windows/DOS command line) of locating the most recent (2 years old!) backup of his user.dat & system.dat files (which being 'hidden' system files are not easy to find or move) and using them to overwrite his current copies. Which, following several reboots, got him into Windows.
That following weekend he went to a computer expo and bought a Win98 ugrade disk for (I think) $10. His system now generally works, but still doesn't shut down cleanly, though I think I will be able to get that fixed during the next "housecall".
Then consider loading this on it (it can also be configured as menuing system). An earlier version was included in the FreeDOS distro, but I don't think that version played MP3's
If you can then link him into the house network (The Arachne browser comes with a freeware TCPIP stack for DOS), he can surf the web, and check email with it.
They seem to be very context sensitive when it comes to censorship of ads. For example, they allowed this very provocative (and not work safe) ad to go forward, on the basis that it would be used in sophisticated fashion magazines.
If it were to be used on a billboard across the street from a school, the impression their ruling gives is that it would not have been given the go ahead.
Re:Where do you get the replacement parts?
on
Cat Organ Transplants
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· Score: 2, Funny
forget genetic engineering... make your dream cat frankenstein style
'cat' already means to merge two entities together, so I guess this operation can be summed up as:
Slashdot Mirror
Discovery.com provides a few more details but since the scientists themselves are still baffled, I don't think we will find any lengthy explanations of the phenomenom except perhaps by reading the article in Nature itself which is not available except by subscription.
The thing new in the Discovery article I found significant was that they performed the movements with "millimetric" precision.
I wonder if the dragonfly's 3 foot long ancestors were also capable of such precision, or whether the need to remain so precise led to their reduced current size.
Actually from what I can tell it is essentially the same as the Picard Maneuver or at least has the same effect - that the bogey (be it predator or prey) thinks you are stationary when in fact you are moving.
And it does have military implications thought I would think they are limited in that fooling a biological eye is now of little concern - its fooling electronic eyes that is the current challenge, and I can't see how this can be applied to foil them.
Are available from here.
This opens up the oppertunity for investors to sue SCO for misinformation.
Not just investors. If the Nike case recently argued before the Supreme Court goes against Nike, then the California law under which they were sued could easily be used to sue SCO for making false commercial pronouncements.
The question is, while they evolved, did their genome evolve in a direction similar enough to our own to warrant including them in the genus homo?
Actually I think the real question was the species we both forked from in family Homo? I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure the Lucy is sometimes considered the earliest or one the ealiest members of the family Homo, but some consider her as part of family Austropithicenae either way, these families only date back 2.5 - 4 Million years, well past the split from our common ancester with chimps/bonobos. If you now reclassify chimps/bonobos as being family Homo, you would I presume have to consider all species since the split with our commmon ancester to also be family Homo.
That sounds like it would having a sweeping impact on the human ancester timeline more significant than on our modern connection with chimps & bonobos.
Cyveillance runs a web robot. That web robot has one purpose, and one purpose only: to scour the web looking for "copyrighted material" owned by its clients. What happens when such material is found, I don't know; it's probably reported back to the Mother Ship for C&D processing.
What I don't understand is why scouring the web for Copyrighted material is considered being violated. If you are depending on the copyright laws, then you must abide by the limitations on those rights. Once the copyright owner has made the document publicly accessibly without encryption, fair-use would dictate that anyone that comes across it can at least read and index the text. They may not be able to keep a complete copy, but they would be able to keep their index, and even profit from the sale/rental of access to that index. If they are caching the page ala Google, then persue them under the copyright laws. If they are merely scouring and indexing and you don't want that done, then don't allow public access to the document. As noted elsewhere robots.txt is not the method for denying public access - some combination of userid/password and/or encryption where you control the encryption key is.
Any discussion of making the console a user friendly environment for the mouse wielding masses must take a look at the Arachne Web Browser and Internet Suite. Originally developed for DOS, and included with the FreeDOS distro, Arachne's creator has been working on a Linux port (based on SVGAlib & GGI lib) for a while now - but it is still a beta release. You can also of course run the DOS version in an emulator from the Linux console.
In addition to Web browsing and email, it can also be used as a front end for a media player capable of handling MP3's and some video. And ist can be used as a handy directory tool for browsing your own local files.
One criticism of it is the licensing it is released under - though this is partly due to tools created by others that were incorporated into it. But the author is a SlashDot fan so is aware of the concerns. The standard download is cripple-ware and free for personal use.
H20 is not a greenhouse gas
That, my friend, is wrong.
Water is the most siginificant and most abundant greenhouse gas. It is also one we have the least control over. We do have some control over CO2 and Methane, and so that has been the primary focus of greenhouse gas reduction planning - but were a mechanism found to control water vapor, we might not have to bother much with controlling carbon based greenhouse gases.
Buy a second hand ring.
For our engagement ring we bought a second hand ring and had it re-sized, and the stone adjusted to sit lower. Much cheaper, and yet in a way more personalized than a jewelry store ring - especially since similar antique styles are no longer found at jewelry stores.
For our wedding bands we worked with a friend of a friend who is a jeweler to design and create custom rings that combined two standard jeweler's "blanks" in a unique way.
As to using you're own gems & metal, I second another recomendation here to find an artist who makes jewelry. Your typical jeweler probably doesn't even do their own re-sizing let alone know how to recast metal into a lasting emblem of your love. I would no sooner walk into a Zales or similar type chain jeweler and ask them to hand craft my wedding ring than I would walk into CompUSA with a box of silicon, plastic, solder, and wire and ask them to handcraft my new PC from "scratch".
Wow, this is one of the most negative threads I've ever read on SlashDot, and that is saying a lot. Yes, it does seem trivial. And Yes, he shouldn't have patented it. But let let me put my analysis into terms the the typical SlashDot reader should be able to appreciate:
Using one formula to produce shapes will make graphics programs much more efficient,
That means faster and more realistic video games and Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies folks, what could be bad about that?
Well actually, most local bookstores that want to stay in business have stopped trying to beat Amazon and bn.com and decided to join them by offering used & hard to find books via their affiliated dealers programs.
Unfortunately, just one copy of the hardback version was (sold within the last few minutes while I was writing this post) available through bn's affilliate system, and none of either edition are available through Amazon's affiliates. Though the paper back version is available through Amazon.
If there are local stores out there that have the book available, they might want to consider selling the book through Amazon or bn.com. After all, listing (at least on Amazon) is free.
BTW NineNine, we miss you!
Amazon still thinks it is
Actually, its a little more complicated than that. Amazon has the paper back edition (ISBN 0957921810), but they too are out of the hardback edition (ISBN 0957921802) which is the edition identified in the book's stats part of the review.
bn.com doesn't even acknowledge the paperback exists, let alone having it in stock - but if you dig you will find they do have a copy of the hardback available through an affiliate dealer. Amazon's affiliated sellers don't have any of the hardback available and in fact have a buyer waiting for copy to go up for sale.
It would seem that the same approach could be used to distinguish potential intelligent radio signals from those of random or astronomical origin. Though perhaps you would want a pattern to be present resulting in a more compressible file? I think it would depend whether the signal that is picked up is a deliberate simple pattern meant to be a "hello, are you out there?" broadcast by an E.T, or if it is normal communications between E.T.'s not realizing (or not concerned) that they are being overheard.
You can purchase Linux For the Rest of Us from bn.com.
Per BN.com: "A new copy is not available from Barnes & Noble.com at this time. A used copy may be available from our network of book dealers."
You can however buy it from Amazon.
What no one here has mentioned, and what doesn't appear in the reviews is whether or not it comes with a Distro on CD-ROM. I'm assuming from the low price that it doesn't, which is a shame, as it would seem the perfect vehicle for distributing a copy of DemoLinux or Knoppix. Without an included disk, I can only assume the guidance is kept very distro-independent, which is good if you are technically oriented, but I think the people that consider themselves technically oriented and that are interested in Linux don't consider themselves part of "the rest of us". The people that I would put in the category of "the rest of us" are people that would love to try linux, as long as they can do so without downloading an ISO image, burning it to a cd, and then partitioning their harddrive - or alternatively shelling out $20 - $99 for a commercial shrink-wrapped distro.
Here are some ideas that could be pursued intead of layoffs.
Did anyone elase read the full article? There are some very scary statements regarding user privacy. Your userid will be you REAL name, plus a uniques identifying number. And your password is your fingerprint. And advertisiers will be able to to directly target their advertising on a user by user basis.
While the box pulls together a couple of cool technologies, I don't think there is anything innovative enough here to make this product worth the hype given the privacy concerns. The big innovation is the cited remaining challenge of getting a network connection to each building (then presumably wiring each household in the building, or not if wireless is used within each site). If that could be accomplished, then about $300 could assemble a Linux based set-top box using off the shelf parts (TV tuner card, PAL/NTSC video out instead of XGA, CD-RW drive, 500 Mhz processor, 128M ram, ethernet, and maybe a 20G HD).
I'd love to have one, but for the 800 bucks I'd shell out for a decent 15" LCD...
$800? You can get a SONY SDM-M51 15.1" Monitor for $335, and their "professional quality" Sony SDMX52 15" Flat Panel LCD (with additional input jack for DVI-D, and integrated speakers) is around $379 after rebate.
If you've got $800 to spend you could one of SONY's higher end 18" LCD monitors such as the Sony SDMX82 18" Flat Panel LCD (also with additional input jack for DVI-D, and integrated speakers) which is only $737 after rebate.
Where do you shop that you pay List Price on electronics?
Does it run Linux?
Well it "supports" Linux (at least in a way). It was one of the free Polaroid style (uses the same flat battery technology Polaroind uses to power their film packs) lights Sun was giving out a Linux conference they were sponsoring.
I think the micro payment's issue isn't there. You just buy $5 worth of stamps from the charity or OS project or your choice. You wouldn't have to buy the stamps one at a time.
As far as changing the servers, that too wouldn't be needed since the whole process could be handled on the client side. If PGP for email (and unfortunately webbugs) can be implemented without altering the email servers, then certainly this kind of system could as well.
As for me, I recently started using the Bayesian filters in Mozilla 1.3's email client. I can't say enough good things about how well this has worked--I've reclaimed my email box. It used to take me ten minutes or more a day to delete spam. But Mozilla does it with uncanny accuracy,
Thanks for the tip, I will try it out one of my accounts I have abbandoned due to too much spammage.
Well, SPAM selling banner ad space was being sent out at least as early as
February 1996. I love how the text of the spam says the site displaying the ad the gets two - three hundred hits per day.
(Note the 'patented' process for having an ad embedded in my /. sig below)
My Brother-in-Law is a victim of the tech-support provided by his own brother who has instead of giving up the ghost and making him buy a new PC for a couple hundred bucks, kept upgrading his box, but keeping the same hardrive (at one point adding first a zip drive, and then a second HD for storage). As a result he had sort of a mismash of hardware with a 16-bit soundcard, and other legacy cards running on a Pentium II system with the original Windows 95 (and no remaining install disks).
Well eventually it was suffering from serious problems (in fact it still is having problems - but is generally working), and then stopped booting into Windows altogether.
Of course this had to happen just days after our most recent visit and likely many weeks before either his brother or I could make a "housecall". Over two hours (free long-distance on weekends is definately a mixed blessing) I carefully walked him through the process of (using only the Windows/DOS command line) of locating the most recent (2 years old!) backup of his user.dat & system.dat files (which being 'hidden' system files are not easy to find or move) and using them to overwrite his current copies. Which, following several reboots, got him into Windows.
That following weekend he went to a computer expo and bought a Win98 ugrade disk for (I think) $10. His system now generally works, but still doesn't shut down cleanly, though I think I will be able to get that fixed during the next "housecall".
Consider FreeDOS.
Then consider loading this on it (it can also be configured as menuing system). An earlier version was included in the FreeDOS distro, but I don't think that version played MP3's
If you can then link him into the house network (The Arachne browser comes with a freeware TCPIP stack for DOS), he can surf the web, and check email with it.
They seem to be very context sensitive when it comes to censorship of ads. For example, they allowed this very provocative (and not work safe) ad to go forward, on the basis that it would be used in sophisticated fashion magazines.
If it were to be used on a billboard across the street from a school, the impression their ruling gives is that it would not have been given the go ahead.
forget genetic engineering... make your dream cat frankenstein style
'cat' already means to merge two entities together, so I guess this operation can be summed up as:
cat Cat1 Kidney(Cat2) ???