Yes, the entire sequence is posted to the internet. It's not like someone else couldn't sequence the virus on his own...if you have the ability to reconstruct a virus from a published sequence (hell, CAN anyone reconstruct a virus from a published sequence yet?), you've got the ability to sequence it in the first place.
The ISS isn't in as much of a vacuum as an interstellar ship would be. The upper reaches of the atmosphere at the ISS's altitude are much, much thicker than the interstellar medium in the local bubble. Yes, there are structural needs to be able to withstand acceleration, but we're not talking about the kind of shear forces you'd see in an atmosphere.
Seriously, those are the most structurally unsound things I ever saw. In space, even though there is no weight there is still mass, Einstein!;)
No friction. The impetus on any part of the structure accelerates the whole structure with the same force, unlike in an atmosphere where the various jutting out bits would snap off because of shear forces due to the equality of friction and the inequality of acceleration. That's one of the few things B5 did get right (too bad they abandoned the rotating sections for artificial grav so early on in the series).
1644 (http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/adnotes/1999/201 799/an2017j.txt), when Milton published Areopagitica. One could probably also argue 508 bce, foundation of the Athenian Democracy by Kleishtenes (http://www.classics.und.ac.za/projects/democracy/ kleisthenes.htm), as isegoria, the Athenian equivalent of free speech, was one of the elements introduced. Because it is not global law does not mean it is not global principle.
To stick more precisely with law, since this is New Zealand, they probably follow English common law, and therefore have had mildly limited free speech rights (similar to those advocated by Milton) since they established a government, even as a colony. But I would expect that NZers could answer that more precisely.
for Ichat, The dell likly has or can download MSN/ICQ. And both of those would find a greater chance of having friends on that system than Ichat.
iChat is AOL IM compatible, IIRC. On the other stuff: yes, $600 is more that "a little bit more"; in my experience, my 500 MHz iBook is about 1.2X faster than my 700 MHz P3, so I would say that for all but the most platform-optimized apps the MHz differential is no more than 1.4:1; IE5.2 for Mac is quite different from IE5 for Windows, in some ways better, in some much worse (Unicode support, anyone?). Overall the main things that the Mac has going for it are rock-solid stability, good battery life, and some very useful alternative applications (you haven't lived until you've used BBEdit). After hemming and hawing, I've decided that I'll buy a Mac desktop box after the 970 is released, but will also get another Wintel box - after all, the extra $600 for the Wintel box isn't that bad....
I don't know; Faye works for me with the English voice better than with the Japanese voice. but then I don't know what a world-weary cynical Japanese woman's voice is supposed to sound like. Anyway, I believe they are the same voice actors.
It's on topic, the parent asked whether Spike died at the end of the series, which is only a few episodes after the movie. If you want to mod someone down, mod down the guy who asked the question, not the one who answered it.
The thing I didn't like about the ending was that it pretty much came out of nowhere. (Spike just suddenly decides to go after this guy - while the individual episodes were good, there just wasn't much build-up.)
You're kidding, right? The whole series builds to it. Go, get all the DVDs, and watch it in sequence.
As I probably detest the practice as much as you, I have to say that the story above says he is being held as a "material witness". This procedure is quite ancient in US law.
Yes, but don't you agree that holding someone as a material witness whom you intend to charge when you get enough evidence on him violates the spirit of the common law practice and the constitution? If I understand it correctly, a material witness is someone whom you do not intend to charge with a crime, but whose participation is required for your prosecution of another's crime.
The government agencies all report to Bush, whose constitutional mandate is the enforcement and implementation of legislation. And believe me, there have been times when the executive branch has failed to enforce or implement laws that they felt were unconstitutional pending court review. Because the Executive branch *can* do something like this, does not mean it *has to* do something like this. Mind you, the guy could be as crooked as a 3 dollar bill, but holding without charging is usually a sign of prosecutorial incompetence.
Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups wield technology as a weapon with no worries about privacy rights, MacDonald said. But fear and distrust of anti-terrorism and surveillance technology hampers the U.S. government's ability to shore up defenses and stop attacks before they happen.
Well, then, why don't we take away all the guns. After all, criminals wield guns as a weapon with no worries about people's rights. But fear and distrust hampers the U.S. government's ability to round up all the guns and stop crime befoe it happens.
It's so much fun to take a conservative argument, make one substitution, and watch them squirm. Though 90% of the conversatives around here would think this woman is an idiot, too.
I personally find, the bigger the book, the more difficult it is to navigate and the less useful it really becomes.
mega biblion, mega kakon - Kallimakhos, one of the librarians of the Library of Alexandria. The Greek is easy enough you can probably figure out what it means on your own without knowing Greek; kakos means "bad."
For an example: how many people bought a Mac because it had hours of free music and spoken word content (including I think most of a Harry Potter book?). Answer: nobody. I don't think they even bothered advertising the fact. And some of the content was pretty good (Phish, for instance).
You know what to call a response to one's on posting? An afterthought. Too quick on the trigger.
This would only work if "content" were a commodity like rice or eggs, which everyone would want the same kind of and which is pretty much interchangeable. Before the.com bubble burst, there was a lot of this "content is a commodity" type of thinking. It was wrong.
Re:Basically, a GIVE ME BACK MY OS 9 article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
First, I think you missed the point he stated at the begining that many people think that a spatial UI has to be a metaphore to something in real life. Hence your doornob argument is irrelivent.
Nope. I didn't miss the point. Did you not notice that the doorknob metaphor was taken from the article? See his response to me below for a better way of answering that criticism (or actually, your own second sentence). I don't know if I buy the idea that color-coding is "spatial." It's a different kind of real-world-to-virtual metaphor than the spatial one, a qualitative (rather than spatial) metaphor. Maybe I'm taking the word "spatial" too literally, too.
That might have been a good point if you had mentioned, let alone try and prove that Next had a better GUI. But since you didn't I'm not really sure what your point is. Shold we be re-inventing the wheel instead of improving upon something that already works?
The wheel has already been reinvented. OS X is NOT a linear progression from OS 9, it is a linear progression from NeXT. Which had the better GUI isn't the issue; the issue is whether the article really says anything more than "they should have brought the whole OS 9 GUI over to OS X, instead of creating a new GUI that is neither fish (OS 9) or fowl (NeXTStep)."
Given the tendency of some/. readers to post
about 3D GUIs, how would the author integrate ideas about 3D GUIs into his spatial metaphor? Is a 3D GUI even better because it is more spatial? I don't remember seeing that in the article (feel free to trump me if I'm wrong).
How is a tree more spatial than a column-based representation of directory structure? Isn't a tree better described as a useful non-spatial representational element? (I mean the linear trees, not a big spread-out org chart style tree, which would be more "spatial.") Why is a many-to-one representation really so bad? Is it because the user has such a hard time understanding the idea that two windows can point to one folder? The way this was handled (which window is it?) didn't quite capture the argument for me. I think the many-to-one model can be quite useful. I agree with him, though, with the idea that "open every folder in a new frame" would be a better default than "open new folders in the frame of parent" is. That's one place the spatial argument really holds together well.
Too bad, as I would love to see a proper discussion on/. about GUIs that wasn't dominated by people saying the CLI is better or misinterperating concepts on GUIs and usability.
Where did I say CLI is better? (It is better for some things, GUI is better for others.) The other half of your last comment is best described as specious.
Re:Basically, a GIVE ME BACK MY OS 9 article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps I should have said labels are "a natural extension of the values that form the foundation for the Spatial Finder", but I thought the intent was clear with the existing wording.
No, it wasn't. Rather you should have written what you've just written above, as it is a far more supportable argument.
Good of you to answer the criticism directly. How would you answer my other criticism: which of the suggestions that you mention were not inspired by OS9?
The Japanese market may be able to support a higher intro price than the US market. They're more tech rabid than Americans (a frightening thought, that).
Apple is a hardware manufacturer. They will do a simple calculation: okay, if 50% of the purchasers of a clone are people who wouldn't or couldn't buy a Mac at our prices, and 50% of the purchasers of a clone are people who would buy the cheapest available Mac if this clone weren't available, he is stealing a percentage of our business equal to 50% of his business. The numbers are wrong (50%), but the calculation will be made, and if this guys costs Apple more than a few hundred sales, you can bet they'll be pretty motivated. Also, if my speculation (that Apple would obviously have a contract with parts resellers prohibiting them from selling to systems integrators or integrating systems on their own) is correct, Apple will want to enforce that contract immediately even if they calculate that this guy won't cost them a dime himself, because it sets a dangerous precedent.
Thanks, Surak, that's exactly what I meant. I don't know if Apple has a contract with repair parts resellers that prohibits system integration or sale to a system integrator, but it would seem to me that such an agreement would be a necessary measure for a hardware manufacturer to take if they wanted to discourage a clone business.
He's using spare parts manufactured by Apple and sold to repair shops. Why do I have a funny feeling that there's language in the repair parts purchase agreement that prohibits them from being used in just this fashion? IANAL, and IANAACT, but that would be the obvious way to prevent this.
Well, with KDE right now I can right click on any file and tell it to open with any application on the system.
I guess you can do this with Win2k, too, but I prefer KDE.
And you can do it with OS X. Ctrl-Click > Open With > Application | Other... . If you have bought yourself a scroll mouse (like my Macally mouse) you can use the right mouse button to Ctrl-click, just like Win2K/XP.
Basically, a GIVE ME BACK MY OS 9 article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
disguised as serious UI theory. Look, the moment the guy writes:
Labels - Like the feature introduced in System 7, but extensible, and with support for different scopes (e.g. globally visible labels, user-specific labels, etc.) The ability to "colorize" icons is a natural extension of the Spatial Finder, providing a quick visual cue for metadata that would otherwise have to be read as a text.
he loses credibility. Not because labels are a bad thing, they're a good thing, and I'd like to have them too, along with other metadata improvements; but labels have no connection whatsoever with the spatial metaphor he's talking about in his "spatial finder" rant: one does not normally label a doorknob.
The article suffers from that tendency in reasoning called "saving the phenomena" - he wants to come up with a catchall argument that explains why OS 9's finder was better than OS X's, damnit, and he'll do any rhetorical gymnastics he has to in order to fit every missing feature of OS 9 into the argument. Anything he says that goes beyond OS 9 is basically just a linear improvement on OS 9, like an OS 10 might have been, rather than a NeXT operating system.
Too bad, as I would love to see a good, original article on improving the UI.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the entire sequence is posted to the internet. It's not like someone else couldn't sequence the virus on his own...if you have the ability to reconstruct a virus from a published sequence (hell, CAN anyone reconstruct a virus from a published sequence yet?), you've got the ability to sequence it in the first place.
The ISS isn't in as much of a vacuum as an interstellar ship would be. The upper reaches of the atmosphere at the ISS's altitude are much, much thicker than the interstellar medium in the local bubble. Yes, there are structural needs to be able to withstand acceleration, but we're not talking about the kind of shear forces you'd see in an atmosphere.
Seriously, those are the most structurally unsound things I ever saw. In space, even though there is no weight there is still mass, Einstein! ;)
No friction. The impetus on any part of the structure accelerates the whole structure with the same force, unlike in an atmosphere where the various jutting out bits would snap off because of shear forces due to the equality of friction and the inequality of acceleration. That's one of the few things B5 did get right (too bad they abandoned the rotating sections for artificial grav so early on in the series).
1644 (http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/adnotes/1999/201 799/an2017j.txt), when Milton published Areopagitica. One could probably also argue 508 bce, foundation of the Athenian Democracy by Kleishtenes (http://www.classics.und.ac.za/projects/democracy/ kleisthenes.htm), as isegoria, the Athenian equivalent of free speech, was one of the elements introduced. Because it is not global law does not mean it is not global principle.
To stick more precisely with law, since this is New Zealand, they probably follow English common law, and therefore have had mildly limited free speech rights (similar to those advocated by Milton) since they established a government, even as a colony. But I would expect that NZers could answer that more precisely.
for Ichat, The dell likly has or can download MSN/ICQ. And both of those would find a greater chance of having friends on that system than Ichat.
iChat is AOL IM compatible, IIRC. On the other stuff: yes, $600 is more that "a little bit more"; in my experience, my 500 MHz iBook is about 1.2X faster than my 700 MHz P3, so I would say that for all but the most platform-optimized apps the MHz differential is no more than 1.4:1; IE5.2 for Mac is quite different from IE5 for Windows, in some ways better, in some much worse (Unicode support, anyone?). Overall the main things that the Mac has going for it are rock-solid stability, good battery life, and some very useful alternative applications (you haven't lived until you've used BBEdit). After hemming and hawing, I've decided that I'll buy a Mac desktop box after the 970 is released, but will also get another Wintel box - after all, the extra $600 for the Wintel box isn't that bad....
I thought it was a fake Slashdot anime name based on "Cowboy Neal". It certainly doesn't sound Japanese.
It's anglophile Japanese. The title is in katakana.
I don't know; Faye works for me with the English voice better than with the Japanese voice. but then I don't know what a world-weary cynical Japanese woman's voice is supposed to sound like. Anyway, I believe they are the same voice actors.
It's on topic, the parent asked whether Spike died at the end of the series, which is only a few episodes after the movie. If you want to mod someone down, mod down the guy who asked the question, not the one who answered it.
The thing I didn't like about the ending was that it pretty much came out of nowhere. (Spike just suddenly decides to go after this guy - while the individual episodes were good, there just wasn't much build-up.)
You're kidding, right? The whole series builds to it. Go, get all the DVDs, and watch it in sequence.
As I probably detest the practice as much as you, I have to say that the story above says he is being held as a "material witness". This procedure is quite ancient in US law.
Yes, but don't you agree that holding someone as a material witness whom you intend to charge when you get enough evidence on him violates the spirit of the common law practice and the constitution? If I understand it correctly, a material witness is someone whom you do not intend to charge with a crime, but whose participation is required for your prosecution of another's crime.
Of course, IANAL.
Given Clarke's fears about technology being perverted to mindless entertainment, I think it is more likely to be "Damn!","Sigh...," and "Hehehe...'
The government agencies all report to Bush, whose constitutional mandate is the enforcement and implementation of legislation. And believe me, there have been times when the executive branch has failed to enforce or implement laws that they felt were unconstitutional pending court review. Because the Executive branch *can* do something like this, does not mean it *has to* do something like this. Mind you, the guy could be as crooked as a 3 dollar bill, but holding without charging is usually a sign of prosecutorial incompetence.
Strange, I live in Europe and have nothing whatsoever to fear from "freedom hating terrorists".
So that tube station that blew up just as I was walking down the street to get on the tube back in '91, killing 2 people, that wasn't terrorists?
Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups wield technology as a weapon with no worries about privacy rights, MacDonald said. But fear and distrust of anti-terrorism and surveillance technology hampers the U.S. government's ability to shore up defenses and stop attacks before they happen.
Well, then, why don't we take away all the guns. After all, criminals wield guns as a weapon with no worries about people's rights. But fear and distrust hampers the U.S. government's ability to round up all the guns and stop crime befoe it happens.It's so much fun to take a conservative argument, make one substitution, and watch them squirm. Though 90% of the conversatives around here would think this woman is an idiot, too.
I personally find, the bigger the book, the more difficult it is to navigate and the less useful it really becomes.
mega biblion, mega kakon - Kallimakhos, one of the librarians of the Library of Alexandria. The Greek is easy enough you can probably figure out what it means on your own without knowing Greek; kakos means "bad."
For an example: how many people bought a Mac because it had hours of free music and spoken word content (including I think most of a Harry Potter book?). Answer: nobody. I don't think they even bothered advertising the fact. And some of the content was pretty good (Phish, for instance).
You know what to call a response to one's on posting? An afterthought. Too quick on the trigger.
This would only work if "content" were a commodity like rice or eggs, which everyone would want the same kind of and which is pretty much interchangeable. Before the .com bubble burst, there was a lot of this "content is a commodity" type of thinking. It was wrong.
First, I think you missed the point he stated at the begining that many people think that a spatial UI has to be a metaphore to something in real life. Hence your doornob argument is irrelivent.
Nope. I didn't miss the point. Did you not notice that the doorknob metaphor was taken from the article? See his response to me below for a better way of answering that criticism (or actually, your own second sentence). I don't know if I buy the idea that color-coding is "spatial." It's a different kind of real-world-to-virtual metaphor than the spatial one, a qualitative (rather than spatial) metaphor. Maybe I'm taking the word "spatial" too literally, too.
That might have been a good point if you had mentioned, let alone try and prove that Next had a better GUI. But since you didn't I'm not really sure what your point is. Shold we be re-inventing the wheel instead of improving upon something that already works?
The wheel has already been reinvented. OS X is NOT a linear progression from OS 9, it is a linear progression from NeXT. Which had the better GUI isn't the issue; the issue is whether the article really says anything more than "they should have brought the whole OS 9 GUI over to OS X, instead of creating a new GUI that is neither fish (OS 9) or fowl (NeXTStep)."
Given the tendency of some /. readers to post
about 3D GUIs, how would the author integrate ideas about 3D GUIs into his spatial metaphor? Is a 3D GUI even better because it is more spatial? I don't remember seeing that in the article (feel free to trump me if I'm wrong).
How is a tree more spatial than a column-based representation of directory structure? Isn't a tree better described as a useful non-spatial representational element? (I mean the linear trees, not a big spread-out org chart style tree, which would be more "spatial.") Why is a many-to-one representation really so bad? Is it because the user has such a hard time understanding the idea that two windows can point to one folder? The way this was handled (which window is it?) didn't quite capture the argument for me. I think the many-to-one model can be quite useful. I agree with him, though, with the idea that "open every folder in a new frame" would be a better default than "open new folders in the frame of parent" is. That's one place the spatial argument really holds together well.
Too bad, as I would love to see a proper discussion on /. about GUIs that wasn't dominated by people saying the CLI is better or misinterperating concepts on GUIs and usability.
Where did I say CLI is better? (It is better for some things, GUI is better for others.) The other half of your last comment is best described as specious.
Perhaps I should have said labels are "a natural extension of the values that form the foundation for the Spatial Finder", but I thought the intent was clear with the existing wording.
No, it wasn't. Rather you should have written what you've just written above, as it is a far more supportable argument.
Good of you to answer the criticism directly. How would you answer my other criticism: which of the suggestions that you mention were not inspired by OS9?
The Japanese market may be able to support a higher intro price than the US market. They're more tech rabid than Americans (a frightening thought, that).
Apple is a hardware manufacturer. They will do a simple calculation: okay, if 50% of the purchasers of a clone are people who wouldn't or couldn't buy a Mac at our prices, and 50% of the purchasers of a clone are people who would buy the cheapest available Mac if this clone weren't available, he is stealing a percentage of our business equal to 50% of his business. The numbers are wrong (50%), but the calculation will be made, and if this guys costs Apple more than a few hundred sales, you can bet they'll be pretty motivated. Also, if my speculation (that Apple would obviously have a contract with parts resellers prohibiting them from selling to systems integrators or integrating systems on their own) is correct, Apple will want to enforce that contract immediately even if they calculate that this guy won't cost them a dime himself, because it sets a dangerous precedent.
Thanks, Surak, that's exactly what I meant. I don't know if Apple has a contract with repair parts resellers that prohibits system integration or sale to a system integrator, but it would seem to me that such an agreement would be a necessary measure for a hardware manufacturer to take if they wanted to discourage a clone business.
He's using spare parts manufactured by Apple and sold to repair shops. Why do I have a funny feeling that there's language in the repair parts purchase agreement that prohibits them from being used in just this fashion? IANAL, and IANAACT, but that would be the obvious way to prevent this.
Well, with KDE right now I can right click on any file and tell it to open with any application on the system. I guess you can do this with Win2k, too, but I prefer KDE.
And you can do it with OS X. Ctrl-Click > Open With > Application | Other ... . If you have bought yourself a scroll mouse (like my Macally mouse) you can use the right mouse button to Ctrl-click, just like Win2K/XP.
disguised as serious UI theory. Look, the moment the guy writes:
Labels - Like the feature introduced in System 7, but extensible, and with support for different scopes (e.g. globally visible labels, user-specific labels, etc.) The ability to "colorize" icons is a natural extension of the Spatial Finder, providing a quick visual cue for metadata that would otherwise have to be read as a text.
he loses credibility. Not because labels are a bad thing, they're a good thing, and I'd like to have them too, along with other metadata improvements; but labels have no connection whatsoever with the spatial metaphor he's talking about in his "spatial finder" rant: one does not normally label a doorknob.
The article suffers from that tendency in reasoning called "saving the phenomena" - he wants to come up with a catchall argument that explains why OS 9's finder was better than OS X's, damnit, and he'll do any rhetorical gymnastics he has to in order to fit every missing feature of OS 9 into the argument. Anything he says that goes beyond OS 9 is basically just a linear improvement on OS 9, like an OS 10 might have been, rather than a NeXT operating system.
Too bad, as I would love to see a good, original article on improving the UI.