Governments usually are pretty good at declaring themselves immune to liability, at least from their own citizens... but aside from that, diverting the hurricane, making that rain fall or not fall, moving that tornado's path, et cetra, are much more likely to result in claims than not doing so. IANAL but as I understand it, you can't be sued for not doing something if you didn't have a duty to do it. Even "Good Samaritan" laws that might protect you from being sued for accidently breaking someone's leg dragging him out of the way of a train don't let you get sued for not doing so. Along with the legal situation - if one of 40 farmers who could benefit from a weather modification caused it, only he and not the other 39 would be sued by the 10 farmers who were flooded instead - this pretty much means only governments could even consider the risks.
Back when Hurricane Andrew (I think it was Andrew) blasted across lower Florida and flattened neighborhoods far from the ocean, I remember one victim who thought that thermonuclear weapons should have been used against the storm. "This hurricane could have been prevented!" he angrily insisted.
Somehow I doubt he would have been happy if he had ended up instead being merely showered with moderate soggy nuclear fallout, but since a hurricane dissipates thermonuclear-bomb quantities of energy every few seconds, I really doubt much is ever really going to be done to divert them. Which is probably a good thing, since if hurricanes were suppressed, the lack of atmospheric mixing and droughts resulting would probably cause more damage than the storms themselves.
Heh - Here, it is a Sun Ultra5 running Solaris 2.6 (development system for software that has to run under old Solaris).
2.1GB IDE limitation. Even the Solaris 8, I think, only sees 8.4GB.
And worse, it only runs the IDE interface in PIO mode. S-l-o-w.
I theenk I try a couple of these with 120GB+ drives for the CVS storage and its backup, in external drive boxes. Already have the SCSI card for 18G of existing storage.
I think you might be looking for the ATAPI-to-SCSI converter that Addonics has on their site though instead? Are DVD-RW drives ATAPI like CDROMs, or are they full EIDE/ATA-1XX now, and does it matter?
The reason electronic parts manufacturers in the United States lost market share to foreign makers in the first place was the shoddy workmanship of the US companies' products. Like the US Auto companies, they exaggerated the importance of their own prestige and assumed that this guaranteed competition did not matter, so they inflated their profits by shipping bad parts. The machine control manufacturer I worked for in the 1980s, when trying to purchase parts, would receive shipments that fit into two classes: The ones where the 10-15% non-operating parts were scattered throughout the shipment, and the other variety where the manufacturer had tested the parts, then placed what they already knew were the bad ones in the bottom of the cartons in the hope that they would thus slip by incoming inspection.
It was not until foreign companies began to supply the parts as well, usually with failure rates so low the incoming inspections were no longer necessary, that the US companies realized they could no longer get away with this crap, and began to get their own act together.
Worst case scenario: protectionism placing non-US manufacturers under a handicap with regards to US electronic parts makers - inevitable result would be the domestic suppliers slacking off on their quality again.
Nope. Assuming all households have the same number of residents, 67% of households = 67% of population.
In fact, if poorer South Koreans tend to live in households crowded with more members, and tend not to be able to afford broadband, that could represent a lower percentage of the population.
That's odd... as far as I can tell, the current spasm of allergy studies indicate that children not exposed to allergens when young are more likely to have asthma or severe allergies when grown. IIRC children raised on formulas in general are more likely to develop allergies - that immature immune system being assisted and set up by the antibodies in mothers' milk; it would make sense that soy formulas, not based on milk at all, would be an even worse replacement.
On the gripping hand, when I stopped feeding soy-based dog food to my personal domesticated wolves, I watched their chronic skin allergies disappear like magic. Even the flea reactions. Clearly there is something about this stuff that afflicts dogs, but overall your "vulnerable to severe antigens" theory seems frankly bass-ackwards. You don't help your case by inventing a reason honey is forbidden for infants to replace the real one, the danger of botulism caused by bacteria growing from spores that may be in the honey.
Despite the obvious need for vitamins in the diet, I don't see any reason to assume that the possible oxidizing effect of Vitamin C noted in the study you link to - or the slightly increased levels of cancer measured among people taking beta carotine supplements - wouldn't be caused by natural as well as artifical sources of the chemicals. In the.pdf I see no mention of the source of the ascorbic acid at all.
It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if it turned out that rapidly dividing cancer cells simply have a higher need for certain nutrients, and grow even more successfully when encouraged with more effective natural vitamins supplements including trace phytochemicals?
Your last paragraph, btw, applies to the natural as well as synthetic pills sold in stores... and in relevance to the topic at hand, to attempts to use beta carotene to replace natural sources of Vitamin A - eggs, butter and other dairy products in proportion to milkfat, liver, shellfish, cod liver oil. The liver inefficiently uses up 5 units of it to make one unit of Vitamin A (retinol). Which, presumably, when found in those natural sources, would include other vital carnichemicals not found in plant-derived replacements.
Yes, it is. My own need to install Apache 2.0, as it happens, was to allow on-the-fly compression to work correctly with SSL. It works fine, fast, and well for the server it is on, with no kludgy proxying stuff.
I don't think you read the article clocely enough. The inventor's main goal seems to be saving the petrochemicals that would go into producing the alternative source material, sand.
Yeah, here too - the Allen-Bradley SI I worked for (on the programming end, rather than the wiring end), always shipped the cabinets lying on their backs.
This worked because the controls were built for it. About everything electronic or heavy was strongly bolted onto the big flat back panel in the cabinet; that back panel and the cabinet itself were made of really heavy gauge steel and weighed a ton, sometimes literally after all the transformers and motor controls were mounted; and the pallets were custom-made, lavishly screwed together by the guys in "production" out of lumber fetched from Home Depot; the plastic wrap was to keep it clean until it hit the factory it was destined to live in, and for the pile of cables and boxes of manuals on the accompanying ordinary pallet.
These cabinets are heavier than, half as thick as, and wider and taller than soda vending machines, no way is a "this end up" arrow needed. No one was going to reorient that thing until they were forced to on the factory floor.
There's one company everyone seems to be missing out here: Adaptec. They took over maintenance of the SCSI drivers for their cards in the Linux kernel a while ago, and they've put a lot of work into them.
Unfortunately, I have to deal with some systems that have Adaptec RAID cards installed. They haven't released anything sourcewise since their "unsupported" 25Jul2001 patches for the I2O-based controllers.
Someone should inform them that there is a general-purpose kernel distribution past version 2.4.6 too...
You're not trying to make "arbitrary" categories. They're not arbitrary, I can define them rather quickly - anything that causes a human to die prematurely (normal lifespan) and (this is the tough one) anything that hampers a person's ability to live his or her life as anyone else.
A little too late for that. HGH (Human Growth Hormone) is already being prescribed not just to correct for actual deficencies of the stuff, but to adjust moderately short children to what their parents (society?) considers a better stature.
Unfortunately, larger body size correlates with a shorter lifespan.
On the other hand, your analysis would justify modifying known "housekeeping" genes that help maintain the body to certain variations which measurably increase lifespan.
And despite the strident disbelief of the egalitarian "Nuture" faction, there is a genetic element to at least some elements of learning ability. Not 100%, perhaps not even 30%, but one is there nevertheless.
Fixing defective genes to "normalize" our children would be acceptable; ask anyone who has to wear glasses, or those who have children stricken with down syndrom. But to make us better than normal, that opens a whole new can of worms. What happens when your non-altered-dna child can't get a job because everyone else has had their IQ bumped 50 points?
The same thing that happens when someone who applies to a job and has had their heart disease probability dropped and causes the guy who didn't not to be hired. Yet this would be fixing a "defect" and not helping someone who would have to try much harder to learn, or make it in their school Phys Ed class?
Sorry, you're making distinctions without a difference based on your personal opinions. Of course "fixing defects" is as much or as little playing God as choosing your offspring to be "at least normal" intelligence, strength, height, whatever. You end up having to play God whether play him and you decide to, or play him and decide not to despite having the option.
As I said in the original post, people have been hunting and eating chimps for millenia. If there was the potential for the virus jumping species why did it wait until the 1950s to do so?
HIV is a not-easily transmitted disease, but mutates quickly. You might as well ask, since the Chinese have been raising ducks and pigs in close proximity for centuries, why the bird/mammal flu combination that apparently took place in swine took place in swine "waited" until the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic. As it happened, it didn't.
I am not a geneticist. However I have worked in enough academic disciplines to be able to use a certain degree of meta-logic.[...]
Bing!
Self-styled expert on everything outside his field alarm just went off...
Sorry, I've seen that too many times when, to support their oddball theories, someone combines their lack of technical knowledge, use of speculative and proven-false statistics (like your "vaccines correspond to the spread of HIV" - if you continue to believe early 1990's claims of African governments that it doesn't exist in their countries...), disbelief in the Law of large numbers and other simple concepts of probability, etc, etc...
Sorry, I'm tired of reading anti-atomic energy diatribes packed with technical nonsense written by PhD's in "Education", and of petitions to ignore global warming where most of the scientific "Dr."s who signed turn out to be medical doctors, with a few veternarians thrown in, et cetra. Yeah, a little learning can be a dangerous thing.
Humans and apes are 90-97% the same. What if I replace 70% of a human genome with the exact same genes from an orangutan or chimanze? How would you distinguish that from a cloned human?
Shrug.
You wouldn't have to genetically manipulate a pig, or for that matter most mammals, to create someting which to the naked eye, intelligence tests, et cetra could not be distinguished from a (genetic) human being. Merely subject the embryo involved to substances that would that would link up with the homeobox genes and cause them to be expressed in the same way as a human's are, and you'd have an ersatz human.
Of course, if two of them tried to have children they would need the same treatments, or would end up with an ordinary piglet or whatever as an offspring.
To fix a defect is one thing, but to create a race of super-humans is another.
So those who make up the left hand edge of the IQ spectrum, or are below average in strength, and maybe other arbitrary categories should live with their disadvantages - but we raise the bar for "normal" 20/20 eyesight, immunity against diseases, and other categories?
What do you think happens when we eliminate those on the low side of the average, we all become above average?
If this is true, then there is no hope for natural evolution ever again. Just remember everything that is beautiful in this world as you watch it be replaced with technology.
Like the mosquitoes they're trying to develop that have a malarial protein in their saliva, naturally immunizing those they bite instead of spreading the disease?
Transgenic implants are a terrible idea. The most credible theory on the origin of HIV is that it jumped species after a bunch of vaccinations with a trial vaccine that had been incubated in monkeys. The first known cases of AIDS turn out to map pretty well to the trial sites.
Apocryphal.
HIV is a chimpanzee virus, well established in wild populations, and one which apparently causes them little trouble, Well adaped to its wild hosts, it spreads among them easily while maintaining a balance between surviving in their bodies and not damaging the host which are its natural home; this is why chimpanzees experimentally infected with HIV do not develop AIDS.
The most credible theory for transfer of the virus to humans involves a person hunting chimpanzees for food who had a cut or sore which came in contact with the blood of an infected chimp they killed.
Of course, this does nevertheless support your conclusion.
Yeah, but now I have to figure in the new 1.53Ghz Athlon MPs AMD just released as well. At less than the 1.26 Tulatins... I think the balance just shifted.:-)
FRAUD: noun: specificallya : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right (See DECEIT, TRICKERY) b : an act of deceiving or misrepresenting (See TRICK)
Actually I meant the Thunder K7 needed registered DDR RAM, of course, I gather you understood that from your response.
I should also add that I agree with you about the Tulatins and the P4s - but the thing I find really irritating is that the P4 RDRAM chipsets allow using two banks of RDRAM at a time, and the new 845 chipset only one SDRAM bank. Doubly castrated... pretty obvious they're *still* trying to push Rambus - whether you like it or not they aren't going to give another solution that really works.
It would be interesting to see what banked DDR RAM would be capable of with the Athlon too...
So, if you go with all four sockets you have a maximum of 1Gig with the K7.
Okay, Crucial.com is promoting DDR by matching SDRAM's prices - but don't even produce any but 256MB modules.
Other manufacturers supply compatable 1GB DIMMS, but as Tyan's site points out:
Some modules on the list above contain stacked DRAM parts (36 chips per module). These parts have thermal limitations in some chassis configurations. It is advised to verify that your chassis configuration as adequate airflow to support stacked (36 chip) parts
And the drive requirements of all those chips means Tyan has to recommend only using 3 of the DIMM sockets with them.
Kingston Registered PC133 RAM - best pricewatch.com price - is $142.
The 1G Registered DDR PC2100 - best price on Pricewatch.com - is $488. Ouch!
[...]Now I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS ends up having to purchase fancy devices to look for questionable substances being shipped in letters and packages.[...]
Maybe they should irridate all snailmail with gamma rays...
Of course, you'd have to slap that "irridated food" label on all fruitcakes mailed at Christmastime.
I think. Do Christmas fruitcakes count as food? Oh well, most deserve some kind of warning label anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments usually are pretty good at declaring themselves immune to liability, at least from their own citizens... but aside from that, diverting the hurricane, making that rain fall or not fall, moving that tornado's path, et cetra, are much more likely to result in claims than not doing so. IANAL but as I understand it, you can't be sued for not doing something if you didn't have a duty to do it. Even "Good Samaritan" laws that might protect you from being sued for accidently breaking someone's leg dragging him out of the way of a train don't let you get sued for not doing so. Along with the legal situation - if one of 40 farmers who could benefit from a weather modification caused it, only he and not the other 39 would be sued by the 10 farmers who were flooded instead - this pretty much means only governments could even consider the risks.
Back when Hurricane Andrew (I think it was Andrew) blasted across lower Florida and flattened neighborhoods far from the ocean, I remember one victim who thought that thermonuclear weapons should have been used against the storm. "This hurricane could have been prevented!" he angrily insisted.
Somehow I doubt he would have been happy if he had ended up instead being merely showered with moderate soggy nuclear fallout, but since a hurricane dissipates thermonuclear-bomb quantities of energy every few seconds, I really doubt much is ever really going to be done to divert them. Which is probably a good thing, since if hurricanes were suppressed, the lack of atmospheric mixing and droughts resulting would probably cause more damage than the storms themselves.
Heh - Here, it is a Sun Ultra5 running Solaris 2.6 (development system for software that has to run under old Solaris).
2.1GB IDE limitation. Even the Solaris 8, I think, only sees 8.4GB.
And worse, it only runs the IDE interface in PIO mode. S-l-o-w.
I theenk I try a couple of these with 120GB+ drives for the CVS storage and its backup, in external drive boxes. Already have the SCSI card for 18G of existing storage.
I think you might be looking for the ATAPI-to-SCSI converter that Addonics has on their site though instead? Are DVD-RW drives ATAPI like CDROMs, or are they full EIDE/ATA-1XX now, and does it matter?
What a comfortably short memory you must possess.
The reason electronic parts manufacturers in the United States lost market share to foreign makers in the first place was the shoddy workmanship of the US companies' products. Like the US Auto companies, they exaggerated the importance of their own prestige and assumed that this guaranteed competition did not matter, so they inflated their profits by shipping bad parts. The machine control manufacturer I worked for in the 1980s, when trying to purchase parts, would receive shipments that fit into two classes: The ones where the 10-15% non-operating parts were scattered throughout the shipment, and the other variety where the manufacturer had tested the parts, then placed what they already knew were the bad ones in the bottom of the cartons in the hope that they would thus slip by incoming inspection.
It was not until foreign companies began to supply the parts as well, usually with failure rates so low the incoming inspections were no longer necessary, that the US companies realized they could no longer get away with this crap, and began to get their own act together.
Worst case scenario: protectionism placing non-US manufacturers under a handicap with regards to US electronic parts makers - inevitable result would be the domestic suppliers slacking off on their quality again.
Nope. Assuming all households have the same number of residents, 67% of households = 67% of population.
In fact, if poorer South Koreans tend to live in households crowded with more members, and tend not to be able to afford broadband, that could represent a lower percentage of the population.
On the gripping hand, when I stopped feeding soy-based dog food to my personal domesticated wolves, I watched their chronic skin allergies disappear like magic. Even the flea reactions. Clearly there is something about this stuff that afflicts dogs, but overall your "vulnerable to severe antigens" theory seems frankly bass-ackwards. You don't help your case by inventing a reason honey is forbidden for infants to replace the real one, the danger of botulism caused by bacteria growing from spores that may be in the honey.
It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if it turned out that rapidly dividing cancer cells simply have a higher need for certain nutrients, and grow even more successfully when encouraged with more effective natural vitamins supplements including trace phytochemicals?
Your last paragraph, btw, applies to the natural as well as synthetic pills sold in stores... and in relevance to the topic at hand, to attempts to use beta carotene to replace natural sources of Vitamin A - eggs, butter and other dairy products in proportion to milkfat, liver, shellfish, cod liver oil. The liver inefficiently uses up 5 units of it to make one unit of Vitamin A (retinol). Which, presumably, when found in those natural sources, would include other vital carnichemicals not found in plant-derived replacements.
Yes, it is. My own need to install Apache 2.0, as it happens, was to allow on-the-fly compression to work correctly with SSL. It works fine, fast, and well for the server it is on, with no kludgy proxying stuff.
I don't think you read the article clocely enough. The inventor's main goal seems to be saving the petrochemicals that would go into producing the alternative source material, sand.
This has to be the first time any land speed record has been set between Fairbanks and Amsterdam, then. Without the contestants getting wet.
This worked because the controls were built for it. About everything electronic or heavy was strongly bolted onto the big flat back panel in the cabinet; that back panel and the cabinet itself were made of really heavy gauge steel and weighed a ton, sometimes literally after all the transformers and motor controls were mounted; and the pallets were custom-made, lavishly screwed together by the guys in "production" out of lumber fetched from Home Depot; the plastic wrap was to keep it clean until it hit the factory it was destined to live in, and for the pile of cables and boxes of manuals on the accompanying ordinary pallet.
These cabinets are heavier than, half as thick as, and wider and taller than soda vending machines, no way is a "this end up" arrow needed. No one was going to reorient that thing until they were forced to on the factory floor.
Unfortunately, I have to deal with some systems that have Adaptec RAID cards installed. They haven't released anything sourcewise since their "unsupported" 25Jul2001 patches for the I2O-based controllers.
Someone should inform them that there is a general-purpose kernel distribution past version 2.4.6 too...
A little too late for that. HGH (Human Growth Hormone) is already being prescribed not just to correct for actual deficencies of the stuff, but to adjust moderately short children to what their parents (society?) considers a better stature.
Unfortunately, larger body size correlates with a shorter lifespan.
On the other hand, your analysis would justify modifying known "housekeeping" genes that help maintain the body to certain variations which measurably increase lifespan.
And despite the strident disbelief of the egalitarian "Nuture" faction, there is a genetic element to at least some elements of learning ability. Not 100%, perhaps not even 30%, but one is there nevertheless.
The same thing that happens when someone who applies to a job and has had their heart disease probability dropped and causes the guy who didn't not to be hired. Yet this would be fixing a "defect" and not helping someone who would have to try much harder to learn, or make it in their school Phys Ed class?
Sorry, you're making distinctions without a difference based on your personal opinions. Of course "fixing defects" is as much or as little playing God as choosing your offspring to be "at least normal" intelligence, strength, height, whatever. You end up having to play God whether play him and you decide to, or play him and decide not to despite having the option.
HIV is a not-easily transmitted disease, but mutates quickly. You might as well ask, since the Chinese have been raising ducks and pigs in close proximity for centuries, why the bird/mammal flu combination that apparently took place in swine took place in swine "waited" until the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic. As it happened, it didn't.
I am not a geneticist. However I have worked in enough academic disciplines to be able to use a certain degree of meta-logic.[...]
Bing!
Self-styled expert on everything outside his field alarm just went off...
Sorry, I've seen that too many times when, to support their oddball theories, someone combines their lack of technical knowledge, use of speculative and proven-false statistics (like your "vaccines correspond to the spread of HIV" - if you continue to believe early 1990's claims of African governments that it doesn't exist in their countries...), disbelief in the Law of large numbers and other simple concepts of probability, etc, etc...
Sorry, I'm tired of reading anti-atomic energy diatribes packed with technical nonsense written by PhD's in "Education", and of petitions to ignore global warming where most of the scientific "Dr."s who signed turn out to be medical doctors, with a few veternarians thrown in, et cetra. Yeah, a little learning can be a dangerous thing.
Shrug.
You wouldn't have to genetically manipulate a pig, or for that matter most mammals, to create someting which to the naked eye, intelligence tests, et cetra could not be distinguished from a (genetic) human being. Merely subject the embryo involved to substances that would that would link up with the homeobox genes and cause them to be expressed in the same way as a human's are, and you'd have an ersatz human.
Of course, if two of them tried to have children they would need the same treatments, or would end up with an ordinary piglet or whatever as an offspring.
So those who make up the left hand edge of the IQ spectrum, or are below average in strength, and maybe other arbitrary categories should live with their disadvantages - but we raise the bar for "normal" 20/20 eyesight, immunity against diseases, and other categories?
What do you think happens when we eliminate those on the low side of the average, we all become above average?
Besides, who died and made you God?
Like the mosquitoes they're trying to develop that have a malarial protein in their saliva, naturally immunizing those they bite instead of spreading the disease?
Apocryphal.
HIV is a chimpanzee virus, well established in wild populations, and one which apparently causes them little trouble, Well adaped to its wild hosts, it spreads among them easily while maintaining a balance between surviving in their bodies and not damaging the host which are its natural home; this is why chimpanzees experimentally infected with HIV do not develop AIDS.
The most credible theory for transfer of the virus to humans involves a person hunting chimpanzees for food who had a cut or sore which came in contact with the blood of an infected chimp they killed.
Of course, this does nevertheless support your conclusion.
Yeah, but now I have to figure in the new 1.53Ghz Athlon MPs AMD just released as well. At less than the 1.26 Tulatins... I think the balance just shifted. :-)
FRAUD: noun: specifically a : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right (See DECEIT, TRICKERY) b : an act of deceiving or misrepresenting (See TRICK)
I should also add that I agree with you about the Tulatins and the P4s - but the thing I find really irritating is that the P4 RDRAM chipsets allow using two banks of RDRAM at a time, and the new 845 chipset only one SDRAM bank. Doubly castrated... pretty obvious they're *still* trying to push Rambus - whether you like it or not they aren't going to give another solution that really works.
It would be interesting to see what banked DDR RAM would be capable of with the Athlon too...
Umm, the Thunder SE requires Registered DDR RAM. The newegg page doesn't say. Say that it is...
Okay, you can use all 4 (not recommended?) slots on the Thunder K7 board and populate with 2 Gig.
Or for about the same price get 4 gig of RAM on the HEsl. Slightly faster RAM used in banks. And still have slots free.
Crucial.com memory compatable with the Tyan Thunder K7:
256 MB, DDR PC2100 CL=2.5 Registered ECC 2.5V 32Meg x 72) - $40.49
Crucial.com memory compatable with the Serverworks II HE chipset:
128 MB, SDRAM, PC133 CL=2 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 16Meg x 72 $26.99
256MB SDRAM, PC133 CL=2 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 32Meg x 72 $40.49
512MB SDRAM, PC133 CL=3 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 64Meg x 72 #74.69
1024MB SDRAM, PC133 CL=3 Registered ECC 7.5ns 3.3V 128Meg x 72 $200.69
So, if you go with all four sockets you have a maximum of 1Gig with the K7.
Okay, Crucial.com is promoting DDR by matching SDRAM's prices - but don't even produce any but 256MB modules.
Other manufacturers supply compatable 1GB DIMMS, but as Tyan's site points out:
Some modules on the list above contain stacked DRAM parts (36 chips per module). These parts have thermal limitations in some chassis configurations. It is advised to verify that your chassis configuration as adequate airflow to support stacked (36 chip) parts
And the drive requirements of all those chips means Tyan has to recommend only using 3 of the DIMM sockets with them.
Kingston Registered PC133 RAM - best pricewatch.com price - is $142.
The 1G Registered DDR PC2100 - best price on Pricewatch.com - is $488. Ouch!
Um, I don't think so; Escalade's card uses one channel per drive.
Maybe they should irridate all snailmail with gamma rays...
Of course, you'd have to slap that "irridated food" label on all fruitcakes mailed at Christmastime.
I think. Do Christmas fruitcakes count as food? Oh well, most deserve some kind of warning label anyway.