You are 98% right. The other 2% of TV is what TV is supposed to be about and is something that can enrich your life. TiVo is like a miner's pan. It does the sorting for you, throws out the 98% of dross and collects the 2% of pure gold. When all you watch of TV is the cream of the cream, provided via Tivo, your perception of TV changes and your cynicism (which I used to share before TiVO!!!) fades away...
I bought the lifetime subscription for $199 on sale and folks, its worth every penny. People, if you don't have a Tivo, you CANNOT understand what all the fuss is about. Trust us. Get one. It Is Worth It. The lame ads about pausing live TV are stupid. TiVo is about sitting down once to program the thing - takes an hour pushing buttons on a simple menu - and then (1) you come home to things you want to watch (2) that you can watch whenever you want to (3) without commercials or (4) without worrying about setting up the programming for next week's stuff. This is FUN. TiVo mentally changes what you think about how to watch TV. You have to be nuts to channel surf or watch commercials after using a Tivo for just one week. Even my WIFE is sold on the TiVo. Just get one, you'll see!!!
You have really hit on a big issue from my point about TiVo not recording particular scenes. I've got several programs that all I'm keeping them for are particular scenes. Nikita meeting Jurgen for the first time ("Why are you here?"), Byers' dream from the X Files ep "Three Of A Kind (best scene in the whole series - one fantastic, continuous shot that ends "I lose it all"), the brain surgery scene from RoboCop 2 - the most chilling scene ever filmed in sci-fi in my opinion, perfectly balanced by the absurd telethon scene that follows...People do "best mix" CDs of audio all the time, I wish we could do TiVo mix disks just as easily...
This is a FANTASTIC book and I strongly recommend reading it, too. As we get farther and farther from Patient Zero for AIDS the whole "AIDS came from contaminated polio vaccine" theory gets more and more swept under the rug. It shouldn't. For an overview of ths book / topic, check out this article from The Atlantic magazine. What is really interesting is how the scientists are SO DRIVEN to disprove this theory - they are not objective at all. Check out, for exaple, this Nature article. These articles always say something like "Important Doctor X tested remaining polio vaccine sample Y and detected no trace of AIDS/chimp DNA" and the headline conclusion is that Hooper's theory has been disproven. Balony. There are not representative surviving samples for ALL lots of vaccines that were used and it would only have taken ONE SINGLE CONTAMINATED LOT to kick off the AIDS epidemic. Tests can NEVER prove there were NO containated lots of vaccine; it can only prove there WERE by FINDING ONE.
I'm with you, I thought the 80s rock version was pretty good. I particularly remember one scene that I think was an Adam Ant song set to the workers going down in the tunnels that I thought was particularly appropriate and well done.
Metropolis is a silent German black-and-white film that is considered to be the first true Sci-fi film, done in the early 1920s. Some documentation and still photos are here. The part of Metropolis everybody remembers is that the bad guys make a robot to take the place of the heroine Maria and the scene where the robot is activated is FANTASTIC. A great special effect even by todays standards that blew away audiences in the 1920s.
There was an early Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan film called Joe vs. the Volcano which has the opening 15 minutes doing a GREAT takeoff on Metropolis - not camp or tongue in cheek, but a serious emulation with modern filmmaking. The rest of the movie was so-so to OK. Worth checking out.
We should be worried. we should be worried about a lot more than the creation of synthetic viruses. Take the Ebola virus - 90% fatal, compared to the smallpox fatality rate of 30%. We know a lot about the genetic structure of Ebola and the details of its genome are at a universtiy library near you; see Sanchez, A., et al. (1993), "Sequence analysis of the Ebola virus genome: organization, genetic elements and comparison with the enome of Marburg virus", Virus Research 29, 215-240(1993).
But nobody is going to go to the trouble of synthesyzing an Ebola virus because it's too much trouble and there's a better way to turn it into a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD). Ebola has just seven genes and only one of these produces the substance that causes the 90% fatality rate - Ebola glycoprotein. The
gene for this protein has already been isolated and put in a common cold virus!!!
"...Nabel's team worked with intact blood vessels taken from people and animals. The researchers infected those cells with a cold virus they had engineered to carry the Ebola glycoprotein gene. Within 48 hours, massive numbers of endothelial cells began to die and the blood vessels became leaky. Such effects could lead to the internal and external bleeding caused by Ebola...."
Kinda makes you wonder where ol' Nabel's virus is now, huh? Hope it's safely in the bottom of his lab freezer. But inserting the Ebola glycoprotein in a bacterium (as opposed to a virus) is basically a science fair project these days, so ANYBODY can get in on the fun. Who knows, the next Jack in the Box E Coli scare may very well be a version with an Ebola gene in it. The basic data you need for such a project is onlione at the SWISS-PROT database in Switzerland; just enter ebola in their search engine and see for yourself. The specific data for Ebola glycoprotein is here, and in case that gets slashdotted, the relevant sequence data info is as follows:
Any genetic engineer worth her salt should be able to take this data and create a Ebola / E Coli hybrid plasmid with the help of this data and a friendly mail order supplier of synthetic DNA...
Worried yet? I am. PS to any Fed reading this: don't worry, I'm no terrorist, I'm posting this in the spirit of Paul Revere, not Osama. The public has got to be EDUCATED about the implications of transgenic research and just how easy it is to do some really scary things that may well lead to the next 9/11...
The Russian Energia vehicle flew exactly TWICE and the last time it flew was almost FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. The Shuttle has flown well over A HUNDRED times and the last time it flew was a couple of weeks ago. The Shuttle is expensive and the Shuttle isn't a mass-payload booster but it unfortunately is ALL WE'VE GOT (humanity, not America) to do a serious space mission at present with real equipment, not fantasy sand castles. Wanna use nuclear or a heavy lift vehicle? Hey, back to the drawing board for a ten-year development project...and it ain't gonna be as cheap as you think. Even if the Russians do it.
I actually HAVE done quite a bit of reading on the subject of Russian boosters and let me tell you, they ain't got much. Which of these Russian boosters are so much better than the Shuttle and are ***actually flying today***?
...$20 billion isn't even gonna be enough to buy the paint for the logos on the side of the spacecraft. We are SO overbudget on ISS it stopped being funny a decade ago. Every shuttle flight is $0.5 billion, so $20 billion will get 40 shuttle flights, which can carry if we're lucky 40*30,000 = 1,200,000 pounds or 600 tons to low Earth orbit. A Mars mission is 95%+ fuel so the $20 billion is just TRANSPORTATION COSTS for a 30 ton vehicle and the fuel for it. I don't think you can get 6 people to mars and back in a 30 ton ship; somebody prove me wrong - and then tell me how we build it for free!
Amateur rockets don't get to space or orbit because they're generally limited to low specific impule solid fuels. Is there much of a gain in specific impulse to be obtained by further research into hybrid (ie, plastic/nitrous oxide) propellants? How about exotic chemicals (buckyballs, multi-atomic nitrogen, fluorine for example) - any route for amateur utilization of these?
For those of you young whippersnappers who have never heard of a grue, download and play Zork or any of the old, great Infocom games... from the "good old days" of computing, when anything over 16 kilobytes was a tremendous amount of free memory...
If playing a game (albeit an interesting one) isn't what you'd like to spend your spare CPU cycles on, there's a lot more than Seti@Home out there. Check out the Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects for more options...
irony : The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain). An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity.
Duh, I think "lone gunmen" fits this definition pretty well as an "ironic" statement. I'm well aware it's a play on words referencing JFK - the LG origins ep from X-Files explains it quite clearly with Deep Throat II's parting exchange on the loading dock. And although you couldn't know that I remember very well The Day Kennedy Got Shot (impossible to forget the adrenaline rush, the world was different then, lots of people actually believed we would get nuked from the Russians by sunset), lots of people weren't even born at that time (or failed to become X-Files fans since) and might very well not get the "lone gunmen" reference. That doesn't make them a "jackass", and I for one would never "hate having to explain" a significant historical reference so that we all have a cultural identity to share regardless of our age or experience. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it....
While we're microanalyzing words, shouldn't it be "lone gunMEN" instead of "lone gunMAN"? The actual series title always juxtaposed a "singular" adjective with a "plural" noun as some sort of ironic statement, didn't it?
Atomic clocks on ISS are a trivial test of relativity compared to Gravity Probe B, hopefully to be launched soon after DECADES of development. A one-pager "GPB for Dummies" is here. GPB tests not for alterations in time but another phenomenon known as "frame dragging" which has never been directly measured. There's been lots of criticism about GPB as being too ambitious, so there's been lots of independent reviews.
The article implies there hasn't been enough time for each bit/particle in the universe to have been "flipped" more than once, which further implies that the universe is NOT a computer. However, the number of particles mentioned is that in out 3D/4D (space / spacetime) universe. With superstring theory postulating extra dimensions up to 10 or 11 all "curled up" out of our sight, maybe this is where extra particles/bits are located to support the universe as a computer?
If they're doing all of this revision, I hope JarJar officially goes over to the Dark side and becomes kind of a mini-me to Vader. Call him Darth JarJar. In Episode IV - Death Star Officer to Vader - "(insert new footage of JarJar)The two of you...are the last of the Jedi Order...later, ObiWan can fight BOTH a digitally inserted JarJar and Darth at the same time in a two-on-one fight like in Ep 1. Etc, Etc, the possibilities are endless...
You're right, I'm wrong. See above. Marsupials only have breasts (presumably we all know what breasts are, provide you own link for those) and they don't have placentas which connect unborn offspring to their mother for nourishment. And speaking of placental nourishment, here are some yummy recipes. Score some brownie points with your wife/girlfriend/significant other about the fate of the placenta when you two have kids, she will find you SO sensitive and romantic...
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You are 98% right. The other 2% of TV is what TV is supposed to be about and is something that can enrich your life. TiVo is like a miner's pan. It does the sorting for you, throws out the 98% of dross and collects the 2% of pure gold. When all you watch of TV is the cream of the cream, provided via Tivo, your perception of TV changes and your cynicism (which I used to share before TiVO!!!) fades away...
I bought the lifetime subscription for $199 on sale and folks, its worth every penny. People, if you don't have a Tivo, you CANNOT understand what all the fuss is about. Trust us. Get one. It Is Worth It. The lame ads about pausing live TV are stupid. TiVo is about sitting down once to program the thing - takes an hour pushing buttons on a simple menu - and then (1) you come home to things you want to watch (2) that you can watch whenever you want to (3) without commercials or (4) without worrying about setting up the programming for next week's stuff. This is FUN. TiVo mentally changes what you think about how to watch TV. You have to be nuts to channel surf or watch commercials after using a Tivo for just one week. Even my WIFE is sold on the TiVo. Just get one, you'll see!!!
You have really hit on a big issue from my point about TiVo not recording particular scenes. I've got several programs that all I'm keeping them for are particular scenes. Nikita meeting Jurgen for the first time ("Why are you here?"), Byers' dream from the X Files ep "Three Of A Kind (best scene in the whole series - one fantastic, continuous shot that ends "I lose it all"), the brain surgery scene from RoboCop 2 - the most chilling scene ever filmed in sci-fi in my opinion, perfectly balanced by the absurd telethon scene that follows...People do "best mix" CDs of audio all the time, I wish we could do TiVo mix disks just as easily...
This is a FANTASTIC book and I strongly recommend reading it, too. As we get farther and farther from Patient Zero for AIDS the whole "AIDS came from contaminated polio vaccine" theory gets more and more swept under the rug. It shouldn't. For an overview of ths book / topic, check out this article from The Atlantic magazine. What is really interesting is how the scientists are SO DRIVEN to disprove this theory - they are not objective at all. Check out, for exaple, this Nature article. These articles always say something like "Important Doctor X tested remaining polio vaccine sample Y and detected no trace of AIDS/chimp DNA" and the headline conclusion is that Hooper's theory has been disproven. Balony. There are not representative surviving samples for ALL lots of vaccines that were used and it would only have taken ONE SINGLE CONTAMINATED LOT to kick off the AIDS epidemic. Tests can NEVER prove there were NO containated lots of vaccine; it can only prove there WERE by FINDING ONE.
Ah, now it's slashdotted. Try here or here or here or here for more info on this major landmark in film history...
I'm with you, I thought the 80s rock version was pretty good. I particularly remember one scene that I think was an Adam Ant song set to the workers going down in the tunnels that I thought was particularly appropriate and well done.
Metropolis is a silent German black-and-white film that is considered to be the first true Sci-fi film, done in the early 1920s. Some documentation and still photos are here. The part of Metropolis everybody remembers is that the bad guys make a robot to take the place of the heroine Maria and the scene where the robot is activated is FANTASTIC. A great special effect even by todays standards that blew away audiences in the 1920s.
There was an early Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan film called Joe vs. the Volcano which has the opening 15 minutes doing a GREAT takeoff on Metropolis - not camp or tongue in cheek, but a serious emulation with modern filmmaking. The rest of the movie was so-so to OK. Worth checking out.
But nobody is going to go to the trouble of synthesyzing an Ebola virus because it's too much trouble and there's a better way to turn it into a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD). Ebola has just seven genes and only one of these produces the substance that causes the 90% fatality rate - Ebola glycoprotein. The gene for this protein has already been isolated and put in a common cold virus!!!
"...Nabel's team worked with intact blood vessels taken from people and animals. The researchers infected those cells with a cold virus they had engineered to carry the Ebola glycoprotein gene. Within 48 hours, massive numbers of endothelial cells began to die and the blood vessels became leaky. Such effects could lead to the internal and external bleeding caused by Ebola...."
Kinda makes you wonder where ol' Nabel's virus is now, huh? Hope it's safely in the bottom of his lab freezer. But inserting the Ebola glycoprotein in a bacterium (as opposed to a virus) is basically a science fair project these days, so ANYBODY can get in on the fun. Who knows, the next Jack in the Box E Coli scare may very well be a version with an Ebola gene in it. The basic data you need for such a project is onlione at the SWISS-PROT database in Switzerland; just enter ebola in their search engine and see for yourself. The specific data for Ebola glycoprotein is here, and in case that gets slashdotted, the relevant sequence data info is as follows:
MGVTGILQLP RDRFKRTSFF LWVIILFQRT FSIPLGVIHN STLQVSDVDK LVCRDKLSST NQLRSVGLNL EGNGVATDVP SATKRWGFRS GVPPKVVNYE AGEWAENCYN LEIKKPDGSE CLPAAPDGIR GFPRCRYVHK VSGTGPCAGD FAFHKEGAFF LYDRLASTVI YRGTTFAEGV VAFLILPQAK KDFFSSHPLR EPVNATEDPS SGYYSTTIRY QATGFGTNET EYLFEVDNLT YVQLESRFTP QFLLQLNETI YTSGKRSNTT GKLIWKVNPE IDTTIGEWAF WETKKTSLEK FAVKSCLSQL YQTEPKTSVV RVRRELLPTQ GPTQQLKTTK SMASENSSAM VQVHSQGREA AVSHLTTLAT ISTSPQSLTT KPGPDNSTHN TPVYKLDISE ATQVEQHHRR TDNDSTASDT PSATTAAGPP KAENTNTSKS TDFLDPATTT SPQNHSETAG NNNTHHQDTG EESASSGKLG LITNTIAGVA GLITGGRRTR REAIVNAQPK CNPNLHYWTT QDEGAAIGLA WIPYFGPAAE GIYIEGLMHN QDGLICGLRQ LANETTQALQ LFLRATTELR TFSILNRKAI DFLLQRWGGT CHILGPDCCI EPHDWTKNIT DKIDQIIHDF VDKTLPDQGD NDNWWTGWRQ WIPAGIGVTG VIIAVIALFC ICKFVF
Any genetic engineer worth her salt should be able to take this data and create a Ebola / E Coli hybrid plasmid with the help of this data and a friendly mail order supplier of synthetic DNA...
Worried yet? I am. PS to any Fed reading this: don't worry, I'm no terrorist, I'm posting this in the spirit of Paul Revere, not Osama. The public has got to be EDUCATED about the implications of transgenic research and just how easy it is to do some really scary things that may well lead to the next 9/11...The Russian Energia vehicle flew exactly TWICE and the last time it flew was almost FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. The Shuttle has flown well over A HUNDRED times and the last time it flew was a couple of weeks ago. The Shuttle is expensive and the Shuttle isn't a mass-payload booster but it unfortunately is ALL WE'VE GOT (humanity, not America) to do a serious space mission at present with real equipment, not fantasy sand castles. Wanna use nuclear or a heavy lift vehicle? Hey, back to the drawing board for a ten-year development project...and it ain't gonna be as cheap as you think. Even if the Russians do it.
I actually HAVE done quite a bit of reading on the subject of Russian boosters and let me tell you, they ain't got much. Which of these Russian boosters are so much better than the Shuttle and are ***actually flying today***?
Anybody interested in a Mars mission would do well to use as a starting point Zubrin's Mars Direct plan...
...$20 billion isn't even gonna be enough to buy the paint for the logos on the side of the spacecraft. We are SO overbudget on ISS it stopped being funny a decade ago. Every shuttle flight is $0.5 billion, so $20 billion will get 40 shuttle flights, which can carry if we're lucky 40*30,000 = 1,200,000 pounds or 600 tons to low Earth orbit. A Mars mission is 95%+ fuel so the $20 billion is just TRANSPORTATION COSTS for a 30 ton vehicle and the fuel for it. I don't think you can get 6 people to mars and back in a 30 ton ship; somebody prove me wrong - and then tell me how we build it for free!
Amateur rockets don't get to space or orbit because they're generally limited to low specific impule solid fuels. Is there much of a gain in specific impulse to be obtained by further research into hybrid (ie, plastic/nitrous oxide) propellants? How about exotic chemicals (buckyballs, multi-atomic nitrogen, fluorine for example) - any route for amateur utilization of these?
For those of you young whippersnappers who have never heard of a grue, download and play Zork or any of the old, great Infocom games... from the "good old days" of computing, when anything over 16 kilobytes was a tremendous amount of free memory...
If playing a game (albeit an interesting one) isn't what you'd like to spend your spare CPU cycles on, there's a lot more than Seti@Home out there. Check out the Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects for more options...
irony : The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain). An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity.
Duh, I think "lone gunmen" fits this definition pretty well as an "ironic" statement. I'm well aware it's a play on words referencing JFK - the LG origins ep from X-Files explains it quite clearly with Deep Throat II's parting exchange on the loading dock. And although you couldn't know that I remember very well The Day Kennedy Got Shot (impossible to forget the adrenaline rush, the world was different then, lots of people actually believed we would get nuked from the Russians by sunset), lots of people weren't even born at that time (or failed to become X-Files fans since) and might very well not get the "lone gunmen" reference. That doesn't make them a "jackass", and I for one would never "hate having to explain" a significant historical reference so that we all have a cultural identity to share regardless of our age or experience. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it....
While we're microanalyzing words, shouldn't it be "lone gunMEN" instead of "lone gunMAN"? The actual series title always juxtaposed a "singular" adjective with a "plural" noun as some sort of ironic statement, didn't it?
Atomic clocks on ISS are a trivial test of relativity compared to Gravity Probe B, hopefully to be launched soon after DECADES of development. A one-pager "GPB for Dummies" is here. GPB tests not for alterations in time but another phenomenon known as "frame dragging" which has never been directly measured. There's been lots of criticism about GPB as being too ambitious, so there's been lots of independent reviews.
The article implies there hasn't been enough time for each bit/particle in the universe to have been "flipped" more than once, which further implies that the universe is NOT a computer. However, the number of particles mentioned is that in out 3D/4D (space / spacetime) universe. With superstring theory postulating extra dimensions up to 10 or 11 all "curled up" out of our sight, maybe this is where extra particles/bits are located to support the universe as a computer?
Here's the Completed Items page for this vendor that includes the USAF items mentioned at the bottom of the web page.
If they're doing all of this revision, I hope JarJar officially goes over to the Dark side and becomes kind of a mini-me to Vader. Call him Darth JarJar. In Episode IV - Death Star Officer to Vader - "(insert new footage of JarJar)The two of you...are the last of the Jedi Order...later, ObiWan can fight BOTH a digitally inserted JarJar and Darth at the same time in a two-on-one fight like in Ep 1. Etc, Etc, the possibilities are endless...
I meant to say, "...DISCUSSING the fate...", not "about the fate". Boy, this is like a Monday morning for me...
You're right, I'm wrong. See above. Marsupials only have breasts (presumably we all know what breasts are, provide you own link for those) and they don't have placentas which connect unborn offspring to their mother for nourishment. And speaking of placental nourishment, here are some yummy recipes. Score some brownie points with your wife/girlfriend/significant other about the fate of the placenta when you two have kids, she will find you SO sensitive and romantic...
Ooops. You're right. Back to studying Venn Diagrams for me!