Are these guys going to take this lying down? Claria and Clarica sure look and sound very much alike...and about the only company who could tarnish public perception of an insurance company would have to be Gator....
But what if you actually want to copy that video? How long do you wait while hundreds of megs or gigs of data transfer? Do you want to wait less time? Gigabit is great and you'll waist _a lot_ less time waiting for your file transfers.
Can the filesystem at the other end of the pipe write that quickly? That's going to be an issue in a lot of setups.
Of course, I ignore completely the question of why it's so hard to carry the DVD into the next room to make a copy at the computer. The old adage about bandwidth, tapes, and a station wagon is still true....
Finally, it's important to really address the premium you're willing to pay for this convenience. If you're moving a couple DVDs back and forth each week, is it worht a major investment in hardware if you're only going to save five minutes on each transfer?
You've not seen anything till you've seen a guy steering with one knee, other foot on the gas...Playing a FLUTE...passing you on the shoulder.
My aunt and uncle once saw someone weaving back and forth across eight lanes...knitting.
Re:Perl, SDL, OpenGL, Festival, kids...
on
A Babe in Tuxland
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· Score: 1
With a lot more work, I want to get into more hands-on experimentation. Simulated water-pouring, block-stacking, multiplication drills, cause/effect lessons, and even networked "shared toys" simulations involving small groups of children.
Does this project remind anyone else of the Book in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Just checking.
So remember folks, BUSH is pulling the FBI off terrorism to fight PORN. PORN didnt bomb the trade towers on 911.
Saddam Hussein didn't bomb the World Trade Center, either, but look what happened to him. And notice that a majority of Americans still believe that he was involved.
I wouldn't put it past Ashcroft to persuade the country that Larry Flynt is a terrorist. Remember those moronic ads that tried to link terrorism to drug use? You think Ashcroft won't try a stunt in the same vein to go after porn?
How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM and about an 800K floppy... am I missing something, have they come up with larger mass storage systems for the C64 or something?
Even 'back in the day' there was mass storage for Commodore 64s. My father taught computer studies at a local high school, and part of his job was managing a network of--if memory serves--sixty or so Commodore 64s.
The Commodore 9060 and 9090 offered 6.4 and 9.6 MB of storage, respectively. Manual here, for anyone who wants it. Pictures here.
As for showing John Q. Public how powerful these systems are... You should try reading some of the stuff on privacy at Reason's website. Often times, the stuff there is (believe it or not) more insightful than the stuff posted here!!!
Oh my God! A magazine has been able to successfully transform AN ADDRESS into a GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION.
Powerful indeed....
Yes, I know--they also showed they could link my address to a low-res satellite image. Good gravy, they know I live in...a light gray pixel.
It's a nice publicity stunt, but I'm not terribly concerned about my privacy being infringed by a mapping satellite. You could get *much* better pictures of my house from a private plane. Or by parking across the street with a camera. There are many real ways in which my privacy may be trampled by government or business; this just isn't one of them.
You might get away with brief exposure to a conventional oven, but microwaving for any length of time is going to kill one of these devices.
There will be strong induced currents in any extended metal object, including the circuit board traces of one of these USB dongles. Very quickly, resistive heating will fry thsoe traces. Quite probably a lethal current will be induced or travel through the flash memory chip itself.
Ever put aluminum foil in a microwave? It's a graphic demonstration of the problem. A conventional compact disc will also spark prettily in a microwave.
Heck, it's possible to create arcing between chunks of sausage. I did it inadvertantly just last week. Cut two wedges of Polish sausage, five to ten millimeters thick. (90 to 120 degree sectors.) Place them on a plate so that the points of the wedges are just touching; the arrangement should look roughly like a bow tie when viewed from above. Microwave on high. Within a few seconds, induced currents should flow between the two sausage halves (I presume that there is enough salt and water in the sausage to make it a passable conductor) producing sparking.
I assume no responsibility for damage to your sausages, microwaves, etc. Warning: sausage will be hot, yadda yadda yadda.
Actually, Canadians are quite violent. We just sublimate it through hockey. (Current men's and women's Olympic champions, baby! We also beat the Russians when it really counted--and it was waaaay cheaper than having a Cold War.)
And since I would guess the material that made up the disk itself would need only to be relatively transparent to the electron beam, it could be a lot less scratch-prone than lexan. The bigger problem might be certain kinds of dust, with unpredictable qualities that could affect the path or focus of the beam.
Actually, the big problem with any sort of electron beam technology outside of a controlled industrial environment is that they scatter readily. In a vacuum you haven't got any problems (over moderate distances) but even introducing air into the system can create significant scatter.
Electrons also suck at pentrating anything more solid than air. Electrons at, say, 10 kV won't penetrate more than a few microns into a layer of plastic; they'll travel an even shorter distance into a metallic surface. They'll be useless for high precision work after travelling several tens of nanometers.
Unfortunately, solid materials relatively transparent to electrons don't exist, and can't be made from regular matter. Electrons are deflected by charge--and matter is made up of charged particles.
This technique is confined to the factory. It is designed for 'pressing' master discs. Until the inside of your computer's case can maintain a vibration free environment (no fan, no other drives), tolerates high magnetic and electric fields for the electron optics (goodbye hard disk) tolerates high voltages, and can supply a good vacuum, and can apply a high quality coating after the disc is 'burned', this isn't going to show up on the desktop.
As far as I know, we don't. Evolution happens in leaps rather than continuously; isn't DNA supposed to be subject to larger, sudden changes as well? And how should we know much about evolution in a completely separate ecosystem?
Changes in genes that code for important proteins are definitely relatively rare. Usually such mutations are fatal, and get eliminated.
Changes to noncoding DNA are quite a bit more common. Most species have quite a bit of this stuff, and usually (but not always) mutations that occur in noncoding DNA don't have an appreciable effect on the organism.
For a given species, the drift rate in this 'junk' DNA is pretty constant, some fixed (very small) number of errors per million base pairs per replication. By comparison with surface organisms, we should be able to estimate when the lake was sealed...though there are probably better methods. Isotopic techniques could probably be applied more easily.
Two weeks later, when I got my paycheck, I noticed they had trimmed off all minutes prior to official beginning of the shift. Mother Fuckers! Burn me for 5-10 minutes a day. But, I dare not burn them for 3 in toto.
Not that I want to incur the wrath of the parent poster, but I don't think that his former employer's policy was that unreasonable. On any sort of production line, if one guy shows up late, the line stops--nobody gets any work done. If you go to the extreme end of that spectrum, a stopped line in the auto industry costs its owners thousands of dollars per minute. Damn right you're going to be on time.
Yeah, it's rough that the parent didn't get paid for the five to ten minutes after he arrived--but if he wasn't able to work during that time, why would he expect to be paid for it? Bring a book or a magazine. Play a game on your PDA. Read the paper; do a crossword. There are lots of ways to kill five or ten minutes.
Count those five minutes as an irretrievable part of your commute. The guy who lives twenty-five miles away doesn't get paid any more than the guy who lives fifteen miles away. Your employer isn't responsible for getting you to work on time.
The policy is a bit stingy, perhaps, but not out-and-out unreasonable.
Sharing was made possible by a technology that could not be envisioned when the copyright law was created, and we won't get far by suing people who engage in it. A legal change is what we desperatly need: a kind of a copyright law that would allow artists to get paid, while all people are able to share the information in an unrestricted manner, for non-commercial purposes. I'm am of opinion that art will survive even if we go all the way and declare information free, but heck, I'll settle for a voluntary collective licensing scheme too.
The modification to the Canadian Copyright Act that permitted copying music for personal use was made in 1997, the year before Napster hit the scene. Widespread online access to copyrighted materials wasn't happening at the time, but to say it could not be envisioned is a bit of a stretch. I'm sure that there are lots of people on Slashdot who have tales of shared music on IRC or ftp sites dating to 1997 and earlier.
Section 82 of the Act creates a levy on recordable media (CD-Rs, blank tapes, minidiscs, iPods, etc.) expressly for the purpose of compensating artists for copies made of their work. The Canadian Private Copying Collective pulls in roughly thirty million dollars per year in levies; that amount has been increasing at about ten percent per year for the last couple of years. That money is distributed to artists, songwriters, and labels. If they're already being compensated for copying, is it necessary for a legislative change to take place?
If all else fails, it sometimes helps to read the law in question--in this case, the Copyright Act. The original Act dates to 1985. Until 1997 nearly all acts of copying were deemed infringing, even for purposes that would be held to be 'fair use' in most other jurisdictions. In 1997, section 80 (Copying for Private Use) of Part VIII (Copyright Board and Collective Administration of Copyright) was added. Section 80 is reproduced in its entirety below.
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):
(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;
(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;
(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or
(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
To address your concerns:
Okay... copyright means that the author has the absolutely exclusive _rights_ to copy the work and others can only obtain _permission_ to copy the work by authorization from the copyright holder. Fair use, btw, is granted permission by the copyright act and the copyright holder has no choice but to implicitly grant that permission.
Copyright means whatever the government with jurisdiction says it means. In this case, Canadian law specifically recognizes that individuals may make copies of copyrighted works for their personal use. It's explicitly recognized as what the U.S. system would refer to as 'fair use'.
So in what world is putting a file that you do _NOT_ own the copyright on, and have not actually obtained permission from the copyright holder to copy for purposes beyond fair use, in a publicly shared folder for others to obtain _not_ a violation of the copyright act?
It's a very interesting legal question, actually. If I borrow a CD from a friend and rip a copy for myself, I have not violated Canadian law. If he rips a copy and gives it to me, then a violation has occurred--my friend has run afoul of section 80(2)(b) by 'distributing' a copyrighted work. Note that we would still be in the clear if I had visited my friend and used his computer to make the copy for myself.
It gets complicated where P2P systems come into the question. Who performs the act of copying? Justice von Finckenstein's ruling held, in effect, that the person downloading the copyrighted work was the one performing the act of copying. Since it was for personal use, the copying was protected under the Copyright Act. The party supplying the song for download was only providing a list of the music in his collection, an act which does not contravene copyright law.
This ruling could (and very likely will) be challenged on the grounds that a) the person sharing files is an active participant in the copying, or b) a person who downloads and then shares music files has downloaded them with the intent to distribute, and is therefore not protected by the Act. Ultimately, it will be the Supreme Court of Canada that decides the merits of either or both of those arguments.
Wouldn't what amounts to the emergence of a vanity press undermine that measure of one's worth?
Nope. This isn't a vanity press; your work still needs to be peer-reviewed to be published. If a journal gained a reputation for being soft on authors, its prestige would fall. Scientists publishing in it would receive little professional respect or acknowledgement.
Scientists already rank existing journals both formally and informally based upon the quality of work that they publish. If I apply for a faculty position at a university, the hiring committee is going to be more impressed by a couple of articles in Nature than by scores of papers in the International Journal of Salami Slicing.
If you only new[sic] how many different journals we need.
Indeed. To maintain a well-stocked library at a modern comprehensive university requires literally tens of thousands of subscriptions. The University of Toronto has the second-largest library collection in North America, after Harvard University. In April 2002, their library system received 33409 print serials, and subscribed to 19385 electronic serials. I can only assume that the number of journal subscriptions has increased since then. Incredibly, I still run across references to articles published in journals to which the university does not subscribe. It's utterly mindboggling.
The university spent in 2002/2003 $12 million on serials--nearly fifty percent more than the $8.3 million spent on books.
But anyway, as someone else said, there's ALOT to be said for the peer review model. You can see this even at some conferences, where anybody can attend if they pay the registration fee. You basically see science trolls at some of the sessions, just shouting down the speaker with false claims, or saying the talk is obvious (when it's not), etc. It's kind of weird to see 'professionals' trolling.
I suppose the important thing is that the speakers themselves are screened. (At least in most cases, and at all good conferences.) There isn't anything to prevent obnoxious idiots scrawling notes into print journals at the library, either--though it seems quite rare. Perhaps trolling is more common in some fields than others...?
A word of advice: I've found that the AIP Physics Desk Reference has just the right amount of heft--light enough to carry; heavy enough to silence most trolls. For the most persistant and pugnacious ones, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physicsalways does the trick.
How is this different than now? As of now, most people will have years' worth of email on their home computers.
Ah, but I have cleverly protected my data from prying eyes by crashing my hard drive at least once a year...thank you Maxtor, for your dedication to innovative security solutions!
We need juries that also decide whether the laws are valid, not just whether they were broken. That is the whole reason we have juries and not 'Star Chambers.'
Discussion of 'jury nullification' aside, no, this isn't why we have juries. We're supposed to elect representatives to decide if laws are appropriate, with oversight by the judiciary to ensure that the laws are constitutional. Juries are supposed to weigh evidence.
Question to ponder: We're supposed to choose representatives to design and implement laws. Should we be looking to random groups of twelve to second-guess that?
Many, if not most space launchers have used kerosene as a fuel, including the Saturn series of rockets. They use it because it's a particularly light fuel. Liquid Hydrogen + Liquid Oxygen is better, but requires a lot of cryogenic equipment and has only come into style in the past couple decades.
Not to be nitpicky, but the Saturn V second and third stages were fuelled by liquid hydrogen / liquid oxygen. A completely kerosene-fuelled Saturn V would have been much too heavy to get off the launch pad.
Even on a purely kerosene-fuelled rocket, you still need cryogenic equipment to store and pump the liquid oxygen. (Rare cases probably used a different oxidizer, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.) It's quite a bit warmer than liquid hydrogen, but definitely still counts as cryo.
Bottom line: using ANY crop for pharmaceutical production is inefficient and dangerous and impractical.
To argue that using crops to produce pharmaceuticals (so-called 'pharming') is inefficient and impractical is definitely open to discussion. Say what you will about the ethical nature (or lack thereof) of the major biotech and pharmaceutical companies--one thing they do know is money. Presumably they aren't investigating these techniques just so that they can piss off environmentalists.
Some protein products don't fold correctly in e. coli or other bacterial systems. Maintaining bacterial cultures requires pristine vats and utterly aseptic conditions. Temperature, humidity, nutrients...all have to be monitored and controlled.
Rice requires some care, but certainly not the level that culturing demands. It grows outdoors, in dirt. To determine which choice is more economical would require quite a bit of study and probably depends a great deal on the product you're interested in. I'm sure that the bean counters are watching this closely.
What really irks me is that they are producing drugs which will possibly be leaked into the ground after degradation or harvesting. If there happen to be bacteria in the ground with some sort of drug resistance that can be transmitted to other bacteria by plasmids/recombination through contamination of the crops, there will be big problems.
It's inappropriate to make blanket statements about the dangers of these crop products being released into the environment. Some products will degrade rapidly once the plant dies. Others may persist. An environmental assessment can and should take this into account.
In this case, the compounds in question are lactoferrin and lysozyme. They are naturally and widely-occuring compounds that already exist in many organisms and perform as natural antimicrobial agents. Exposure of organisms in the soil and around the field to these compounds will not generate mutant superbugs; microbes are exposed to these compounds every day inside our bodies. Since these are naturally occuring compounds, any resistance genes that could come about already exist.
Incidentally, these are compounds that you probably couldn't generate using e. coli, since they're toxic to bacteria. There are definitely some compounds that for safety reasons I wouldn't want to see pharmed, but these...well, they ain't them.
All too often comments get modded to 5 even though they are filled with erronious facts or lies.
I can hear it now--Janet Jackson testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Obscenity in Football (not Pertaining to Salaries).
Senator: Originally, your story was that the flash... Janet Jackson: Wardrobe malfunction, please. Senator: Right. Wardrobe malfunction, was the result of an accident. Now, you say that that is not necessarily correct...? JJ: Well, Senator, that depends on what your definition of is is. Senator: So you're saying that you lied? JJ: Not at all. Just that I presented some erroneous facts. Senator: Erroneous facts. Ah, well...that's all right then. We use those to generate budgets, after all...
Erroneous fact.. noun. 1. Fiction created when a) you can't think of the real answer b) you don't expect anyone else to know. 2. Lie.
A hundred years from now I'd just like to be alive...
That is the fresh social problem. Billions of ornery geezers, alive through the miracle of modern medicine, all of them yelling at those damn kids on their hoverboards.
Slashdot Mirror
Are these guys going to take this lying down? Claria and Clarica sure look and sound very much alike...and about the only company who could tarnish public perception of an insurance company would have to be Gator....
Can the filesystem at the other end of the pipe write that quickly? That's going to be an issue in a lot of setups.
Of course, I ignore completely the question of why it's so hard to carry the DVD into the next room to make a copy at the computer. The old adage about bandwidth, tapes, and a station wagon is still true....
Finally, it's important to really address the premium you're willing to pay for this convenience. If you're moving a couple DVDs back and forth each week, is it worht a major investment in hardware if you're only going to save five minutes on each transfer?
My aunt and uncle once saw someone weaving back and forth across eight lanes...knitting.
Does this project remind anyone else of the Book in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Just checking.
Saddam Hussein didn't bomb the World Trade Center, either, but look what happened to him. And notice that a majority of Americans still believe that he was involved.
I wouldn't put it past Ashcroft to persuade the country that Larry Flynt is a terrorist. Remember those moronic ads that tried to link terrorism to drug use? You think Ashcroft won't try a stunt in the same vein to go after porn?
Even 'back in the day' there was mass storage for Commodore 64s. My father taught computer studies at a local high school, and part of his job was managing a network of--if memory serves--sixty or so Commodore 64s.
The Commodore 9060 and 9090 offered 6.4 and 9.6 MB of storage, respectively. Manual here, for anyone who wants it. Pictures here.
Oh my God! A magazine has been able to successfully transform AN ADDRESS into a GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION.
Powerful indeed....
Yes, I know--they also showed they could link my address to a low-res satellite image. Good gravy, they know I live in...a light gray pixel.
It's a nice publicity stunt, but I'm not terribly concerned about my privacy being infringed by a mapping satellite. You could get *much* better pictures of my house from a private plane. Or by parking across the street with a camera. There are many real ways in which my privacy may be trampled by government or business; this just isn't one of them.
You might get away with brief exposure to a conventional oven, but microwaving for any length of time is going to kill one of these devices.
There will be strong induced currents in any extended metal object, including the circuit board traces of one of these USB dongles. Very quickly, resistive heating will fry thsoe traces. Quite probably a lethal current will be induced or travel through the flash memory chip itself.
Ever put aluminum foil in a microwave? It's a graphic demonstration of the problem. A conventional compact disc will also spark prettily in a microwave. Heck, it's possible to create arcing between chunks of sausage. I did it inadvertantly just last week. Cut two wedges of Polish sausage, five to ten millimeters thick. (90 to 120 degree sectors.) Place them on a plate so that the points of the wedges are just touching; the arrangement should look roughly like a bow tie when viewed from above. Microwave on high. Within a few seconds, induced currents should flow between the two sausage halves (I presume that there is enough salt and water in the sausage to make it a passable conductor) producing sparking.
I assume no responsibility for damage to your sausages, microwaves, etc. Warning: sausage will be hot, yadda yadda yadda.
The correct term, as everyone should know, is African-African.
Er, wait...
Actually, Canadians are quite violent. We just sublimate it through hockey. (Current men's and women's Olympic champions, baby! We also beat the Russians when it really counted--and it was waaaay cheaper than having a Cold War.)
Actually, the big problem with any sort of electron beam technology outside of a controlled industrial environment is that they scatter readily. In a vacuum you haven't got any problems (over moderate distances) but even introducing air into the system can create significant scatter.
Electrons also suck at pentrating anything more solid than air. Electrons at, say, 10 kV won't penetrate more than a few microns into a layer of plastic; they'll travel an even shorter distance into a metallic surface. They'll be useless for high precision work after travelling several tens of nanometers.
Unfortunately, solid materials relatively transparent to electrons don't exist, and can't be made from regular matter. Electrons are deflected by charge--and matter is made up of charged particles.
This technique is confined to the factory. It is designed for 'pressing' master discs. Until the inside of your computer's case can maintain a vibration free environment (no fan, no other drives), tolerates high magnetic and electric fields for the electron optics (goodbye hard disk) tolerates high voltages, and can supply a good vacuum, and can apply a high quality coating after the disc is 'burned', this isn't going to show up on the desktop.
Changes in genes that code for important proteins are definitely relatively rare. Usually such mutations are fatal, and get eliminated.
Changes to noncoding DNA are quite a bit more common. Most species have quite a bit of this stuff, and usually (but not always) mutations that occur in noncoding DNA don't have an appreciable effect on the organism.
For a given species, the drift rate in this 'junk' DNA is pretty constant, some fixed (very small) number of errors per million base pairs per replication. By comparison with surface organisms, we should be able to estimate when the lake was sealed...though there are probably better methods. Isotopic techniques could probably be applied more easily.
Not that I want to incur the wrath of the parent poster, but I don't think that his former employer's policy was that unreasonable. On any sort of production line, if one guy shows up late, the line stops--nobody gets any work done. If you go to the extreme end of that spectrum, a stopped line in the auto industry costs its owners thousands of dollars per minute. Damn right you're going to be on time.
Yeah, it's rough that the parent didn't get paid for the five to ten minutes after he arrived--but if he wasn't able to work during that time, why would he expect to be paid for it? Bring a book or a magazine. Play a game on your PDA. Read the paper; do a crossword. There are lots of ways to kill five or ten minutes.
Count those five minutes as an irretrievable part of your commute. The guy who lives twenty-five miles away doesn't get paid any more than the guy who lives fifteen miles away. Your employer isn't responsible for getting you to work on time.
The policy is a bit stingy, perhaps, but not out-and-out unreasonable.
The modification to the Canadian Copyright Act that permitted copying music for personal use was made in 1997, the year before Napster hit the scene. Widespread online access to copyrighted materials wasn't happening at the time, but to say it could not be envisioned is a bit of a stretch. I'm sure that there are lots of people on Slashdot who have tales of shared music on IRC or ftp sites dating to 1997 and earlier.
Section 82 of the Act creates a levy on recordable media (CD-Rs, blank tapes, minidiscs, iPods, etc.) expressly for the purpose of compensating artists for copies made of their work. The Canadian Private Copying Collective pulls in roughly thirty million dollars per year in levies; that amount has been increasing at about ten percent per year for the last couple of years. That money is distributed to artists, songwriters, and labels. If they're already being compensated for copying, is it necessary for a legislative change to take place?
To address your concerns:
Okay... copyright means that the author has the absolutely exclusive _rights_ to copy the work and others can only obtain _permission_ to copy the work by authorization from the copyright holder. Fair use, btw, is granted permission by the copyright act and the copyright holder has no choice but to implicitly grant that permission.
Copyright means whatever the government with jurisdiction says it means. In this case, Canadian law specifically recognizes that individuals may make copies of copyrighted works for their personal use. It's explicitly recognized as what the U.S. system would refer to as 'fair use'.
So in what world is putting a file that you do _NOT_ own the copyright on, and have not actually obtained permission from the copyright holder to copy for purposes beyond fair use, in a publicly shared folder for others to obtain _not_ a violation of the copyright act?
It's a very interesting legal question, actually. If I borrow a CD from a friend and rip a copy for myself, I have not violated Canadian law. If he rips a copy and gives it to me, then a violation has occurred--my friend has run afoul of section 80(2)(b) by 'distributing' a copyrighted work. Note that we would still be in the clear if I had visited my friend and used his computer to make the copy for myself.
It gets complicated where P2P systems come into the question. Who performs the act of copying? Justice von Finckenstein's ruling held, in effect, that the person downloading the copyrighted work was the one performing the act of copying. Since it was for personal use, the copying was protected under the Copyright Act. The party supplying the song for download was only providing a list of the music in his collection, an act which does not contravene copyright law.
This ruling could (and very likely will) be challenged on the grounds that a) the person sharing files is an active participant in the copying, or b) a person who downloads and then shares music files has downloaded them with the intent to distribute, and is therefore not protected by the Act. Ultimately, it will be the Supreme Court of Canada that decides the merits of either or both of those arguments.
Downloading copyrighted materials may be per
You have 30 minutes to move your car.
You have 10 minutes to move your car.
Your car has been towed.
Your car is being crushed into a cube.
You have 30 minutes to move your cube.
Errors in transcription are my own. Cheers.
Nope. This isn't a vanity press; your work still needs to be peer-reviewed to be published. If a journal gained a reputation for being soft on authors, its prestige would fall. Scientists publishing in it would receive little professional respect or acknowledgement.
Scientists already rank existing journals both formally and informally based upon the quality of work that they publish. If I apply for a faculty position at a university, the hiring committee is going to be more impressed by a couple of articles in Nature than by scores of papers in the International Journal of Salami Slicing .
Indeed. To maintain a well-stocked library at a modern comprehensive university requires literally tens of thousands of subscriptions. The University of Toronto has the second-largest library collection in North America, after Harvard University. In April 2002, their library system received 33409 print serials, and subscribed to 19385 electronic serials. I can only assume that the number of journal subscriptions has increased since then. Incredibly, I still run across references to articles published in journals to which the university does not subscribe. It's utterly mindboggling.
The university spent in 2002/2003 $12 million on serials--nearly fifty percent more than the $8.3 million spent on books.
I suppose the important thing is that the speakers themselves are screened. (At least in most cases, and at all good conferences.) There isn't anything to prevent obnoxious idiots scrawling notes into print journals at the library, either--though it seems quite rare. Perhaps trolling is more common in some fields than others...?
A word of advice: I've found that the AIP Physics Desk Reference has just the right amount of heft--light enough to carry; heavy enough to silence most trolls. For the most persistant and pugnacious ones, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics always does the trick.
Ah, but I have cleverly protected my data from prying eyes by crashing my hard drive at least once a year...thank you Maxtor, for your dedication to innovative security solutions!
Discussion of 'jury nullification' aside, no, this isn't why we have juries. We're supposed to elect representatives to decide if laws are appropriate, with oversight by the judiciary to ensure that the laws are constitutional. Juries are supposed to weigh evidence.
Question to ponder: We're supposed to choose representatives to design and implement laws. Should we be looking to random groups of twelve to second-guess that?
Not to be nitpicky, but the Saturn V second and third stages were fuelled by liquid hydrogen / liquid oxygen. A completely kerosene-fuelled Saturn V would have been much too heavy to get off the launch pad.
Even on a purely kerosene-fuelled rocket, you still need cryogenic equipment to store and pump the liquid oxygen. (Rare cases probably used a different oxidizer, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.) It's quite a bit warmer than liquid hydrogen, but definitely still counts as cryo.
To argue that using crops to produce pharmaceuticals (so-called 'pharming') is inefficient and impractical is definitely open to discussion. Say what you will about the ethical nature (or lack thereof) of the major biotech and pharmaceutical companies--one thing they do know is money. Presumably they aren't investigating these techniques just so that they can piss off environmentalists.
Some protein products don't fold correctly in e. coli or other bacterial systems. Maintaining bacterial cultures requires pristine vats and utterly aseptic conditions. Temperature, humidity, nutrients...all have to be monitored and controlled.
Rice requires some care, but certainly not the level that culturing demands. It grows outdoors, in dirt. To determine which choice is more economical would require quite a bit of study and probably depends a great deal on the product you're interested in. I'm sure that the bean counters are watching this closely.
What really irks me is that they are producing drugs which will possibly be leaked into the ground after degradation or harvesting. If there happen to be bacteria in the ground with some sort of drug resistance that can be transmitted to other bacteria by plasmids/recombination through contamination of the crops, there will be big problems.
It's inappropriate to make blanket statements about the dangers of these crop products being released into the environment. Some products will degrade rapidly once the plant dies. Others may persist. An environmental assessment can and should take this into account.
In this case, the compounds in question are lactoferrin and lysozyme. They are naturally and widely-occuring compounds that already exist in many organisms and perform as natural antimicrobial agents. Exposure of organisms in the soil and around the field to these compounds will not generate mutant superbugs; microbes are exposed to these compounds every day inside our bodies. Since these are naturally occuring compounds, any resistance genes that could come about already exist.
Incidentally, these are compounds that you probably couldn't generate using e. coli, since they're toxic to bacteria. There are definitely some compounds that for safety reasons I wouldn't want to see pharmed, but these...well, they ain't them.
I can hear it now--Janet Jackson testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Obscenity in Football (not Pertaining to Salaries).
Erroneous fact.. noun. 1. Fiction created when a) you can't think of the real answer b) you don't expect anyone else to know. 2. Lie.That is the fresh social problem. Billions of ornery geezers, alive through the miracle of modern medicine, all of them yelling at those damn kids on their hoverboards.