Re:Easier way to colonize the universe
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
Hence the birth of "faith". Where is this "earth" place anyways? Who was the rotten b*tch that ate the forbidden fruit and got us cast off of that wonderful place?
You do have a point there... I've been using Gnome for three years solid now, and I've NEVER known about the alt-middle feature... Thanks!:)
What you do have to admit though, is that although I have been using Gnome for three years, I've never actually MISSED that feature. It's not like I was sitting at my computer one day, and thought... hmm, I wish there was a quick way to resize my windows... Its simplicity is very good, although admittedly documentation and modularity could be much better. Perhaps I will give KDE or Xfce a try the next time my computer is due for an update...
I'm not changing the DEFINITION of tab, I only want MY tab to DISPLAY as 4 spaces instead of 8. Also, I hate using spaces as indentation, because it's a pain in the ass skipping ahead in some editors like nano or notepad. Some other helpful people showed me how to change the tabwidth in kdevelop though, so I'm happy:)
THANK YOU SO MUCH!! The docs kept on telling me to go to Indentation, and there were no tab width settings there! I found it in Editing in KDevelop as well. Now everything is happy:)
Who knows who did that first... who cares? In fact, I'm not advocating Gnome's superiority. I'm just saying that segmenting the OS population into discrete opinions was probably a good idea, to avoid conflict.
My big problem with KDE is that there are so many options that I can never find the one I want. Do you know where i can change the width of a tab in Kate/KDevelop? The docs tell me to go to one option pane to change it, but there's nothing relating to tab width there. The whole 8-space thing is really annoying me, but it's also the only decent IDE for C++ that's stable...
Actually, if more people had this "ego problem", I think open source would be screwed. Flame wars would erupt every day over trivial things, as one person patches and someone else counterpatches. People have differing opinions, and even on trivial things, it's hard to get them to agree. That's why there's so many choices. KDE/Gnome/Xfce/Openbox/whatever. KDE has craploads of options too, if you need to change anything. Gnome tried a different approach from KDE - instead of allowing everyone to change everything, they did a study to see what is the most efficient to use. Although I did not like some of the choices they made for me in the beginning, you'd be amazed to see how quickly you grow attached to them. Silly things like alt-click to move the window. I'm constantly trying to do this on windows machines now...
Speaking as a neuroscience major with some eye tracking-related research experience, eye movements have two components of control - top down, and bottom up. Top down control basically means your consciousness controls where your eyes are looking, and bottom up basically means sensory input drives a "saccade", an unconscious but fast movement of the eyes, normally to a surprising, quickly moving, or dangerous stimuli. Your top-down control is actually very powerful, and if the given stimuli are not too powerful, you can almost completely suppress saccadic movements and focus on one point.
You are correct in the low-bandwidth optic nerve. Your optic nerve is carrying already heavily processed and compressed information. Only about a million ganglia are connected to the photoreceptors in your eye. The fovea has a one to one correspondence with ganglia, which gives you the high acuity in the center of your vision. Out toward the periphery, more and more photoreceptors connect to each ganglia, which means any particular ganglia is active for a very large spatial area of stimulation. This is why your peripheral vision is not as acute as the center.
Also, to the person suggesting that the optic nerve was a bad connector design, it's not. It's possibly the best connector for the situation, as with most of mother nature's designs. The sclera (outside of the eyeball) is extremely tough, and having each individual ganglia poke through its surface would be foolhardy, and very dangerous. In fact, if that were the case, evolution would make sure you couldn't move your eyes, because if you do, you'd most likely sever a pretty nice batch of the axons heading to your brain. Also, having it near the center of vision is a pretty good idea too, in order to reduce signal latency from any one portion of the retina. A much more valid criticism, however, is why your retina is inverted. The photoreceptors are on the bottom, so light reaching them have already passed through multiple layers of cells and stuff layered on top. Admittedly, having the photoreceptors at the bottom means the opsin disks are more easily cleaned up by the pigmented epithelium after they're used, but why not have macrophage-like structures on top that could scrub the opsins?
You know, IR devices aren't THAT bright. Most digital cameras can see IR - try it, point a remote at the lens and you can see the blinking. Admittedly, most cameras now have IR filters in them (since it's a pretty nice trick to use a visible light filter and see through light clothing using IR), but the effect is still pretty cool.
The problem with this is... even if I WANTED to change how the borders interacted with each other, I can't bloody FIND the option under the SEA of similar options. At least Gnome chooses mostly sane defaults, so I have no urge to change anything. I was suffering from major option overload when I tried KDE, and sadly, although it was far prettier than Gnome, I just couldn't find any relevant options. For example - how the hell do I change tab width in KDevelop/Kate? It seems to default on 8 spaces making my code GIGANTIC. The docs tell me to change it in one option pane, but there is nothing relating to tab width on that pane....
So let me get this straight... deleting a shortcut brings up a pile of popups, but installing something doesn't?! Who's trading security for annoyance here?
I hope you realize that most people type in commands like that only to prove a point. As the flood of other people have shown you already, there are visual tools to do the same process. I'd like you to show me explicitly the full process of downloading and installing any windows software with only text, the medium of choice for a forum like this. Seems a bit harder now, no?
Actually, having amazing battlefield medicine ( basically invincible soldiers ) would be very bad for war in general, no matter which side. The point of war is to kill enough of the opposing side's population to force them to withdraw. If the opposing side cannot be killed and their resources (or will) do not run out, then there is no reasonable end to the war. As another posted earlier, if 2500 American troops were killed on Day 18, we would be out of there, and it would be pretty damned quick too.
My problem with camera phones is that no matter how good the camera (such as the nokia n-series, and the sony k800 series), all camera phone shots have a distinctive blurriness/noisiness to it. It's extremely distinctive, and even with 3 mp varieties, I can easily distinguish between a camera phone shot, and a 3 mp point and shoot even.
When I purchased my k750i, I specifically looked for a good camera on a phone. I was a bit disappointed that even in broad daylight, the camera more or less... sucked... At night, the nasty nasty lines of noise came up and basically made it unusable for anything less than broad daylight. That's one thing that these photostitching programs can't correct... the crappy lens
You know, I wouldn't even mind it as much if it was snowing. But this goddamned RAIN! It's 50 degrees out, and drizzling rain for the last three days. WHAT HAPPENED TO WINTER?!?!?!
I've kept on hearing about this comet for the last few days. I tried to look for it last week, but I always had a mess of clouds blocking the western horizon, exactly where I should be looking. Curse this weather!
I felt so sad when I thought of Sojurner wandering around aimlessly, slowly dying itself, while searching for its big brother Pathfinder, who had already died... *tear*
I think I'm watching too much anime at this point...
That animation was AWESOME! Having recently taken cell biology, I could name most of the features they depicted... Actin assembly, microtubule dynamics, myosin and kinesins, cadherins, trasposons, the entire process of DNA replication... WOW... I really wished they showed that at the end of my class, because it really tells the whole story, that one animation...
BTW, if you want to know more, that animation clearly depicted a lymphocyte crossing the endothelial layer of a cappillary to enter into the tissues. That's how your immune system works!
That would be BRILLIANT... If crap can't autolaunch on windows startup, we've gotten rid of the virus problem as well! Most of the viruses today hide in the registry under piles of crap. Why thought up registry autorun anyways?!
I believe in freedom and liberty for all molecules.
And by all molecules, I don't just mean the ones in my body.
I don't see how any person can ethically justify excluding specific molecules from their own body.
If a molecule from a bacteria, a virus, - where-ever wishes to enter your body, the only basis upon which you could deny them is self-defence.
I'm not trying to troll, but I am illustrating a VERY important concept from biology. REGULATION is ultimately REQUIRED. Our bodies cannot screen every single molecule/cell entering it - it's wayyy too big. A perfectly normal "looking" (from a molecular perspective, at least) protein could enter, deform into a prion, and wreak havoc. It also cannot take too much all at once - imagine all the water in your immediate surroundings trying to dilute the salt content in your blood. I would love to have more immigrants entering the country. I am personally an immigrant, and the majority of my friends are foreign. However, similar to a human body, it cannot accept EVERY single molecule that wants to enter into the body
Sane immigration laws would be the first step to solving this problem. Create a legal path with at least a HOPE of entering the country, and you will have a very healthy legal immigrant workforce. As another poster mentioned, allow a short period by which you're allowed to enter the country and look for a job. If the person can maintain employment, regardless of location for 5 years, grant citizenship. It's extremely simple, but effective. It mirrors what our body does with entering molecules. You eat food, it enters into your stomach. If your body needs it, the stomach intakes it, and makes it a part of your body.
Illegal immigration is just an excuse corporations use to enslave people.
As a student at johns hopkins university, I would KILL to have a decent WORKING public transportation system in a MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREA. Public transportation can be a VERY good thing if implemented correctly. And in the US, it is ANYTHING but. Hopkins is located about 5 miles north of downtown baltimore. A public transportation system does exist, however, its reliability is literally NONE. I cannot even count the number of times where I've just sat around waiting for a bus, and at least two or three bus arrivals pass without a bus actually showing up. I usually just give up in frustration and grab an obscenely expensive cab. Attempting to get to inner harbor consists of basically two options - take a cab, or wait for the school shuttle to run, which runs only on Thursday - Sunday nights from 6-11. Paying for the bus once you do get on requires EXACT CHANGE of $1.60. Screw change, you're not getting any. Almost nobody ventures out of the small region around campus unless they own a car due to the lack of any sane form of transportation, the safety conditions around the campus, and the workload associated with class.
Sadly, improving baltimore's public transportation system would be extremely trivial. Ensure the busses arrive on time. Create a card-swipe system that's easily accessible and attained. I would love to explore baltimore more, but even after three years, I barely even know what inner harbor looks like, let alone anywhere else. The US public transportation system has its head screwed on backwards, and I hope they would fix it soon.
I think everything that I want to say has probably already been mentioned, but I really need to say this. Javascript is not a bad thing. Sure its design sucks, and the 20 different ways the same code can be interpreted is a real pain in the ass, but it has its uses. Developing interactivity is not a bad thing, and that is exactly what javascript is great at.
In order to make safe javascript, all you need to do is consider one thing - would my site send and recieve the same data if there was NO javascript? Consider google maps, and the old mapquest. When you drag around the map, the javascript is merely requesting images at a certain coordinate. Even if the user hacks up the javascript to do whatever, the only thing they'll be able request are images at a certain coordinate. Which is exactly what mapquest did when you clicked the edges. If you need to send text data and you use ajax, the javascript can send ANYTHING to ANYWHERE. But should you care? Not if your server actually only accepts proper data with full error checking. Same applied to standard form text boxes. ajax or not, if your server dumps all the data from a POST into a database, your server is good as hosed.
I play with ajax quite a bit. I love making things interactive. Yeah it's a pain in the ass to work with, especially if you're an ascetic like me, and refuse to use any libraries (I love making my own code, hehe). Locking down the javascript is not one of my concerns though. Sure you need to make good code, if only to make sure it makes sense to yourself. But all server-side handling should be done as if javascript did not exist at all. Server-side code should have only one failure mode - rejection. Client side code can, and WILL fail no matter what. Even slight interpretation issues between the various browsers will muck up the script. You just have to pretend that it doesn't make a difference, and allow the site to be operational still. Follow this, and I don't see how you can actually compromise a site.
I'm sure it's already been said before, but this post made me think of a few things.
Drugs by themselves are worthless. The synthesis process that makes the majority of drugs could churn out millions of pills for pennies. With the exception of a few natural compound starters, most drugs are synthesized in huge facilities where the compound itself is nearly worthless. Selling the product by itself is nearly worthless - most drugs would literally cost less than a bottle of aspirin.
When you buy a branded drug, you're buying the research that went into making it. That is the reason why branded drugs are expensive - you bought the entire process of finding the biological target, creating a modifier of the pathway, and testing the modifier for safety, efficacy, etc etc. You're also buying the process for a huge set of failed drugs which did not make it to the market. Pfizer spends $8 billion dollars a year on research, and lipitor (their flagship drug, not viagra as most people would think) only earns back a small portion of that. However, what happens if you let any pipsqueak company make the compound after the research is done? Research has no returns anymore, all the drug companies would literally disappear overnight. If they cover up what's in their pills, any organic chemist worth his/her title would feed it into an NMR and find the structure instantly. And they'd probably also be able to come up with the entire process required to make it too. br
Disclaimer: my dad works as a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry. One big thing that peeves both of us off is how clueless the public is to drug research. We also both admit that the industry is not a good one - I personally think that the research should probably be a public institution funded by the government. But the way the public demonizes the entire industry is very unsettling...
Thank you for the link! I really wish slashdot would stop posting these sensationalized news articles. "Treatment for diabetes in 2 years!"? Bullshit. Sensory neurons control islet cell inflammation? Makes sense. Either post accurate scientific titles and links to articles, or don't post them at all. Because the press releases meant for the sheeple will only dumb you down:-p
Is the journal posted online yet? At least a pubmed link? I really hate these slashdot medical posts, because I know there are journals behind them, but it's such a pain to find them...
Who said you had to rely on rational argument?
"Yield to Islam, heathen dogs, or we'll spray your city with nukular radioactivitiness!" and you'd have half of America crawling around in fear.
It's a sad state when the mere thought of nuclear materials scares all rationality out of the general population...
I should say, I've only seen vista running on a friend's computer, so I've never actually installed it myself. However, if you use Ubuntu, all the sleep/hibernate stuff also works out of the box. When I first tried to get S3 working, it was on a dell 700m running gentoo, about two years ago. It was a nightmare. The particular kernel version that I used wouldn't suspend at all. Downgrading to another version let me suspend, but waking up NEVER worked. Waited for 6 months. Found that they were developing the whole vbe system to get the screen working again. Tried some test package that I literally HEARD about across 20 different sites, but could never FIND. Finally got it to work! The first attempt to get an S3 suspend took a full 6 months to get working, and countless hours to figure out.
Flash forward to 2006, Ubuntu Dapper. Since a few versions ago, S3 would work "out of the box" on the same 700m. Logout->Suspend, and bam it goes down. I felt so stupid for wasting so much time with S3 just a year back x_x. A few other systems which previously did not work under any attempts started working randomly. A Fujitsu S6230 would suspend with older ubuntus and with the vbe restore system. However, when waking up, the screen would turn on with one color, and crash. Dapper, works out of the box much to my surprise. A Samsung Q10 (IIRC) had a completely broken ACPI. The battery level wouldn't even read properly in gentoo without kernel patches. Dapper - S3 again, works out of the box. Just log out->suspend, and it's down. These rather obscure systems were working without any further intervention! Linux suspend was once a nightmare, I admit. But they sure got their act together recently, and it definitely competes favorably with both Apple and Microsoft!
Slashdot Mirror
Hence the birth of "faith". Where is this "earth" place anyways? Who was the rotten b*tch that ate the forbidden fruit and got us cast off of that wonderful place?
You do have a point there... I've been using Gnome for three years solid now, and I've NEVER known about the alt-middle feature... Thanks! :)
What you do have to admit though, is that although I have been using Gnome for three years, I've never actually MISSED that feature. It's not like I was sitting at my computer one day, and thought... hmm, I wish there was a quick way to resize my windows... Its simplicity is very good, although admittedly documentation and modularity could be much better. Perhaps I will give KDE or Xfce a try the next time my computer is due for an update...
I'm not changing the DEFINITION of tab, I only want MY tab to DISPLAY as 4 spaces instead of 8. Also, I hate using spaces as indentation, because it's a pain in the ass skipping ahead in some editors like nano or notepad. Some other helpful people showed me how to change the tabwidth in kdevelop though, so I'm happy :)
THANK YOU SO MUCH!! The docs kept on telling me to go to Indentation, and there were no tab width settings there! I found it in Editing in KDevelop as well. Now everything is happy :)
Who knows who did that first... who cares? In fact, I'm not advocating Gnome's superiority. I'm just saying that segmenting the OS population into discrete opinions was probably a good idea, to avoid conflict.
My big problem with KDE is that there are so many options that I can never find the one I want. Do you know where i can change the width of a tab in Kate/KDevelop? The docs tell me to go to one option pane to change it, but there's nothing relating to tab width there. The whole 8-space thing is really annoying me, but it's also the only decent IDE for C++ that's stable...
Actually, if more people had this "ego problem", I think open source would be screwed. Flame wars would erupt every day over trivial things, as one person patches and someone else counterpatches. People have differing opinions, and even on trivial things, it's hard to get them to agree. That's why there's so many choices. KDE/Gnome/Xfce/Openbox/whatever. KDE has craploads of options too, if you need to change anything. Gnome tried a different approach from KDE - instead of allowing everyone to change everything, they did a study to see what is the most efficient to use. Although I did not like some of the choices they made for me in the beginning, you'd be amazed to see how quickly you grow attached to them. Silly things like alt-click to move the window. I'm constantly trying to do this on windows machines now...
Speaking as a neuroscience major with some eye tracking-related research experience, eye movements have two components of control - top down, and bottom up. Top down control basically means your consciousness controls where your eyes are looking, and bottom up basically means sensory input drives a "saccade", an unconscious but fast movement of the eyes, normally to a surprising, quickly moving, or dangerous stimuli. Your top-down control is actually very powerful, and if the given stimuli are not too powerful, you can almost completely suppress saccadic movements and focus on one point.
You are correct in the low-bandwidth optic nerve. Your optic nerve is carrying already heavily processed and compressed information. Only about a million ganglia are connected to the photoreceptors in your eye. The fovea has a one to one correspondence with ganglia, which gives you the high acuity in the center of your vision. Out toward the periphery, more and more photoreceptors connect to each ganglia, which means any particular ganglia is active for a very large spatial area of stimulation. This is why your peripheral vision is not as acute as the center.
Also, to the person suggesting that the optic nerve was a bad connector design, it's not. It's possibly the best connector for the situation, as with most of mother nature's designs. The sclera (outside of the eyeball) is extremely tough, and having each individual ganglia poke through its surface would be foolhardy, and very dangerous. In fact, if that were the case, evolution would make sure you couldn't move your eyes, because if you do, you'd most likely sever a pretty nice batch of the axons heading to your brain. Also, having it near the center of vision is a pretty good idea too, in order to reduce signal latency from any one portion of the retina. A much more valid criticism, however, is why your retina is inverted. The photoreceptors are on the bottom, so light reaching them have already passed through multiple layers of cells and stuff layered on top. Admittedly, having the photoreceptors at the bottom means the opsin disks are more easily cleaned up by the pigmented epithelium after they're used, but why not have macrophage-like structures on top that could scrub the opsins?
You know, IR devices aren't THAT bright. Most digital cameras can see IR - try it, point a remote at the lens and you can see the blinking. Admittedly, most cameras now have IR filters in them (since it's a pretty nice trick to use a visible light filter and see through light clothing using IR), but the effect is still pretty cool.
The problem with this is... even if I WANTED to change how the borders interacted with each other, I can't bloody FIND the option under the SEA of similar options. At least Gnome chooses mostly sane defaults, so I have no urge to change anything. I was suffering from major option overload when I tried KDE, and sadly, although it was far prettier than Gnome, I just couldn't find any relevant options. For example - how the hell do I change tab width in KDevelop/Kate? It seems to default on 8 spaces making my code GIGANTIC. The docs tell me to change it in one option pane, but there is nothing relating to tab width on that pane....
So let me get this straight... deleting a shortcut brings up a pile of popups, but installing something doesn't?! Who's trading security for annoyance here?
I hope you realize that most people type in commands like that only to prove a point. As the flood of other people have shown you already, there are visual tools to do the same process. I'd like you to show me explicitly the full process of downloading and installing any windows software with only text, the medium of choice for a forum like this. Seems a bit harder now, no?
Actually, having amazing battlefield medicine ( basically invincible soldiers ) would be very bad for war in general, no matter which side. The point of war is to kill enough of the opposing side's population to force them to withdraw. If the opposing side cannot be killed and their resources (or will) do not run out, then there is no reasonable end to the war. As another posted earlier, if 2500 American troops were killed on Day 18, we would be out of there, and it would be pretty damned quick too.
My problem with camera phones is that no matter how good the camera (such as the nokia n-series, and the sony k800 series), all camera phone shots have a distinctive blurriness/noisiness to it. It's extremely distinctive, and even with 3 mp varieties, I can easily distinguish between a camera phone shot, and a 3 mp point and shoot even.
When I purchased my k750i, I specifically looked for a good camera on a phone. I was a bit disappointed that even in broad daylight, the camera more or less... sucked... At night, the nasty nasty lines of noise came up and basically made it unusable for anything less than broad daylight. That's one thing that these photostitching programs can't correct... the crappy lens
You know, I wouldn't even mind it as much if it was snowing. But this goddamned RAIN! It's 50 degrees out, and drizzling rain for the last three days. WHAT HAPPENED TO WINTER?!?!?!
I've kept on hearing about this comet for the last few days. I tried to look for it last week, but I always had a mess of clouds blocking the western horizon, exactly where I should be looking. Curse this weather!
I felt so sad when I thought of Sojurner wandering around aimlessly, slowly dying itself, while searching for its big brother Pathfinder, who had already died... *tear*
I think I'm watching too much anime at this point...
That animation was AWESOME! Having recently taken cell biology, I could name most of the features they depicted... Actin assembly, microtubule dynamics, myosin and kinesins, cadherins, trasposons, the entire process of DNA replication... WOW... I really wished they showed that at the end of my class, because it really tells the whole story, that one animation...
BTW, if you want to know more, that animation clearly depicted a lymphocyte crossing the endothelial layer of a cappillary to enter into the tissues. That's how your immune system works!
That would be BRILLIANT... If crap can't autolaunch on windows startup, we've gotten rid of the virus problem as well! Most of the viruses today hide in the registry under piles of crap. Why thought up registry autorun anyways?!
I believe in freedom and liberty for all molecules.
And by all molecules, I don't just mean the ones in my body.
I don't see how any person can ethically justify excluding specific molecules from their own body.
If a molecule from a bacteria, a virus, - where-ever wishes to enter your body, the only basis upon which you could deny them is self-defence.
I'm not trying to troll, but I am illustrating a VERY important concept from biology. REGULATION is ultimately REQUIRED. Our bodies cannot screen every single molecule/cell entering it - it's wayyy too big. A perfectly normal "looking" (from a molecular perspective, at least) protein could enter, deform into a prion, and wreak havoc. It also cannot take too much all at once - imagine all the water in your immediate surroundings trying to dilute the salt content in your blood. I would love to have more immigrants entering the country. I am personally an immigrant, and the majority of my friends are foreign. However, similar to a human body, it cannot accept EVERY single molecule that wants to enter into the body
Sane immigration laws would be the first step to solving this problem. Create a legal path with at least a HOPE of entering the country, and you will have a very healthy legal immigrant workforce. As another poster mentioned, allow a short period by which you're allowed to enter the country and look for a job. If the person can maintain employment, regardless of location for 5 years, grant citizenship. It's extremely simple, but effective. It mirrors what our body does with entering molecules. You eat food, it enters into your stomach. If your body needs it, the stomach intakes it, and makes it a part of your body.
Illegal immigration is just an excuse corporations use to enslave people.
As a student at johns hopkins university, I would KILL to have a decent WORKING public transportation system in a MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREA. Public transportation can be a VERY good thing if implemented correctly. And in the US, it is ANYTHING but. Hopkins is located about 5 miles north of downtown baltimore. A public transportation system does exist, however, its reliability is literally NONE. I cannot even count the number of times where I've just sat around waiting for a bus, and at least two or three bus arrivals pass without a bus actually showing up. I usually just give up in frustration and grab an obscenely expensive cab. Attempting to get to inner harbor consists of basically two options - take a cab, or wait for the school shuttle to run, which runs only on Thursday - Sunday nights from 6-11. Paying for the bus once you do get on requires EXACT CHANGE of $1.60. Screw change, you're not getting any. Almost nobody ventures out of the small region around campus unless they own a car due to the lack of any sane form of transportation, the safety conditions around the campus, and the workload associated with class.
Sadly, improving baltimore's public transportation system would be extremely trivial. Ensure the busses arrive on time. Create a card-swipe system that's easily accessible and attained. I would love to explore baltimore more, but even after three years, I barely even know what inner harbor looks like, let alone anywhere else. The US public transportation system has its head screwed on backwards, and I hope they would fix it soon.
I think everything that I want to say has probably already been mentioned, but I really need to say this. Javascript is not a bad thing. Sure its design sucks, and the 20 different ways the same code can be interpreted is a real pain in the ass, but it has its uses. Developing interactivity is not a bad thing, and that is exactly what javascript is great at.
In order to make safe javascript, all you need to do is consider one thing - would my site send and recieve the same data if there was NO javascript? Consider google maps, and the old mapquest. When you drag around the map, the javascript is merely requesting images at a certain coordinate. Even if the user hacks up the javascript to do whatever, the only thing they'll be able request are images at a certain coordinate. Which is exactly what mapquest did when you clicked the edges. If you need to send text data and you use ajax, the javascript can send ANYTHING to ANYWHERE. But should you care? Not if your server actually only accepts proper data with full error checking. Same applied to standard form text boxes. ajax or not, if your server dumps all the data from a POST into a database, your server is good as hosed.
I play with ajax quite a bit. I love making things interactive. Yeah it's a pain in the ass to work with, especially if you're an ascetic like me, and refuse to use any libraries (I love making my own code, hehe). Locking down the javascript is not one of my concerns though. Sure you need to make good code, if only to make sure it makes sense to yourself. But all server-side handling should be done as if javascript did not exist at all. Server-side code should have only one failure mode - rejection. Client side code can, and WILL fail no matter what. Even slight interpretation issues between the various browsers will muck up the script. You just have to pretend that it doesn't make a difference, and allow the site to be operational still. Follow this, and I don't see how you can actually compromise a site.
I'm sure it's already been said before, but this post made me think of a few things. Drugs by themselves are worthless. The synthesis process that makes the majority of drugs could churn out millions of pills for pennies. With the exception of a few natural compound starters, most drugs are synthesized in huge facilities where the compound itself is nearly worthless. Selling the product by itself is nearly worthless - most drugs would literally cost less than a bottle of aspirin.
When you buy a branded drug, you're buying the research that went into making it. That is the reason why branded drugs are expensive - you bought the entire process of finding the biological target, creating a modifier of the pathway, and testing the modifier for safety, efficacy, etc etc. You're also buying the process for a huge set of failed drugs which did not make it to the market. Pfizer spends $8 billion dollars a year on research, and lipitor (their flagship drug, not viagra as most people would think) only earns back a small portion of that. However, what happens if you let any pipsqueak company make the compound after the research is done? Research has no returns anymore, all the drug companies would literally disappear overnight. If they cover up what's in their pills, any organic chemist worth his/her title would feed it into an NMR and find the structure instantly. And they'd probably also be able to come up with the entire process required to make it too.
br Disclaimer: my dad works as a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry. One big thing that peeves both of us off is how clueless the public is to drug research. We also both admit that the industry is not a good one - I personally think that the research should probably be a public institution funded by the government. But the way the public demonizes the entire industry is very unsettling...
Thank you for the link! I really wish slashdot would stop posting these sensationalized news articles. "Treatment for diabetes in 2 years!"? Bullshit. Sensory neurons control islet cell inflammation? Makes sense. Either post accurate scientific titles and links to articles, or don't post them at all. Because the press releases meant for the sheeple will only dumb you down :-p
Is the journal posted online yet? At least a pubmed link? I really hate these slashdot medical posts, because I know there are journals behind them, but it's such a pain to find them...
Who said you had to rely on rational argument? "Yield to Islam, heathen dogs, or we'll spray your city with nukular radioactivitiness!" and you'd have half of America crawling around in fear. It's a sad state when the mere thought of nuclear materials scares all rationality out of the general population...
I should say, I've only seen vista running on a friend's computer, so I've never actually installed it myself. However, if you use Ubuntu, all the sleep/hibernate stuff also works out of the box. When I first tried to get S3 working, it was on a dell 700m running gentoo, about two years ago. It was a nightmare. The particular kernel version that I used wouldn't suspend at all. Downgrading to another version let me suspend, but waking up NEVER worked. Waited for 6 months. Found that they were developing the whole vbe system to get the screen working again. Tried some test package that I literally HEARD about across 20 different sites, but could never FIND. Finally got it to work! The first attempt to get an S3 suspend took a full 6 months to get working, and countless hours to figure out.
Flash forward to 2006, Ubuntu Dapper. Since a few versions ago, S3 would work "out of the box" on the same 700m. Logout->Suspend, and bam it goes down. I felt so stupid for wasting so much time with S3 just a year back x_x. A few other systems which previously did not work under any attempts started working randomly. A Fujitsu S6230 would suspend with older ubuntus and with the vbe restore system. However, when waking up, the screen would turn on with one color, and crash. Dapper, works out of the box much to my surprise. A Samsung Q10 (IIRC) had a completely broken ACPI. The battery level wouldn't even read properly in gentoo without kernel patches. Dapper - S3 again, works out of the box. Just log out->suspend, and it's down. These rather obscure systems were working without any further intervention! Linux suspend was once a nightmare, I admit. But they sure got their act together recently, and it definitely competes favorably with both Apple and Microsoft!