You set out to do something else, but you have just proven to me that the patent-idiocy is so wide-spread that it is even infecting ppl who otherwise are mostly modded positively.
Once again: it is a recipe. Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that? McD's *never* had a patent on a Big Mac (do have trademark though). No Michelin-starred chef *ever* patented a new recipe. Why is that?
The corn flake was patented
May 31 1894 under the name Granose. Why was that?
My guess is that this will not last even a century. Certainly this
device sounds like it won't survive being submerged in sand and mud
Where is the sand and mud going to come from? Its up a mountain.
and if they design the entrance right (add a U-bend and some doors)
should keep the elements away from the mechinism. From the clocks POV
a blocked entrance could be a good thing its self winding the worst that
could happen is the solar reset hole gets blocked up. People are its
biggest danger to bronze age tech Iron and steel are valuable!!
The other critical difference between biological viruses and electronic viruses is that, unlike biological viruses which rise out of random evolution, electronic viruses are still[1] created by intelligent designers who often have ulterior motives above and beyond maximizing survival of the virus. Electronic viruses are able to turn their hosts into zombies which the virus creator can enslave towards his own ends (usually some form of criminal financial gain).
How about terrorists, religous nuts and rogue goverments? Virus development can be done
on the cheap. All they would need is a 100 PC network to simulate the internet
and some good programmers (and a good sysadmin to reimage the system after it dies). This sort of thing would be pretty easy to hide (PC's are not hard to get hold
of, or transport, the number of people in the know could tiny (6 or less)). To the terrorist mind would be really, really attractive (Potential for massive damage, using the great Satans power against them and the chance to overwrite impure data with copys of their manifesto and/or holy book)
I read an article about 10 months ago about the "death of history" due to the electronic age. snip
It was an excellent article; my google-fu sucks apparently because I can't find hide nor hair of it. Curses. No +5 Informative for me.
Hmm that anecdote makes the point rather eloquently, Both the transience of electronic
records and the difficulty in finding them.
Give me a good phone book feature, voice, text messaging and some sort of answerphone if I can't take a call. I don't need it to be a low quality digital camera, hard-to-use PDA, sub-standard web browser, trivial calculator, poor-capacity MP3 player, pathetically quiet alarm clock, and all the other junk. Nor do I need it to run some super-complicated operating system that's ripe for attacking.
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone"
- Bjarne Stronstrup
A virus that destroys its host cannot propogate very far before becoming extinct. Viruses that damage their host but leave it good enough condition to continue transmitting it to other hosts are much more successful. The most successful viruses of all are those that go largely undetected and manage to spread to a majority of the population (think of sexually-transmitted diseases such as HPV).
Biological virus don't know if they have propagated, a computer virus could be written to count sucessful infections
Consider a virus that can count its generation and progeny and also knows the date
Set it to just propagates till 27th September (mostly using system time, but also polling NTP servers just to check). After that when it when it has finished
scanning the area. If it has infected more than three machines it goes into kill mode,
trashes the hard disk and zeros the BIOS, if it has failed to reproduce enough it keeps
scanning and passes the time introducing single bit errors into documents and images.
The thing that might kill this is the reaction of the airlines. I'm not sure they will want people carrying laptops full of flammable methanol onto airplanes. In fact, I'm still surprised that lithium batteries haven't been outlawed. They are pretty nasty when they short out.
I routinely carry a full liter of 55% spirit every time I fly (mmm cask strength Laphroaig). I understand the average 747 carrys half a ton of spirits along with the passengers. A few laptops is peanuts compaired to that.
Trying to keep the family electronic archives requires active maintainance (basically copying to a
new redundant array every few years). I'd love to have access to a well backed electronic safe deposit that didn't require my maintainance, on whom I could rely on to provide at least 100 years worth of archiving
>> RNAse is the bugbear of RNA work, its a normal part of every cell and its job
>> it to break up RNA (which it does very well). When its in the cell its kept under
>> close control, however if the cell is broken up (to extract RNA for example) the
>>control is broken and it eats any RNA it can find.
>Darned DRM. You'd think I would at least have fair use rights over my own body!
Don't sweat it, the binarys have DRM but the source code
is freely avalable
RNA is the hardest to work with in the laboratory. It just fall to pieces. When I was working with DNA/RNA/protien it was just really hard to work with RNA.
I'd disagree, sure RNA is fragile and falls apart at the drop of an RNAse (1), but its chemically uniform, one batch is pretty much like the next and there are plenty of commercial protocols and reagents for manipulating it.
Working with RNA really a matter of good technique (paranoid levels of cleanness and make sure
all reagents are free of RNAse). If I had a sample of RNA that coded myosin, a sample that coded for pepsin and a sample of total RNA (all the different RNA molecules in a cell). I can use exactly the same methods to purify and study them.
Protein on the other hand is a pit of horrors, the thing is that every protein is different, what works with one protein will completly degrade another, some proteins are so unstable that
they degrade with time even under perfect conditions, some are so rare that there may only be 2-3 molecules in a cell. With RNA there are thousands of labs and really BIG money working on essentially the same molecule, with protein you may be the only person ever to study it
(1) RNAse is the bugbear of RNA work, its a normal part of every cell and its job it to break up RNA (which it does very well). When its in the cell its kept under close control, however if the cell is broken up (to extract RNA for example) the control is broken and it eats any RNA it can find. When prepareing RNA the first step it to break up the cells/tissue and inactivate the RNAse
without damaging the RNA (not too hard there a strong solution of salts it used). The trouble is that RNAse is really really stable, you can spit in a testtube boil it for 10 minutes and the only enzyme still active is RNAse. When the salts are removed and RNA extracted, any RNAse contaminant will reassemble and eat the RNA.
That's where the full tank of gas and battery-operated radio came into play. We listened to the weather reports and were ready to leave if told to do so.
What we did didn't require spending much money, batteries (sometimes), pack of ice. That's like 5 bucks. Topping off the car, maybe $20, but if you're short on money, that could be skipped.
Where does the money come to buy/maintain the car come from? Are you saying that having a car
is a way of life (not a luxury)?
With this database suddenly all files are compressible to 32 bytes. A 1440 Kb floppy disk can store 46080 MD5 hashes. If each hash represents a file that is on average 10 Mb, the floppy disk can store 461 Gb on average.
Your missing a trick.. you could reduce the file of MD5 hashes with MD5, write it down and
carry 461 Gb on a postit note!
The reason I won't use wireless is pretty simple, suppose I have my computer and my WAP sitting in the front room of my house. If you decide to pull up and park across the street you can sniff my data rather easily.
Some random webhead in a car is not the biggest danger, its the local teens, a wireless AP represents a source of all the pron they can beat... and don't be supprised when the RIAA come a knocking
I must be partially British. I hate hanging up on Sales People too. So I just put them on hold.
"Can you hold half a minute?"
"Sure..."
Natch, I just set the phone down and walk away.
Your probably doing the Sales Person a favour, breaks are hard to come by in that line of work
As an aside, do you oppose BBC World Service on shortwave?
quote
"the World Service is funded by the British Government through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although it remains politically neutral," ie the World Service is not funded via the Licence fee.
Add to all this the increased costs of manufacturing the 'specially equipped DVD players' mentioned in the article, and it's easy to see why this idea is a non-starter.
I think it would be the manufacturers who would kill this... In the same way
they make DVD players that can be made region free by typing in a 'secret code'
they will have a bypass code that was there for 'hardware testing' and they 'forgot'
to remove it
You're thinking of CO, carbon monoxide. You could let a ten pound slab of dry ice completely sublimate in your house, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Been there, done that, no problems.
No CO2, Sure it will be OK in a well ventilated house. Which is why I mentioned confined spaces
There is a family of genes called the
septins the gene symbols for these are SEPT1 SEPT2 to SEPT11 which gets converted to dates. Some Accession numbers get converted to floating point.
here is a link to the paper
Slashdot Mirror
Once again: it is a recipe. Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that? McD's *never* had a patent on a Big Mac (do have trademark though). No Michelin-starred chef *ever* patented a new recipe. Why is that?
The corn flake was patented May 31 1894 under the name Granose. Why was that?
Where is the sand and mud going to come from? Its up a mountain. and if they design the entrance right (add a U-bend and some doors) should keep the elements away from the mechinism. From the clocks POV a blocked entrance could be a good thing its self winding the worst that could happen is the solar reset hole gets blocked up. People are its biggest danger to bronze age tech Iron and steel are valuable!!
And this being Slashdot even that was a dupe
Many Scenes were deleted bringing you this film... but not enough
How about terrorists, religous nuts and rogue goverments? Virus development can be done on the cheap. All they would need is a 100 PC network to simulate the internet and some good programmers (and a good sysadmin to reimage the system after it dies). This sort of thing would be pretty easy to hide (PC's are not hard to get hold of, or transport, the number of people in the know could tiny (6 or less)). To the terrorist mind would be really, really attractive (Potential for massive damage, using the great Satans power against them and the chance to overwrite impure data with copys of their manifesto and/or holy book)
snip
It was an excellent article; my google-fu sucks apparently because I can't find hide nor hair of it. Curses. No +5 Informative for me.
Hmm that anecdote makes the point rather eloquently, Both the transience of electronic records and the difficulty in finding them.
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone"
- Bjarne Stronstrup
Biological virus don't know if they have propagated, a computer virus could be written to count sucessful infections
Consider a virus that can count its generation and progeny and also knows the date
Set it to just propagates till 27th September (mostly using system time, but also polling NTP servers just to check). After that when it when it has finished scanning the area. If it has infected more than three machines it goes into kill mode, trashes the hard disk and zeros the BIOS, if it has failed to reproduce enough it keeps scanning and passes the time introducing single bit errors into documents and images.
I routinely carry a full liter of 55% spirit every time I fly (mmm cask strength Laphroaig). I understand the average 747 carrys half a ton of spirits along with the passengers. A few laptops is peanuts compaired to that.
Trying to keep the family electronic archives requires active maintainance (basically copying to a new redundant array every few years). I'd love to have access to a well backed electronic safe deposit that didn't require my maintainance, on whom I could rely on to provide at least 100 years worth of archiving
>> RNAse is the bugbear of RNA work, its a normal part of every cell and its job
>> it to break up RNA (which it does very well). When its in the cell its kept under
>> close control, however if the cell is broken up (to extract RNA for example) the
>>control is broken and it eats any RNA it can find.
>Darned DRM. You'd think I would at least have fair use rights over my own body!
Don't sweat it, the binarys have DRM but the source code is freely avalable
RNA is the hardest to work with in the laboratory. It just fall to pieces. When I was working with DNA/RNA/protien it was just really hard to work with RNA.
I'd disagree, sure RNA is fragile and falls apart at the drop of an RNAse (1), but its chemically uniform, one batch is pretty much like the next and there are plenty of commercial protocols and reagents for manipulating it.
Working with RNA really a matter of good technique (paranoid levels of cleanness and make sure all reagents are free of RNAse). If I had a sample of RNA that coded myosin, a sample that coded for pepsin and a sample of total RNA (all the different RNA molecules in a cell). I can use exactly the same methods to purify and study them.
Protein on the other hand is a pit of horrors, the thing is that every protein is different, what works with one protein will completly degrade another, some proteins are so unstable that they degrade with time even under perfect conditions, some are so rare that there may only be 2-3 molecules in a cell. With RNA there are thousands of labs and really BIG money working on essentially the same molecule, with protein you may be the only person ever to study it
(1) RNAse is the bugbear of RNA work, its a normal part of every cell and its job it to break up RNA (which it does very well). When its in the cell its kept under close control, however if the cell is broken up (to extract RNA for example) the control is broken and it eats any RNA it can find. When prepareing RNA the first step it to break up the cells/tissue and inactivate the RNAse without damaging the RNA (not too hard there a strong solution of salts it used). The trouble is that RNAse is really really stable, you can spit in a testtube boil it for 10 minutes and the only enzyme still active is RNAse. When the salts are removed and RNA extracted, any RNAse contaminant will reassemble and eat the RNA.
That's where the full tank of gas and battery-operated radio came into play. We listened to the weather reports and were ready to leave if told to do so.
What we did didn't require spending much money, batteries (sometimes), pack of ice. That's like 5 bucks. Topping off the car, maybe $20, but if you're short on money, that could be skipped.
Where does the money come to buy/maintain the car come from? Are you saying that having a car is a way of life (not a luxury)?
Your missing a trick.. you could reduce the file of MD5 hashes with MD5, write it down and carry 461 Gb on a postit note!
OK I did my homework
Were seeing small and smaller form factors. Why are we not seeing 5.25" form factor being used to build terabyted rives?
Some random webhead in a car is not the biggest danger, its the local teens, a wireless AP represents a source of all the pron they can beat... and don't be supprised when the RIAA come a knocking
"Can you hold half a minute?"
"Sure
Natch, I just set the phone down and walk away.
Your probably doing the Sales Person a favour, breaks are hard to come by in that line of work
quote "the World Service is funded by the British Government through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although it remains politically neutral," ie the World Service is not funded via the Licence fee.
I think it would be the manufacturers who would kill this... In the same way they make DVD players that can be made region free by typing in a 'secret code' they will have a bypass code that was there for 'hardware testing' and they 'forgot' to remove it
Cats don't make good Catholic, they are unable to fel guilt.
No CO2, Sure it will be OK in a well ventilated house. Which is why I mentioned confined spaces
I'd certainally not use this in a confined space! A Cooling system that can make you feel crap and sleepy? No thanks!
How about using a drill bit that is less than 2 inches long?
There is a family of genes called the septins the gene symbols for these are SEPT1 SEPT2 to SEPT11 which gets converted to dates. Some Accession numbers get converted to floating point. here is a link to the paper