Asia, heck. You can get rabbit meat at the grocery store here in Texas, and if you go to the First Monday Trade Days in Canton, you can get all the rabbit skins you want for $5 a piece. Which is part of the problem -- they breed like, well, you know, so they're not scarce enough to be worth raising. Dynamite sounds like as good a market support as any.
Politicians take note: George Orwell's Ninteen Eighty-Four is not a manual for statecraft.
That's just paranoia and coincidence. They really do have your best interests in mind. And they do hope you'll be showing up at the patriotism rally the day the citizen-protecting drones are launched from Airstrip One.
Have you seen their coverage maps? They make AT&T look good.
I <3 T-Mobile, but their coverage has always been an unattractive shade of Suck. Even in Dallas -- home of Texas Instruments, y'all -- my cheap touchscreen is constantly switching from 3G to EDGE, or dropping data altogether. Hearing that Nexus One users are having trouble with T-Mobile's 3G network is like hearing that bears have been discovered crapping in the woods.
There is so much FUD in this article... or at least in the summary. I don't want to click-thru, because I don't want to give any hits to yet another OMG GERMS article.
News flash: you *want* E. Coli, unless you 3 diarrhea, dehydration, and death. It's everywhere, because we need it. The "bad" E. Coli is largely engineered by humans -- not on purpose, but by feeding antibiotics to our factory-farmed food animals, feeding antibiotics to ourselves, and by meticulously cleaning every possible surface. The antibiotics kill off all but the mutant zombie strains, and the overzealous cleaning gets rid of the competing strains that would normally push the mutants aside.
Inability to stare at the sun is a bug, not a feature. Since this eye will actually be DESIGNED, they should be able to leave it out
Agreed, but unless they replace the whole thing, it's just an upgrade. The magnifying-glass effect is an artifact of the original case design... even if the new retina can handle it, the legacy I/O port (aka optic nerve) might blow out.
Now, add some automatic cornea-side filtering and a new interface to the visual cortex, and you've got something. I could look forward to laying outside on a blanket, looking up and counting the sunspots.
This sounds really awesome. If my natural vision degenerates, I want the model with IR and UV sensitivity.
But I can see an endless loop condition developing:
10: "Don't look into the sun, you'll go blind!" 20: "AAAA I looked into the sun and I'm blind!" 30: "We've given you solar-powered retinal implants." 40: "Oops, my eye batteries are low, I'd better go..." 50: goto 20
Yeah, but you obscured something, that no man would have thought of obscuring.:D
Which probably proves the gender of girlintraining, but ultimately leaves the gender of the hero/ine of the story still in doubt.
Though I'd still lay odds it was a guy. A female in such a life-or-death predicament has other... assets... at her disposal. Definitely not a good situation for her, but she's got ways to work an escape that are gender-specific -- and operate primarily on the weaknesses of that *other* gender.
Does political activism really carry the same cachet as skydiving? I guess I need to start attending those Green Party meetings again. Really -- I was running for office before family issues derailed my erstwhile campaign. I just pretty much assumed that politics was a huge turn-off. (I know that's how my ex felt!)
Thanks for giving me something to think about... in the most unexpected possible place.
Pulling a page from the lesbian handbook here, but it works for hetero couples too; Don't actually be bad, but look like you could be. It's the same reason horror flicks are so popular with my friends -- it's a safe kind of scare. It's the chills down the back of your spine, but you're still in control.
That's probably it... I'm a computer programmer with a stable job, safe and boring as a rock at the bottom of a valley. Maybe my newfound love of Karaoke will make me seem more dangerous. Then again, probably not -- "shameless" isn't really the same thing as "dangerous", is it?
I'm with you, when you say "Women make up for in detail what men do in quantity in that regard."
From my intense "research", I've found that the sites with the most male visitors are full of pictures of lots of different females, but there's nothing distinctive about *any* of them. That's the "quantity" factor.
And from a couple of decades of marriage (now ended:( ), I learned that while women may not be so interested in pretty pictures (and it's not like the male figure is "pretty" anyway), they are *very* interested in spending a long night, watching TV together, cuddling by the fire, making sweet lovin' (which bears no resemblance to anything the porn sites tout), cuddling some more, waking up in his arms, breakfast in bed... a whole *experience*, not just a fleeting image.
Only problem is that women apparently don't *want* someone who understands their needs. Otherwise, I wouldn't still be single, and I'd actually get *replies* to my plentyoffish profile.:p
lolz, but really... this is the first time I've seen the "git://" protocol specifier. I had to resort to the Fount of All Knowledge to find out what in tarnation "git" is:
Git is a free distributed revision control, or software source code management project with an emphasis on being fast. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development.
Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.
Ok, that doesn't tell me much, actually. And there's no reference at all to git://. I had to step away from Wikipedia and do a real search -- which ended up on the Git Wiki, of course.
Which git protocol to use Generally these days the git protocol (the git://) URLs) is the prefered protocol.
git Git's own protocol which tries to heavily optimize the amount of bandwidth used and thus is generally very efficient for updates. An issue with the git protocol is its use of TCP port 9418 which paranoid firewall admins may have blocked.
http Rather inefficient usage of bandwith and CPU but since http is generally enabled in firewalls it exists for those poor souls suffering from fascist firewall admins.
rsync The oldest git protocol, deprecated and supposed to eventually go away. Suffers from a low probability race condition. Its advantage is the lowest CPU usage on the server side. Not recommended for pulling or fetching. Heck, it really should be considered the last alternative.
I bet I'll end up seeing git:// all over the place on Slashdot soon. Once something better comes along, I might even understand it. (I just now figured out that whole "bittorrent" thing...)
I've clearly seen too many web ads. When I saw the article title "Obama Backs New Launcher and Bigger NASA Budget", I immediately conjured up other gems such as "Obama tells moms to go back to school", "Obama backs auto insurance reform, find cheaper rates", and "Obama will destroy us all". (Oh, nvm, that last one was from my daughter's Teabagger boyfriend, sry.)
The most interesting thing in the (short) article was that this is related to Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, the malady documented in the excellent film, A Life Without Pain. That explains something that made no sense -- how can these folks feel enough to pick up objects, but not feel that the object is a red-hot cinder?
I hope this is a first step towards not just discovering a cause of "phantom" pain... I hope it's a step towards eliminating *all* pain. I seem to end up on the bad side of the Slashdot community when I say this, but I think "congenital insensitivity to pain" is the next phase of human evolution. We already have several adaptations that have no advantage without a big brain -- decade-long adolescence, non-reproductive grandparents, non-seasonal sexual receptivity. I think eliminating pain is a very logical next phase.
It's an adaptation that wouldn't be possible without modern medicine, with antibiotics to prevent infection, and non-intrusive diagnostics to find that broken bone you don't feel. In fact, we probably need to progress further, to replace natural pain-dependent systems with technology. You wouldn't feel a heart attack coming on, but you might have a circuit installed that monitors your critical systems. You wouldn't have to croak "Call 911, I'm having a heart attack!" Your heart would call for help itself.
I'm in my 40s, and I know some day I'm going to be afflicted with the painful conditions that are inevitable this side of full-body replacement. If I've got some sort of inoperable tumor, and know it, why should I feel the pain? Or become an opioid zombie? Pain is a biological anachronism, and I look forward to the day it is banished from the human experience entirely.
I want Chromium OS to come out NOW*, if not sooner. Not for me -- I can install Puppy Linux and play around with dependencies and the like, learning from my mistakes. Heck, I can even run Windows without getting more than a virus or two per decade.
No, I want it for the sweet little old lady who lived a few doors down in my old apartment complex. She doesn't know the first thing about computers. She sends email like a whirling dervish of glurge -- I had to set up my Gmail to filter messages from her into a special folder, which gets several messages a day of "inspirational" forwards (half of which actually end up in the spam folder), her original poetry (kinda sweet, actually), and bizarre, rabid anti-Obama hate messages (massive pile of WTF).
Even after several rounds of explanation, she doesn't know the difference between "a computer" and "the internet". The concept of an "operating system" is absolutely impossible to comprehend -- it has no meaning. She doesn't *need* desktop applications -- she doesn't even know that they *are* desktop applications.
I set her up with a Puppy Linux installation, but that computer died and her family bought her a $40 box with some old, unpatched version of Windows on it. It met the expected fate, and she called me to ask what to do next. I recommended a $99 XP box from Micro Center, and set it up for her with "her" login lacking Admin rights (no installing software without going to the password-protected "Admin" login!). And because she really doesn't do anything but play online games, check the lottery, and send massive volumes of email, I put Google Chrome in her Startup folder -- maximized.
But I still got a call over the holiday... from her daughter, asking about anti-virus software. A good investment, but this sweet lady is on a fixed income, and I doubt she'll be able to come up with $40 a year for F-Secure Antivirus. More likely, she would buy it but never renew it, so she'd just be delaying the inevitable.
Please, Google... give me Chromium OS, for the sweet lady in the downstairs apartment. She needs it. And I need it, so that I can go back to deleting the latest "news" about the coming Obamapocalypse.
* Yes, I know it's Open Source, I could compile my own. With the time I have available for such a project (none), the chances of me doing it right are about as high as getting that sweet lady to quit worrying about Obama's birth certificate.
Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet... others peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes.
That's not such a difficult metaphor to construct. The net was *conceived* when the two nodes came together, just as you and I were *conceived* when two nodes, um, er, yeah. And just like then, nobody knew what the result of coupling of the first Internet nodes would be, if anything.
It was *born* when someone slapped it on the bottom and it did something seen by the people gathered around. You probably went "WAAAA!". The Internet went "LO". Of course "G" caused a fault, because the next letter was supposed to be "L".
So I think it would be fair to say that the world would want to celebrate the "birthday" of the Internet today, October 29, just as the world (or your corner of it) celebrate your birthday on the day you made your emergence into the world.
Celebrating the day the Internet was *conceived*... well, that seems a bit weird.
I think "Liberation" would be a better word. The companies will enter the eyeball (in small numbers), and will be cheered by all the cells... at first. But then they'll get caught up in the bitter rivalries, with renegade Rods lobbing bombs at the Cones, who will in turn blame the support cells in the Sclera for fomenting dissent.
Can someone explain why they didn't use more than 2.7TB of HDD space if HDD space is the limiting factor?
Yes, the explanation is simple. The non-technical writers who wrote "limited by the size of a computer's hard drive" have no freakin' clue how a computer actually works. Someone gave them a detailed explanation about the limits on multiplying large integers without resorting to "lossy" floating-point arithmetic, and the writer's head threw a fatal exception.
So by default, they said, "Some computer thing isn't big enough." And computers only have four parts: Screen (aka "computer"), keyboard, mouse, and Hard Drive. So it must have been the Hard Drive.
Well, for my part, if I'd waited a couple of minutes I might have seen your reply to yourself where you noted that the article is better than it might have seemed! Ain't Slashdot great?
If only biologists had thought of the idea of treating DNA/RNA sequences as data, and then analyzing their properties statistically and computationally, with an eye towards what effects different modifications to the sequences might be predicted to have. We might call this field something fancy like "biological informatics".
Hahaha, I'm sure the biological informaticians are laughing their asses off. Kinda like we computer geeks did when the Not So Hon. Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes".
Meanwhile, though, I'm really enjoying the analogies that "bunnie" draws between DNA/RNA and computer bits. You see, I know a thing or two about computer bits, and ports, and stuff like that. And I know that DNA encodes proteins. But I didn't make the connection the way "bunnie" does, with a simple statement like this:
If you thought of organisms as computers with IP addresses, each functional group of cells in the organism would be listening to the environment through its own active port. So, as port 25 maps specifically to SMTP services on a computer, port H1 maps specifically to the windpipe region on a human. Interestingly, the same port H1 maps to the intestinal tract on a bird. Thus, the same H1N1 virus will attack the respiratory system of a human, and the gut of a bird.
That's probably baby science to a biological informatician, just like mapping to port 25 is baby networking to many of us. But for me, it makes the concepts click.
Similarly, we all made fun of the "series of tubes" metaphor, without considering that for most of humanity, an electron is "the size and shape of a small pea" (Heinlein reference). If thinking of the Internet as a bunch of interconnected steampunk-style tubes that can get full (saturated bandwidth) helps a non-techie understand why they can't watch YouTube and play Halo at the same time... well, so much the better.
Encrypt your devices and don't worry about it; just get a new device. What's with the desire to catch the thief for a device that's probably not worth more than a few hundred dollars? Besides, you were dumb enough to put your device in a position to be stolen in the first place.
Yeah, I was "dumb enough" to leave my (daughter's) laptop in the house with the doors locked.
And "a few hundred dollars" is a few hundred more than we were really hoping to spend, especially one MONTH after spending "a few hundred dollars" on the laptop in the first place.
Although I have to admit... short of the simple desire for revenge, there's not much to be gained. The thieves that broke into my house probably couldn't even use a mouse -- they almost certainly unloaded the laptop to their favorite fence, who *does* know someone who can wipe a HD and sell the laptop on Craigslist in another part of the country. Just like the bastards had no idea what they stole when they grabbed an armful of DVDs. Hope they enjoy Chobits, Whisper of the Heart, and Pom Poko.
You wont get this though. Because we live in a world that demands "social justice" aka: forcing the smartest to be clumped in with the dumbest and the laziest.
Mr. 'antirelic', there's a call for you on line 1 from a fellow name of Sir Francis Galton. He'd like to discuss his exciting new theory with you -- he calls it "Eugenics". I'm sure you'll be interested.
This was posted 2 weeks ago, it was stupid then and is stupid now. Also, go back to digg with your lists kthxby.
I second that emotion. The most notable thing about the list is that it shows a possibly-unhealthy level of interest in non-human reproduction on the part of the author -- five out of the ten, including "slug genitalia" and "hyena clitoris". Mr. Wolman should either get into a college-level comparative anatomy class, or into therapy.
And lists aren't such a bad thing, in and of themselves. I've gotten addicted to the Cracked Mazagine (sic) lists of things like "The 6 Most Badass Murder Weapons in the Animal Kingdom". Compare those with the Wired.com list, and you can't help but wonder if Cracked already saw this list... and stamped it "REJECTED".
Slashdot Mirror
Asia, heck. You can get rabbit meat at the grocery store here in Texas, and if you go to the First Monday Trade Days in Canton, you can get all the rabbit skins you want for $5 a piece. Which is part of the problem -- they breed like, well, you know, so they're not scarce enough to be worth raising. Dynamite sounds like as good a market support as any.
Don't mind him. I hear he was spotted carrying a heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover..
You know, your pithy interpretation of the less-than-three emoticon may be the most accurate description yet for my relationship with T-Mobile.
It gives their "Get More" slogan a whole new meaning as well.
No, really?
Have you seen their coverage maps? They make AT&T look good.
I <3 T-Mobile, but their coverage has always been an unattractive shade of Suck. Even in Dallas -- home of Texas Instruments, y'all -- my cheap touchscreen is constantly switching from 3G to EDGE, or dropping data altogether. Hearing that Nexus One users are having trouble with T-Mobile's 3G network is like hearing that bears have been discovered crapping in the woods.
There is so much FUD in this article... or at least in the summary. I don't want to click-thru, because I don't want to give any hits to yet another OMG GERMS article.
News flash: you *want* E. Coli, unless you 3 diarrhea, dehydration, and death. It's everywhere, because we need it. The "bad" E. Coli is largely engineered by humans -- not on purpose, but by feeding antibiotics to our factory-farmed food animals, feeding antibiotics to ourselves, and by meticulously cleaning every possible surface. The antibiotics kill off all but the mutant zombie strains, and the overzealous cleaning gets rid of the competing strains that would normally push the mutants aside.
Now, 'scuse me while I go play in the dirt.
Inability to stare at the sun is a bug, not a feature. Since this eye will actually be DESIGNED, they should be able to leave it out
Agreed, but unless they replace the whole thing, it's just an upgrade. The magnifying-glass effect is an artifact of the original case design... even if the new retina can handle it, the legacy I/O port (aka optic nerve) might blow out.
Now, add some automatic cornea-side filtering and a new interface to the visual cortex, and you've got something. I could look forward to laying outside on a blanket, looking up and counting the sunspots.
This sounds really awesome. If my natural vision degenerates, I want the model with IR and UV sensitivity.
But I can see an endless loop condition developing:
10: "Don't look into the sun, you'll go blind!"
20: "AAAA I looked into the sun and I'm blind!"
30: "We've given you solar-powered retinal implants."
40: "Oops, my eye batteries are low, I'd better go..."
50: goto 20
Yeah, but you obscured something, that no man would have thought of obscuring. :D
Which probably proves the gender of girlintraining, but ultimately leaves the gender of the hero/ine of the story still in doubt.
Though I'd still lay odds it was a guy. A female in such a life-or-death predicament has other... assets... at her disposal. Definitely not a good situation for her, but she's got ways to work an escape that are gender-specific -- and operate primarily on the weaknesses of that *other* gender.
Does political activism really carry the same cachet as skydiving? I guess I need to start attending those Green Party meetings again. Really -- I was running for office before family issues derailed my erstwhile campaign. I just pretty much assumed that politics was a huge turn-off. (I know that's how my ex felt!)
Thanks for giving me something to think about... in the most unexpected possible place.
That's probably it... I'm a computer programmer with a stable job, safe and boring as a rock at the bottom of a valley. Maybe my newfound love of Karaoke will make me seem more dangerous. Then again, probably not -- "shameless" isn't really the same thing as "dangerous", is it?
I'm with you, when you say "Women make up for in detail what men do in quantity in that regard."
From my intense "research", I've found that the sites with the most male visitors are full of pictures of lots of different females, but there's nothing distinctive about *any* of them. That's the "quantity" factor.
And from a couple of decades of marriage (now ended :( ), I learned that while women may not be so interested in pretty pictures (and it's not like the male figure is "pretty" anyway), they are *very* interested in spending a long night, watching TV together, cuddling by the fire, making sweet lovin' (which bears no resemblance to anything the porn sites tout), cuddling some more, waking up in his arms, breakfast in bed... a whole *experience*, not just a fleeting image.
Only problem is that women apparently don't *want* someone who understands their needs. Otherwise, I wouldn't still be single, and I'd actually get *replies* to my plentyoffish profile. :p
lolz, but really... this is the first time I've seen the "git://" protocol specifier. I had to resort to the Fount of All Knowledge to find out what in tarnation "git" is:
Ok, that doesn't tell me much, actually. And there's no reference at all to git://. I had to step away from Wikipedia and do a real search -- which ended up on the Git Wiki, of course.
I bet I'll end up seeing git:// all over the place on Slashdot soon. Once something better comes along, I might even understand it. (I just now figured out that whole "bittorrent" thing...)
I've clearly seen too many web ads. When I saw the article title "Obama Backs New Launcher and Bigger NASA Budget", I immediately conjured up other gems such as "Obama tells moms to go back to school", "Obama backs auto insurance reform, find cheaper rates", and "Obama will destroy us all". (Oh, nvm, that last one was from my daughter's Teabagger boyfriend, sry.)
And all this time I thought that the "canonical" executive for any open-source project was "Ty Coon, President of Vice".
The most interesting thing in the (short) article was that this is related to Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, the malady documented in the excellent film, A Life Without Pain. That explains something that made no sense -- how can these folks feel enough to pick up objects, but not feel that the object is a red-hot cinder?
I hope this is a first step towards not just discovering a cause of "phantom" pain... I hope it's a step towards eliminating *all* pain. I seem to end up on the bad side of the Slashdot community when I say this, but I think "congenital insensitivity to pain" is the next phase of human evolution. We already have several adaptations that have no advantage without a big brain -- decade-long adolescence, non-reproductive grandparents, non-seasonal sexual receptivity. I think eliminating pain is a very logical next phase.
It's an adaptation that wouldn't be possible without modern medicine, with antibiotics to prevent infection, and non-intrusive diagnostics to find that broken bone you don't feel. In fact, we probably need to progress further, to replace natural pain-dependent systems with technology. You wouldn't feel a heart attack coming on, but you might have a circuit installed that monitors your critical systems. You wouldn't have to croak "Call 911, I'm having a heart attack!" Your heart would call for help itself.
I'm in my 40s, and I know some day I'm going to be afflicted with the painful conditions that are inevitable this side of full-body replacement. If I've got some sort of inoperable tumor, and know it, why should I feel the pain? Or become an opioid zombie? Pain is a biological anachronism, and I look forward to the day it is banished from the human experience entirely.
I want Chromium OS to come out NOW*, if not sooner. Not for me -- I can install Puppy Linux and play around with dependencies and the like, learning from my mistakes. Heck, I can even run Windows without getting more than a virus or two per decade.
No, I want it for the sweet little old lady who lived a few doors down in my old apartment complex. She doesn't know the first thing about computers. She sends email like a whirling dervish of glurge -- I had to set up my Gmail to filter messages from her into a special folder, which gets several messages a day of "inspirational" forwards (half of which actually end up in the spam folder), her original poetry (kinda sweet, actually), and bizarre, rabid anti-Obama hate messages (massive pile of WTF).
Even after several rounds of explanation, she doesn't know the difference between "a computer" and "the internet". The concept of an "operating system" is absolutely impossible to comprehend -- it has no meaning. She doesn't *need* desktop applications -- she doesn't even know that they *are* desktop applications.
I set her up with a Puppy Linux installation, but that computer died and her family bought her a $40 box with some old, unpatched version of Windows on it. It met the expected fate, and she called me to ask what to do next. I recommended a $99 XP box from Micro Center, and set it up for her with "her" login lacking Admin rights (no installing software without going to the password-protected "Admin" login!). And because she really doesn't do anything but play online games, check the lottery, and send massive volumes of email, I put Google Chrome in her Startup folder -- maximized.
But I still got a call over the holiday... from her daughter, asking about anti-virus software. A good investment, but this sweet lady is on a fixed income, and I doubt she'll be able to come up with $40 a year for F-Secure Antivirus. More likely, she would buy it but never renew it, so she'd just be delaying the inevitable.
Please, Google... give me Chromium OS, for the sweet lady in the downstairs apartment. She needs it. And I need it, so that I can go back to deleting the latest "news" about the coming Obamapocalypse.
* Yes, I know it's Open Source, I could compile my own. With the time I have available for such a project (none), the chances of me doing it right are about as high as getting that sweet lady to quit worrying about Obama's birth certificate.
... oh my goodness, I can't bring myself to do it. Go on without me! For great justice!
Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet... others peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes.
That's not such a difficult metaphor to construct. The net was *conceived* when the two nodes came together, just as you and I were *conceived* when two nodes, um, er, yeah. And just like then, nobody knew what the result of coupling of the first Internet nodes would be, if anything.
It was *born* when someone slapped it on the bottom and it did something seen by the people gathered around. You probably went "WAAAA!". The Internet went "LO". Of course "G" caused a fault, because the next letter was supposed to be "L".
So I think it would be fair to say that the world would want to celebrate the "birthday" of the Internet today, October 29, just as the world (or your corner of it) celebrate your birthday on the day you made your emergence into the world.
Celebrating the day the Internet was *conceived*... well, that seems a bit weird.
I think "Liberation" would be a better word. The companies will enter the eyeball (in small numbers), and will be cheered by all the cells... at first. But then they'll get caught up in the bitter rivalries, with renegade Rods lobbing bombs at the Cones, who will in turn blame the support cells in the Sclera for fomenting dissent.
This can only end badly.
Can someone explain why they didn't use more than 2.7TB of HDD space if HDD space is the limiting factor?
Yes, the explanation is simple. The non-technical writers who wrote "limited by the size of a computer's hard drive" have no freakin' clue how a computer actually works. Someone gave them a detailed explanation about the limits on multiplying large integers without resorting to "lossy" floating-point arithmetic, and the writer's head threw a fatal exception.
So by default, they said, "Some computer thing isn't big enough." And computers only have four parts: Screen (aka "computer"), keyboard, mouse, and Hard Drive. So it must have been the Hard Drive.
Well, for my part, if I'd waited a couple of minutes I might have seen your reply to yourself where you noted that the article is better than it might have seemed! Ain't Slashdot great?
If only biologists had thought of the idea of treating DNA/RNA sequences as data, and then analyzing their properties statistically and computationally, with an eye towards what effects different modifications to the sequences might be predicted to have. We might call this field something fancy like "biological informatics".
Hahaha, I'm sure the biological informaticians are laughing their asses off. Kinda like we computer geeks did when the Not So Hon. Ted Stevens described the Internet as a "series of tubes".
Meanwhile, though, I'm really enjoying the analogies that "bunnie" draws between DNA/RNA and computer bits. You see, I know a thing or two about computer bits, and ports, and stuff like that. And I know that DNA encodes proteins. But I didn't make the connection the way "bunnie" does, with a simple statement like this:
That's probably baby science to a biological informatician, just like mapping to port 25 is baby networking to many of us. But for me, it makes the concepts click.
Similarly, we all made fun of the "series of tubes" metaphor, without considering that for most of humanity, an electron is "the size and shape of a small pea" (Heinlein reference). If thinking of the Internet as a bunch of interconnected steampunk-style tubes that can get full (saturated bandwidth) helps a non-techie understand why they can't watch YouTube and play Halo at the same time... well, so much the better.
Encrypt your devices and don't worry about it; just get a new device. What's with the desire to catch the thief for a device that's probably not worth more than a few hundred dollars? Besides, you were dumb enough to put your device in a position to be stolen in the first place.
Yeah, I was "dumb enough" to leave my (daughter's) laptop in the house with the doors locked.
And "a few hundred dollars" is a few hundred more than we were really hoping to spend, especially one MONTH after spending "a few hundred dollars" on the laptop in the first place.
Although I have to admit... short of the simple desire for revenge, there's not much to be gained. The thieves that broke into my house probably couldn't even use a mouse -- they almost certainly unloaded the laptop to their favorite fence, who *does* know someone who can wipe a HD and sell the laptop on Craigslist in another part of the country. Just like the bastards had no idea what they stole when they grabbed an armful of DVDs. Hope they enjoy Chobits, Whisper of the Heart, and Pom Poko.
You wont get this though. Because we live in a world that demands "social justice" aka: forcing the smartest to be clumped in with the dumbest and the laziest.
Mr. 'antirelic', there's a call for you on line 1 from a fellow name of Sir Francis Galton. He'd like to discuss his exciting new theory with you -- he calls it "Eugenics". I'm sure you'll be interested.
This was posted 2 weeks ago, it was stupid then and is stupid now. Also, go back to digg with your lists kthxby.
I second that emotion. The most notable thing about the list is that it shows a possibly-unhealthy level of interest in non-human reproduction on the part of the author -- five out of the ten, including "slug genitalia" and "hyena clitoris". Mr. Wolman should either get into a college-level comparative anatomy class, or into therapy.
And lists aren't such a bad thing, in and of themselves. I've gotten addicted to the Cracked Mazagine (sic) lists of things like "The 6 Most Badass Murder Weapons in the Animal Kingdom". Compare those with the Wired.com list, and you can't help but wonder if Cracked already saw this list... and stamped it "REJECTED".