$150, but they'll outlast the cockroaches. Price spiked when Chinese outsourced components were cloned and sold; the story reads a lot like the CrunchPad (but this one didn't die; they just found a domestic machine shop to source from. If "Made in USA" is important, by the way)
Previous refill generations had a blobbing problem, but I called and complained and they sent me a couple new-generation refills, and they haven't exhibited even the hint of a blob.
They do tend to behave better - smoother rolling - the more you use them, however.
When it happens to me, it usually kicks me out of a fullscreen multiplayer game - because naturally, I can't see the "click to postpone" popover, which does not in fact pop over. Which is good - such popovers can also crash a game. I'd be happier if it decided "I can't bee seen, I'll wait until there's nothing fullscreened to start my death clock".
I almost ran over a little girl with a red blinker on the front of her bike. I was riding slowly toward her at bicycle speed, assuming that she was keeping pace with me. Then I realized the light was getting closer and came to a full stop; shortly there after (Hand brake engaged, car out of gear) I was almost front-ended by a four-year-old with a red blinker dangling from a brake line.
In hindsight, I should have told her parents, brought over a screwdriver, and offered to mount the light properly, but I was still a little jittery for the rest of the night.
Or they'll be launched with expendable solid rocket boosters, which means you can ripple-fire the entire mess of drones in about 30 seconds. The only thing you need to be careful about is not jettisoning the booster while you're over anything expensive - like other drones, or the C&C antenna array.
It's also a step toward 2 -- railguns would make neat-o keen AA guns; due to the velocity they can produce, hitting with an unguided projectile is suddenly not the impossibility it once was. And the capacitor banks required could feed lasers, which are most definitely feasible AA weapons and the navy's free electron laser is ahead of schedule and under budget, for what it's worth.
It did. I'm no longer worried about him. That's mostly the product of a nagging worry, which is under most circumstances dormant; most months I never think about this once. However, in the last day or so as a result of reading about Leo's ordeal, it all seems quite fresh in my memory - which is unavoidably going to color my normal responses.
In a week, I hope to once again believe that body armor is a silly way to spend a bunch of money, but that hit a little close to home.
Most of the time I'm happy to live a boring life, knowing I'm doing my civic duty to deter strongarm criminals from working in my city. Some of them are smart enough to avoid targeting well-armed populations, as the odds don't tend to favor a long career as a professional crook. I think I'll just quote this: "In 1966, the city of Orlando responded to a wave of sexual assaults by offering firearms training classes to women. Rapes dropped by nearly 90% the following year." Source is either the DOJ or a study by the University of Chicago; this footnote is a little ambiguous. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports the same thing occurred in Texas when concealed carry was legalized; a 93% drop compared to the rest of the nation the first year, and 500% the second. I conclude that well-armed populations get left alone, {sarcasm}and my civic duty is to help my friends and neighbors be left alone.{/sarcasm} Traffic safety, I can't do much about that beyond driving safely. Other than that, I vote in local elections for the candidate promising to fix roads, or with a track record of doing so - I do what I can.
Red meat's attendant risks can be offset via not overindulging and staying in shape. It's not the only way to get enough iron in your diet, but it's certainly the tastiest.
I'd debate your "worrying frequency", as well. Firearm accidents account for 0.8% of all accidental deaths, according to the CDC in 2001 (pardon the age of my data, it's what I have it hand). There were 800 accidental firearm deaths in 2001, and the number has been continuously falling since 1981 with the exception of one puzzling spike in 1993. Most of these are hunting accidents* along the lines of Dick Cheney's incident with his lawyer.
*(Gary Kleck, “Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control”, 1997, pages 293-324)
**(And no, I don't smoke.)
AC, first, I'd like to thank you for serving our nation. (Or your nation, if we don't share one; it's still quite a patriotic decision.)
I'd consider ceramic plates if I actually expected to get shot at. (As mentioned above, I'll statistically never need either weapon or armor.) Actually, I'd probably go with polymer plates; despite the bulk, they're a couple pounds lighter than ceramic and I hear they don't tend to shatter when hit by rifle fire (though, they are terribly expensive). Steel rifle plates are something like 20 pounds each, but if you're only going to wear them for five adrenaline-fueled minutes after you hear someone kick down your front door, I think I could live with that weight. I appreciate the voice of experience, however; if you think they'd be more burden than is prudent, I'd like to know.
Perhaps I wasn't clear (I wrote that at something like 4AM local time; it's not exactly my best writing) - I did not mean for wearing everywhere I go. I meant for leaving under the bed in case those books were sent deliberately, and not accidentally; if that's the case, the guy has my address.* I'm not sure if the library thing was his way of some kind of cop-out; it could have been genuine incompetence and coincidence, or it could have been some way to end the confrontation while still coming off as though he would have gone through with it had he identified me correctly.
Statistically speaking, I will never see a gunfight, and if I ever do, it will be too soon. I'd be perfectly happy to have "wasted" that investment. If nothing else, I'll enjoy shooting bowling pin matches after work, I guess.
*(The books came from the same shop as, and shortly after, an order I placed. I could have simply gotten the book someone else ordered by mistake, and the one the bookseller sent when the other customer complained they never got their reading material. Or, they could have been purchased as a "gift" for me by my troll. I doubt I'll ever be able to know conclusively how they ended up on my doorstep.)
I blocked at least a dozen AIM accounts a night for weeks (maybe months); I can be fortunate there was no "twitter" then, nor this "book of faces", and that smartphones were this exciting new thing Handspring was just introducing to the market that nobody could afford.
Then I got two unsolicited copies of the TSR novel "Death of the Dragon" in the mail - this may have been an error by a small book distributor I did business with, so I can't be sure -- but "Dragon" was part of the IM name I used at the time, and I could never be sure. I still have both copies, and I haven't read either. I don't actually think I even touched either after I put them on the bookshelf those years ago.
Then the fella proved himself grossly incompetent, and threatened to beat me to death. In a public library, where I "was", he was "behind" me. I was sitting at a desk, at home, with a baseball bat within arms' reach. I mocked him for the rest of the night, and then it ended. He failed. Epically. His confrontation... wasn't.
But I'm not in high school any more. I spent the next couple years reading books like "Shooting To Live" and "Kill or Get Killed". I took years of aikido, tae kwon do, and studied a few forms of swordplay for a few more years. I carry a gun, and enough ammo to get through the statistically average civilian-defense gunfight, and then a little more. Sometimes, more than one. I'm seriously considering building some ghetto-but-effective body armor. (Steel rifle plates went out of style because they're heavy and unconcealable, but they offer an awful lot of protection). I don't carry a gun because I expect to get in a fight; I carry because I don't expect to get in a fight. If I expected one, I'd simply send a SWAT team in my stead, and sip Starbucks in the mobile command center. (No police department takes documentable, documented conspiracy to commit murder lightly in this age of lawsuits!) I don't sit with my back to the door at restaurants any more, I know what phrases like "condition yellow" mean, and I look for the bulge of a poorly-concealed weapon now when someone walks into the gas station while I'm fueling up.
Fortunately, for the most part, I don't mind living like this. In practice, 98% of the time, it just means I can make unplanned trips to the gun range without going home for weapons. And - unlike most liberals - I know a secret: The shooting sports are fun. I hesitate to say it, but it's a blast to put 20 shots into a single hole not any bigger than a nickel; mastery for its own sake is one of the most rewarding things.
But somewhere, deep down, I know and cannot forget: I found this thing I enjoy because someone threatened to kill me in a public place, in front of witnesses, and get away with it. And other geeks may not get through it as well as I did. I may enjoy the trappings, but I wouldn't want to put anyone through the scary parts on the way to where I am today.
Let us not mistake this for an isolated incident; it is not. Let us not mistake it for something new; it is not. Let us not allow this to happen again; it should not.
Launching them from a first stage that's reusable is just a form of space and monetary efficiency, since while a few dozen warheads can share the same first stage with sub-launched ballistic missiles, a few dozen warheads can share the same first stage with a strike fighter. Then a few dozen more. Then a few dozen more the next day. You get the picture.
I missed this when I responded to Godzilla first, but this is exactly the right track - and unless I misread the original story, exactly what's going on here. If it's working on the principle of modified nucleosomes being autocatalytic, it's operating on a fairly coarse, chunky level, however.
It doesn't have to be recombined; gene regulation happens rather a lot within the individual lifespan. And it also (it's really complicated) tends to influence how often the code is transcribed, rather than how it is transcribed, though there's edge cases like white blood cells where they actually splice out chunks of their DNA to see if they can make an antibody that is potentially useful - instead of cels that target your pancreas (and would otherwise cause diabetes) simply self-destructing, they try to hack their antibody genes until they get something that isn't going to cause friendly fire, and only self-destruct when they run out of relevant DNA to cut. Still, there's no synthesis of novel sequences, just diking out parts that may be causing the problem.
There's still a possibility that DNA can be a genuine read-write mechanism in biology, it's tantalizing, but it's still proving quite elusive.
You got it right with DNA methylation - and there's also acetylation, which I forgot to mention as well. Thank you for catching me on that. The two can be generally described as up-regulating (acetylation) and down-regulating (methylation) the expression of that patch of DNA. Wikipedia has a nice overview of it here, which helpfully points out that it's the histones - "spindle" molecules that are acetylated, to allow easier access to the DNA for increased transcription.
Crick didn't really have it right when he called it dogma. I think the consensus as of six months ago was somewhere between "Central Dogma is a theory" and "Central Dogma should have been called Central Theory". The fact that they went back and had to revise it when HIV and reverse-transcriptase were discovered means that it never really was dogma in the literal sense.
And I probably did come on stronger than is polite. I'm sorry about that, I was trying to be unambiguous in a post written in 60 seconds or less.
Tasks are not! transcoded to DNA; this is NOT an exception to the central dogma of molecular biology. The epigenome is RNA and protein and smaller signaling molecules; the DNA sequence itself is untouched, and nothing happens to the deoxy-ribose sugar backbone.
Think of it as the metadata getting changed, not the code - a differing pattern of lines of code being commented out.
Because some people are professional scientists, and they're seriously excited about this.
And a lot of/. readers are college students, who don't even notice the paywall thanks to their institution's subscriptions. This one's for them. (And maybe you, if you can find a pirated copy)
Slashdot Mirror
I maintain my claim that Bubblegum Crisis predicted the future best of all cyberpunk works.
Another fountain pen user here; Noodler's bulletproof black and a fine nib looks like a good solution - maybe a Parker 25?
Also, I suggest that you get a new Space Pen refill, they fixed the blobbing problem early last year.
I'd also recommend the CW&T Pen Type A if you learn you love those, OP.
http://shop.cwandt.com/products/pen-type-a
$150, but they'll outlast the cockroaches. Price spiked when Chinese outsourced components were cloned and sold; the story reads a lot like the CrunchPad (but this one didn't die; they just found a domestic machine shop to source from. If "Made in USA" is important, by the way)
Previous refill generations had a blobbing problem, but I called and complained and they sent me a couple new-generation refills, and they haven't exhibited even the hint of a blob. They do tend to behave better - smoother rolling - the more you use them, however.
When it happens to me, it usually kicks me out of a fullscreen multiplayer game - because naturally, I can't see the "click to postpone" popover, which does not in fact pop over. Which is good - such popovers can also crash a game. I'd be happier if it decided "I can't bee seen, I'll wait until there's nothing fullscreened to start my death clock".
I almost ran over a little girl with a red blinker on the front of her bike. I was riding slowly toward her at bicycle speed, assuming that she was keeping pace with me. Then I realized the light was getting closer and came to a full stop; shortly there after (Hand brake engaged, car out of gear) I was almost front-ended by a four-year-old with a red blinker dangling from a brake line.
In hindsight, I should have told her parents, brought over a screwdriver, and offered to mount the light properly, but I was still a little jittery for the rest of the night.
And noise, and overflight, and total cost of operation rising faster than expected.
Or they'll be launched with expendable solid rocket boosters, which means you can ripple-fire the entire mess of drones in about 30 seconds. The only thing you need to be careful about is not jettisoning the booster while you're over anything expensive - like other drones, or the C&C antenna array.
You're not always going to be firing at your maximum engagement range, though.
It's also a step toward 2 -- railguns would make neat-o keen AA guns; due to the velocity they can produce, hitting with an unguided projectile is suddenly not the impossibility it once was. And the capacitor banks required could feed lasers, which are most definitely feasible AA weapons and the navy's free electron laser is ahead of schedule and under budget, for what it's worth.
At about 3x the velocity, flight times might actually be significantly shorter.
It did. I'm no longer worried about him. That's mostly the product of a nagging worry, which is under most circumstances dormant; most months I never think about this once. However, in the last day or so as a result of reading about Leo's ordeal, it all seems quite fresh in my memory - which is unavoidably going to color my normal responses.
In a week, I hope to once again believe that body armor is a silly way to spend a bunch of money, but that hit a little close to home.
Most of the time I'm happy to live a boring life, knowing I'm doing my civic duty to deter strongarm criminals from working in my city. Some of them are smart enough to avoid targeting well-armed populations, as the odds don't tend to favor a long career as a professional crook. I think I'll just quote this: "In 1966, the city of Orlando responded to a wave of sexual assaults by offering firearms training classes to women. Rapes dropped by nearly 90% the following year." Source is either the DOJ or a study by the University of Chicago; this footnote is a little ambiguous. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports the same thing occurred in Texas when concealed carry was legalized; a 93% drop compared to the rest of the nation the first year, and 500% the second. I conclude that well-armed populations get left alone, {sarcasm}and my civic duty is to help my friends and neighbors be left alone.{/sarcasm} Traffic safety, I can't do much about that beyond driving safely. Other than that, I vote in local elections for the candidate promising to fix roads, or with a track record of doing so - I do what I can.
Red meat's attendant risks can be offset via not overindulging and staying in shape. It's not the only way to get enough iron in your diet, but it's certainly the tastiest.
I'd debate your "worrying frequency", as well. Firearm accidents account for 0.8% of all accidental deaths, according to the CDC in 2001 (pardon the age of my data, it's what I have it hand). There were 800 accidental firearm deaths in 2001, and the number has been continuously falling since 1981 with the exception of one puzzling spike in 1993. Most of these are hunting accidents* along the lines of Dick Cheney's incident with his lawyer.
*(Gary Kleck, “Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control”, 1997, pages 293-324)
**(And no, I don't smoke.)
AC, first, I'd like to thank you for serving our nation. (Or your nation, if we don't share one; it's still quite a patriotic decision.)
I'd consider ceramic plates if I actually expected to get shot at. (As mentioned above, I'll statistically never need either weapon or armor.) Actually, I'd probably go with polymer plates; despite the bulk, they're a couple pounds lighter than ceramic and I hear they don't tend to shatter when hit by rifle fire (though, they are terribly expensive). Steel rifle plates are something like 20 pounds each, but if you're only going to wear them for five adrenaline-fueled minutes after you hear someone kick down your front door, I think I could live with that weight. I appreciate the voice of experience, however; if you think they'd be more burden than is prudent, I'd like to know.
Perhaps I wasn't clear (I wrote that at something like 4AM local time; it's not exactly my best writing) - I did not mean for wearing everywhere I go. I meant for leaving under the bed in case those books were sent deliberately, and not accidentally; if that's the case, the guy has my address.* I'm not sure if the library thing was his way of some kind of cop-out; it could have been genuine incompetence and coincidence, or it could have been some way to end the confrontation while still coming off as though he would have gone through with it had he identified me correctly.
Statistically speaking, I will never see a gunfight, and if I ever do, it will be too soon. I'd be perfectly happy to have "wasted" that investment. If nothing else, I'll enjoy shooting bowling pin matches after work, I guess.
*(The books came from the same shop as, and shortly after, an order I placed. I could have simply gotten the book someone else ordered by mistake, and the one the bookseller sent when the other customer complained they never got their reading material. Or, they could have been purchased as a "gift" for me by my troll. I doubt I'll ever be able to know conclusively how they ended up on my doorstep.)
Happened to me in high school.
I blocked at least a dozen AIM accounts a night for weeks (maybe months); I can be fortunate there was no "twitter" then, nor this "book of faces", and that smartphones were this exciting new thing Handspring was just introducing to the market that nobody could afford.
Then I got two unsolicited copies of the TSR novel "Death of the Dragon" in the mail - this may have been an error by a small book distributor I did business with, so I can't be sure -- but "Dragon" was part of the IM name I used at the time, and I could never be sure. I still have both copies, and I haven't read either. I don't actually think I even touched either after I put them on the bookshelf those years ago.
Then the fella proved himself grossly incompetent, and threatened to beat me to death. In a public library, where I "was", he was "behind" me. I was sitting at a desk, at home, with a baseball bat within arms' reach. I mocked him for the rest of the night, and then it ended. He failed. Epically. His confrontation... wasn't.
But I'm not in high school any more. I spent the next couple years reading books like "Shooting To Live" and "Kill or Get Killed". I took years of aikido, tae kwon do, and studied a few forms of swordplay for a few more years. I carry a gun, and enough ammo to get through the statistically average civilian-defense gunfight, and then a little more. Sometimes, more than one. I'm seriously considering building some ghetto-but-effective body armor. (Steel rifle plates went out of style because they're heavy and unconcealable, but they offer an awful lot of protection). I don't carry a gun because I expect to get in a fight; I carry because I don't expect to get in a fight. If I expected one, I'd simply send a SWAT team in my stead, and sip Starbucks in the mobile command center. (No police department takes documentable, documented conspiracy to commit murder lightly in this age of lawsuits!) I don't sit with my back to the door at restaurants any more, I know what phrases like "condition yellow" mean, and I look for the bulge of a poorly-concealed weapon now when someone walks into the gas station while I'm fueling up.
Fortunately, for the most part, I don't mind living like this. In practice, 98% of the time, it just means I can make unplanned trips to the gun range without going home for weapons. And - unlike most liberals - I know a secret: The shooting sports are fun. I hesitate to say it, but it's a blast to put 20 shots into a single hole not any bigger than a nickel; mastery for its own sake is one of the most rewarding things.
But somewhere, deep down, I know and cannot forget: I found this thing I enjoy because someone threatened to kill me in a public place, in front of witnesses, and get away with it. And other geeks may not get through it as well as I did. I may enjoy the trappings, but I wouldn't want to put anyone through the scary parts on the way to where I am today.
Let us not mistake this for an isolated incident; it is not. Let us not mistake it for something new; it is not. Let us not allow this to happen again; it should not.
Theory is, when Christ came, all the old rules went out the window, and a new covenant was established.
Launching them from a first stage that's reusable is just a form of space and monetary efficiency, since while a few dozen warheads can share the same first stage with sub-launched ballistic missiles, a few dozen warheads can share the same first stage with a strike fighter. Then a few dozen more. Then a few dozen more the next day. You get the picture.
I missed this when I responded to Godzilla first, but this is exactly the right track - and unless I misread the original story, exactly what's going on here. If it's working on the principle of modified nucleosomes being autocatalytic, it's operating on a fairly coarse, chunky level, however.
It doesn't have to be recombined; gene regulation happens rather a lot within the individual lifespan. And it also (it's really complicated) tends to influence how often the code is transcribed, rather than how it is transcribed, though there's edge cases like white blood cells where they actually splice out chunks of their DNA to see if they can make an antibody that is potentially useful - instead of cels that target your pancreas (and would otherwise cause diabetes) simply self-destructing, they try to hack their antibody genes until they get something that isn't going to cause friendly fire, and only self-destruct when they run out of relevant DNA to cut. Still, there's no synthesis of novel sequences, just diking out parts that may be causing the problem.
There's still a possibility that DNA can be a genuine read-write mechanism in biology, it's tantalizing, but it's still proving quite elusive.
You got it right with DNA methylation - and there's also acetylation, which I forgot to mention as well. Thank you for catching me on that. The two can be generally described as up-regulating (acetylation) and down-regulating (methylation) the expression of that patch of DNA. Wikipedia has a nice overview of it here, which helpfully points out that it's the histones - "spindle" molecules that are acetylated, to allow easier access to the DNA for increased transcription.
Crick didn't really have it right when he called it dogma. I think the consensus as of six months ago was somewhere between "Central Dogma is a theory" and "Central Dogma should have been called Central Theory". The fact that they went back and had to revise it when HIV and reverse-transcriptase were discovered means that it never really was dogma in the literal sense.
And I probably did come on stronger than is polite. I'm sorry about that, I was trying to be unambiguous in a post written in 60 seconds or less.
Tasks are not! transcoded to DNA; this is NOT an exception to the central dogma of molecular biology. The epigenome is RNA and protein and smaller signaling molecules; the DNA sequence itself is untouched, and nothing happens to the deoxy-ribose sugar backbone.
Think of it as the metadata getting changed, not the code - a differing pattern of lines of code being commented out.
Because some people are professional scientists, and they're seriously excited about this.
/. readers are college students, who don't even notice the paywall thanks to their institution's subscriptions. This one's for them. (And maybe you, if you can find a pirated copy)
And a lot of
It's fair to point out that the vast majority of which is going to be reinvested in R&D to make the iPhone 5s.