The Library is obliged to preserve copies of copyrighted material ready for its entry into the Public Domain. Since it gets this job by Government mandate, then anything standing in the way of it doing this job has to go.
This is really just a special kind of Compulsory Purchase Order. It might be temporarily unpopular with a few individuals, but the benefits to Society At Large outweigh the inconvenience it may cause them. And one can presume that an organisation like a National Library probably will take reasonable steps to prevent a premature release.
The library is still breaking the law, wether or not the publishers gave them permission (which is not for them to give).
No, it is entirely for them to give. The copyright holder -- usually the publisher -- is by definition absolutely entitled to grant permission to make copies of their copyrighted work. That's how the GPL works.
No, the problem is that DVDseller.com think that by splattering adverts all over other people's screens willy-nilly, they will earn more than enough money in increased sales to pay for the adverts. But visitors to sometvfansite.com really don't want to be splattered with adverts, even for DVDs of sometvshow. Some of them click on the advert anyway, even though they have no intention of buying. Only a grade-one idiot would pay for a click that didn't result in a sale. DVDseller.com just got greedy and lost out, is all. And Google and sometvfansite.com get to split the proceeds of DVDseller.com's greed.
Paying just to get people to click on your advert, regardless of whether or not they actually buy anything, is a broken business model.
As far as I am concerned -- and I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way -- every single advertisement anyone tries to show me is unwanted. In fact, I may well decide never to buy any product or service from that company just on general principle. After all, I know that company spends money on advertising which they could spend on making a better product. So if you have ever spent a single penny trying to show me an advertisement, then you have wasted that money. Harsh? Maybe, but that's the way you turn out when you were raised watching the BBC.
I won't be guilt-tripped with talk of how advertisers pay for this and pay for that. I never asked them to pay for it! I am the sole custodian of my destiny. I am not going to buy anything from anybody who advertises, period. I personally see no need to waste my bandwidth downloading an advertisement when I am only going to ignore it -- hence the Squid proxy and moderate-to-heavy use of Firefox's image blocking feature. Not just on the Internet either; I leave the room while adverts are on the TV.
If I was feeling really malicious, I might actually write a quick perl script to put in a few hundred bogus clicks against a really egregious advertiser. But on the whole, I most probably wouldn't be bothered; it's too much effort for too little return.
The whole point of a database is to secure the data integrity, and not worry about some random application screwing it up. MySQL is nothing but a storage engine if it can't handle that.
This is like the thing with the electronic engineer and the mechanical engineer arguing over the watch with no moving parts. If you want all the checks and balances done in the backend, don't use MySQL.
Well, as long as your internal distribution is subject to the conditions for which the GPL grants permission to distribute software, then you are fine. The "grey area" is internal distribution of modified software in binary form only {or are you doing no such thing, just keeping the sources in salt for the rest of the department?} That could even be construed as fair dealing, permissible under copyright law; the GPL cannot block it and remain compatible with your statutory rights. At any rate it would only be detectable illegally.
GPL makes sense for corporations, because it prevents anyone else from making a closed-source derivative. If you use a BSD-like licence, you have to be very careful; if some competitor tweaks your source to make an incompatible derivative, and launches it as closed-source with an expensive advertising campaign, you could well be squozen right out of the market unless you hit back quickly with something which is both free and compatible with their version.
If you buy the commercial licence, you are buying a support package -- that's what the MySQL company has that customers want, and letting them have the software without paying for it isn't cutting their throat. Distributing it as source code means it can be run on damn nigh any hardware, which maximises the customer base. And letting users tweak it themselves means that the MySQL company get all the best tweaks to use in their next version -- but they can't deny those tweaks to non-paying users either! Best of all worlds, really.
Additionally, they still haven't addressed their problem with silent exceptions (quietly truncating strings that don't fit, quietly converting numbers that don't fit, allowing invalid dates, etc, etc).
Have you tried doing bounds-checking in whatever scripting language your frontend application is written in, before passing it to MySQL? MySQL just assumes you're smart enough to deal with stuff like that your own way if you don't like the way it's going to. Fortunately you do get to see exactly how MySQL deals with exceptions, and you can even change it if you don't like it.
Wealth distribution is in the common good. If the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the economy stagnates. It is unfortunate, but true, that the only way the poor are ever going to get any richer is if the rich get a little poorer. It is also true that while there is such a gulf between rich and poor as exists today, only a very small minority have much to lose: many, many more people would actually be better off if all the world's wealth were distributed truly equitably.
I can almost understand that those who have benefitted so long from unfairness would not be keen to see the situation change. What completely escapes me is why someone who has been suffering from the same unfairness would be so keen to leave things as they are?
They probably will just run them on spent cooking fat or something. Face it -- it's now over 30 years since they first said we had enough oil left for maybe another 30 years if we were lucky. Anyone designing an engine today would be worse than crazy if they didn't bear in mind the possibility of having to adapt to an alternative fuel source during the engine's own working lifetime. Aircraft engines already are regularly stripped down and rebuilt, so the conversion can be done as part of regular cheduled maintenance.
And what exactly is wrong with governments investing in socially-useful projects? One of the jobs of any government is to distribute the wealth. Ultimately, the people paying the most money to Airbus are the ones who earn the most and can afford to pay the most -- and the poorest will be stumping up the least. It's definitely worth it. Building airliners creates employment at many levels. A plane has many minor components which are bought in from outside: things like seat coverings, wiring, plastic mouldings. Factories and offices need cleaning. Many of those workers will need a hot lunch preparing. {If you were around in the 1970s, you'd know what happened when Longbridge went on strike and how it wasn't just the car makers who stopped working.}
Jobs are good for the economy because workers pay taxes. If all those people were unemployed, claiming the dole {paid for out of taxpayer's money}, running round committing crimes and so forth, then European governments would have a much heftier bill trying to sort out the consequences. The money they give to Airbus is not a subsidy at all: it's an investment, because it pays a dividend.
A car driver is liable if their brakes fail. This is why Third Party insurance is compulsory -- you can't be sued for money you haven't got.
However, a technological solution might actually be better in this case. It's not like spam, which is meant for human beings and hard for a machine to determine accurately. DDoS attacks are just streams of packets. Threatening hanging and flogging only works against people who take notice of what you say and who you have a reasonable chance of catching. Nailing stuff down works against everyone.
Could we build routers capable of blocking DDoS attacks? IPV4 addresses are 32 bits long so, to keep a very simple track of which ones were permitted and which weren't, you would need to address 4Gb of memory, or 512MB. That is certainly within the bounds of doability. Double it just so you can block outgoing as well as incoming traffic. Any address seen pushing suspected malicious packets gets blocked for awhile, then unblocked. Anyone getting blocked often enough gets a friendly word from their ISP.
It would be nice to see a law mandating that software vendors must either supply full annotated source code on request, or not be allowed to peddle their warez at all. In theory, under English Common Law you almost certainly have a right to the source code anyway {you are privy to any secret embodied in goods you rightfully own}. In practice, this might take some effort and you might have to settle for old-fashioned reverse engineering.
And I don't give a toss if it puts anyone out of business. If you have been benefitting from unfairness in any form, I have only this to say: TOUGH TITTY! Hole-in-the-wall machines put a lot of armed robbers out of business in the UK, since employers started paying straight into bank accounts and so there was no need to bring a vanload of cash into the factory every Pay Day.
I take it taht you're referring to how all living things on Earth produce only "right handed" optical stereoisomers, whereas laboratory syntheses of substances which exhibit this property always produce an even mix of left and right handed optical stereoisomers. Living things based on right-handed optical stereoisomers furthermore cannot properly decompose left-handed optical stereoisomers.
Now, we know from experience that right-handed favours right-handed; so let us assume that left-handed, if it actually existed anywhere, would favour left-handed. If, at some point in the Beginning of Life, there were even just ever so slightly more life forms based on right-handed optical stereoisomers than left-handed ones, then eventually the right-handed ones would come to dominate -- even though number was the only survival advantage they enjoyed.
Organic chemistry sometimes favours certain bond formation processes. You might expect, from a casual glance, that the reaction product from propene and steam should be a 50:50 mix of propan-1-ol and propan-2-ol: when the double bond breaks, the oxygen should be equally likely to stick to the end or the middle carbon atom. In fact, you get much more propan-2-ol than propan-1-ol. Read your A-level chemistry textbook to see why.
OK, you say, but there is no difference between the bond energies of optical stereoisomers as there is with the propanol isomers. But, according to collision theory, chemical reactions depend upon collisions between moving particles. A molecule doesn't need to break up completely to get involved in a reaction, and a chemical reaction proceeds stepwise. In the case of complex compounds, it seems logical that the reaction will favour a particular stereoisomer in the product simply because of the way in which potential collision sites are presented. 3-D models of reaction mechanisms ought to explain this better than words.....
You want evidence for evolution? Penicillin used to be a powerful drug. It isn't anymore. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are very real.
Classical Darwinian theory suggests that misuse of antibiotics -- overprescription, and/or premature discontinuation of treatment -- should lead to the evolution of strains of bacteria which are resistant to those antibiotics. What do people do? They take antibiotics when they don't really need them, and stop taking them at the first sign of feeling better. But in those last couple of days of a course of penicillin, the combined effects of your body's immune system and the antibiotics together are killing every last germ stone dead; without that boost, the strongest bacteria could recover, multiply and pass on their immunity to the antibiotic, and you would eventually have a strain of bacterium that was resistant to a particular antibiotic.
Scientific observation and experimentation bear this proposed mechanism out, so I am prepared to claim this as an observeable example of evolution in action.
Beside which, if you want to go that far into it, electromagnetism is only a theory, not a fact; there could be some other, completely different reason why a television set works.
If it's genuinely impossible to devise a test to determine directly-modified from selectively-bred organisms, then it follows that they are equivalent. Things that are equivalent to the same, other thing are equivalent to each other.
Pesticide resistance certainly can be selectively bred into plants. It can take many generations, but it is most definitely possible. Some of the older weedkillers were already ineffective before they were banned! Antibiotic resistance is being bred into bacteria right now through misuse of antibiotics -- doctors are having to prescribe stronger and stronger antibiotics, especially in countries where they are available without a prescription. {That's the reason why you have to stay the course and not stop taking them as soon as you feel better -- between the antibiotics and your own immune system, you will kill off the last of the germs and thus not create "superbugs".}
I don't have a specific problem with genetically modified organisms entering the food chain solely on the basis that they are genetically modified. If one effect of the GM process were to make them poisonous, I would be less happy..... but I would expect that appropriate tests would be done as a matter of course. What I do have a problem with is the biotech companies' attitude to the set of artificial constructs which have come to be referred to as "intellectual property" -- as though DNA were something that could be patented. Which is not to mention that pesticide resistance isn't even a desirable quality to breed for in the first place. It would be more efficient all round to breed for pest resistance -- unless, of course, your business be to sell pesticides.....
Perhaps you know of a way to selectively breed a cabbage which produces it's [sic] own pesticides? That's what they do with GMOs.
All living organisms have some degree of defence against predators. I'm sure that it ought to be possible to find samples with a higher-than-average concentration of natural defensive chemicals and breed for this property.
Genetically Modified plants have been created which are highly tolerant to certain chemicals, e.g. the neurotoxin glyphosate which is sold {not co-incidentally, by the same people who do the genetic modification and fondly imagine that they somehow own the "intellectual property" in the DNA of their GM organisms} under the proprietary name "Round-up". The idea is that you can then be less selective where you spray the stuff. Glyphosate tolerance can be achieved by selective breeding {and is speculated to have been done with coca plants; whether this is true, and if so whether it be deliberate or merely an unintended consequence of misguided US government policy which treats consenting adults like criminals and commits acts tantamount to war against sovereign nations, is a matter for debate elsewhere}.
You still haven't properly responded to my challenge, which was to propose a test capable of determining whether an organism's DNA was altered by selective breeding or by direct manipulation.
The article describes a method for analysing what data is being sent back and forth. Note that you need an older type, non-switching ethernet hub to make it work -- one with a co-ax port is very definitely non-switching. The reason is that a non-switching hub simply repeats any packet on every port, so wherever it's meant to go it will certainly get there. Modern, switching hubs actually inspect each packet, determine the hardware address of each appliance, and send packets only to the relevant port based on the destination address. {Or, to all ports at once if the correct destination is not known; which can happen if the destination machine has not yet sent a packet.} This way you can get the machine on port 1 talking to the machine on port 2 at the same time as the machine on port 3 is talking to the machine on port 4, without causing a collision.
Then, look for stuff being sent to Weatherbug's servers.....
Note that packet-sniffing may violate the EULA; but as long as you are the Administrator of the computer, then legally no data entering, leaving or stored upon it is a secret from you, and you therefore have an inalienable right to inspect it -- which invokes the EULA's severability clause.
Actually, lead-acid batteries are green. Almost every part of a lead-acid battery is recyclable or innocuous. When the battery is no longer capable of holding a charge, the electrolyte {dilute sulphuric acid} can just be dumped in the sea, or anywhere there isn't much growing. If you were really bothered about the pH of the stuff, you could mix it with some alkaline industrial waste -- or maybe just chuck it into a disused limestone quarry. You could even use it as a feedstock for some industrial process. The lead plates, terminals and connector bars can be melted down, and all the impurities and corrosion products {which are what have been causing the battery to lose its charge-holding ability} will separate out. They may be useful in some industrial process. The outer casing probably is made of plastic, but it's all the same kind of plastic so can be melted down together; or can even be washed out and re-used.
Lead-acid batteries also have a low internal resistance, so very little energy is wasted as heat when charging or discharging. They don't need highly complex charging circuitry; they're pretty much self-regulating. Just supply DC and top up the cells with de-mineralised water {which you can get from an air conditioner}. Any surplus energy above what can be stored as potential energy in the cell itself just goes to split the water in the electrolyte into hydrogen and oxygen. Though they aren't easy to separate, the mixture is almost {but not quite, since oxygen is more soluble in water than hydrogen} perfectly stoichiometric, and so could be used as a fuel in its own right. When it's burned, you will get back as much energy as it took to make it in the first place, of course.
Well, you could fit them with sails and use wind power! The only problem with this is, since a H2 molecule is so small, almost anything you try to contain it in is going to leak..... so a vessel full of hydrogen is technically "perishable goods".
Another interesting question concerns the oxygen which is a waste product of electrolysing water to get hydrogen. If you stand too close to wherever they're venting it off, what is your chance of spontaneous combustion?
Yes, there seems to be a Mac version. But does it compile OK on Linux? What about FreeBSD? Solaris?
There are enough "popular" Unix-alikes out there now, that it ought to be easy enough to create a "one size fits all" tar.gz file. All it needs then is a configure script that picks up on the differences and generates an appropriate Makefile. Bandwidth and HDD space are cheap enough nowadays that the "extra" bits you might have to download won't really matter, and there's nothing to stop diehard fan types from offering unofficial, "customised" downloads for particular architectures.
If non-ionising radiation at mobile phone strength actually caused tissue damage, there would be evidence of this. There isn't, because it doesn't. Scientists have been experimenting with RF energy at much higher power levels for many years. Still the greatest danger to living things comes from the fact that if RF energy is absorbed by matter, it will be converted to heat.
Most tissue damage is pretty well recoverable anyway. DNA contains the instructions for copying itself, wrapped in a complex error-checking and correcting system. Any sufficiently slight change is recoverable: if a "faulty" cell is still able to reproduce itself, the next generation of cells will contain the correct code, and if it can't reproduce itself at all, the duff code dies out. It's actually very hard indeed to get a severe enough mutation that the new DNA code is viable and auto-corrects itself to something different than the host organism's DNA and for enough of these mutant cells to form, so much faster than the host organism's immune system can deal with them, that they establish themselves as a living organism in its own right. This is what we call cancer. It is known that ionising radiation can cause DNA mutation: one way of treating cancer is to bombard the cancer cells with ionising radiation, both to kill them off and cause unviable DNA mutations so that the cancer cannot grow. Non-ionising radiation does not have this effect.
I'm not discounting the possibility that some people might be more sensitive than others to the effects of an electromagnetic field, but they are the minority -- and they're just going to have to deal with it, somehow or other.
The fact is, even though today we are better fed, better educated, better housed and just plain better off all around than we have ever been at any time in recorded history, people prefer doom and gloom to sunshine and flowers. Show them a rose and they'll see the thorns. Show them a bird with beautiful plumage and they'll imagine it crapping over their car. Show them the ocean and they'll see themselves drowning. Show them a tree and they'll imagine a paedophile hiding behind it.
If you have ever eaten a swede, a turnip, a cabbage, a cauliflower, broccoli, a brussels sprout or anything containing rapeseed oil, then you have eaten genetically modified food. All the above are descended from a now virtually extinct plant Brassica sativa which had a fleshy root, small cabbage-like outgrowths and produced small, oily seeds. Over time, humans practising agriculture selectively bred brassica specimens for particular characteristics. Deep down underneath, they're all the same plant.
First: note how similar the seeds of all the above mentioned plants look to the unaided eye. Second: if you place a piece of uncooked swede or turnip in water, it will grow a stem. If you cut that stem, a cabbage-like growth will form on it. Not absolute proof, obviously. But kind of interesting anyway.....
Until you prove to me that there is a difference between genetic modification achieved through selective breeding and genetic modification achieved by direct manipulation of DNA, and describe to me a test which can determine which method was used to modify the DNA in a particular specimen, I'm prepared to assume there is no difference in health risk levels between the two processes.
That's not the tower doing that -- it's the phone. The base station sends a signal to the phone {actually, several base stations try to send a signal to the phone}; and the phone sends back a response, which may be picked up by several base stations. Whichever challenge-response had the clearest path {or the only one} is used for the conversation. All the base stations are linked; and if at anytime during the conversation the signal is stronger in another base station than the one currently in use, then the conversation is re-routed seamlessly through that one instead.
Now, almost any imperfectly-matched antenna broadcasting a digital signal -- characterised by sharp transitions -- will radiate severe harmonics and subharmonics that a MW radio in the same room will pick up easily {but which won't actually travel very far}. What's more, any audio amplifier with even a slight DC offset and/or nonlinearity around the zero crossing will perform amplitude demodulation -- in other words, behave as a kind of untuned MW+LW radio.
It's not a masively strong signal. It just overloads analogue amplifiers quite spectacularly because it's a digital signal and so goes violently from one extreme to the other. Also, the initial negotiation is necessarily done with the phone operating at full-on maximum strength: the RF signal is adjusted up and down continuously throughout the conversation, both to save your batteries and to avoid blocking other nearby base stations.
How much potential energy do you really think there is in a piddly little telephone battery anyway?
The truth is meaningless. Even if you shove the truth in someone's face where they shouldn't be able to ignore it, they will ignore it anyway if they want to believe something different. People will believe what they want to believe even when they know it to be untrue. Now, for some reason, people in this country want to believe that things they enjoy are bad for them. People enjoy sending text messages and talking on the phone; therefore they naturally expect there to be some sort of harmful consequence to the use of a telephone.
Some people probably are susceptible to non-ionising radiation, and a lot of people are less {or not at all} susceptible. And given time, natural selection probably will take care of that; the susceptible ones won't be so likely to pass on their susceptible gene {due to being dead, or infertile due to non-ionising radiation} as the immune ones are to pass on theirs.
The real guestion is: where do you draw the line between allergy and poisoning?
Slashdot Mirror
This is really just a special kind of Compulsory Purchase Order. It might be temporarily unpopular with a few individuals, but the benefits to Society At Large outweigh the inconvenience it may cause them. And one can presume that an organisation like a National Library probably will take reasonable steps to prevent a premature release. No, it is entirely for them to give. The copyright holder -- usually the publisher -- is by definition absolutely entitled to grant permission to make copies of their copyrighted work. That's how the GPL works.
No, the problem is that DVDseller.com think that by splattering adverts all over other people's screens willy-nilly, they will earn more than enough money in increased sales to pay for the adverts. But visitors to sometvfansite.com really don't want to be splattered with adverts, even for DVDs of sometvshow. Some of them click on the advert anyway, even though they have no intention of buying. Only a grade-one idiot would pay for a click that didn't result in a sale. DVDseller.com just got greedy and lost out, is all. And Google and sometvfansite.com get to split the proceeds of DVDseller.com's greed.
The more advertisements I see, the more I come to realise the BBC really is worth the licence fee.
Paying just to get people to click on your advert, regardless of whether or not they actually buy anything, is a broken business model.
As far as I am concerned -- and I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way -- every single advertisement anyone tries to show me is unwanted. In fact, I may well decide never to buy any product or service from that company just on general principle. After all, I know that company spends money on advertising which they could spend on making a better product. So if you have ever spent a single penny trying to show me an advertisement, then you have wasted that money. Harsh? Maybe, but that's the way you turn out when you were raised watching the BBC.
I won't be guilt-tripped with talk of how advertisers pay for this and pay for that. I never asked them to pay for it! I am the sole custodian of my destiny. I am not going to buy anything from anybody who advertises, period. I personally see no need to waste my bandwidth downloading an advertisement when I am only going to ignore it -- hence the Squid proxy and moderate-to-heavy use of Firefox's image blocking feature. Not just on the Internet either; I leave the room while adverts are on the TV.
If I was feeling really malicious, I might actually write a quick perl script to put in a few hundred bogus clicks against a really egregious advertiser. But on the whole, I most probably wouldn't be bothered; it's too much effort for too little return.
Well, as long as your internal distribution is subject to the conditions for which the GPL grants permission to distribute software, then you are fine. The "grey area" is internal distribution of modified software in binary form only {or are you doing no such thing, just keeping the sources in salt for the rest of the department?} That could even be construed as fair dealing, permissible under copyright law; the GPL cannot block it and remain compatible with your statutory rights. At any rate it would only be detectable illegally.
GPL makes sense for corporations, because it prevents anyone else from making a closed-source derivative. If you use a BSD-like licence, you have to be very careful; if some competitor tweaks your source to make an incompatible derivative, and launches it as closed-source with an expensive advertising campaign, you could well be squozen right out of the market unless you hit back quickly with something which is both free and compatible with their version.
If you buy the commercial licence, you are buying a support package -- that's what the MySQL company has that customers want, and letting them have the software without paying for it isn't cutting their throat. Distributing it as source code means it can be run on damn nigh any hardware, which maximises the customer base. And letting users tweak it themselves means that the MySQL company get all the best tweaks to use in their next version -- but they can't deny those tweaks to non-paying users either! Best of all worlds, really.
Wealth distribution is in the common good. If the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the economy stagnates. It is unfortunate, but true, that the only way the poor are ever going to get any richer is if the rich get a little poorer. It is also true that while there is such a gulf between rich and poor as exists today, only a very small minority have much to lose: many, many more people would actually be better off if all the world's wealth were distributed truly equitably.
I can almost understand that those who have benefitted so long from unfairness would not be keen to see the situation change. What completely escapes me is why someone who has been suffering from the same unfairness would be so keen to leave things as they are?
They probably will just run them on spent cooking fat or something. Face it -- it's now over 30 years since they first said we had enough oil left for maybe another 30 years if we were lucky. Anyone designing an engine today would be worse than crazy if they didn't bear in mind the possibility of having to adapt to an alternative fuel source during the engine's own working lifetime. Aircraft engines already are regularly stripped down and rebuilt, so the conversion can be done as part of regular cheduled maintenance.
And what exactly is wrong with governments investing in socially-useful projects? One of the jobs of any government is to distribute the wealth. Ultimately, the people paying the most money to Airbus are the ones who earn the most and can afford to pay the most -- and the poorest will be stumping up the least. It's definitely worth it. Building airliners creates employment at many levels. A plane has many minor components which are bought in from outside: things like seat coverings, wiring, plastic mouldings. Factories and offices need cleaning. Many of those workers will need a hot lunch preparing. {If you were around in the 1970s, you'd know what happened when Longbridge went on strike and how it wasn't just the car makers who stopped working.}
Jobs are good for the economy because workers pay taxes. If all those people were unemployed, claiming the dole {paid for out of taxpayer's money}, running round committing crimes and so forth, then European governments would have a much heftier bill trying to sort out the consequences. The money they give to Airbus is not a subsidy at all: it's an investment, because it pays a dividend.
You own the disc it's recorded on.
A car driver is liable if their brakes fail. This is why Third Party insurance is compulsory -- you can't be sued for money you haven't got.
However, a technological solution might actually be better in this case. It's not like spam, which is meant for human beings and hard for a machine to determine accurately. DDoS attacks are just streams of packets. Threatening hanging and flogging only works against people who take notice of what you say and who you have a reasonable chance of catching. Nailing stuff down works against everyone.
Could we build routers capable of blocking DDoS attacks? IPV4 addresses are 32 bits long so, to keep a very simple track of which ones were permitted and which weren't, you would need to address 4Gb of memory, or 512MB. That is certainly within the bounds of doability. Double it just so you can block outgoing as well as incoming traffic. Any address seen pushing suspected malicious packets gets blocked for awhile, then unblocked. Anyone getting blocked often enough gets a friendly word from their ISP.
Hear here!
It would be nice to see a law mandating that software vendors must either supply full annotated source code on request, or not be allowed to peddle their warez at all. In theory, under English Common Law you almost certainly have a right to the source code anyway {you are privy to any secret embodied in goods you rightfully own}. In practice, this might take some effort and you might have to settle for old-fashioned reverse engineering.
And I don't give a toss if it puts anyone out of business. If you have been benefitting from unfairness in any form, I have only this to say: TOUGH TITTY! Hole-in-the-wall machines put a lot of armed robbers out of business in the UK, since employers started paying straight into bank accounts and so there was no need to bring a vanload of cash into the factory every Pay Day.
OK, I'll bite.
.....
I take it taht you're referring to how all living things on Earth produce only "right handed" optical stereoisomers, whereas laboratory syntheses of substances which exhibit this property always produce an even mix of left and right handed optical stereoisomers. Living things based on right-handed optical stereoisomers furthermore cannot properly decompose left-handed optical stereoisomers.
Now, we know from experience that right-handed favours right-handed; so let us assume that left-handed, if it actually existed anywhere, would favour left-handed. If, at some point in the Beginning of Life, there were even just ever so slightly more life forms based on right-handed optical stereoisomers than left-handed ones, then eventually the right-handed ones would come to dominate -- even though number was the only survival advantage they enjoyed.
Organic chemistry sometimes favours certain bond formation processes. You might expect, from a casual glance, that the reaction product from propene and steam should be a 50:50 mix of propan-1-ol and propan-2-ol: when the double bond breaks, the oxygen should be equally likely to stick to the end or the middle carbon atom. In fact, you get much more propan-2-ol than propan-1-ol. Read your A-level chemistry textbook to see why.
OK, you say, but there is no difference between the bond energies of optical stereoisomers as there is with the propanol isomers. But, according to collision theory, chemical reactions depend upon collisions between moving particles. A molecule doesn't need to break up completely to get involved in a reaction, and a chemical reaction proceeds stepwise. In the case of complex compounds, it seems logical that the reaction will favour a particular stereoisomer in the product simply because of the way in which potential collision sites are presented. 3-D models of reaction mechanisms ought to explain this better than words
You want evidence for evolution? Penicillin used to be a powerful drug. It isn't anymore. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are very real.
Classical Darwinian theory suggests that misuse of antibiotics -- overprescription, and/or premature discontinuation of treatment -- should lead to the evolution of strains of bacteria which are resistant to those antibiotics. What do people do? They take antibiotics when they don't really need them, and stop taking them at the first sign of feeling better. But in those last couple of days of a course of penicillin, the combined effects of your body's immune system and the antibiotics together are killing every last germ stone dead; without that boost, the strongest bacteria could recover, multiply and pass on their immunity to the antibiotic, and you would eventually have a strain of bacterium that was resistant to a particular antibiotic.
Scientific observation and experimentation bear this proposed mechanism out, so I am prepared to claim this as an observeable example of evolution in action.
Beside which, if you want to go that far into it, electromagnetism is only a theory, not a fact; there could be some other, completely different reason why a television set works.
If it's genuinely impossible to devise a test to determine directly-modified from selectively-bred organisms, then it follows that they are equivalent. Things that are equivalent to the same, other thing are equivalent to each other.
..... but I would expect that appropriate tests would be done as a matter of course. What I do have a problem with is the biotech companies' attitude to the set of artificial constructs which have come to be referred to as "intellectual property" -- as though DNA were something that could be patented. Which is not to mention that pesticide resistance isn't even a desirable quality to breed for in the first place. It would be more efficient all round to breed for pest resistance -- unless, of course, your business be to sell pesticides .....
Pesticide resistance certainly can be selectively bred into plants. It can take many generations, but it is most definitely possible. Some of the older weedkillers were already ineffective before they were banned! Antibiotic resistance is being bred into bacteria right now through misuse of antibiotics -- doctors are having to prescribe stronger and stronger antibiotics, especially in countries where they are available without a prescription. {That's the reason why you have to stay the course and not stop taking them as soon as you feel better -- between the antibiotics and your own immune system, you will kill off the last of the germs and thus not create "superbugs".}
I don't have a specific problem with genetically modified organisms entering the food chain solely on the basis that they are genetically modified. If one effect of the GM process were to make them poisonous, I would be less happy
Genetically Modified plants have been created which are highly tolerant to certain chemicals, e.g. the neurotoxin glyphosate which is sold {not co-incidentally, by the same people who do the genetic modification and fondly imagine that they somehow own the "intellectual property" in the DNA of their GM organisms} under the proprietary name "Round-up". The idea is that you can then be less selective where you spray the stuff. Glyphosate tolerance can be achieved by selective breeding {and is speculated to have been done with coca plants; whether this is true, and if so whether it be deliberate or merely an unintended consequence of misguided US government policy which treats consenting adults like criminals and commits acts tantamount to war against sovereign nations, is a matter for debate elsewhere}.
You still haven't properly responded to my challenge, which was to propose a test capable of determining whether an organism's DNA was altered by selective breeding or by direct manipulation.
The article describes a method for analysing what data is being sent back and forth. Note that you need an older type, non-switching ethernet hub to make it work -- one with a co-ax port is very definitely non-switching. The reason is that a non-switching hub simply repeats any packet on every port, so wherever it's meant to go it will certainly get there. Modern, switching hubs actually inspect each packet, determine the hardware address of each appliance, and send packets only to the relevant port based on the destination address. {Or, to all ports at once if the correct destination is not known; which can happen if the destination machine has not yet sent a packet.} This way you can get the machine on port 1 talking to the machine on port 2 at the same time as the machine on port 3 is talking to the machine on port 4, without causing a collision.
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Then, look for stuff being sent to Weatherbug's servers
Note that packet-sniffing may violate the EULA; but as long as you are the Administrator of the computer, then legally no data entering, leaving or stored upon it is a secret from you, and you therefore have an inalienable right to inspect it -- which invokes the EULA's severability clause.
Actually, lead-acid batteries are green. Almost every part of a lead-acid battery is recyclable or innocuous. When the battery is no longer capable of holding a charge, the electrolyte {dilute sulphuric acid} can just be dumped in the sea, or anywhere there isn't much growing. If you were really bothered about the pH of the stuff, you could mix it with some alkaline industrial waste -- or maybe just chuck it into a disused limestone quarry. You could even use it as a feedstock for some industrial process. The lead plates, terminals and connector bars can be melted down, and all the impurities and corrosion products {which are what have been causing the battery to lose its charge-holding ability} will separate out. They may be useful in some industrial process. The outer casing probably is made of plastic, but it's all the same kind of plastic so can be melted down together; or can even be washed out and re-used.
Lead-acid batteries also have a low internal resistance, so very little energy is wasted as heat when charging or discharging. They don't need highly complex charging circuitry; they're pretty much self-regulating. Just supply DC and top up the cells with de-mineralised water {which you can get from an air conditioner}. Any surplus energy above what can be stored as potential energy in the cell itself just goes to split the water in the electrolyte into hydrogen and oxygen. Though they aren't easy to separate, the mixture is almost {but not quite, since oxygen is more soluble in water than hydrogen} perfectly stoichiometric, and so could be used as a fuel in its own right. When it's burned, you will get back as much energy as it took to make it in the first place, of course.
Well, you could fit them with sails and use wind power! The only problem with this is, since a H2 molecule is so small, almost anything you try to contain it in is going to leak ..... so a vessel full of hydrogen is technically "perishable goods".
Another interesting question concerns the oxygen which is a waste product of electrolysing water to get hydrogen. If you stand too close to wherever they're venting it off, what is your chance of spontaneous combustion?
Yes, there seems to be a Mac version. But does it compile OK on Linux? What about FreeBSD? Solaris?
There are enough "popular" Unix-alikes out there now, that it ought to be easy enough to create a "one size fits all" tar.gz file. All it needs then is a configure script that picks up on the differences and generates an appropriate Makefile. Bandwidth and HDD space are cheap enough nowadays that the "extra" bits you might have to download won't really matter, and there's nothing to stop diehard fan types from offering unofficial, "customised" downloads for particular architectures.
If non-ionising radiation at mobile phone strength actually caused tissue damage, there would be evidence of this. There isn't, because it doesn't. Scientists have been experimenting with RF energy at much higher power levels for many years. Still the greatest danger to living things comes from the fact that if RF energy is absorbed by matter, it will be converted to heat.
Most tissue damage is pretty well recoverable anyway. DNA contains the instructions for copying itself, wrapped in a complex error-checking and correcting system. Any sufficiently slight change is recoverable: if a "faulty" cell is still able to reproduce itself, the next generation of cells will contain the correct code, and if it can't reproduce itself at all, the duff code dies out. It's actually very hard indeed to get a severe enough mutation that the new DNA code is viable and auto-corrects itself to something different than the host organism's DNA and for enough of these mutant cells to form, so much faster than the host organism's immune system can deal with them, that they establish themselves as a living organism in its own right. This is what we call cancer. It is known that ionising radiation can cause DNA mutation: one way of treating cancer is to bombard the cancer cells with ionising radiation, both to kill them off and cause unviable DNA mutations so that the cancer cannot grow. Non-ionising radiation does not have this effect.
I'm not discounting the possibility that some people might be more sensitive than others to the effects of an electromagnetic field, but they are the minority -- and they're just going to have to deal with it, somehow or other.
The fact is, even though today we are better fed, better educated, better housed and just plain better off all around than we have ever been at any time in recorded history, people prefer doom and gloom to sunshine and flowers. Show them a rose and they'll see the thorns. Show them a bird with beautiful plumage and they'll imagine it crapping over their car. Show them the ocean and they'll see themselves drowning. Show them a tree and they'll imagine a paedophile hiding behind it.
If you have ever eaten a swede, a turnip, a cabbage, a cauliflower, broccoli, a brussels sprout or anything containing rapeseed oil, then you have eaten genetically modified food. All the above are descended from a now virtually extinct plant Brassica sativa which had a fleshy root, small cabbage-like outgrowths and produced small, oily seeds. Over time, humans practising agriculture selectively bred brassica specimens for particular characteristics. Deep down underneath, they're all the same plant.
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First: note how similar the seeds of all the above mentioned plants look to the unaided eye. Second: if you place a piece of uncooked swede or turnip in water, it will grow a stem. If you cut that stem, a cabbage-like growth will form on it. Not absolute proof, obviously. But kind of interesting anyway
Until you prove to me that there is a difference between genetic modification achieved through selective breeding and genetic modification achieved by direct manipulation of DNA, and describe to me a test which can determine which method was used to modify the DNA in a particular specimen, I'm prepared to assume there is no difference in health risk levels between the two processes.
That's not the tower doing that -- it's the phone. The base station sends a signal to the phone {actually, several base stations try to send a signal to the phone}; and the phone sends back a response, which may be picked up by several base stations. Whichever challenge-response had the clearest path {or the only one} is used for the conversation. All the base stations are linked; and if at anytime during the conversation the signal is stronger in another base station than the one currently in use, then the conversation is re-routed seamlessly through that one instead.
Now, almost any imperfectly-matched antenna broadcasting a digital signal -- characterised by sharp transitions -- will radiate severe harmonics and subharmonics that a MW radio in the same room will pick up easily {but which won't actually travel very far}. What's more, any audio amplifier with even a slight DC offset and/or nonlinearity around the zero crossing will perform amplitude demodulation -- in other words, behave as a kind of untuned MW+LW radio.
It's not a masively strong signal. It just overloads analogue amplifiers quite spectacularly because it's a digital signal and so goes violently from one extreme to the other. Also, the initial negotiation is necessarily done with the phone operating at full-on maximum strength: the RF signal is adjusted up and down continuously throughout the conversation, both to save your batteries and to avoid blocking other nearby base stations.
How much potential energy do you really think there is in a piddly little telephone battery anyway?
The truth is meaningless. Even if you shove the truth in someone's face where they shouldn't be able to ignore it, they will ignore it anyway if they want to believe something different. People will believe what they want to believe even when they know it to be untrue. Now, for some reason, people in this country want to believe that things they enjoy are bad for them. People enjoy sending text messages and talking on the phone; therefore they naturally expect there to be some sort of harmful consequence to the use of a telephone.
Some people probably are susceptible to non-ionising radiation, and a lot of people are less {or not at all} susceptible. And given time, natural selection probably will take care of that; the susceptible ones won't be so likely to pass on their susceptible gene {due to being dead, or infertile due to non-ionising radiation} as the immune ones are to pass on theirs.
The real guestion is: where do you draw the line between allergy and poisoning?