For those who doubt the effects of global warming, I recommend taking up SCUBA. Not only is it a great sport, you'll get to see first-hand the effects of global warming, and it WILL scare you.
Actually, studies have shown that divers wearing scuba gear shed bacteria alien to the reef's enviroment, thus causing a large percentage of the die off.
then their faces would be jsut a little red if they made the mistake of choosing a campground that had no power. Not that I wouldn't put it past them, but hopefully they were smart enough to figure that one out
I'm putting my money on the side that says they have no idea what they are doing.
They obviously don't have their IT shit together, since the IT guy is posting to/. saying he doesn't know what he's doing.
My advice to the submitter of the headline: Hit google up, learn what you can, then submit a/. advice article. It's asinine when people post "I don't know what I am doing, HELP!" as opposed to "This is what I have learned, so far, and would like your input on making it happen.". The latter does a lot more to inspire thought. It also does a lot to keep you from looking ignorant and needy.
I had one of those, and yes, it was awful. As soon as it was engaged, hills became a nightmare.
Perhaps you should invest in a battery powered system using nimh rechargable batteries? They are rather light and don't interfere with your efficiency.
Eventually, the EU is going to stomp all over US software firms. This will happen after a few years of unrestricted development.
If this pans out well, I'll be looking for citizenship in the EU in the next few years. What's so great about the US nowadays? We've demonstrated that our voting system has failed, that our leadership hates gays, muslims, and does nothing to protect middle america's jobs while all the fatcats get fatter by outsourcing anything and everything they can because they lost their sense of nationalism over a few dollars.
The way I see it, the US has had leadership without any real vision of tomorrow. This has resulted in a world of nations against it. The repair will require a lot more than a democrat in office, too. It will require people actually caring, and that is not going to happen anytime soon. Hell, look how well 9/11 "brought us together". All it brought together were the straight, old white people out in the boonies, and that's only because they all bought the same stickers, t-shirts, and other random 9/11 merchandise at the local gas station. For the rest of us, all we see is a nation filled with hate and sensless, highly reactionary, law making.
Damn telephone companies.. next thing you know, McDonald's will start charging enough to cover the health insurance costs for their employees, Radio Shack price mark-up will include their retail store expenses, and ISP's will start raising fees to cover the cost of their electricity. It's as if these companies are trying to make money or something.
Check this out, EarthLink was $19.99/mo until it began outsourcing it's call centers overseas. Even after getting the super-cheap labor, they turn around and raise rates to $21.95/mo.
Yeah, all of this is really good for the economy. But only if your name is Gary Betty.
My insurance has never gone down with the same company here in CA. I have to switch providers for a $100 break, then it goes up, up, then I have to switch again. Perfect record.
Yeah, same here. It's a load of crap. The part the author leaves out is the same part left out when it comes to outsourcing jobs. It's the investors who own a portion of these companies that rake in the saved money. They will continue to charge consumers the same, if not more, to reach whatever new expectations shareholders threw in their laps.
It's kind of like Gary Betty and EarthLink. They outsourced, what? 4000 jobs now? That saved a chunk of cash, right? Then why is the service still $21.95 a month? See, it's not the consumer who wins.. It's also not the american working class.
I agree. The DVD drive in the XBox is not progressive, so you really don't get any benefit by using it as a player for an HDTV.
On my DLP set, the XBox does very well on divx playback. I use XBMP instead of XBMC most of the time, because it seems slightly more stable. The only issues I've run into are sync issues in a few movies, which seems to happen in both players.
Either way, anyone playing back downloaded movies on their XBox will find it to be a very pleasing experience compared to sitting in front of a monitor. Yeah, it's not "the ultimate", but it's chick-friendly easy and is a whole lot less hassle and cost compared to setting up a media PC. Oh, and it is free with a modded Xbox.:)
While this latest review is bound to be a polarizing and heavily debated issue (read flamebait), it is important in that this review will be seen by so many mainstream readers and corporate types who may have been considering Gnome."
Does anyone else hear MC Chris's voice when they read that last bit? For real, man. Relax already.
If you hate it so much, why did you submit it? Oh, I know. You wanted to get the link posted so a bunch of/. people will write them bitching and complaining about the "inaccuracy" or "bias" in their article..
How is that going to benefit the Linux/OSS movement? It's not. You are just going to cause an editor to get a lot of nasty mail just because he doesn't agree with your opinion. Perhaps, next time he will just find something besides Linux to write about..
It's great to support the one you love, but why strike out like that? Nobody gains anything from it. Oh, and shame on the moderators for letting this get through. You had to recognize it was soley to irritate the editor.
Also, Finns have summer cottages in the woods all over the country which helps cover the costs of 100% network coverage.
Do they dress the cell towers up to look like giant metal trees? That's what they do in some parts of GA. Though, in inhabited areas, they are often dressed up to look like a church steeple -- complete with a cross on top.
It's sad, though, the cell tower infrastructure only seems to cover the major highways in between cities. There is no coverage out in most of the boonies. Us americans are cheap bastards.
Since you are going with your own finances, it might be a better idea to set up some durable cameras in conjunction with the motion sensors to give you a visible way to weed out false positives. But here's a decent low-tech solution:
Maybe putting up a sealed message box with notifications on local laws, regulations, and respectful hiking and camping procedures. I'd stick something in there like "Please sign in and give us feedback". Hang a log book on a metal wire and you'll find that most people will use it.
For good measure, a poster saying "This area is under regular police patrol". This will be enough to scare at least a few vandals/drinking kids off.
I'm just talking out of my butt, as this is/...:-)
So I'd like to hear from the tinfoil hat brigade - what are your objections to such a system, and how might your concerns be addressed?
This is less of a tin-foil hat issue and more of your idea being redundant and a waste of money. First off, hikers are already tracked. Before you go on any long distance hike, you should typically sign in at a local ranger station. These are usually where the best drop-off points and parking lots are. Plus, it's just good to be face to face with a ranger before hitting the woods. At least then, they will have a face in memory, just in case you turn up missing.
Anyway, tax dollars are already being spent on tracking hikers through a paper log, there is no benefit to doing it digitally, and considering costs of managing the electronic system, it's pointless and doesn't deserve much attention.
No offense, just an honest thought on the issue. I grow weary of people searching for technical solutions to mundane things that can be done better through arcane methods.
JimLynch writes "Gmail, Gmail, Gmail--how do we love thee? Let us count the ways! We finally had a chance to try Google's new e-mail service and we're happy to say that, for the most part, we love it! In this article, we'll give you an overview of what you can expect from Gmail, as well as what we liked and didn't like about it. We'll also tell you what we think needs to be added to make it even better."
Such blatent pandering to IPO hype is disgusting. Grow up and move out of your mother's basement. You have a lot to learn in life.
Actually, most of that 95% of users have a client support group that takes care of this sort of thing for them.
Plus, when this starts shipping with new computers, the FW should save a lot of headaches coming from home users on broadband connections.
So yeah, it won't be perfect. It's also okay to hate the company, or the products, but being a negative nancy isn't going to make the world a better place.
I ran a BBS on an old TRS80 with 4 floppies and was sending drives off over alignment issues every few months and that was from normal read/write accesses. Luckily, my local Radio Shack was cool and looking for support from the BBS community and ate the cost.
Us TRS80 users had the tape motor relay as our audio toy. It was a simple coil relay that would make a very audible click when engaged or released. Though there was code to control the speed of access in BASIC, there were no limitations on what you could do with it in ASM. Apparently, the limitation was put in place to keep from destroying tape drives and the relay.
I remember producing some really disturbing sounds, but ended up rigging the tape relay up to the power cable to my modem. With a small bit of code, a few wires, and raped cassette drive cable, it was relatively easy to turn the old RS 300 baud modems into auto-answer. Basically, splice the power cable to the modem, cut the cassette cable's drive motor and connect the two. Then splice the phone cable and connect the two live wires to the audio-in cable, then make a loop in ASM or BASIC that watches for a particular memory address value to jump from 7-10 to 250-255 for a few moments, then issue a MOTOR ON command and close the loop to power the modem who's switch is already flipped to ANS mode. Of course, this had limitations. I had to spend a lot of time tooling code for the BBS that would reduce the chances of a hung, dead connection (if the user hung up without logging out) as there was no actual carrier detection. My final solution was a TSR that would MOTOR OFF and reload the answer script if there was no activity for 2 minutes.
That's another example as to why I always considered Commodites to be similar to what script kiddies of the mid-80's would have been, compared to the more traditional TRS80 hackers. The Commodites downloaded someone else's crap and ran it while us TRS80 ppl got out the soldering iron on a regular basis or learned ASM so all 64k of resources would be usable.:-)
Online gaming? Been around since Doom, yet only caught on around the time of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament.
Maybe for you, but my first online game was a P51 Mustang battle flight sim on the TRS80 in 1983. It ran with relatively little lag on a 300 baud modem and supported 2 players. My BBS friends and I would play for hours and hours.
Online piracy? Been around since geeks in colleges would run IRC servers sharing everything from music to videos to games using simple dial-up modems yet only now we're hearing about it in the mainstream.
Nah, the BBS was the birthplace of modern warez distribution. The first time I knowingly logged into one was in 1981.
Most of the people involved weren't college age geeks, either. We were nerds back then. There was no 'chic geek' thing or nerdy IRC girls on Prozac. Except for Sherrod, but she was an IRC chiq before IRC even existed.
If americans had lived through several generations of extreme poverty, they would be having masses of children too.
I would use the word 'uneducated' instead of 'dumb'. You can have a 130 IQ, but your mind will never develop properly on a starvation diet. Also, if there is no educational system in place, then that just adds to the problem. Intelligent people do some of the stupidest things when left to their own thoughts and beliefs without any exposure to the world around them.
I guess that makes us the smart ones for shouting our pseudo-standards in their direction. If you were unaware, many christians and catholic groups are against us giving aid to these nations even in the form of free condoms and sex education. Brilliant.
Here's what you need to sit down and think about:
The human race is globally connected. If you sit back and play the role of chickenhawk nationalist, then you are adding to the problem which will come back to sting your people later. It's not like the HIV spreading through africa isn't going to impact the US. It will just result in a far greater number of americans with HIV and much sooner. The borders are only invisible lines put in place by politicians, we are all in the same pool.
Personally, I find it asinine that/. moderators pass links to sites that obviously don't have the bandwidth to deal with being a/. headline.
Not only does his site suffer, but the other 200 virtual hosts on the server go down too. Guess what that results in? Pissed off customers calling the hosting company raising hell and demanding discounts on that month's service. Not to mention all the people who can't get to the other sites hosted on the box.
don't think GE is inherently evil -- but it lacks the QA of time that traditional breeding has under its belt. Sure, Super Cow's milk may up my life span by 10 years and prevent cancer, but can you tell me it won't cause sterility (random, bad problem unforseen by creators of Super Cow) after a few generations of people consuming it? No you can't, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that there's a risk like that in the traditionally bred milk cow after a couple of hundred years of selective breeding.
You have a good point, but it has been accepted that we will have to deal with those problems as they pop up. Who knows? In a few generations we may be able to re-grow your replacement sexual organs in a small test tube. The fact is, people are starving right now and obese white people are making the decision not to take action while the majority of earth's inhabitants suffer**.
All this dicking around and worrying about how things might go wrong is costing millions of people their lives. I cite the rugged GE corn that will grow in a desert. Who cares if it fucks up the local balance? Humans created that very desert many years ago, the balance was lost then.
I'm sure megacows and super corn won't cause more harm than good. Not for many, many years. It's not like any evidence has shown any real evidence of a disaster in our future. But just like nuclear power, the masses have been cleansed in the media spin cycle. It doesn't take a disaster*, only the threat of one combined with technology the commoner doesn't understand.
* Chernobyl doesn't count. They didn't even have a large mass of water around to cool the core down.
** The first step towards a peaceful world is getting everyone's belly full.
There is no such thing as a refresh rate on a progressive display. There is pixel refresh latency -- but that is quite a bit different, technically speaking, and does not matter when looking at a static image. Anything above 15ms pixel refresh is annoying if you are playing a FPS. 25ms or less is good for an RPG. Anything higher, and smooth scrolling text will begin to ghost.
Progressive displays simply turn on or off a pixel and set a color to it. Non-progressive displays, like your CRT, constantly refreshes the information in a sweep across the entire screen. Thus it has a refresh rate.
It goes to show how many people got their display education from the Windows display control panel. I cracked up when I saw I still had to set a refresh rate with my LCD panel hooked up via DVI in XP.
Okay, this is just getting sickening. Google approaches it's IPO date and comes up with webmail. So, suddenly, it finds it's way into the 30 minute CNN/FOX treadmills, it's in all the papers, and there's not an IT news site without some big story on it.
Gee, someone at the AP sure has an interest in getting that IPO to skyrocket, huh?
Search engine + webmail =! news Search engine + rumors + AP treadmill + IPO = lots of money for whoever is behind this big media push.
Please, don't be sheep. As soon as Google goes public, you guys are going to be crying about how cool Google was before all the banners and popups. Trust me, their business model will change for the worst. Right now, they are trying to get you to buy them and have got to be cool -- But soon, things will be different. There will be shareholder meetings and demands made to increase revenue. Then, Google will be just like AOL or Yahoo and you won't feel so excited about it anymore.
I'll be sure to link back to this thread in a few months when the first crappy news about Google breaks. Like when it becomes a whore to the share holders and advertisers.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who doubt the effects of global warming, I recommend taking up SCUBA. Not only is it a great sport, you'll get to see first-hand the effects of global warming, and it WILL scare you.
Actually, studies have shown that divers wearing scuba gear shed bacteria alien to the reef's enviroment, thus causing a large percentage of the die off.
then their faces would be jsut a little red if they made the mistake of choosing a campground that had no power. Not that I wouldn't put it past them, but hopefully they were smart enough to figure that one out
/. saying he doesn't know what he's doing.
/. advice article. It's asinine when people post "I don't know what I am doing, HELP!" as opposed to "This is what I have learned, so far, and would like your input on making it happen.". The latter does a lot more to inspire thought. It also does a lot to keep you from looking ignorant and needy.
I'm putting my money on the side that says they have no idea what they are doing.
They obviously don't have their IT shit together, since the IT guy is posting to
My advice to the submitter of the headline: Hit google up, learn what you can, then submit a
why would a company who makes spyware (whose very nature is to be secretive and hard to remove) want to follow Google's principles?"
It won't help at all. This is all part of Google's push to appear as cool as possible before the IPO.
I believe Google, as a business entity, is as serious about getting rid of spyware as GWB is about world peace or going to Mars.
I had one of those, and yes, it was awful. As soon as it was engaged, hills became a nightmare.
Perhaps you should invest in a battery powered system using nimh rechargable batteries? They are rather light and don't interfere with your efficiency.
I think I know what is going to happen:
:)
Eventually, the EU is going to stomp all over US software firms. This will happen after a few years of unrestricted development.
If this pans out well, I'll be looking for citizenship in the EU in the next few years. What's so great about the US nowadays? We've demonstrated that our voting system has failed, that our leadership hates gays, muslims, and does nothing to protect middle america's jobs while all the fatcats get fatter by outsourcing anything and everything they can because they lost their sense of nationalism over a few dollars.
The way I see it, the US has had leadership without any real vision of tomorrow. This has resulted in a world of nations against it. The repair will require a lot more than a democrat in office, too. It will require people actually caring, and that is not going to happen anytime soon. Hell, look how well 9/11 "brought us together". All it brought together were the straight, old white people out in the boonies, and that's only because they all bought the same stickers, t-shirts, and other random 9/11 merchandise at the local gas station. For the rest of us, all we see is a nation filled with hate and sensless, highly reactionary, law making.
Geeks, get your passports ready.. EU or bust!
Damn telephone companies.. next thing you know, McDonald's will start charging enough to cover the health insurance costs for their employees, Radio Shack price mark-up will include their retail store expenses, and ISP's will start raising fees to cover the cost of their electricity. It's as if these companies are trying to make money or something.
Check this out, EarthLink was $19.99/mo until it began outsourcing it's call centers overseas. Even after getting the super-cheap labor, they turn around and raise rates to $21.95/mo.
Yeah, all of this is really good for the economy. But only if your name is Gary Betty.
Wow, the article doesn't even show a picture of the completed device.
My insurance has never gone down with the same company here in CA. I have to switch providers for a $100 break, then it goes up, up, then I have to switch again. Perfect record.
Yeah, same here. It's a load of crap. The part the author leaves out is the same part left out when it comes to outsourcing jobs. It's the investors who own a portion of these companies that rake in the saved money. They will continue to charge consumers the same, if not more, to reach whatever new expectations shareholders threw in their laps.
It's kind of like Gary Betty and EarthLink. They outsourced, what? 4000 jobs now? That saved a chunk of cash, right? Then why is the service still $21.95 a month? See, it's not the consumer who wins.. It's also not the american working class.
Welcome to a society selling out..
I agree. The DVD drive in the XBox is not progressive, so you really don't get any benefit by using it as a player for an HDTV.
:)
On my DLP set, the XBox does very well on divx playback. I use XBMP instead of XBMC most of the time, because it seems slightly more stable. The only issues I've run into are sync issues in a few movies, which seems to happen in both players.
Either way, anyone playing back downloaded movies on their XBox will find it to be a very pleasing experience compared to sitting in front of a monitor. Yeah, it's not "the ultimate", but it's chick-friendly easy and is a whole lot less hassle and cost compared to setting up a media PC. Oh, and it is free with a modded Xbox.
While this latest review is bound to be a polarizing and heavily debated issue (read flamebait), it is important in that this review will be seen by so many mainstream readers and corporate types who may have been considering Gnome."
/. people will write them bitching and complaining about the "inaccuracy" or "bias" in their article..
Does anyone else hear MC Chris's voice when they read that last bit? For real, man. Relax already.
If you hate it so much, why did you submit it? Oh, I know. You wanted to get the link posted so a bunch of
How is that going to benefit the Linux/OSS movement? It's not. You are just going to cause an editor to get a lot of nasty mail just because he doesn't agree with your opinion. Perhaps, next time he will just find something besides Linux to write about..
It's great to support the one you love, but why strike out like that? Nobody gains anything from it. Oh, and shame on the moderators for letting this get through. You had to recognize it was soley to irritate the editor.
Also, Finns have summer cottages in the woods all over the country which helps cover the costs of 100% network coverage.
Do they dress the cell towers up to look like giant metal trees? That's what they do in some parts of GA. Though, in inhabited areas, they are often dressed up to look like a church steeple -- complete with a cross on top.
It's sad, though, the cell tower infrastructure only seems to cover the major highways in between cities. There is no coverage out in most of the boonies. Us americans are cheap bastards.
Since you are going with your own finances, it might be a better idea to set up some durable cameras in conjunction with the motion sensors to give you a visible way to weed out false positives. But here's a decent low-tech solution:
/... :-)
Maybe putting up a sealed message box with notifications on local laws, regulations, and respectful hiking and camping procedures. I'd stick something in there like "Please sign in and give us feedback". Hang a log book on a metal wire and you'll find that most people will use it.
For good measure, a poster saying "This area is under regular police patrol". This will be enough to scare at least a few vandals/drinking kids off.
I'm just talking out of my butt, as this is
I do not think arcane [reference.com] means what you think it means
It is sarcasm.
So I'd like to hear from the tinfoil hat brigade - what are your objections to such a system, and how might your concerns be addressed?
This is less of a tin-foil hat issue and more of your idea being redundant and a waste of money. First off, hikers are already tracked. Before you go on any long distance hike, you should typically sign in at a local ranger station. These are usually where the best drop-off points and parking lots are. Plus, it's just good to be face to face with a ranger before hitting the woods. At least then, they will have a face in memory, just in case you turn up missing.
Anyway, tax dollars are already being spent on tracking hikers through a paper log, there is no benefit to doing it digitally, and considering costs of managing the electronic system, it's pointless and doesn't deserve much attention.
No offense, just an honest thought on the issue. I grow weary of people searching for technical solutions to mundane things that can be done better through arcane methods.
In other words -- "Keep it simple, stupid."
JimLynch writes "Gmail, Gmail, Gmail--how do we love thee? Let us count the ways! We finally had a chance to try Google's new e-mail service and we're happy to say that, for the most part, we love it! In this article, we'll give you an overview of what you can expect from Gmail, as well as what we liked and didn't like about it. We'll also tell you what we think needs to be added to make it even better."
Such blatent pandering to IPO hype is disgusting. Grow up and move out of your mother's basement. You have a lot to learn in life.
Actually, most of that 95% of users have a client support group that takes care of this sort of thing for them.
Plus, when this starts shipping with new computers, the FW should save a lot of headaches coming from home users on broadband connections.
So yeah, it won't be perfect. It's also okay to hate the company, or the products, but being a negative nancy isn't going to make the world a better place.
I was wondering about the alignment issue.
:-)
I ran a BBS on an old TRS80 with 4 floppies and was sending drives off over alignment issues every few months and that was from normal read/write accesses. Luckily, my local Radio Shack was cool and looking for support from the BBS community and ate the cost.
Us TRS80 users had the tape motor relay as our audio toy. It was a simple coil relay that would make a very audible click when engaged or released. Though there was code to control the speed of access in BASIC, there were no limitations on what you could do with it in ASM. Apparently, the limitation was put in place to keep from destroying tape drives and the relay.
I remember producing some really disturbing sounds, but ended up rigging the tape relay up to the power cable to my modem. With a small bit of code, a few wires, and raped cassette drive cable, it was relatively easy to turn the old RS 300 baud modems into auto-answer. Basically, splice the power cable to the modem, cut the cassette cable's drive motor and connect the two. Then splice the phone cable and connect the two live wires to the audio-in cable, then make a loop in ASM or BASIC that watches for a particular memory address value to jump from 7-10 to 250-255 for a few moments, then issue a MOTOR ON command and close the loop to power the modem who's switch is already flipped to ANS mode. Of course, this had limitations. I had to spend a lot of time tooling code for the BBS that would reduce the chances of a hung, dead connection (if the user hung up without logging out) as there was no actual carrier detection. My final solution was a TSR that would MOTOR OFF and reload the answer script if there was no activity for 2 minutes.
That's another example as to why I always considered Commodites to be similar to what script kiddies of the mid-80's would have been, compared to the more traditional TRS80 hackers. The Commodites downloaded someone else's crap and ran it while us TRS80 ppl got out the soldering iron on a regular basis or learned ASM so all 64k of resources would be usable.
Online gaming? Been around since Doom, yet only caught on around the time of Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament.
Maybe for you, but my first online game was a P51 Mustang battle flight sim on the TRS80 in 1983. It ran with relatively little lag on a 300 baud modem and supported 2 players. My BBS friends and I would play for hours and hours.
Online piracy? Been around since geeks in colleges would run IRC servers sharing everything from music to videos to games using simple dial-up modems yet only now we're hearing about it in the mainstream.
Nah, the BBS was the birthplace of modern warez distribution. The first time I knowingly logged into one was in 1981.
Most of the people involved weren't college age geeks, either. We were nerds back then. There was no 'chic geek' thing or nerdy IRC girls on Prozac. Except for Sherrod, but she was an IRC chiq before IRC even existed.
I heard the phone company was going to start charging a tariff on all modem communications, too.
If americans had lived through several generations of extreme poverty, they would be having masses of children too.
I would use the word 'uneducated' instead of 'dumb'. You can have a 130 IQ, but your mind will never develop properly on a starvation diet. Also, if there is no educational system in place, then that just adds to the problem. Intelligent people do some of the stupidest things when left to their own thoughts and beliefs without any exposure to the world around them.
I guess that makes us the smart ones for shouting our pseudo-standards in their direction. If you were unaware, many christians and catholic groups are against us giving aid to these nations even in the form of free condoms and sex education. Brilliant.
Here's what you need to sit down and think about:
The human race is globally connected. If you sit back and play the role of chickenhawk nationalist, then you are adding to the problem which will come back to sting your people later. It's not like the HIV spreading through africa isn't going to impact the US. It will just result in a far greater number of americans with HIV and much sooner. The borders are only invisible lines put in place by politicians, we are all in the same pool.
Personally, I find it asinine that /. moderators pass links to sites that obviously don't have the bandwidth to deal with being a /. headline.
/. banner ad clicks, eh?
Not only does his site suffer, but the other 200 virtual hosts on the server go down too. Guess what that results in? Pissed off customers calling the hosting company raising hell and demanding discounts on that month's service. Not to mention all the people who can't get to the other sites hosted on the box.
All in the name of a few
Yeah, too much exposure to the ports tree will make anyone a lazy slob.
don't think GE is inherently evil -- but it lacks the QA of time that traditional breeding has under its belt. Sure, Super Cow's milk may up my life span by 10 years and prevent cancer, but can you tell me it won't cause sterility (random, bad problem unforseen by creators of Super Cow) after a few generations of people consuming it? No you can't, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that there's a risk like that in the traditionally bred milk cow after a couple of hundred years of selective breeding.
You have a good point, but it has been accepted that we will have to deal with those problems as they pop up. Who knows? In a few generations we may be able to re-grow your replacement sexual organs in a small test tube. The fact is, people are starving right now and obese white people are making the decision not to take action while the majority of earth's inhabitants suffer**.
All this dicking around and worrying about how things might go wrong is costing millions of people their lives. I cite the rugged GE corn that will grow in a desert. Who cares if it fucks up the local balance? Humans created that very desert many years ago, the balance was lost then.
I'm sure megacows and super corn won't cause more harm than good. Not for many, many years. It's not like any evidence has shown any real evidence of a disaster in our future. But just like nuclear power, the masses have been cleansed in the media spin cycle. It doesn't take a disaster*, only the threat of one combined with technology the commoner doesn't understand.
* Chernobyl doesn't count. They didn't even have a large mass of water around to cool the core down.
** The first step towards a peaceful world is getting everyone's belly full.
There is no such thing as a refresh rate on a progressive display. There is pixel refresh latency -- but that is quite a bit different, technically speaking, and does not matter when looking at a static image. Anything above 15ms pixel refresh is annoying if you are playing a FPS. 25ms or less is good for an RPG. Anything higher, and smooth scrolling text will begin to ghost.
Progressive displays simply turn on or off a pixel and set a color to it. Non-progressive displays, like your CRT, constantly refreshes the information in a sweep across the entire screen. Thus it has a refresh rate.
It goes to show how many people got their display education from the Windows display control panel. I cracked up when I saw I still had to set a refresh rate with my LCD panel hooked up via DVI in XP.
Okay, this is just getting sickening. Google approaches it's IPO date and comes up with webmail. So, suddenly, it finds it's way into the 30 minute CNN/FOX treadmills, it's in all the papers, and there's not an IT news site without some big story on it.
Gee, someone at the AP sure has an interest in getting that IPO to skyrocket, huh?
Search engine + webmail =! news
Search engine + rumors + AP treadmill + IPO = lots of money for whoever is behind this big media push.
Please, don't be sheep. As soon as Google goes public, you guys are going to be crying about how cool Google was before all the banners and popups. Trust me, their business model will change for the worst. Right now, they are trying to get you to buy them and have got to be cool -- But soon, things will be different. There will be shareholder meetings and demands made to increase revenue. Then, Google will be just like AOL or Yahoo and you won't feel so excited about it anymore.
I'll be sure to link back to this thread in a few months when the first crappy news about Google breaks. Like when it becomes a whore to the share holders and advertisers.