Even though I've finished university of applied science about ten years ago I stumbled upon the MIT classical mechanics lectures by Walter Levin and couldn't resist to work through the whole course. It's excellent. The same goes for electricity and magnetism lectures.
It's easy to archive. But to search a large set of mail for knowledge it is not that good. That has nothing to do with e-mail but with discrete messages. Knowledge should go to a document management system, Wiki or something similar.
- Email is fine for communicating 1 to 1 or 1 to many, but it is a poor vehicle for many-to-many conversations.
Set up a mailing list for your topics, then you have an excellent tool for many-to-many conversations. The problem is nobody outside of Open Source projects knows about mailing list managers (Sympa, mailman etc.). So you got ridiculous large to and cc headers and TOFU quote chains instead of a single list address and an archive.
In our team, we've tried sticking to the rule that forbids the use of email for anything that will still be relevant one week from the day of sending.
This is a good idea: Prefer documentation over e-mails. Only use the e-mail to announce that there is documentation, and where it is.
I also seem to remember that the first units weren't entirely random, due to dead times in the counters or something similar. Random in theory does not mean random in practice, and I am not sure I would trust a billion dollar deal relying on a one-time-pad generated by the ANU quantum random number generator, at least until it had been through a lot of testing.
Having build my own random generator I can confirm this discrepancy between theory and practice. You have to be very cautious to eliminate externals noise and oscillation of the random source. As it's not possible to measure the true randomness but only guess it, additional filtering like bias elimination and mixing may improve the entropy, but may be still not true random.
The random service alone as cryptographic source raises questions about thrust. But if you use it as an additional source to mix into you entropy pool, it won't hurt and probably improve the quality and data rate of your random source.
Facebook is taking data that users are providing them, and sending it off to a third party to do statistical analysis on it. This is a terrible invasion of privacy, because Facebook users never intended for their private data to be shipped off to other companies.
The main reason why I don't have a Facebook account is because I have to sign an agreement, that all data I enter into Facebook belongs to Facebook and they could do with it whatever they like. Specifically they could provide it to other organisations. If I had signed this agreement like anyone with a Facebook account then I'll be ok with that.
Presently they are about resistance to insects, better weed management practices, and virus resistance, and they work.
Of course this works against the targeted diseases and parasites. No objections so far. But still there's a chance of diseases an parasites missed or adapting to the modified organisms.
And as a matter of fact, I have asked biologists about this very subject. University professors in genetics, biochemistry, plant biology, and agriculture. Guess how many of them opposed genetic engineering? None.
No wonder. I don't think it's all about genetic engineering in general, but how it can be used (and misused) by profit seeking corporations.
Whenever you take and engineer biological entities such as plants, that are gentically identical and create entire artificial eco systems that have low diversity, or in the case of GMO, _NO_ diversity, all sorts of catastrophic destruction can happen to the population.
That doesn't even make sense. Yes, lack of biodiversity is bad. Genetic engineering however is a way of improving a plant, not a system of agriculture. What you are saying is like saying that modifying cars with spinning rims means that there will only be one car on the market. Furthermore, even with GE crops, they breed the trait into numerous different lines of the crop.
Your point is valid.
Biodiversity is what you grow. genetic engineering is a way to improve it. That's a false dichotomy that makes absolutely no sense and could just as easily be applied to conventional breeding.
True.
GMO has got to be the worst possible idea of all time.
Tell that to the papaya farmers in Hawaii who would no longer be papaya farmers without the GE Rainbow papaya. Tell that to the farmers in India who stole Bt cotton seeds from test fields. Tell that to the farmers all across America, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina who willingly choose to buy GE seed every year.
According to my sources (various newspapers) the reality looks a bit different: The Indian farmers experienced a crop shortfalls due a fungus. The ones that stole Bt cotton most likely expected a wonder like the ones who purchased it because the advertisements from Monsanto promised exactly that wonder.
I'm sure many farmers are still willing to buy GE seed, as they expect more yield. But many of the farmers have no other chances: In the USA and possibly in other countries too it's nearly impossible to get unmodified seed for corn. And if you get unmodified seed you'll face the risk of contamination with GE seed and be sued for unauthorized use of GE seed. Or you can't simply find a seed washer because most of them got sued.
It isn't by accident you know, they will not put GMO labels on food. They know it is not safe, and they do not want you to know about it.
They?
Most likely he means the bio tech industry like Monsanto.
I always wondered why a country dedicated to the power of the free marked let the consumers uninformed about the content of the products they buy. Only an informed consumer can make the right decision. And if it works so well the producers will be proud to print a "contains GMO ingredients" on their products like the ones who are proud to print "contains no GMO ingredients" on their salad.
GMO also is causing massive extinction rates in our grain crops from gene contamination. If this isn't stopped, there won't be any grain species left that are safe to eat.
Really? Care to explain in detail how a single new transgene could possibly do that? Because it sounds like you just made that up.
It sounds like you know nothing about biology or agriculture, but you've got conspiracies down.
Corporations trying to create a monopoly by controlling the seeds with help of GMO is the biggest threat to the world food supply. What they do is to generate huge monocultures. And monocultures are prone to diseases and parasites. The GM cotton from Monsanto has had exactly this problem with a fungus in India. The resulting crop shortfall drove countless farmers into suicide. The benefit in resistance is quite low for the fact that the seeds are sold with this feature. There are experiments with highly mixed cultures and sorts (no GMO) in strips on farm land that need no pesticides at all while still allow harvesting with machines.
I have no problem with research. I really welcome research in this field. But I don't thrust any corporations to use GMO in a manner that the humanity will benefit from. The won't fight against hunger. They want to control our food to generate the most profit.
This is a hugh area if used for the sole purpose of installing solar panels. Fortunately there are vast amount of surfaces available without the need to cover additional areas.
I did your calculation before for Switzerland: For the 1.5 million buildings you have to use one square meter of solar panel to replace a nuclear reactor. We have five reactors resulting in about 5 square meters for each building to replace all of them. While this is a huge project it's possible to get a average area of 5 square meters per building.
An this example only take in account buildings. There are more unused surfaces: Avalanche barriers[1], surface parking lots, motorway and rail road borders (maybe even across motorways and rail roads), waste depots, yes even on atomic power plants [2] (while they wait to be decomposed).
Now there is a need to run your own Sofware again on PS3. As long as Sony allowed yellow dog linux few took the effort to hack around the hardware protection. As this should allow to run various OS outside the sandbox this may even allow some new applications.
~Andy
The "Paperless" office is less about "no paper" and far more about LESS paper.
That's the key. I work in a paperless office. We don't have fix desks, and having nearly no paper is the key to make this work. We basically need our notebook and an external keyboard and mouse when we move (each desk has a 24' monitor). There are no paper stacks and files to move.
There are still printers in the office, especially legal documents have to be in paper form. Sometimes it's easier to draw something on a sheet of paper. These are rare cases and we are pragmatic enough to just use a piece of paper. Later we scan it, if we still need it's content.
We make heavy use of collaborative tools like Wikis and integrated project tools (like Trac or Redmine). Even our ISO 9001 is managed within a Wiki.
If they where really available next year, this seems to be the perfect solution to control my home. The components works without programming at all out of the box, you'll just need a button and a few digitalSTROM enabled bulb or luster terminal to start. There is no wiring needed, only a simple component right after the fuse or each circuit.
I'll add the server component of course, as this part is released as OpenSource (GPL, as this was said at LinuxTag '09). Using this server I'm able to program and control the house exactly as I like.
I'll use OpenRemote to control the server part. This project finally connects all kind of home equippment together (KNX, UPnP, etc). This project should also provide an easy panel interface.
I think this is the key for battery powerered cars. Switching the batteries using a robot takes no longer than a stop at gas station. You don't own the batteries, you just rent them.
The hardest part with this is the need for the car manufacturers to commit to a few form factors. I think they are again too stupid and release brand specific batteries.
(I saw this working with electric bicycle rent service here in Switzerland/Engadin, where you've got a battery service in each village. You just change the batteries if they are empty. So you'll able to drive a whole day).
We are very glad to see you here. I think we showed enough loyality during standardization of you Office Formats and by contract with you without public invitation to bid. Our goverment really rely on you.
I just purchased four compact disks I've immediatly ripped into OGG Vorbis and put into the disk shelf, where the stay untouched. At least untouched until I look into the booklets for the song texts or need full quality to cut and edit.
This costs more than e.g. online store, but I've got a good backup. I do this only with a few artits/albums I really like very much. Single song or not so good one I just buy online (but without DRM).
If you go after Swiss Girls you have to choose between German, French, Italian, and Raeto-Romance. I'll suggest you choose the last one (Rumantsch), it's as nice as Swedish (the Language) and you'll become a credible skiing instructor. Everybody knows they got the hot girls.
I purchased a new HP Compaq subnotebook. No chance to get it without Vista. Ok, giv'em a try: after 3 Hours installing Vista after turning it on the first time a new Vista desktop looked at me. Not too bad, but it has had pre installed Norton Antivirus. I already spend hours to deinstall Norton before.
To make a long story short. I finally installed Ubuntu into to whole disk.
You're right. But comparing those impacts with the nuclear power it lasts not as long as nuclear radiation.
While a nuclear power plant has very little direct emissions (and none nuclear emissions), the resulting nuclear trash is a big problem. The recycling is still dangerous and dirty (Sellafield) and the disposal an unsolved problem. We may bury them save for more than a humans live, but then? Is it as save as we belive? I dunno...
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I've finished university of applied science about ten years ago I stumbled upon the MIT classical mechanics lectures by Walter Levin and couldn't resist to work through the whole course. It's excellent. The same goes for electricity and magnetism lectures.
- Email sucks as an archive.
It's easy to archive. But to search a large set of mail for knowledge it is not that good. That has nothing to do with e-mail but with discrete messages. Knowledge should go to a document management system, Wiki or something similar.
- Email is fine for communicating 1 to 1 or 1 to many, but it is a poor vehicle for many-to-many conversations.
Set up a mailing list for your topics, then you have an excellent tool for many-to-many conversations. The problem is nobody outside of Open Source projects knows about mailing list managers (Sympa, mailman etc.). So you got ridiculous large to and cc headers and TOFU quote chains instead of a single list address and an archive.
In our team, we've tried sticking to the rule that forbids the use of email for anything that will still be relevant one week from the day of sending.
This is a good idea: Prefer documentation over e-mails. Only use the e-mail to announce that there is documentation, and where it is.
~Andy
I also seem to remember that the first units weren't entirely random, due to dead times in the counters or something similar. Random in theory does not mean random in practice, and I am not sure I would trust a billion dollar deal relying on a one-time-pad generated by the ANU quantum random number generator, at least until it had been through a lot of testing.
Having build my own random generator I can confirm this discrepancy between theory and practice. You have to be very cautious to eliminate externals noise and oscillation of the random source. As it's not possible to measure the true randomness but only guess it, additional filtering like bias elimination and mixing may improve the entropy, but may be still not true random.
The random service alone as cryptographic source raises questions about thrust. But if you use it as an additional source to mix into you entropy pool, it won't hurt and probably improve the quality and data rate of your random source.
~Andy
I'm sure the apes are not DAUs, this category is still occupied by humans...
Facebook is taking data that users are providing them, and sending it off to a third party to do statistical analysis on it. This is a terrible invasion of privacy, because Facebook users never intended for their private data to be shipped off to other companies.
The main reason why I don't have a Facebook account is because I have to sign an agreement, that all data I enter into Facebook belongs to Facebook and they could do with it whatever they like. Specifically they could provide it to other organisations. If I had signed this agreement like anyone with a Facebook account then I'll be ok with that.
~Andy
Presently they are about resistance to insects, better weed management practices, and virus resistance, and they work.
Of course this works against the targeted diseases and parasites. No objections so far. But still there's a chance of diseases an parasites missed or adapting to the modified organisms.
And as a matter of fact, I have asked biologists about this very subject. University professors in genetics, biochemistry, plant biology, and agriculture. Guess how many of them opposed genetic engineering? None.
No wonder. I don't think it's all about genetic engineering in general, but how it can be used (and misused) by profit seeking corporations.
Whenever you take and engineer biological entities such as plants, that are gentically identical and create entire artificial eco systems that have low diversity, or in the case of GMO, _NO_ diversity, all sorts of catastrophic destruction can happen to the population.
That doesn't even make sense. Yes, lack of biodiversity is bad. Genetic engineering however is a way of improving a plant, not a system of agriculture. What you are saying is like saying that modifying cars with spinning rims means that there will only be one car on the market. Furthermore, even with GE crops, they breed the trait into numerous different lines of the crop.
Your point is valid.
Biodiversity is what you grow. genetic engineering is a way to improve it. That's a false dichotomy that makes absolutely no sense and could just as easily be applied to conventional breeding.
True.
GMO has got to be the worst possible idea of all time.
Tell that to the papaya farmers in Hawaii who would no longer be papaya farmers without the GE Rainbow papaya. Tell that to the farmers in India who stole Bt cotton seeds from test fields. Tell that to the farmers all across America, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina who willingly choose to buy GE seed every year.
According to my sources (various newspapers) the reality looks a bit different: The Indian farmers experienced a crop shortfalls due a fungus. The ones that stole Bt cotton most likely expected a wonder like the ones who purchased it because the advertisements from Monsanto promised exactly that wonder.
I'm sure many farmers are still willing to buy GE seed, as they expect more yield. But many of the farmers have no other chances: In the USA and possibly in other countries too it's nearly impossible to get unmodified seed for corn. And if you get unmodified seed you'll face the risk of contamination with GE seed and be sued for unauthorized use of GE seed. Or you can't simply find a seed washer because most of them got sued.
It isn't by accident you know, they will not put GMO labels on food. They know it is not safe, and they do not want you to know about it.
They?
Most likely he means the bio tech industry like Monsanto.
I always wondered why a country dedicated to the power of the free marked let the consumers uninformed about the content of the products they buy. Only an informed consumer can make the right decision. And if it works so well the producers will be proud to print a "contains GMO ingredients" on their products like the ones who are proud to print "contains no GMO ingredients" on their salad.
GMO also is causing massive extinction rates in our grain crops from gene contamination. If this isn't stopped, there won't be any grain species left that are safe to eat.
Really? Care to explain in detail how a single new transgene could possibly do that? Because it sounds like you just made that up.
It sounds like you know nothing about biology or agriculture, but you've got conspiracies down.
The the original comment impli
Corporations trying to create a monopoly by controlling the seeds with help of GMO is the biggest threat to the world food supply. What they do is to generate huge monocultures. And monocultures are prone to diseases and parasites. The GM cotton from Monsanto has had exactly this problem with a fungus in India. The resulting crop shortfall drove countless farmers into suicide. The benefit in resistance is quite low for the fact that the seeds are sold with this feature. There are experiments with highly mixed cultures and sorts (no GMO) in strips on farm land that need no pesticides at all while still allow harvesting with machines.
I have no problem with research. I really welcome research in this field. But I don't thrust any corporations to use GMO in a manner that the humanity will benefit from. The won't fight against hunger. They want to control our food to generate the most profit.
~Andy
This is a hugh area if used for the sole purpose of installing solar panels. Fortunately there are vast amount of surfaces available without the need to cover additional areas.
I did your calculation before for Switzerland: For the 1.5 million buildings you have to use one square meter of solar panel to replace a nuclear reactor. We have five reactors resulting in about 5 square meters for each building to replace all of them. While this is a huge project it's possible to get a average area of 5 square meters per building.
An this example only take in account buildings. There are more unused surfaces: Avalanche barriers[1], surface parking lots, motorway and rail road borders (maybe even across motorways and rail roads), waste depots, yes even on atomic power plants [2] (while they wait to be decomposed).
Now there is a need to run your own Sofware again on PS3. As long as Sony allowed yellow dog linux few took the effort to hack around the hardware protection. As this should allow to run various OS outside the sandbox this may even allow some new applications. ~Andy
The "Paperless" office is less about "no paper" and far more about LESS paper.
That's the key. I work in a paperless office. We don't have fix desks, and having nearly no paper is the key to make this work. We basically need our notebook and an external keyboard and mouse when we move (each desk has a 24' monitor). There are no paper stacks and files to move.
There are still printers in the office, especially legal documents have to be in paper form. Sometimes it's easier to draw something on a sheet of paper. These are rare cases and we are pragmatic enough to just use a piece of paper. Later we scan it, if we still need it's content.
We make heavy use of collaborative tools like Wikis and integrated project tools (like Trac or Redmine). Even our ISO 9001 is managed within a Wiki.
You had me up until that bit.
Why? He's calling it technological miracle, that's quite appropriate.
Yeah, the IOC lost the last bit of sportmanship in favor of commercial profit maximization.
First they overruled any critism by the Indian natives. Then ignored any warnings about the insecure bob run. Now the claim insane property rights.
Yes, but only because last time I tried not to, they put my face in their database.
Only your face?
If they where really available next year, this seems to be the perfect solution to control my home. The components works without programming at all out of the box, you'll just need a button and a few digitalSTROM enabled bulb or luster terminal to start. There is no wiring needed, only a simple component right after the fuse or each circuit.
I'll add the server component of course, as this part is released as OpenSource (GPL, as this was said at LinuxTag '09). Using this server I'm able to program and control the house exactly as I like.
I'll use OpenRemote to control the server part. This project finally connects all kind of home equippment together (KNX, UPnP, etc). This project should also provide an easy panel interface.
I think this is the key for battery powerered cars. Switching the batteries using a robot takes no longer than a stop at gas station. You don't own the batteries, you just rent them.
The hardest part with this is the need for the car manufacturers to commit to a few form factors. I think they are again too stupid and release brand specific batteries.
(I saw this working with electric bicycle rent service here in Switzerland/Engadin, where you've got a battery service in each village. You just change the batteries if they are empty. So you'll able to drive a whole day).
~Andy
Welcome to Switzerland.
We are very glad to see you here. I think we showed enough loyality during standardization of you Office Formats and by contract with you without public invitation to bid. Our goverment really rely on you.
Thank you
Your Swiss Goverment
So did I.
I just purchased four compact disks I've immediatly ripped into OGG Vorbis and put into the disk shelf, where the stay untouched. At least untouched until I look into the booklets for the song texts or need full quality to cut and edit.
This costs more than e.g. online store, but I've got a good backup. I do this only with a few artits/albums I really like very much. Single song or not so good one I just buy online (but without DRM).
~Andy
C'mon, they'll never use that feature, that would destrNO CARRIER
Learn Swiss..........Swedish hot chicks
Nice joke.
If you go after Swiss Girls you have to choose between German, French, Italian, and Raeto-Romance. I'll suggest you choose the last one (Rumantsch), it's as nice as Swedish (the Language) and you'll become a credible skiing instructor. Everybody knows they got the hot girls.
I purchased a new HP Compaq subnotebook. No chance to get it without Vista. Ok, giv'em a try: after 3 Hours installing Vista after turning it on the first time a new Vista desktop looked at me. Not too bad, but it has had pre installed Norton Antivirus. I already spend hours to deinstall Norton before.
To make a long story short. I finally installed Ubuntu into to whole disk.
At least it was broadcasted yesterday in 10vor10 news:
http://www.sf.tv/sf1/10vor10/index.php
A while ago I was very bored and coded a tetris clone in Excel.
The timer I used is too slow but it works... http://www.knitter.ch/src/snipplets/excel-tetris/
Cheers, Andy
You're right. But comparing those impacts with the nuclear power it lasts not as long as nuclear radiation.
While a nuclear power plant has very little direct emissions (and none nuclear emissions), the resulting nuclear trash is a big problem. The recycling is still dangerous and dirty (Sellafield) and the disposal an unsolved problem. We may bury them save for more than a humans live, but then? Is it as save as we belive? I dunno...
~ Andy
> brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently
Do they process information at all?