I thought maybe if I held onto Doc Brown's Flux Crapacitor while jogging, that I could time travel faster WITHOUT needing that big aluminum disgrace of a screendoor we call a Delorian.
In my tests, I found that time travel occurred faster on foot than in a Delorian! Even better than running with the Flux Capacitor, jogging in place is even faster! And you know what else is faster to time travel than both the Delorian and two placid legs? That's right, I sat in a recliner and with a TV Remote went around the world in 60 minutes and was back in the confines of my house quicker than any other means.
And the text I wrote above, I uhm wrote it yesterday and it appeared today because I can time travel faster than even Slashdot! So hah!
Not fake, just not accurate.
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The images will never be perfect. The page you reference on the space.com article was not the exact image stored on the rover. When the images are transmitted from the Rover back to JPL, there is a transmission loss in the retro-bias diagonal frequency bass carrier that causes the image to be distorted. The fuzzy look we receive is then dithered and poly-metrophased with the dark "shadows" you see. This brings the image back to what we could theoretically predict it would be if the image was proper.
Somewhat offtopic, though much software ON THE GROUND at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is written in Java, but not software on the spacecraft. This doesn't have any problem, but due to Java's slow execution rate on the Rover's computer we actualy lose tetra-physical carbonic exposure rate because the camera simply can't be operated as quickly in Java as if the comman protocol were operated through a more iffecient lower-level language such as C.
Needless to say, I wrote some of the software used for the mission in Java, and it worked very well for our purposes, namely due to platform independence and quick development time. We had a heck of a time with some of the GUI code, however.
The rover runs VxWorks from Wind River. Very solid. Cheers,
Jim Cobgrobbler Science Activation Planning Developer Mars Exploration Rovers
I just checked the Contrib section of my local Linux vendor and discovered libTalent-1.0.so is obsolete and is only needed when you buy a computer. What you need to download is libTalent-1.0.1.so. I may attest that symlinking libTalent-1.0.so to libTalent-1.0.1.so is protocol-compatible for applications linked with the earlier libTalent.
Wow, how quick Linux technology updates faster than Mac OSX!
As of this day, only FreeBSD can run these applicatiosn but Mac OSX can't do anything with them...
OpenOffice-1.0-x86-Linux.tar.gz
netscape-v304-export.x86-unknown-linux-elf.tar.gz
(oh yea, ad infinitum "-x86-linux...")
Neither is Open Office specialized (it's a bread-and-butter office productivity suite), nor is it high quality.
Allow me to impose on everyone my multiple-personalities...
Enable Mode.Bruce-Perens If there is any lacking feature which the majority of other users didn't find needful, you are welcome to implement it yourself as you have the sourcecode. Disable Mode.Bruce-Perens
Enable Mode.Theo-Du-Ratd RTFM! Add features you want! If you want a paper-clip, put it in there GODDDAAAMIT!#@$ Disable Mode.Theo-Du-Ratd
"Itanium is a poor architecture. This isn't just my opinion, it's the opinion of the professor here at UT Austin working on the multi-core lightweight processor"
Your professor's opinion is... well... flawed.
Itanium is an excellent architecture. Its flaws come from politics:
An excellent architecture has no faults. Clearly, the Alpha architectuer would b considered The Excellent Architectuer(TM) as it out-performs the Itanium2! Go check the benchmarks for a 21264CB Alpha!
1: Itanium requires good compilers. For now, that means compilers from Intel. GCC will be fine for running Mozilla on an Itanium, but technical apps simply won't perform anywhere near the performance of the machine when compied with GCC.
It appears Itanium is in a chicken-before-the-egg issue: Hello Mr. Anderson, what good is a CPU's outstanding performance...when...there...exists...no...outstan ding...compiler? The Itanium arch has been available for 3 years and there has not yet been a Good Compiler(TM) for it. Here is Itanium2, an update of the Itanium architecture, and there is not Good Compiler(TM) in sight. I have more confidence in buying swampland and praying to God for a drought to dry it all up. Better yet, I hear there is some HOT land for sale in California that has potential; a smoking deal, just a few issues of supply and demand of fire-fighters just-in-case...
2: Intel wants to market Itanium as a server chip. That means that they are putting 3MB or 6MB on the high end Itaniums. Soon they will have a 9MB cache version. Lots of cache means lots of transistors means lots of heat.
There is no spoo^H^H^H^Hserver chip. Yesterday's dedicated servers are today's 1337 workstations.
3: Intel is not fabbing Itanium with a state of the art process. Intel leads the world in process technology, yet their Itanium is still on a 130nm process. Before Madison (about a year ago), it was on a 180nm process.
Yea, ok Mohammed...
Some misconceptions:
1: Itanium is "inefficent". This couldn't be further from the truth. At 1.5Ghz, it whoops *anything* else in SPECfp (by a margin of 1.5x or more) and matches the 3.2Ghz P4 or 2.2Ghz Opteron in SPECint.
Itanium2 is latest technology and has already been whooped by the Alpha CPU. Sure, it's arguabl on the Itanium2's actualy performance when the COMPILER can't put all that Performance on the pavement. From an architecture that didn't require a compiler written in the future to be taken forward in the past using a mod'd Delorian; AlphaLinux.org, providing a link to a Heis.de article with a benchmark between Itanium2 and Alpha. Itanium2 is inferior to 2-year-old Alpha technology, and so is PowerPC4.
2: Itanium is "slow". Wrong again, see above.
Somewhere in Jerusalem, a Yeti is jumping on his desk flinging his poop at Developers(TM) and shouting: "Compilers, compilers, compilers, compilers!"
3: Itanium doesn't scale. Wrong again. Itanium scales better than any other current architecture, getting nearly 100% of clock in both int and fp. Opteron gets around 99% int and 95% fp. Pentium 4 gets around 85% int and 80% fp. I don't have data for PPC970.
Shit! Flying Shit! In Air! "Compilers, compilers, compilers, compilers!"
4: Itanium is expensive. This is true, but it has to do with politics rather than architecture. Itanium uses *fewer* transistors and does *more* instructions per clock than a RISC architecture. Itanium takes much of the logic out of the CPU and puts it into the compiler (this is why you need good compilers). Itanium's architecture is called EPIC, or explicitly paralell instruction computing, because each instruction is "tagged" by the compiler to tell the CPU what instructions can and cannot be executed in paralell.
I hate to have fed this troll. I'm a dope ped
Re:PDAs are not for all types of people
on
Death of the PDA?
·
· Score: 1
I asked the same question to Johny Cash, and do you know what he replied? He says to me, "You can't take it with you, because PDA's were dead from the beginning!!"
Realy, a PDA is just a cripplied computer! All PDAs were supposed to have excellent handwriting recognition and a miniature fold-up keyboard, but they all didn't provide either of that in good standing. A PDA can't pull its own weight, as performance-wise it can hardly do anything on its own. Finding one with a single RS232 port would be luck, or even a USB port, but we're left fighting with ways to expand its use and interactivity with OTHER computers and PDAs.
PDAs are dead from the start, meant to be replaced by tablet-computers too hot to hold in your hands and too expensive to risk carying in public lest it be mis-placed with a 4-foot fall to the ground or stolen by a nimble-prick fellow student or public enemy.
A computer in my sunglasses is what I want. I want to be a Terminator, like Arnold BrownSchwagger was; as I look at everyone and measure their pant-size and breast-size in real-time skynet precision.
That's right,/. participants...don't mirror little Jimmy's Milipede Linux/MAME project. Fuck that server in the a$$ with high-bandwidth bills.
Look at little Jimmy. You sicko slashdotters kick sand in his server's face. How do you think poor little Jimmy's $5/week allowance will pay for the damages?
Hey friend's of little Jimmy, would you like to get even? Here's a great idea, let's all go visit SLASHDOT.ORG a few HUNDRED times! Maybe if we tried hard(er)...(est), we could "Jimmy" the slashdot domain. That'll teach those four-eyed bullies on our playground from messing with us!
PS: I got dibbs on previous-art on Jimmy-ing a domain. heh
Yep I understand and also think we need a more friendly website to produce information for alternatives to Microsoft software. For those of you that have seen the Blue Screen of Death, goto FuckMicrosoft.com. For those of you that enjoy a little spice with your operating system, try GNU/Lesbian or RTFM OS. And for those of you that always RTFM, try Emacs OS; just remember that when using Emacs OS, you need a good wordprocessor and the best one you can get is here.
Maybe if you stopped oogling over girly pictures, you would recognize that I expressed I could not remember the name of the sourceforge project and thus I provided one "WxWindows" and one "Jungo WinDrive" that I remember well. Stop being a baby over it, pr0ntab.
WxWindowsappears to be the solution, yet it is "is a free C++ framework that facilitates cross platform software development, including GUIs, threads, sockets, database, file system access, etc."
I remember of a sourceforge-hosted project that dealt specifically with cross-platform driver development, but the memory evades me at the moment. After a quick-search of google, appears Jungo WinDriver, but that wasn't the one I was thinking of.
How do I keep politicians from spamming my message recorder?
For crying out loud, I just received a message from "Concerned Republicans against Arnold Schwarzenegger", and then another from Martin Sheene "urgeing" me to vote for Cruz Bustamante!
They should extend the anti-solicitations list to anyone that costs me money on my phone usage; that means everyone, my next-door neighbor, relatives, with exception to The Stripper (she's a personal call *wing)
Yes, the BioTerrorism "is not a threat" angle is actualy becoming somehwhat true. It appears the BioTerrorism slant used by politicians is being used to just put more laws on the books and grasp on none other than freedom? Supporting the "theory", a google cache'd article dug from a student.augie.edu website, and quoted below;
Bioterrorism not a threat at Augustana, professor says
Anthrax and smallpox: concerns of the nation since 9/11 scares
By Marcella Prokop
Mirror Assistant Editor
Since last fall's anthrax attacks, students at larger schools who study potentially harmful micro
organisms have been forced to abandon their work because of new regulations. This, however, is
not the case at Augustana, so students shouldn't see any changes in the way they are being
taught, according to Dr. Nola Bormann.
"We don't deal with any micro-organisms that are at a high risk for bioterrorism," she said. "So
all of the new regulations haven't really affected the way we do research here, [but] it's causing
lots of scientists in universities to destroy samples to err on the side of safety."
For Bormann, who gave a presentation on bioterrorism in the Gilbert Science Center last month,
the anthrax mailings presented an interesting topic - one that she felt needed to be addressed. It
was for this reason that she presented her findings at the Biology Department Seminar.
In her presentation, she focused on the types of micro-organisms that terrorists can use for
bioterrorism and what harm they would cause were they used. Because the anthrax mailings were
the only attempt at bioterrorism in recent history, Bormann also focused on why bio terrorism may
become more popular.
"It was the first somewhat-organized bioterrorism attack in United States modern history,"she
said. "It brought the use of micro organisms as international weapons for killing to a more
prominent focus - not only for microbiologists but for the general public. That moral boundary has
been crossed."
According to Bormann, bioterrorism is the intentional use of micro-organisms to cause harm or
death not only to humans, but also to plants and animals.
"Scientists are also starting to wonder about what types of plant pathogens terrorists might be able
to use [on crops]," she said. "That type of use would be devastating."
Scientists aren't the only group of researchers concerned about bioterrorism. The government has
also launched studies of its own and is providing major funding to the study of bioterrorism.
"One of the outcomes of the anthrax letters was that it caused people to look at bioterrorism as a
real threat," Bormann said. "All of a sudden, [the government] is pouring more money into
bioterrorism defense."
Anthrax should not be thought of as a tool for terrorists in every instance, however. The most
common form of anthrax, known as "cutaneous anthrax," is contracted through an abrasion in the
skin. It is a typical health hazard of those who work closely with animals or animal by-products.
People in the meat or leather industry face this type of anthrax.
Anthrax is a bacteria, and in its natural form, can lie dormant in the soil where an infected animal
has died. A person who comes in contact with this soil usually will not get the "anthrax-letter"
form, which is more commonly known as "inhalation anthrax."
"Anthrax can survive for long periods in the environment," Bormann said. "If you have some kind of
background, some microbiology knowledge, you can grow up that bacteria and prepare it in a way
that it can be distr
Slightly Offtopic, yet when the article referenced Opensource Biology I got the urge to post about Internet Archive.org's collection of opensourced education material. It has some excellent subjective matter for anyone looking for information to read between your own class books. It's Biology section only has one title "Uses of Waste Water", so anyone with material willing to contribute would indeed strengthen the freedom of information movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh
More like McManagement.
[...]his acting to be quite poor in star wars and would have preferred someone else in his place; not sure who though.
Yoda: Resurrect McCully Culkin, you will? Weakened, the force is.
Damn you, Lucas! Damn you!
Yoda is a woman. Regards, George.
Nooooooooooooooooo!
dman lysdexia,
I thought maybe if I held onto Doc Brown's Flux Crapacitor while jogging, that I could time travel faster WITHOUT needing that big aluminum disgrace of a screendoor we call a Delorian.
In my tests, I found that time travel occurred faster on foot than in a Delorian! Even better than running with the Flux Capacitor, jogging in place is even faster! And you know what else is faster to time travel than both the Delorian and two placid legs? That's right, I sat in a recliner and with a TV Remote went around the world in 60 minutes and was back in the confines of my house quicker than any other means.
And the text I wrote above, I uhm wrote it yesterday and it appeared today because I can time travel faster than even Slashdot! So hah!
The images will never be perfect. The page you reference on the space.com article was not the exact image stored on the rover. When the images are transmitted from the Rover back to JPL, there is a transmission loss in the retro-bias diagonal frequency bass carrier that causes the image to be distorted. The fuzzy look we receive is then dithered and poly-metrophased with the dark "shadows" you see. This brings the image back to what we could theoretically predict it would be if the image was proper.
Somewhat offtopic, though much software ON THE GROUND at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is written in Java, but not software on the spacecraft. This doesn't have any problem, but due to Java's slow execution rate on the Rover's computer we actualy lose tetra-physical carbonic exposure rate because the camera simply can't be operated as quickly in Java as if the comman protocol were operated through a more iffecient lower-level language such as C.
Needless to say, I wrote some of the software used for the mission in Java, and it worked very well for our purposes, namely due to platform independence and quick development time. We had a heck of a time with some of the GUI code, however.
The rover runs VxWorks from Wind River. Very solid. Cheers,
Jim Cobgrobbler
Science Activation Planning Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
What of the Good products leading to a massice industry and then stagnates?
BTW, this comic comes to mind
Patent the technology so you can sue the spammers when they use it.
Why couldn't RedHat do this?
How can this be applied to SCO's C&D letters?
Or is AT&T breeding its own sinister plan of mailbox domination?
Find out next, on the BOFH channel!
I just checked the Contrib section of my local Linux vendor and discovered libTalent-1.0.so is obsolete and is only needed when you buy a computer. What you need to download is libTalent-1.0.1.so. I may attest that symlinking libTalent-1.0.so to libTalent-1.0.1.so is protocol-compatible for applications linked with the earlier libTalent. Wow, how quick Linux technology updates faster than Mac OSX!
$ cd /mnt/wineC/Program*Files/Adobe/Illustrator
$ wine Illustrator.exe.
Also, having invested the Time/Money in downloading and installing libTalent-1.0.so may do some help if you don't have libwine.
As of this day, only FreeBSD can run these applicatiosn but Mac OSX can't do anything with them... OpenOffice-1.0-x86-Linux.tar.gz netscape-v304-export.x86-unknown-linux-elf.tar.gz (oh yea, ad infinitum "-x86-linux...")
Neither is Open Office specialized (it's a bread-and-butter office productivity suite), nor is it high quality.
Allow me to impose on everyone my multiple-personalities...
Enable Mode.Bruce-Perens
If there is any lacking feature which the majority of other users didn't find needful, you are welcome to implement it yourself as you have the sourcecode.
Disable Mode.Bruce-Perens
Enable Mode.Theo-Du-Ratd
RTFM! Add features you want! If you want a paper-clip, put it in there GODDDAAAMIT!#@$
Disable Mode.Theo-Du-Ratd
Linux has many high-quality desktop applications: WordPerfect OpenOffice Xess Applixware Gnomeeting Blender Maya Mozilla Nvu GIMP (ad infinitum sourceforge.net && freshmeat.net) Civilization Quake3 Return to Castle Wolfenstein Kohan FreeCraft FreeSpace Vendetta (ad infinitum happypenguin.org && linuxgames.com)
"Itanium is a poor architecture. This isn't just my opinion, it's the opinion of the professor here at UT Austin working on the multi-core lightweight processor"
Your professor's opinion is... well... flawed.
Itanium is an excellent architecture. Its flaws come from politics:
An excellent architecture has no faults. Clearly, the Alpha architectuer would b considered The Excellent Architectuer(TM) as it out-performs the Itanium2! Go check the benchmarks for a 21264CB Alpha!
1: Itanium requires good compilers. For now, that means compilers from Intel. GCC will be fine for running Mozilla on an Itanium, but technical apps simply won't perform anywhere near the performance of the machine when compied with GCC.
It appears Itanium is in a chicken-before-the-egg issue: Hello Mr. Anderson, what good is a CPU's outstanding performance...when...there...exists...no...outstan ding...compiler? The Itanium arch has been available for 3 years and there has not yet been a Good Compiler(TM) for it. Here is Itanium2, an update of the Itanium architecture, and there is not Good Compiler(TM) in sight. I have more confidence in buying swampland and praying to God for a drought to dry it all up. Better yet, I hear there is some HOT land for sale in California that has potential; a smoking deal, just a few issues of supply and demand of fire-fighters just-in-case...
2: Intel wants to market Itanium as a server chip. That means that they are putting 3MB or 6MB on the high end Itaniums. Soon they will have a 9MB cache version. Lots of cache means lots of transistors means lots of heat.
There is no spoo^H^H^H^Hserver chip. Yesterday's dedicated servers are today's 1337 workstations.
3: Intel is not fabbing Itanium with a state of the art process. Intel leads the world in process technology, yet their Itanium is still on a 130nm process. Before Madison (about a year ago), it was on a 180nm process.
Yea, ok Mohammed...
Some misconceptions:
1: Itanium is "inefficent". This couldn't be further from the truth. At 1.5Ghz, it whoops *anything* else in SPECfp (by a margin of 1.5x or more) and matches the 3.2Ghz P4 or 2.2Ghz Opteron in SPECint.
Itanium2 is latest technology and has already been whooped by the Alpha CPU. Sure, it's arguabl on the Itanium2's actualy performance when the COMPILER can't put all that Performance on the pavement. From an architecture that didn't require a compiler written in the future to be taken forward in the past using a mod'd Delorian; AlphaLinux.org, providing a link to a Heis.de article with a benchmark between Itanium2 and Alpha. Itanium2 is inferior to 2-year-old Alpha technology, and so is PowerPC4.
2: Itanium is "slow". Wrong again, see above.
Somewhere in Jerusalem, a Yeti is jumping on his desk flinging his poop at Developers(TM) and shouting: "Compilers, compilers, compilers, compilers!"
3: Itanium doesn't scale. Wrong again. Itanium scales better than any other current architecture, getting nearly 100% of clock in both int and fp. Opteron gets around 99% int and 95% fp. Pentium 4 gets around 85% int and 80% fp. I don't have data for PPC970.
Shit! Flying Shit! In Air! "Compilers, compilers, compilers, compilers!"
4: Itanium is expensive. This is true, but it has to do with politics rather than architecture. Itanium uses *fewer* transistors and does *more* instructions per clock than a RISC architecture. Itanium takes much of the logic out of the CPU and puts it into the compiler (this is why you need good compilers). Itanium's architecture is called EPIC, or explicitly paralell instruction computing, because each instruction is "tagged" by the compiler to tell the CPU what instructions can and cannot be executed in paralell.
I hate to have fed this troll. I'm a dope ped
I asked the same question to Johny Cash, and do you know what he replied? He says to me, "You can't take it with you, because PDA's were dead from the beginning!!"
Realy, a PDA is just a cripplied computer! All PDAs were supposed to have excellent handwriting recognition and a miniature fold-up keyboard, but they all didn't provide either of that in good standing. A PDA can't pull its own weight, as performance-wise it can hardly do anything on its own. Finding one with a single RS232 port would be luck, or even a USB port, but we're left fighting with ways to expand its use and interactivity with OTHER computers and PDAs.
PDAs are dead from the start, meant to be replaced by tablet-computers too hot to hold in your hands and too expensive to risk carying in public lest it be mis-placed with a 4-foot fall to the ground or stolen by a nimble-prick fellow student or public enemy.
A computer in my sunglasses is what I want. I want to be a Terminator, like Arnold BrownSchwagger was; as I look at everyone and measure their pant-size and breast-size in real-time skynet precision.
Yet Another Sick Post. *cough* karma whore *cough* I have some CowboyNeal-brand syrup that can clear-up that dreadful disease you have.
That's right, /. participants...don't mirror little Jimmy's Milipede Linux/MAME project. Fuck that server in the a$$ with high-bandwidth bills.
Look at little Jimmy. You sicko slashdotters kick sand in his server's face. How do you think poor little Jimmy's $5/week allowance will pay for the damages?
Hey friend's of little Jimmy, would you like to get even? Here's a great idea, let's all go visit SLASHDOT.ORG a few HUNDRED times! Maybe if we tried hard(er)...(est), we could "Jimmy" the slashdot domain. That'll teach those four-eyed bullies on our playground from messing with us!
PS: I got dibbs on previous-art on Jimmy-ing a domain. heh
Yep I understand and also think we need a more friendly website to produce information for alternatives to Microsoft software. For those of you that have seen the Blue Screen of Death, goto FuckMicrosoft.com. For those of you that enjoy a little spice with your operating system, try GNU/Lesbian or RTFM OS. And for those of you that always RTFM, try Emacs OS; just remember that when using Emacs OS, you need a good wordprocessor and the best one you can get is here.
Maybe if you stopped oogling over girly pictures, you would recognize that I expressed I could not remember the name of the sourceforge project and thus I provided one "WxWindows" and one "Jungo WinDrive" that I remember well. Stop being a baby over it, pr0ntab.
WxWindows appears to be the solution, yet it is "is a free C++ framework that facilitates cross platform software development, including GUIs, threads, sockets, database, file system access, etc." I remember of a sourceforge-hosted project that dealt specifically with cross-platform driver development, but the memory evades me at the moment. After a quick-search of google, appears Jungo WinDriver, but that wasn't the one I was thinking of.
FuckMicrosoft.com has the largest list of Microsoft-alternative software that I have ever seen.
I think Theo should get off the rags. Hey THEO! Y0u r teh scr3w.
For crying out loud, I just received a message from "Concerned Republicans against Arnold Schwarzenegger", and then another from Martin Sheene "urgeing" me to vote for Cruz Bustamante!
They should extend the anti-solicitations list to anyone that costs me money on my phone usage; that means everyone, my next-door neighbor, relatives, with exception to The Stripper (she's a personal call *wing)
Yes, the BioTerrorism "is not a threat" angle is actualy becoming somehwhat true. It appears the BioTerrorism slant used by politicians is being used to just put more laws on the books and grasp on none other than freedom? Supporting the "theory", a google cache'd article dug from a student.augie.edu website, and quoted below;
Bioterrorism not a threat at Augustana, professor says Anthrax and smallpox: concerns of the nation since 9/11 scares
By Marcella Prokop
Mirror Assistant Editor
Since last fall's anthrax attacks, students at larger schools who study potentially harmful micro organisms have been forced to abandon their work because of new regulations. This, however, is not the case at Augustana, so students shouldn't see any changes in the way they are being taught, according to Dr. Nola Bormann. "We don't deal with any micro-organisms that are at a high risk for bioterrorism," she said. "So all of the new regulations haven't really affected the way we do research here, [but] it's causing lots of scientists in universities to destroy samples to err on the side of safety." For Bormann, who gave a presentation on bioterrorism in the Gilbert Science Center last month, the anthrax mailings presented an interesting topic - one that she felt needed to be addressed. It was for this reason that she presented her findings at the Biology Department Seminar. In her presentation, she focused on the types of micro-organisms that terrorists can use for bioterrorism and what harm they would cause were they used. Because the anthrax mailings were the only attempt at bioterrorism in recent history, Bormann also focused on why bio terrorism may become more popular. "It was the first somewhat-organized bioterrorism attack in United States modern history,"she said. "It brought the use of micro organisms as international weapons for killing to a more prominent focus - not only for microbiologists but for the general public. That moral boundary has been crossed." According to Bormann, bioterrorism is the intentional use of micro-organisms to cause harm or death not only to humans, but also to plants and animals. "Scientists are also starting to wonder about what types of plant pathogens terrorists might be able to use [on crops]," she said. "That type of use would be devastating." Scientists aren't the only group of researchers concerned about bioterrorism. The government has also launched studies of its own and is providing major funding to the study of bioterrorism. "One of the outcomes of the anthrax letters was that it caused people to look at bioterrorism as a real threat," Bormann said. "All of a sudden, [the government] is pouring more money into bioterrorism defense." Anthrax should not be thought of as a tool for terrorists in every instance, however. The most common form of anthrax, known as "cutaneous anthrax," is contracted through an abrasion in the skin. It is a typical health hazard of those who work closely with animals or animal by-products. People in the meat or leather industry face this type of anthrax. Anthrax is a bacteria, and in its natural form, can lie dormant in the soil where an infected animal has died. A person who comes in contact with this soil usually will not get the "anthrax-letter" form, which is more commonly known as "inhalation anthrax." "Anthrax can survive for long periods in the environment," Bormann said. "If you have some kind of background, some microbiology knowledge, you can grow up that bacteria and prepare it in a way that it can be distr
Slightly Offtopic, yet when the article referenced Opensource Biology I got the urge to post about Internet Archive.org's collection of opensourced education material. It has some excellent subjective matter for anyone looking for information to read between your own class books. It's Biology section only has one title "Uses of Waste Water", so anyone with material willing to contribute would indeed strengthen the freedom of information movement.