BeOS 5 was released in two forms a PRO version and a Personal version. The personal version was available in 'Free' as in cost at http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ and is still available on many mirrors, linked to from that page. If you have never tried it, give Be a try. It's quite nice, and different than everything else out there. Hopefully it won't die off completely. -OctaneZ
I hate to say it but tape is still great! I have ~120 Gigs across a number of SCSI Drives. I picked up a Seagate NS20 Travan "refurbished" actual open box, as nothing inside had actually ever been opened, and never looked back. Switching tapes isn't the worst thing in the world guys, and for a home system you don't really need nightly backups. Plus this way you can get your tapes out of the house (leave them at work) or put them in a firesafe in your basement, the possibilites are limitless. Tape also archives better than many of the other solutions being offered up. Just an idea but worth looking into if you need to backup a lot of data.
-OctaneZ
PS. I wouldn't go with anything smaller than a 10/20 compressed drive; I had an 8 Gig Seagate and never backed everything up as it was just too much, but 6 tapes is not bad at all.
While this may be possible you may not liek the results that you will get. The refresh rates are unbelievably low on these low cost LCDs. So while it may be cool to show it off, you will likely want to keep your Trinitron TV around for your real gaming.
-OZ
Oh I agree with you, I'm just saying that the media and hype around (I mean Code Red made the 6 o'clock news in the states the day it broke) creates a "competitive" climate for the virus hackers. It's a challenge. I wholey agree that they want to see if they can do it, what will happen, can they beat the last "worst virus ever" (tm), I just think that the coverage that it is given hypes it and creates a mystique.
I'm just waiting for the next rendition of D&D/Magic/Pokemon/Fighting game to be computer viruses...
I disagree, these "crack downs" get media time for the kids who are writing the viruses. If anythign I think all of this media coverage glamourises the entire thing. If kids didn't see this as a way to rebel against everyone in the "mainstream" then this wouldn't be as rampant as it is. I am not saying that we should except it, and I am not saying that it wouldn't exist without the meida talking about it every 30 seconds. But what I am saying is that (Insert Anchor Man Name Here) says that this is the worst thing to ever happen, then some kid sitting there who like many of us (and I freely admit that I used to check all the boards) would look at this when they were younger just to understand it, is going to say to himself I can do better than THAT!
Just my 2 cents.
-OctaneZ
You could even do a variant on the war stories aproach with a BOFH-off. Who has the best story of vengance against a user. People usually get a kick out of good-humored pain and suffering.
Yes, you are! You are missing the oppurtunity to support the community, that supports you! There is no better way to make your voice heard than to do it with your dollars (or whatever your local currency is). Sure they get the page hits, but that doesn't help them nearly as much as a paying, dead-tree copy receiving subscriber, with their publisher or advertisers. If you can swing it (which you probably can if you canceled your subscription) pay the $20 a year and support the writers who make their livelyhood writing what you enjoy reading.
While Pricewatch may not be the best place for reliable vendors, Mushkin Ram certainly is! Their memory is extrememly well made, stable, and relatively compitive in price. (and no I do not work for them)
Also the 4GB ram there is NOT a single 4GB Dimm, but rather 4x 1G PC100 ECC Memory
-OZ
Yes it is Einstein, however I hit the 120 char limit and didn't notice, as it gives you no indictation of that fact, I am sorry for offending you; as it obviously did.
-OZ
I have been running AWStats since July, and I absolutely love it. It does not provide the fine-grain detail that many people need, and which can be provided by Analog. But it does provide exactly what 90% percent of us need, in an easy to view package. It creates an easy to understand page about many aspects of your site, including, users, page hits, countries, languages, OS, browser, spiders/robots, access times; it's great! It is also a GPLed perl script! The developement team is over at Source Forge and is actively releasing new code all the time. It also has the added benefit of allowing cgi updating through a web page; simply putting the script in your/www/cgi-bin/ directory and adding appropriate permissions allows you to get up to the second information about your sight without having to dig up a terminal! Definately check this package out! -OctaneZ
Yeah, Vietnam was one hell of a police action. You tell my father and the thousands of others who fought during Vietnam that that was not a war either.
Do we really need a declaration of war from the congress to make it a war? We are bombing, we have landed troups, we are fighting on the ground? How is this not a war other than the perfunctory "declaration."
Just because the 75GXP has had some very noticeable reliability problems, that does NOT mean that IBM does not make a good drive! The IBM 60GXP is well known to be a better drive, in price/performance, performance, and reliability. These drives work great, I have them running in both Workstation and Server environments with no problem. I am also going to plug the much-maligned SCSI protocol, and say that the IBM SCSI Drives are some of the best I have ever used!
I have had horrible luck with Maxtor drives, I have had about 6 fail on me, and have not had a single good experience getting them replaced. Other than IBM drives I have had good luck with the SCSI Seagates, however all of my IDE Seagates have developed many bad sectors in short periods of time, though Seagate has swapped them out no problem. -OctaneZ
Re:Sets!=Death of Imagination (The Boats)
on
Battle Over Blocks
·
· Score: 2
I had the old set where you built the boat hull out of parts, now they are prebuilt
I have to admit that the preformed hulls worked great. As a kid facinated with water, boats, and just generally anything that's wet,the single piece hull was a god-send. You could make your own hull out of plates and bricks, but after more than about a half an hour, the water would just flood right through (admittedly this worked much beter when the goal was to sink one of them by running two or more boats into each other, or capsula creations) but the ability to build models that could stand up to repeated soaking for a long duration was a ton of fun. The best part was the ability to have your legos interacting with other things in a new medium.
The truly best part about being a geek, was having a couple different things to throw together; thousands of hours of time was spent combining LEGO, Construx, Starcom (yeah I know it was themed, but I just loved the guys with the magnets in their feet.. nothing like a war on the fridge), and good old fashioned wooden blocks.
While I think that there is a certain nostalgia about building everything from the 1x2 blocks, the new pieces do draw in a different market; kids are still going to tear everything apart when they get bored and do something new with it (if you claim you didn't do this, ask your parents, I am sure I am not the only one who took apart the phone). -OctaneZ
I am sure everyone reading this thread is trying to get onto Alex Belits web page (link doesn't work, hence this post) as it is linked multiple places in this thread, and every webpage worth it's weight is linking to his page (he added support for the Richochet GS/128 k modems to STRIP). Unfortunately his page is inaccessible; however, and I know this is not really kosher; GOOGLE has an archived copy of this page, allowing you to read up on the support, and get a better feeling of where the project is now, as well as the support for the USB modems and 2.x kernel, straight through support and patches for the 2.4.1 kernel. Hope this helps everyone, this sounds like a very interesting technology, it's too bad it didn't fly. -OctaneZ
There are many websites which have schematics and ideas on how to do this. This German Site has plans to build a very small one that you could throw in a bay, or add to your baybus if you are so inclined. Try Google if you need more ideas.
-OctaneZ "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
>>Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end.
>What on earth does that mean?
What I meant by this was that the amount of available bandwidth, be it dialup, 1.5mbps, 10mbps, etc. seems to have a greater improvement on the connection, when the increase is at the server side.
eg (just an example): The conection seems to be much better when you connect from a Dialup Client to a T1 server; than from a client on a T1 line to a server on a dialup line. -OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Note: this is not based on any white papers, but rather years of usage.
VNC server from experience is much more adept on UNIX servers than on Windows. Remember if you are running Windows you can always change the polling to change what part of the screen gets updated (use less bandwidth). Another option to reduce bandwidth (this works on all servers/clients) is reduce the color to 8bit. Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end. I have used a client on a Dial-up (29.6 kbps) to connect to windows and unix servers on a T1 line. Remember to keep your software up to date, as they make improvements to handling regularly. -OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
While USENET2 may not have "made it big" like USENET, the content is worth it, even if you only read the bofh.* hierarchy. The signal:noise ratio is quite high, though definately lurk for a while before posting, or you will never make it out alive. IT is true however that finding a USENET2 peer is pretty hard, ask around , I'm sure you can find one, may take a bit though.
-OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
In 1992 Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act to (and this is off the RIAA site) "ease access to advanced digital audio recording technologies". Isn't that exactly what we are doing? I am much like Crashnbur, I am a college kid, who's music purchases has gone up simply because we can hear music that the commercial radio stations aren't playing. I buy ~30 cds a year, I rip them, I burn them to MP3 CDs, and I take them with me. Isn't this exactly what Congress foresaw? I think this is, or at least should be, well within our "fair use" rights.
-OctaneZ "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
The problem I see is not whether the protocol itself can scale, we are seeing numerous "tweaks" that will allow this ( Clip2's Reflector and Bearshare.net's forthcoming 3.0.0 "Defender" release) What I see as the problem is the splintering and added features being incorporated by the different Gnutella Clients: Gnotella has added "Improved bitrate scanning", BearShare and Limewire's Firewall Detection, as well as other "extraneous" features, that add information to the gnutella packets. How long will it be before these clients cause sufficient incompatibility that seperate, client specific networks arise? What we really need is an agreement between the different developers to pass on these extra packets, or agree on a central "feature set". I am not advocating that we do away with the myriad gnutella clinets, I think there variety and different personalities are great. I just don't want to see the community splinter through incompatibility issues.
-OctaneZ
(What I would really like to see is a native applications similar to Clip2's reflector for both WIN32 and Linux that serves as a "network server" only, that uses low CPU and large numbers of connections for people who believe in the Gnutella idea and are graced with highspeed connections.)
This is a HUGE advancement! Not onlly do they have a way to "maufacture" cartilage, they are NOT doing it from embryonic stem cells! Stem cell research is much more advanced in Europe, and they actually have some cartilidge therapy based on stem cell research and injections; but the fact that this team has been able to do it with Adult Fat cells is mind breaking! This is of particular interest to me as I am one of thousands of people (probably millions) who have damaged there cartilage. I was in a car vs. rollerblade accident almost exactly a year ago and "shattered" the cartilage in both of my knees; in the US as stem cell research is so contriversial, my Drs said that there was little I could do, but hope it got better and look forward to knee replacements. (which they can only do twice btw and only last ~15-20 years; I am 20) While this is still very early in the research/test stage the idea that I may be able to run again is so exciting I don't have words for it! -OctaneZ
Re:could a distributed parallel system be useful?
on
Genetic Stone Soup
·
· Score: 3
While some people are discussing Folding@Home as a response to your question of a "seti-like" processing system; there is actually a much more relevant project, also hosted at Stanford. The Genome@Home Project is attmepting "to design new genes that can form working proteins in the cell" from the DNA sequence of non-human organisms. It is a new project, but gaining speed quickly. It is worth taking a look at if you have spare cycles you can give to a good cause. -OctaneZ
Open your curtains. (So you don't have to turn on the lights.) (As a bonus, it's likely that the sun will warm up your house.)
Actually you are more likely to gain a power savings if you close your curtains. Currents can do an extraordinary amount to reduce drafts around windows (one of the leading causes of heat leakage from a house). They also add another layer of insulation between the rooms you are trying to keep warm and the heat conducting glass. In our old house closing the curtains at night, and when people were not in the room gave us a significant savings in our gas bill. -OctaneZ
The real problem with melting ice caps is not the immediate sea level rise, but rather a break in the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). NADW is the driving force behind the worlds largest ocean currents. In the north atlantic, extremely salty, cold water descends to the bottom of the; this downward flow, draws water behind it, initiating global thermohaline circulation. This circulation acts as a belt that rotates around the world, Americans would most likely identify the Gulf Stream lying off the coast of the Eastern United States; this stream is caused by the sinking of the NADW; however this flow of water from the equatorial regions of the atlantic most notably affects England and North-Western Europe. If the Polar ice caps continue to melt, or a fresh water lake in the cap were to rupture and spill out over the North Atlantic, the salty/cold water would be dilluted and would no longer sink to the bottom. This would cause all of the major ocean currents to slow and ultimately cease. Most likely the first place that this effect would be seen is in dramatic weather change in the Northeast Atlantic, if the Gulf stream stops then warm water will no longer carry warm water to these upper latitudes, resulting in much colder temperatures, and possibly a regrowth of some ice sheets over regions of England and Northern Europe.
-OctaneZ
All Things Considered had an interesting discussion of DNA banks and peoples rights. They discussed both the voluntary data bank in Iceland, as well as the purchased databanks, of entire islands that were bought by independant American research companies. They also discused similar actions very similar to a DNA collection, such as Cancer and tumor collection that were collected from patients during surgery, and sent on for analysis and research without the patients consent; their point being think how much we have advanced through not giving people a choice, or even informing them. While I do not neccessarilly agree with this view, it is an interesting one to think about and hear debated. Genetic mapping differs slightly from previous collections in that these samples could theoretically tell you almost everything physical about a person; where as previous databanks like this had been mutated or foreign cells. Anyway, an interesting thing to think about; you can get both transcripts and audio from the site. and if you didn't know about "Science Friday" on NPR you should check it out, it's a great program! -OctaneZ
Slashdot Mirror
BeOS 5 was released in two forms a PRO version and a Personal version. The personal version was available in 'Free' as in cost at http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ and is still available on many mirrors, linked to from that page. If you have never tried it, give Be a try. It's quite nice, and different than everything else out there. Hopefully it won't die off completely.
-OctaneZ
I hate to say it but tape is still great! I have ~120 Gigs across a number of SCSI Drives. I picked up a Seagate NS20 Travan "refurbished" actual open box, as nothing inside had actually ever been opened, and never looked back. Switching tapes isn't the worst thing in the world guys, and for a home system you don't really need nightly backups. Plus this way you can get your tapes out of the house (leave them at work) or put them in a firesafe in your basement, the possibilites are limitless. Tape also archives better than many of the other solutions being offered up. Just an idea but worth looking into if you need to backup a lot of data.
-OctaneZ
PS. I wouldn't go with anything smaller than a 10/20 compressed drive; I had an 8 Gig Seagate and never backed everything up as it was just too much, but 6 tapes is not bad at all.
While this may be possible you may not liek the results that you will get. The refresh rates are unbelievably low on these low cost LCDs. So while it may be cool to show it off, you will likely want to keep your Trinitron TV around for your real gaming.
-OZ
Oh I agree with you, I'm just saying that the media and hype around (I mean Code Red made the 6 o'clock news in the states the day it broke) creates a "competitive" climate for the virus hackers. It's a challenge. I wholey agree that they want to see if they can do it, what will happen, can they beat the last "worst virus ever" (tm), I just think that the coverage that it is given hypes it and creates a mystique.
I'm just waiting for the next rendition of D&D/Magic/Pokemon/Fighting game to be computer viruses...
-OZ
I disagree, these "crack downs" get media time for the kids who are writing the viruses. If anythign I think all of this media coverage glamourises the entire thing. If kids didn't see this as a way to rebel against everyone in the "mainstream" then this wouldn't be as rampant as it is. I am not saying that we should except it, and I am not saying that it wouldn't exist without the meida talking about it every 30 seconds. But what I am saying is that (Insert Anchor Man Name Here) says that this is the worst thing to ever happen, then some kid sitting there who like many of us (and I freely admit that I used to check all the boards) would look at this when they were younger just to understand it, is going to say to himself I can do better than THAT!
Just my 2 cents.
-OctaneZ
You could even do a variant on the war stories aproach with a BOFH-off. Who has the best story of vengance against a user. People usually get a kick out of good-humored pain and suffering.
-OctaneZ
Yes, you are! You are missing the oppurtunity to support the community, that supports you! There is no better way to make your voice heard than to do it with your dollars (or whatever your local currency is). Sure they get the page hits, but that doesn't help them nearly as much as a paying, dead-tree copy receiving subscriber, with their publisher or advertisers. If you can swing it (which you probably can if you canceled your subscription) pay the $20 a year and support the writers who make their livelyhood writing what you enjoy reading.
While Pricewatch may not be the best place for reliable vendors, Mushkin Ram certainly is! Their memory is extrememly well made, stable, and relatively compitive in price. (and no I do not work for them)
Also the 4GB ram there is NOT a single 4GB Dimm, but rather 4x 1G PC100 ECC Memory
-OZ
Yes it is Einstein, however I hit the 120 char limit and didn't notice, as it gives you no indictation of that fact, I am sorry for offending you; as it obviously did.
-OZ
I have been running AWStats since July, and I absolutely love it. It does not provide the fine-grain detail that many people need, and which can be provided by Analog. But it does provide exactly what 90% percent of us need, in an easy to view package. It creates an easy to understand page about many aspects of your site, including, users, page hits, countries, languages, OS, browser, spiders/robots, access times; it's great! It is also a GPLed perl script! The developement team is over at Source Forge and is actively releasing new code all the time. It also has the added benefit of allowing cgi updating through a web page; simply putting the script in your /www/cgi-bin/ directory and adding appropriate permissions allows you to get up to the second information about your sight without having to dig up a terminal! Definately check this package out!
-OctaneZ
Yeah, Vietnam was one hell of a police action. You tell my father and the thousands of others who fought during Vietnam that that was not a war either.
Do we really need a declaration of war from the congress to make it a war? We are bombing, we have landed troups, we are fighting on the ground? How is this not a war other than the perfunctory "declaration."
Just because the 75GXP has had some very noticeable reliability problems, that does NOT mean that IBM does not make a good drive! The IBM 60GXP is well known to be a better drive, in price/performance, performance, and reliability. These drives work great, I have them running in both Workstation and Server environments with no problem. I am also going to plug the much-maligned SCSI protocol, and say that the IBM SCSI Drives are some of the best I have ever used!
I have had horrible luck with Maxtor drives, I have had about 6 fail on me, and have not had a single good experience getting them replaced. Other than IBM drives I have had good luck with the SCSI Seagates, however all of my IDE Seagates have developed many bad sectors in short periods of time, though Seagate has swapped them out no problem.
-OctaneZ
I had the old set where you built the boat hull out of parts, now they are prebuilt
I have to admit that the preformed hulls worked great. As a kid facinated with water, boats, and just generally anything that's wet,the single piece hull was a god-send. You could make your own hull out of plates and bricks, but after more than about a half an hour, the water would just flood right through (admittedly this worked much beter when the goal was to sink one of them by running two or more boats into each other, or capsula creations) but the ability to build models that could stand up to repeated soaking for a long duration was a ton of fun. The best part was the ability to have your legos interacting with other things in a new medium.
The truly best part about being a geek, was having a couple different things to throw together; thousands of hours of time was spent combining LEGO, Construx, Starcom (yeah I know it was themed, but I just loved the guys with the magnets in their feet.. nothing like a war on the fridge), and good old fashioned wooden blocks.
While I think that there is a certain nostalgia about building everything from the 1x2 blocks, the new pieces do draw in a different market; kids are still going to tear everything apart when they get bored and do something new with it (if you claim you didn't do this, ask your parents, I am sure I am not the only one who took apart the phone).
-OctaneZ
I am sure everyone reading this thread is trying to get onto Alex Belits web page (link doesn't work, hence this post) as it is linked multiple places in this thread, and every webpage worth it's weight is linking to his page (he added support for the Richochet GS/128 k modems to STRIP). Unfortunately his page is inaccessible; however, and I know this is not really kosher; GOOGLE has an archived copy of this page, allowing you to read up on the support, and get a better feeling of where the project is now, as well as the support for the USB modems and 2.x kernel, straight through support and patches for the 2.4.1 kernel. Hope this helps everyone, this sounds like a very interesting technology, it's too bad it didn't fly.
-OctaneZ
There are many websites which have schematics and ideas on how to do this.
This German Site has plans to build a very small one that you could throw in a bay, or add to your baybus if you are so inclined. Try Google if you need more ideas.
-OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
>>Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end.
>What on earth does that mean?
What I meant by this was that the amount of available bandwidth, be it dialup, 1.5mbps, 10mbps, etc. seems to have a greater improvement on the connection, when the increase is at the server side.
eg (just an example): The conection seems to be much better when you connect from a Dialup Client to a T1 server; than from a client on a T1 line to a server on a dialup line.
-OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Note: this is not based on any white papers, but rather years of usage. VNC server from experience is much more adept on UNIX servers than on Windows. Remember if you are running Windows you can always change the polling to change what part of the screen gets updated (use less bandwidth). Another option to reduce bandwidth (this works on all servers/clients) is reduce the color to 8bit. Also the speed of the connection at the server is more important than at the client end. I have used a client on a Dial-up (29.6 kbps) to connect to windows and unix servers on a T1 line. Remember to keep your software up to date, as they make improvements to handling regularly.
-OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
While USENET2 may not have "made it big" like USENET, the content is worth it, even if you only read the bofh.* hierarchy. The signal:noise ratio is quite high, though definately lurk for a while before posting, or you will never make it out alive. IT is true however that finding a USENET2 peer is pretty hard, ask around , I'm sure you can find one, may take a bit though.
-OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
In 1992 Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act to (and this is off the RIAA site) "ease access to advanced digital audio recording technologies". Isn't that exactly what we are doing? I am much like Crashnbur, I am a college kid, who's music purchases has gone up simply because we can hear music that the commercial radio stations aren't playing. I buy ~30 cds a year, I rip them, I burn them to MP3 CDs, and I take them with me. Isn't this exactly what Congress foresaw? I think this is, or at least should be, well within our "fair use" rights.
-OctaneZ
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
The problem I see is not whether the protocol itself can scale, we are seeing numerous "tweaks" that will allow this ( Clip2's Reflector and Bearshare.net's forthcoming 3.0.0 "Defender" release) What I see as the problem is the splintering and added features being incorporated by the different Gnutella Clients: Gnotella has added "Improved bitrate scanning", BearShare and Limewire's Firewall Detection, as well as other "extraneous" features, that add information to the gnutella packets. How long will it be before these clients cause sufficient incompatibility that seperate, client specific networks arise? What we really need is an agreement between the different developers to pass on these extra packets, or agree on a central "feature set". I am not advocating that we do away with the myriad gnutella clinets, I think there variety and different personalities are great. I just don't want to see the community splinter through incompatibility issues.
-OctaneZ
(What I would really like to see is a native applications similar to Clip2's reflector for both WIN32 and Linux that serves as a "network server" only, that uses low CPU and large numbers of connections for people who believe in the Gnutella idea and are graced with highspeed connections.)
This is a HUGE advancement! Not onlly do they have a way to "maufacture" cartilage, they are NOT doing it from embryonic stem cells! Stem cell research is much more advanced in Europe, and they actually have some cartilidge therapy based on stem cell research and injections; but the fact that this team has been able to do it with Adult Fat cells is mind breaking! This is of particular interest to me as I am one of thousands of people (probably millions) who have damaged there cartilage. I was in a car vs. rollerblade accident almost exactly a year ago and "shattered" the cartilage in both of my knees; in the US as stem cell research is so contriversial, my Drs said that there was little I could do, but hope it got better and look forward to knee replacements. (which they can only do twice btw and only last ~15-20 years; I am 20) While this is still very early in the research/test stage the idea that I may be able to run again is so exciting I don't have words for it!
-OctaneZ
While some people are discussing Folding@Home as a response to your question of a "seti-like" processing system; there is actually a much more relevant project, also hosted at Stanford. The Genome@Home Project is attmepting "to design new genes that can form working proteins in the cell" from the DNA sequence of non-human organisms. It is a new project, but gaining speed quickly. It is worth taking a look at if you have spare cycles you can give to a good cause.
-OctaneZ
Open your curtains. (So you don't have to turn on the lights.) (As a bonus, it's likely that the sun will warm up your house.)
Actually you are more likely to gain a power savings if you close your curtains. Currents can do an extraordinary amount to reduce drafts around windows (one of the leading causes of heat leakage from a house). They also add another layer of insulation between the rooms you are trying to keep warm and the heat conducting glass. In our old house closing the curtains at night, and when people were not in the room gave us a significant savings in our gas bill.
-OctaneZ
The real problem with melting ice caps is not the immediate sea level rise, but rather a break in the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). NADW is the driving force behind the worlds largest ocean currents. In the north atlantic, extremely salty, cold water descends to the bottom of the; this downward flow, draws water behind it, initiating global thermohaline circulation. This circulation acts as a belt that rotates around the world, Americans would most likely identify the Gulf Stream lying off the coast of the Eastern United States; this stream is caused by the sinking of the NADW; however this flow of water from the equatorial regions of the atlantic most notably affects England and North-Western Europe. If the Polar ice caps continue to melt, or a fresh water lake in the cap were to rupture and spill out over the North Atlantic, the salty/cold water would be dilluted and would no longer sink to the bottom. This would cause all of the major ocean currents to slow and ultimately cease. Most likely the first place that this effect would be seen is in dramatic weather change in the Northeast Atlantic, if the Gulf stream stops then warm water will no longer carry warm water to these upper latitudes, resulting in much colder temperatures, and possibly a regrowth of some ice sheets over regions of England and Northern Europe.
-OctaneZ
All Things Considered had an interesting discussion of DNA banks and peoples rights. They discussed both the voluntary data bank in Iceland, as well as the purchased databanks, of entire islands that were bought by independant American research companies. They also discused similar actions very similar to a DNA collection, such as Cancer and tumor collection that were collected from patients during surgery, and sent on for analysis and research without the patients consent; their point being think how much we have advanced through not giving people a choice, or even informing them. While I do not neccessarilly agree with this view, it is an interesting one to think about and hear debated. Genetic mapping differs slightly from previous collections in that these samples could theoretically tell you almost everything physical about a person; where as previous databanks like this had been mutated or foreign cells. Anyway, an interesting thing to think about; you can get both transcripts and audio from the site. and if you didn't know about "Science Friday" on NPR you should check it out, it's a great program!
-OctaneZ