You'd be insane not to be a little bit creeped out by google. Cookies that last forever, "never delete your email", google maps (wow, I can find my house the first time I connect to this!).:)
"Similarly, if you donate $0.25, you could cover the world's landmass (6km granularity) with solar-powered atmospheric H2O/CO2 reclamation facilities."
A tracking system that is connected to a computer network and that monitors someone's behavior seems to fall into the "rights online" category to me. This is probably off topic at this point, but I had to respond as your comment had been modded up to "insightful" which really doesn't make any sense.
Okay, yeah, I'm desperately clinging to some ancient withered ideal that reeks of revolution and 'transhumanism' from like 1995, but it's sort of disturbing that "big media" is working even harder to restrict access to worldwide communications that once seemed like they would lead us towards some utopian global society of peace, happiness, and superintelligence. Alright, alright, all that really goes on in usenet is posturing and 17 year old flamewars between aging M.I.T. dropouts, but hey...
If you look at the caption for the photograph on that page, you'll see: "I have bumpmapped the image for clearer details: (the "craters" you might see are photographing artefacts that only seem to be craters)"
Still it was a very good observation to notice those... and maybe there's something to it?
A lot of publicity surrounds the issue of evolution vs. creationism (or intelligent design), and no other alternatives are being publically discussed. There is a very clear association between proponents of alternative views of creation and the rise of christianity in america. In light of this, stickers decrying evolution carry an intrinsic association with creationism, intelligent design, and also bibilical literalism and religious fundamentalism (though of course not all anti-evolutionists are fundamentalists). It is absolutely true that evolution is a theory, but the currently debated alternatives are motivated by religion and very poorly supported using what scientists would call scientific approaches.
Would you let a biblical scholar dictate engineering principles to a group of civil engineers about to go out into the world and construct towers and bridges? Uhh, no. Unless the scientific method is revised, these stickers don't belong in a science text book.
After high school, the children are free to run off and join contemporary christian rock bands, and never set eye on a dirty old science book again.
I hope someone was listening the time I administered the Turing test to a female synthetic-voice / voice-recognition self-help system, in the form of an attempt to solicit phone sex...
(Telus customer assistance robot: 1-800-400-2598)
See subject. Approximately a 2:3 sugar/potassium nitrate ratio, melt on stove over conservative heat until fully combined but not caramelized. Can be formed before cooling. Shoots flame and massive quantities of smoke. Good for bus shelters, mall food courts, and school yards.
Potassium nitrate can be usually purchased bulk at large Chinese groceries if you have such things. I'm not sure what Chinese people use it for, but the clerks usually tell you that it's not a seasoning and you shouldn't use it on your food.
Or a pressurized natural gas line running into your house, or a couple of propane tanks on your R.V. and barbecue, and the big propane refiller at the gas station...
It may be safe to use in your vegetable garden, but on the other hand, it might be a bad idea to blanket the hills of south american countries with the stuff. In addition to the obvious environmental problems caused by using a "broad-spectrum" herbicide on entire regions, the surfactant in the RoundUp formulation (polyoxyethylene amine, POEA) might affect a whole gamut of animals, plants, and microorganisms to varying degrees.
Gotta wonder which administration member has huge stock holdings in Montsanto, I'm sure a lot of tax money can be redirected to his private accounts through the columbian warondrugs.
Way back in the days of 9600/HST ONLY, N0 L4M3Rz aLLoWed, ConTACT PHiBeRTerMinATOR for NUP, BBSes on datapac, and cool skull ANSIs there was a dos ANSI escape sequence that could remap "N" on your keyboard to "format c:(carrige return)Y(carriage return)" (or something annoying like that). I remember being fucked by this once and being very angry (all 5 MB of 320x200 VGA resolution porn, gone for good!).
You could also write a batch file called setup.bat to distribute with your 0-day Sierra release, that called 'echo y | format c:'.
Google also says that only short portions of published, copyrighted material will be available. You will have to buy the book to read the entire thing.
I have no particular desire to print pages 17-23 of a 500 page textbook on chemistry or cooking, but those pages will give me an idea of how the book is organized and how useful it will be. This makes DRM a bit redundant. Also, annoying browser-disabling DRM doesn't really protect much anyway (third party screen capture) and shakes my faith in Mozilla as an alternative (to IE) that doesn't let web-sites hijack the functions of my browser.
It most certainly would melt again after 75C; it's just a hydrogen-bonded organic solid at that point, and hydrogen bonds are weak and only partially-covalent and would easily melt at moderate temperatures.
I was hoping something more interesting and subtle was going on. Of course, it will still liquify above 75 degrees or whatever the melting temperature is for the hydrogen-bonded network of the two compounds... Maybe you could make some kind of antilubricant out of a similar compound though: increase friction / viscocity as the temperature increases. Not sure what that might be useful for though - slowing down a flywheel when a machine starts to overheat?
Some of my friends like to bemoan how we will never be able to get off of oil dependence but I tell them "necessity is the mother of invention"
I wonder how much more energy efficient it would be to produce methanol batteries (fuel cells) instead of the other options? I'd imagine much more, methanol is pretty simple, though I'm not so sure about the catalyst (which presumably would be reusable for a reasonably long period of time anyway). I don't think there are any bacteria that produce methanol though I might be wrong...
It's not particularly difficult to install a flash player. If you want to control whether or not you're inundated with flash garbage, you can always use firefox & flashblock extension (it's what I use, and with adblock keeps everything relatively sane). If your problem is technological - tough. I have a few computers kicking around that don't have the capacity to run a graphical web browser, but that doesn't mean I complain when a site isn't lynx compatible:) "Get with the times, man."
If you could rig some sort of buried wire recognition system (magnetic?) you could have it follow a preset course that you could bury in the lawn yourself... (idea from the robomower site which alluded to something like that: " With the Rl1000 and the Docking Stations, it's even easier! After completing the one-time set-up of wire around the lawn including the Docking Station, set the weekly program and forget about mowing for the entire season! ")
Actually I thought the point was the "Our friend, the meter" web page, and how many people fuck up the conversion and/or have posted completely wrong conversion factors on websites etc, not the press release from SS1.
At first I thought this was incredible - thought it was a self-contained garment coated with an array of tiny cameras interspersed with color display elements or something neat like that. The technical problems with something like that seemed almost insurmountable to my tiny mind. Then I read the.pdf brochure and realized how silly this actually is. I guess you could use it to see through the floor of an airplane or something, but as camoflage it seems totally useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and "invite a friend" to gmail :) Social networks mapped: Check.
You'd be insane not to be a little bit creeped out by google. Cookies that last forever, "never delete your email", google maps (wow, I can find my house the first time I connect to this!). :)
"Similarly, if you donate $0.25, you could cover the world's landmass (6km granularity) with solar-powered atmospheric H2O/CO2 reclamation facilities."
Uhh, you mean like trees?
A tracking system that is connected to a computer network and that monitors someone's behavior seems to fall into the "rights online" category to me. This is probably off topic at this point, but I had to respond as your comment had been modded up to "insightful" which really doesn't make any sense.
Who needs a silly toolbar when you can use the quicklink bookmarks. CTRL-L google keyword keyword is about as easy as it gets.
Okay, yeah, I'm desperately clinging to some ancient withered ideal that reeks of revolution and 'transhumanism' from like 1995, but it's sort of disturbing that "big media" is working even harder to restrict access to worldwide communications that once seemed like they would lead us towards some utopian global society of peace, happiness, and superintelligence. Alright, alright, all that really goes on in usenet is posturing and 17 year old flamewars between aging M.I.T. dropouts, but hey...
If you look at the caption for the photograph on that page, you'll see: "I have bumpmapped the image for clearer details: (the "craters" you might see are photographing artefacts that only seem to be craters)" Still it was a very good observation to notice those... and maybe there's something to it?
A lot of publicity surrounds the issue of evolution vs. creationism (or intelligent design), and no other alternatives are being publically discussed. There is a very clear association between proponents of alternative views of creation and the rise of christianity in america. In light of this, stickers decrying evolution carry an intrinsic association with creationism, intelligent design, and also bibilical literalism and religious fundamentalism (though of course not all anti-evolutionists are fundamentalists). It is absolutely true that evolution is a theory, but the currently debated alternatives are motivated by religion and very poorly supported using what scientists would call scientific approaches.
Would you let a biblical scholar dictate engineering principles to a group of civil engineers about to go out into the world and construct towers and bridges? Uhh, no. Unless the scientific method is revised, these stickers don't belong in a science text book.
After high school, the children are free to run off and join contemporary christian rock bands, and never set eye on a dirty old science book again.
Unless the definition of a second is changed so that there are still exactly the same number of seconds per day.
I hope someone was listening the time I administered the Turing test to a female synthetic-voice / voice-recognition self-help system, in the form of an attempt to solicit phone sex... (Telus customer assistance robot: 1-800-400-2598)
To destroy the walmart, you must strike it's heart. A small mirror in the back near the television department....
See subject. Approximately a 2:3 sugar/potassium nitrate ratio, melt on stove over conservative heat until fully combined but not caramelized. Can be formed before cooling. Shoots flame and massive quantities of smoke. Good for bus shelters, mall food courts, and school yards. Potassium nitrate can be usually purchased bulk at large Chinese groceries if you have such things. I'm not sure what Chinese people use it for, but the clerks usually tell you that it's not a seasoning and you shouldn't use it on your food.
Or a pressurized natural gas line running into your house, or a couple of propane tanks on your R.V. and barbecue, and the big propane refiller at the gas station...
It may be safe to use in your vegetable garden, but on the other hand, it might be a bad idea to blanket the hills of south american countries with the stuff. In addition to the obvious environmental problems caused by using a "broad-spectrum" herbicide on entire regions, the surfactant in the RoundUp formulation (polyoxyethylene amine, POEA) might affect a whole gamut of animals, plants, and microorganisms to varying degrees. Gotta wonder which administration member has huge stock holdings in Montsanto, I'm sure a lot of tax money can be redirected to his private accounts through the columbian warondrugs.
Way back in the days of 9600/HST ONLY, N0 L4M3Rz aLLoWed, ConTACT PHiBeRTerMinATOR for NUP, BBSes on datapac, and cool skull ANSIs there was a dos ANSI escape sequence that could remap "N" on your keyboard to "format c:(carrige return)Y(carriage return)" (or something annoying like that). I remember being fucked by this once and being very angry (all 5 MB of 320x200 VGA resolution porn, gone for good!).
You could also write a batch file called setup.bat to distribute with your 0-day Sierra release, that called 'echo y | format c:'.
Life was so much simpler then.
Google also says that only short portions of published, copyrighted material will be available. You will have to buy the book to read the entire thing. I have no particular desire to print pages 17-23 of a 500 page textbook on chemistry or cooking, but those pages will give me an idea of how the book is organized and how useful it will be. This makes DRM a bit redundant. Also, annoying browser-disabling DRM doesn't really protect much anyway (third party screen capture) and shakes my faith in Mozilla as an alternative (to IE) that doesn't let web-sites hijack the functions of my browser.
It most certainly would melt again after 75C; it's just a hydrogen-bonded organic solid at that point, and hydrogen bonds are weak and only partially-covalent and would easily melt at moderate temperatures.
I was hoping something more interesting and subtle was going on. Of course, it will still liquify above 75 degrees or whatever the melting temperature is for the hydrogen-bonded network of the two compounds... Maybe you could make some kind of antilubricant out of a similar compound though: increase friction / viscocity as the temperature increases. Not sure what that might be useful for though - slowing down a flywheel when a machine starts to overheat?
fuck@you.com and horse@horse.org
Some of my friends like to bemoan how we will never be able to get off of oil dependence but I tell them "necessity is the mother of invention"
I wonder how much more energy efficient it would be to produce methanol batteries (fuel cells) instead of the other options? I'd imagine much more, methanol is pretty simple, though I'm not so sure about the catalyst (which presumably would be reusable for a reasonably long period of time anyway). I don't think there are any bacteria that produce methanol though I might be wrong...
It's not particularly difficult to install a flash player. If you want to control whether or not you're inundated with flash garbage, you can always use firefox & flashblock extension (it's what I use, and with adblock keeps everything relatively sane). If your problem is technological - tough. I have a few computers kicking around that don't have the capacity to run a graphical web browser, but that doesn't mean I complain when a site isn't lynx compatible :) "Get with the times, man."
If you could rig some sort of buried wire recognition system (magnetic?) you could have it follow a preset course that you could bury in the lawn yourself... (idea from the robomower site which alluded to something like that: " With the Rl1000 and the Docking Stations, it's even easier! After completing the one-time set-up of wire around the lawn including the Docking Station, set the weekly program and forget about mowing for the entire season! ")
Actually I thought the point was the "Our friend, the meter" web page, and how many people fuck up the conversion and/or have posted completely wrong conversion factors on websites etc, not the press release from SS1.
At first I thought this was incredible - thought it was a self-contained garment coated with an array of tiny cameras interspersed with color display elements or something neat like that. The technical problems with something like that seemed almost insurmountable to my tiny mind. Then I read the .pdf brochure and realized how silly this actually is. I guess you could use it to see through the floor of an airplane or something, but as camoflage it seems totally useless.
Yeah, you can achieve the same results by going out clubbing on the weekends, and as a side benefit: you might even get laid.