I can't be the only person who noticed that the step from 1 to 2 added 2 hydrogens, step 2 to 3 deletes an oxygen, and step 4 adds 2 more hydrogens... without any mention of where these things are coming from and going to! I'm not a biochemist so I don't know anything about the chemistry of NADH, but a science article ought to at least explain how the equations are balanced. --
While Newton figured out the conservation of momentum thingie, he knew nothing of turbo pumps, or cooling technologies, or combustion. For that matter, neither did Goddard.
If you go to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, you will see one of Goddard's rockets on display. It has turbopumps in it. It definitely used combustion. I'd have to check, but I'm sure Goddard used regenerative cooling too. --
One could create a special cookie (and mail-address) for this purpose and send all the Mail back to all the senders or such stuff. I would have real impact, when some ten thousands have the same identity.
Many Slashdotters are already doing something like this to news sites like nytimes.com (slashdoted/slashdot or cypherpunk/cypherpunk). However, I don't know how many of them delete their cookies after every session (I do). Failing to delete the cookie allows tracking them upon their return, which I refuse to do. As far as these sites are concerned, I'm a new guy every time.
Exchanging cookies (like wearing and swapping masks) is a great twist on this concept. I like it. --
I have adopted a policy: if an ad site tries to serve me with a cookie, I block that ad site entirely. I never see ads from flycast.com, for example. I'm doing this by hand, mostly for fun, but also as a bit of consciousness-raising on my own part.
I'm doing this under IE4.0 at work. The HOSTS file is useless since all HTTP traffic goes through a proxy, but going into the advanced-proxy configuration allows one to specify sites which should not be accessed through the proxy. Routing these to the local network gets them blocked at the firewall, and they time out. This is better than blocking cookies, because the ad site never gets to see an IP address, let alone the http:referrer field.
Something to be aware of: Even if you use the write-protected cookie file trick under Netscape, if you accept a cookie it will still be active until the end of your session. This means you will be letting Doubleclick/Abacus connect your hits to your name and home address, at least for the rest of your surfing that day. Blocking all access to Doubleclick costs them a lot more.
Slashdot serves a lot of its own ads, which I still see (of course). I will happily patronize Slashdot, because I doubt it is going to sell my private information to anyone or track me between sites. Doubleclick, flycast, bfast, hitbox and the rest are not so friendly, and I think that sites which use their services should not be given the benefit of the doubt (or the revenue).
But it could possibly make a sweet deep space observatory.
What could you see from there that you couldn't see from here?
You still have the Zodiacal light fogging your pictures of nebulae; to get away from that, you need to go further from the Sun.
You can't see much more of the Sun from a 20-degree inclined orbit. For that you really want a polar orbit. If you want to see solar flares and prominences from a different angle, you'd want to be at the Earth-Sun L4 or L5 point instead of on Cruithne, which varies its angular separation from the Earth-Sun line throughout the year.
You can't see much more of the sky from Cruithne than you can from the Moon's L4 or L5 point, and it's a lot faster to get data back from the shorter distance.
Last and most significant: what kind of observatory needs to be gotten away from Earth and put on a rock somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, so that you can still only see the half of the sky it doesn't block? Why not a free-flying probe?
An observatory which is best suited to Cruithne than somewhere else would have to have some very specialized requirements. I can't think of anything that has requirements remotely like that. Note: I am not an astronomer. --
I'd say the thing to do is order these protected discs TODAY
No. Absolutely not. If you buy them at all, you are telling BMG (and everyone else) that they can make money by producing an incompatible format which obsoletes your present hardware, stamps out many of your current methods for playback and deprives you of fair use.
The way to kill this thing is to make it cost money. Make sure BMG eats all their production and promotional costs, without getting a return on them. If you buy one of these discs by mistake, return it for refund. This also costs the store, and they may stop carrying such discs. Without retail channels, BMG will have to drop the format and go back to regular CD. Kill it the same way we killed DIVX: stay away in droves. It's the only way. --
If you read the Cruithne page, you'd know that Cruithne orbits the Sun roughly once a year. The 770 year figure is for the slow-dance of the Cruithne-Earth cycle. --
Near as I can tell, it's probably not suitable at all.
The orbit is inclined 20 degrees to Earth's. Change-of-plane maneuvers are very costly in terms of propellant.
Being so close to the Sun, there is a smaller likelihood of Cruithne having deposits of the essentials for life-support: water, ammonia or methane ices. These would make it more attractive to set up shop there, because resupply costs would be drastically reduced.
As it is, we're probably better off looking for something like an extinct comet nucleus, regardless of its orbit, if we want to set up a space station far from Earth. --
The orbit is not unstable; according to the Cruithne FAQ, it will be stable for at least 10,000 years. The FAQ does not say if anyone has projected Cruithne's orbit back in time, let alone what the results were. Given the chaotic nature of 3-body interactions, we probably cannot determine the origin of Cruithne from its orbit alone. We will have to determine its composition to get an idea of where it came from, and send a probe past it to get some idea of its bombardment history (and thus where in the solar system it's spent most of its past). From this we might... might... be able to make some good guesses as to how long it's been Earth's orbital partner. --
The problem with that is that he'd have to write his decisions in longhand, and I'm sure that OSHA would have something to say about the ergonomics of his workstation and repetitive stress injuries resulting therefrom. --
How is he going to read your questions without using a computer ?
Print them out on paper, give him a typewriter for writing his responses. Or even a dedicated word-processor.
I have no idea how much judicial review there is for parole-board actions, but if they are subject to injunction or appeal this may be a way to give the government a black eye. If Kevin is willing to try something like the word-processor thing and the government jumps on him, having them reversed on First Amendment grounds would look very bad for the parole board. It would also put legal handcuffs on future parole boards; once there's a decision saying that such tactics are an abuse of a parolee's civil rights, they can't even use the threat again. --
Economies of distribution and commoditization, my friend.
Precisely. Electricity is a commodity. Up to a point, it happens to be cheaper to build and install (and more convenient to feed) a few large generators than many small ones. Having a separate fuel-cell power supply for every light in your house is going to be far more expensive and demanding of your time than one big fuel cell for the whole house. Besides, with one fuel cell in the basement you can do things like having its waste heat bring your hot water up to temperature. Since you cannot do just one thing, you might as well make use of the possible synergies. --
I'm largely in agreement with Nitrozac's conclusion, though I am not personally affected the same way she is. My complaints are along different lines:
This stuff increases the load on the servers, and the traffic on the lines. The cumulative effect of so many of them is a creeping denial-of-service attack.
Worse is the demand on people's attention. I haven't seen the/. thread yet which was meant to be a piece out of talk.bizarre. These things would have a place there, but anywhere else they're off-topic and just wasting people's time even to page past them.
The repetition has lost them whatever humor value they ever had. A six-year-old will laugh at the same joke ten times in a row, but most/.'ers have advanced beyond the mentality of a six-year-old. The poster(s) seem to have serious cases of arrested development.
The poster(s) have this obsession with helpless, sexualized objects. It's pretty obvious that their fantasies involve encounters with blow-up dolls. (Has anyone pointed them at the "I Love Ewe" yet?)
As Katz has been noting over the past few days, this place is hostile to a lot of groups. Perhaps not deliberately, but there's a culture-clash here that isn't along ethnic, class or religious lines, but sexual ones. The people you're alienating aren't "them"; they are your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. What's really sad is that these posters don't have the empathy to care.
I found it amusing that the only person to stick up for the N&P postings was an AC; he (almost certainly "he") wouldn't even put the reputation of a login behind his defense.
What to do about it? Ban the IP's? If they're from some large proxy server, this causes a lot of collateral damage. I favor the idea of giving moderators renewable (based on prompt meta-moderation) points for "off-topic", "redundant" and perhaps a new category of "hateful" down-moderations, combined with some auto-moderation which kicks things down based on all the boring and repetetive key-phrases most of us have come to hate. If "naked and petrified" automatically posts at -1 (Offtopic), moderators don't have to waste any time at all. --
Here's the link from the Viridian Mailing List Archive. Note the date on the article: December 30, 1998. Yup, over a year old. (Why's Slashdot so slow on some of these things?) --
At dollars to tens of dollars per fuel cell, plus all the refilling requirements of all their little fuel tanks, I'm sure you'd quickly see the wisdom of a centralized generator. Economies of scale, my friend. Economies of scale. --
Battery exchange stations are quite feasible, but can you imagine the investment required to build what amounts to a complete parallel to the network of gasoline filling stations? It boggles my mind. On the other hand, there are fast-chargers which can fill most batteries in about 15-20 minutes; then the problem becomes one of generating and transmitting enough juice to feed them!
Fuel cells are just a more efficient way to convert chemical energy into work. They have the advantage for many uses in that they perform very well at part load (the killer of the gasoline engine is its horrible fuel consumption at idle). The disadvantages of fuel cells are that they still require fuel. Under future tax regimes which will probably include stiff carbon taxes, this is still going to hit you at the pump even if your car gets 80 miles per gallon. --
That should be "your prefixes". "You're" is a contraction of "you are". Easy memory technique: possessive pronouns are not contractions and do not have apostrophes.
(If irony was posted on Slashdot, would anybody notice? Oh, BTW, I fully expect self-righteous lousy spellers to moderate me down.) --
This is only significant if the sites which take encrypted data actually go to the effort to protect it. Keeping people's orders, including credit-card numbers, in a file with a standard name in cleartext is going to send e-commerce security to hell in a handbasket. Worse, this is one of the easier problems to deal with, because when your security is cracked you tend to find out about it.
Encryption is touted as a way to protect privacy and human rights. Unlike a slip-up which reveals credit-card numbers to a cracker, the sort of people who want the goods on dissidents and the like won't be asking for ransoms for the data or making fraudulent purchases. The connection between the security lapse and the late-night phone calls, break-ins, beatings, and other dirty tricks will be impossible to see. It's a new ocean out there, full of shoals hidden beneath the dark water. We must not put too much trust in our handiwork until it has well and truly proven itself sound. --
I think I used "Hubert Lewis Dewey". If I ever fill out another one of those (handy lock-openers, they're free, why not?) and it has a slot for "Employer", I'm going to put down "Dewey, Cheetham & Howe, Attys". --
Appliance companies are already looking toward selling services as much as (or instead of) goods. Electrolux is marketing a pay-per-load washing machine in Europe; they install it for free and you get the bill added to your utilities every month. The EU has data privacy laws, but in the USA (and Japan?) sales of very intimate customer data are possible just as soon as they become feasible to collect. Sales of the data would pay for the R&D and promotion. A scheme that doesn't lead to any data collection eliminates a profit center in the business. --
You don't want Them to know where to find you, eating your Cap'n Crunch.
In my case, I don't want them to have information about me without giving anything up. For instance, who are they giving my information to? How much money are they getting for it? What's their margin on this item?
Sales of that information is quite a bit less benign than just the store having it. If your dental insurer finds out you eat a box of Cap'n Crunch every two days and you never buy toothpaste, they're bound to run your rates up. It would be one thing if they nagged you honestly and gave you a chance to change; it's quite another if you suddenly see a price increase and cannot connect it to anything you can change. These things give power to mega-business and take it away from the individual. --
You must have a funky browser. As I get the article, the word Techserver links to http://www.techserver.com, and the word "reports" right after it links to http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,50 0155342-500192009-500825041-0,00.html. Two different links, right next to each other. Even passing my pointer over the two words (in IE 4.0) shows that they're different. --
Slashdot Mirror
Step 2: CHOOH
Step 3: CH2O
Step 4: CH3OH
I can't be the only person who noticed that the step from 1 to 2 added 2 hydrogens, step 2 to 3 deletes an oxygen, and step 4 adds 2 more hydrogens... without any mention of where these things are coming from and going to! I'm not a biochemist so I don't know anything about the chemistry of NADH, but a science article ought to at least explain how the equations are balanced.
--
--
Exchanging cookies (like wearing and swapping masks) is a great twist on this concept. I like it.
--
I'm doing this under IE4.0 at work. The HOSTS file is useless since all HTTP traffic goes through a proxy, but going into the advanced-proxy configuration allows one to specify sites which should not be accessed through the proxy. Routing these to the local network gets them blocked at the firewall, and they time out. This is better than blocking cookies, because the ad site never gets to see an IP address, let alone the http:referrer field.
Something to be aware of: Even if you use the write-protected cookie file trick under Netscape, if you accept a cookie it will still be active until the end of your session. This means you will be letting Doubleclick/Abacus connect your hits to your name and home address, at least for the rest of your surfing that day. Blocking all access to Doubleclick costs them a lot more.
Slashdot serves a lot of its own ads, which I still see (of course). I will happily patronize Slashdot, because I doubt it is going to sell my private information to anyone or track me between sites. Doubleclick, flycast, bfast, hitbox and the rest are not so friendly, and I think that sites which use their services should not be given the benefit of the doubt (or the revenue).
Here's my current blocklist (pardon the formatting): ;ads16.focalink.com;redherring.ngadcenter.net; ads.guardianunlimited.co.uk; media.preferences.com;excite.com; stats.superstats.com;mojofarm.mediaplex.com
a32.g.a.yimg.com;valueclick.com; mojofarm.sjc.mediaplex.com;www.burstnet.com ad-adex3.flycast.com;ads17.focalink.com; ad.doubleclick.net;ad.uk.doubleclick.net; a1.g.a.yimg.com;ad.preferences.com; barnesandnoble.bfast.com;ads.enliven.com; ads09.focalink.com; view.avenuea.com;ads.i33.com;ads.bfast.com; adserver.track-star.com;ads.admaximize.com; ads24.focalink.com;banners.orbitcycle.com; adforce.imgis.com;service.bfast.com; ph-ad04.focalink.com;leader.linkexchange.com; adex3.flycast.com;Ogilvy.ngadcenter.net; ads18.focalink.com;ads06.focalink.com; van.ads.link4ads.com;view.accendo.com; ads19.focalink.com;ads21.focalink.com; thinknyc.eu-adcenter.net;ph-ad05.focalink.com; ad.doubleclick.net;barnesandnoble.bfast.com; gm.preferences.com;newads.cmpnet.com; ads25.focalink.com;ads22.focalink.com; app-05.www.ibm.com;cookies.cmpnet.com; ads20.focalink.com;idealab-ad.flycast.com; ph-ad07.focalink.com;ads15.focalink.com; ads10.focalink.com;ad.ca.doubleclick.net; static.admaximize.com;ads.dallasnews.com; realmedia.com;www.rbiproduction.co.uk; w131.hitbox.com;ln.doubleclick.net; c1.thecounter.com;ads23.focalink.com; maximumpcads.imaginemedia.com; maximumpcads.snv.futurenet.com; www56.valueclick.com;ads05.focalink.com; kansas.valueclick.com;oz.valueclick.com; ads07.focalink.com;ads12.focalink.com
--
- You still have the Zodiacal light fogging your pictures of nebulae; to get away from that, you need to go further from the Sun.
- You can't see much more of the Sun from a 20-degree inclined orbit. For that you really want a polar orbit. If you want to see solar flares and prominences from a different angle, you'd want to be at the Earth-Sun L4 or L5 point instead of on Cruithne, which varies its angular separation from the Earth-Sun line throughout the year.
- You can't see much more of the sky from Cruithne than you can from the Moon's L4 or L5 point, and it's a lot faster to get data back from the shorter distance.
- Last and most significant: what kind of observatory needs to be gotten away from Earth and put on a rock somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, so that you can still only see the half of the sky it doesn't block? Why not a free-flying probe?
An observatory which is best suited to Cruithne than somewhere else would have to have some very specialized requirements. I can't think of anything that has requirements remotely like that. Note: I am not an astronomer.--
The way to kill this thing is to make it cost money. Make sure BMG eats all their production and promotional costs, without getting a return on them. If you buy one of these discs by mistake, return it for refund. This also costs the store, and they may stop carrying such discs. Without retail channels, BMG will have to drop the format and go back to regular CD. Kill it the same way we killed DIVX: stay away in droves. It's the only way.
--
--
- The orbit is inclined 20 degrees to Earth's. Change-of-plane maneuvers are very costly in terms of propellant.
- Being so close to the Sun, there is a smaller likelihood of Cruithne having deposits of the essentials for life-support: water, ammonia or methane ices. These would make it more attractive to set up shop there, because resupply costs would be drastically reduced.
As it is, we're probably better off looking for something like an extinct comet nucleus, regardless of its orbit, if we want to set up a space station far from Earth.--
--
The orbit is not unstable; according to the Cruithne FAQ, it will be stable for at least 10,000 years. The FAQ does not say if anyone has projected Cruithne's orbit back in time, let alone what the results were. Given the chaotic nature of 3-body interactions, we probably cannot determine the origin of Cruithne from its orbit alone. We will have to determine its composition to get an idea of where it came from, and send a probe past it to get some idea of its bombardment history (and thus where in the solar system it's spent most of its past). From this we might... might... be able to make some good guesses as to how long it's been Earth's orbital partner.
--
The problem with that is that he'd have to write his decisions in longhand, and I'm sure that OSHA would have something to say about the ergonomics of his workstation and repetitive stress injuries resulting therefrom.
--
I have no idea how much judicial review there is for parole-board actions, but if they are subject to injunction or appeal this may be a way to give the government a black eye. If Kevin is willing to try something like the word-processor thing and the government jumps on him, having them reversed on First Amendment grounds would look very bad for the parole board. It would also put legal handcuffs on future parole boards; once there's a decision saying that such tactics are an abuse of a parolee's civil rights, they can't even use the threat again.
--
--
- This stuff increases the load on the servers, and the traffic on the lines. The cumulative effect of so many of them is a creeping denial-of-service attack.
- Worse is the demand on people's attention. I haven't seen the
/. thread yet which was meant to be a piece out of talk.bizarre. These things would have a place there, but anywhere else they're off-topic and just wasting people's time even to page past them. - The repetition has lost them whatever humor value they ever had. A six-year-old will laugh at the same joke ten times in a row, but most
/.'ers have advanced beyond the mentality of a six-year-old. The poster(s) seem to have serious cases of arrested development. - The poster(s) have this obsession with helpless, sexualized objects. It's pretty obvious that their fantasies involve encounters with blow-up dolls. (Has anyone pointed them at the "I Love Ewe" yet?)
- As Katz has been noting over the past few days, this place is hostile to a lot of groups. Perhaps not deliberately, but there's a culture-clash here that isn't along ethnic, class or religious lines, but sexual ones. The people you're alienating aren't "them"; they are your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. What's really sad is that these posters don't have the empathy to care.
I found it amusing that the only person to stick up for the N&P postings was an AC; he (almost certainly "he") wouldn't even put the reputation of a login behind his defense.What to do about it? Ban the IP's? If they're from some large proxy server, this causes a lot of collateral damage. I favor the idea of giving moderators renewable (based on prompt meta-moderation) points for "off-topic", "redundant" and perhaps a new category of "hateful" down-moderations, combined with some auto-moderation which kicks things down based on all the boring and repetetive key-phrases most of us have come to hate. If "naked and petrified" automatically posts at -1 (Offtopic), moderators don't have to waste any time at all.
--
--
Here's the link from the Viridian Mailing List Archive. Note the date on the article: December 30, 1998. Yup, over a year old. (Why's Slashdot so slow on some of these things?)
--
At dollars to tens of dollars per fuel cell, plus all the refilling requirements of all their little fuel tanks, I'm sure you'd quickly see the wisdom of a centralized generator. Economies of scale, my friend. Economies of scale.
--
Fuel cells are just a more efficient way to convert chemical energy into work. They have the advantage for many uses in that they perform very well at part load (the killer of the gasoline engine is its horrible fuel consumption at idle). The disadvantages of fuel cells are that they still require fuel. Under future tax regimes which will probably include stiff carbon taxes, this is still going to hit you at the pump even if your car gets 80 miles per gallon.
--
(If irony was posted on Slashdot, would anybody notice? Oh, BTW, I fully expect self-righteous lousy spellers to moderate me down.)
--
--
Encryption is touted as a way to protect privacy and human rights. Unlike a slip-up which reveals credit-card numbers to a cracker, the sort of people who want the goods on dissidents and the like won't be asking for ransoms for the data or making fraudulent purchases. The connection between the security lapse and the late-night phone calls, break-ins, beatings, and other dirty tricks will be impossible to see. It's a new ocean out there, full of shoals hidden beneath the dark water. We must not put too much trust in our handiwork until it has well and truly proven itself sound.
--
I think I used "Hubert Lewis Dewey". If I ever fill out another one of those (handy lock-openers, they're free, why not?) and it has a slot for "Employer", I'm going to put down "Dewey, Cheetham & Howe, Attys".
--
Appliance companies are already looking toward selling services as much as (or instead of) goods. Electrolux is marketing a pay-per-load washing machine in Europe; they install it for free and you get the bill added to your utilities every month. The EU has data privacy laws, but in the USA (and Japan?) sales of very intimate customer data are possible just as soon as they become feasible to collect. Sales of the data would pay for the R&D and promotion. A scheme that doesn't lead to any data collection eliminates a profit center in the business.
--
Sales of that information is quite a bit less benign than just the store having it. If your dental insurer finds out you eat a box of Cap'n Crunch every two days and you never buy toothpaste, they're bound to run your rates up. It would be one thing if they nagged you honestly and gave you a chance to change; it's quite another if you suddenly see a price increase and cannot connect it to anything you can change. These things give power to mega-business and take it away from the individual.
--
You must have a funky browser. As I get the article, the word Techserver links to http://www.techserver.com, and the word "reports" right after it links to http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,50 0155342-500192009-500825041-0,00.html. Two different links, right next to each other. Even passing my pointer over the two words (in IE 4.0) shows that they're different.
--