Modern staple foods are almost universally descended from plants that were deliberately exposed to high levels of artificial ionizing radiation or chemical mutagens in order to induce mutations. Mankind induced the mutations, then mankind artificially and selectively bred the mutations into the food supply. Outside a few minor heirloom varieties, there is virtually no maize, wheat, rice, or soy on the planet which isn't the result of these artificially-induced alterations of the plant genomes.
Which is to say, no, there is almost nothing you can eat "which is part of the ecosystem without human intervention." It's all been meddled with.
Actually, every version of Windows since XP has also shipped with it--if you bought the right edition. Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista Enterprise/Ultimate, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7 Enterprise/Ultimate all shipped with the "Subsystem for Unix-based Applications".
Yeah, see, that's a well-known scam, originally used for sports betting picks. If you're caught doing it, you will do time for fraud. It's listed on Wikipedia, it's been broadcast on the Simpsons, and it's been covered in books on swindles for decades.
If people use h.264 exclusively instead of WebM for HTML5, yeah, it'll be a problem. Of course, only the stupid will do that stupid enough to do that, since Firefox and Opera are a third of the whole browser share, while the no-VP8/WebM holdout is Safari with about five percent.
Butanol is pretty near gasoline in energy density, doesn't have the hydrophilic tendencies or corrosion levels of ethanol (so it can be used in existing gasoline infrastructure, like tanks and pipelines), and 100% pure butanol has successfully been used in cars designed only to burn gasoline. Of pretty much all the alternative fuels that have been proposed, it's the one that could replace gasoline with the absolute least difficulty and infrastructure adjustment.
On the other hand, nobody's managed to get the fermentation process cheap enough to be competitive with gasoline. Pretty much all commercially-available butanol is made synthetically from natural gas feedstock, because that's cheaper.
Well, butanol at least meets the energy density (pretty close to gasoline) and ready-to-use (can be used in most gasoline infrastructure as-is) criteria, which means it makes a hell of a lot more sense than ethanol. If, of course, they can make it cost-effective.
Making acetone and butanol with the Weizmann organism is downright ordinary. People stopped doing in the the 1940s mostly because hydrocarbon cracking was cheaper than ABE fermentation. The feedstock isn't particularly unusual. Wonder what they're specifically trying to patent.
Analogous to adding brown? No. Old-style 3D vs. modern is analogous to Technicolor versus modern color methods, or early Moveitone vs. Dolby Digital. Which is to say, no, the improvements don't make it something new. Still requires glasses, still significantly degrades the experience for a substantial minority of viewers, still gives people headaches, still adds significant costs to production, still doesn't add anything to the vast majority of movies ("Oh, I loved On the Waterfront, but it would have been even better in 3D!").
Color was tried, and became universal. 3D was tried, was popular for a few years, and then was abandoned for the next five decades. 3D's already been proven to be a mere gimmick whose popularity goes away after it ceases to be novel.
Avatar, for instance, was one of the first to hold back on the "It's 3D!"isms and just show a great film with a great story.
"Dial M for Murder" debuted in 3D. Shortly thereafter, people stopped doing 3D, because it was a fad that ran its course, not adding enough to the movie experience to be worth the hassle once the novelty wore off.
After fifty years, it was novel again. And now it's going to wear off, and then it'll go away again.
If 3D were something new, there might be some point in analogizing it to sound or color. But 3D dates back to the 1950s. It's been done before, and it's been proven to be a fad. It'll get put on the shelf again in a few years.
3D was really popular in the 1950s, selling huge numbers of tickets and being used for everything from Casper, the Friendly Ghost shorts to classics like "Dial M for Murder". So of course, with such success, it became the norm, and the kids who grew up with it demanded it for the rest of their lives. When George Lucas tried releasing his Star Wars in archaic 2D, it flopped horribly and Mr. Lucas wound up working as a module designer for TSR, which became a major entertainment giant on the strength of the enduring mass popularity of Dungeons & Dragons.
See, I thought the response to the iPod was obvious. The Zune would be compatible with the Microsoft-created DRMed music format used by the wide network of then-extant "PlaysForSure" download services. The Zune would come with the ability to play pretty much any non-DRM audio format in existence at the time. The Zune would have a user-replaceable battery and a user-replaceable hard drive. The Zune would have a standardized, fully-documented (both hardware and software), royalty-free accessory interface, to actively encourage third-party add-ons. Zune would be launched in a huge co-marketing deal with Walmart (which ran one of the PlaysForSure download stores). Initial pricing would be 20% off the iPod of equivalent storage, just to drive initial adoption. And, to top it off, Walmart and Microsoft would pay Apple Corps (then in a lawsuit with Apple Computer) a fortune to bring the Beatles to the Walmart music store at the launch.
In short, I thought Microsoft would actually try to beat the iPod by attacking the iPod simultaneously at every point of potential vulnerability. Not just put up a near-clone and hope it sold.
Since then, I've been pretty certain that Microsoft can't do anything but flail in consumer electronics. They're dead in the water. The future is either Apple or Android.
Code which depends on the virtual environment leaving clues the malware's code can detect. Code which also can be disabled by (for example) putting a jump instruction in the right place in the binary.
There are some tricks you could play with dividing the hexagonal pixel into six equilateral triangle color elements (instead of the modern "square" pixel of three rectangular color elements), too.
First, Tetris has no narrative, while these games do. Immersion in a narrative is different than absorption in a puzzle. Just because they're both "games" doesn't mean you can successfully mix-and-match the fundamentally different experiences of narrative and puzzle. Narrative immersion isn't dependent on realism, but internal consistency. There's a willing suspension of disbelief, and if you break it, you've failed as the crafter of a narrative.
Second, even puzzle absorption can be broken by jarring inconsistencies. If Tetris had random blocks that couldn't be moved or rotated, or sometimes arbitrarily reversed the effect of a rotation, the change would break puzzle absorption, and the game would have been much less successful.
Star Wars fighters have to bank like airplanes because of the side effects of inertial compensation. The wooshing sounds are generated by in-cabin speakers to alert the pilots, taking advantage of the fact that people are evolved to understand the noises to mean something is passing by.
Stealing from casinos is an activity that ticks off casino owners; money laundering is a business that profits casino owners. Which activity do you think casino owners are more likely to organize, or to wink at if some of their employees organize?
The government doesn't have to make regulations to discourage casinos from organizing or tolerating theft from the casino. They do have to make regulations to discourage casinos from organizing or tolerating money laundering operations.
If they're paid, it becomes easy to use a casino for money laundering. Walk into the casino with a bunch of cash you obtained illegally, dump it as a high roller at the craps table, hit the deliberately-broken slot machine your accomplice in the casino management set up to get most of your money back, and when you go to the bank and have to explain where you got the money you're depositing, hey, you won it from a slot machine, perfectly legal source.
To stop that, when a big payout is hit, the machines are audited by the gaming commission and checked for errors. If there is one, you don't get the payout, so a crooked casino manager can't set up a broken machine as part of a money-laundering operation.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern staple foods are almost universally descended from plants that were deliberately exposed to high levels of artificial ionizing radiation or chemical mutagens in order to induce mutations. Mankind induced the mutations, then mankind artificially and selectively bred the mutations into the food supply. Outside a few minor heirloom varieties, there is virtually no maize, wheat, rice, or soy on the planet which isn't the result of these artificially-induced alterations of the plant genomes.
Which is to say, no, there is almost nothing you can eat "which is part of the ecosystem without human intervention." It's all been meddled with.
Actually, every version of Windows since XP has also shipped with it--if you bought the right edition. Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista Enterprise/Ultimate, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7 Enterprise/Ultimate all shipped with the "Subsystem for Unix-based Applications".
Actually, the original Zune was at its core a Toshiba Gigabeat S, with the modifications jointly developed by Toshiba and Microsoft.
Yeah, see, that's a well-known scam, originally used for sports betting picks. If you're caught doing it, you will do time for fraud. It's listed on Wikipedia, it's been broadcast on the Simpsons, and it's been covered in books on swindles for decades.
If people use h.264 exclusively instead of WebM for HTML5, yeah, it'll be a problem. Of course, only the stupid will do that stupid enough to do that, since Firefox and Opera are a third of the whole browser share, while the no-VP8/WebM holdout is Safari with about five percent.
Yes, but though large, they aren't significant swaths. They're full of No True Scotsmen.
Butanol is pretty near gasoline in energy density, doesn't have the hydrophilic tendencies or corrosion levels of ethanol (so it can be used in existing gasoline infrastructure, like tanks and pipelines), and 100% pure butanol has successfully been used in cars designed only to burn gasoline. Of pretty much all the alternative fuels that have been proposed, it's the one that could replace gasoline with the absolute least difficulty and infrastructure adjustment.
On the other hand, nobody's managed to get the fermentation process cheap enough to be competitive with gasoline. Pretty much all commercially-available butanol is made synthetically from natural gas feedstock, because that's cheaper.
Well, butanol at least meets the energy density (pretty close to gasoline) and ready-to-use (can be used in most gasoline infrastructure as-is) criteria, which means it makes a hell of a lot more sense than ethanol. If, of course, they can make it cost-effective.
Making acetone and butanol with the Weizmann organism is downright ordinary. People stopped doing in the the 1940s mostly because hydrocarbon cracking was cheaper than ABE fermentation. The feedstock isn't particularly unusual. Wonder what they're specifically trying to patent.
Buggy whips in all cars might spice up the sex lives of American teenagers.
Just replace Hurd with Linux!!
Analogous to adding brown? No. Old-style 3D vs. modern is analogous to Technicolor versus modern color methods, or early Moveitone vs. Dolby Digital. Which is to say, no, the improvements don't make it something new. Still requires glasses, still significantly degrades the experience for a substantial minority of viewers, still gives people headaches, still adds significant costs to production, still doesn't add anything to the vast majority of movies ("Oh, I loved On the Waterfront, but it would have been even better in 3D!").
It's doomed.
Color was tried, and became universal. 3D was tried, was popular for a few years, and then was abandoned for the next five decades. 3D's already been proven to be a mere gimmick whose popularity goes away after it ceases to be novel.
Avatar, for instance, was one of the first to hold back on the "It's 3D!"isms and just show a great film with a great story.
"Dial M for Murder" debuted in 3D. Shortly thereafter, people stopped doing 3D, because it was a fad that ran its course, not adding enough to the movie experience to be worth the hassle once the novelty wore off.
After fifty years, it was novel again. And now it's going to wear off, and then it'll go away again.
If 3D were something new, there might be some point in analogizing it to sound or color. But 3D dates back to the 1950s. It's been done before, and it's been proven to be a fad. It'll get put on the shelf again in a few years.
3D was really popular in the 1950s, selling huge numbers of tickets and being used for everything from Casper, the Friendly Ghost shorts to classics like "Dial M for Murder". So of course, with such success, it became the norm, and the kids who grew up with it demanded it for the rest of their lives. When George Lucas tried releasing his Star Wars in archaic 2D, it flopped horribly and Mr. Lucas wound up working as a module designer for TSR, which became a major entertainment giant on the strength of the enduring mass popularity of Dungeons & Dragons.
Which is to say, if AND happens, it's compatible with my prediction, but I'm not going to expect AND.
And Apple is making GPS systems, actually. At least, the in-car standalone GPS has been absolutely murdered by the iPhone and Android phones recently.
Oh, god.
I had hopes for the Zune.
See, I thought the response to the iPod was obvious. The Zune would be compatible with the Microsoft-created DRMed music format used by the wide network of then-extant "PlaysForSure" download services. The Zune would come with the ability to play pretty much any non-DRM audio format in existence at the time. The Zune would have a user-replaceable battery and a user-replaceable hard drive. The Zune would have a standardized, fully-documented (both hardware and software), royalty-free accessory interface, to actively encourage third-party add-ons. Zune would be launched in a huge co-marketing deal with Walmart (which ran one of the PlaysForSure download stores). Initial pricing would be 20% off the iPod of equivalent storage, just to drive initial adoption. And, to top it off, Walmart and Microsoft would pay Apple Corps (then in a lawsuit with Apple Computer) a fortune to bring the Beatles to the Walmart music store at the launch.
In short, I thought Microsoft would actually try to beat the iPod by attacking the iPod simultaneously at every point of potential vulnerability. Not just put up a near-clone and hope it sold.
Since then, I've been pretty certain that Microsoft can't do anything but flail in consumer electronics. They're dead in the water. The future is either Apple or Android.
Code which depends on the virtual environment leaving clues the malware's code can detect. Code which also can be disabled by (for example) putting a jump instruction in the right place in the binary.
There are some tricks you could play with dividing the hexagonal pixel into six equilateral triangle color elements (instead of the modern "square" pixel of three rectangular color elements), too.
First, Tetris has no narrative, while these games do. Immersion in a narrative is different than absorption in a puzzle. Just because they're both "games" doesn't mean you can successfully mix-and-match the fundamentally different experiences of narrative and puzzle. Narrative immersion isn't dependent on realism, but internal consistency. There's a willing suspension of disbelief, and if you break it, you've failed as the crafter of a narrative.
Second, even puzzle absorption can be broken by jarring inconsistencies. If Tetris had random blocks that couldn't be moved or rotated, or sometimes arbitrarily reversed the effect of a rotation, the change would break puzzle absorption, and the game would have been much less successful.
Is it so hard for you to just use Unicode
Unicode doesn't cover the full set of CJK characters used for names, nor does it cover all writing systems in actual use.
Star Wars fighters have to bank like airplanes because of the side effects of inertial compensation. The wooshing sounds are generated by in-cabin speakers to alert the pilots, taking advantage of the fact that people are evolved to understand the noises to mean something is passing by.
Stealing from casinos is an activity that ticks off casino owners; money laundering is a business that profits casino owners. Which activity do you think casino owners are more likely to organize, or to wink at if some of their employees organize?
The government doesn't have to make regulations to discourage casinos from organizing or tolerating theft from the casino. They do have to make regulations to discourage casinos from organizing or tolerating money laundering operations.
If they're paid, it becomes easy to use a casino for money laundering. Walk into the casino with a bunch of cash you obtained illegally, dump it as a high roller at the craps table, hit the deliberately-broken slot machine your accomplice in the casino management set up to get most of your money back, and when you go to the bank and have to explain where you got the money you're depositing, hey, you won it from a slot machine, perfectly legal source.
To stop that, when a big payout is hit, the machines are audited by the gaming commission and checked for errors. If there is one, you don't get the payout, so a crooked casino manager can't set up a broken machine as part of a money-laundering operation.