mmm, maybe we will be getting $1000 mid range CPU's with a 'free' copy of Windows. Dont like the EULA? well, ok then, we will just refund the zero dollars you paid for it as it was a 'free' copy....
except those people up there are more likely to have the cash to have 1) mobile phone with 50 note polyphonic ring tone 1b) the cash to talk on it non stop (loudly)
2) a notebook with a widescreen 2b) case of batteries to run it for the duration of the trip, on brightness setting requiring spf50+ sunscreen 2c) the cash to pay several dolars a minute to watch an inflight movie on it
and 3) to fall asleep from the combination of moet and antidepressent/sedative coctail anyway and leave it all on, bleeping, squarking and ringing
AFAIK the crossrange ability is a big thing in the man-rated features of the shuttle. If you *need* the shuttle down *now* then the 1000km crossrange is going to help a lot in getting to a landing site. Near enough can be good enough, rather than waiting a dozen orbits for the right place on earth to appear under you.
The 1000km number comes from the air force requirment to land in the same place it took off from after only 1 orbit. Dont forget the Earth moves as well as the shuttle. How much? depends on your inclination, but if you are flying over soviet russia ill bet its close to 1000km. So to get back to where you started you need to be able to move which needs fuel or gliding ability.
So in either case it is a *good thing* that the crossrange ability hasnt been used because: a) we havnt needed to spy/nuke russia b) we havnt had an in-orbit emergency
I once had a pizza place haggle the price with me on competitors coupons. "Im sorry we cant take the $4 coupon, but how about $5.50?" (normal price is $8) sounded fair to me, and i was hungry...
Well yes i agree that flywheels or centrifuges (what i work with) are damn scary things to be around. With objects easily generating tonnes of force just waiting to be flung around in a catostrophic failure. (5kg rotor, 10,000 g = 50 tons of not so friendly die cast aluminium wanting to be free)
Although it would have to be cool to have a car that could not roll over due to the gyroscopic effect of a flywheel...
hmmm speaking of which, how the hell am i going to turn corners?
well i mention carbon fiber or other fiber strengthners as they should be easily laminated into the structure to provide lateral support. You can get these as flexible sheets. Yes a carbon fibre panel is brittle from the inter-layer bonding designed to make it rigid, but here we dont need to worry about strengthing the flexible axis, and just worry about the disk tearing itself apart at high RPM.
It does a tad more than bad sector remapping. Yes the DVD spec has all of those features, but nothing *implements* them.
MRW allows you to put in a new disk, and withing a few seconds/minutes you can start putting data on it. None of this messing around with compiling and burning data. Opps i forgot a file, lets do it all again, another 10 minute burn. With MRW you just put the file there and its there. If you didnt want the file, delete it. Simple, and 'it just works(TM)'.
Easywrite and MRW (the same?) is hopefully a standard that will take off. I have 3 computers with 3 different burners that read each others MRW disks (they all run InCD). Another computer with a non MRW drive popped up a helpful webpage with a driver to read the disk and it just worked also.
I played with the early incarnation of UDF with old versions of InCD (V3?) and some other program that was on the GF's notebook. I admit they were crap and just would not work (not to metion having a really long format before you could not use the disk)
And if bad sector managment is so hard, how does old fashioned magnetic media work with it? At least it gives you the ability to use a disk with a defect rather than just not being able to get your data off of it.
And this is the same market that buys stuff from spam, telemarketers, and dodgy-computers-r-us, and expects CDR to delaminate, harddisks to last 12 months, and bugs to normal in their software. Someone has to market it so they will buy it. (why do people still buy coke/pepsi when there are much cheaper colas?)
I dont get why DVD-RAM still isnt taking off. Both of the -RW +RW technologies like a CD are limited to 1000 read/writes but the -RAM can be cycled *millions* of times, which means you can use it like a floppy (and reliably).
I also believe that the +rw disks dont need to be closed as the whole disk surface does not need to contain data (a -RW disk needs formatting to the edge). +RW is also superior technology in the way data can be written in multiple sessions/burn recovery/random access/etc. yet it is also in the minority of use.
I havnt looked up lately how DL disks were being implimented and if they decided on the fill the whole disk strategy or put half the data on each layer (i believe the disks *have* to have something on both layers or else the system doesnt work)
What i would love to take off is the mini-RAM disks now being used in DVD camcorders. 8cm disk holds 1gb and fits easily in a pocket, but at $25 (australian) a disk its way too pricey and a serious opportunity lost to portable optical media. I already use the mini CD-RW disks but can only find them in 4x.
Just like trying to find good quality scratch resistant CDs. Sure i can get a CDR for 10c but the foil on top just rubs off (no need to scratch!). I miss the good old Kodak Gold CDR and their 4x goodness.
If *plastic* disks are going to be limiting the technology, why dont we use something a little stronger?
DVDs are already layered construction on top and bottom polycarbonate with bits between, it shouldnt be too hard to put in a fiberglass, carbon-fiber, carbon-nanotube, transparent aluminium/aluminum, reinforcing layer into the manufacturing process.
Yes it might cost some more, but a lot of things are described as "cheep arse plastic". Why should CD/DVDs be any different?
I think the accent it also has a lot to do with the accent of who did the teaching.
French people hearing people i went to school with speaking french recognise it as a Mauritian accent. Why? thats where the teachers were from.
I also noticed while in Quebec, that their French seems well French (to my untrained ear) but their english was spoken with an *American* accent, not Canadian, and not like frenchman either.
I have wondered that when you laugh at engrish or frenchish or what ever, it seems obvious to us where they come from, but what about in other places... say a Japanese person taught german by a frenchman
Cant find the link that went into depth about this. It basically concludes that toast falling buttered side down is a constant of the universe.
If molecular bonds were stronger (or gravity weaker), we would have stronger skulls, so could fall from a greater height, so would be taller, so would have higher tables, so the toast could do a complete flip and land buttered side up before hitting the ground.
By my reply would still be, why the hell sell me (or advertise) an unlimited 24/7 connection, when it isnt one and they have no intention of providing it.
With dialup (yes i live in the dark-ages here in australia WA- also known as 'wait awhile') you get Unlimited connections that have a 4 hour timeout. I guess you dont have to worry much about data limits when you can only move 48kbps for 4 hours.
With ADSL you get unlimited time (well it is part of the technology after all) but they sting new users with a 200MB *mega-fscking-byte* limit on downloads.
Ok i never really believed that soapies wonder wash would get my clothes whiter than the rest, but if you say its unlimited then it had better bloody well be.
I want my internet pipe to have 10% more love in it than the nearest compeditor.
People generally hate not being able to explain things. I think "$deiety did it" is often used to just put some damn explanation on the unexplainable either due to being naive or a lack of technology.
Why is there thunder? Because God is angry, or because there is some electrical imbalance in the atmosphere causing a lightning which superheats air that explodes and causes a noise (still simplified, but closer to the truth...)
What really really bugs me though is when bad things happen and you get the crap about "He works in mysterious ways" etc etc. Or when someone believes that *their* god is the one true god and i will kill everyone who dosent believe so (and not just recent events, it used to be the other way around not so long ago)
Yes IAAA (i am an agnostic). I refuses to participate in any organised religion because of these cop-outs. Religion is/was a good way to organise a society so we behave in a way that allows society to function. Personally i like the karma system, just do good and be good and if everyone else does that then we all have a good life.
At the uni i go to, they have started testing out Turn-it-in (http://www.turnitin.com/). It can be used in all faculties for code, mathematics, and 'normal' written assignments. Checks all submitted assigments against each other and the web, highlights the similarities and gives a report.
The good thing about it is that it is not just to catch cheats, but to educate students (particularly in the sciences) about referencing quotes etc, and to not just block copy other peoples work. Courses will either have the students submit to Turn-it-in and see the reports before they actually submit and fix it if necessary (at least one dumbass submitted his copied assignment anyway!), or markers can submit bits they think are suspicious.
Well, a well-put responce (on slashdot!) im impressed.
There has been so much fear-mongering speculation here that I was trying to avoid talking about future possibilities and minority cases. What process is being used most typically, right now, and what should we expect to happen as a result?
Well, these arnt the minority cases. Most of the current *new* lines of plants are using non-antibiotic methods, becasue of public pressure. True the currently released ones dont, but i dont think that is an issue anyway (read on). If you dont want antibiotic resistance genes in your food, say so and the market will (and has) decided. But dont dismiss GM because of a particular application.
But plasmid transfer is an important natural mechanism for horizontal gene transfer. Why do you consider this natural behavior to be unlikely? And do you consider nature to be a "controlled environment?"
Plasmid transfer is certainly possible and frequent (in fact i am doing it right now!), but gene transfer horizontally *is* very rare. It is very hard for an organism to get a gene from a plant, that is designed to work in a plant and is *not* in a plasmid, and to get it into its own genome/plasmid. By controlled environment i mean to say 'very high pressure selection'. If for some crazy reason you spray your crop with tetracycline, then you are bound to get a lot of tet resistant bactieria. Either they get the gene from a natural source, or maybe, just maybe one of them gets lucky and manages to get the gene from the plant. A bacteria isnt a concious being and cant go, ooooh i want that resistance gene, but if the selection is right, then the one that just happended to have the right piece of DNA will win.
Now in animal farming where they do spray antibiotics around willy-nilly then you definately have a problem and this is a 'bad-thing (tm)', but a totally different issue to GM.
antibiotic resistance in gut bacteria might be expected as the norm for anyone who's ever taken the given antibiotic.
Well i have said in another post, but, the antibiotics typically used are not that important in human medicine, becasue there is already a huge number of natural resistance genes out there. Any old handfull of soil (or gut contents) will have some resistant bacteria to pratically everything currently in use or stuff that hasnt even been invented yet. Yes you have the right to know, but i dont think you actually need to worry (but that is up to the individual)
Antibiotic resistance is not resistance to *all* drugs. Some obscure and rarley used drug (and some not even in human medicine) shouldn't play big on your mind. And yes i know about antibiotic resistance (I am a scientist/geneticist/molecular biologist/evil genetically modifing scumbag) so i am imformed on the facts from both sides of the fence. Using last-line of defence drugs (eg vancomycin) in chickens is just plain stupid and should be criminal, but as most anti-gm "information" likes to avoid is that is very different from common antibiotics that *are* used in GM like tetracycline, ampicillin, chloramphenicol etc.
And well i've never heard of CEC's before, but i dont think that intravenious yoghut is going to help a lot. I think that phage technology is probably the way to go. Kill the pathogens with pathogens of the pathogens! And no its not GM, and the Russians? did a lot of research into it while the west concentrated on antibiotics.
Big ugly business: 1) make GM crop that can withstand twenty times the dose of our herbicide 2) sensitive to the competitor's herbicide (?wtf!) 3) make the crops sterile so that the farmers have to buy from us year after year 4) ??? 5) profit
Farmer: 1) Dont buy X's seed 2) Buy compeditors seed (GM or not) 2) ??? 3) no profit for X 4) Profit (for compeditor)
Slashdot Mirror
mmm, maybe we will be getting $1000 mid range CPU's with a 'free' copy of Windows. Dont like the EULA? well, ok then, we will just refund the zero dollars you paid for it as it was a 'free' copy....
except those people up there are more likely to have the cash to have
1) mobile phone with 50 note polyphonic ring tone
1b) the cash to talk on it non stop (loudly)
2) a notebook with a widescreen
2b) case of batteries to run it for the duration of the trip, on brightness setting requiring spf50+ sunscreen
2c) the cash to pay several dolars a minute to watch an inflight movie on it
and
3) to fall asleep from the combination of moet and antidepressent/sedative coctail anyway and leave it all on, bleeping, squarking and ringing
AFAIK the crossrange ability is a big thing in the man-rated features of the shuttle. If you *need* the shuttle down *now* then the 1000km crossrange is going to help a lot in getting to a landing site. Near enough can be good enough, rather than waiting a dozen orbits for the right place on earth to appear under you.
The 1000km number comes from the air force requirment to land in the same place it took off from after only 1 orbit. Dont forget the Earth moves as well as the shuttle. How much? depends on your inclination, but if you are flying over soviet russia ill bet its close to 1000km. So to get back to where you started you need to be able to move which needs fuel or gliding ability.
So in either case it is a *good thing* that the crossrange ability hasnt been used because:
a) we havnt needed to spy/nuke russia
b) we havnt had an in-orbit emergency
I once had a pizza place haggle the price with me on competitors coupons. "Im sorry we cant take the $4 coupon, but how about $5.50?" (normal price is $8) sounded fair to me, and i was hungry...
Stay out!
Hungry, Angry,
Pissed-off bees inside...
No sun = no flowers, but
No sun also = "assorted decaying plant matter"
"assorted decaying plant matter" = happy bee
i see no problem here.
Well yes i agree that flywheels or centrifuges (what i work with) are damn scary things to be around. With objects easily generating tonnes of force just waiting to be flung around in a catostrophic failure. (5kg rotor, 10,000 g = 50 tons of not so friendly die cast aluminium wanting to be free)
Although it would have to be cool to have a car that could not roll over due to the gyroscopic effect of a flywheel...
hmmm speaking of which, how the hell am i going to turn corners?
They actually can do this (well over relatively short distances between landmasses). Its called a monopolar High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) line.
k est.html
http://members.iinet.net.au/~emfacts/basslink/wea
Minor problems with electromagnetic fields in the vicinity, and chlorine gas production at the +ve electrode....
Paint in luminescent green!
It is very easy to find a *glowing* green object at the bottom of a dark hole... or at night.
mmmm radioactive glow...
well i mention carbon fiber or other fiber strengthners as they should be easily laminated into the structure to provide lateral support. You can get these as flexible sheets. Yes a carbon fibre panel is brittle from the inter-layer bonding designed to make it rigid, but here we dont need to worry about strengthing the flexible axis, and just worry about the disk tearing itself apart at high RPM.
It does a tad more than bad sector remapping.
Yes the DVD spec has all of those features, but nothing *implements* them.
MRW allows you to put in a new disk, and withing a few seconds/minutes you can start putting data on it. None of this messing around with compiling and burning data. Opps i forgot a file, lets do it all again, another 10 minute burn. With MRW you just put the file there and its there. If you didnt want the file, delete it. Simple, and 'it just works(TM)'.
Easywrite and MRW (the same?) is hopefully a standard that will take off. I have 3 computers with 3 different burners that read each others MRW disks (they all run InCD). Another computer with a non MRW drive popped up a helpful webpage with a driver to read the disk and it just worked also.
I played with the early incarnation of UDF with old versions of InCD (V3?) and some other program that was on the GF's notebook. I admit they were crap and just would not work (not to metion having a really long format before you could not use the disk)
And if bad sector managment is so hard, how does old fashioned magnetic media work with it? At least it gives you the ability to use a disk with a defect rather than just not being able to get your data off of it.
And this is the same market that buys stuff from spam, telemarketers, and dodgy-computers-r-us, and expects CDR to delaminate, harddisks to last 12 months, and bugs to normal in their software. Someone has to market it so they will buy it. (why do people still buy coke/pepsi when there are much cheaper colas?)
I dont get why DVD-RAM still isnt taking off. Both of the -RW +RW technologies like a CD are limited to 1000 read/writes but the -RAM can be cycled *millions* of times, which means you can use it like a floppy (and reliably).
I also believe that the +rw disks dont need to be closed as the whole disk surface does not need to contain data (a -RW disk needs formatting to the edge). +RW is also superior technology in the way data can be written in multiple sessions/burn recovery/random access/etc. yet it is also in the minority of use.
I havnt looked up lately how DL disks were being implimented and if they decided on the fill the whole disk strategy or put half the data on each layer (i believe the disks *have* to have something on both layers or else the system doesnt work)
What i would love to take off is the mini-RAM disks now being used in DVD camcorders. 8cm disk holds 1gb and fits easily in a pocket, but at $25 (australian) a disk its way too pricey and a serious opportunity lost to portable optical media. I already use the mini CD-RW disks but can only find them in 4x.
Just like trying to find good quality scratch resistant CDs. Sure i can get a CDR for 10c but the foil on top just rubs off (no need to scratch!). I miss the good old Kodak Gold CDR and their 4x goodness.
If *plastic* disks are going to be limiting the technology, why dont we use something a little stronger?
DVDs are already layered construction on top and bottom polycarbonate with bits between, it shouldnt be too hard to put in a fiberglass, carbon-fiber, carbon-nanotube, transparent aluminium/aluminum, reinforcing layer into the manufacturing process.
Yes it might cost some more, but a lot of things are described as "cheep arse plastic". Why should CD/DVDs be any different?
And if it dosent come back, hunt it down and kill it :)
I think the accent it also has a lot to do with the accent of who did the teaching.
French people hearing people i went to school with speaking french recognise it as a Mauritian accent. Why? thats where the teachers were from.
I also noticed while in Quebec, that their French seems well French (to my untrained ear) but their english was spoken with an *American* accent, not Canadian, and not like frenchman either.
I have wondered that when you laugh at engrish or frenchish or what ever, it seems obvious to us where they come from, but what about in other places... say a Japanese person taught german by a frenchman
eg. Fsck fsck fsck! why the fsck did the fscking fscker fscking well do that me right fscking now. FSCK!!!!
Its amazing how versatile one word can be.
I may have to curb my ways before i get a child (or a parrot)
Cant find the link that went into depth about this. It basically concludes that toast falling buttered side down is a constant of the universe.
/ MurphysScience.html isnt the original, and not nearly as funny...
If molecular bonds were stronger (or gravity weaker), we would have stronger skulls, so could fall from a greater height, so would be taller, so would have higher tables, so the toast could do a complete flip and land buttered side up before hitting the ground.
This http://wvlc.uwaterloo.ca/biology447/modules/intro
By my reply would still be, why the hell sell me (or advertise) an unlimited 24/7 connection, when it isnt one and they have no intention of providing it.
With dialup (yes i live in the dark-ages here in australia WA- also known as 'wait awhile') you get Unlimited connections that have a 4 hour timeout. I guess you dont have to worry much about data limits when you can only move 48kbps for 4 hours.
With ADSL you get unlimited time (well it is part of the technology after all) but they sting new users with a 200MB *mega-fscking-byte* limit on downloads.
Ok i never really believed that soapies wonder wash would get my clothes whiter than the rest, but if you say its unlimited then it had better bloody well be.
I want my internet pipe to have 10% more love in it than the nearest compeditor.
Pretty damn depressing if you have ever seen one of these elitist mustards. They make the weeds in my lawn seem complex.
And if you want to really feel inferior, wheat has three genomes (not a typo), each of which is larger than the human genome...
People generally hate not being able to explain things. I think "$deiety did it" is often used to just put some damn explanation on the unexplainable either due to being naive or a lack of technology.
Why is there thunder? Because God is angry, or because there is some electrical imbalance in the atmosphere causing a lightning which superheats air that explodes and causes a noise (still simplified, but closer to the truth...)
What really really bugs me though is when bad things happen and you get the crap about "He works in mysterious ways" etc etc. Or when someone believes that *their* god is the one true god and i will kill everyone who dosent believe so (and not just recent events, it used to be the other way around not so long ago)
Yes IAAA (i am an agnostic). I refuses to participate in any organised religion because of these cop-outs. Religion is/was a good way to organise a society so we behave in a way that allows society to function. Personally i like the karma system, just do good and be good and if everyone else does that then we all have a good life.
At the uni i go to, they have started testing out Turn-it-in (http://www.turnitin.com/). It can be used in all faculties for code, mathematics, and 'normal' written assignments. Checks all submitted assigments against each other and the web, highlights the similarities and gives a report.
The good thing about it is that it is not just to catch cheats, but to educate students (particularly in the sciences) about referencing quotes etc, and to not just block copy other peoples work. Courses will either have the students submit to Turn-it-in and see the reports before they actually submit and fix it if necessary (at least one dumbass submitted his copied assignment anyway!), or markers can submit bits they think are suspicious.
Greek for "little chief nipple twister"
If i could get an image of one it would be my new wallpaper (google is not my friend)...
That silly page lists penguinone... 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dienone, with an appropriate molecular structure to suit...
How come I've never seen that mentioned here before?
There has been so much fear-mongering speculation here that I was trying to avoid talking about future possibilities and minority cases. What process is being used most typically, right now, and what should we expect to happen as a result?
Well, these arnt the minority cases. Most of the current *new* lines of plants are using non-antibiotic methods, becasue of public pressure. True the currently released ones dont, but i dont think that is an issue anyway (read on). If you dont want antibiotic resistance genes in your food, say so and the market will (and has) decided. But dont dismiss GM because of a particular application.
But plasmid transfer is an important natural mechanism for horizontal gene transfer. Why do you consider this natural behavior to be unlikely? And do you consider nature to be a "controlled environment?"
Plasmid transfer is certainly possible and frequent (in fact i am doing it right now!), but gene transfer horizontally *is* very rare. It is very hard for an organism to get a gene from a plant, that is designed to work in a plant and is *not* in a plasmid, and to get it into its own genome/plasmid. By controlled environment i mean to say 'very high pressure selection'. If for some crazy reason you spray your crop with tetracycline, then you are bound to get a lot of tet resistant bactieria. Either they get the gene from a natural source, or maybe, just maybe one of them gets lucky and manages to get the gene from the plant. A bacteria isnt a concious being and cant go, ooooh i want that resistance gene, but if the selection is right, then the one that just happended to have the right piece of DNA will win.
Now in animal farming where they do spray antibiotics around willy-nilly then you definately have a problem and this is a 'bad-thing (tm)', but a totally different issue to GM.
antibiotic resistance in gut bacteria might be expected as the norm for anyone who's ever taken the given antibiotic.
Well i have said in another post, but, the antibiotics typically used are not that important in human medicine, becasue there is already a huge number of natural resistance genes out there. Any old handfull of soil (or gut contents) will have some resistant bacteria to pratically everything currently in use or stuff that hasnt even been invented yet. Yes you have the right to know, but i dont think you actually need to worry (but that is up to the individual)
Antibiotic resistance is not resistance to *all* drugs. Some obscure and rarley used drug (and some not even in human medicine) shouldn't play big on your mind. And yes i know about antibiotic resistance (I am a scientist/geneticist/molecular biologist/evil genetically modifing scumbag) so i am imformed on the facts from both sides of the fence. Using last-line of defence drugs (eg vancomycin) in chickens is just plain stupid and should be criminal, but as most anti-gm "information" likes to avoid is that is very different from common antibiotics that *are* used in GM like tetracycline, ampicillin, chloramphenicol etc.
And well i've never heard of CEC's before, but i dont think that intravenious yoghut is going to help a lot. I think that phage technology is probably the way to go. Kill the pathogens with pathogens of the pathogens! And no its not GM, and the Russians? did a lot of research into it while the west concentrated on antibiotics.
Big ugly business:
1) make GM crop that can withstand twenty times the dose of our herbicide
2) sensitive to the competitor's herbicide (?wtf!)
3) make the crops sterile so that the farmers have to buy from us year after year
4) ???
5) profit
Farmer:
1) Dont buy X's seed
2) Buy compeditors seed (GM or not)
2) ???
3) no profit for X
4) Profit (for compeditor)