"...behind the bumper of a car traveling at 28 mph, the impact would feel the same to passengers as an impact traveling at only 5 mph,,,"
George Carlin used to point out that if you put a large spike on the steering wheel so that the driver would suffer badly in a collision, the numbers of collisions would drop dramatically.
This concept of DIY biology is far, far older than science, itself. People have been manipulating livestock, crops, even our own genome, for a long time now. But the author of this article is right about new tools making the process that much more accessible and powerful.
The build-out of world trade over the last century has wrought some damaging changes to the world ecology. Invasive species, pernicious plant diseases, and the like are spreading world-wide. Government efforts in this realm have been sporadic and often do more harm than good. The ability of smaller, private organizations to conduct sophisticated science on a smaller budget will be a boon to the restoration of endangered species, for example.
But, I tagged this article with the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag. Danger ahead.
I don't doubt the research at all. It is saying that there was a relative lack of diversity of generic material at a certain point. I just have some questions about their conclusions.
We already have lots of models of societal structures where a relative few individuals are providing all the population, from bees and meerkats to elk. The best we can say is that a relative few individuals were mating and procreating.
I'll offer proof that this is actually happening; a species that follows human, the Eastern Gray Squirrel, has adapted to cars. Previously, they had an inborn, instinctive behavior of darting in circles when confronted by a danger. This was thought to be an adaptation that helped them escape predation by birds of prey. But this was maladaptive when confronted by a speeding vehicle.
These days, the gray squirrel runs in a straight line when it is in danger. This is probably good news for birds of prey, but squirrel populations are thriving, so I doubt that birds are as big a problem as cars are.
I don't doubt that our environment is promoting genetic variations that are compatible with technology. That meme has been suggested before.
Seems to me that SVG will help deliver the death blow to Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop. Once SVG is implemented, it can be used to provide a 'desktop'. Once a desktop is widely adopted, Microsoft is redundant.
Microsoft's only play is to sabotage the standards.
There are certainly flavors of Democrats. My favorite is the traditional farmer-laborer Democrats of the West. A progressive strain of them is found in Minnesota. I love them.
The deep South were Democrats because Lincoln was Republican. That's it. Look up Dixiecrat in Wikipedia. It was only when the Democrat President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act that they started bolting for the Republican Party and changed the course of American politics. Look up Southern Strategy in Wikipedia.
The South has long been a political force that is basically outside the typical American mainstream of politics. They are cohesive, but they aren't so much a politically organized group as they are a sociologically organized force. Look up Authoritarianism and Right-wing Authoritarianism in Wikipedia. Proto-fascist.
The Republican party in the north, the party of Lincoln, was Fiscally Conservative, pro-business, Politically Moderate, and Socially Moderate. They were certainly liberal in the sense that they liberated the black slaves.
When Texas Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the voting rights act in 1964, he remarked that it was going to deliver the deep South to the Republican Party for a generation. He underestimated.
The deep South segregationists that now control the Republican Party are only Socially Conservative. They are Politically Liberal (intruding into people's personal decisions) and Fiscally Spendthrifts or corrupt. Newt Gingrich and his fellow 'Movement Republicans' are not actually conservative at all. And I would hold that they are hardly Republican.
Ron Paul is truly Politically Conservative, Fiscally Conservative and Socially Conservative. There are few others like him, but they exist. Joel Hefley of Colorado, perhaps Chuck Hegel of Nebraska. Governor 'Butch' Otter of Idaho. The vast majority of the Republican party are simply pro-business (or more accurately, pro-corporation) proto-fascists. Opportunists. Thieves. Corrupt.
The Democratic Party has evolved into an aimless, populist mob. They currently have no guiding principles. They seem to exist only in reaction to big business and the corrupting influence of money.
Getting back to the article; it seems that piracy has a lot to do with intellectual property similar to software programs. If a person creates a work, it would be better if that person could maintain control over its provenance. This encourages continued production of similar work. China, India and other Wild West type newly minted capitalistic systems care little for hypothetical rights such as intellectual property. With good reason, it's unenforceable.
Dang it! I wanted to mod parent up for such a well articulated explanation of cellular composition and some of the evolution behind it. But parent commented as AC.
Although I am not a biologist, I do remember reading some relatively new science that describes how the evolutionary trees of prokaryotes and eukaryotes first diverged, but then recombined. Thus, we have living cells that contain the elements of both.
But, I tagged this article with a 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag because of the inevitable unintended consequences.
I was planning to use my well for a water-source geothermal heat pump for my home. The electric furnace needs work and is expensive to operate. From what I hear, I can get 300-400% efficiency with this type of system.
It is interesting to hear that the ground in the European installation got cold. I would have expected that heat would migrate up to re-warm the earth. But I'll be both cooling and heating my system with the ground water.
I didn't realize that Mars was so much smaller than Earth. That does explain a few things such as why its core isn't molten.
So, there might be life on Mars, but it won't thrive on the surface.
Some other poster made a crack about environmentalists, but the question should be asked; what responsibilities do we have WTR Mars' environment? Large scale terraforming is a distinct possibility in the future.
Parent has good advice. It would be a matter of what you are suited to do (management) and do you like or trust your new manager. If you don't trust the new manager, take the job and start looking for a new job.
I thought I had heard that Mars' atmosphere is weak because the plant's core is not molten like the core of Earth. Is this still the theory?
For those who aren't familiar with the idea, Earth's molten core creates a magnetic field that blocks the solar wind from the Sun. The solar wind would blow away Earth's atmosphere if it weren't there.
So, if Mars somehow got a molten core, by adding mass, or simply spontaneously, air would remain, then seas could form, etc.
The presence of methane from biological processes holds hope for a Green Mars someday.
After watching the Republicans politicize Justice, squelch scientific research, such as climate change research, co-opt the military (Rumsfeldt), etc., etc., I realized that our political system is corruptible just as Lord Acton predicted;
“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” - John Dalberg-Acton
Answering your question: It's not clear to me that the current Democratic Party is as capable of boldly cynical manipulation of political and governmental systems as the 'Movement Republicans' are. Traditional Republican are, of course, horrified by what they see going on within the Republican party at large. Snow, Sanders, Spector and others will either switch parties, retire, or be voted out in the ongoing 'conservative' purification now underway in the GOP.
Eisenhower, famous for his expression of fear of the 'military-industrial comoplex', knew full well the dangers of the Authoritarian influences in the GOP. He carried the book The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements and tried to protect the GOP from the likes of McCarthy. Nonetheless, he knew that GOP political power drew, in part, from the right-wing Authoritarian party faithful.
The best we can hope for is to do the right thing now, and hope that the corrupted GOP will not drive this country off in the wrong direction again.
Our federal government is flaky. We vote in Republicans and they promote their agenda and agencies are co-opted to that agenda. Then we vote in Democrats and they completely change how those agencies operate. Simply put, there's no reason to assume that the federal government will do the right thing.
We should refurbish our existing stockpile right away and keep our fingers crossed that some dumbass administration doesn't come along and bugger that stockpile because some 'special interest' wanted to sell the military some whizzy new system.
Is this not a state machine design?
A network switch ought to implement this sort of design. In fact, the design of TCP would also provide functionality for parallel processing, multiple cores, etc. That would make for a variable word size, too.
The work would be in the implementation of the various functions such as add, subtract, etc.
It's troubling. Let's hope this does not catch on.
I'm sympathetic, but, really, is this a good idea? And it's hard for me to imagine how he's going to stalk a deer in that chair. I'm going to assume that they have a salt lick and are baiting the deer to a location where he can shoot it.
What is your point? The parent asked for an example of a system modded for reasons other than making copies of copyrighted material. There are tons of examples of this sort of modding.
The parent claims that modding Xboxes stifles innovation, yet does not give examples, simply makes the claim. Has someone demonstrated how much revenue was lost? People who make unauthorized copies of games aren't necessarily going to buy those games if they can't get them free. The actual revenue lost is far less then the sexed-up numbers you'll hear from Microsoft.
Maybe I've just missed it. Can anyone point to a real life example of something worth modding your system for that doesn't involve torrented games, tv shows, music, movies, etc.
Sure. Linksys WRT54G. Download new firmware and get better signal strength and other improvements. Cisco embraced this modding by making a product line for modding. It's a success story.
Your lack of imagination or lack of appreciation of the creative forces that promote innovation is curious. The story of high tech is the story of the adaptation of old technology for new uses. If Microsoft wants to make money, they need to get creative.
When you take my words out of context, it is easy to criticize. But you haven't responded to the question; why punish people for gaming their systems? After all, the audience are gamers, right?
Gamers who cared enough to want to do well on Xbox consoles learned that they need to soup-up their systems. It was just another level of gaming. It was easy to do and the rewards were there.
Microsoft's solution to the situation is disordered. Microsoft is punishing their own customers for taking advantage of Microsoft's mistakes. If I were running Microsoft, I would fire the person who is doing this and replace them with someone who can come up with a win-win for their most clever customers.
Products like Xbox have an enthusiast base. This enthusiast base generates lots of 'chatter' that helps spread the word about a product. Kicking those fans off the system is simply stupid.
First of all, think about the psychology of the situation. These people are 'gamers'. Hard core 'gamers'. Games are about learning tips, tricks, and other detail that allow a person to excel. It should come as no surprise that these gamers take it to the next level by modding their systems.
Now, randomly, arbitrarily, they are being punished for 'gaming' their system. Seems like Microsoft would want to encourage gaming. Instead, they make an 'attractive nuisance', an easy-to-mod console, sell it to a creative crowd, then hammer them when it gets modded. Stupid.
Microsoft created the problem with a poor design. They should be offering to trade those modded systems in for a bugger-proof system. Pay $150 and trade in your system and get a new one together with a new game.
Slashdot Mirror
"...behind the bumper of a car traveling at 28 mph, the impact would feel the same to passengers as an impact traveling at only 5 mph,,,"
George Carlin used to point out that if you put a large spike on the steering wheel so that the driver would suffer badly in a collision, the numbers of collisions would drop dramatically.
This concept of DIY biology is far, far older than science, itself. People have been manipulating livestock, crops, even our own genome, for a long time now. But the author of this article is right about new tools making the process that much more accessible and powerful.
The build-out of world trade over the last century has wrought some damaging changes to the world ecology. Invasive species, pernicious plant diseases, and the like are spreading world-wide. Government efforts in this realm have been sporadic and often do more harm than good. The ability of smaller, private organizations to conduct sophisticated science on a smaller budget will be a boon to the restoration of endangered species, for example.
But, I tagged this article with the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag. Danger ahead.
I don't doubt the research at all. It is saying that there was a relative lack of diversity of generic material at a certain point. I just have some questions about their conclusions.
We already have lots of models of societal structures where a relative few individuals are providing all the population, from bees and meerkats to elk. The best we can say is that a relative few individuals were mating and procreating.
I'll offer proof that this is actually happening; a species that follows human, the Eastern Gray Squirrel, has adapted to cars. Previously, they had an inborn, instinctive behavior of darting in circles when confronted by a danger. This was thought to be an adaptation that helped them escape predation by birds of prey. But this was maladaptive when confronted by a speeding vehicle.
These days, the gray squirrel runs in a straight line when it is in danger. This is probably good news for birds of prey, but squirrel populations are thriving, so I doubt that birds are as big a problem as cars are.
I don't doubt that our environment is promoting genetic variations that are compatible with technology. That meme has been suggested before.
Seems to me that SVG will help deliver the death blow to Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop. Once SVG is implemented, it can be used to provide a 'desktop'. Once a desktop is widely adopted, Microsoft is redundant.
Microsoft's only play is to sabotage the standards.
There are certainly flavors of Democrats. My favorite is the traditional farmer-laborer Democrats of the West. A progressive strain of them is found in Minnesota. I love them.
The deep South were Democrats because Lincoln was Republican. That's it. Look up Dixiecrat in Wikipedia. It was only when the Democrat President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act that they started bolting for the Republican Party and changed the course of American politics. Look up Southern Strategy in Wikipedia.
The South has long been a political force that is basically outside the typical American mainstream of politics. They are cohesive, but they aren't so much a politically organized group as they are a sociologically organized force. Look up Authoritarianism and Right-wing Authoritarianism in Wikipedia. Proto-fascist.
The Republican party in the north, the party of Lincoln, was Fiscally Conservative, pro-business, Politically Moderate, and Socially Moderate. They were certainly liberal in the sense that they liberated the black slaves.
When Texas Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the voting rights act in 1964, he remarked that it was going to deliver the deep South to the Republican Party for a generation. He underestimated.
The deep South segregationists that now control the Republican Party are only Socially Conservative. They are Politically Liberal (intruding into people's personal decisions) and Fiscally Spendthrifts or corrupt. Newt Gingrich and his fellow 'Movement Republicans' are not actually conservative at all. And I would hold that they are hardly Republican.
Ron Paul is truly Politically Conservative, Fiscally Conservative and Socially Conservative. There are few others like him, but they exist. Joel Hefley of Colorado, perhaps Chuck Hegel of Nebraska. Governor 'Butch' Otter of Idaho. The vast majority of the Republican party are simply pro-business (or more accurately, pro-corporation) proto-fascists. Opportunists. Thieves. Corrupt.
The Democratic Party has evolved into an aimless, populist mob. They currently have no guiding principles. They seem to exist only in reaction to big business and the corrupting influence of money.
Getting back to the article; it seems that piracy has a lot to do with intellectual property similar to software programs. If a person creates a work, it would be better if that person could maintain control over its provenance. This encourages continued production of similar work. China, India and other Wild West type newly minted capitalistic systems care little for hypothetical rights such as intellectual property. With good reason, it's unenforceable.
Pedantic, I know, but it's a pet peeve with me.
Although SPICE could be a legitimate acronym, neither UML nor X would be acronyms, they would be abbreviations.
Examples of acronyms; radar - RAdio Detecting And Ranging, sonar - SOunt NAvagation Ranging Examples of abbreviations; IBM, XML
Dang it! I wanted to mod parent up for such a well articulated explanation of cellular composition and some of the evolution behind it. But parent commented as AC.
Although I am not a biologist, I do remember reading some relatively new science that describes how the evolutionary trees of prokaryotes and eukaryotes first diverged, but then recombined. Thus, we have living cells that contain the elements of both.
But, I tagged this article with a 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag because of the inevitable unintended consequences.
I was planning to use my well for a water-source geothermal heat pump for my home. The electric furnace needs work and is expensive to operate. From what I hear, I can get 300-400% efficiency with this type of system.
It is interesting to hear that the ground in the European installation got cold. I would have expected that heat would migrate up to re-warm the earth. But I'll be both cooling and heating my system with the ground water.
Out of the mine, or out of the datacenter?
They are already moving warm air out of the datacenter. I would suppose that air can then pass through the power room to cool it, too.
Typo. Sorry.
I didn't realize that Mars was so much smaller than Earth. That does explain a few things such as why its core isn't molten.
So, there might be life on Mars, but it won't thrive on the surface.
Some other poster made a crack about environmentalists, but the question should be asked; what responsibilities do we have WTR Mars' environment? Large scale terraforming is a distinct possibility in the future.
Parent has good advice. It would be a matter of what you are suited to do (management) and do you like or trust your new manager. If you don't trust the new manager, take the job and start looking for a new job.
Good luck.
I thought I had heard that Mars' atmosphere is weak because the plant's core is not molten like the core of Earth. Is this still the theory?
For those who aren't familiar with the idea, Earth's molten core creates a magnetic field that blocks the solar wind from the Sun. The solar wind would blow away Earth's atmosphere if it weren't there.
So, if Mars somehow got a molten core, by adding mass, or simply spontaneously, air would remain, then seas could form, etc.
The presence of methane from biological processes holds hope for a Green Mars someday.
After watching the Republicans politicize Justice, squelch scientific research, such as climate change research, co-opt the military (Rumsfeldt), etc., etc., I realized that our political system is corruptible just as Lord Acton predicted;
“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” - John Dalberg-Acton
Answering your question: It's not clear to me that the current Democratic Party is as capable of boldly cynical manipulation of political and governmental systems as the 'Movement Republicans' are. Traditional Republican are, of course, horrified by what they see going on within the Republican party at large. Snow, Sanders, Spector and others will either switch parties, retire, or be voted out in the ongoing 'conservative' purification now underway in the GOP.
Eisenhower, famous for his expression of fear of the 'military-industrial comoplex', knew full well the dangers of the Authoritarian influences in the GOP. He carried the book The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements and tried to protect the GOP from the likes of McCarthy. Nonetheless, he knew that GOP political power drew, in part, from the right-wing Authoritarian party faithful.
The best we can hope for is to do the right thing now, and hope that the corrupted GOP will not drive this country off in the wrong direction again.
I immediately thought of the quote about Microsoft; "the only time Microsoft will make something that doesn't suck is when they make a vacuum."
Did anybody else catch the reference to NCIS? Life imitates art.
Truly, what were you thinking, that people were going to understand the architecture and comment in a coherent manner? :)
I was wondering if this could be implemented with network switches and TCP packets.
Our federal government is flaky. We vote in Republicans and they promote their agenda and agencies are co-opted to that agenda. Then we vote in Democrats and they completely change how those agencies operate. Simply put, there's no reason to assume that the federal government will do the right thing.
We should refurbish our existing stockpile right away and keep our fingers crossed that some dumbass administration doesn't come along and bugger that stockpile because some 'special interest' wanted to sell the military some whizzy new system.
Is this not a state machine design? A network switch ought to implement this sort of design. In fact, the design of TCP would also provide functionality for parallel processing, multiple cores, etc. That would make for a variable word size, too. The work would be in the implementation of the various functions such as add, subtract, etc.
It's troubling. Let's hope this does not catch on.
I'm sympathetic, but, really, is this a good idea? And it's hard for me to imagine how he's going to stalk a deer in that chair. I'm going to assume that they have a salt lick and are baiting the deer to a location where he can shoot it.
What is your point? The parent asked for an example of a system modded for reasons other than making copies of copyrighted material. There are tons of examples of this sort of modding.
The parent claims that modding Xboxes stifles innovation, yet does not give examples, simply makes the claim. Has someone demonstrated how much revenue was lost? People who make unauthorized copies of games aren't necessarily going to buy those games if they can't get them free. The actual revenue lost is far less then the sexed-up numbers you'll hear from Microsoft.
What was your point?
Maybe I've just missed it. Can anyone point to a real life example of something worth modding your system for that doesn't involve torrented games, tv shows, music, movies, etc.
Sure. Linksys WRT54G. Download new firmware and get better signal strength and other improvements. Cisco embraced this modding by making a product line for modding. It's a success story.
Your lack of imagination or lack of appreciation of the creative forces that promote innovation is curious. The story of high tech is the story of the adaptation of old technology for new uses. If Microsoft wants to make money, they need to get creative.
When you take my words out of context, it is easy to criticize. But you haven't responded to the question; why punish people for gaming their systems? After all, the audience are gamers, right?
Gamers who cared enough to want to do well on Xbox consoles learned that they need to soup-up their systems. It was just another level of gaming. It was easy to do and the rewards were there.
Microsoft's solution to the situation is disordered. Microsoft is punishing their own customers for taking advantage of Microsoft's mistakes. If I were running Microsoft, I would fire the person who is doing this and replace them with someone who can come up with a win-win for their most clever customers.
99.9% of them are people...
Where, exactly, go you get your information?
Products like Xbox have an enthusiast base. This enthusiast base generates lots of 'chatter' that helps spread the word about a product. Kicking those fans off the system is simply stupid.
First of all, think about the psychology of the situation. These people are 'gamers'. Hard core 'gamers'. Games are about learning tips, tricks, and other detail that allow a person to excel. It should come as no surprise that these gamers take it to the next level by modding their systems.
Now, randomly, arbitrarily, they are being punished for 'gaming' their system. Seems like Microsoft would want to encourage gaming. Instead, they make an 'attractive nuisance', an easy-to-mod console, sell it to a creative crowd, then hammer them when it gets modded. Stupid.
Microsoft created the problem with a poor design. They should be offering to trade those modded systems in for a bugger-proof system. Pay $150 and trade in your system and get a new one together with a new game.