We live in an age of rapid travel, where anyone can be virtually anywhere else in under 36 hours. You can be immersed in odd Congo bacilli or virii on Wednesday and dying due to an unknown disease in Des Moines on Friday.
Except for the fact that Ebola kills so quickly I am really surprised it has not reached North America or Europe sooner. We should feel very lucky this woman's symptoms did not manifest at JFK...
Where the flight attendent held the victim's head as the ambulance was summoned, then went back to her work and developed a fever halfway to San Diego, shrugged it off as a cold, and infected her second plane full of people when they reloaded to take 300 tourists to Sydney.
And the EMT's who transported the victim went on to do a hospital to hospital transfer from a hospital in Brooklyn to an inpatient/outpatient facility upstate.
And the nice man who got the lady a drink of water went on back to Knoxville, Tennessee to teach his sixth graders and collapse in the middle of Sunday school...
And so on, and so on...
I suspect that outside of a few specialy labs like the CDC in Atlanta, and possibly in the hospitals of larger cities, most doctors are not sufficiently versed with new or non-regional diseases to recognize the symptoms of something like Ebola.
Similarly I suspect that many doctors simply would not think to take appropriate precautions when dealing with a patient like this lady. When you think of hemorrhaging, you think of bruising, you think of trauma. You will take blood and body fluid precautions but until you are in the middle of stabilizing this patient and notice the fever of 104 degrees it might not occur to you to do something against aerosols:
The ambulance en route describes a patient hemorrhaging severely, sweating, and bruising. When are severe beatings normally contagious?
We need more training of physicians, and like it or not we need more careful checks of incoming individuals in customs, before they are allowed in country (be that country Canada, the US, Mexico, or Tonga.) AIDS does not frighten me -- it is hard to catch, it is long term, and it's already here. It's the virii like Ebola or hantavirus that frighten me.
This is not a flame -- I'll start with that. Your opinion is very well-expressed, and I understand your concerns.
Having said that, I wonder what your specific concerns might be. That the children might end up gay themselves?
From my real world experience I can say that I have never seen a child raised by a gay couple turn out to be gay themselves -- I have personally known four same sex couples raising children. These kids were as well adjusted as their peers, if not more so, and actively involved in social lives. What it boils down to is that no parents raise their child to be gay.
I do see these children face ridicule in school from their peers, the same as children from mixed race parents, other minority children, children from one parent homes, children with limps, children with funny teeth, children with funny hair, children with funny ears... Not to minimize the grief any child feels when they are teased, but you sense a pattern here?
Should a heterosexual couple seeking to adopt face preferential treatment over a gay couple? Suprisingly enough, if all things are equal between the two choices, I say yes. Neither couple offers a superior home environment for the child, but what kind of behavior the child may face from adults (well-meaning or otherwise) is a concern.
Adults are not the peers of children. What they say and do carries extra weight. Authority figures are not seen as teasing. If Children's Services is going to be breathing down the back of the parents, if guidance counselors will be pulling the child into their offices to "talk about their feelings", if adults refuse to let their children play with the "gay kid" then all other things being equal place the child where they will not have to deal with the general ignorance of society.
On the other hand should gay couples be considered by adoption agencies? Certainly. If a stable couple have extra love they seek to share with a little one, then more power to them. There are locations where children are waiting/have been waiting for years to simply find a loving home.
If there is an empty home wanting for a child, and an empty child wanting for a home, let them be together.
Now I can be flamed.:)
P.S. Before anyone begins associating gays with pedophilia a few years ago I spoke with the gentleman who heads the USDOJ's sex crime statistics gathering group. He informed me that according to their statistics over ninety-five percent of pedophiles who prey on girls and boys are heterosexual. The other five percent are gay males, or female. Draw your own conclusions from the statistics.
I found this link, a paper by a fellow named Michael Richmond entitled "Will a Nearby Supernova Endanger Life on Earth?" published in 1999.
"Conclusion: I suspect that a type II explosion must be within a few
parsecs of the Earth, certainly less than 10 pc (33 light years),
to pose a danger to life on Earth. I suspect that a type Ia explosion,
due to the larger amount of high-energy radiation, could be several times
farther away. My guess is that the X-ray and gamma-ray radiation
are the most important at large distances.
"
Unless we have a testy giant within a hundred LY or so a 30 LY radius should be far enough to move our eggs about to keep them from getting scrambled from any nearby booms.:)
I liked your point about stellar motion -- did you see the recent photo of a white dwarf that appeared to be moving at high speed through the galactic ecliptic? One of those be-bopping through the solar system could certainly ruin one's day.:)
Assuming of course that we do not blow ourselves up, create machines that don't like us, infect ourselves with an incurable disease, or laze about like the late great Roman empire until we barely have enough motivation to lift our hands to our faces to eat -- forget about the fanciful idea of lifting a payload off planet.
I suspect if we can make it off planet and establish viable populations of terrestrial life elsewhere in the solar system we'll have more than enough time to spread far enough to avoid the nasty side effects of Alpha Centauri going BOOM in a few billion years.
As I recall according to theory a supernova within twenty light years would release enough radiation to extinguish most life on Earth.
If we can spread out thirty light years I'd wager we can be around until entropy makes life impossible. Even travelling at the best speeds attainable today the entire galaxy could be explored and settled within half the amount of time that hominids have been around on Earth.
Assuming no major impacts within the next fifty years, no supernovae within the next thousand years, and no Darwinian cul-de-sac lurking in our genes I am pretty certain two million years from now some distantly-related Earthlife creature will look up at a sky full of stars and have a difficult time finding one that has NOT been visited by at least a hominid-originated robotic presence.
That's true. The "fair" test results would have been interesting to see. I did not notice the -j3 compile flag, just gave the results a cursory glance and thought "yah, right..."
I still cannot understand a > 2 times increase in speed as aminorex asserts, but I'll take him on his word. I assume with different bus architecture such a thing might be possible, and there IS a whole world out there above and beyond x86.
I have a hard enough time keeping my facts straight with x86 without worrying about Compaq, Sun, HP/IA 64, and IBM.
Yes that could indeed cause an entirely new spectrum of problems. Not to mention that it would probably be very HEAVY.:)
I am trying to imagine something like a personal Topaz reactor. And of course the armed guards to make certain no one tries to abscond with the power supply. %)
In any case I do feel 1.5 hours is inadequate for long-term use of the device. I suspect it might be a decent stop-gap measure, and it is certainly less cumbersome than the air-powered ventricular assist devices that are out now.
What you say makes sense assuming the software running on the processors is capable of harnessing that feature.
What I still do not understand is how these two processors could function at greater than two times combined individual performance if the bus linking them is a fraction of their core speed?
What I am wondering is if the techniques with which you are familiar also apply to x86 architecture. It is usual to see something more like a 1.5:1 improvement overall in Pentium-based MP machines. From what I have seen of benchmarks that's the norm.
The Athlon IS a different architecture, and EV6 IS a different bus. I suspect that if putting two Athlons together MORE than doubles their speed that will make considerable waves in x86 computing.
On the other hand as has been pointed out elsewhere the posted Sandra scores are based on a motherboard with virtually no features that would allow an overclock from 1.2 GHz to 1.53 GHz. In addition these types of unsubstantiated "announcements" are the norm on many smaller tech sites looking to boost their readership.
If you could answer my questions or point me towards resources where I could do a little research it would be appreciated. Thanks for your comment.
As I recall Itanium is 64 bit, has yet to see commercial release, and has a hard enough time running as a single processor. Athlon/Thunderbird is 32 bit, is over twenty months in widespread commercial release, and competes against P-III/P-4, not Itanium.
From what I have seen, running standard 32 bit software the Itanium should not be compared to any current 32 bit chip -- it gets beaten into the ground by anything faster than a 486.
On the other hand an Itanium running native 64 bit code should outperform any current 32 bit chip in FP operations, which makes it ideally suited for FP-intensive tasks where the Pentium III/4/Thunderbird cores will never dare tread...
In terms of performance, in terms of architecture, in terms of intended market, comparing an Athlon to an Itanium is silly.
But then again we must remember that this story has been promoted to front page material by the same group that brought us nanopants.
That's not a grain of salt the editor mentions, that's a rock of crack...
But I digress...
Why do I strongly suspect this is non-authentic? Does anyone else remember the photograph of the modified Duron that was supposedly being produced by AMD to thwart overclockers. A pin was physically "removed" from the pin interface.
The picture was posted all over the place. Everyone was all up in arms. It was the end of all things.
And then someone noticed that this "modified" processor had the same serial number as an unaltered promotional processor photo from another web site.
NEW FLASH: Overzealous Tech Sites Taken in by Paintshop Pro Forgery...
Many Japanese tech sites are notorious for posting outrageously altered faux benchmark screens. This would appear to be another one of those posts...
Multiprocessor Thunderbirds will rock, I am certain. But this is as ridiculous as the recently reported SMP Thunderbird Linux kernel compile that supposedly demonstrated a greater than two times increase in speed between one processor and two... Yup.
Why couldn't I find people who believe things like this when I was selling electronics? I'd have made a fortune in commission.:)
PCI is newer than ISA and twice as fast. PCI involves a 33 MHz bus, as opposed to ISA's 16 MHz bus. ISA modems cost more because they tend to handle the actual signal processing on the modem card. That is the only case where I can think of an ISA card costing more than a PCI card.
There are no ISA slots on many newer motherboards (including my Asus A7V) because ISA is over ten years old. Even the newer PCI is scheduled for an overhaul in the form of PCI-X, due out this year.
end over end. Basically it wobbles on at least two, if not three, axes -- look at NEAR's movies.
Even if NEAR manages to "land" at a relatively stable point on Eros NASA will be very lucky to have the probe's antenna pointing towards Earth for a fraction of Eros' short day. I suspect that constant contact with the probe will not be possible even under the best of circumstances.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but with Eros' low mass/gravity wouldn't anything attempting to land on the points farthest from Eros' pivot points risk being lobbed out into space like a wiffle ball unless some seriously delicate maneuvers managed to come very close to nullifying the relative velocity of the probe to the asteroid?
are very widely used for pacemakers to give them a life of ten years or more. I do not understand why such a short-lived battery would be used in a device like this.
If Uncle Fred gets too far away from the inductive recharger he's history. What happens if the charging pad slips in the middle of the night? What happens if he lives in California?
An hour and a half is not a very long window for such an intensely critical device.
I hope this is only the first in what will be a long series of devices whose abilities will progressively improve. If roaming times do not improve then an artificial heart will replace a condition that was a death sentence with a new condition, a boredom sentence.
I think twenty hours of operation per charge should be a minimum desirable goal for any device that would be widely deployed, with even longer periods between recharges required within a set time period by regulating agencies.
In the meantime, I commend researchers who invent alternatives to ever-scarce donor organs. I guess until we can make new organs easily boredom is preferable to death?
what does this have to do with seti? yeah, there are plenty of other successful DNA/RNA carriers. plants.... insects.... but they're not going into space...
Me commenting in the wrong area at 2 AM with not enough sleep. Apologies.:)
I think I was agreeing with your idea re: the accuracy of Drake's equation. We basically don't know what direction or form extra-Terrestrial life will take. SETI could be seen as a way of determining the accuracy of Drake's equation.
Personally I think humans are far too arrogant in their perception of themselves as somehow superior to Earth's other DNA/RNA carriers. We are not the biggest biomass on the planet. We are not the most numerous species. Other species have had similar impact on the world's climate -- look at the murderous rise of aerobes and imagine the extinctions associated with the sudden permeation of oxygen through an anaerobic biosphere.
For a few years I have held the belief that the perpetuation of DNA/RNA is the driving force of life on Earth. Anything that passes on its DNA is successful in the grand scheme of things. I kind of see Earth as a big colonial organism, sort of like a slime mold. I see humanity as that slime mold's latest attempt to reproduce itself by flinging its spores ever further, even into space itself, and to other worlds.
I suspect that if we should somehow manage to wipe ourselves out (and do so without killing off some of the other more clever species -- some cephalopods, other primates, cetatians) something else will step in a few million years from now and continue the push of perpetuating Terrestrial DNA/RNA.
But I would just as soon have humanity succeed in this venture as to wait a hundred million years for air-breathing octopii to visit other stars.
we stand a better chance of eavesdropping in on cross-chatter, if such a thing exists.
As others have pointed out laser transmissions are good if you want to get ahold of Uncle Nrgnrr'c two star systems over and wish It happy birthday twenty terrestrial years from now... Lasers would be highly efficient assuming there is nothing between you and Nrgnrr'c's receiving station. I suspect for point-to-point communications within our current understanding of physics a laser or laser-like device makes sense. If we are somewhere around the fringe of the transmission we should be able to at least detect it, even if we cannot decode it.
Then again as others have mentioned, if Nrgnrr'c uses some form of communication beyond our current understanding of the universe, say E.T.OL Instant Hypermessenger, then we're S.O.L. until we attain a workable knowledge of the different laws under which it's communications operate.
In my opinion SETI is worth the try -- if we succeed then one of the greatest questions imaginable will be answered. It does not matter whether or not they send us an Encyclopedia Galactica, or if they're in another galaxy, or if they ever even deign to speak with us.
We would know we were not alone.
If we find nothing then we still have an answer. Maybe if a few dozen years from now we've still found nothing then we'll pay a bit closer attention to the special place our noisy little planet holds in this overwhelmingly huge, deeply silent universe. Maybe we'll treat it a little bit better.
Maybe the voices of Earth life will fill the void between the stars several million years from now, and make the universe a less lonely place.
Silly me, here I thought DSL came about after the deregulation of the American cable industry as a means for telcos to deliver video to customers' homes...
What was I thinking, I am glad/. says it's new, even though it has been deployed for a year by Ameritech Cable in at least one market I am familiar with...
You can just learn something new every day around here. Gosh and golly, isn't that just ducky?:)
This is your/., this is your/. on drugs. Any questions?
Short and sweet: do a WHOIS on the domain and contact the technical contact.
From my experience if they do not have a hand in the administration of the provider you are trying to contact -- you can be certain they have the direct telephone number of someone who does...
... thanks of course to natural selection engineering a form of Mars life that could "interact" with Terrestrial bacteria which our hothead so kindly provided.:)
The other thing -- if life on Mars arose independently of Earth life then as I see it, at best, chances are the two will be incompatible. At worst the Martian equivalent of spores could be deadly simply due to their chemistry, above and beyond any other actions inimic to the organism (wiggly bits, chompy bits, diamond-tipped reproductive organs...)
Earth life would likely have an equal effect on Martian life.
It always made me shudder to think of Sarek and Amanda (or Worf and Deanna) together on Star Trek. If such a hypothetical meeting were even possible, when it comes to conjugal activities Amanda is biologically more closely related to an earthworm than she is to Sarek. Who wants to knowingly smooch an earthworm?
Geology 101: Silicon née silicates are the primary components of the Earth's crust. You get a gold star.:)
If you say it with a short "o" sound as opposed to the long "o" sound you get extra credit.
If you know that silicone is the primary component of Pamela Lee Anderson then the whole class will sing a song to you.:)
But I digress -- silicon is not nearly as durable as diamond. I am not going ga-ga over the idea of semiconductors that can withstand a blowtorch. What juices me are the applications for diamond-deposition technology -- scratch-proofing optics, hardening membranes, preserving surfaces, stuff like that.
Now if we can only get a tech that allows us to diamond coat objects without exposing them to near vaccuum and extreme temperatures that would be ducky, especially for realatively fragile carbon-rich baubles like the Mona Lisa.
Back to Ms. Anderson, she coats herself with diamonds through a process of well-documented reproductive efforts.:)
Gemesis is a Florida company that is now producing large, gem-quality clear or colored diamonds.
There's not much information on the Gemesis web site, but a few weeks ago I remember watching a PBS Nova program entitled "The Diamond Deception" about the quest for gem quality man-made diamonds. Gemesis contracted for Russian technology to produce what they claim are the best man-made diamonds in the world -- diamonds that can only be detected by a fluorescence test.
The stones being produced are of such high quality that DeBeers is seriously concerned about the future of the diamond market.
Carbon is abundant -- it's all around us. Although removing carbon from the living carbon reservoir might be undesirable, in the short term the supply is more than sufficient for a technique like the one in the mentioned article.
With a practical method of large scale diamond coating we could preserve structures, heirlooms, and treasures almost indefinitely. We could create surfaces that are virtually scratch proof, and optics that only deform under the most extreme conditions. With the technology to create panels of diamond we could create incredibly thin windows that are structurally superior to steel. With sheets of colored or opaque diamond we could build structures that would last for eons.
And don't forget one current application for vapor-deposition diamond: coating the cone with diamond creates bitchin' hi-fi tweeters.:)
As others have said, the US Postal Service and the Effa Bee Eye are good places to complain.
Also contact your state's attorney general -- there should be contact/fraud information available on a link from your state government's web site.
From a run-in with a deadbeat on eBay I know that most state laws ignore any incomplete transaction below $25. On the other hand if your transaction exceeds $25 then the Feds, the Post Office, their nearest relatives, and a fellow named Guido from across town will all step in to help you. Interstate fraud is a Phe-lo-nee with a capital PH.:)
You need only make enough noise in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
We live in an age of rapid travel, where anyone can be virtually anywhere else in under 36 hours. You can be immersed in odd Congo bacilli or virii on Wednesday and dying due to an unknown disease in Des Moines on Friday.
Except for the fact that Ebola kills so quickly I am really surprised it has not reached North America or Europe sooner. We should feel very lucky this woman's symptoms did not manifest at JFK ...
I suspect that outside of a few specialy labs like the CDC in Atlanta, and possibly in the hospitals of larger cities, most doctors are not sufficiently versed with new or non-regional diseases to recognize the symptoms of something like Ebola.
Similarly I suspect that many doctors simply would not think to take appropriate precautions when dealing with a patient like this lady. When you think of hemorrhaging, you think of bruising, you think of trauma. You will take blood and body fluid precautions but until you are in the middle of stabilizing this patient and notice the fever of 104 degrees it might not occur to you to do something against aerosols:
The ambulance en route describes a patient hemorrhaging severely, sweating, and bruising. When are severe beatings normally contagious?
We need more training of physicians, and like it or not we need more careful checks of incoming individuals in customs, before they are allowed in country (be that country Canada, the US, Mexico, or Tonga.) AIDS does not frighten me -- it is hard to catch, it is long term, and it's already here. It's the virii like Ebola or hantavirus that frighten me.
This is not a flame -- I'll start with that. Your opinion is very well-expressed, and I understand your concerns.
Having said that, I wonder what your specific concerns might be. That the children might end up gay themselves?
From my real world experience I can say that I have never seen a child raised by a gay couple turn out to be gay themselves -- I have personally known four same sex couples raising children. These kids were as well adjusted as their peers, if not more so, and actively involved in social lives. What it boils down to is that no parents raise their child to be gay.
I do see these children face ridicule in school from their peers, the same as children from mixed race parents, other minority children, children from one parent homes, children with limps, children with funny teeth, children with funny hair, children with funny ears ... Not to minimize the grief any child feels when they are teased, but you sense a pattern here?
Should a heterosexual couple seeking to adopt face preferential treatment over a gay couple? Suprisingly enough, if all things are equal between the two choices, I say yes. Neither couple offers a superior home environment for the child, but what kind of behavior the child may face from adults (well-meaning or otherwise) is a concern.
Adults are not the peers of children. What they say and do carries extra weight. Authority figures are not seen as teasing. If Children's Services is going to be breathing down the back of the parents, if guidance counselors will be pulling the child into their offices to "talk about their feelings", if adults refuse to let their children play with the "gay kid" then all other things being equal place the child where they will not have to deal with the general ignorance of society.
On the other hand should gay couples be considered by adoption agencies? Certainly. If a stable couple have extra love they seek to share with a little one, then more power to them. There are locations where children are waiting/have been waiting for years to simply find a loving home.
If there is an empty home wanting for a child, and an empty child wanting for a home, let them be together.
Now I can be flamed. :)
P.S. Before anyone begins associating gays with pedophilia a few years ago I spoke with the gentleman who heads the USDOJ's sex crime statistics gathering group. He informed me that according to their statistics over ninety-five percent of pedophiles who prey on girls and boys are heterosexual. The other five percent are gay males, or female. Draw your own conclusions from the statistics.
I found this link, a paper by a fellow named Michael Richmond entitled "Will a Nearby Supernova Endanger Life on Earth?" published in 1999.
"Conclusion: I suspect that a type II explosion must be within a few parsecs of the Earth, certainly less than 10 pc (33 light years), to pose a danger to life on Earth. I suspect that a type Ia explosion, due to the larger amount of high-energy radiation, could be several times farther away. My guess is that the X-ray and gamma-ray radiation are the most important at large distances. "
Unless we have a testy giant within a hundred LY or so a 30 LY radius should be far enough to move our eggs about to keep them from getting scrambled from any nearby booms. :)
I liked your point about stellar motion -- did you see the recent photo of a white dwarf that appeared to be moving at high speed through the galactic ecliptic? One of those be-bopping through the solar system could certainly ruin one's day. :)
Assuming of course that we do not blow ourselves up, create machines that don't like us, infect ourselves with an incurable disease, or laze about like the late great Roman empire until we barely have enough motivation to lift our hands to our faces to eat -- forget about the fanciful idea of lifting a payload off planet.
I suspect if we can make it off planet and establish viable populations of terrestrial life elsewhere in the solar system we'll have more than enough time to spread far enough to avoid the nasty side effects of Alpha Centauri going BOOM in a few billion years.
As I recall according to theory a supernova within twenty light years would release enough radiation to extinguish most life on Earth.
If we can spread out thirty light years I'd wager we can be around until entropy makes life impossible. Even travelling at the best speeds attainable today the entire galaxy could be explored and settled within half the amount of time that hominids have been around on Earth.
Assuming no major impacts within the next fifty years, no supernovae within the next thousand years, and no Darwinian cul-de-sac lurking in our genes I am pretty certain two million years from now some distantly-related Earthlife creature will look up at a sky full of stars and have a difficult time finding one that has NOT been visited by at least a hominid-originated robotic presence.
That's true. The "fair" test results would have been interesting to see. I did not notice the -j3 compile flag, just gave the results a cursory glance and thought "yah, right ..."
I still cannot understand a > 2 times increase in speed as aminorex asserts, but I'll take him on his word. I assume with different bus architecture such a thing might be possible, and there IS a whole world out there above and beyond x86.
I have a hard enough time keeping my facts straight with x86 without worrying about Compaq, Sun, HP/IA 64, and IBM.
LOLOL
Yes that could indeed cause an entirely new spectrum of problems. Not to mention that it would probably be very HEAVY. :)
I am trying to imagine something like a personal Topaz reactor. And of course the armed guards to make certain no one tries to abscond with the power supply. %)
In any case I do feel 1.5 hours is inadequate for long-term use of the device. I suspect it might be a decent stop-gap measure, and it is certainly less cumbersome than the air-powered ventricular assist devices that are out now.
What you say makes sense assuming the software running on the processors is capable of harnessing that feature.
What I still do not understand is how these two processors could function at greater than two times combined individual performance if the bus linking them is a fraction of their core speed?
What I am wondering is if the techniques with which you are familiar also apply to x86 architecture. It is usual to see something more like a 1.5:1 improvement overall in Pentium-based MP machines. From what I have seen of benchmarks that's the norm.
The Athlon IS a different architecture, and EV6 IS a different bus. I suspect that if putting two Athlons together MORE than doubles their speed that will make considerable waves in x86 computing.
On the other hand as has been pointed out elsewhere the posted Sandra scores are based on a motherboard with virtually no features that would allow an overclock from 1.2 GHz to 1.53 GHz. In addition these types of unsubstantiated "announcements" are the norm on many smaller tech sites looking to boost their readership.
If you could answer my questions or point me towards resources where I could do a little research it would be appreciated. Thanks for your comment.
-JoeGee
True, I was just going by bus speed in MHz.
You're right -- my bad.
As I recall Itanium is 64 bit, has yet to see commercial release, and has a hard enough time running as a single processor. Athlon/Thunderbird is 32 bit, is over twenty months in widespread commercial release, and competes against P-III/P-4, not Itanium.
From what I have seen, running standard 32 bit software the Itanium should not be compared to any current 32 bit chip -- it gets beaten into the ground by anything faster than a 486.
On the other hand an Itanium running native 64 bit code should outperform any current 32 bit chip in FP operations, which makes it ideally suited for FP-intensive tasks where the Pentium III/4/Thunderbird cores will never dare tread ...
In terms of performance, in terms of architecture, in terms of intended market, comparing an Athlon to an Itanium is silly.
I certainly HOPE it's intended to be humorous. :) If not someone is seriously misinformed.
Maybe peyote juice?
But then again we must remember that this story has been promoted to front page material by the same group that brought us nanopants.
That's not a grain of salt the editor mentions, that's a rock of crack ...
But I digress ...
Why do I strongly suspect this is non-authentic? Does anyone else remember the photograph of the modified Duron that was supposedly being produced by AMD to thwart overclockers. A pin was physically "removed" from the pin interface.
The picture was posted all over the place. Everyone was all up in arms. It was the end of all things.
And then someone noticed that this "modified" processor had the same serial number as an unaltered promotional processor photo from another web site.
NEW FLASH: Overzealous Tech Sites Taken in by Paintshop Pro Forgery ...
Many Japanese tech sites are notorious for posting outrageously altered faux benchmark screens. This would appear to be another one of those posts ...
Multiprocessor Thunderbirds will rock, I am certain. But this is as ridiculous as the recently reported SMP Thunderbird Linux kernel compile that supposedly demonstrated a greater than two times increase in speed between one processor and two ... Yup.
Why couldn't I find people who believe things like this when I was selling electronics? I'd have made a fortune in commission. :)
PCI is newer than ISA and twice as fast. PCI involves a 33 MHz bus, as opposed to ISA's 16 MHz bus. ISA modems cost more because they tend to handle the actual signal processing on the modem card. That is the only case where I can think of an ISA card costing more than a PCI card.
There are no ISA slots on many newer motherboards (including my Asus A7V) because ISA is over ten years old. Even the newer PCI is scheduled for an overhaul in the form of PCI-X, due out this year.
end over end. Basically it wobbles on at least two, if not three, axes -- look at NEAR's movies.
Even if NEAR manages to "land" at a relatively stable point on Eros NASA will be very lucky to have the probe's antenna pointing towards Earth for a fraction of Eros' short day. I suspect that constant contact with the probe will not be possible even under the best of circumstances.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but with Eros' low mass/gravity wouldn't anything attempting to land on the points farthest from Eros' pivot points risk being lobbed out into space like a wiffle ball unless some seriously delicate maneuvers managed to come very close to nullifying the relative velocity of the probe to the asteroid?
are very widely used for pacemakers to give them a life of ten years or more. I do not understand why such a short-lived battery would be used in a device like this.
If Uncle Fred gets too far away from the inductive recharger he's history. What happens if the charging pad slips in the middle of the night? What happens if he lives in California?
An hour and a half is not a very long window for such an intensely critical device.
I hope this is only the first in what will be a long series of devices whose abilities will progressively improve. If roaming times do not improve then an artificial heart will replace a condition that was a death sentence with a new condition, a boredom sentence.
I think twenty hours of operation per charge should be a minimum desirable goal for any device that would be widely deployed, with even longer periods between recharges required within a set time period by regulating agencies.
In the meantime, I commend researchers who invent alternatives to ever-scarce donor organs. I guess until we can make new organs easily boredom is preferable to death?
what does this have to do with seti? yeah, there are plenty of other successful DNA/RNA carriers. plants.... insects.... but they're not going into space...
Me commenting in the wrong area at 2 AM with not enough sleep. Apologies. :)
I think I was agreeing with your idea re: the accuracy of Drake's equation. We basically don't know what direction or form extra-Terrestrial life will take. SETI could be seen as a way of determining the accuracy of Drake's equation.
Possibly? :)
Personally I think humans are far too arrogant in their perception of themselves as somehow superior to Earth's other DNA/RNA carriers. We are not the biggest biomass on the planet. We are not the most numerous species. Other species have had similar impact on the world's climate -- look at the murderous rise of aerobes and imagine the extinctions associated with the sudden permeation of oxygen through an anaerobic biosphere.
For a few years I have held the belief that the perpetuation of DNA/RNA is the driving force of life on Earth. Anything that passes on its DNA is successful in the grand scheme of things. I kind of see Earth as a big colonial organism, sort of like a slime mold. I see humanity as that slime mold's latest attempt to reproduce itself by flinging its spores ever further, even into space itself, and to other worlds.
I suspect that if we should somehow manage to wipe ourselves out (and do so without killing off some of the other more clever species -- some cephalopods, other primates, cetatians) something else will step in a few million years from now and continue the push of perpetuating Terrestrial DNA/RNA.
But I would just as soon have humanity succeed in this venture as to wait a hundred million years for air-breathing octopii to visit other stars.
we stand a better chance of eavesdropping in on cross-chatter, if such a thing exists.
As others have pointed out laser transmissions are good if you want to get ahold of Uncle Nrgnrr'c two star systems over and wish It happy birthday twenty terrestrial years from now ... Lasers would be highly efficient assuming there is nothing between you and Nrgnrr'c's receiving station. I suspect for point-to-point communications within our current understanding of physics a laser or laser-like device makes sense. If we are somewhere around the fringe of the transmission we should be able to at least detect it, even if we cannot decode it.
Then again as others have mentioned, if Nrgnrr'c uses some form of communication beyond our current understanding of the universe, say E.T.OL Instant Hypermessenger, then we're S.O.L. until we attain a workable knowledge of the different laws under which it's communications operate.
In my opinion SETI is worth the try -- if we succeed then one of the greatest questions imaginable will be answered. It does not matter whether or not they send us an Encyclopedia Galactica, or if they're in another galaxy, or if they ever even deign to speak with us.
We would know we were not alone.
If we find nothing then we still have an answer. Maybe if a few dozen years from now we've still found nothing then we'll pay a bit closer attention to the special place our noisy little planet holds in this overwhelmingly huge, deeply silent universe. Maybe we'll treat it a little bit better.
Maybe the voices of Earth life will fill the void between the stars several million years from now, and make the universe a less lonely place.
Silly me, here I thought DSL came about after the deregulation of the American cable industry as a means for telcos to deliver video to customers' homes ...
What was I thinking, I am glad /. says it's new, even though it has been deployed for a year by Ameritech Cable in at least one market I am familiar with ...
You can just learn something new every day around here. Gosh and golly, isn't that just ducky? :)
This is your /., this is your /. on drugs. Any questions?
Short and sweet: do a WHOIS on the domain and contact the technical contact.
From my experience if they do not have a hand in the administration of the provider you are trying to contact -- you can be certain they have the direct telephone number of someone who does ...
The other thing -- if life on Mars arose independently of Earth life then as I see it, at best, chances are the two will be incompatible. At worst the Martian equivalent of spores could be deadly simply due to their chemistry, above and beyond any other actions inimic to the organism (wiggly bits, chompy bits, diamond-tipped reproductive organs ...)
Earth life would likely have an equal effect on Martian life.
It always made me shudder to think of Sarek and Amanda (or Worf and Deanna) together on Star Trek. If such a hypothetical meeting were even possible, when it comes to conjugal activities Amanda is biologically more closely related to an earthworm than she is to Sarek. Who wants to knowingly smooch an earthworm?
At least keep it in your phylum.
Geology 101: Silicon née silicates are the primary components of the Earth's crust. You get a gold star. :)
If you say it with a short "o" sound as opposed to the long "o" sound you get extra credit.
If you know that silicone is the primary component of Pamela Lee Anderson then the whole class will sing a song to you. :)
But I digress -- silicon is not nearly as durable as diamond. I am not going ga-ga over the idea of semiconductors that can withstand a blowtorch. What juices me are the applications for diamond-deposition technology -- scratch-proofing optics, hardening membranes, preserving surfaces, stuff like that.
Now if we can only get a tech that allows us to diamond coat objects without exposing them to near vaccuum and extreme temperatures that would be ducky, especially for realatively fragile carbon-rich baubles like the Mona Lisa.
Back to Ms. Anderson, she coats herself with diamonds through a process of well-documented reproductive efforts. :)
Gemesis is a Florida company that is now producing large, gem-quality clear or colored diamonds.
There's not much information on the Gemesis web site, but a few weeks ago I remember watching a PBS Nova program entitled "The Diamond Deception" about the quest for gem quality man-made diamonds. Gemesis contracted for Russian technology to produce what they claim are the best man-made diamonds in the world -- diamonds that can only be detected by a fluorescence test.
The stones being produced are of such high quality that DeBeers is seriously concerned about the future of the diamond market.
Carbon is abundant -- it's all around us. Although removing carbon from the living carbon reservoir might be undesirable, in the short term the supply is more than sufficient for a technique like the one in the mentioned article.
With a practical method of large scale diamond coating we could preserve structures, heirlooms, and treasures almost indefinitely. We could create surfaces that are virtually scratch proof, and optics that only deform under the most extreme conditions. With the technology to create panels of diamond we could create incredibly thin windows that are structurally superior to steel. With sheets of colored or opaque diamond we could build structures that would last for eons.
And don't forget one current application for vapor-deposition diamond: coating the cone with diamond creates bitchin' hi-fi tweeters. :)
As others have said, the US Postal Service and the Effa Bee Eye are good places to complain.
Also contact your state's attorney general -- there should be contact/fraud information available on a link from your state government's web site.
From a run-in with a deadbeat on eBay I know that most state laws ignore any incomplete transaction below $25. On the other hand if your transaction exceeds $25 then the Feds, the Post Office, their nearest relatives, and a fellow named Guido from across town will all step in to help you. Interstate fraud is a Phe-lo-nee with a capital PH. :)
You need only make enough noise in the right direction.
Peace,
-JoeGee