The anti-biofilm activity of this and other substances derived from sponges was discovered by Japanese researches. The application they were looking for was the prevention of biofouling in shipping, power stations cooling systems, etc. In 2007, the use of bromoageliferin analogues against antibiotic resistant strains was tested in NCSU. In 2008, a NOAA researcher rediscovered it, apparently independently.
...the Shuttle entered the armosphere wrong end in
The shuttle HAS NO right end to enter the atmosphere. It is not stable without active controls. Soyuz can enter in brick mode and still survive the reentry.
This concept was pioneered in the canadian MOST(Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) mission. MOST is a suitcase-sized satellite build on a modest budget but still achieved some significant scientific results. Kepler follows in its footsteps with a larger and more powerful implementation.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Most of today's financial instruments have very good legitimate uses. Unfortunately, the vast majority of actual total trading activity in these instruments is speculation.
I think a "buddy backup" system makes a lot of sense. Keep multiple copies of your data on the hard disks of friends and family through the net (and let them keep their data on yours, of course). Encrypt it if you like. Each participant only needs to invest in a big hard drive every few of years (1.5GB is as low as $133 these days). No need for RAID - geographically distributed redundancy is better.
There is a commercial application to do this called CrashPlan. I'd really love to see an open source project with similar functionality. It should be easy to use for non-technical people and run on multiple platforms.
This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.
Using dynamic translation techniques (a la valgrind) it should be possible to run x86 code on other platforms with excellent performance.
With dynamic translation you can either design a completely new bytecode that is equally alien to all platforms or choose an existing platform as a "bytecode". I think x86 is actually a pretty good choice. The x86 architecture has segment registers that help isolate untrusted code. These segment registers are accessible from user mode on all major x86 operating systems (unlike the paging hardware that is available only to the OS kernel). Also, all other major architectures sets have more general purpose registers than x86. This makes it possible to devote a dedicated register to each of the emulated x86 register while still having a few free registers to manage the state of the dynamic translation engine.
Ok, so x86 assembly is a weird and not very orthogonal instruction set. So what? This merely makes the lookup and translation tables in the dynamic execution engine a bit bigger when compared to some "ideal" bytecode. I don't think this makes a good argument against an otherwise very elegant solution.
Also, making the keys() method not return a list doesn't make sense. I often use mixed data sets, it's very convenient to be able to do somelist.append(x.keys()).
This one will actually work just fine. The result of.keys() is iterable so you can pass it as an argument to append() with no problem. What you can't is do something like indexing the result of.keys() with the [] operator. Dictionaries are unordered so you should consider the result of.keys() as a set, not a list.
There is an elegant Knight's Tour solver right inside your Python distribution. You can find it at/usr/lib/python2.5/test/test_generators.py. Written by Tim Peters (a.k.a. timbot).
The first two locations made more sense. On a small island, electric cars could work - you just can't take a long trip. Since Israel doesn't get along with most of its neighbors, there's not much cross-border car traffic, and the country is small. But the SF Bay Area is a big step up from there.
Hawaii and Israel may be small but the Bay Area is full of people who may be willing to drive vehicles with certain limitations if they think they are more environmentally friendly. Ideological reasons can be just as valid as geographical reasons.
(I started writing this comment and got a strange feeling of deja-vu. It turns out that my last slashdot comment 67 days ago was virtually identical. This is getting scary.)
If static is indeed a significant source of noise it should be possible to reduce it by processing multiple playbacks of the recording. But I'm afraid that much of the noise in a typical record is already part of the medium in the form of tiny scratches and will not average out. You would need two or more imprints of the same master to fix that.
Bringing the recordings into phase is not as straightforward as you describe. You need to track the variations in rotation rate and continuously stretch and compress the signal based on cross-correlation. But I'm sure there's a plugin that already does it.
Uranium can be completely removed from the waste by converting it to gaseous Uranium hexafluoride. This stuff is no more dangerous than the original uranium ore (or the uranium in the concrete in the walls around you and the ground under your feet).
3. Fission products - approximately half the atomic weight of uranium. Intensely radioactive, but that is why they decay relatively rapidly. In 300 years it decays to less than the radioactivity of the ore it came from. We have examples structures that last centuries built with medieval technology. Language does not change fast enough for reliably warning a couple of future generations.
4. Transuranics - isotopes of plutonium, americium neptunium and perhaps a few others. Caused by uranium and other elements capturing neutrons without fissioning. Radioactive enough to be a serious problem. Not radioactive enough to decay quickly. This is the 10000 year stuff.
Oh, did I mention that transuranics are a valuable nuclear fuel that our energy-starved descendants will probably want to extract from the waste far before warning future generations ever becomes a problem? I say let's burn it sooner (in molten salt reactors) rather than constructing big mausoleums for it.
I work as a consultant and often use Truecrypt on my USB key in traveller mode on sites where I work. The top thing on my wishlist is to be able to run/install Truecrypt on a Windows machine without admin rights.
Installing a driver requires administrator access. A possible way to mount a filesystem without a driver is to create a CIFS server that listens on localhost and mount it as a network share. This would also require a user-mode implementation of the FAT filesystem.
Israel was among the list of countries from which they were receiving overly many fraudulent donations. Nowhere in the article does it say that they were actually getting "fraudulend donations". I
If the "e-commerce experts" mentioned in the article claim that the rate of fraud in transactions from a certain country is higher for commerce applications I would tend to believe them. But how is thos relevant to donations? Donating with stolen credit cards is not exactly a common criminal activity, for obvious reasons.
Barack Obama: [...] "Absolutely, and look, the NRC is a moribund and...it's a moribund agency that needs to be revamped and it's become captive of the industries that it regulates and I think that's a problem. It's not unique by the way to the nuclear industry [...] We've got a whole bunch of federal agencies that over the last seven years have been filled with cronies, have lost their sense of mission. It's true in the justice department, the civil rights division. [...] Part of what I want to do as President is I want to make government cool again. I say that only partly tongue-in-cheek. I want to be able to attract a whole new generation of talent to go into the federal government and their charge will be make these agencies lean, mean, make them work [...] Let's restore this sense that government can get things done [...] I would describe myself as agnostic on nuclear power in the sense I'm not somebody who says nuclear's off the table no matter what because there's no perfect energy source and given the importance of producing carbon emissions, nuclear should be in the mix if we can make it safe [...] There are a whole set of questions and they may not be solvable and if they're not solvable then I don't want to invest in it. But if they are solvable, why not?"
Install a bandwidth management tool like cFosSpeed and you will see that latency drops down to essentially the same levels as you have without BitTorrent running without reducing the torrent speed whatsoever. This doesn't even require any of the fancy prioritization features of the bandwidth manager tool - just avoiding overloading the transmit queue.
In other words, your DSL line is perfectly capable of handling an uplink that is actually used for more than an occasional HTTP request without bogging down. The reason it doesn't do it is poor engineering of the DSLAM. With better tuning and queue management algorithms like RED (Random Early Drop) they will cooperate with TCP congestion control to avoid overloading the uplink buffers. Your DSL line will work just fine without a third-party bandwidth management tool.
Why is the DSLAM poorly engineered? The simple explanation is incompetence. Conspiracy theorist would probably claim that it's intentional because ISPs don't want you to use bandwidth-intensive applications. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: the original flaw was a combination of lazy engineers and the fact that most users don't really use their uplink so much. It's not being fixed beacuse it serves the interests of the ISPs.
> You're right when you mean patents and copyrights, but trademarks make a lot of sense, as there is no advantage in letting someone pose as someone else.
Correct. Trademarks are 100% compatible with the core libertarian values of freedom from coersion, violence and fraud. Decorating a product with the distinctive marks of a competitor in order to deceive customers is fraud.
How is this moderated as "informative" when it contains blatantly incorrect information? SQLite is most definitely present in all Python 2.5 installations. It's part of the Python source tree. It's as much a part of the Python distribution as the regular expressions library you use in your code. And if you insist on using an older version of Python SQLite is just one apt-get away.
In what specific ways does the supposed "bloat" of SQLite affect the user, exactly?
What kind of "maintenance" does the user need to do on the SQLite source code? It's maintained well enough for some some pretty big users. Who maintains your code and why should I trust you with my data?
How can SQLite be "difficult to use" when it's just standard SQL with a standard Python DBAPI interface?
It's really nice that you wrote a cute little datastore. But there's no need to badmouth what you perceive as the competition.
>... maybe this is why quality is not so great in offshore products
I don't find the quality of most "onshore" development that great either. Don't compare offshore projects with shrink-wrapped software. Compare them with the typical in-house or outsourced project and you'll see they suck about equally.
The press does not exist to provide information but to provoke emotion. Showing the actual button that destroyes a spacecraft with human occupants achieves this effect nicely.
> Too bad most of the satellites will be knocked out of orbit by all the debris their last little stunt in orbit left behind.
Nope.
The navigation satellites are at medium earth orbit (MEO) of ~20000 kilometers and geosynchronous at ~36000. The antisatellite test left debris in relatively low earth orbit (LEO) around 800 kilometers. The debris from the test will not affect the navigation satellites.
Slashdot Mirror
I searched for the words "bromoageliferin" and "biofilm" on Google Scholar to see the distribution of articles by year.
1997, 1 article, Japan
2007, 1 article, US
2008, 6 articles, US
The anti-biofilm activity of this and other substances derived from sponges was discovered by Japanese researches. The application they were looking for was the prevention of biofouling in shipping, power stations cooling systems, etc.
In 2007, the use of bromoageliferin analogues against antibiotic resistant strains was tested in NCSU.
In 2008, a NOAA researcher rediscovered it, apparently independently.
The shuttle HAS NO right end to enter the atmosphere. It is not stable without active controls. Soyuz can enter in brick mode and still survive the reentry.
This concept was pioneered in the canadian MOST(Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) mission. MOST is a suitcase-sized satellite build on a modest budget but still achieved some significant scientific results. Kepler follows in its footsteps with a larger and more powerful implementation.
The software architect for MOST is Henry Spencer
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Most of today's financial instruments have very good legitimate uses. Unfortunately, the vast majority of actual total trading activity in these instruments is speculation.
I think a "buddy backup" system makes a lot of sense. Keep multiple copies of your data on the hard disks of friends and family through the net (and let them keep their data on yours, of course). Encrypt it if you like. Each participant only needs to invest in a big hard drive every few of years (1.5GB is as low as $133 these days). No need for RAID - geographically distributed redundancy is better.
There is a commercial application to do this called CrashPlan. I'd really love to see an open source project with similar functionality. It should be easy to use for non-technical people and run on multiple platforms.
This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.
Using dynamic translation techniques (a la valgrind) it should be possible to run x86 code on other platforms with excellent performance.
With dynamic translation you can either design a completely new bytecode that is equally alien to all platforms or choose an existing platform as a "bytecode". I think x86 is actually a pretty good choice. The x86 architecture has segment registers that help isolate untrusted code. These segment registers are accessible from user mode on all major x86 operating systems (unlike the paging hardware that is available only to the OS kernel). Also, all other major architectures sets have more general purpose registers than x86. This makes it possible to devote a dedicated register to each of the emulated x86 register while still having a few free registers to manage the state of the dynamic translation engine.
Ok, so x86 assembly is a weird and not very orthogonal instruction set. So what? This merely makes the lookup and translation tables in the dynamic execution engine a bit bigger when compared to some "ideal" bytecode. I don't think this makes a good argument against an otherwise very elegant solution.
Also, making the keys() method not return a list doesn't make sense. I often use mixed data sets, it's very convenient to be able to do somelist.append(x.keys()).
This one will actually work just fine. The result of .keys() is iterable so you can pass it as an argument to append() with no problem. What you can't is do something like indexing the result of .keys() with the [] operator. Dictionaries are unordered so you should consider the result of .keys() as a set, not a list.
There is an elegant Knight's Tour solver right inside your Python distribution. You can find it at /usr/lib/python2.5/test/test_generators.py. Written by Tim Peters (a.k.a. timbot).
The first two locations made more sense. On a small island, electric cars could work - you just can't take a long trip. Since Israel doesn't get along with most of its neighbors, there's not much cross-border car traffic, and the country is small. But the SF Bay Area is a big step up from there.
Hawaii and Israel may be small but the Bay Area is full of people who may be willing to drive vehicles with certain limitations if they think they are more environmentally friendly. Ideological reasons can be just as valid as geographical reasons.
This is the vehicle that ATK Thiokol tried to sell as "Safe, Simple and Soon"
Oh, well.
(I started writing this comment and got a strange feeling of deja-vu. It turns out that my last slashdot comment 67 days ago was virtually identical. This is getting scary.)
This is the vehicle that ATK Thiokol tried to sell as "Safe, Simple and Soon"
Oh, well.
If static is indeed a significant source of noise it should be possible to reduce it by processing multiple playbacks of the recording. But I'm afraid that much of the noise in a typical record is already part of the medium in the form of tiny scratches and will not average out. You would need two or more imprints of the same master to fix that.
Bringing the recordings into phase is not as straightforward as you describe. You need to track the variations in rotation rate and continuously stretch and compress the signal based on cross-correlation. But I'm sure there's a plugin that already does it.
Would be nice to find a nitrogen source, then you'd have CHON, which is most of what you need to live. In the right proportions, of course.
The Martian atmosphere, perhaps? Freeze out the CO2 and 60% of the remainder is nitrogen.
The nuclear waste consists of the following:
1. Uranium 238 - very low radioactivity.
2. Unburned Uranium 235 - low radioactivity.
Uranium can be completely removed from the waste by converting it to gaseous Uranium hexafluoride. This stuff is no more dangerous than the original uranium ore (or the uranium in the concrete in the walls around you and the ground under your feet).
3. Fission products - approximately half the atomic weight of uranium. Intensely radioactive, but that is why they decay relatively rapidly. In 300 years it decays to less than the radioactivity of the ore it came from. We have examples structures that last centuries built with medieval technology. Language does not change fast enough for reliably warning a couple of future generations.
4. Transuranics - isotopes of plutonium, americium neptunium and perhaps a few others. Caused by uranium and other elements capturing neutrons without fissioning. Radioactive enough to be a serious problem. Not radioactive enough to decay quickly. This is the 10000 year stuff.
Oh, did I mention that transuranics are a valuable nuclear fuel that our energy-starved descendants will probably want to extract from the waste far before warning future generations ever becomes a problem? I say let's burn it sooner (in molten salt reactors) rather than constructing big mausoleums for it.
The psychoacoustic models of MP3 compression must have done wonders for the ancient recording.
It's like compressing a bitmap of line art with JPEG.
I work as a consultant and often use Truecrypt on my USB key in traveller mode on sites where I work. The top thing on my wishlist is to be able to run/install Truecrypt on a Windows machine without admin rights.
Installing a driver requires administrator access. A possible way to mount a filesystem without a driver is to create a CIFS server that listens on localhost and mount it as a network share. This would also require a user-mode implementation of the FAT filesystem.
Magazine photos generally do not have pupils that contract in response to a bright light.
If the "e-commerce experts" mentioned in the article claim that the rate of fraud in transactions from a certain country is higher for commerce applications I would tend to believe them. But how is thos relevant to donations? Donating with stolen credit cards is not exactly a common criminal activity, for obvious reasons.
Check this youtube video.
Barack Obama: [...] "Absolutely, and look, the NRC is a moribund and...it's a moribund agency that needs to be revamped and it's become captive of the industries that it regulates and I think that's a problem. It's not unique by the way to the nuclear industry [...] We've got a whole bunch of federal agencies that over the last seven years have been filled with cronies, have lost their sense of mission. It's true in the justice department, the civil rights division. [...] Part of what I want to do as President is I want to make government cool again. I say that only partly tongue-in-cheek. I want to be able to attract a whole new generation of talent to go into the federal government and their charge will be make these agencies lean, mean, make them work [...] Let's restore this sense that government can get things done [...] I would describe myself as agnostic on nuclear power in the sense I'm not somebody who says nuclear's off the table no matter what because there's no perfect energy source and given the importance of producing carbon emissions, nuclear should be in the mix if we can make it safe [...] There are a whole set of questions and they may not be solvable and if they're not solvable then I don't want to invest in it. But if they are solvable, why not?"
Install a bandwidth management tool like cFosSpeed and you will see that latency drops down to essentially the same levels as you have without BitTorrent running without reducing the torrent speed whatsoever. This doesn't even require any of the fancy prioritization features of the bandwidth manager tool - just avoiding overloading the transmit queue.
In other words, your DSL line is perfectly capable of handling an uplink that is actually used for more than an occasional HTTP request without bogging down. The reason it doesn't do it is poor engineering of the DSLAM. With better tuning and queue management algorithms like RED (Random Early Drop) they will cooperate with TCP congestion control to avoid overloading the uplink buffers. Your DSL line will work just fine without a third-party bandwidth management tool.
Why is the DSLAM poorly engineered? The simple explanation is incompetence. Conspiracy theorist would probably claim that it's intentional because ISPs don't want you to use bandwidth-intensive applications. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: the original flaw was a combination of lazy engineers and the fact that most users don't really use their uplink so much. It's not being fixed beacuse it serves the interests of the ISPs.
> You're right when you mean patents and copyrights, but trademarks make a lot of sense, as there is no advantage in letting someone pose as someone else.
Correct. Trademarks are 100% compatible with the core libertarian values of freedom from coersion, violence and fraud. Decorating a product with the distinctive marks of a competitor in order to deceive customers is fraud.
Patents and copyrights are a different issue.
How is this moderated as "informative" when it contains blatantly incorrect information? SQLite is most definitely present in all Python 2.5 installations. It's part of the Python source tree. It's as much a part of the Python distribution as the regular expressions library you use in your code. And if you insist on using an older version of Python SQLite is just one apt-get away.
In what specific ways does the supposed "bloat" of SQLite affect the user, exactly?
What kind of "maintenance" does the user need to do on the SQLite source code? It's maintained well enough for some some pretty big users. Who maintains your code and why should I trust you with my data?
How can SQLite be "difficult to use" when it's just standard SQL with a standard Python DBAPI interface?
It's really nice that you wrote a cute little datastore. But there's no need to badmouth what you perceive as the competition.
> ... maybe this is why quality is not so great in offshore products
I don't find the quality of most "onshore" development that great either. Don't compare offshore projects with shrink-wrapped software. Compare them with the typical in-house or outsourced project and you'll see they suck about equally.
The press does not exist to provide information but to provoke emotion. Showing the actual button that destroyes a spacecraft with human occupants achieves this effect nicely.
> Too bad most of the satellites will be knocked out of orbit by all the debris their last little stunt in orbit left behind.
Nope.
The navigation satellites are at medium earth orbit (MEO) of ~20000 kilometers and geosynchronous at ~36000. The antisatellite test left debris in relatively low earth orbit (LEO) around 800 kilometers. The debris from the test will not affect the navigation satellites.