As an aside, if you use your laptop on work premises, no matter who ends up paying for it, consider also how it's insured and who is liable if something happens. Get the answer in writing (I can't stress this strongly enough). I had a situation where I used my own laptop and my own desktop at work, to avoid using the company's 10 year old relics. However, an office fire destroyed a lot of my equipment and despite being assured that it was definitely covered because I was using it for work purposes that turned out not to be the case for the hardware or any of the software / data on it. My (costly) mistake for not checking this carefully. So the advantage of you using company equipment is that they're liable for it. Whether that's worth the restrictions and conditions, if any, they place upon you using it is up to you to decide if it's an option.
Although I tend to agree, I don't think that all "pirates" would be pirates if a better legal alternative was available. One thing that a high level of piracy suggests is that it's offering a better service overall. So concentrate on improving the legal services, get rid of DRM, offer lossless downloads, reduces prices, offer discounts for buying albums over tracks, provide supplementary materials such as artwork, band profiles etc - anything to make people think that a legal purchase isn't such a ripoff. I'd never use the bigger online providers because they fail on all the above - the smaller operations do a much better job, and they get my business.
Bear in mind that the key factor here is the photographs. Whatever you want to "enhance" must be present in those photos as well, so a robbery on CCTV can only be enhanced in this way if simultaneous photos that include the perpetrator are available... in which case why not simply use a high-resolution still security system in the first place (easy: it costs too much to store the massive amounts of data). You also cannot enhance, say, people moving through the scene or changing / unpredictable elements in the scene unless someone else was there simultaneously taking high-resolution photos. Clearly this tech is intended for static scenes, or static objects within those scenes.
While this is great tech and certainly has its uses, it also relies on your ability to take well-exposed, clear photographs of the same scene. If your video technical skills aren't up to proper exposure settings, what makes them think your photographic skills are going to compensate for that?
I can see this being a plug-in for video editing suites, although knowing what the better ones already cost I can't see it being cheap!
Ah yes, but on the cardinal game reviewing scale of 7-9 (7 = sucks, 8 = ok I suppose, 9 = awesome), getting 68% is worse than "it sucks". No wonder Atari are pissed off!
That sounds familiar (the box with 400+ Speccy games) only in my case my grandmother gave the entire thing away to one of her nieces! This was a few years ago so the pain has lessened somewhat, but at the time I was gutted. She claimed that I wasn't using them anymore so she donated them all to someone (who I actually didn't much like anyway!). Oh, and my entire collection of Crash magazines went the same way.
The only things I have left from that time are boxed copies of Jetpac, Chaos: Battle of the Wizards, and Crystal's Dungeon Master.
That's a key reason the alligator work is so interesting, because it mirrors the findings from saltwater crocodiles and suggests these peptides had evolved in a common ancestor. It would be interesting to check birds, which share the nearest common ancestor with the Crocodylia, to see what similarities in their immune system exist.
I made the initial discovery with saltwater crocodiles back in 1999, and my colleague Dr Gill Diamond named the peptide "crocodillin". So this is really a decade old now!
The goal is to sequence the peptides involved, ultimately to synthesize them. It's not going to affect wild alligator populations, not that there's a dearth of them!
Adam
No, the whole point of this is that it's part of the alligator's innate immune system. These proteins basically break down the walls of bacteria, and assist the adaptive immune system to kill them. Given how these proteins work, it's not really possible to adapt quickly and become immune to them because it's a simple action that's harder to foil. That's why alligators and crocs can deal with every bacterium that we've thrown at them so far, including antibiotic-resistant ones.
Adam
Yes, that's the research I was involved in. We actually first discovered this way back in 1999! We tested serum activity (and lysed leucocytes) in Australian saltwater crocodiles and later in 2002 in Australian freshwater crocodiles. We called this antimicrobial peptide "crocodillin".
The work from 2005 comes from a project I did with Mark Merchant on saltwater crocs where we tried to learn more about the antimicrobial and antiviral activity.
This latest media release is essential the same as the previous work, except this time with American alligators because Mark has more of them in the backyard than he does saltwater crocs.
Adam
I always like to get on the plane early because otherwise I find the luggage space above my seat has been taken up with someone else's luggage, and I have to find someplace else to stow it - I'd say 80% of the time that's further back. This wouldn't be a problem apart from getting off the plane again, where everyone is in such a hurry to leave that nobody will let you backwards to the bin where your luggage is, so you have to wait until the aisles clear before you can retrieve it. By the time you're off the plane, you're at the back of the immigration queue (for international travel obviously, which I do a lot) and when you only have a few minutes leeway to rush between gates to catch connecting flights such delays can mean the difference between a relaxing trip and a burst blood vessel.
Context, though, is very important. If I'm talking to my boss, I'm probably not going to use much profanity. But if I want to communicate effectively to, say, a group of construction workers who know me, the right use of profanity can actually help. If you don't come across as being a stuck up wanker, you probably won't be regarded as one!
What "science" doesn't need, though, is the attitude that "real science" is above casual entertainment because "real science" is so staggeringly boring that hardly anyone would want to watch it. Science isn't some ivory tower, exclusive club that only the most arrogant can subscribe to. All science is, and this is what programs like Mythbusters try to get across, is applying logic and investigation to theories, instead of believing heresay and anecdote without question. You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to do science. Kids do science in science class every day in schools across the world. Teaching those kids normally involves simple examples of science to get them interested in asking more in-depth questions over time. This is what program like Mythbusters are all about. That some adults like to watch them because they "blow shit up" helps to broaden its appeal so that it doesn't get cancelled. It's not supposed to be rigorous, it's supposed to get you thinking. Here we are on Slashdot talking about it, so it achieved something.
Of course that's not to say there isn't room for more demanding science shows on television, and you cite a good example, because whether TV forces you to think or not is purely down to the quality of the programming. There is a serious issue in terms of the bias TV has towards undemanding entertainment, but where should the blame lie? Ultimately the people behind these stations are trying to make money, and they do that by giving people what they want (or what they think they want). We've created a monster.
Frankly, it's much easier to instil brand awareness when you have a name like "Blu-ray" which rolls off the tongue in the way that "HD-DVD" does not. Sometimes it's the simplest things...
I would be very surprised if there wasn't a far more accurate and expensive way of doing this. I think what you're looking at here is simply a cheap solution for those who can't afford the high end software and hardware.
For my PhD about 15 years ago (that long?!) I had a custom-built system to measure distances and dimensions (even speeds from one frame to the next) that employed the perspective differences between two cameras a set distance apart. Back in those days I had to develop each print separately onto an A4 sheet, measure reference points, and input the coordinates into a PC using a digitising tablet, then calculate everything using a software-written algorhythm written in QBasic. Took ages, but the result was accurate (I forget the exact figure, but it was less than 1% error and that was mostly due to manual errors in digitising and camera calibration). Essentially it enabled me to re-create points in three dimensions - I used it to measure flight speeds and distances. I haven't been following the "scene" for a long time now, but I'd be shocked if a real-time version didn't exist in 2007. Even in 1996 I saw a video system that used similar principles where the calculations were done automatically - still wasn't real-time, but it was heading that way.
Not really. It just shows that 160 mya temperature also led to genetic abnormalities during incubation. That's not news - the fact that extreme temperature affects cellular mitosis goes back a hell of a lot further than the dinosaurs.
Everyone seems to be missing the point of this discovery (including most news agencies who think it's a cool story). Bifurcation of the head is a pretty common genetic abnormality in a number of vertebrates, but especially reptiles because eggs are exposed to a wider range of temperature extremes. High temperatures during incubation, particularly early in incubation, very often lead to genetic abnormalities. A "hot" crocodile or turtle nest, for example, will give you a lot of dead, deformed embryos including those with two tails, no jaws, two heads, and any other number of strange mutations. It's exceptionally rare for one to survive past hatching, but it has happened.
So basically these guys have discovered a fossilised embryo that was deformed during incubation, not a two-headed monster that terrorised the Cretaceous. It's neat to find one, but it's not a particularly novel discovery IMO.
Of course, none of this would really be a problem, and few would really care, if each region had the exact same content available, and the same release dates. There is no greater incentive for consumers to try and bypass region restrictions than making content exclusive to a particular region, or have release dates months apart for desirable hardware or its content.
Actually that's not quite correct. Steve very vocally lobbied the environment minister in his opposition to the safari hunting program. What came out later was that the environment minister was about to approve the program based on very strong scientific, economic and social evidence, until Steve Irwin took him to see some crocs, wined and dined him, and basically caused him to rethink his decision. In other words, the environment minister ignored all the factual evidence in favour of one man's emotional appeal. Not everyone would regard this as informed conservation strategy.
Steve always put animals first and common sense second, whether it was his own personal safety or his conservation recommendations. Still, nobody ever wished his fate upon him and it's sad to see him go - he was a "spanner in the works" that kept people on their toes. He ultimately did a lot of good things for crocs, and for that I respected him.
This is a good summary of the real issues. It goes back to the fact that supporters of ID do not understand that evolution is a theory, and that a theory needs to be tested with evidence, and that the whole field of evolution is basically about linking evidence to prove the theory. That's why it's taught as science. Creationism or ID should never be taught as science because they're not about gathering evidence and creating testable hypotheses. As you say, many pro-Evolutionists miss this point.
It all comes down to giving the right impression. I won't ask anyone to represent me if they give the impression that our company is a bunch of idiots or that we don't particularly care.
Who would you hire?
"Sir, I believe that our company can assist you with this analysis. We have significant experience in the field of population ecology and the impact of feral species on endemic ecosystems. Thank you for considering us."
or
"we can help, sure. done plenty of this stuff before - things like how cane toads kill our crocs when they invade using stats etc. thx."
Perhaps I'm exaggerating a little. Anyone will forgive a few spelling mistakes, minor grammatical errors and typos. However I tend to read between the lines and and I expect others will do the same when faced with a poorly written letter or email where giving the right impression matters.
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, if you use your laptop on work premises, no matter who ends up paying for it, consider also how it's insured and who is liable if something happens. Get the answer in writing (I can't stress this strongly enough). I had a situation where I used my own laptop and my own desktop at work, to avoid using the company's 10 year old relics. However, an office fire destroyed a lot of my equipment and despite being assured that it was definitely covered because I was using it for work purposes that turned out not to be the case for the hardware or any of the software / data on it. My (costly) mistake for not checking this carefully. So the advantage of you using company equipment is that they're liable for it. Whether that's worth the restrictions and conditions, if any, they place upon you using it is up to you to decide if it's an option.
Although I tend to agree, I don't think that all "pirates" would be pirates if a better legal alternative was available. One thing that a high level of piracy suggests is that it's offering a better service overall. So concentrate on improving the legal services, get rid of DRM, offer lossless downloads, reduces prices, offer discounts for buying albums over tracks, provide supplementary materials such as artwork, band profiles etc - anything to make people think that a legal purchase isn't such a ripoff. I'd never use the bigger online providers because they fail on all the above - the smaller operations do a much better job, and they get my business.
Bear in mind that the key factor here is the photographs. Whatever you want to "enhance" must be present in those photos as well, so a robbery on CCTV can only be enhanced in this way if simultaneous photos that include the perpetrator are available... in which case why not simply use a high-resolution still security system in the first place (easy: it costs too much to store the massive amounts of data). You also cannot enhance, say, people moving through the scene or changing / unpredictable elements in the scene unless someone else was there simultaneously taking high-resolution photos. Clearly this tech is intended for static scenes, or static objects within those scenes. While this is great tech and certainly has its uses, it also relies on your ability to take well-exposed, clear photographs of the same scene. If your video technical skills aren't up to proper exposure settings, what makes them think your photographic skills are going to compensate for that? I can see this being a plug-in for video editing suites, although knowing what the better ones already cost I can't see it being cheap!
Ah yes, but on the cardinal game reviewing scale of 7-9 (7 = sucks, 8 = ok I suppose, 9 = awesome), getting 68% is worse than "it sucks". No wonder Atari are pissed off!
That sounds familiar (the box with 400+ Speccy games) only in my case my grandmother gave the entire thing away to one of her nieces! This was a few years ago so the pain has lessened somewhat, but at the time I was gutted. She claimed that I wasn't using them anymore so she donated them all to someone (who I actually didn't much like anyway!). Oh, and my entire collection of Crash magazines went the same way. The only things I have left from that time are boxed copies of Jetpac, Chaos: Battle of the Wizards, and Crystal's Dungeon Master.
That's a key reason the alligator work is so interesting, because it mirrors the findings from saltwater crocodiles and suggests these peptides had evolved in a common ancestor. It would be interesting to check birds, which share the nearest common ancestor with the Crocodylia, to see what similarities in their immune system exist.
Adam
I made the initial discovery with saltwater crocodiles back in 1999, and my colleague Dr Gill Diamond named the peptide "crocodillin". So this is really a decade old now!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/680840.stm
Adam Britton
The goal is to sequence the peptides involved, ultimately to synthesize them. It's not going to affect wild alligator populations, not that there's a dearth of them! Adam
No, the whole point of this is that it's part of the alligator's innate immune system. These proteins basically break down the walls of bacteria, and assist the adaptive immune system to kill them. Given how these proteins work, it's not really possible to adapt quickly and become immune to them because it's a simple action that's harder to foil. That's why alligators and crocs can deal with every bacterium that we've thrown at them so far, including antibiotic-resistant ones. Adam
Yes, that's the research I was involved in. We actually first discovered this way back in 1999! We tested serum activity (and lysed leucocytes) in Australian saltwater crocodiles and later in 2002 in Australian freshwater crocodiles. We called this antimicrobial peptide "crocodillin". The work from 2005 comes from a project I did with Mark Merchant on saltwater crocs where we tried to learn more about the antimicrobial and antiviral activity. This latest media release is essential the same as the previous work, except this time with American alligators because Mark has more of them in the backyard than he does saltwater crocs. Adam
I always like to get on the plane early because otherwise I find the luggage space above my seat has been taken up with someone else's luggage, and I have to find someplace else to stow it - I'd say 80% of the time that's further back. This wouldn't be a problem apart from getting off the plane again, where everyone is in such a hurry to leave that nobody will let you backwards to the bin where your luggage is, so you have to wait until the aisles clear before you can retrieve it. By the time you're off the plane, you're at the back of the immigration queue (for international travel obviously, which I do a lot) and when you only have a few minutes leeway to rush between gates to catch connecting flights such delays can mean the difference between a relaxing trip and a burst blood vessel.
Context, though, is very important. If I'm talking to my boss, I'm probably not going to use much profanity. But if I want to communicate effectively to, say, a group of construction workers who know me, the right use of profanity can actually help. If you don't come across as being a stuck up wanker, you probably won't be regarded as one!
A wretched hive of scum and villainy.
What "science" doesn't need, though, is the attitude that "real science" is above casual entertainment because "real science" is so staggeringly boring that hardly anyone would want to watch it. Science isn't some ivory tower, exclusive club that only the most arrogant can subscribe to. All science is, and this is what programs like Mythbusters try to get across, is applying logic and investigation to theories, instead of believing heresay and anecdote without question. You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to do science. Kids do science in science class every day in schools across the world. Teaching those kids normally involves simple examples of science to get them interested in asking more in-depth questions over time. This is what program like Mythbusters are all about. That some adults like to watch them because they "blow shit up" helps to broaden its appeal so that it doesn't get cancelled. It's not supposed to be rigorous, it's supposed to get you thinking. Here we are on Slashdot talking about it, so it achieved something.
Of course that's not to say there isn't room for more demanding science shows on television, and you cite a good example, because whether TV forces you to think or not is purely down to the quality of the programming. There is a serious issue in terms of the bias TV has towards undemanding entertainment, but where should the blame lie? Ultimately the people behind these stations are trying to make money, and they do that by giving people what they want (or what they think they want). We've created a monster.
Frankly, it's much easier to instil brand awareness when you have a name like "Blu-ray" which rolls off the tongue in the way that "HD-DVD" does not. Sometimes it's the simplest things...
I would be very surprised if there wasn't a far more accurate and expensive way of doing this. I think what you're looking at here is simply a cheap solution for those who can't afford the high end software and hardware.
For my PhD about 15 years ago (that long?!) I had a custom-built system to measure distances and dimensions (even speeds from one frame to the next) that employed the perspective differences between two cameras a set distance apart. Back in those days I had to develop each print separately onto an A4 sheet, measure reference points, and input the coordinates into a PC using a digitising tablet, then calculate everything using a software-written algorhythm written in QBasic. Took ages, but the result was accurate (I forget the exact figure, but it was less than 1% error and that was mostly due to manual errors in digitising and camera calibration). Essentially it enabled me to re-create points in three dimensions - I used it to measure flight speeds and distances. I haven't been following the "scene" for a long time now, but I'd be shocked if a real-time version didn't exist in 2007. Even in 1996 I saw a video system that used similar principles where the calculations were done automatically - still wasn't real-time, but it was heading that way.
Not really. It just shows that 160 mya temperature also led to genetic abnormalities during incubation. That's not news - the fact that extreme temperature affects cellular mitosis goes back a hell of a lot further than the dinosaurs.
Everyone seems to be missing the point of this discovery (including most news agencies who think it's a cool story). Bifurcation of the head is a pretty common genetic abnormality in a number of vertebrates, but especially reptiles because eggs are exposed to a wider range of temperature extremes. High temperatures during incubation, particularly early in incubation, very often lead to genetic abnormalities. A "hot" crocodile or turtle nest, for example, will give you a lot of dead, deformed embryos including those with two tails, no jaws, two heads, and any other number of strange mutations. It's exceptionally rare for one to survive past hatching, but it has happened.
So basically these guys have discovered a fossilised embryo that was deformed during incubation, not a two-headed monster that terrorised the Cretaceous. It's neat to find one, but it's not a particularly novel discovery IMO.
You can tell which people have self-control in WoW - the ones who take months, not weeks (or days) to go from level 1 to level 60.
Of course, none of this would really be a problem, and few would really care, if each region had the exact same content available, and the same release dates. There is no greater incentive for consumers to try and bypass region restrictions than making content exclusive to a particular region, or have release dates months apart for desirable hardware or its content.
Ironic that students would complain about this, and then blow $10 to $20 a night on beer!
Actually that's not quite correct. Steve very vocally lobbied the environment minister in his opposition to the safari hunting program. What came out later was that the environment minister was about to approve the program based on very strong scientific, economic and social evidence, until Steve Irwin took him to see some crocs, wined and dined him, and basically caused him to rethink his decision. In other words, the environment minister ignored all the factual evidence in favour of one man's emotional appeal. Not everyone would regard this as informed conservation strategy.
Steve always put animals first and common sense second, whether it was his own personal safety or his conservation recommendations. Still, nobody ever wished his fate upon him and it's sad to see him go - he was a "spanner in the works" that kept people on their toes. He ultimately did a lot of good things for crocs, and for that I respected him.
This is a good summary of the real issues. It goes back to the fact that supporters of ID do not understand that evolution is a theory, and that a theory needs to be tested with evidence, and that the whole field of evolution is basically about linking evidence to prove the theory. That's why it's taught as science. Creationism or ID should never be taught as science because they're not about gathering evidence and creating testable hypotheses. As you say, many pro-Evolutionists miss this point.
It all comes down to giving the right impression. I won't ask anyone to represent me if they give the impression that our company is a bunch of idiots or that we don't particularly care. Who would you hire? "Sir, I believe that our company can assist you with this analysis. We have significant experience in the field of population ecology and the impact of feral species on endemic ecosystems. Thank you for considering us." or "we can help, sure. done plenty of this stuff before - things like how cane toads kill our crocs when they invade using stats etc. thx." Perhaps I'm exaggerating a little. Anyone will forgive a few spelling mistakes, minor grammatical errors and typos. However I tend to read between the lines and and I expect others will do the same when faced with a poorly written letter or email where giving the right impression matters.
You missed Farscape, then, featuring inter-species humanoid alien sex! (I hope that will sell a few more Farscape DVDs!)