unless you have a real solution for the business model, the only authors you'll see dedicating themselves to the art are cranks writing manifestos and dilettantes who are already well-off enough to do it as a hobby.
I really hate all those cranks and dilettantes like Shakespeare and Milton and Homer and Cervantes. They sure wrote crap.
I did not know that! Ya learn something new every day. Especially interesting insofar as I've been trying to weld magnesium of late, and there are shielding gas mixes that contain 25% carbon dioxide. I think I'll stick with straight argon.
Titanium's only exotic because it's so hard to get from the oxide to the elemental form. But it's the ninth most common element on the planet: you can hardly move without tripping over the stuff. Yeah, they use it in paint, toothpaste, all sorts of things. Miserable to machine, though, and a little tricky to weld. It's also interesting because as far as I know it's the only element that'll burn in pure nitrogen, as well as oxygen/atmospheric.
Titanium dioxide is dirt cheap, like $2 USD/kilogram cheap. Now, this might use some higher-purity version, but if they're using a "silicon dioxide substrate" they're already spending as much on reasonable SiO2 and its processing than the TiO2 is going to cost.
I think it's cool research -- self-assembling stuff rocks -- but I'm dubious about their claim of the effectiveness of that particular cost reduction.
Of-course for a vegetarian it's a much easier proposition.
Me, I'm not so into raw kidney beans, quince, rhubarb, fava/broad beans, cassava, olives, eggplant, artichokes, plantains, and even raw spinach produces health problems in large quantities -- but you can go ahead if you'd like. Many of them won't kill you outright.
Am I only the one who doesn't need a pat on the back every 5 minutes in order to enjoy something or derive satisfaction from it?
"Congratulations! You survived a bird looking at you! Achievement unlocked, 10 points!"
If you truly feel this way, there's probably something wrong with you. If you just don't feel this way about, say, Farmville, but do feel it about other things (and probably don't realize that you do) then you're merely normal and not paying attention.
"Gamification" is a fuzzy description of operant conditioning. Anything with a bit of intelligence (dogs, parrots, maybe even sheep, and certainly humans) are wired to get a little jolt of pleasure after successfully negotiating a crisis situation. It's how we learn. What games do is short-circuit this by providing lots and lots of crisis situations, and providing the player with ways to get through them and win, and get that little burst of success-feeling. Some people are seriously susceptible to this kind of shenanigans and spend all their time enjoying their imagined success at Farmville. Others do the same thing climbing the corporate ladder and running companies. In that case, of course, it's not imagined success, it's the intended result of how we're wired, operating in a complex social environment. In any case, it's an essential system for learning in humans, and while it sucks that people are getting really good at twisting it to manipulate other people, it's still vitally important and ubiquitous.
Hopefully Righthaven finds more politicians to sue. Lots more. Then maybe - just maybe - will we get some consumer friendly copyright laws. In this case it would appear that Sharron Angle is indeed guilty of willful infringement, but if more politicians get hurt in their own pocket by copyright suits then the chance of them creating laws that states that damages must fit the crime may actually come into effect. That would kill the business model behind the *IAA cartel suits.
Put me down as exceedingly dubious that it'll actually have anything like that effect. What I think is much more likely will be what John McCain proposed when Jackson Browne sued him for using Browne's songs without permission. McCain promptly introduced legislation to exempt politicians from copyright infringement violations when they were using the material for their campaigns. The rest of us would still be just as on the hook. The proposed bill didn't go anywhere that time, but if stuff like this keeps going, I bet we'll see it come back.
Totally agree. I know my company has a fab, in the US, that does all of and only our military contracts, and I'm told that most other large semiconductor companies in the US do the same thing. Likewise, totally agreed about the bugs. I wrote about this more extensively elsewhere in this thread but despite having this argument with other people on slashdot -- who know what they're talking about, I admit -- we're all postulating the possibility of trojan silicon with no strong indication that it's ever happened. Even the most famous supposed case where something like this did happen, the Siberian pipeline explosion, has been questioned, and there's a lot of indication that if it did actually happen it was a software issue, not a deliberately mis-designed IC, as a lot of people have claimed.
Seriously, where will the work be done? Will HP set up the fab shop here, or in SK? Or set up multiple shops. I would love to see the DOD suggest to HP that they need to set up a shop here in the USA. We need to make certain that we have our electronics under control here.
In addition, the DOD, NSA, etc needs to offer up contracts to American companies that produce equipment here. Why? Because we are increasingly seeing embedded virus, etc coming in from Asia.
Last I heard, Hewlett Packard still has domestic fabs: Corvallis, Oregon, I believe, and I think they still have fab capability in Palo Alto. A lot of large semiconductor companies retain small cutting-edge fabs at their headquarters for doing small runs of experimental stuff.
My company has two of its fabs in the US and one in the UK. We do all our packaging and testing in southeast Asia, but the company apparently made a decision about three years ago that we're not going to put fabs there, because we closed down one we'd built less than two years before.
And, as I've said many times before, with the possible exception of processors, it's really difficult to sabotage chip design. Your profit margin is directly related to the surface area your chip layout occupies, so it is aggressively minimized in design, and there simply isn't room on the silicon to splice in new stuff. Added to that, chip companies that I've worked with usually do a planet run of many prototype silicon designs through one fab, often their domestic/in-house fab, do their initial testing on that, and only after that do they put it into production with a full-size mask on dedicated silicon in the production fab, so if you wanted to sneak stuff in you'd have to infiltrate both fabs, or you'd end up with silicon that's visually different -- and we spend a lot of time with high-power microscopes and microprobes poking around at new silicon, sometimes chipping bits out with a laser if we need to do a metal layer change, so it's not like someone wouldn't notice changes on smaller chips. And even if all of THAT didn't catch changes, test and product engineers spend months writing automated test programs that check each pin on each chip and characterize its leakage current, its current draw when functioning, its ESD resistance, all sorts of things, and added circuitry will change those values.
If a company doesn't have a fab, and they just send all their completed masks (or, even worse, just the designs) off to one company, then I think it's possible, albeit difficult, for stuff to sneak into the silicon. But a company that has a fab, or runs their designs through multiple fabs, is pretty unlikely to get compromised silicon without noticing it. It would be significantly easier for a malevolent group to just design their own silicon from the ground up, and package it to look like the target chip and get it into distribution channels by selling it as authentic stuff, than to try to compromise a company's silicon.
. This one does have the advantage of offloading the origin-of-life-on-earth, in which case you can at least claim that maybe biogenesis only happened once somewhere else and is being blown all over the Universe, rather than having only one planet and only a billion years in which to fit your explanation.
How does that help, exactly? You still have the problem of abiogenesis somewhere. At least here on Earth you know you have the right ingredients in abundance and you don't need to invoke a low-probability transfer mechanism to explain how it got here.
I'm not saying that this rules out panspermia, but it does make it seem like rather the more complicated option, all else being equal.
I'm not making an argument *for* panspermia, especially not after reading Nick Lake's brilliant book Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, in which he has a lot to say about biogenesis as an iterative chemical process in deep-sea thermal vents.
But with that said, panspermia is almost as simple as creationism: "oh it happened somehow somewhere and we just got the results." We've demonstrated several times that bacteria -- and I believe lichens -- can at least survive extended exposure in low earth orbit, so at that point it's not difficult to believe they could get here from somewhere else. (Especially because bacterial spores *certainly* could withstand outer space, probably indefinitely.) So at that point you no longer have to fit your biogenesis explanation into early Earth conditions and timeframes: you can come up with just about any starting conditions you want and say "it must have happened on a planet that was like THIS" and you have a nice self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm in complete agreement with you, but some stuff occurs to me, in reading more about this.
1. If he's just an attention whore, he could have found some weird bacterium that uses RNA and claim -- and be technically correct -- that there is no DNA. That'd be surprising, but not anywhere nearly as surprising as finding something that appears to be reproducing without nucleic acids.
2. From other reading about red rain, it appears that his attempts to find DNA were restricted to malachite green and ethidium bromide, and the current theory by people who aren't him is that he's got a bunch of yeast spores, which are going to have cell walls impermeable to both so he's not going to detect DNA even if it's there, or at least not by such relatively crude techniques.
3. I wonder about metabolites. If the stuff *is* from outer space, it might not have the typical ultra-fast metabolism we see in common Earth bacteria, where energy is plentiful and the only real competitive tool available to prokaryotes is rapid reproduction. Something from outer space might act more like some of the archaea or mycobacteria that take days to reproduce -- or years -- rather than the half-hour cycles we're used to seeing in many bacteria. If this thing has a reproductive cycle measured in days or months, it's going to take a lot of time and quantitative analysis to actually see it metabolising.
4. While I agree with your statement that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, I do have to wonder: what explanation of the origin of life *isn't* extraordinary? Every theory of earth-bound biogenesis I've read is pretty difficult reading. This one does have the advantage of offloading the origin-of-life-on-earth, in which case you can at least claim that maybe biogenesis only happened once somewhere else and is being blown all over the Universe, rather than having only one planet and only a billion years in which to fit your explanation.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
~ Socrates (399 BC)
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Socrates ever said that. Your quote first appeared in the book Personality and Adjustment in 1953. There is no evidence of the quote before that date. See
Although, from that second link, they make it clear that Plato claimed Socrates had made statements to that general effect, and Plato himself had directly stated something similar -- so while Socrates may not have said those specific words, it's pretty clear that both Socrates and Plato were saying things that were so similar as to be practically identical when the vagaries of translation are taken into account, as did Hesiod at roughly the same time. So the OP's point, that "the kids these days are all lousy slackers" was being made 3000 years ago, is still valid.
I'm not a fan of rape-after-the-fact: a friend nearly had his life destroyed from exactly that. But with that said, I can at least see some point in the second woman's complaint. Consider Nadja Benaissa, the German pop star with HIV/AIDS who was sleeping with guys without telling them she was infected. That's Really Crappy Behavior. When Assange had unprotected sex (whether unintentionally or not) with a woman, he no longer knows whether he has some nasty disease or not, and he should be letting subsequent sex partners know that.
The second woman should've been asking that sort of question up front if he didn't say anything, but he should've been saying something. It sounds to me like she found out after the fact that he'd had unprotected sex with someone else only a few hours earlier and that's why she bust a gusset -- although why "a few hours earlier" is somehow better than "a few weeks" or any other period of time, could well be, as you said, jealousy. He should've told her up front, and if he didn't, she should have asked. Maybe she did and he lied, in which case I can see her filing charges. Maybe she didn't, in which case filing charges is after-the-fact rape.
i have a crazy texan cousin-in-law that ran up against the same dilemma the christmas that they purchased a dish network rig. the ol ~10' dish's newfound uselessness was accompanied by a freak snow storm that dumped 1.5 foot of snow.
apparently every farmer in texas has an old snowmobile somewhere in their possession. an old tractor seat (with improvised belt) got bolted to the inside of the dish and someone came up w/ 30' of rope for towing.
we never were able to flip it over, but airborne? yes.
I knew a guy who did this. He was riding in an inner tube behind 30 feet of rope when the person on the skimobile did a hard turn and misjudged clearances. Guy on the inner tube got whipped sideways and went through the side of a barn.
He was very, very, very, very screwed-up.
When you're on a snowmobile and you smash it into a tree, it's because you drove it there. When you're on an inner tube and someone else is driving the snowmobile, their less-than-great judgment isn't going to hurt them, it's going to hurt *you*, and as a result they might take more risks with your person than you would take.
I'm not generally a safety-trumps-everything kind of dude -- I'm a bike racer, after all -- but I have to say that if you're going to try this particular sport, choose the person driving with a lot of care.
The lasers used in eye surgery are fairly different. There are two general types of laser action, burning and ablation. The lasers used in this article are infra-red or red -- which is to say, inexpensive, readily available -- and they remove material by burning it off. You don't really want to be burning stuff off your eyes if you can help it. So the lasers used in eye surgery (and a variety of other heat-sensitive materials) ablate rather than burning: they work in the ultraviolet range, so the photons in the laser beam have enough energy to snap the bonds between molecules directly, through knocking the electrons involved in the bonds into other orbitals. You blast a surface with a bunch of UV photons and the whole surface basically lifts off, one or two atoms deep, leaving the surface underneath basically completely unaffected. In contrast, burning involves heating up the atoms themselves until they have enough kinetic energy to break the bonds and fly off, but that necessarily heats everything, hundreds to millions of atoms deep.
There are UV lasers but they're still rare and expensive. The ones most often used involve noble gases and halogens, so you briefly form things like xenon fluoride or argon fluoride, and when they break back down into the noble gas and the elemental halogen they blast out a uv-wavelength photon. It's difficult to make a solid laser that can stand up to the energy required to produce uv photons (because the bonds within the solid will break for exactly the same reason.) They exist, but they're quite new.
There's a wholly different way to make UV light with lasers, though, that just makes no sense at all: there are crystals called non-linear optics that if pumped with a very large number of coherent photons start dumping out photons at shorter frequencies: they basically combine photon energy. So you can take a cheap powerful IR laser and run it through a frequency-doubler, and get a nice green out, and then run that through another photon doubler and get UV out. That stuff's pretty much voodoo physics, and still an area of active research and new discoveries, but there are lots of industrial laser cutter systems that use frequency-doubling to produce UV ablation lasers. Memory chips are tuned by cutting out dead sections of memory and splicing in good ones, using frequency-doubled UV lasers, for instance.
Oh, by the way, the cost of LASIK isn't really driven by the cost of the machinery, but by the cost of FDA certification of the machinery and training and certification for the people operating it, which isn't going to change much regardless of what sort of technology the laser itself uses. The lasers used in LASIK are typically frequency-doubled YAG lasers, which aren't actually very expensive in industrial settings. It's only when they're designed to be used on eyes that they get expensive.
There are lots of laser etching/marking systems that work perfectly well with wood. The one that comes to mind first is Epilog who make things that are basically desktop printers with an industrial laser, so you put in your piece of whatever and it cuts it. They're fairly cheap, fairly rugged, and do a fantastic job of burning complex patterns into wood. (I know the people who make them, and have used them quite a bit.) They do a fine job with even fairly light woods like Southern Yellow Pine, and if you are willing to take some time and install a vacuum system to get all the burned debris out without getting crap all over the optics you could probably cut entirely through balsa sheet. (Maybe people already are: I haven't tried.)
The laser in the article would absolutely do a fine job of burning patterns in wood, but is interesting primarily because it has a significant working depth: it's designed to do more than just flat surfaces.
By the way, if you want you can absolutely make these yourself. You can get 250mW red laser diodes off ebay for about $30. Make sure you get a module rather than just the laser can itself, because it needs a focusing mirror -- laser diodes have highly divergent beams and act like a flashlight with an elliptical spot, without the lens. With the lens, a cheap laser can burn wood *right now*, like as fast as you get it focussed smoke starts coming off the piece of wood. Then mount it in an old plotter in place of the pen, and start dumping graphics to the plotter. It's really that easy.
although it was pretty crude. The situation was: my ex-girlfriend was working with Peace Corps in rural China, teaching, and we were sending email back and forth. We noticed pretty quickly that email was disappearing: she'd send stuff that wouldn't show up and wouldn't generate a failure message. So we started numbering our email, making it obvious when a number was missing.
But I thought it'd be more fun to actually send steganographic stuff, so I coded up a little bit of stuff in matlab (what I was using at the time) that merged a jpeg and a stream of ascii, alternately adding and subtracting the bits of the ascii from the jpeg values. The resulting pictures looked just like pictures: it wasn't visually obvious.
Then I'd post the unmodified pictures in an unlinked directory on my website (this was pre-flickr) so she could download the originals and subtract out the difference.
This would have been easily defeated by the chinese firewall just re-encoding jpegs that passed through to a slightly different size or quality, but they never did so it worked fine. But it was a pain in the butt to actually *use*.
But it'd be even more of a pain in the butt to detect.
It helps if you're a whackjob, but I think his general idea is, to quote from an article I linked in another comment in this thread, "Maes said in a later interview that he was referring to Denver's membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international association that promotes sustainable development and has attracted the membership of more than 1,200 communities, 600 of which are in the United States." So he thinks that Denver signing up to the ICLEI, means it will somehow be obligated to act/behave like a bunch of European cities where they have needle exchange programs and low-income medical assistance programs. He's looking at the cheerful red bikes as being the thin end of the wedge, that leads to all sorts of other awful things.
I reiterate that I think he's a whackjob, but I can at least understand his trajectory.
I'm in agreement with what you're saying: I want to make that clear.
A few points:
In Colorado (where Maes is running) bicycles have the same rights and responsibilities as cars, as long as there is no existing signage that says "no bicycles" (limited-access roads like interstates, where there exists a nearby alternative road: you can ride on interstates if there's no frontage road.) Bikes are required to ride in the "right-most half of the right-most lane of traffic" (meaning you can ride down the middle of the road on a one-way road, legally, if you want to be a jerk.) A recent law requires automotive traffic to give bicycles a three foot clearance when passing them -- and that law, which only went into effect about six months ago, has been pissing off a lot of people in Colorado and might be a bit of motivation for Maes and his yammering.
The bike-lanes-more-dangerous thing was largely popularized by John Forrester's book "Effective Cycling", and his actual claim was that if riding in/with traffic is roughly X dangerous, riding in on-road bike lanes (where the lane is separated from the road itself by just a curb, or the bicyclist is riding on the sidewalk) is roughly 6-20 times as dangerous as riding in/with traffic, precisely because you're far enough away that you're not seen as traffic and/or people misjudge your speed and think they can make a turn without a collision. Forrester has an entirely different class of path, though: the ones that are completely separate from the road, where there aren't any car/path crossings, and those are, indeed, significantly safer than in/with traffic riding, by a factor of at least 10, possibly 100.
At least locally, cycling or pedestrian/cycling paths are completely optional: if you want to ride on the road, even if there's a huge sign saying bike path, you are completely legally within your rights to ride on the road unless it's specifically signed "no bicycles".
With all THAT said, every one of my bike/car accidents has been on a road, while riding with/in traffic. But that's because I put in 10,000 km a year or more, 95% of it on the road, and won't go near an on-road bike lane because of all the stupid automotive behavior I've seen.
I read the article and reread and reread it, and I cannot even begin to see how, from *ANY* perspective that I can conceive of some other even modestly intelligent person having, that one could come to the conclusions that he did.
Most conspiracy theories I've heard of have at least a shred of something to at least build the conspiracy on, but I just can't find any evidence of it in that article.
I really hate defending Maes since I think he's being an idiot. Disclaimer: back when he was just a used car salesman he worked for my girlfriend's father, so I know a bit about him.
What he's concerned by is, in part, treaties. Y'know how we on slashdot are all against ACTA and other such things, because we feel like a treaty comes sailing in with all sorts of draconian conditions, and Congress either confirms it, in which case we're stuck, or doesn't confirm it, in which case businesses yell that we're not in step with everyone else? That is, in essence, what Maes is on about: he thinks that since the City of Denver signed up to help promote and use an urban development planning methodology that has European roots, that's the equivalent of signing a binding treaty that we're going to become the next Copenhagen or whatever. He's arguing that from bikes to heroin junkies and free abortions on request, is a slippery slope. (Which it is, but then again, if you have a public library someone might read stuff that makes the person become the next Joe Stalin. That's not a good reason to close libraries.)
I'm sure that his background as a used-car salesman helps him hate bicycles (and be thoroughly untrustworthy) but there is an underlying theme in his ranting. It's not pure crazy, it's just lousy premises and complete exaggeration. And used-car salesman tactics.
One correction - The incumbent in this election for governor is Bill Ritter who is not running for re-election. Maes Democratic opponent is John Hickenlooper who is currently the mayor of Denver
Correction to correction: Dan Maes somehow managed to win the Republican primary so he's the Republican candidate. He's facing Hickenlooper and independent-with-name-recognition Tom Tancredo, who ran for US President in 2008. Usually third-party candidates don't have a chance, but Tancredo has a lot of local support, so right now he's polling 18% with Hickenlooper at about 40% and Maes with about 30%.
As an aside, every time I ride through Denver I see dozens of people out on those cute red bicycles. It's an amazingly successful program, that isn't supported by Federal, State, or local funds, and since the individuals who use the bikes have a financial stake (deposit, credit card info) in keeping the bikes in reasonable shape, it has a much higher chance of being successful in the long-term than many of the other city bike programs that have been floated. Plus, the bikes are keen. They weigh a ton but they have a huge cargo basket, so they're actually useful for lugging stuff. Two weeks ago I saw a couple riding them and they had a kid's bicycle in the basket of one bike, and the kid herself in the basket of the other bike -- not a WISE thing, but indicative of the flexibility the bikes can provide. They have front and rear lights that are always on when the bike's moving, compliments of a hub generator system, so they're quite visible. I think it's a fantastic program.
I can't find the article right now but Dan Maes is on record as saying that Denver's bike program "may threaten our personal freedoms". Once you realize that the last job Maes had was as a used car salesman, his feelings might be more understandable, if not more sensible.
I hope they go ahead with this because it's beautiful, and it's a comparatively inexpensive alteration to existing towers that converts them from a necessary eyesore into something that at least some people will actually enjoy. I'll go back to Iceland again just to see these, if they do get installed.
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It's also quite an upgrade for their power system. Iceland produces *enormous* amounts of electricity from their hydroelectric plants, so there's always a need for more power lines from the interior, where the reservoirs are located, to the coast, where the aluminum smelters are being built. I was reading a discussion of electrical systems in a small museum in Vik (I believe) where they mentioned that until the 1960's much of Iceland had single-wire power distribution -- not single phase, mind you, but just a single wire, that carried high voltage, and used the earth itself as the current return path. Any building with power outside of the few cities had its own monster variable transformer so the people living there could adjust the in-house voltage to the value they needed, to account for voltage drop along the supply line.
I ride a 600 pound motorcycle, so I use less gas than almost EVERY skinny person that drives their car to work alone. And I get to use the HOV lane, which means I'm not in stop-and-go traffic as often.
So THAT'S why I'm upgrading my 22 pound bicycle to a 15 pound bike in a couple months! Imagine how much more gasoline I'll save!
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unless you have a real solution for the business model, the only authors you'll see dedicating themselves to the art are cranks writing manifestos and dilettantes who are already well-off enough to do it as a hobby.
I really hate all those cranks and dilettantes like Shakespeare and Milton and Homer and Cervantes. They sure wrote crap.
I did not know that! Ya learn something new every day. Especially interesting insofar as I've been trying to weld magnesium of late, and there are shielding gas mixes that contain 25% carbon dioxide. I think I'll stick with straight argon.
Titanium's only exotic because it's so hard to get from the oxide to the elemental form. But it's the ninth most common element on the planet: you can hardly move without tripping over the stuff. Yeah, they use it in paint, toothpaste, all sorts of things. Miserable to machine, though, and a little tricky to weld. It's also interesting because as far as I know it's the only element that'll burn in pure nitrogen, as well as oxygen/atmospheric.
I think it's cool research -- self-assembling stuff rocks -- but I'm dubious about their claim of the effectiveness of that particular cost reduction.
cooking is. Everything raw, that's the way.
Of-course for a vegetarian it's a much easier proposition.
Me, I'm not so into raw kidney beans, quince, rhubarb, fava/broad beans, cassava, olives, eggplant, artichokes, plantains, and even raw spinach produces health problems in large quantities -- but you can go ahead if you'd like. Many of them won't kill you outright.
Am I only the one who doesn't need a pat on the back every 5 minutes in order to enjoy something or derive satisfaction from it?
"Congratulations! You survived a bird looking at you! Achievement unlocked, 10 points!"
If you truly feel this way, there's probably something wrong with you. If you just don't feel this way about, say, Farmville, but do feel it about other things (and probably don't realize that you do) then you're merely normal and not paying attention.
"Gamification" is a fuzzy description of operant conditioning. Anything with a bit of intelligence (dogs, parrots, maybe even sheep, and certainly humans) are wired to get a little jolt of pleasure after successfully negotiating a crisis situation. It's how we learn. What games do is short-circuit this by providing lots and lots of crisis situations, and providing the player with ways to get through them and win, and get that little burst of success-feeling. Some people are seriously susceptible to this kind of shenanigans and spend all their time enjoying their imagined success at Farmville. Others do the same thing climbing the corporate ladder and running companies. In that case, of course, it's not imagined success, it's the intended result of how we're wired, operating in a complex social environment. In any case, it's an essential system for learning in humans, and while it sucks that people are getting really good at twisting it to manipulate other people, it's still vitally important and ubiquitous.
Hopefully Righthaven finds more politicians to sue. Lots more. Then maybe - just maybe - will we get some consumer friendly copyright laws. In this case it would appear that Sharron Angle is indeed guilty of willful infringement, but if more politicians get hurt in their own pocket by copyright suits then the chance of them creating laws that states that damages must fit the crime may actually come into effect. That would kill the business model behind the *IAA cartel suits.
Put me down as exceedingly dubious that it'll actually have anything like that effect. What I think is much more likely will be what John McCain proposed when Jackson Browne sued him for using Browne's songs without permission. McCain promptly introduced legislation to exempt politicians from copyright infringement violations when they were using the material for their campaigns. The rest of us would still be just as on the hook. The proposed bill didn't go anywhere that time, but if stuff like this keeps going, I bet we'll see it come back.
Totally agree. I know my company has a fab, in the US, that does all of and only our military contracts, and I'm told that most other large semiconductor companies in the US do the same thing. Likewise, totally agreed about the bugs. I wrote about this more extensively elsewhere in this thread but despite having this argument with other people on slashdot -- who know what they're talking about, I admit -- we're all postulating the possibility of trojan silicon with no strong indication that it's ever happened. Even the most famous supposed case where something like this did happen, the Siberian pipeline explosion, has been questioned, and there's a lot of indication that if it did actually happen it was a software issue, not a deliberately mis-designed IC, as a lot of people have claimed.
Seriously, where will the work be done? Will HP set up the fab shop here, or in SK? Or set up multiple shops. I would love to see the DOD suggest to HP that they need to set up a shop here in the USA. We need to make certain that we have our electronics under control here. In addition, the DOD, NSA, etc needs to offer up contracts to American companies that produce equipment here. Why? Because we are increasingly seeing embedded virus, etc coming in from Asia.
Last I heard, Hewlett Packard still has domestic fabs: Corvallis, Oregon, I believe, and I think they still have fab capability in Palo Alto. A lot of large semiconductor companies retain small cutting-edge fabs at their headquarters for doing small runs of experimental stuff.
My company has two of its fabs in the US and one in the UK. We do all our packaging and testing in southeast Asia, but the company apparently made a decision about three years ago that we're not going to put fabs there, because we closed down one we'd built less than two years before.
And, as I've said many times before, with the possible exception of processors, it's really difficult to sabotage chip design. Your profit margin is directly related to the surface area your chip layout occupies, so it is aggressively minimized in design, and there simply isn't room on the silicon to splice in new stuff. Added to that, chip companies that I've worked with usually do a planet run of many prototype silicon designs through one fab, often their domestic/in-house fab, do their initial testing on that, and only after that do they put it into production with a full-size mask on dedicated silicon in the production fab, so if you wanted to sneak stuff in you'd have to infiltrate both fabs, or you'd end up with silicon that's visually different -- and we spend a lot of time with high-power microscopes and microprobes poking around at new silicon, sometimes chipping bits out with a laser if we need to do a metal layer change, so it's not like someone wouldn't notice changes on smaller chips. And even if all of THAT didn't catch changes, test and product engineers spend months writing automated test programs that check each pin on each chip and characterize its leakage current, its current draw when functioning, its ESD resistance, all sorts of things, and added circuitry will change those values.
If a company doesn't have a fab, and they just send all their completed masks (or, even worse, just the designs) off to one company, then I think it's possible, albeit difficult, for stuff to sneak into the silicon. But a company that has a fab, or runs their designs through multiple fabs, is pretty unlikely to get compromised silicon without noticing it. It would be significantly easier for a malevolent group to just design their own silicon from the ground up, and package it to look like the target chip and get it into distribution channels by selling it as authentic stuff, than to try to compromise a company's silicon.
. This one does have the advantage of offloading the origin-of-life-on-earth, in which case you can at least claim that maybe biogenesis only happened once somewhere else and is being blown all over the Universe, rather than having only one planet and only a billion years in which to fit your explanation.
How does that help, exactly? You still have the problem of abiogenesis somewhere. At least here on Earth you know you have the right ingredients in abundance and you don't need to invoke a low-probability transfer mechanism to explain how it got here.
I'm not saying that this rules out panspermia, but it does make it seem like rather the more complicated option, all else being equal.
I'm not making an argument *for* panspermia, especially not after reading Nick Lake's brilliant book Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, in which he has a lot to say about biogenesis as an iterative chemical process in deep-sea thermal vents.
But with that said, panspermia is almost as simple as creationism: "oh it happened somehow somewhere and we just got the results." We've demonstrated several times that bacteria -- and I believe lichens -- can at least survive extended exposure in low earth orbit, so at that point it's not difficult to believe they could get here from somewhere else. (Especially because bacterial spores *certainly* could withstand outer space, probably indefinitely.) So at that point you no longer have to fit your biogenesis explanation into early Earth conditions and timeframes: you can come up with just about any starting conditions you want and say "it must have happened on a planet that was like THIS" and you have a nice self-fulfilling prophecy.
1. If he's just an attention whore, he could have found some weird bacterium that uses RNA and claim -- and be technically correct -- that there is no DNA. That'd be surprising, but not anywhere nearly as surprising as finding something that appears to be reproducing without nucleic acids.
2. From other reading about red rain, it appears that his attempts to find DNA were restricted to malachite green and ethidium bromide, and the current theory by people who aren't him is that he's got a bunch of yeast spores, which are going to have cell walls impermeable to both so he's not going to detect DNA even if it's there, or at least not by such relatively crude techniques.
3. I wonder about metabolites. If the stuff *is* from outer space, it might not have the typical ultra-fast metabolism we see in common Earth bacteria, where energy is plentiful and the only real competitive tool available to prokaryotes is rapid reproduction. Something from outer space might act more like some of the archaea or mycobacteria that take days to reproduce -- or years -- rather than the half-hour cycles we're used to seeing in many bacteria. If this thing has a reproductive cycle measured in days or months, it's going to take a lot of time and quantitative analysis to actually see it metabolising.
4. While I agree with your statement that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, I do have to wonder: what explanation of the origin of life *isn't* extraordinary? Every theory of earth-bound biogenesis I've read is pretty difficult reading. This one does have the advantage of offloading the origin-of-life-on-earth, in which case you can at least claim that maybe biogenesis only happened once somewhere else and is being blown all over the Universe, rather than having only one planet and only a billion years in which to fit your explanation.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
~ Socrates (399 BC)
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Socrates ever said that. Your quote first appeared in the book Personality and Adjustment in 1953. There is no evidence of the quote before that date. See
http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104
Although, from that second link, they make it clear that Plato claimed Socrates had made statements to that general effect, and Plato himself had directly stated something similar -- so while Socrates may not have said those specific words, it's pretty clear that both Socrates and Plato were saying things that were so similar as to be practically identical when the vagaries of translation are taken into account, as did Hesiod at roughly the same time. So the OP's point, that "the kids these days are all lousy slackers" was being made 3000 years ago, is still valid.
The second woman should've been asking that sort of question up front if he didn't say anything, but he should've been saying something. It sounds to me like she found out after the fact that he'd had unprotected sex with someone else only a few hours earlier and that's why she bust a gusset -- although why "a few hours earlier" is somehow better than "a few weeks" or any other period of time, could well be, as you said, jealousy. He should've told her up front, and if he didn't, she should have asked. Maybe she did and he lied, in which case I can see her filing charges. Maybe she didn't, in which case filing charges is after-the-fact rape.
i have a crazy texan cousin-in-law that ran up against the same dilemma the christmas that they purchased a dish network rig. the ol ~10' dish's newfound uselessness was accompanied by a freak snow storm that dumped 1.5 foot of snow. apparently every farmer in texas has an old snowmobile somewhere in their possession. an old tractor seat (with improvised belt) got bolted to the inside of the dish and someone came up w/ 30' of rope for towing. we never were able to flip it over, but airborne? yes.
I knew a guy who did this. He was riding in an inner tube behind 30 feet of rope when the person on the skimobile did a hard turn and misjudged clearances. Guy on the inner tube got whipped sideways and went through the side of a barn.
He was very, very, very, very screwed-up.
When you're on a snowmobile and you smash it into a tree, it's because you drove it there. When you're on an inner tube and someone else is driving the snowmobile, their less-than-great judgment isn't going to hurt them, it's going to hurt *you*, and as a result they might take more risks with your person than you would take.
I'm not generally a safety-trumps-everything kind of dude -- I'm a bike racer, after all -- but I have to say that if you're going to try this particular sport, choose the person driving with a lot of care.
There are UV lasers but they're still rare and expensive. The ones most often used involve noble gases and halogens, so you briefly form things like xenon fluoride or argon fluoride, and when they break back down into the noble gas and the elemental halogen they blast out a uv-wavelength photon. It's difficult to make a solid laser that can stand up to the energy required to produce uv photons (because the bonds within the solid will break for exactly the same reason.) They exist, but they're quite new.
There's a wholly different way to make UV light with lasers, though, that just makes no sense at all: there are crystals called non-linear optics that if pumped with a very large number of coherent photons start dumping out photons at shorter frequencies: they basically combine photon energy. So you can take a cheap powerful IR laser and run it through a frequency-doubler, and get a nice green out, and then run that through another photon doubler and get UV out. That stuff's pretty much voodoo physics, and still an area of active research and new discoveries, but there are lots of industrial laser cutter systems that use frequency-doubling to produce UV ablation lasers. Memory chips are tuned by cutting out dead sections of memory and splicing in good ones, using frequency-doubled UV lasers, for instance.
Oh, by the way, the cost of LASIK isn't really driven by the cost of the machinery, but by the cost of FDA certification of the machinery and training and certification for the people operating it, which isn't going to change much regardless of what sort of technology the laser itself uses. The lasers used in LASIK are typically frequency-doubled YAG lasers, which aren't actually very expensive in industrial settings. It's only when they're designed to be used on eyes that they get expensive.
The laser in the article would absolutely do a fine job of burning patterns in wood, but is interesting primarily because it has a significant working depth: it's designed to do more than just flat surfaces.
By the way, if you want you can absolutely make these yourself. You can get 250mW red laser diodes off ebay for about $30. Make sure you get a module rather than just the laser can itself, because it needs a focusing mirror -- laser diodes have highly divergent beams and act like a flashlight with an elliptical spot, without the lens. With the lens, a cheap laser can burn wood *right now*, like as fast as you get it focussed smoke starts coming off the piece of wood. Then mount it in an old plotter in place of the pen, and start dumping graphics to the plotter. It's really that easy.
But I thought it'd be more fun to actually send steganographic stuff, so I coded up a little bit of stuff in matlab (what I was using at the time) that merged a jpeg and a stream of ascii, alternately adding and subtracting the bits of the ascii from the jpeg values. The resulting pictures looked just like pictures: it wasn't visually obvious.
Then I'd post the unmodified pictures in an unlinked directory on my website (this was pre-flickr) so she could download the originals and subtract out the difference.
This would have been easily defeated by the chinese firewall just re-encoding jpegs that passed through to a slightly different size or quality, but they never did so it worked fine. But it was a pain in the butt to actually *use*.
But it'd be even more of a pain in the butt to detect.
Because I can't help but think Microsoft loves Open Source like Roman Polanski loves 14-year-old girls.
I reiterate that I think he's a whackjob, but I can at least understand his trajectory.
A few points:
In Colorado (where Maes is running) bicycles have the same rights and responsibilities as cars, as long as there is no existing signage that says "no bicycles" (limited-access roads like interstates, where there exists a nearby alternative road: you can ride on interstates if there's no frontage road.) Bikes are required to ride in the "right-most half of the right-most lane of traffic" (meaning you can ride down the middle of the road on a one-way road, legally, if you want to be a jerk.) A recent law requires automotive traffic to give bicycles a three foot clearance when passing them -- and that law, which only went into effect about six months ago, has been pissing off a lot of people in Colorado and might be a bit of motivation for Maes and his yammering.
The bike-lanes-more-dangerous thing was largely popularized by John Forrester's book "Effective Cycling", and his actual claim was that if riding in/with traffic is roughly X dangerous, riding in on-road bike lanes (where the lane is separated from the road itself by just a curb, or the bicyclist is riding on the sidewalk) is roughly 6-20 times as dangerous as riding in/with traffic, precisely because you're far enough away that you're not seen as traffic and/or people misjudge your speed and think they can make a turn without a collision. Forrester has an entirely different class of path, though: the ones that are completely separate from the road, where there aren't any car/path crossings, and those are, indeed, significantly safer than in/with traffic riding, by a factor of at least 10, possibly 100.
At least locally, cycling or pedestrian/cycling paths are completely optional: if you want to ride on the road, even if there's a huge sign saying bike path, you are completely legally within your rights to ride on the road unless it's specifically signed "no bicycles".
With all THAT said, every one of my bike/car accidents has been on a road, while riding with/in traffic. But that's because I put in 10,000 km a year or more, 95% of it on the road, and won't go near an on-road bike lane because of all the stupid automotive behavior I've seen.
I mean... WTF?
I read the article and reread and reread it, and I cannot even begin to see how, from *ANY* perspective that I can conceive of some other even modestly intelligent person having, that one could come to the conclusions that he did.
Most conspiracy theories I've heard of have at least a shred of something to at least build the conspiracy on, but I just can't find any evidence of it in that article.
I really hate defending Maes since I think he's being an idiot. Disclaimer: back when he was just a used car salesman he worked for my girlfriend's father, so I know a bit about him.
What he's concerned by is, in part, treaties. Y'know how we on slashdot are all against ACTA and other such things, because we feel like a treaty comes sailing in with all sorts of draconian conditions, and Congress either confirms it, in which case we're stuck, or doesn't confirm it, in which case businesses yell that we're not in step with everyone else? That is, in essence, what Maes is on about: he thinks that since the City of Denver signed up to help promote and use an urban development planning methodology that has European roots, that's the equivalent of signing a binding treaty that we're going to become the next Copenhagen or whatever. He's arguing that from bikes to heroin junkies and free abortions on request, is a slippery slope. (Which it is, but then again, if you have a public library someone might read stuff that makes the person become the next Joe Stalin. That's not a good reason to close libraries.)
I'm sure that his background as a used-car salesman helps him hate bicycles (and be thoroughly untrustworthy) but there is an underlying theme in his ranting. It's not pure crazy, it's just lousy premises and complete exaggeration. And used-car salesman tactics.
One correction - The incumbent in this election for governor is Bill Ritter who is not running for re-election. Maes Democratic opponent is John Hickenlooper who is currently the mayor of Denver
Correction to correction: Dan Maes somehow managed to win the Republican primary so he's the Republican candidate. He's facing Hickenlooper and independent-with-name-recognition Tom Tancredo, who ran for US President in 2008. Usually third-party candidates don't have a chance, but Tancredo has a lot of local support, so right now he's polling 18% with Hickenlooper at about 40% and Maes with about 30%.
As an aside, every time I ride through Denver I see dozens of people out on those cute red bicycles. It's an amazingly successful program, that isn't supported by Federal, State, or local funds, and since the individuals who use the bikes have a financial stake (deposit, credit card info) in keeping the bikes in reasonable shape, it has a much higher chance of being successful in the long-term than many of the other city bike programs that have been floated. Plus, the bikes are keen. They weigh a ton but they have a huge cargo basket, so they're actually useful for lugging stuff. Two weeks ago I saw a couple riding them and they had a kid's bicycle in the basket of one bike, and the kid herself in the basket of the other bike -- not a WISE thing, but indicative of the flexibility the bikes can provide. They have front and rear lights that are always on when the bike's moving, compliments of a hub generator system, so they're quite visible. I think it's a fantastic program.
I can't find the article right now but Dan Maes is on record as saying that Denver's bike program "may threaten our personal freedoms". Once you realize that the last job Maes had was as a used car salesman, his feelings might be more understandable, if not more sensible.
. It's also quite an upgrade for their power system. Iceland produces *enormous* amounts of electricity from their hydroelectric plants, so there's always a need for more power lines from the interior, where the reservoirs are located, to the coast, where the aluminum smelters are being built. I was reading a discussion of electrical systems in a small museum in Vik (I believe) where they mentioned that until the 1960's much of Iceland had single-wire power distribution -- not single phase, mind you, but just a single wire, that carried high voltage, and used the earth itself as the current return path. Any building with power outside of the few cities had its own monster variable transformer so the people living there could adjust the in-house voltage to the value they needed, to account for voltage drop along the supply line.
And I haven't even started on all the breasts (Grand Tetons), nipples, jugs, and the like in the Western US.
I ride a 600 pound motorcycle, so I use less gas than almost EVERY skinny person that drives their car to work alone. And I get to use the HOV lane, which means I'm not in stop-and-go traffic as often.
So THAT'S why I'm upgrading my 22 pound bicycle to a 15 pound bike in a couple months! Imagine how much more gasoline I'll save!