You say: "Know why Jesus was sexy?" Everyone says "why?" You put your arms out to either side, fingers curled inwards, and say "coz he was hung like *this*."
>If you blur out someone's face, the detail can never be recovered. No, not even by the NSA. The information is lost. You *can* sharpen up edges and improve contrast, but if the information just plain isn't there any more there's not a lot you can do.
Almost like how an MD5 of an *enormous* file is a very small number, and the MD5 of another enormous file is a *different* very small number, and if you have two enormous files that produce the same MD5, they're probably the same file...?
I know some pro-porn feminists, and lots of pro-women-positive-porn feminists. This again runs into the same political problem we keep having with left-right: censorship is on the authoritarian-anarchist continuum, which is poorly correlated with the left-right continuum.
Similar experiences. The cockatoos -- a Molloccan and a Sulfur-crested -- that I lived with for a while could open locking carabiners with ease. Both preferred to drink from containers, if given the choice, by which I mean they'd take a shot glass or pop can or bottle, immerse it in the water bowl until it was filled with water, then lift it and drink from it, in preference to drinking from the water bowl. The Molloccan would track what other things we spent time with, and then destroy them utterly if he got the chance, presumably out of jealousy: he could take a computer keyboard apart in about 5 minutes. (By 'apart' I mean the circuit board removed from the case and broken into pieces.) I'm not sure they conversed with us or each other, but they definitely had a set of greetings/countergreetings they insisted we participate in: they'd say "Hi" and we'd say "Hi" back, and if we didn't they'd get mad at us. One would yell "NO!" at us for doing things he didn't like. Amazing birds, scarily smart. They make dogs and cats seem really boring.
As dmadole said, the issue is bacterial vs. human cell size. Generally, people have about 1-2% of their body weight consisting of bacteria -- on the order of about a kilogram of them -- but the number of bacteria in there is about the same to maybe 5-10 times the number of cells in the person's body. Estimates for how many cells people have range from 3-50 trillion; estimates for how many bacteria the average person has are in the same general range, running up to 100 trillion. (Ew.)
Many bacteria aren't even floating around, but live their entire lives within cells: most of the mycobacterial diseases (leprosy, chlamydia, some types of pneumonia) have bacterial cell lives that are necessarily contained within the cells for their whole lives, with hundreds or thousands of bacteria in a single cell. The ultimate expression of this might be mitochondria, which look a lot like bacteria that have been retained in cells for over a billion years and are now necessary for cellular survival. Part of the reason that there's a difference between white and dark meat in birds is that the brown meat has so many mitochondria per cell they change the color.
>There is no sensible definition of life that would include viruses.
Let me shorten that: There is no sensible definition of life.
People who don't know much about science and real-world occurrences like black-and-white definitions, of the legal form. Nature is not so obliging. If you talk to biologists, actual working ones, they'll say that words like 'species' and 'life' are useful to describe a set of observations, but aren't true in some basic, fundamental way: they're just descriptive.
If you write a definition of 'life' that says, buried down in the assumptions and premises, that viruses aren't alive, then yeah, viruses aren't alive. But if you use a definition of life that reflects what we see in the world, it's really difficult to make a definition that includes obligate intracellular parasites like some mycobacteria but excludes viruses. It's a continuum: there are things that are clearly alive, like dogs; there are things that clearly aren't, like rocks; and there are things in the middle, like (in increasing order of alive) prions, tobacco mosaic virus, herpesvirus, chlamydia species, animals, plants, and at the top, photolithotrophes, which are about as alive as you can get, requiring nothing but sunlight and rock for their continued survival.
Okay, the KNO3 is somewhat exciting, in a dirty DIY blackpowder kind of way, but does anyone have any idea what's dangerous about a big pile of CaCl? In the States they pour tons of that on the roads to melt ice, but I literally cannot think of a single exciting thing you can do with that salt. At least with table salt, a bunsen burner, and a power supply you can crank out sodium metal, but CaCl is as boring as Britney.
Re:Yeah, mutual geeking out is awesome
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
Heh. I missed out on that, too: weird being raised small-town Baptist and then realizing there's a whole other world out there, totally unlike anything you've ever seen before.
Re:Yeah, mutual geeking out is awesome
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 4, Funny
That's a wonderful account, and it's also awesome that you post on slashdot.
My story isn't as cool, because A: I'm not famous and B: I was a dork, of sorts. But hey, it's my story.
I was at a sci-fi con, had some art in the art show. Since I grew up without a TV I really didn't know much about what was going on, but my friend was helping organize the con and talked me into going and watching the art auction. We were wandering around, talking about this and that, and walked into a room. There was a strikingly pretty woman sitting in a chair, looking *very* bored, and on the other side of the room, a strikingly handsome man, surrounded by people, talking.
I've never suffered from either shyness or lack of confidence. So I went over, introduced myself to the pretty blonde lady, and we started talking about art, as it happens. I noticed a couple people look my way, frown, but I didn't think anything of it, until my friend sidled up and said, sotto voice, "dude, you're hitting on Starbuck's girlfriend."
I said, "who?"
Some may argue that not knowing who Starbuck was makes me not a dork. But in the land of dorks, well, the clueless man is even more dorky.
>What the RIAA doesn't understand is that a LOT of people are perfectly willing to pay for the songs, we just don't want to pay for copies of them that we don't have control over.
They understand that perfectly well. However, they make more money if they sell you stuff you don't have control over, and then sell it to you again a couple times because you don't have control over it. As such, it's in their financial interest to have rigorous enforcement and extension of copyright protection. The problem is not at all that they're out of touch, that they don't get what consumers want. They get it: they just want something different.
Y'all are wimps. Here in Colorado we used to produce earthquakes by lubricating old faults with chemical WMD's including nerve gas because everyone knows the best thing to do with nerve gas is pump it into a hole just outside of an enormous city.
Some friends of mine had a gold mine that kept collapsing -- they got most of their gold from a slip area at a fault line, and that's what was moving. The snag was: why were the earthquakes happening once a month, on Saturday morning? People started asking questions, and it turned out it was the Army pumping WMD's into holes.
>hell, didnt some tests show that as long as the first and last letter of the word was in the right place, the other letters could be all over the place and not affect readability?
That aoietrssn is cllptmeoey icrrcenot. (That assertion is ompletely incorrect, that is.) *some* sentences written with small words can be unscrambled using just the first and last letters as cues, but larger words and more complex sentences make it fail badly.
I'm not arguing with the *rest* of your discussion, but that particular argument annoys me since the original articles/research engaged in serious cherry-picking, and I can cherry-pick the other way and write whole paragraphs that are utterly indecipherable.
To the best of my knowledge prior to reading this, yes: species with quicker lifespans show -- practically by definition -- the effects of evolutionary pressure much more quickly.
Where things get somewhat more tricky is that in many cases there are species, or genera, or larger groupings yet, that have sophisticated systems for adaption, that allow them to react to changes very rapidly. Maize/corn, for instance, or mammalian immune systems, for another, can move large functional chunks of DNA around to build classes and groups of novel proteins: an adaption for better adaption, in a manner of speaking. Once that's established, it's not really evolution to watch it working, but it does mean that an organism that uses these sorts of techniques can react better to a specific changing environment than a smaller/shorter reproduction time organism could.
As far as the population thing goes -- yeah, it makes sense that separated species will accumulate more variation from each other. That's practically the definition of strict Darwinian evolution, I think. But, it seems to me that a larger population will have more variation (as will an older population) as a group, than a smaller population, and at some point, I'd expect that a sufficiently large group would have more variation seen within it than two small, geographically isolated groups. (I've read claims that a sampling of genetic variability from ten people in a rural African village will show greater variance than a sampling of ten Caucasian people randomly sampled across the US, Canada, and northern Europe.)
Anyway. Steven Jay Gould has written about the differences between interspecies and intraspecies variations; he says there's plenty of data to show that in many cases interspecies variation might have a positive correlation -- brain size vs. body size, for instance -- whereas intraspecies variation for the same characteristics might have a negative correlation across that species. So, as usual, I wish I had the time to read more about this particular research.
You obviously know more about this than I do, so I'm asking because I don't understand: If you use powered amplifiers, then you're running the signal through wire to the amp. Any noise the wire picks up gets amplified. If you're running a big amp, then running heavy wires out to the unpowered speakers, the noise you pick up appears 1:1 in the speakers. Doesn't the latter situation seem innately better, from a noise-fighting standpoint? When I lay out power-correction circuitry, I put all my effort into minimizing the loop area in front of the amplifiers, the high-impedance region, and downstream of the amp, I just make sure nothing's overtly stupid. It seems like the same would hold for audio amplifiers, wouldn't it? Or are you saying that the wire type does actually matter a lot, that shielded wire to powered amps is a much better solution than unshielded wire for either unpowered or powered speakers?
>Switch on your amplifier at least half an hour before even thinking about playing music, even if you have an amplifier that is devoid of any tubes whatsoever,
I'm not defending stupid audiophiles. I would, however, like to mention that most of our electronic equipment -- hundreds of thousands of dollars of oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, semiconductor parameter analyzers -- comes with operating instructions saying the machines need to be running for at least an hour before they're suitable for either calibration or production-quality use, except for one frequency counter and one network analyzer that have crystal ovens and extensive internal temperature compensation. They both self-qualify for use after about three or four minutes. There are plenty of time-dependent temperature variations that can lead to measurable changes in test equipment. I very seriously doubt they can be heard in audio frequencies in any well-designed amplifiers, but it's at least plausible.
It's not "I'm better than you" -- those people are cool with being better than you. The problem is fear and envy: the problem is that if you have made a different choice than someone insecure, it casts doubt on that person's choice, and the person has to defend the choice and attack your choice as being wrong, in what amounts to self-defence.
People with superiority complexes are easy to deal with, in comparison to people with inferiority complexes who are compensating by attacking you and trying to drag you to their level.
Go find the webcomic sexylosers. I think it's sexylosers.com but I'm *not* going to search for it from work. I don't *know* that he invented 'fap' but I do know he's the reason it became widespread. SL is impressive because more than 1/3 of the comics, I can't decide whether I'm more offended or amused.
A large part of the reason bacteria have a higher rate of mutation (and, as a result, evolution) is because they have much poorer error-correcting systems in DNA replication and DNA->RNA->protein. Eukaryotes (animals and plants) have several different DNA polymerases, some of which have significant error-correction capability, both while replicating and transcribing DNA and for proofreading DNA that is still double-stranded. Bacteria, aka prokaryotes, have a different set of polymerases, that have much less capability for either error-discovery or error-correction.
I'd never considered that. You'll also notice that leprosy damage is greatest where the body is coolest: fingertips, toes, nose. It could be that this is just circulation-related: areas with the worst circulation recover more poorly, fight off infection more poorly, because of less access to blood-based nutrients and defences. But that makes me wonder whether either temperature or circulation quality is causative, or just correlated.
Read the biblical book of Job for discussion of that. The essential claim is that God created the world but is more or less letting it go its own way, while the devil is actively trying to subvert it, so it's not that the devil's more powerful, it's that God chooses not to act in opposition. (Which brings up some ethical problems of its own...) By so doing, the choice to follow God is not automatic, which is what makes that choice meaningful.
I think the situation is generally pretty simple: any time a group declares that "God is on our side" they stake a position that they have to defend. If they see another group who is more successful -- more powerful, more money, whatever -- they *have* to explain to their followers why this is happening. There are only two explanations: "we were wrong: God isn't on our side" or "those people are in league with the devil!"
Guess which one people inevitably choose?
Once you've made that choice, it's much easier to demonize, literally, your opposition, and justify doing them harm. This same system of thought is seen in conservative Christian and Muslim movements, and has shown up in other religions as well, just not as strongly recently. And, while I'm at it, I like atheists because they never say that God is on their side, but many people say 'truth' when they mean 'whatever it is I believe' -- and that's no different, from the context of explaining why people do things, than saying 'God'. It's just human nature. The problem is that this particular bit of humanity has been stuck in this mindset for a thousand years.
I disagree with the basic premise of your statement. Every ladybug is unique, because every ladybug is different than every other ladybug. A ladybug that can shoot fire from its eyes is *more* unique than a ladybug that has a 0.00000000001% genetic difference from all other ladybugs. In other words: while 'unique' is a boolean, it can be modified in speech to indicate degree. If not, then your definition of 'unique' is kind of useless.
Tops of wal-marts and other buildings covered in algae ponds: produce the biodiesel where the fuel needs are, so you don't have to truck stuff in from the deserts of the Southwest, which would be the second most likely place to occupy chunks of land to minimize loss of farmland.
And one assumes that most crackers are going to be most familiar with Windows, especially if they're developing new cracks, so will probably use Win machines just out of familiarity and availability, kind of like how most older mechanics drive big American cars made in the '70's and '80's.
Slashdot Mirror
You say: "Know why Jesus was sexy?"
Everyone says "why?"
You put your arms out to either side, fingers curled inwards, and say "coz he was hung like *this*."
>If you blur out someone's face, the detail can never be recovered. No, not even by the NSA. The information is lost. You *can* sharpen up edges and improve contrast, but if the information just plain isn't there any more there's not a lot you can do.
Almost like how an MD5 of an *enormous* file is a very small number, and the MD5 of another enormous file is a *different* very small number, and if you have two enormous files that produce the same MD5, they're probably the same file...?
Just sayin'.
I know some pro-porn feminists, and lots of pro-women-positive-porn feminists. This again runs into the same political problem we keep having with left-right: censorship is on the authoritarian-anarchist continuum, which is poorly correlated with the left-right continuum.
Similar experiences. The cockatoos -- a Molloccan and a Sulfur-crested -- that I lived with for a while could open locking carabiners with ease. Both preferred to drink from containers, if given the choice, by which I mean they'd take a shot glass or pop can or bottle, immerse it in the water bowl until it was filled with water, then lift it and drink from it, in preference to drinking from the water bowl. The Molloccan would track what other things we spent time with, and then destroy them utterly if he got the chance, presumably out of jealousy: he could take a computer keyboard apart in about 5 minutes. (By 'apart' I mean the circuit board removed from the case and broken into pieces.)
I'm not sure they conversed with us or each other, but they definitely had a set of greetings/countergreetings they insisted we participate in: they'd say "Hi" and we'd say "Hi" back, and if we didn't they'd get mad at us. One would yell "NO!" at us for doing things he didn't like.
Amazing birds, scarily smart. They make dogs and cats seem really boring.
As dmadole said, the issue is bacterial vs. human cell size. Generally, people have about 1-2% of their body weight consisting of bacteria -- on the order of about a kilogram of them -- but the number of bacteria in there is about the same to maybe 5-10 times the number of cells in the person's body. Estimates for how many cells people have range from 3-50 trillion; estimates for how many bacteria the average person has are in the same general range, running up to 100 trillion. (Ew.)
Many bacteria aren't even floating around, but live their entire lives within cells: most of the mycobacterial diseases (leprosy, chlamydia, some types of pneumonia) have bacterial cell lives that are necessarily contained within the cells for their whole lives, with hundreds or thousands of bacteria in a single cell. The ultimate expression of this might be mitochondria, which look a lot like bacteria that have been retained in cells for over a billion years and are now necessary for cellular survival. Part of the reason that there's a difference between white and dark meat in birds is that the brown meat has so many mitochondria per cell they change the color.
>There is no sensible definition of life that would include viruses.
Let me shorten that:
There is no sensible definition of life.
People who don't know much about science and real-world occurrences like black-and-white definitions, of the legal form. Nature is not so obliging. If you talk to biologists, actual working ones, they'll say that words like 'species' and 'life' are useful to describe a set of observations, but aren't true in some basic, fundamental way: they're just descriptive.
If you write a definition of 'life' that says, buried down in the assumptions and premises, that viruses aren't alive, then yeah, viruses aren't alive. But if you use a definition of life that reflects what we see in the world, it's really difficult to make a definition that includes obligate intracellular parasites like some mycobacteria but excludes viruses. It's a continuum: there are things that are clearly alive, like dogs; there are things that clearly aren't, like rocks; and there are things in the middle, like (in increasing order of alive) prions, tobacco mosaic virus, herpesvirus, chlamydia species, animals, plants, and at the top, photolithotrophes, which are about as alive as you can get, requiring nothing but sunlight and rock for their continued survival.
>to be pedantic,... including the famous Doolittle B-15 raid on the home islands in April 1942,
To be pedantic, they were heavily modified 24 operational B-25B medium bombers. (I assume, however, that you just hit '1' when you meant '2'.)
Okay, the KNO3 is somewhat exciting, in a dirty DIY blackpowder kind of way, but does anyone have any idea what's dangerous about a big pile of CaCl? In the States they pour tons of that on the roads to melt ice, but I literally cannot think of a single exciting thing you can do with that salt. At least with table salt, a bunsen burner, and a power supply you can crank out sodium metal, but CaCl is as boring as Britney.
Heh. I missed out on that, too: weird being raised small-town Baptist and then realizing there's a whole other world out there, totally unlike anything you've ever seen before.
That's a wonderful account, and it's also awesome that you post on slashdot.
My story isn't as cool, because A: I'm not famous and B: I was a dork, of sorts. But hey, it's my story.
I was at a sci-fi con, had some art in the art show. Since I grew up without a TV I really didn't know much about what was going on, but my friend was helping organize the con and talked me into going and watching the art auction. We were wandering around, talking about this and that, and walked into a room. There was a strikingly pretty woman sitting in a chair, looking *very* bored, and on the other side of the room, a strikingly handsome man, surrounded by people, talking.
I've never suffered from either shyness or lack of confidence. So I went over, introduced myself to the pretty blonde lady, and we started talking about art, as it happens. I noticed a couple people look my way, frown, but I didn't think anything of it, until my friend sidled up and said, sotto voice, "dude, you're hitting on Starbuck's girlfriend."
I said, "who?"
Some may argue that not knowing who Starbuck was makes me not a dork. But in the land of dorks, well, the clueless man is even more dorky.
>What the RIAA doesn't understand is that a LOT of people are perfectly willing to pay for the songs, we just don't want to pay for copies of them that we don't have control over.
They understand that perfectly well. However, they make more money if they sell you stuff you don't have control over, and then sell it to you again a couple times because you don't have control over it. As such, it's in their financial interest to have rigorous enforcement and extension of copyright protection. The problem is not at all that they're out of touch, that they don't get what consumers want. They get it: they just want something different.
Y'all are wimps. Here in Colorado we used to produce earthquakes by lubricating old faults with chemical WMD's including nerve gas because everyone knows the best thing to do with nerve gas is pump it into a hole just outside of an enormous city.
Some friends of mine had a gold mine that kept collapsing -- they got most of their gold from a slip area at a fault line, and that's what was moving. The snag was: why were the earthquakes happening once a month, on Saturday morning? People started asking questions, and it turned out it was the Army pumping WMD's into holes.
>hell, didnt some tests show that as long as the first and last letter of the word was in the right place, the other letters could be all over the place and not affect readability?
That aoietrssn is cllptmeoey icrrcenot. (That assertion is ompletely incorrect, that is.) *some* sentences written with small words can be unscrambled using just the first and last letters as cues, but larger words and more complex sentences make it fail badly.
I'm not arguing with the *rest* of your discussion, but that particular argument annoys me since the original articles/research engaged in serious cherry-picking, and I can cherry-pick the other way and write whole paragraphs that are utterly indecipherable.
To the best of my knowledge prior to reading this, yes: species with quicker lifespans show -- practically by definition -- the effects of evolutionary pressure much more quickly.
Where things get somewhat more tricky is that in many cases there are species, or genera, or larger groupings yet, that have sophisticated systems for adaption, that allow them to react to changes very rapidly. Maize/corn, for instance, or mammalian immune systems, for another, can move large functional chunks of DNA around to build classes and groups of novel proteins: an adaption for better adaption, in a manner of speaking. Once that's established, it's not really evolution to watch it working, but it does mean that an organism that uses these sorts of techniques can react better to a specific changing environment than a smaller/shorter reproduction time organism could.
As far as the population thing goes -- yeah, it makes sense that separated species will accumulate more variation from each other. That's practically the definition of strict Darwinian evolution, I think. But, it seems to me that a larger population will have more variation (as will an older population) as a group, than a smaller population, and at some point, I'd expect that a sufficiently large group would have more variation seen within it than two small, geographically isolated groups. (I've read claims that a sampling of genetic variability from ten people in a rural African village will show greater variance than a sampling of ten Caucasian people randomly sampled across the US, Canada, and northern Europe.)
Anyway. Steven Jay Gould has written about the differences between interspecies and intraspecies variations; he says there's plenty of data to show that in many cases interspecies variation might have a positive correlation -- brain size vs. body size, for instance -- whereas intraspecies variation for the same characteristics might have a negative correlation across that species. So, as usual, I wish I had the time to read more about this particular research.
You obviously know more about this than I do, so I'm asking because I don't understand:
If you use powered amplifiers, then you're running the signal through wire to the amp. Any noise the wire picks up gets amplified.
If you're running a big amp, then running heavy wires out to the unpowered speakers, the noise you pick up appears 1:1 in the speakers.
Doesn't the latter situation seem innately better, from a noise-fighting standpoint?
When I lay out power-correction circuitry, I put all my effort into minimizing the loop area in front of the amplifiers, the high-impedance region, and downstream of the amp, I just make sure nothing's overtly stupid. It seems like the same would hold for audio amplifiers, wouldn't it? Or are you saying that the wire type does actually matter a lot, that shielded wire to powered amps is a much better solution than unshielded wire for either unpowered or powered speakers?
>Switch on your amplifier at least half an hour before even thinking about playing music, even if you have an amplifier that is devoid of any tubes whatsoever,
I'm not defending stupid audiophiles. I would, however, like to mention that most of our electronic equipment -- hundreds of thousands of dollars of oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, semiconductor parameter analyzers -- comes with operating instructions saying the machines need to be running for at least an hour before they're suitable for either calibration or production-quality use, except for one frequency counter and one network analyzer that have crystal ovens and extensive internal temperature compensation. They both self-qualify for use after about three or four minutes.
There are plenty of time-dependent temperature variations that can lead to measurable changes in test equipment. I very seriously doubt they can be heard in audio frequencies in any well-designed amplifiers, but it's at least plausible.
It's not "I'm better than you" -- those people are cool with being better than you. The problem is fear and envy: the problem is that if you have made a different choice than someone insecure, it casts doubt on that person's choice, and the person has to defend the choice and attack your choice as being wrong, in what amounts to self-defence.
People with superiority complexes are easy to deal with, in comparison to people with inferiority complexes who are compensating by attacking you and trying to drag you to their level.
Go find the webcomic sexylosers. I think it's sexylosers.com but I'm *not* going to search for it from work. I don't *know* that he invented 'fap' but I do know he's the reason it became widespread.
SL is impressive because more than 1/3 of the comics, I can't decide whether I'm more offended or amused.
A large part of the reason bacteria have a higher rate of mutation (and, as a result, evolution) is because they have much poorer error-correcting systems in DNA replication and DNA->RNA->protein. Eukaryotes (animals and plants) have several different DNA polymerases, some of which have significant error-correction capability, both while replicating and transcribing DNA and for proofreading DNA that is still double-stranded. Bacteria, aka prokaryotes, have a different set of polymerases, that have much less capability for either error-discovery or error-correction.
I'd never considered that. You'll also notice that leprosy damage is greatest where the body is coolest: fingertips, toes, nose. It could be that this is just circulation-related: areas with the worst circulation recover more poorly, fight off infection more poorly, because of less access to blood-based nutrients and defences. But that makes me wonder whether either temperature or circulation quality is causative, or just correlated.
Read the biblical book of Job for discussion of that. The essential claim is that God created the world but is more or less letting it go its own way, while the devil is actively trying to subvert it, so it's not that the devil's more powerful, it's that God chooses not to act in opposition. (Which brings up some ethical problems of its own...) By so doing, the choice to follow God is not automatic, which is what makes that choice meaningful.
I think the situation is generally pretty simple: any time a group declares that "God is on our side" they stake a position that they have to defend. If they see another group who is more successful -- more powerful, more money, whatever -- they *have* to explain to their followers why this is happening. There are only two explanations: "we were wrong: God isn't on our side" or "those people are in league with the devil!"
Guess which one people inevitably choose?
Once you've made that choice, it's much easier to demonize, literally, your opposition, and justify doing them harm. This same system of thought is seen in conservative Christian and Muslim movements, and has shown up in other religions as well, just not as strongly recently. And, while I'm at it, I like atheists because they never say that God is on their side, but many people say 'truth' when they mean 'whatever it is I believe' -- and that's no different, from the context of explaining why people do things, than saying 'God'. It's just human nature. The problem is that this particular bit of humanity has been stuck in this mindset for a thousand years.
I disagree with the basic premise of your statement.
Every ladybug is unique, because every ladybug is different than every other ladybug. A ladybug that can shoot fire from its eyes is *more* unique than a ladybug that has a 0.00000000001% genetic difference from all other ladybugs.
In other words: while 'unique' is a boolean, it can be modified in speech to indicate degree. If not, then your definition of 'unique' is kind of useless.
Tops of wal-marts and other buildings covered in algae ponds: produce the biodiesel where the fuel needs are, so you don't have to truck stuff in from the deserts of the Southwest, which would be the second most likely place to occupy chunks of land to minimize loss of farmland.
And one assumes that most crackers are going to be most familiar with Windows, especially if they're developing new cracks, so will probably use Win machines just out of familiarity and availability, kind of like how most older mechanics drive big American cars made in the '70's and '80's.