The problem is that there aren't many natural predators for wild pigs.
Since Hernando de Soto brought pigs to the New World, wild boars were used up through the colonies to destroy Native American crops. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to kill these pigs. Feral pigs are quite muscular and large... proving quite the opponent to any respectable animal.
Ever had to castrate a full grown boar? I have, and it's not easy, four grown men to hold it down and one to... well, the football term might be "strip the ball."
... I don't think this meat would sell so well in the market.
Furthermore, after reading the two links, I'm not exactly clear on what the benefit is when you turn them green. I assume it's so you can tell who's mated with the new pigs because the transgenic coloration will be present in the offspring?
From the article:
But creating them has not been easy. Many of the altered embryos failed to develop.
Four out of 265 is a pretty low rate.
I wonder how this will affect their ability to survive in nature and I also wonder if the Polynesian Islands will one day be covered with rainbow colored pigs left there by researchers trying to do stem cell research.
Researcher 1: "Has he got any orange on him?" Researcher 2: "Nope but he's got red, green and purple all about him." Researcher 1: "Then he's not one a carrier." Researcher 2: "That's one ugly pig though." *looks in his Audubon Society guide* "According to his colors, he's got Alzheimer's genes, cancer genes and is extremely susceptible to syphilis...poor bastard."
When something like Linux is ported to anything, it's because there is a cult following in the community and this is what they specialize in. Window's has a cult following, it's just not specialized in this sort of development.
The benefits of a port might be because of cheaper or easier to find hardware capable of running something that it wasn't meant to but is very useful to users. I don't think this is the case in putting Windows on an Intel Mac because Intel Macs are cheaper than what I can piece together in PC x86 form. Don't get me wrong, Macs are nice machines but they're not exactly easy to upgrade or fix on your own.
I'm sure someone will port the extended firmware interface to run Windows through a virtual layer (if it needs it) but this can only introduce Windows running as fast or slower than the speed it could run at without EFI.
For this reason, I doubt people are going to find much use using the port since it's a) cheaper to piece their own machine together and leave the specs up to themselves and b) Windows will probably run slower.
Yeah, there might be someone out there bragging about running Windows on an Intel Mac but he's probably the rare Window's equivalent to the guy with a penguin displayed on his microwave's LCD.
They could have avoided a lot of complaints if they had simply made a feature you could enable--not a feature you have to disable.
If you install a piece of software and it starts to gathering information about you, it's called spyware even if there's some magic button combination or option that turns it off. Until it is turned off, it's spyware. I don't understand why the default setting isn't "off" but I guess that was Apple's decision and now they'll catch flack for it.
There are at least 20 services out there that will help you filter spam without trying to use some heuristics or algorithms but actual processes that work.
Well, you bring up a good point.
The problem is that my 12-year old airhead cousin isn't going to know how to do this. And she's not going to stop using her angela@britneyspears.com e-mail address.
Why don't you list these 20 services and link them? Why don't you also reveal how much they cost and then tell someone under 18 that they have to pay that?
I mean, I am an adult, but I could sure do without the adult-product spam mail. Seriously, does anyone want to know where they can get more booby mags and silly sauce? How are they going to regulate who gets on these lists? The button you click says "Household E-mail address."
Is this an abuse of the service? Probably. But it would bring me great joy to watch some spammer take a $1K-$5K hit for each e-mail sent to me promising the enlargement of my genitals and/or mammaries. From the article:
The Utah Division of Consumer Protection has cited one Web site for allegedly violating the law. It says a Web site called HoneyI------TheBabysitter.com sent a sexually explicit email last month to an address on the registry, and the state is seeking a fine of up to $2,500. The site's owner couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Now that's satisfying!
If you're wondering what adult products qualify for you to file a complaint: Under the law, marketers are prohibited from sending messages containing or linking to any products or services that are illegal under Michigan law for children to purchase, obtain, view or participate in. These include, but are not necessarily limited to:
Alcohol,
Tobacco,
Pornography or Obscene Material,
Gambling,
Illegal Drugs, &
Firearms
On the converse, I'm guessing that if I did get on the list my Spongebob spam would probably increase.
So Apple and Sun almost merged... however, the way the article is written makes it sound as though we're only concerned with one thing--iPods.
Is this the only product that Apple makes? I thought they also made fairly nice laptops.
Yes, I know iPods are the hot thing right now, but did it talk about any of Sun's products?
McNealy has an iPod, McNealy says iPods will be as archaic as answering machines one day, McNealy seems to think that all Apple has are iPods.
My god, they weren't merging their mp3 players, they were talking about merging architectures and file systems.
Is McNealy really so shallow to as to say, "I bought your media player and it's pretty good but it's going to be obsolete someday and that's why we won't merge."?
This is the computer science industry, everything becomes obsolete! Apple is not losing money on iPods and they have other technologies to rely on.
What do iPods and their long term reliability have to do with a merger!?
Perhaps this article should have been titled "McNealy Speaks Out About the Mediocre iPod.... And Failed Mergers."
Tice had his security clearance removed and was fired because of psychological concerns.
And you've just swallowed this information--hook, line and sinker.
ABC News seemed to treat him as pretty psychologically stable. How do you know the government isn't painting him to be this way so that his story isn't believable?
After the president admitted to wiretapping some Americans without the proper warrants, you bet I'll believe Tice's story.
It doesn't bother me that they want to wiretap suspected terrorists, but why the no-warrant stuff? Can't they just get a classified warrant?
Well, in the article, they mentioned using data mining to find when the word "jihad" was used in a conversation. In reality, they don't have many suspected terrorists so they would like to just use this technology on the largest set of civilians as possible. In order to do the paper work and justify this action... well, they'd have to go through the warrant process for every American.
So they bend the rules a little and overlook some of our rights and suddenly they have a great tool for catching terrorists or anyone that uses the wrong language!
I hope you never become a "suspected terrorist" because nowadays, the word "suspected" seems to be equivalent with "guilty" in the eyes of Homeland Security.
According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
This is becoming more and more common for the intelligence community to use. You can call it data mining or information retrieval, it has a lot of names (some sound nicer than others).
In fact, there are commercially available engines out there that anyone can buy. Check out Collexis, which also has demos online. This isn't as advanced as what the analysts at the NSA are using but it's close. Plug something like this into ontology software such as Cerebra and you've got a decent tool for keeping dossiers on people.
Nothing about this is illegal until the information passed into it is acquired illegally. Like most people, I'm a little more than annoyed that our civil liberties are slowly ebbing. One thing I've learned from history is that freedom and liberties are often the hardest things to find once you've lost them.
Recently, I've relied on the ACLU and certain political groups to jump all over the president and anyone who is part of the government if they overstep these bounds. I sure hope Tice gets his wish to reform the intelligence community as to how they handle wiretapping Americans. They can wiretap everyone else in the world but I don't want our government wiretapping us without the usual requisite warrants.
Side note on Tice, I kind of admire him for doing this. He's not going to go to jail because he's (intelligently) not revealed anything classified. He's only saying that this is going on. Now, I hope he's prepared to not work there anymore because I imagine the rest of his career is going to be fairly cold with people treating him like a snitch.
He expects to find investors to help pay for the research needed to figure a way to increase the tree power from less than 2 volts to 12 volts sometime this year, creating an alternative to fossil fuels.
It sounds like they have a long way to go yet and there is reason for much skepticism. Everything has some amount of electric charge to it, even the surface of your skin. Does that mean we should research away to increase that small voltage to something larger so we can all walk around with extension cords hanging off our arms?
Afterall, there was the man who did this accidentally!
Actually, I RTFA instead of the summary and as it turns out:
In 1990, Sheehan's NREL program calculated that just 15,000 square miles of desert (the Sonoran desert in California and Arizona is more than eight times that size) could grow enough algae to replace nearly all of the nation's current diesel requirements.
They make it sound like you just need to grow it and it will clean the air. Why would you put that figure out there if you have to build just as much pipe filled with algae to clean the air?
Does anyone know if there are techniques like this to use to directly alter the genes of other organisms (like algae) using perhaps similar tricks?
Furthermore, what if this could be used for gases other than nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide?
Is there maybe a possibility of coating hot air balloons or zeppelins with this algae and letting them float about in the atmosphere until they become so heavy with algae they descend? I know it's kind of farfetched to propose that but stranger things that once were science fiction have become useful. The article seems to make it sound like just having the algae exposed to the air near a plant.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
That's interesting... you've almost tempted me to install iTunes on my machine and look for this music.
What I forgot to mention in my original post is that I do not use iTunes. I rip my cds using CDex and then listen to them using Quintessential Player. Never had a need for iTunes and, frankly, I've never really been interested in Apple.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
My God! That was close. I almost became a victim of myself.
I don't believe you can send a squad car to my home fast enough. I will handcuff myself to the toilet and await the justice squadron.
Praise the lord for The Automated Insurgency Location System!
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The chip that CowboyNeal put in my brain goes off.
The tube that CmdrTaco put in my neck to feed me is filled with coffee.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
Then you better stop blasting it out of your riced up Honda Civic's pathetic Optimus audio system at 3:00am you worthless piece of marmoset dung!
Um, I'd first like to say, Optimus Prime forever!
Second, that's a riced up Chevrolet Cavalier, thank you.
Third, I'm usually in bed by 2:00 am.
Fourth, marmoset dung is valued by some cultures so you can't consider it worthless. I'm sure it burns just fine as cheap heating fuel.
Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
All companies want to market their products to you as effectively and automatically as possible. With the sudden rise in data mining tools such as this, what's a big corporation to do but hop on the bandwagon?
You may remember that Amazon even patented a similar technique. And I've always suspected my local grocery store of profiling me. Afterall, I hand them a little tag on my keychain for my discount, they scan it and suddenly my name is on the reciept. I'd be naive to think they aren't generating statistics about me and secretly making note that I buy far more long grain wild rice than the average consumer.
So what's the problem here? The problem is that I don't like it. I don't want a computer program diagnosing me at a hospital even if it is built on solid Bayesian probability models and I don't want a profile of my musical tastes being generated on a company's database. My taste in music is my business and I don't want other people knowing that my most listened to album is Tom Dooley and Other Hits by The Kingston Trio.
All I've learned from this is that a big company is a big company whether it's Microsoft, Sony, Apple or Google.
From the article:
Apple has overstepped its limits, and this spyware (because it sends information to a server) and adware (because it displays information to attempt to sell you products) is a very serious breach of the trust I have long had in Apple's products.
Oh, come now, you're telling me you've trusted Apple? What has Apple done to gain your trust? They're a profitable corporation and that's where their interests lie. How to get the moneys from your hands to theirs as efficiently as possible.
The only thing that makes me sad about this is that local bands still lose out because I doubt they'll ever make recommendations unless tens of thousands of users are showing that association. I wish Apple would make a service called halfTunes that sold songs at 50 or 25 or free for bands that are looking for exposure, not profits.
1) The Earth is not a thermodynamically closed system. It receives a constant influx of energy from the Sun. The existence of life presents no conflict with any law of thermodynamics.
The argument would then follow that they were referring to our solar system as a closed system. Or, if you like, the entire universe as a closed system. We are existing in the universe, afterall.
Perhaps I could then say that the proposed entropy that decreased here only did so because entropy elsewhere severely increased? Thus maintaining a rising level of entropy in the closed system. *shrugs*
You're right except I can't accept your assumption (#4).
I think that there exists information unknown to us (isn't stored). For instance, there may be something special that happens deep in the cores of stars as they implode, if only very briefly. That information is out there to be learned but we do not know it and it's not stored anywhere though it may happen very frequently.
I've had to refute time and again Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that entropy in a closed system can never decrease. They like to use this as an argument as to why organisms couldn't evolve. In order to agree with this, you have to acknowledge that organisms are very orderly (which I don't believe we are). And you also have to believe that this law holds true on the grand scale of the universe as well as the molecular level (for which it was intended).
What I'm trying to say here is that if they can throw this crap at me, they certainly could dream up the ability to stump me. A proposed argument that I know everything could simply result in:
IDist: What are we made of?
Me: Cells.
Idist: What are the cells made of?
Me: Atoms.
Idist: What are the atoms made of?
Me: Electrons, protons & neutrons.
Idist: And what are those made of?
Me: Superstrings I guess.
Idist: And what are Superstrings made of?
etc.
So you can see it only takes a five year old asking "Why" repeatedly to illustrate the cunondrum.
Allow me to take a stab at this using a very dirty ugly proof.
Proof by Contradiction
1) Assume there is a finite amount of information.
2) Assume there is information regarding how something is stored (i.e. it's physical location whether it be electrical signals in my brain or bits on a hard disk including the time it was acquired).
3) It follows from 1 & 2 that any new information about the finite information would provide information regarding itself (meta-information). This would then require us to store more knowledge regarding the newly acquired knowledge, which we would need to know about, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that there aren't many natural predators for wild pigs.
... proving quite the opponent to any respectable animal.
... well, the football term might be "strip the ball."
Since Hernando de Soto brought pigs to the New World, wild boars were used up through the colonies to destroy Native American crops. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to kill these pigs. Feral pigs are quite muscular and large
Ever had to castrate a full grown boar? I have, and it's not easy, four grown men to hold it down and one to
Furthermore, after reading the two links, I'm not exactly clear on what the benefit is when you turn them green. I assume it's so you can tell who's mated with the new pigs because the transgenic coloration will be present in the offspring?
From the article:Four out of 265 is a pretty low rate.
I wonder how this will affect their ability to survive in nature and I also wonder if the Polynesian Islands will one day be covered with rainbow colored pigs left there by researchers trying to do stem cell research.
Researcher 1: "Has he got any orange on him?"
Researcher 2: "Nope but he's got red, green and purple all about him."
Researcher 1: "Then he's not one a carrier."
Researcher 2: "That's one ugly pig though." *looks in his Audubon Society guide* "According to his colors, he's got Alzheimer's genes, cancer genes and is extremely susceptible to syphilis...poor bastard."
When something like Linux is ported to anything, it's because there is a cult following in the community and this is what they specialize in. Window's has a cult following, it's just not specialized in this sort of development.
The benefits of a port might be because of cheaper or easier to find hardware capable of running something that it wasn't meant to but is very useful to users. I don't think this is the case in putting Windows on an Intel Mac because Intel Macs are cheaper than what I can piece together in PC x86 form. Don't get me wrong, Macs are nice machines but they're not exactly easy to upgrade or fix on your own.
I'm sure someone will port the extended firmware interface to run Windows through a virtual layer (if it needs it) but this can only introduce Windows running as fast or slower than the speed it could run at without EFI.
For this reason, I doubt people are going to find much use using the port since it's a) cheaper to piece their own machine together and leave the specs up to themselves and b) Windows will probably run slower.
Yeah, there might be someone out there bragging about running Windows on an Intel Mac but he's probably the rare Window's equivalent to the guy with a penguin displayed on his microwave's LCD.
They could have avoided a lot of complaints if they had simply made a feature you could enable--not a feature you have to disable.
If you install a piece of software and it starts to gathering information about you, it's called spyware even if there's some magic button combination or option that turns it off. Until it is turned off, it's spyware. I don't understand why the default setting isn't "off" but I guess that was Apple's decision and now they'll catch flack for it.
The problem is that my 12-year old airhead cousin isn't going to know how to do this. And she's not going to stop using her angela@britneyspears.com e-mail address.
Why don't you list these 20 services and link them? Why don't you also reveal how much they cost and then tell someone under 18 that they have to pay that?
Is this an abuse of the service? Probably. But it would bring me great joy to watch some spammer take a $1K-$5K hit for each e-mail sent to me promising the enlargement of my genitals and/or mammaries. From the article: Now that's satisfying!
If you're wondering what adult products qualify for you to file a complaint: Under the law, marketers are prohibited from sending messages containing or linking to any products or services that are illegal under Michigan law for children to purchase, obtain, view or participate in. These include, but are not necessarily limited to: Alcohol, Tobacco, Pornography or Obscene Material, Gambling, Illegal Drugs, & Firearms
On the converse, I'm guessing that if I did get on the list my Spongebob spam would probably increase.
So Apple and Sun almost merged ... however, the way the article is written makes it sound as though we're only concerned with one thing--iPods.
.... And Failed Mergers."
Is this the only product that Apple makes? I thought they also made fairly nice laptops.
Yes, I know iPods are the hot thing right now, but did it talk about any of Sun's products?
McNealy has an iPod, McNealy says iPods will be as archaic as answering machines one day, McNealy seems to think that all Apple has are iPods.
My god, they weren't merging their mp3 players, they were talking about merging architectures and file systems.
Is McNealy really so shallow to as to say, "I bought your media player and it's pretty good but it's going to be obsolete someday and that's why we won't merge."?
This is the computer science industry, everything becomes obsolete! Apple is not losing money on iPods and they have other technologies to rely on.
What do iPods and their long term reliability have to do with a merger!?
Perhaps this article should have been titled "McNealy Speaks Out About the Mediocre iPod
ABC News seemed to treat him as pretty psychologically stable. How do you know the government isn't painting him to be this way so that his story isn't believable?
After the president admitted to wiretapping some Americans without the proper warrants, you bet I'll believe Tice's story.
So they bend the rules a little and overlook some of our rights and suddenly they have a great tool for catching terrorists or anyone that uses the wrong language!
I hope you never become a "suspected terrorist" because nowadays, the word "suspected" seems to be equivalent with "guilty" in the eyes of Homeland Security.
In fact, there are commercially available engines out there that anyone can buy. Check out Collexis, which also has demos online. This isn't as advanced as what the analysts at the NSA are using but it's close. Plug something like this into ontology software such as Cerebra and you've got a decent tool for keeping dossiers on people.
Nothing about this is illegal until the information passed into it is acquired illegally. Like most people, I'm a little more than annoyed that our civil liberties are slowly ebbing. One thing I've learned from history is that freedom and liberties are often the hardest things to find once you've lost them.
Recently, I've relied on the ACLU and certain political groups to jump all over the president and anyone who is part of the government if they overstep these bounds. I sure hope Tice gets his wish to reform the intelligence community as to how they handle wiretapping Americans. They can wiretap everyone else in the world but I don't want our government wiretapping us without the usual requisite warrants.
Side note on Tice, I kind of admire him for doing this. He's not going to go to jail because he's (intelligently) not revealed anything classified. He's only saying that this is going on. Now, I hope he's prepared to not work there anymore because I imagine the rest of his career is going to be fairly cold with people treating him like a snitch.
Afterall, there was the man who did this accidentally!
They make it sound like you just need to grow it and it will clean the air. Why would you put that figure out there if you have to build just as much pipe filled with algae to clean the air?
The logistics of this process aren't very clear.
I don't have a biology degree but it seems to me that there might be faster ways of creating strains more efficient at harvesting/reducing CO2. I have seen lectures given where Alzheimer's susceptible genes were spliced into the genes of mice neurons using a strain of the herpes virus that had previously infected neurons of Alzheimer's patients.
Does anyone know if there are techniques like this to use to directly alter the genes of other organisms (like algae) using perhaps similar tricks?
Furthermore, what if this could be used for gases other than nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide?
Is there maybe a possibility of coating hot air balloons or zeppelins with this algae and letting them float about in the atmosphere until they become so heavy with algae they descend? I know it's kind of farfetched to propose that but stranger things that once were science fiction have become useful. The article seems to make it sound like just having the algae exposed to the air near a plant.
Oh, there's no need to tell me about CDBaby.
My last order from CDBaby left me quite happy.
That's interesting ... you've almost tempted me to install iTunes on my machine and look for this music.
What I forgot to mention in my original post is that I do not use iTunes. I rip my cds using CDex and then listen to them using Quintessential Player. Never had a need for iTunes and, frankly, I've never really been interested in Apple.
My God! That was close. I almost became a victim of myself.
I don't believe you can send a squad car to my home fast enough. I will handcuff myself to the toilet and await the justice squadron.
Praise the lord for The Automated Insurgency Location System!
The chip that CowboyNeal put in my brain goes off.
The tube that CmdrTaco put in my neck to feed me is filled with coffee.
Second, that's a riced up Chevrolet Cavalier, thank you.
Third, I'm usually in bed by 2:00 am.
Fourth, marmoset dung is valued by some cultures so you can't consider it worthless. I'm sure it burns just fine as cheap heating fuel.
You may remember that Amazon even patented a similar technique. And I've always suspected my local grocery store of profiling me. Afterall, I hand them a little tag on my keychain for my discount, they scan it and suddenly my name is on the reciept. I'd be naive to think they aren't generating statistics about me and secretly making note that I buy far more long grain wild rice than the average consumer.
So what's the problem here? The problem is that I don't like it. I don't want a computer program diagnosing me at a hospital even if it is built on solid Bayesian probability models and I don't want a profile of my musical tastes being generated on a company's database. My taste in music is my business and I don't want other people knowing that my most listened to album is Tom Dooley and Other Hits by The Kingston Trio.
All I've learned from this is that a big company is a big company whether it's Microsoft, Sony, Apple or Google.
From the article: Oh, come now, you're telling me you've trusted Apple? What has Apple done to gain your trust? They're a profitable corporation and that's where their interests lie. How to get the moneys from your hands to theirs as efficiently as possible.
The only thing that makes me sad about this is that local bands still lose out because I doubt they'll ever make recommendations unless tens of thousands of users are showing that association. I wish Apple would make a service called halfTunes that sold songs at 50 or 25 or free for bands that are looking for exposure, not profits.
Fire a rifle at a target, you might hit the bullseye. Fire buck shot at a target, you can't miss the bullseye.
Make 1 game and maybe it's a hit. Make 50 games, there's bound to be a hit.
Perhaps I could then say that the proposed entropy that decreased here only did so because entropy elsewhere severely increased? Thus maintaining a rising level of entropy in the closed system. *shrugs*
Mod this parent up. :)
You're right except I can't accept your assumption (#4).
I think that there exists information unknown to us (isn't stored). For instance, there may be something special that happens deep in the cores of stars as they implode, if only very briefly. That information is out there to be learned but we do not know it and it's not stored anywhere though it may happen very frequently.
I've had many arguments with ID proponents.
I've had to refute time and again Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that entropy in a closed system can never decrease. They like to use this as an argument as to why organisms couldn't evolve. In order to agree with this, you have to acknowledge that organisms are very orderly (which I don't believe we are). And you also have to believe that this law holds true on the grand scale of the universe as well as the molecular level (for which it was intended).
What I'm trying to say here is that if they can throw this crap at me, they certainly could dream up the ability to stump me. A proposed argument that I know everything could simply result in:
IDist: What are we made of?
Me: Cells.
Idist: What are the cells made of?
Me: Atoms.
Idist: What are the atoms made of?
Me: Electrons, protons & neutrons.
Idist: And what are those made of?
Me: Superstrings I guess.
Idist: And what are Superstrings made of?
etc.
So you can see it only takes a five year old asking "Why" repeatedly to illustrate the cunondrum.
Allow me to take a stab at this using a very dirty ugly proof.
Proof by Contradiction
1) Assume there is a finite amount of information.
2) Assume there is information regarding how something is stored (i.e. it's physical location whether it be electrical signals in my brain or bits on a hard disk including the time it was acquired).
3) It follows from 1 & 2 that any new information about the finite information would provide information regarding itself (meta-information). This would then require us to store more knowledge regarding the newly acquired knowledge, which we would need to know about, etc.
*tips his hat to Gödel, Escher, Bach*