How can Monsanto grow non-germinating but otherwise healthy-seeded plants in a commercial setting? Lab-engineered plants are really expensive--once you get a few good plants, you need cheap, natural breeding to make them into a million plants.
You could make glyphosate-resistant plants sterile maybe by some funny cross-breeding, but that would be so complicated you'd need to contract out seed-crops to farmers anyway. That defeats what you were trying to do in the first place.
Although this technology has the possibility to make manufacturing chips much cheaper, Cringly doesn't mention anything about designing them.
How much of the current price of a chip goes into R&D? Half or more?
Now, granted, producing more chips does allow the cost of R&D to be distributed to more costomers, but the idead of a $15 computer seems absurd. You can only distribute the cost to so many poeple. (Most of the first world already supports it, and who else can afford it?)
I hope this technology works, but it's more likely to be an evolution than a revolution.
Part of the reason text isn't used more is because of the low resolution of our display screens.
16x16 pixels is enough to make small drawings of mice and monitors, but not enough for meaningfull text.
This will change (hopefully) as technology improves. (Although I chuckle at the thought of microsoft making a patch for windows to allow resolution-independant icons.)
Let's remember that the article is dicussing children under grade 4. I think they have a point.
I know a mom who showed her 5-year old how to tyoe her her own name, (except for the accented 'e'). On her own, this girl started spelling it with "e`". Imagine her mom's surprise.
On one hand, she has explored and found a solution for a problem. On the other hand, she now thinks that writing her name with a pen and paper is stupid.
Kids that young aren't ready for Linux. They aren't even ready for Basic. Maybe in grade four I'd show them turle graphics.
You raise an excellent point. It's dirty business to try and pass off characters higher than 127 as ASCII.
And you are correct that it may not be a "proprietary Windows-only" thing, (or even a Mozilla thing, I use OPERA.) But let's face it: when someone dumps dejour standards for defacto ones, it's probably* done with the ignorant phrase, "well it works under MS...".
(* Microsoft is not responsible for the sorenson vs. mpeg fiasco. But they are still an evil empire. )
After doing something many posters have not--READING SOME OF THE ARTICLE, I learned a new fact:
When individuals are trade music privately, and on a one-to-one basis, it (legally) is not piracy.
This makes the case much more intersting for armchair layers like myself. (It's like chess, but sometimes with teams, and opponents must do research.)
Napster obviously facilitates trading of copyrighted material. The question is, can the interaction be considered private, as it occurs with public listings? And is it considered non-profit after Napster began advertising for profit?
It could be that Napster the corporation may be found liable. But if that happens, individuals will continue to legally trade music online in private, one-to-one transactions. They may do it on _free_ FTP, (screw you allAdvantage whores,) or on a decentralized napster clone. But they will do it.
In fact, maybe "Napter guilty" won't be a bad verdict. Since it has been established that individual trading is lawfull, let us legally encourage _distributed_ information sharing, and another step of evolution in the information age.
The article opens by saying: I don[]t have any inside track with Microsoft. Heck, our company doesn[]t even have a Microsoft developer or marketing rep!
The first thing that caught my eye was the blocks that appeared where apostropies should have gone. The page, (produced by Adobe GoLive) suffers from that same glitch that Frontpage-created pages do, which stems from assuming you are reading it with de-facto browsers.
When an article discussing a microsoft-dependant market contains html errors that punish me for using Opera and not Internet Explorer, is that irony or hippocracy?
It is a grand public relations stunt. You are correct that this robot is useless to a consumer, but stunts like this are what fund real robotics.
Some of the technology in this robot:
-binocular vision
-miniturized servo joints
-miniturized controller. (Contollers as large as refrigerators are still used in industry.)
-ballence system adjusting to payload
These technologies are not revolutionary, but important evolutions for industrial robots.
Tell your investors the phrase, "evolutionary reducion in controller size". Boring. Tell them, "walking robot" instead. That's news!
Remember, many manufacturers also sell industrial robots. (Kawasaki and mitsubishi are other examples.) We can say, "anthropomorphic robots are useless," but Honda is going to take the technology they developed for it and apply it immeadiately to industrial robots.
Tendon-driven robots are already well researched in acedamia.
They use servo-driven spools to pull wires, not plastic muscles, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing in movement is the connection point of the tendons, and their relationship with the joints.
Plastic mussels may allow the mechanism to get smaller, but it would be a small, evolutionary step. Nothing is stopping an ambitious hobbyist from building a tendon driven hand right now.
Graphics hardware currently is not required to have much dialogue with the software. Software just says, "draw this", and assumes it to be done. (Perhaps polling for refresh times.)
Once you introduce physics models, the interface between the software and hardware becomes a lot more complicated--how do you report a collision? Polling or interupt? How do you describe the objects involved?
I really don't know, but I'm quite curious: by the time you introduce all the overhead of extra communication, and drivers, will you save enough clock cycles to make it worth the trouble?
If slashdot begins to discriminate against questions starting with, "I'm doing acedemic research in foo," students can probably just lie and say, "Reading slashdot has peaked my interest in foo, and I was wondering..."
Besides, having a collection of messages containing mostly links and opinions is hardly having your work done for you. (Asking/. may require more work, after you filter the signal from the noise.)
If a question promotes interesting discussion, I have no problem with someone using it as a stepping stone for other work.
I wish I could remember who said, "Stealing the work of one person is plagerism, stealing the work of many people is research."
That's an excellent point--if Canwest Global may be rebroadcast, that gives us more or less the cream of American TV. (i.e. Simpsons)
Even if iCraveTV can't braodcast american TV, this could be a good thing. Without american content, ICTV will draw more from the pool of Canadian content.
Some of that programming (for example, discovey and the learning channel,) is excellent--better (imho) than most of the pop garbage they were formerly braodcasting. This might cause a shift from pop programming to intellectual content that otherwise might have been passed over.
I'd love to see that happen--I'll take David Suzuki over Disney any day of the week.
The problem with the Hindenberg was the reflective surface used to prevent solar heating. They had both aluminum powder and iron sharing a surface. High school chemistry students may recognize these as the ingredients for thermite, which burns far hotter than gun powder.
The/. article Rumors About Episode II Denounced, posted about 5 articles below this one, indicates that Variety is an inaccurate source of casting information.
This is only slightly offtopic, so I'll ask anyway...
Q: How to they get different intensities of colour in monitors?
My understanding of LCD is that they are either on or off. Crystals are aligned with a magnetic field, and the alignment causes them to be visible (or not) through a polarizing filter.
Is my understanding wrong? I'd appreciate someone who knows more about the technology elightening me.
Slashdot Mirror
Serious Security flaw in US Anti-Missle Defence System
by Hemos
Will the War Delay Kernel Release?
by CmdrTaco
War is Targetted at Geeks Like Me and You by JohnKatz
How can Monsanto grow non-germinating but otherwise healthy-seeded plants in a commercial setting? Lab-engineered plants are really expensive--once you get a few good plants, you need cheap, natural breeding to make them into a million plants.
You could make glyphosate-resistant plants sterile maybe by some funny cross-breeding, but that would be so complicated you'd need to contract out seed-crops to farmers anyway. That defeats what you were trying to do in the first place.
> IANAF
Perhaps IDARTS (I didn't actually read the story) would be more apprpriate.
Canola is grown primarily for the seeds. Sterile plants wouldn't be worth much, would they?
If computers only cost $15 to manufacture, that will mean Windows will be over 3x more expensive than the computer itself.
The masses will finally start taking free software seriously.
Although this technology has the possibility to make manufacturing chips much cheaper, Cringly doesn't mention anything about designing them.
How much of the current price of a chip goes into R&D? Half or more?
Now, granted, producing more chips does allow the cost of R&D to be distributed to more costomers, but the idead of a $15 computer seems absurd. You can only distribute the cost to so many poeple. (Most of the first world already supports it, and who else can afford it?)
I hope this technology works, but it's more likely to be an evolution than a revolution.
John Johansen should contribute the DeCSS source. I really want to see how RIAA would react.
EMP bombing still won't get rid of the T-shirts.
=)
The number of people cheating like that is probably no more than the number of teens without credit cards who dowloaded it but were unable to pay.
Where do you get those figures?
Part of the reason text isn't used more is because of the low resolution of our display screens.
16x16 pixels is enough to make small drawings of mice and monitors, but not enough for meaningfull text.
This will change (hopefully) as technology improves. (Although I chuckle at the thought of microsoft making a patch for windows to allow resolution-independant icons.)
Let's remember that the article is dicussing children under grade 4. I think they have a point.
I know a mom who showed her 5-year old how to tyoe her her own name, (except for the accented 'e'). On her own, this girl started spelling it with "e`". Imagine her mom's surprise.
On one hand, she has explored and found a solution for a problem. On the other hand, she now thinks that writing her name with a pen and paper is stupid.
Kids that young aren't ready for Linux. They aren't even ready for Basic. Maybe in grade four I'd show them turle graphics.
You raise an excellent point. It's dirty business to try and pass off characters higher than 127 as ASCII.
And you are correct that it may not be a "proprietary Windows-only" thing, (or even a Mozilla thing, I use OPERA.) But let's face it: when someone dumps dejour standards for defacto ones, it's probably* done with the ignorant phrase, "well it works under MS...".
(* Microsoft is not responsible for the sorenson vs. mpeg fiasco. But they are still an evil empire. )
After doing something many posters have not--READING SOME OF THE ARTICLE, I learned a new fact:
When individuals are trade music privately, and on a one-to-one basis, it (legally) is not piracy.
This makes the case much more intersting for armchair layers like myself. (It's like chess, but sometimes with teams, and opponents must do research.)
Napster obviously facilitates trading of copyrighted material. The question is, can the interaction be considered private, as it occurs with public listings? And is it considered non-profit after Napster began advertising for profit?
It could be that Napster the corporation may be found liable. But if that happens, individuals will continue to legally trade music online in private, one-to-one transactions. They may do it on _free_ FTP, (screw you allAdvantage whores,) or on a decentralized napster clone. But they will do it.
In fact, maybe "Napter guilty" won't be a bad verdict. Since it has been established that individual trading is lawfull, let us legally encourage _distributed_ information sharing, and another step of evolution in the information age.
The article opens by saying: I don[]t have any inside track with Microsoft. Heck, our company doesn[]t even have a Microsoft developer or marketing rep!
The first thing that caught my eye was the blocks that appeared where apostropies should have gone. The page, (produced by Adobe GoLive) suffers from that same glitch that Frontpage-created pages do, which stems from assuming you are reading it with de-facto browsers.
When an article discussing a microsoft-dependant market contains html errors that punish me for using Opera and not Internet Explorer, is that irony or hippocracy?
Stay a while... stay FOREVER!
It is a grand public relations stunt. You are correct that this robot is useless to a consumer, but stunts like this are what fund real robotics.
Some of the technology in this robot:
-binocular vision
-miniturized servo joints
-miniturized controller. (Contollers as large as refrigerators are still used in industry.)
-ballence system adjusting to payload
These technologies are not revolutionary, but important evolutions for industrial robots.
Tell your investors the phrase, "evolutionary reducion in controller size". Boring. Tell them, "walking robot" instead. That's news!
Remember, many manufacturers also sell industrial robots. (Kawasaki and mitsubishi are other examples.) We can say, "anthropomorphic robots are useless," but Honda is going to take the technology they developed for it and apply it immeadiately to industrial robots.
Tendon-driven robots are already well researched in acedamia.
They use servo-driven spools to pull wires, not plastic muscles, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing in movement is the connection point of the tendons, and their relationship with the joints.
Plastic mussels may allow the mechanism to get smaller, but it would be a small, evolutionary step. Nothing is stopping an ambitious hobbyist from building a tendon driven hand right now.
Graphics hardware currently is not required to have much dialogue with the software. Software just says, "draw this", and assumes it to be done. (Perhaps polling for refresh times.)
Once you introduce physics models, the interface between the software and hardware becomes a lot more complicated--how do you report a collision? Polling or interupt? How do you describe the objects involved?
I really don't know, but I'm quite curious: by the time you introduce all the overhead of extra communication, and drivers, will you save enough clock cycles to make it worth the trouble?
"Mission to Mars" already predicted this, showing us that Dr. Pepper and M&M's exist in high quantity in space.
If slashdot begins to discriminate against questions starting with, "I'm doing acedemic research in foo," students can probably just lie and say, "Reading slashdot has peaked my interest in foo, and I was wondering..."
Besides, having a collection of messages containing mostly links and opinions is hardly having your work done for you. (Asking /. may require more work, after you filter the signal from the noise.)
If a question promotes interesting discussion, I have no problem with someone using it as a stepping stone for other work.
I wish I could remember who said, "Stealing the work of one person is plagerism, stealing the work of many people is research."
That's an excellent point--if Canwest Global may be rebroadcast, that gives us more or less the cream of American TV. (i.e. Simpsons)
Even if iCraveTV can't braodcast american TV, this could be a good thing. Without american content, ICTV will draw more from the pool of Canadian content.
Some of that programming (for example, discovey and the learning channel,) is excellent--better (imho) than most of the pop garbage they were formerly braodcasting. This might cause a shift from pop programming to intellectual content that otherwise might have been passed over.
I'd love to see that happen--I'll take David Suzuki over Disney any day of the week.
The problem with the Hindenberg was the reflective surface used to prevent solar heating. They had both aluminum powder and iron sharing a surface. High school chemistry students may recognize these as the ingredients for thermite, which burns far hotter than gun powder.
Do you want to see anything added to the standard C++ library that is not already there? (For example, a standard set of design patterns.)
Along the same lines, do you think sockets and graphics should be standardized as part of a language?
The /. article Rumors About Episode II Denounced, posted about 5 articles below this one, indicates that Variety is an inaccurate source of casting information.
Should we trust this?
This is only slightly offtopic, so I'll ask anyway...
Q: How to they get different intensities of colour in monitors?
My understanding of LCD is that they are either on or off. Crystals are aligned with a magnetic field, and the alignment causes them to be visible (or not) through a polarizing filter.
Is my understanding wrong? I'd appreciate someone who knows more about the technology elightening me.