Actually, it seems like an interesting idea. We all have libraries of CDs based on our likes and I suspect if the libraries were analyzed we'd find slighlty deeper relations between the disparate music we collect. I've got a very eclectic collection of music and I'd be hard pressed to see the link between Reba McIntyre, Pink Floyd, and David Sanborn, but maybe there is one.
Of course some conspiracy theorist is going to use this to determine that the music industry is actually selling the same 5 songs over and over again, just in different keys and rhythms. Because we all know it's true.
Of course Cyber Monday doesn't exist, by way of the fact that you can shop at most e-tailers at any time, any day, and with advances in shipping, you can shop and get things delivered to you right up to Christmas day in most cases.
Of course some marketing person thought this up -- they thought up New Coke didn't they?
From Business Week: That's not to suggest that the Cyber Monday boost is a total fabrication. The fact is, people do most of their online shopping at work -- 58% of them, according to comScore Networks. They often get started in earnest on Mondays, when they return from a frustrating weekend at the mall to their broadband connections at work.
The fact is, many of us are smart enough not to buy into the hype of Black Friday, let alone Cyber Monday. I can shop online any time, from work, from home. It's easier to do from work because there's little chance of someone discovering what you're buying. Mind you, you have to be careful and actually work occasionally...
Because it changes the size of the PC's case. The 5 1/4" disc drive hasn't changed since I was a child... it has outlasted so many changes in media, PC slots, etc... the disc will be resized before the drive is. But again, also note no mention is made as to the size of the support hardware. If we are really pulling millions of bits of information at a time (versus 1 bit in a traditional drive) you'd think the head would be bigger, along with the cabling, the mount, the motor, and the hardware required to interpret the data... it may not fit in a drive bay any way you slice it.
The holographic drive is still using lasers for read/write, just in a new way, so I doubt the head will be that much bigger, except for the necessity of a beam spliter used to create the interference patterns. I really don't see anything here to indicate a major change in the way the technology works, just how its applied to the medium and the medium itself changing to accept the patterns. As a matter of fact, given that file sizes are large but not that large in most cases and the drive's supposed write speed, the head may not have to work as hard. There's not enough in the article to tell, but I'm extrapolating from current design.
And while the 5-1/4 inch drive bay still exists the drive that gave the bay its name is long gone. So why is it so important to stick with it? Give designers some more flexibility, and who knows what kind of desktops they might create. And in case you haven't noticed, very few laptops have 5-1/4 inch bays and they pack the same number of features into more compact forms, including CD/DVD drives. The need to miniaturize and make components fit into new configurations is a great driver of technological innovation and should not be discounted.
Its also not known whether the supporting hardware for a holographic drive will fit in a standard drive bay once they shave the discs down to size.
Why does the technology have to be a slave to a drive bay's size? If this technology is robust enough and delivers the performance/storage gains enumerated, then why won't computer manufacturers go to the expedient of updating their cases to accomodate it? 300 Gb of storage is too seductive to simply let go because of the inconvenience of the media size. And I suspect they can refine the media to fit current technology if it proves cost effective. Of course if they had to shave 300 Gb down to say 250 Gb, how a great a loss would that be?
I think it's easy to say that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may temporarily have to tangle, but if this technology pans out, they won't have to fight for long. The whole holographic concept is light-years ahead.
From vunet.com: The discs, holding 300GB each, use so-called Tapestry holographic memory technology to store data by interference of light. They are also able to read and write data at 10 times the speed of a normal DVD.
From New Scientist: The discs, at 13 centimetres across, are a little wider than conventional DVDs, and slightly thicker. Normal DVDs record data by measuring microscopic ridges on the surface of a spinning disc. Two competing successors to the DVD format - Blu-ray and HD-DVD - use the same technique but exploit shorter wavelengths of light to cram more information onto a surface.
Safe to say that the fight between Blu-ray and HD-DVD has now become moot. The only issue will be getting people to invest in the hardware to play the new disks, but heck, all the guys with huge p0rn collections will drive this market if nothing else.
From New Scientist: Although holographic memory was first suggested in 1963, it has failed to find commercial success so far.
Imagine that. A useful technology sits on the shelf, because business didn't think it was a good idea. 1963! Can you imagine where we would be if this technology was around in the 80's?
We can't even agree on what "child pornography" is. Is it a picture of a naked child, a written or graphic novel that includes minors having sex, a sexually explicit movie that has "young looking" actors, photographs of child models in "inappropriate" clothing or "suggestive" poses, anything that shows the genitalia of a minor?
I'm a parent, and I think I damned well know what child pornography is. There's a big difference between my taking photos of my baby girl that are for my family photo album and some sleaze suckering in kids and posing them in suggestive sexual positions, many times with adults (usually fat slobs of men). What person in their right mind is going to post a naked picture of their son/daughter for other people to look at?
There may be quite a few "gray" areas in normal pornography, but anyone who produces pictures of children in suggestive sexual poses and worse, makes money off the deal, is looking to lose their genetalia if I get my hands on them.
The concern is raised in the next issue of the journal Acta Astronautica by Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.
And he is after all, one of the most reputable names in the computing field today.
Computer scientists argue that to hack a computer, or write a virus that will infect it, requires a knowledge of how the computer and the software it is running work: a computer on Earth is going to be as alien to the aliens as they would be to us. But Dr Carrigan says there is still a risk.
There most certainly is a risk: a risk that someone in the government might actually take a particle physicist's word that aliens are trying to hack the Internet (which, given the speed of light, most enlightened civilizations in the galaxy won't find out about for about 200 years, assuming they are listening in the first place).
On the one hand, I don't know why this is a story. This guy is out of his element, and no one should be taking him too seriously (Independence Day buffs notwithstanding). On the other hand, the chance that people in positions of power with less than two neurons to rub together might take this guy seriously, thereby jeopardizing peaceful scientific research (see Contact) has me just a bit concerned.
I can add the date to my calendar of events to be ignored. I suspect I will continue using XP until they stop supporting it. Vista does not impress me at first blush.
Just who is this guy going to get to do this? I'm not volunteering... Leave the p0rn alone. Most of it is harmless. Expend the energy going after child pornographers; that's a fight I'll sign up for.
From the review: You will learn how to ensure your app is flexible and maintainable, and how good, structured design can help avoid problems like browser incompatibilities. Along the way it helps you unlearn many old coding habits.
To quote a famous 900-year old green swamp-dweller, "you must unlearn what you have learned."
This sounds intriguing. Anything that could help mitigate the problems of interfacing and data presentation on the web would be a blessing.
But if it's true that the Xbox is unstable, then they may not make enough sales or sell enough after-market stuff to be able to absorb the loss. Let the patching commence!
You have obviously read more into my post than I intended. Don't let me stop you from using my post as a platform for your own agenda.
If I have in fact read more into it, I apologize, but these are things I feel passionate about. As a matter of fact, the greatest saying to come from the Apollo program was "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we... [put your favorite problem here]." And truth be told, there is no reason we can't cure cancer or AIDS, house the homeless, feed the hungry. And believe it or not, we can do these things. It requires the same level of dedication that the men and women of NASA brought to Apollo, along with putting aside profitability and nationalistic pride.
I feel mankind has to explore space, because ultimately there are resources we can tap there to improve life here. Imagine being able to ship heavy industrial manufacturing up to the Moon, reducing the amount of pollution and environmental damage. The Moon is just chock full of mineral resources waiting to be tapped, so we no longer have to lay waste to our planet to dig them out. The list goes on.
I want us to start thinking about this seriously now, before we're forced to in the future by some cataclysmic event. If it's an agenda, then I think it's an important one. As always, opinions will differ.
For the same reason we send robots into hazardous environments - it is too dangerous to justify sending humans.
Of course it's dangerous! It's space! Vacuum, radiation, and all that. And yes, unmanned probes do a wonderful job scouting things out (look at the Voyager probes and the Mars rovers). But unless we're planning to colonize Mars with von Neumann robots and allow them to become an advanced civilization bent on destroying humanity (cue Battlestar Galactica theme [the old one]), Mankind is eventually going out there to face the hazards.
This is the same argument they made when the idea of going to the Moon came up. Jerome Wiesner, head of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee recomended to Kennedy that unmanned Moon probes would be more cost effective and just as useful in beating the Russians. But the Russian had been besting us in human spaceflight, not probes (it seems like every probe they tried to send to Mars crashed or missed the planet) and in the end, men went to the Moon, though the Surveyor and Ranger probes went there first to scope things out.
What it comes down to is that there are alway Nervous Nellies who look at the expense and/or danger factor involved in something and go "we shouldn't do that" while simultaneously hiding under their beds. The movement of Mankind to space is inevitable, just as Columbus, Magellan, Cook, the Wright Brothers, and Lindbergh leading us into new frontiers was in their time. You can't stop progress, and anyone who thinks we're going to sit here on our over-crowded, polution-tinged rock and let the robots have all the fun is kidding themselves.
The keyboard - again, a component that's ALWAYS in play. Cheap keyboards are horrible. Have you seen how much geeks are willing to pay for antique IBM keyboards from back when they made them well? If you spend a lot of time using your keyboard, and if you post to/. you probably do, then getting hold of a decent quality one will make a world of difference.
Ah yes... the melodious clackety-clack of IBM keys, with their smooth but firm response. You knew you were typing with those bad boys. And more importantly, it made Moria more exciting.
...apparently did not deploy its sampling tools, which was kind of the point of the mission. Still, it's a pretty major feat and the article says they might try again, to see if they can get their samples. And check out this great image of the asteroid with the probe's shadow.
All you need to do is overlook one itty bitty thing and it becomes a weak link, but I still wouldn't call it "bad coding practices".
Bad coding can take on many forms. The single hardest thing to get people to do is sanity-check data. I work in Perl and I swear by the -T switch (taint mode) because it forces me to verify that data passed in from the real world is in fact valid and doesn't contain any surprises. Now mind you, it can lead to some ugly-looking regexs, but if you're writing a CGI that calls for access to a database or activates some internal process, you can't take the risk that someone won't try to force malicious code into it to get it do what they want.
That said, you can be as thorough as you like, run the code through several evaluations, UAT it to death, and end up overlooking an obvious avenue. It's a good idea to make sure all code that interfaces with the real world gets put through a code review, especially by people who don't work with that code every day. You may not be able to stop everything but you can sure whittle down your vulnerabilities to an insignificant number and make them much easier to fix if they become exploited.
This whole debate is not about evolution in the sense of physical evolution, but mental evolution. It can be proven fairly conclusively that organisms evolve (anyone who has ever dabbled with fruit flies knows this). Darwin called it the "Theory" of Evolution because when it was proposed, that's exaclty what it was, a theory. A theory which has been verified through many thousands of experiments and observations.
But while it appears that the physical mechanism of evolution works well to shape and adapt an organism to its environment, the same cannot be said for mental evolution. The mind is a tricky thing. The most sophisticated computer you will ever find, but it can play tricks upon itself, believe in contradictory statements (Captain Kirk was famous for defeating computers with illogical statements, but his brain was perfectly capable of handling them), and send false impressions/sensations to the body.
Evolution on the mental scale belongs to the individual. Knowledge is the fuel that is poured on the fire of mentality to make it possible for us to reason and dream and grow. Despite that, there are those who douse their flames with idolatry, obstinance, and ignorance. What they "believe" is more important that what "is." And down that path lie pride, bigotry, and fear-mongering.
Do I beleieve in God? Sure. Why not? I haven't seen any other theories out there as to where everything came from. Why not believe in some supernatural being, until such time as we have something more concrete? But don't let that belief blind you to reality and the wonders it holds. As I tell people, who says God couldn't have created Adam and Eve through evolution? Where do Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson get off telling God how he should run his universe? Seems like the ultimate sin of hubris to me.
From Information Week: According to Gartner analysts Martin Reynolds and Mike McGuire, Sony's XCP technology is stymied by sticking a fingernail-size piece of opaque tape on the outer edge of the CD.
Ok, if I'm a Sony exec, do I feel very stupid right now?
From Gartner: After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. Gartner believes that it will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.
And being the music industry, they will not give up. Like lemmings to the sea. Really, there's nothing they can do. If someone can create software to copy-protect a CD, some enterprising soul can create software to defeat it.
They'll keep it up, because they will be in a blind panic at the idea of their profits drying up, even though they could spend time and effort creating some kind of shared, P2P music publication system whereby they could make money and people could get the music they wanted. But that's just one man's opinion.
we're nothing but a bunch of egomaniacs who think that they "get it", but really don't when it comes to application development, IT, networking, etc... Unfortunately, we're far too common.
Speaking as a card-carrying egomaniac, I'd like to think that I come up with a few cogent and well reasoned ideas now and then. And the fact is this is a forum for people's knowledge as well as their opinions. I find that more often than not, people here open up avenues of discussion about topics that the mainstream media won't touch because they don't fit conveniently into a sound bite or might piss off the advertisers.
Maybe not everyone here has two neurons to rub together, but I think the vast majority of us can back up our egos with knowledge and common sense.
From eWeek: The group that published the exploit said Microsoft has been aware of the Javascript Window() vulnerability for several months but was mistakenly treating it as a low-priority denial-of-service flaw.
Because anything that allows a malicious user to exploit your system and hijack isn't a flaw... it's a feature!
I'd give anything to be outsourced to someplace I'd want to live, say New Mexico, Northern California. I like making a lot of money, but it just doesn't go that far in New Jersey, where property taxes are out of control and there are just too many people. I'd take a pay cut to live in some place that was quieter, with a lower cost-of-living. And in this day-and-age of telecommuting, why not? I suspect it would save companies a fortune just by not having to have huge amounts of office space and the environment would certainly be served by getting a large number of commuters off the road.
It is interesting to note, that the telescope in question is named for perhaps the greatest administrator NASA ever had, who ran the agency during the critical years of the Apollo program and quit in 1968 shortly before the Apollo 8 mission which first sent men around the Moon. James Webb was, by the admission of many in NASA at the time, the best administrator they could have had, even though he was not an engineer but a politician. I suspect if he were still around, he'd be able to get his telescope built on time.
Until I saw a series of controlled laboratory tests and their results, I'll remain a bit skeptical. DNA isn't your garden-variety chemical and processing it is so tedious precisely because of that fact. Speed in testing DNA may be desireable (look at the trouble they have to go through identifying Katrina or 9/11 victims), but accuracy is more important. It has to be consistant to be regarded seriously as a security device.
What's more, so they have my DNA and know who I am. How? That data will have to be stored somewhere. An RFID chip in my passport? A government-run DNA database? Better yet, so what? Assuming I haven't faked the RFID chip or hacked the DNA DB, who's to say I'm not a terrorist? Maybe I don't have a criminal record and maybe I'm not Muslim (remember such golden oldies as the Bader-Meinhof?). Speedy DNA processing isn't going to solve the fundamental security problem, which is how do we read your mind.
Slashdot Mirror
...Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Actually, it seems like an interesting idea. We all have libraries of CDs based on our likes and I suspect if the libraries were analyzed we'd find slighlty deeper relations between the disparate music we collect. I've got a very eclectic collection of music and I'd be hard pressed to see the link between Reba McIntyre, Pink Floyd, and David Sanborn, but maybe there is one.
Of course some conspiracy theorist is going to use this to determine that the music industry is actually selling the same 5 songs over and over again, just in different keys and rhythms. Because we all know it's true.
Of course Cyber Monday doesn't exist, by way of the fact that you can shop at most e-tailers at any time, any day, and with advances in shipping, you can shop and get things delivered to you right up to Christmas day in most cases.
Of course some marketing person thought this up -- they thought up New Coke didn't they?
From Business Week: That's not to suggest that the Cyber Monday boost is a total fabrication. The fact is, people do most of their online shopping at work -- 58% of them, according to comScore Networks. They often get started in earnest on Mondays, when they return from a frustrating weekend at the mall to their broadband connections at work.
The fact is, many of us are smart enough not to buy into the hype of Black Friday, let alone Cyber Monday. I can shop online any time, from work, from home. It's easier to do from work because there's little chance of someone discovering what you're buying. Mind you, you have to be careful and actually work occasionally...
The holographic drive is still using lasers for read/write, just in a new way, so I doubt the head will be that much bigger, except for the necessity of a beam spliter used to create the interference patterns. I really don't see anything here to indicate a major change in the way the technology works, just how its applied to the medium and the medium itself changing to accept the patterns. As a matter of fact, given that file sizes are large but not that large in most cases and the drive's supposed write speed, the head may not have to work as hard. There's not enough in the article to tell, but I'm extrapolating from current design.
And while the 5-1/4 inch drive bay still exists the drive that gave the bay its name is long gone. So why is it so important to stick with it? Give designers some more flexibility, and who knows what kind of desktops they might create. And in case you haven't noticed, very few laptops have 5-1/4 inch bays and they pack the same number of features into more compact forms, including CD/DVD drives. The need to miniaturize and make components fit into new configurations is a great driver of technological innovation and should not be discounted.
Why does the technology have to be a slave to a drive bay's size? If this technology is robust enough and delivers the performance/storage gains enumerated, then why won't computer manufacturers go to the expedient of updating their cases to accomodate it? 300 Gb of storage is too seductive to simply let go because of the inconvenience of the media size. And I suspect they can refine the media to fit current technology if it proves cost effective. Of course if they had to shave 300 Gb down to say 250 Gb, how a great a loss would that be?
I think it's easy to say that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may temporarily have to tangle, but if this technology pans out, they won't have to fight for long. The whole holographic concept is light-years ahead.
From vunet.com: The discs, holding 300GB each, use so-called Tapestry holographic memory technology to store data by interference of light. They are also able to read and write data at 10 times the speed of a normal DVD.
From New Scientist: The discs, at 13 centimetres across, are a little wider than conventional DVDs, and slightly thicker. Normal DVDs record data by measuring microscopic ridges on the surface of a spinning disc. Two competing successors to the DVD format - Blu-ray and HD-DVD - use the same technique but exploit shorter wavelengths of light to cram more information onto a surface.
Safe to say that the fight between Blu-ray and HD-DVD has now become moot. The only issue will be getting people to invest in the hardware to play the new disks, but heck, all the guys with huge p0rn collections will drive this market if nothing else.
From New Scientist: Although holographic memory was first suggested in 1963, it has failed to find commercial success so far.
Imagine that. A useful technology sits on the shelf, because business didn't think it was a good idea. 1963! Can you imagine where we would be if this technology was around in the 80's?
I'm a parent, and I think I damned well know what child pornography is. There's a big difference between my taking photos of my baby girl that are for my family photo album and some sleaze suckering in kids and posing them in suggestive sexual positions, many times with adults (usually fat slobs of men). What person in their right mind is going to post a naked picture of their son/daughter for other people to look at?
There may be quite a few "gray" areas in normal pornography, but anyone who produces pictures of children in suggestive sexual poses and worse, makes money off the deal, is looking to lose their genetalia if I get my hands on them.
And he is after all, one of the most reputable names in the computing field today.
Computer scientists argue that to hack a computer, or write a virus that will infect it, requires a knowledge of how the computer and the software it is running work: a computer on Earth is going to be as alien to the aliens as they would be to us. But Dr Carrigan says there is still a risk.There most certainly is a risk: a risk that someone in the government might actually take a particle physicist's word that aliens are trying to hack the Internet (which, given the speed of light, most enlightened civilizations in the galaxy won't find out about for about 200 years, assuming they are listening in the first place).
On the one hand, I don't know why this is a story. This guy is out of his element, and no one should be taking him too seriously (Independence Day buffs notwithstanding). On the other hand, the chance that people in positions of power with less than two neurons to rub together might take this guy seriously, thereby jeopardizing peaceful scientific research (see Contact) has me just a bit concerned.
I can add the date to my calendar of events to be ignored. I suspect I will continue using XP until they stop supporting it. Vista does not impress me at first blush.
Just who is this guy going to get to do this? I'm not volunteering... Leave the p0rn alone. Most of it is harmless. Expend the energy going after child pornographers; that's a fight I'll sign up for.
From the review: You will learn how to ensure your app is flexible and maintainable, and how good, structured design can help avoid problems like browser incompatibilities. Along the way it helps you unlearn many old coding habits.
To quote a famous 900-year old green swamp-dweller, "you must unlearn what you have learned."
This sounds intriguing. Anything that could help mitigate the problems of interfacing and data presentation on the web would be a blessing.
But if it's true that the Xbox is unstable, then they may not make enough sales or sell enough after-market stuff to be able to absorb the loss. Let the patching commence!
No, those would be L'eggs-oes and they would be "hard-boiled" drives.
If I have in fact read more into it, I apologize, but these are things I feel passionate about. As a matter of fact, the greatest saying to come from the Apollo program was "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we... [put your favorite problem here]." And truth be told, there is no reason we can't cure cancer or AIDS, house the homeless, feed the hungry. And believe it or not, we can do these things. It requires the same level of dedication that the men and women of NASA brought to Apollo, along with putting aside profitability and nationalistic pride.
I feel mankind has to explore space, because ultimately there are resources we can tap there to improve life here. Imagine being able to ship heavy industrial manufacturing up to the Moon, reducing the amount of pollution and environmental damage. The Moon is just chock full of mineral resources waiting to be tapped, so we no longer have to lay waste to our planet to dig them out. The list goes on.
I want us to start thinking about this seriously now, before we're forced to in the future by some cataclysmic event. If it's an agenda, then I think it's an important one. As always, opinions will differ.
Of course it's dangerous! It's space! Vacuum, radiation, and all that. And yes, unmanned probes do a wonderful job scouting things out (look at the Voyager probes and the Mars rovers). But unless we're planning to colonize Mars with von Neumann robots and allow them to become an advanced civilization bent on destroying humanity (cue Battlestar Galactica theme [the old one]), Mankind is eventually going out there to face the hazards.
This is the same argument they made when the idea of going to the Moon came up. Jerome Wiesner, head of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee recomended to Kennedy that unmanned Moon probes would be more cost effective and just as useful in beating the Russians. But the Russian had been besting us in human spaceflight, not probes (it seems like every probe they tried to send to Mars crashed or missed the planet) and in the end, men went to the Moon, though the Surveyor and Ranger probes went there first to scope things out.
What it comes down to is that there are alway Nervous Nellies who look at the expense and/or danger factor involved in something and go "we shouldn't do that" while simultaneously hiding under their beds. The movement of Mankind to space is inevitable, just as Columbus, Magellan, Cook, the Wright Brothers, and Lindbergh leading us into new frontiers was in their time. You can't stop progress, and anyone who thinks we're going to sit here on our over-crowded, polution-tinged rock and let the robots have all the fun is kidding themselves.
Besides, I want a job as an asteroid rockhound.
Ah yes... the melodious clackety-clack of IBM keys, with their smooth but firm response. You knew you were typing with those bad boys. And more importantly, it made Moria more exciting.
...apparently did not deploy its sampling tools, which was kind of the point of the mission. Still, it's a pretty major feat and the article says they might try again, to see if they can get their samples. And check out this great image of the asteroid with the probe's shadow.
Bad coding can take on many forms. The single hardest thing to get people to do is sanity-check data. I work in Perl and I swear by the -T switch (taint mode) because it forces me to verify that data passed in from the real world is in fact valid and doesn't contain any surprises. Now mind you, it can lead to some ugly-looking regexs, but if you're writing a CGI that calls for access to a database or activates some internal process, you can't take the risk that someone won't try to force malicious code into it to get it do what they want.
That said, you can be as thorough as you like, run the code through several evaluations, UAT it to death, and end up overlooking an obvious avenue. It's a good idea to make sure all code that interfaces with the real world gets put through a code review, especially by people who don't work with that code every day. You may not be able to stop everything but you can sure whittle down your vulnerabilities to an insignificant number and make them much easier to fix if they become exploited.
...any bad thing I may have ever said about Alabama.
And now Jack can go home, sulk, and concentrate on suing Amazon for all the mean things people said about him.
.This whole debate is not about evolution in the sense of physical evolution, but mental evolution. It can be proven fairly conclusively that organisms evolve (anyone who has ever dabbled with fruit flies knows this). Darwin called it the "Theory" of Evolution because when it was proposed, that's exaclty what it was, a theory. A theory which has been verified through many thousands of experiments and observations.
But while it appears that the physical mechanism of evolution works well to shape and adapt an organism to its environment, the same cannot be said for mental evolution. The mind is a tricky thing. The most sophisticated computer you will ever find, but it can play tricks upon itself, believe in contradictory statements (Captain Kirk was famous for defeating computers with illogical statements, but his brain was perfectly capable of handling them), and send false impressions/sensations to the body.
Evolution on the mental scale belongs to the individual. Knowledge is the fuel that is poured on the fire of mentality to make it possible for us to reason and dream and grow. Despite that, there are those who douse their flames with idolatry, obstinance, and ignorance. What they "believe" is more important that what "is." And down that path lie pride, bigotry, and fear-mongering.
Do I beleieve in God? Sure. Why not? I haven't seen any other theories out there as to where everything came from. Why not believe in some supernatural being, until such time as we have something more concrete? But don't let that belief blind you to reality and the wonders it holds. As I tell people, who says God couldn't have created Adam and Eve through evolution? Where do Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson get off telling God how he should run his universe? Seems like the ultimate sin of hubris to me.
...shares of 3M rose by 15 points
From Information Week: According to Gartner analysts Martin Reynolds and Mike McGuire, Sony's XCP technology is stymied by sticking a fingernail-size piece of opaque tape on the outer edge of the CD.
Ok, if I'm a Sony exec, do I feel very stupid right now?
From Gartner: After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. Gartner believes that it will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.
And being the music industry, they will not give up. Like lemmings to the sea. Really, there's nothing they can do. If someone can create software to copy-protect a CD, some enterprising soul can create software to defeat it.
They'll keep it up, because they will be in a blind panic at the idea of their profits drying up, even though they could spend time and effort creating some kind of shared, P2P music publication system whereby they could make money and people could get the music they wanted. But that's just one man's opinion.
we're nothing but a bunch of egomaniacs who think that they "get it", but really don't when it comes to application development, IT, networking, etc... Unfortunately, we're far too common.
Speaking as a card-carrying egomaniac, I'd like to think that I come up with a few cogent and well reasoned ideas now and then. And the fact is this is a forum for people's knowledge as well as their opinions. I find that more often than not, people here open up avenues of discussion about topics that the mainstream media won't touch because they don't fit conveniently into a sound bite or might piss off the advertisers.
Maybe not everyone here has two neurons to rub together, but I think the vast majority of us can back up our egos with knowledge and common sense.
From eWeek: The group that published the exploit said Microsoft has been aware of the Javascript Window() vulnerability for several months but was mistakenly treating it as a low-priority denial-of-service flaw.
Because anything that allows a malicious user to exploit your system and hijack isn't a flaw... it's a feature!
I'd give anything to be outsourced to someplace I'd want to live, say New Mexico, Northern California. I like making a lot of money, but it just doesn't go that far in New Jersey, where property taxes are out of control and there are just too many people. I'd take a pay cut to live in some place that was quieter, with a lower cost-of-living. And in this day-and-age of telecommuting, why not? I suspect it would save companies a fortune just by not having to have huge amounts of office space and the environment would certainly be served by getting a large number of commuters off the road.
It is interesting to note, that the telescope in question is named for perhaps the greatest administrator NASA ever had, who ran the agency during the critical years of the Apollo program and quit in 1968 shortly before the Apollo 8 mission which first sent men around the Moon. James Webb was, by the admission of many in NASA at the time, the best administrator they could have had, even though he was not an engineer but a politician. I suspect if he were still around, he'd be able to get his telescope built on time.
Until I saw a series of controlled laboratory tests and their results, I'll remain a bit skeptical. DNA isn't your garden-variety chemical and processing it is so tedious precisely because of that fact. Speed in testing DNA may be desireable (look at the trouble they have to go through identifying Katrina or 9/11 victims), but accuracy is more important. It has to be consistant to be regarded seriously as a security device.
What's more, so they have my DNA and know who I am. How? That data will have to be stored somewhere. An RFID chip in my passport? A government-run DNA database? Better yet, so what? Assuming I haven't faked the RFID chip or hacked the DNA DB, who's to say I'm not a terrorist? Maybe I don't have a criminal record and maybe I'm not Muslim (remember such golden oldies as the Bader-Meinhof?). Speedy DNA processing isn't going to solve the fundamental security problem, which is how do we read your mind.