Taniuchi does say in this article "By expanding these principles, 81 types of bacteria could solve a full nine-by-nine grid" - the number of squares that can be solved seems to be entirely dependent on the number of bacteria types, and they were working with 16 types. I don't know how easy it would be to expand that to 81 types (I don't know what differentiates a bacteria "type" or how many variants are commonly available, etc). I assume there was some reason they didn't go with 81 types right away, but maybe it was just time limitations and the maths is solid enough that you can reasonably extrapolate up from a small sample.
Read my comment on how someone who has lived debt free can end up on the receiving end of these companies through no fault of their own. It's not just the financially irresponsible that these people go after, and that's even if they're going after the right person at all (plenty of other comments where people are being pursued as a matter of mistaken identity). I agree people should generally act responsibly with their money, in fact I'm generally the first to advocate this (see the debt free part) but to apply it to a particular person's situation without knowing all of the circumstances is most certainly trollish.
If only it were that clear cut. My first ever internet service was dialup with Demon, when I eventually moved home, I called to cancel because I was getting cable at the new address and their systems were down so they advised me to email them, which I immediately did. I then cancelled my direct debit just to be on the safe side. Almost a year later I got a letter from a debt collection agency saying I'd missed 9 payments and owed them something like £180 - it turns out not only did they not bother to cancel my payment, but they also let 9 whole months of payments elapse before they even tried to get in touch, and when they eventually did they went through a collection agency instead of speaking to me direct (I know they didn't try and contact me because the old address/phone number is my parent's place and I had a forwarder set up for all of my mail). I was furious, but at the time I was in the middle of applying for a job with a financial organisation who were extremely cautious about not hiring people with bad credit, so I had little choice but to pay up or risk being turned down through no fault of my own.
I spoke to Demon again, explained I was not happy with the way they'd dealt with this matter (why not contact me after the first payment failed, for instance, or why have the first point of contact be a threat of legal action). I thought the matter was sorted, next year they did exactly the same thing - they'd still not cancelled the account and yet again they let it lapse 9 months before getting in touch. This time I did contest it and they dropped the charges and I never heard from them again. Note that this is a company that's generally pretty well respected, also note that I have never been in debt (mortgage aside) my entire life, I've never taken an overdraft, I use a credit card for online payment for the payment protection but always pay it off within the month, I didn't even take a student loan at university, I worked to pay my way. If this company had bad mouthed me all over Facebook, or its equivalent at the time, I not only would have been mortified, I probably would have lost the job I was going for to boot (and since I'd already moved home on the basis of the job because the credit checks were just a technicality, I'd have been out on the street too).
That is no doubt why you were marked troll, because your post either shows an incredible level of naivety about how these companies operate (they don't care about the circumstances or the consequences of their actions, they just want the money no matter what), and about the fact that it's easy to end up on the wrong side of them regardless of whether you actually did anything wrong or not (and that's without even going into the fact that life often ruins the best laid plans and renders people unable to repay when they were otherwise comfortable), or you knew this full well and were just trying to get a reaction from people. A lot of people borrow beyond their means and create a rod for their own backs, but by no means does that apply to everyone - debt collection agencies, however, fail to see the distinction.
I suspect you're only partly right. Given the choice, the older generation primarily (but not exclusively, I know plenty of older people who use the internet for this service, I also know at least one person in their 20s who works with PCs all day and spends most of his leisure time on them and still uses a phone book for local business numbers) would keep their phone books, but I suspect it won't be their choice to make. Eventually the companies producing these things will see that the uptake is tiny and they'll abandon them as a cost-saving exercise - companies just don't have the same ethics.
Maybe hand them out in libraries, GP surgeries or local government offices. That way they're relatively easy to access, the phone company saves some money on printing and distribution, the environment benefits from producing and distributing far less of these things, and the rest of us don't have yet another bunch of paper to carry out to the recycling bin.
Why not buy a note book and write down all your important numbers. That way you have a point of reference if the power's out, but you don't have to feel you're wasting more paper than necessary to achieve this.
It's still a waste of a tree, even if that tree wouldn't have been grown otherwise. If the amount of carbon created by processing, printing and distributing a tree's worth of these things is greater than the amount of carbon cleaned by that tree in its lifetime, then it's still a net gain.
What if the telephone line goes down, or it's too dark to see and you don't have a torch/candles to read the directory, or your kids used it to make a papier-mâché volcano for a school project? We can all come up with circumstances where method X will be rendered useless by event Y, but seriously, for most people this isn't an issue, and for the ones where it is an issue they'll more than likely have a contingency (like writing down some useful numbers, or just driving to the store to see if they have power, or even using the internet on their mobile phone). And if they don't plan ahead before the first outage they almost certainly will after the first outage. I've had one power outage in the last decade, despite last year being the worst winter on record or something - it lasted precisely two hours and, even if I'd wanted to phone someone, I would have been screwed trying to find the phone book buried in some cupboard in the dark.
It would have to be opt in, otherwise you end up with the situation where I call them, say don't deliver, then move out - the next person is expecting a directory but the adress is marked as do not deliver so they call up to complain. Every year, a week after the directories go out, they'd be inundated with people calling to complain. With opt in, the worst that would happen is you'll get a directory when you didn't want it and throw it in the recycling bin. Seriously, though, I don't understand why they don't just withdraw it completely except as a paid service for people who call and ask for it. A few weeks ago we got one of these (actually it was the yellow pages rather than the white pages) and I put it straight in the bin - usually I go put it in a cupboard for a year but I realised I've been doing that for the best part of ten years and I've never had to resort to it because the internet is so much simpler, and even calling the directory services is easier than digging out a paper version. If there are a handful of holdouts who like a bit dead tree version I'm sure they wouldn't mind calling for it and paying a small sum to cover the cost associated with producing a low-volume edition with reduced/no ads.
The whole reason we have copyright is because information wants to be free. If you could put your information out in the world and not have people want to take it away and do their own thing, you wouldn't need copyright. There's no conflict for someone to acknowledge information wants to be free AND that we need copyright (AND that current copyright is too far-reaching). Maybe in your mind everyone on the planet hold an extremely polarised opinion on every topic, but most people are realists and live with compromises (not to mention/. is a wealth of differing opinion, just because a bunch of people think there should be no copyright at all, doesn't mean you won't find plenty of people who think a reasonable period of copyright with fair use is bad).
Well not necessarily. The alternative is we make the system opt-out instead of opt-in - have a system where everyone's organs can be used unless they expressly request otherwise. At the moment most organs go to waste not because people care one way or the other about what happens to them after death, but because they're too apathetic to go register, or they can't be bothered because there's nothing really in it for them, or perhaps they've even just never thought about it. Switch the system and those who care enough to fill out a simple form can still remain intact while everyone else can give something back, problem solved.
The very fact that the government doesn't just openly say "your organs become state property on your death" (and save hundreds of lives of people on transplant lists every year) should demonstrate that, despite your own feelings, there are sufficient people in society who disagree with you to prevent this happening. My own personal feeling is that if you can do some good for someone else after your death, why not, but I also respect other people's opinions differ.
Cracking things like hashed passwords or encrypted data is computationally difficult. It's natural that, given this type of computational power (i.e. distributed in "the cloud" rather than in one system), it's one of the first things people try.
Placing the dollar sign after the value isn't necessarily a mistake; it's valid usage in some parts of the world. This might also indicate that the author's first language isn't English, which might excuse some of the other mistakes.
Indeed. Funding drying up? Become a cyborg! Except we've now had dozens of these "professor gets X inserted/implanted/grafted to Y" stories. I wouldn't mind if even one cyborg professor had ever gone on a mad killing rampage as a result, but so far: nothing.
Besides, it's not like this mythical team of sound engineers are ripping it lossless. By the time they've compressed it down to distributable file size levels any extra effort on their part is almost certainly wasted.
Re:Or you can download them for free
on
The Beatles On iTunes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Besides, they broke up 40 years ago, most of this stuff was recorded before a lot of the people posting here were even born. This is the kind of stuff that should be in the public domain, if we didn't have ridiculous copyright periods that perpetuate the right to make money from the same content ad infinitum. People who rush out to buy this stuff again just give ammo to the labels demanding ever longer copyrights.
I think a few torrent sites might beg to differ - maybe you need to add a "legitimate" in that sentence:)
Still, agree with GP - it's relatively big news if you happen to be in that niche of "people who like the Beatles but not enough to not already own their entire back catalogue", but for everyone else it's no bigger deal than them announcing they've got the latest Katy Perry album for sale. There's only so many times you can use the "this is game changing!" marketing tactic and then deliver something average before people stop believing it, though.
Downloads are really supposed to be more convenient than CDs. Brick and mortar stores do not have 24/7 hours.
Where exactly do you live that you don't have 24/7 stores? My parents live in the arse end of nowhere in the UK and yet even they have three 24/7 supermarkets within 20 minutes - sure they might not have that niche CD, but for the mainstream stuff they tend to be both well stocked and, quite often, cheaper than the digital alternatives (that's not to say that the rest of your points aren't valid, by the way, or even that online stores aren't capitalising on the fact that people are too lazy to spend less than 20 minutes to go pick up a CD).
I'm not a huge Beatles fan but I'm very tempted to get Beatles Rock Band for Day Tripper alone. I guess the thing with the Beatles is, while you might not like every song they did (although some people clearly do), they had a hell of a lot of variety in their catalogue so there's pretty much something for everyone.
Maybe because the last thing you want is people having babies on a planet without the available natural resources for life? How do you think people will react, when they realise their offspring will die shortly after they do, as the resources they took with them are used up (or even before, given the lack of medical facilities to treat illnesses). Or when their choice is to take someone else's food/water/air to feed their offspring, how will that end? Of course you could sterilise them or choose only sterile people, but then it's hardly "seeding" anything.
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday here. If we have in the past and can continue to send people to war with a realistic chance that they'll die, then what's the issue with sending someone on such a noble endeavour as this. At least they will know their lives advanced all of humanity, instead of advancing a few inches into no man's land or paying the ultimate price for the enrichment of a few billionaires arguing over resources.
I don't think any company or government would attract the massive negative publicity of leaving a pioneering Mars explorer to suffocate. Of course, that doesn't preclude the cameras going offline one day and when they come back you find a mysterious explosion/fire killed the colonists off, right around the time budget custs were being discussed... Seriously, though, I can't see there would be any shortage of people willing to do this for a number of reasons, from simple curiosity about the universe, to altruistic reasons such as advancing scientific knowledge, to financial (if some kind of reward was paid to their families back home), to simple vanity (sure fire way to get your name in the history books). So long as people go into it with their eyes open and aware of all the risks, I don't think its a bad thing at all - the first astronauts knew there was a high probability they'd never come back (plenty never did but there's still no shortage of people wanting to go up there), same for the first pioneers of flight for that matter.
Fire up a bunch of weapons and some orbital cameras and you probably just came up with a way to pay for the mission, real life subscription Running Man. Who loves you, and who do you love?
Slashdot Mirror
Taniuchi does say in this article "By expanding these principles, 81 types of bacteria could solve a full nine-by-nine grid" - the number of squares that can be solved seems to be entirely dependent on the number of bacteria types, and they were working with 16 types. I don't know how easy it would be to expand that to 81 types (I don't know what differentiates a bacteria "type" or how many variants are commonly available, etc). I assume there was some reason they didn't go with 81 types right away, but maybe it was just time limitations and the maths is solid enough that you can reasonably extrapolate up from a small sample.
Read my comment on how someone who has lived debt free can end up on the receiving end of these companies through no fault of their own. It's not just the financially irresponsible that these people go after, and that's even if they're going after the right person at all (plenty of other comments where people are being pursued as a matter of mistaken identity). I agree people should generally act responsibly with their money, in fact I'm generally the first to advocate this (see the debt free part) but to apply it to a particular person's situation without knowing all of the circumstances is most certainly trollish.
If only it were that clear cut. My first ever internet service was dialup with Demon, when I eventually moved home, I called to cancel because I was getting cable at the new address and their systems were down so they advised me to email them, which I immediately did. I then cancelled my direct debit just to be on the safe side. Almost a year later I got a letter from a debt collection agency saying I'd missed 9 payments and owed them something like £180 - it turns out not only did they not bother to cancel my payment, but they also let 9 whole months of payments elapse before they even tried to get in touch, and when they eventually did they went through a collection agency instead of speaking to me direct (I know they didn't try and contact me because the old address/phone number is my parent's place and I had a forwarder set up for all of my mail). I was furious, but at the time I was in the middle of applying for a job with a financial organisation who were extremely cautious about not hiring people with bad credit, so I had little choice but to pay up or risk being turned down through no fault of my own.
I spoke to Demon again, explained I was not happy with the way they'd dealt with this matter (why not contact me after the first payment failed, for instance, or why have the first point of contact be a threat of legal action). I thought the matter was sorted, next year they did exactly the same thing - they'd still not cancelled the account and yet again they let it lapse 9 months before getting in touch. This time I did contest it and they dropped the charges and I never heard from them again. Note that this is a company that's generally pretty well respected, also note that I have never been in debt (mortgage aside) my entire life, I've never taken an overdraft, I use a credit card for online payment for the payment protection but always pay it off within the month, I didn't even take a student loan at university, I worked to pay my way. If this company had bad mouthed me all over Facebook, or its equivalent at the time, I not only would have been mortified, I probably would have lost the job I was going for to boot (and since I'd already moved home on the basis of the job because the credit checks were just a technicality, I'd have been out on the street too).
That is no doubt why you were marked troll, because your post either shows an incredible level of naivety about how these companies operate (they don't care about the circumstances or the consequences of their actions, they just want the money no matter what), and about the fact that it's easy to end up on the wrong side of them regardless of whether you actually did anything wrong or not (and that's without even going into the fact that life often ruins the best laid plans and renders people unable to repay when they were otherwise comfortable), or you knew this full well and were just trying to get a reaction from people. A lot of people borrow beyond their means and create a rod for their own backs, but by no means does that apply to everyone - debt collection agencies, however, fail to see the distinction.
I suspect you're only partly right. Given the choice, the older generation primarily (but not exclusively, I know plenty of older people who use the internet for this service, I also know at least one person in their 20s who works with PCs all day and spends most of his leisure time on them and still uses a phone book for local business numbers) would keep their phone books, but I suspect it won't be their choice to make. Eventually the companies producing these things will see that the uptake is tiny and they'll abandon them as a cost-saving exercise - companies just don't have the same ethics.
Maybe hand them out in libraries, GP surgeries or local government offices. That way they're relatively easy to access, the phone company saves some money on printing and distribution, the environment benefits from producing and distributing far less of these things, and the rest of us don't have yet another bunch of paper to carry out to the recycling bin.
Why not buy a note book and write down all your important numbers. That way you have a point of reference if the power's out, but you don't have to feel you're wasting more paper than necessary to achieve this.
It's still a waste of a tree, even if that tree wouldn't have been grown otherwise. If the amount of carbon created by processing, printing and distributing a tree's worth of these things is greater than the amount of carbon cleaned by that tree in its lifetime, then it's still a net gain.
What if the telephone line goes down, or it's too dark to see and you don't have a torch/candles to read the directory, or your kids used it to make a papier-mâché volcano for a school project? We can all come up with circumstances where method X will be rendered useless by event Y, but seriously, for most people this isn't an issue, and for the ones where it is an issue they'll more than likely have a contingency (like writing down some useful numbers, or just driving to the store to see if they have power, or even using the internet on their mobile phone). And if they don't plan ahead before the first outage they almost certainly will after the first outage. I've had one power outage in the last decade, despite last year being the worst winter on record or something - it lasted precisely two hours and, even if I'd wanted to phone someone, I would have been screwed trying to find the phone book buried in some cupboard in the dark.
It would have to be opt in, otherwise you end up with the situation where I call them, say don't deliver, then move out - the next person is expecting a directory but the adress is marked as do not deliver so they call up to complain. Every year, a week after the directories go out, they'd be inundated with people calling to complain. With opt in, the worst that would happen is you'll get a directory when you didn't want it and throw it in the recycling bin. Seriously, though, I don't understand why they don't just withdraw it completely except as a paid service for people who call and ask for it. A few weeks ago we got one of these (actually it was the yellow pages rather than the white pages) and I put it straight in the bin - usually I go put it in a cupboard for a year but I realised I've been doing that for the best part of ten years and I've never had to resort to it because the internet is so much simpler, and even calling the directory services is easier than digging out a paper version. If there are a handful of holdouts who like a bit dead tree version I'm sure they wouldn't mind calling for it and paying a small sum to cover the cost associated with producing a low-volume edition with reduced/no ads.
The whole reason we have copyright is because information wants to be free. If you could put your information out in the world and not have people want to take it away and do their own thing, you wouldn't need copyright. There's no conflict for someone to acknowledge information wants to be free AND that we need copyright (AND that current copyright is too far-reaching). Maybe in your mind everyone on the planet hold an extremely polarised opinion on every topic, but most people are realists and live with compromises (not to mention /. is a wealth of differing opinion, just because a bunch of people think there should be no copyright at all, doesn't mean you won't find plenty of people who think a reasonable period of copyright with fair use is bad).
Well not necessarily. The alternative is we make the system opt-out instead of opt-in - have a system where everyone's organs can be used unless they expressly request otherwise. At the moment most organs go to waste not because people care one way or the other about what happens to them after death, but because they're too apathetic to go register, or they can't be bothered because there's nothing really in it for them, or perhaps they've even just never thought about it. Switch the system and those who care enough to fill out a simple form can still remain intact while everyone else can give something back, problem solved.
The very fact that the government doesn't just openly say "your organs become state property on your death" (and save hundreds of lives of people on transplant lists every year) should demonstrate that, despite your own feelings, there are sufficient people in society who disagree with you to prevent this happening. My own personal feeling is that if you can do some good for someone else after your death, why not, but I also respect other people's opinions differ.
Cracking things like hashed passwords or encrypted data is computationally difficult. It's natural that, given this type of computational power (i.e. distributed in "the cloud" rather than in one system), it's one of the first things people try.
Placing the dollar sign after the value isn't necessarily a mistake; it's valid usage in some parts of the world. This might also indicate that the author's first language isn't English, which might excuse some of the other mistakes.
Indeed. Funding drying up? Become a cyborg! Except we've now had dozens of these "professor gets X inserted/implanted/grafted to Y" stories. I wouldn't mind if even one cyborg professor had ever gone on a mad killing rampage as a result, but so far: nothing.
Besides, it's not like this mythical team of sound engineers are ripping it lossless. By the time they've compressed it down to distributable file size levels any extra effort on their part is almost certainly wasted.
Besides, they broke up 40 years ago, most of this stuff was recorded before a lot of the people posting here were even born. This is the kind of stuff that should be in the public domain, if we didn't have ridiculous copyright periods that perpetuate the right to make money from the same content ad infinitum. People who rush out to buy this stuff again just give ammo to the labels demanding ever longer copyrights.
I think a few torrent sites might beg to differ - maybe you need to add a "legitimate" in that sentence :)
Still, agree with GP - it's relatively big news if you happen to be in that niche of "people who like the Beatles but not enough to not already own their entire back catalogue", but for everyone else it's no bigger deal than them announcing they've got the latest Katy Perry album for sale. There's only so many times you can use the "this is game changing!" marketing tactic and then deliver something average before people stop believing it, though.
Downloads are really supposed to be more convenient than CDs. Brick and mortar stores do not have 24/7 hours.
Where exactly do you live that you don't have 24/7 stores? My parents live in the arse end of nowhere in the UK and yet even they have three 24/7 supermarkets within 20 minutes - sure they might not have that niche CD, but for the mainstream stuff they tend to be both well stocked and, quite often, cheaper than the digital alternatives (that's not to say that the rest of your points aren't valid, by the way, or even that online stores aren't capitalising on the fact that people are too lazy to spend less than 20 minutes to go pick up a CD).
I'm not a huge Beatles fan but I'm very tempted to get Beatles Rock Band for Day Tripper alone. I guess the thing with the Beatles is, while you might not like every song they did (although some people clearly do), they had a hell of a lot of variety in their catalogue so there's pretty much something for everyone.
The question is which will we do first, perfect cars without drivers or return sight to the blind. Either way, we are living in pretty interesting times!
Maybe because the last thing you want is people having babies on a planet without the available natural resources for life? How do you think people will react, when they realise their offspring will die shortly after they do, as the resources they took with them are used up (or even before, given the lack of medical facilities to treat illnesses). Or when their choice is to take someone else's food/water/air to feed their offspring, how will that end? Of course you could sterilise them or choose only sterile people, but then it's hardly "seeding" anything.
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday here. If we have in the past and can continue to send people to war with a realistic chance that they'll die, then what's the issue with sending someone on such a noble endeavour as this. At least they will know their lives advanced all of humanity, instead of advancing a few inches into no man's land or paying the ultimate price for the enrichment of a few billionaires arguing over resources.
I don't think any company or government would attract the massive negative publicity of leaving a pioneering Mars explorer to suffocate. Of course, that doesn't preclude the cameras going offline one day and when they come back you find a mysterious explosion/fire killed the colonists off, right around the time budget custs were being discussed... Seriously, though, I can't see there would be any shortage of people willing to do this for a number of reasons, from simple curiosity about the universe, to altruistic reasons such as advancing scientific knowledge, to financial (if some kind of reward was paid to their families back home), to simple vanity (sure fire way to get your name in the history books). So long as people go into it with their eyes open and aware of all the risks, I don't think its a bad thing at all - the first astronauts knew there was a high probability they'd never come back (plenty never did but there's still no shortage of people wanting to go up there), same for the first pioneers of flight for that matter.
Fire up a bunch of weapons and some orbital cameras and you probably just came up with a way to pay for the mission, real life subscription Running Man. Who loves you, and who do you love?