XKCD, Something Positive, Questionable Content, Sinfest and Gone with the Blastwave...

"value of the concept cannot be completely alien..."

by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) on Tuesday December 25, @11:39AM

Says the man spending Christmas morning with his computer, reading Slashdot instead of hanging out with fellow humans in the real world...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but researchers have been successfully cloning whole mammals like cats and sheep for some time now. It's been nine years since Dolly the sheep was cloned. I am not a biologist, but it seems to me that if we can clone one mammal, then the same broad set of techniques can be used to clone pretty much any other animal. If I recall correctly, to achieve the success of Dolly, the research team had to go through many, many attempts before achieving success, a failure rate which might not be acceptable for human cloning.

That assumes you are trying to clone a whole being of course. Cloning of organs or partial cloning of tissues should be rather easier to achieve.

As far as I'm concerned, human cloning can be treated as an accomplished fact, meaning it is now high time we started drafting ethical guidelines and legislative actions to limit the types of cloning we do. Cloning a new organ for you, or creating a clone you and your spouse wish to raise as your child is OK in my book (and most others I think) but creating an entire clone so you can harvest multiple organs or perform a brain transplant is, to me, a heinous and incredibly callous act. It requires that an individual be brought into this world solely for the purpose of being murdered and used as spare parts.

Yeah, sure, we don't know how to achieve that, not yet. But it is far from being science fiction at this point. Achieving that capability is just a matter of time.

what is this unity-lens-shopping of which you speak?

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and Gnome in Fallback mode because I still want Compiz and all that pretty desktop cube eye candy, but I still have all the default Unity crap still installed. Attempting to use the command you suggested (in simulate mode only because I don't want to make any real changes) gives me this result:

root@machine1:/home/User# dpkg --simulate --purge unity-lens-shopping dpkg: warning: there's no installed package matching unity-lens-shopping

Furthermore; browsing through Synaptic Package Manager reveals the following unity-lens-* packages:

unity-lens-applications (installed)

unity-lens-askubuntu (not installed)

unity-lens-files (installed)

unity-lens-github (not installed)

unity-lens-gwibber (not installed)

unity-lens-music (installed)

unity-lens-sshsearch (not installed)

unity-lens-video (installed)

unity-lens-vm (not installed)

unity-lens-wikipedia (not installed)

It's my understanding that unity-lens-shopping is part of 12.10 and later and also that it only effects people still using Unity and Dash.

Technically; the Korean war never ended, both sides are currently in an armistice, despite the fact that North Korea continues to commit provocative acts. Look up the sinking of the Cheonan sometime.

The accompanying picture to the article makes the find looks suspiciously like Mardi Gras beads. I know of the drunken revellers have bad aim, but I don't think anyone could have managed a toss of that magnitude!

I wasn't thinking so much of the graphite or lithium boiling as I was the carrier solvents commonly in aerosol lubricants. For example, I have two cans of lube spray in my toolbox. Jigaloo graphite spray and 3in1 Lithium grease spray. Both have carrier fluids I am pretty sure would boil off almost instantly in a vacuum*, so the lubricant wouldn't stay fluid long enough to wick its way into the threads.

If they can get the bolt to back out even a little bit, they could apply graphite or lithium in stick form, but from what I read in the article, the bolt is stuck in both directions.

* According the MSDS sheets, those are primarily acetone and propane or petroleum solvent and propane respectively

That leads me to an interesting question: Just how strong is capillary action in a vacuum? With the bolt blocking the hole, any lubricant has to have good wicking properties to get in around the threads. On the other hand, I'd imagine that anything with a low enough viscosity to wick well would also be something that would boil off pretty quickly in a vacuum. That would certainly rule out any of the aerosol graphite or lithium sprays.

I know there have been experiments that included capillary action in micro-gravity, astronauts playing with a globe of water and a straw for example. But as far as I know, all such experiments were in a pressurized, shirt sleeve environment. I'm not aware of any similar experiments with fluids in microgravity *and* vacuum.

Oh I dunno about that. It's been well established that large (in the astronomical sense) and dense rotating objects exhibit Frame Dragging . I believe that contractions and expansions of a stellar object are a possible source of Gravitational Waves

Putting those two effects together, it is easy to imagine that some change in the make up of the sun as it evolves can also affect the nature of the gravity well around it.

This is CLEARLY the work of the Maple Syrup King! I warn you, this is just the opening shot in the interstellar war! Next we get blonds in heat thanks to some nifty bio-warfare, so perhaps it's not all bad....

Just call them the modern Ghost Shirt society

There is a time tested, safe,secure and above all inexpensive method for preserving all the data you heart desires.

1. Plain-text hard copy of all your passwords, account numbers/locations etc. (in my case, my passwords change monthly, so rather than try to update the copy every 30 days, I would just detail the simple algorithm I use to create them, along with the password in use as of time of printing.)

2. Place said hard-copy in a safety deposit box. Preferably a main branch, and not a mall or store-front mini-bank. (Which are more likely to close or relocate over the course of a decade or so.) The bank will give you a card where you can list the people you authorize to have access to the box if need arises, your executor or attorney can gain access if they provide a death certificate, this list is for people you might trust to replace the document with an updated copy.

3. Inform your executor, family lawyer and perhaps accountant that this box exists.

4. Relax.

This method has been in use for easily 200 years, as far as I know, nobody has really improved on it.

It's certainly true that being a lawyer, as a profession, has among the worst possible reputations as far as the general public is concerned. It's guys like Carreon and Thompson that do that. I know from personal experience that there *are* good lawyers out there, men and women who genuinely motivated by a desire to seek justice. Our own family attorny is an excellent case for that. He specializes in family law, usually custody cases and I happen to know that he does easily twice the amount of Legal Aid and Pro Bono work the Bar Association urges on it's members.

Here on Slashdot, NewYorkCountryLawyer is also well respected for being "one of the good guys", but being a good guy, he doesn't get nearly the media attention nutjobs like Thompson get.

I have a few suggestions:

First is weather/climate modelling. If you include planets other than earth, there are a number of organizations doing climate models. Based on the news articles I've seen, lots of them are doing their sims on cheap clusters and/or GPUs. In the US, the first two places that come to mind are NOAA and NASA. For both groups, there are several agencies under their umbrella, each agency having more than one project on the go.

The second is working on a render farm. There are several game companies, CGI and computer animation companies that are getting into very intensive crunching for their modelling and simulation work.

Third, what about very large engineering firms? The kind that build damns, the Chunnel or other huge scale projects. They do a fair bit of modeling, both the structures they build and the environment interactions with that structure require some fairly heavy number crunching.

Fourth, don't be so quick to dismiss Pharmaceutical companies. Yes, virtually all of them do animal testing and yes, a small number of trials are test-to-destruction or test-kill-dissect, requiring numerous lab animals to be sacrificed. However; I have a couple of things to think about regarding that.
1) First, the reason why pharmaceutical companies are getting into the kind of stuff that interests you is so they can reduce, maybe some day eliminate animal testing. If you worked for them, your contribution would help them reduce the need for such tests.
2) Are you a strict Vegan? If you are willing to eat meat, wear leather, use antibiotics or vaccines to save your life, you are already on the same moral level as the researcher who induces cancer and/or tests drugs in lab rats. You are benefiting from the exploitation and deaths of animals every day. I grant you that taking a medicine to save your life is rather different than accepting a pay cheque, but I submit that the person willing to take the medicine while looking down his moral nose at those whose work made it possible is in fact on a lower ethical level than the researcher.
3) I certainly agree that an animals life has value and that we have a duty to preserve the health and welfare of the animals who rely on us for their very existence. However; I value human life even more. I would willingly kill a room full of adorable kitties and puppies if it saved the life of even one child. And the inconvenient fact that the anti-testing crowd likes to ignore is that animal testing saves FAR more lives than it costs. Banting and Best sacrificed numerous dogs, but I'll wager Leonard Thompson thought it was a worthwhile trade. (Insulin saved his life until pneumonia cut him down and pneumonia is, today, also a treatable condition rather than a death sentence thanks in part to animal testing.)

If I recall correctly, the Voyager probes both use a Pu powered "nuclear battery" with a half life of roughly 87 years. Just off the top of my head, that means dropping to half of the original output somewhere around 2025, not 2022. That's just nit picking though. What is of more interest is the fact that it means a drop to half power level, not a total loss of power as TFS implies.

The ground teams have already disabled several instruments, either because their purpose has been fulfilled or to save power. Presumably they can disable still more, eking out the scraps of power the RTGs put out for a few more years. Unfortunately, as far as i know, the Voyagers don't have anything like a bank of capacitors or secondary batteries that can be slowly recharged with the diminished output of the RTGs while the rest of the system sleeps until it has enough power to wake up and phone home again.