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AdamSmith

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Everything posted by AdamSmith

  1. First, I trust TY and OZ with my life & soul (assuming such latter in fact exists). So revelation of said IP address I discount. Second, ... Well, given MsGuy's sage counsel, what second is there?
  2. Guardian's coverage of the Pussy Riot business is invaluable. http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sdTTPxZwmFHgPSkOd_cicLg/view.m?id=15&gid=music/2012/aug/17/pussy-riot-trial-verdict-live&cat=most-read
  3. Image shows fine (directly, no need groping the URL) on my iPhone & laptop. No idea what in our friend's config may be the blocking agent. The guy is gorgeous. Thk u for the image, his performance issues notwithstanding.
  4. Thought what I said was a fairly direct, substantive and honest (hoping to Christ the IRS is not snooping here & taking down IP addresses) response. Sorry you do not wish to engage in intellectually honest & authentic interchanges, whatever our ideological differences. I tried.
  5. Finally the MSM offers a reasoned, non-horrified, realistic, even tacitly approving and enjoying story about sex. The world may at last be changing for the better. Or at least growing up. http://us.cnn.com/2012/08/08/sport/olympics-village-sex-party-athletes/index.html?c=&page=1
  6. What say I is, among other things (but not to belabor it, I will elide the rest), that they have let me get away with plenty over the years. I live in dread of an audit. And I am the kind of medium-small fry they go for. You know the audit profiles.
  7. She should, had she any conscience, have worn a "good Republican cloth coat."
  8. ...do we need the meme (I deserve being drawn & quartered for this) "The New Hillary"? ("The student is left to derive the implications." !)
  9. Yes! Klaatu... etc. Could the remake have been any worse than it was? Amazing how Keanu can function as the core of films of pure genius, then go blithely along with such dreck as this. Gratuitously: Wahlberg's astoundingly wooden stilted paralytic (get my drift? ) Planet of the Apes remake was another stunning waste of talent and effort.
  10. NOW you're getting on your game!
  11. 2001 Wild Strawberries Barry Lyndon Clockwork ...ok, All Things Stanley
  12. I.e., if we do not properly genuflect, we can all call ourselves Pussy Riot? (Yer choice of smiley here )
  13. U r so finicky.
  14. Thank you! Also to zip's remark -- that the male here is deemed by his esteemed govt to be of age to enlist (or in a worse time to get drafted) and thus have his ass shot off. To quote none the less than Nixon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0609000357/ref=redir_mdp_mobile).
  15. Why bother feeding this politico-troll? Rational and evidentiary argument will just go down the disposal.
  16. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7tnc9_the-french-chef_fun
  17. Nor do you live in Puerto Vallarta! You know then that you do have at least one competitor for my undying love. ...Agree completely about Africa. China's deep investments there already are quite alarming.
  18. ROFLMAO only thing better would be to get fucked by Data ("Don't you EVER tell anyone about this!") (to repeat) "...what...do you think...of my solution to the Kobayashi Maru?"
  19. I'd move in with Andre and his bf down in PV, hire some ironclad protection, then do as lookin says.
  20. ...What's a little anal leakage compared with THAT? Just rereading my (autographed ) copy of Failure Is Not an Option. Oddly apt follow-on to the Flannery O'Connor bio.
  21. One will stand well back from the direction this is taking. (Only reason for not using a more outlandish smiley is posting this from my iPhone, on which it is a minor feat of engineering to go hunting for the Wide World of Smileys readily available here thru any desktop browser.)
  22. Fairly incredible in the implications... Book written in DNA code Scientists who encoded the book say it could soon be cheaper to store information in DNA than in conventional digital devices Geraint Jones guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 August 2012 14.45 EDT Book of life: DNA is the ultimate compact storage medium. Photograph: Alamy Scientists have for the first time used DNA to encode the contents of a book. At 53,000 words, and including 11 images and a computer program, it is the largest amount of data yet stored artificially using the genetic material. The researchers claim that the cost of DNA coding is dropping so quickly that within five to 10 years it could be cheaper to store information using this method than in conventional digital devices. Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA – the chemical that stores genetic instructions in almost all known organisms – has an impressive data capacity. One gram can store up to 455bn gigabytes: the contents of more than 100bn DVDs, making it the ultimate in compact storage media. A three-strong team led by Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School has now demonstrated that the technology to store data in DNA, while still slow, is becoming more practical. They report in the journal Science that the 5.27 megabit collection of data they stored is more than 600 times bigger than the largest dataset previously encoded this way. Writing the data to DNA took several days. "This is currently something for archival storage," explained co-author Dr Sriram Kosuri of Harvard's Wyss Institute, "but the timing is continually improving." DNA has numerous advantages over traditional digital storage media. It can be easily copied, and is often still readable after thousands of years in non-ideal conditions. Unlike ever-changing electronic storage formats such as magnetic tape and DVDs, the fundamental techniques required to read and write DNA information are as old as life on Earth. The researchers, who have filed a provisional patent application covering the idea, used off-the-shelf components to demonstrate their technique. To maximise the reliability of their method, and keep costs down, they avoided the need to create very long sequences of code – something that is much more expensive than creating lots of short chunks of DNA. The data was split into fragments that could be written very reliably, and was accompanied by an address book listing where to find each code section. Digital data is traditionally stored as binary code: ones and zeros. Although DNA offers the ability to use four "numbers": A, C, G and T, to minimise errors Church's team decided to stick with binary encoding, with A and C both indicating zero, and G and T representing one. The sequence of the artificial DNA was built up letter by letter using existing methods with the string of As, Cs, Ts and Gs coding for the letters of the book. The team developed a system in which an inkjet printer embeds short fragments of that artificially synthesised DNA onto a glass chip. Each DNA fragment also contains a digital address code that denotes its location within the original file. The fragments on the chip can later be "read" using standard techniques of the sort used to decipher the sequence of ancient DNA found in archeological material. A computer can then reassemble the original file in the right order using the address codes. The book – an HTML draft of a volume co-authored by the team leader – was written to the DNA with images embedded to demonstrate the storage medium's versatility. DNA is such a dense storage system because it is three-dimensional. Other advanced storage media, including experimental ones such as positioning individual atoms on a surface, are essentially confined to two dimensions. The work did not involve living organisms, which would have introduced unnecessary complications and some risks. The biological function of a cell could be affected and portions of DNA not used by the cell could be removed or mutated. "If the goal is information storage, there's no need to use a cell," said Kosuri. The data cannot be overwritten but, given the sthttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/16/book-written-dna-codeorage capacity, that is seen as a minor issue. The exercise was not completely error-free, but of the 5.27m bits stored, only 10 were found to be incorrect. The team suggests common error-checking techniques could be implemented in future, including multiple copies of the same information so mistakes can be easily identified. The costs of DNA-handling tools are not yet competitive enough to make this a large-scale storage medium. But the costs and scale of the tools are dropping much more quickly than their electronic equivalents. For example, handheld DNA sequencers are becoming available, which the authors suggest should greatly simplify information stored in DNA. Kosuri foresees this revolution in DNA technologies continuing. "We may hit a wall, but there's no fundamental reason why it shouldn't continue." http://www.guardian....ritten-dna-code
  23. ROFL
  24. Just no pleasing you today, is there?
  25. Do you really agree with the premise that the issue of cheating is getting more prevalent now than before? Thinnin' on just this country's history, cheating has a pretty long pedigree. Jefferson's planting anti-Adams smears anonymously -- actually pseudonymously -- in the press during their contest for the presidency, just to snag one easy example. Or the famously over-cited instance of Socrates bemoaning the decline of the youth of his day. These master-narrative kinds of historical diagnoses frequently seem to leak out a lot of their purported content once a little bit of scrutiny is turned. The postmodern condition and all that. Which I pretty much buy into. (I was too late to suck Foucault's cock and now I see I have missed my chance with Lyotard as well. Eh bien. He who hesitates...) (And I would not give Derrida the pleasure!) (Now, Umberto Eco we could talk about... )
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