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It also might be this project.

Mmmm. Extensible, interactive molecular graphics programs.

How long will that last? In another post I mentioned that in Spiderman all the billbaords in one scene were changed from what really appears there to compnaies that paid for placement. There was even a lawsuit over it.

As fot the Cheerios, that was a paid placement. Superman II is worse. The producers were paid $43k to place Marlboro's logo prominently in the movie and to not portray the brand in a negative light. To me this is worse than a banner ad, but maybe not as bad as a pop-up/under.

When I heard this announced I kept confusing these guys with UCSF's Dr. Cynthia Kenyon, who was on Scientific American Frontiers not long ago talking about her work with elegans and their age-resistant genes. Anyone know what's the difference between her research and these guy's?

I was going to post this directly, but the lameness filter won't let me.

It's a ranking of the current computer go programs. My reading of things lately is that GNU Go is doing fairly well recently. In the link for the 19x19 board, I think GNU Go is ranked 4th.

Now, that doesn't mean that it won't be easy for a strong player. It's just to show that as computer games go (he he), GNU Go really is pretty good. Not the best, but pretty damn good, and definitely has the best challenge:availability ratio.

an intriguing behavioral trait involved in music perception and is defined as the ability to recognize the pitch of a musical tone without an external reference pitch

For example, a professor at my beloved alma mater was able to identify a pitch by referring to its frequency in Hz! The phrase describes someone at a different end of the musical spectrum than the idiots at which this product is aimed.

-jason

Chimera (unix, linux, windows) is a molecular modeling program developed by UC San Francisco, but it was funded by a government grant from the NIH, so guess what, you can download it for free provided you don't want to make money using it.

The NIH (government orginization) has actually REQUIRED that people that use their money to come up with a protein sequence should deposit it in a freely accessable database

Also, just a side note. If anyone wants to download the program, just grab some protiens from the protien database and load them up. Some stuff you might find interesting in the way of proteins.

tryptophan

hemoglobin

Alcohol Dehydrogenase

DNA (not a protein, but oh well)

Insulin

more...

Enjoy,
Steve

Individuals are great for design -- particularly if they have some other individuals with whom they can communicate well for reality checks during design. Consider Seymour Cray's designs -- not very complex by the standards of today's computer systems, but Cray's ability to pick a team and then listen well combined with his individualistic design habits led him to beat IBM's army of well funded PhD. The problem with individuals is that there is a natural limit to the complexity that an individual can fit in his head -- where the internal bandwidths of an individual's mind are enormous enough that engineering tradeoffs can occur at rates vastly exceeding those allowed by the bottlenecks of verbal and/or literate communication.

Similarly, it is a mistake to believe that once a gifted individual's limits are hit that a group of gifted individuals are going to be able to beat a broad evolutionary process in advancing the design.

That's why the gifted individual designer's first and foremost design goal should be to maximize the evolutionary flexibility of his design -- so that the advantages of individualist design are maximally leveraged before complexity dictates that distributed evolution dominates further design.

PS: As for Torvalds' understanding of evolution and breeding -- he underestimates the importance of niches. It is precisely the ability to fill niches that makes an evolutionary system viable. Consider, for instance, sexual reproduction's tendency to, upon encountering the periphery of ecological ranges where population is sparse (like, ahem, Finland) automatically inbreed and therefore express mutations -- most of which fail, of course. The point is that without expressing those mutations the advantages of new genetic patterns can't translate into population increases at those peripheral ranges. Linux isn't a good example of this, since UNIX was a well-populated "ecological range", so Linus should take care not to generalize too far his insights derived therefrom.

Who's Jeff Stryker? This guy?

You cite a common source of confusion. This article should prove helpful. You may want to also have a look at this (the cloth travel bag is a nice touch).

There are so many versions out there that I'm not going to guess which is original.

This troll seems to be based on this version because it mentions space-age material.

Amusingly the identities of the three guys keep changing, but it's always Cindy Crawford who comes for the last one. ('Cept here, of course.)

Absinthe is NASTY. I ordered some from Spain. Did a lot of reading on it, and as expected, it's loathsome...

Did you try diluting it and adding sugar? From the Absinthe FAQ:

[Absinthe] is very bitter (due to the presence of absinthin, which has a bitterness threshold of 1:70,000) and is therefore traditionally diluted with cold water which is poured over a perforated spoonful of sugar into a glass containing a shot of absinthe. The drink then turns into an opaque white as the essential oils precipitate out of the alcoholic solution, forming a colloidal suspension.

All of this reminds me of the story, from the early '80s when Apple bought a Cray to help with their next processor design -- And Cray bought a Mac to help with their next processor design.
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Bzzt. What studies are you referring to? Show me the URL.

I bet they were funded by either the US Govt war on drugs or by the tobacco industry or both. In reality hemp has almost no THC, and America's legal drugs are the real gateways:

• American Academy of Pediatrics
• Indiana University
• American Medical Association

The really interesting part is that the government is the one spending the big money. In 1995 the gov't spent 6.7 billion USD and in 1998 almost 8.7 billion USD on HIV and AIDS. A lot of that money is spent actually treating people to already have AIDS, only 1.4 billion USD in 1995 and about 1.7 billion USD in 1998 went to research. The funny word in that sentence is only. These corporations get to patent ideas resulting (at least in part) from the government spending money on research, then claim that they have to jack the price way up to make up for those horrible research costs. Don't expect any discounts for us for using our tax dollars for that research. These corporations will next insist of receiving tax breaks or government subsidies for any charitable uses of "their IP".

If you could figure out a way for it to be profitable to do it, hunger and disease would be wiped out in a generation. Except (yes, I am that cynical), most of them still wouldn't want to do it, because it would eliminate the market, and they wouldn't be able to make still more money in the future.

Proteins are built up out of twenty standard amino acids, and it turns out that if you can make a model which describes the behaviour of individual amino acids well (with reference to quantum calculations, or experimental data), then you can describe their collective behaviour in proteins quite well too.

The Amber, CHARMM, and GROMOS parameter sets for doing this are quite refined, and simulations using these parameters appear to agree pretty well with reality.

The big problem is that, as the project pages mention, computer simulations of proteins have only recently hit the 1 microsecond range. What they don't tell you is that many common-or-garden proteins fold on a millisecond, second, or longer timescale. That's a factor of a million you have to brute-force your way through. A simulation also deals with one protein molecule at a time, while nature tends to fold a couple of billion of them at once, so it doesn't matter if a few don't quite make it to the correct fold in a reasonable time.

While Imedix is a cool product, I don't think it will meet his needs for a general purpose EMR.

The ACS (or OpenACS) can be customized to suit a variety of tasks, but no EMR module yet exists. So be prepared to do a little bit of hacking/data model extension. Drop me mail if you are interested in taking this route.

A better bet for what you're trying to do (at this point) is probably GNUmed. It uses Postgresql for its database layer (passes the ACID test). Dr. Horst Herb and his crew have built the software in a very thoughtful fashion -- they've clearly used lots of commercial products before.

One final thing to remember for those who wish to go it alone & code their own product is the importance of security.

Good security is critical for all EMR software, but is of particular concern in the USA, where HIPAA rules are starting to be implemented.

Because of these rules, the task of developing an EMR for use as a permanent medical record has become more time consuming, and complex. The law is, ultimately, a consumer protection act, and should lead to higher-quality, standards-driven EMRs in the future. Be sure to examine the rules before setting out on any healthcare project.

hope it helps.

Actually, I do own the content, if I recall what I've read on copyright law correctly. The MPAA has been saying that I don't, but I've paid them money for a copy of a copyrighted work. I OWN that copy, but I cannot create additional copies, except as allowed by fair use legislation.

Novell v. Network Trade Center, 25 F. Supp. 2d 1218 (C.D. Utah 1997)

"This Court holds that transactions making up the distribution chain from Novell through NTC to the end-user are "sales" governed by the U.C.C. [Uniform Commercial Code] Therefore, the first sale doctrine applies. It follows that the purchaser is an "owner" by way of sale and is entitled to the use and enjoyment of the software with the same rights as exist in the purchase of any other good. Said software transactions do not merely constitute the sale of a license to use the software. The shrinkwrap license included with the software is therefore invalid as against such a purchaser insofar as it purports to maintain title to the software in the copyright owner."

Nope. A shrinkwrap license has never been tested in a serious court case.

They've been tested lots of times in federal Courts, and as you predict, mostly tossed. However, it is not settled law.

Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software Ltd., 655 F. Supp. 750, (E.D. La 1987) [no contract & preempted]
Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software Ltd., 847 F.2d 255 (5th Cir. 1988) [no contract & preempted]
Step-Saver Data Sys., Inc. v. Wyse Tech., 939 F.2d 91 (3d Cir. 1991) [no contract]
Arizona Retail Systems v. The Software Link, Inc., 831 F. supp. 759 (D. AZ 1993) [no contract]
ProCD v. Zeidenberg 908 F. Supp. 640(W.D. Wis. 1996) [no contract & preempted]
ProCD v. Zeidenberg 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996) [is contract, not preempted]
Novell v. Network Trade Center, 25 F. Supp. 2d 1218 (D. Utah 1997) [no contract]

While not a shrinkwrap/clickwrap case, the following strongly endorsed Step-Saver:

Expeditors v. Official Creditors 166 F.3d 1012 (9th Cir 1999) [no contract]

Note that there are two issues with a shrinkwrap copyright licence: (1) whether or not it is an enforcable contract and (2) is specific contract terms are "preempted" by Federal law in the Copyright Act.

The Vault v. Quaid cases actually were decided under a Louisiana state law predecessor to UCITA, and were still not enforcable. The court ruled that the adhesion contract was enforcable only if Louisiana's law was valid and that it was invalid.

The bottom line is that the 7th Circuit disagrees with the 3rd and 9th Circuits on whether the shrinkwrap terms are enforcable. The 7th Circuit disagrees with the 5th Circuit on the preemption issue.

There is also a state law case from the Washington state Supreme Court that found shrinkwraps terms enforcable.

http://bioinformatics.u csf.edu/bwtaylor/dvd/LOC_109_RFC.txt

It is difficult to identify any idea that the Supreme Court has rebuffed so repeatedly as the movie industry's overly agressive interpretation of intellectual property rights. Movie industry credibility on copyright should be treated like the tobacco industry on health matters: listen to what they say and believe the opposite.

Normally, one would expect a Federal Judge to identify such clear overreaching. The collective market power of the MPAA studios bears down on the DVD player market, forcing an unwanted licence down the throats of any would be competitor. The violation of antitrust laws, and the misuse of intellectual property are so obvious it shocks the conscience.

Sadly, the judge in the NY DVD case refuses to recognize these arguments, but, as he admits, his former law firm was responsible for advising Time Warner on DVD antitrust matters while the Judge practiced there. Despite this, Judge Kaplan refuses to recuse himself. No reasonable person could believe that such a judge would repudiate the prophylactic antitrust work of his own firm, and any hope of a fair judgement must be abandoned. The recent precedent in Panama v. American Tobacco Company, No. 99-30685 (5th Cir. 7/20/2000) on a very similar recusal situation only confirms that the judge should have stepped down. Fortunately, the integrity of the process the Copyright Office has been using is beyond reproach.

http://bioinformatics.u csf.edu/bwtaylor/dvd/LOC_109_RFC.txt

--

http://bioinformatics.u csf.edu/bwtaylor/dvd/LOC_109_RFC.txt

It is difficult to identify any idea that the Supreme Court has rebuffed so repeatedly as the movie industry's overly agressive interpretation of intellectual property rights. Movie industry credibility on copyright should be treated like the tobacco industry on health matters: listen to what they say and believe the opposite.

Normally, one would expect a Federal Judge to identify such clear overreaching. The collective market power of the MPAA studios bears down on the DVD player market, forcing an unwanted licence down the throats of any would be competitor. The violation of antitrust laws, and the misuse of intellectual property are so obvious it shocks the conscience.

Sadly, the judge in the NY DVD case refuses to recognize these arguments, but, as he admits, his former law firm was responsible for advising Time Warner on DVD antitrust matters while the Judge practiced there. Despite this, Judge Kaplan refuses to recuse himself. No reasonable person could believe that such a judge would repudiate the prophylactic antitrust work of his own firm, and any hope of a fair judgement must be abandoned. The recent precedent in Panama v. American Tobacco Company, No. 99-30685 (5th Cir. 7/20/2000) on a very similar recusal situation only confirms that the judge should have stepped down. Fortunately, the integrity of the process the Copyright Office has been using is beyond reproach.

http://bioinformatics.u csf.edu/bwtaylor/dvd/LOC_109_RFC.txt

--

Achtung is vaporware at this point. Linux is making very few inroads on the laptop. The most robust slide presentation software is MagicPoint. Another relatively stable piece of slide presentation software is Kpresenter . Staroffice is the only version to allow Powerpoint imports.

Of course, you could do all the slidemaking in postscript and use just about anything to present it.

I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.

An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:

• Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
• Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.

The sorehand mailing list (web site at http://www.ucsf.edu/sorehand/) helped me through a bad bout of RSI several years ago.

More info is available at my server... Go ahead and slashdot me!

JMC

Sorehand has a bunch of information about RSI which I found quite useful as I was going thourhg these problems a few years ago. Especially useful to me was the mailing list and The Typing Injury FAQ