Rather than scrapping the entire design (if NASA truly believes the leg deployment triggered a sensor that shut of the thrusters) why don't they revise the sensor design, retest the lander thoroughly and relaunch a new mission with the esisting design? How much would that cost. Does anyone know the percentage of total cost that goes into design/testing versus launch/deployment?
The point of this web site is a forum for students to give criticism to schools and professors as anonomous cowards. When you fill out those course reviews on your prof before you get your grade you are never sure if that prof will recognize your handwriting and grade you down. Sites like this provide a truly anonymous way for the students to provide feedback to the professors. The professor just needs to learn how to read the reviews appropriately. It's like reading Slashdot, -1 troll, -1 offtopic, +5 insightful. Any student in the class can tell between these type of posts. The big problem as far as I see it, is that a few student activists can fusk everything up by posting hundred of trolls and generally the disgruntled students will be the ones posting. The only true solution would be to have one vote per student but this requires some method of identifying the students who post and thus prevents the free nature of the site.
Any suggestion for improvement of such a review site?
Why is it that internet startups (any high tech startup FTM) feel the need to be located in the Bay area, NYC, Boston, SoCal or Seattle given the physical locationlessness (new word) of the internet?
I understand that it provides a method for new companies to recruit talent from other local companies without requireing the employee to move but it would seem to me that a company could either startup or move to somewhere like Ann Arbor, Madison, Boulder or Austin, still offer the same stupidly overvalued salaries and allow the employees to live like kings in some pretty cool cities. Why does this not happen very much? Are the VC's trying to drive up the values of their real estate investments?
I think it would be great for apple to start selling OSX-intel boxes. They could sell a box with usb, firewire and scsi cards that they support. Apple would not have to write drivers for every possible card and thus, to have a PC that works well with OSX people would have to buy it from Apple allowing apple to maintain their hardware business model. If it takes off and people start writing drivers for all kinds of devices and OSX starts to spread to lots of desktops/configurations (imagine dell and gateway selling OSX compatible models that are also Windows compatible) then apple could start to have a business model that is software sales based.
Actually trans-crotonic acid (with 4 carbon 13 isotopes) is the quantum computer. It has 7 magnetically nonequivalent nuclei that have spin -/+ 1/2 and interact strongly. When you selectively flip the spin of one nucleus, it affects the neighbouring nuclei through coupling.
CH3-CH=CH-CO2H
the three H's in the CH3 are equivalent and are considered collectively as a bit. the two H's on the double bond are two more bits and all of the carbons are bits.
I think the max limit of 15 relates to the fact that coupling typically only works across 4 bonds max and thus nobody has yet been able to think of a molecule with more than 15 magnetically distinct atoms that are all within 4 bonds of each other. Its a neat puzzle to try and think of one of these, symmetry keeps fusking things up making atoms magnetically equivalent.
You are absolutely correct! The next misson (after sequencing the genome is to figure out what all of those genes(proteins) are doing. So, onto the human structome project (structures of every protein that has been inferred through sequence) and the functome (functions of all genes that have been inferred from sequece data). I think 50 years is a resonable estimate. Things may accellerate a little once physicists (and coders) get involved and start creating models of signaling networks within cells. Models that predict real cellular responses to the additional expression of genes X & Y will be the one that begin to understand how cells operate.
Just think how different coding will be 50 years from now.
In what they call an ``initial reconstruction,'' the researchers state up front that they must still analyze their map and that their work is far from done.
From their press release....they have a map, they don't have the sequence yet. A map is a guide with landmarks as to where major chunks of sequence fall within the genome. Celera has pioneered the approach of shotgun cloning. They randomly capture chunks of the genome and sequence them. If they do this enough times (10-50X genome size) they will ultimately have the entire genome after some sophisticated algorithyms sort the data and place it onto the map. They probably have most of the genome and have a few difficult bits to figure out (some sequences are harder then others to get).
Some searching reveals the NCBI press release. Looks like they have most of the sequence together. I'll bet berkeley provided the map which is allowing Celera to put their info together.
The big question is: Has Celera already filed patents on every ORF it has found; Will the patent office grant the patents; Will Celera get patents on the human homologs of these genes (they have identified most of the homologous sequences from EST's in the human genome project).
To quote Dyson"religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science"
I know this is a sound bite, I would love to see the context within which this comment was made but since I don't have that info, I'll knee jerk respond:
Perhaps Freeman dosen't think that his work has had much impact, perhaps he believes that physics has not, and will not have much impact on human destiny.
How could he make such a shortsighted statement? First, physics is the ground rules for biology via chemistry. Biology is the study of all life and therefore is all impt for for human destiny. I will agree that religion has had a much greater impact on human life thus far but 100,000 years from now, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) will have played a determing role in human destiny. It has/will provide the means to anhialate(sp?) ourseves, pollute our planet beyond habitability, or whether we manage to colonize human life beyond this planet before destruction. Religion itself dosen't help much here as it tends to promote wars through belief systems that cannot accept views that violate said religious dogma and thus tends to promote destruction.
OTOH Science itself is a religion, a belief system that changes according to what can be reproducibly demonstrated through experiment. A religion that rapidly adapts to current knowlege and one that holds the keys to the both the methods of destruction and the salvation of our species. Perhaps this is what he meant in that quote. Science is religion?!
The concern is that we'll lose control of it, that we'll do the sorcerer's apprentice bit. We're at that stage now with genetic engineering of crops; our "engineering" of genes is to splice the code we want into random spots in the genome and hope for the results we want. Imagine writing a program that way! This is not control. We have very little fscking idea what we're doing and we're releasing these plants into the biosphere. This is extraordinarily dumb, but there's potential profit to be made so ahead we charge.
I agree that releasing these plants into the biosphere is irresponsible, especially on such a huge scale so soon, I must take issue with you on some general points.
First,as Barahir was saying you were created in a much more haphazard way than our genetic engineers are doing now. Mother nature has used the classic mutate and select approach, with no control over where the mutations occur. Also nature has been moving genes from one species into completely different species on a regular basis for about 3 billion years now, you are actually made up up cells that contain two genomes from two different organisms that merged long ago. Even with their limited understanding Genetic engineers can control transgene expression quite well and even regulate it.
I bet Monsanto will come up with a open(gene)source crop that only expresses its special trait when sprayed with Roundup soon. Naysayers- they're just trying to get you to buy roundup. Proponents- they are minimizing the impacts of wild versions of their plants on the environment.
They just can't win, the naysayers won the PR battle over the terminator technology which was supposed to prevent wild versions of the crops.
Sorry I know this is off topic but I think Barahir made some good points and got dissed for it.
Why dosen't the guy just sell the domain to Coke for his costs ~$100-200 US and get himself another name. I just checked and www.cokeabuser.com and www.cokeaddict.com are both available. I'm sure he could get a useful name. Hell mabey coke would reimburse him with some of waste byproducts they generate from their cocao leaf extract process. Just to help him attract some new customers to his site.
If only he had a site up, we would all be championing him.
I suspect this may be redundant with 400 posts already but I dont have time to read them all.
Investment fads come and go. Biotech had a similar boom in around 1990-1993 and then the bottom fell out of the market when the internet came along. Guess what, venture cap has started to subside for web site companies after people realized that clickthroughs give very little sales and that some of these companies are sooooooooo overvalued that even if their wildest predictions of future growth came true, investors would loose.
Has anyone noticed that the biotech sector has enjoyed a huge boom in the last few months? Could that be due to the beginning of a dot.com bailout?
I bet you Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan are still considered financial wizards in 15 years.
I'm not saying that all dot.com's are doomed, just most of them.
Hope I'm not wrong in thinking that both schools with St. Petersburg are in the same city, but assuming I'm not this is quite a coup. I wonder if the city will honor them with a parade or at least a special mention from the mayor.
Being YA Waterloo alum myself, I'm really proud of those guys too but having two schools in the same city place 1st and 4th is downright amazing.
As far as M$FT owning scrollbars, these were part of the origional Macintosh (public disclosure) and Xerox Parc had them before that. Prior art I would say. Drop down and expand....I dont know.
Gnome copied M$FT copied Lotus 123 who copied Visicalc (for spread sheets at least). My Dad (yes another my dad reference, but I'm in my 30's, so this ones a little different from the norm) bought an Apple IIe around 1980 just because it had spreadsheets (thanks Visicalc). As it happens, that computer saved his company, the spreadsheet cashflows and optimistic predictions convinced the bank to loan more and even when I found a buyer for the Apple IIe (offer of $500 in 1988) he said he would never sell it because it saved the company (and my parents house). Talk about a killer app.
I say that all aplications can be copied, you just cant copy the source code without following liscenceing protocols. Reverse engineering is an entrenched software maneuver.
you wrote The word "prime" is defined in the way which makes the word most useful. The central fact about primes is that "any number can be expressed uniquely as a product of prime factors" (ignoring the order in which you write the factors). This is regarded as so fundamental that it's called "The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic".
This fundamental theorem seems to me to be wrong in principle, it requires 1 not to be a prime, where does 0 fit in (or is it not a number). What about the primes themselves if 1 is not a prime, or have you just mis-stated the theorem?
What are the prime factors of 5?
Re:Hmmm, but - how do they...?
on
Laptop Exams?
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· Score: 2
As far as preparing the computers, this could be done easily with a room full of iMAC's that are netbooted from OS X server. If the only application they needed to use was a web brower you wouldn't be discriminating for which OS people use, just provide Netscape, IE and Mozilla (or any others people request) and a two button mouse. Each computer should be the same, running the same setup as provided by the boot server.
I'm sure similar netboot set-ups exist for the PC (or soon will).
Fine provided the test is designed for the web.
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
Much like the take-home exam, the questions need to appropriate for such a test. I would love to give a test like this, advertised as open web and then I'd put questions on the test that could be answered quickly by a student who knows how to solve the problem. I'd put enough of these questions on the test to make it time limited, with ONE question that would require 10 minutes of net research. The real test would be for the student to recognize which question requires info they have not been given in the course and see if they can find it quickly. Students who surf for all the answers get hosed.
I'd tell the students my strategy beforehand so as not be tricking them.
As many others have already noted this would have to be firewalled and monitored apropriately to prevent cheating. Set it up for http requests only and snif all packets so you can investigate suspicious test answers for cheating.
In the real world, if your boss asks you a straitforward technical question you are expected to answer it immediately, if the question if difficult and you find the answer on the net you are considered resourceful.
I remember doing this myself, we were allowed 1 page, 8.5*11 with anything written on it, both sides. I filled it up with equations written very small, and when the exam came I looked at it mabey 2 or 3 times having memorized all those equations in the process of rewriting that page several times. In fact I think I still have that page in a box of notes in my basement. The funnyest thing was a student who filed the page with sample problems and solutions to the problems, man that poor guy was really lost.
We can easily rebutt the following point from Time-Warners comments:
4. I am aware of no works or classes of works that have, because of the implementation of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users.
with fair use on non-standard/OSS platforms but what other compelling arguments can we make?
We can protest the monopoly creating effects of CSS with regard to hardware for content playback in that only companies with the blessing of the MPAA can produce playback hardware which then stifles competition in these markets and keep new players from entering. All in all it puts too much power in the hands of a few groups that do not have the interests of everyone in mind.
Also, the hindrance to academic research that needs access to digital media in these protected formats and requires computer analysis on *nix systems.
Can anyone else add/improve these arguments, it would be good to collect them in a thread to assist letter writers.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than scrapping the entire design (if NASA truly believes the leg deployment triggered a sensor that shut of the thrusters) why don't they revise the sensor design, retest the lander thoroughly and relaunch a new mission with the esisting design? How much would that cost. Does anyone know the percentage of total cost that goes into design/testing versus launch/deployment?
We have to get to Mars before my arteries clog.
The point of this web site is a forum for students to give criticism to schools and professors as anonomous cowards. When you fill out those course reviews on your prof before you get your grade you are never sure if that prof will recognize your handwriting and grade you down. Sites like this provide a truly anonymous way for the students to provide feedback to the professors. The professor just needs to learn how to read the reviews appropriately. It's like reading Slashdot, -1 troll, -1 offtopic, +5 insightful. Any student in the class can tell between these type of posts. The big problem as far as I see it, is that a few student activists can fusk everything up by posting hundred of trolls and generally the disgruntled students will be the ones posting. The only true solution would be to have one vote per student but this requires some method of identifying the students who post and thus prevents the free nature of the site.
Any suggestion for improvement of such a review site?
Why is it that internet startups (any high tech startup FTM) feel the need to be located in the Bay area, NYC, Boston, SoCal or Seattle given the physical locationlessness (new word) of the internet?
I understand that it provides a method for new companies to recruit talent from other local companies without requireing the employee to move but it would seem to me that a company could either startup or move to somewhere like Ann Arbor, Madison, Boulder or Austin, still offer the same stupidly overvalued salaries and allow the employees to live like kings in some pretty cool cities. Why does this not happen very much? Are the VC's trying to drive up the values of their real estate investments?
Any other reasons for this?
I think it would be great for apple to start selling OSX-intel boxes. They could sell a box with usb, firewire and scsi cards that they support. Apple would not have to write drivers for every possible card and thus, to have a PC that works well with OSX people would have to buy it from Apple allowing apple to maintain their hardware business model. If it takes off and people start writing drivers for all kinds of devices and OSX starts to spread to lots of desktops/configurations (imagine dell and gateway selling OSX compatible models that are also Windows compatible) then apple could start to have a business model that is software sales based.
I'd love to see it.
Actually trans-crotonic acid (with 4 carbon 13 isotopes) is the quantum computer. It has 7 magnetically nonequivalent nuclei that have spin -/+ 1/2 and interact strongly. When you selectively flip the spin of one nucleus, it affects the neighbouring nuclei through coupling.
CH3-CH=CH-CO2H
the three H's in the CH3 are equivalent and are considered collectively as a bit. the two H's on the double bond are two more bits and all of the carbons are bits.
I think the max limit of 15 relates to the fact that coupling typically only works across 4 bonds max and thus nobody has yet been able to think of a molecule with more than 15 magnetically distinct atoms that are all within 4 bonds of each other. Its a neat puzzle to try and think of one of these, symmetry keeps fusking things up making atoms magnetically equivalent.
You are absolutely correct! The next misson (after sequencing the genome is to figure out what all of those genes(proteins) are doing. So, onto the human structome project (structures of every protein that has been inferred through sequence) and the functome (functions of all genes that have been inferred from sequece data). I think 50 years is a resonable estimate. Things may accellerate a little once physicists (and coders) get involved and start creating models of signaling networks within cells. Models that predict real cellular responses to the additional expression of genes X & Y will be the one that begin to understand how cells operate.
Just think how different coding will be 50 years from now.
From their press release....they have a map, they don't have the sequence yet. A map is a guide with landmarks as to where major chunks of sequence fall within the genome. Celera has pioneered the approach of shotgun cloning. They randomly capture chunks of the genome and sequence them. If they do this enough times (10-50X genome size) they will ultimately have the entire genome after some sophisticated algorithyms sort the data and place it onto the map. They probably have most of the genome and have a few difficult bits to figure out (some sequences are harder then others to get).
Some searching reveals the NCBI press release. Looks like they have most of the sequence together. I'll bet berkeley provided the map which is allowing Celera to put their info together.
The big question is: Has Celera already filed patents on every ORF it has found; Will the patent office grant the patents; Will Celera get patents on the human homologs of these genes (they have identified most of the homologous sequences from EST's in the human genome project).
And you thought software patenting was fusked.
I'll bet some DARPA topdog rented Alien II and has the hots for Sigourney Weaver.
I know this is a sound bite, I would love to see the context within which this comment was made but since I don't have that info, I'll knee jerk respond:
Perhaps Freeman dosen't think that his work has had much impact, perhaps he believes that physics has not, and will not have much impact on human destiny.
How could he make such a shortsighted statement? First, physics is the ground rules for biology via chemistry. Biology is the study of all life and therefore is all impt for for human destiny. I will agree that religion has had a much greater impact on human life thus far but 100,000 years from now, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) will have played a determing role in human destiny. It has/will provide the means to anhialate(sp?) ourseves, pollute our planet beyond habitability, or whether we manage to colonize human life beyond this planet before destruction. Religion itself dosen't help much here as it tends to promote wars through belief systems that cannot accept views that violate said religious dogma and thus tends to promote destruction.
OTOH Science itself is a religion, a belief system that changes according to what can be reproducibly demonstrated through experiment. A religion that rapidly adapts to current knowlege and one that holds the keys to the both the methods of destruction and the salvation of our species. Perhaps this is what he meant in that quote. Science is religion?!
Sorry but I'm getting bored and will head to bed, I was too optimistic about finding a great thread tonight.
Try my new sig...you may like it! Or not.
test, test, 123
this is just a test
I agree that releasing these plants into the biosphere is irresponsible, especially on such a huge scale so soon, I must take issue with you on some general points.
First,as Barahir was saying you were created in a much more haphazard way than our genetic engineers are doing now. Mother nature has used the classic mutate and select approach, with no control over where the mutations occur. Also nature has been moving genes from one species into completely different species on a regular basis for about 3 billion years now, you are actually made up up cells that contain two genomes from two different organisms that merged long ago. Even with their limited understanding Genetic engineers can control transgene expression quite well and even regulate it.
I bet Monsanto will come up with a open(gene)source crop that only expresses its special trait when sprayed with Roundup soon. Naysayers- they're just trying to get you to buy roundup. Proponents- they are minimizing the impacts of wild versions of their plants on the environment.
They just can't win, the naysayers won the PR battle over the terminator technology which was supposed to prevent wild versions of the crops.
Sorry I know this is off topic but I think Barahir made some good points and got dissed for it.
Why dosen't the guy just sell the domain to Coke for his costs ~$100-200 US and get himself another name. I just checked and www.cokeabuser.com and www.cokeaddict.com are both available. I'm sure he could get a useful name. Hell mabey coke would reimburse him with some of waste byproducts they generate from their cocao leaf extract process. Just to help him attract some new customers to his site.
If only he had a site up, we would all be championing him.
I suspect this may be redundant with 400 posts already but I dont have time to read them all.
OOG has been making sense for quite a few posts now, perhaps we should not discriminate against neandertals and mod him up once in a while.
ps OOG, you are supposed to log in and create an account so the rest of us can track your progress. Good luck!
Investment fads come and go. Biotech had a similar boom in around 1990-1993 and then the bottom fell out of the market when the internet came along. Guess what, venture cap has started to subside for web site companies after people realized that clickthroughs give very little sales and that some of these companies are sooooooooo overvalued that even if their wildest predictions of future growth came true, investors would loose.
Has anyone noticed that the biotech sector has enjoyed a huge boom in the last few months? Could that be due to the beginning of a dot.com bailout?
I bet you Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan are still considered financial wizards in 15 years.
I'm not saying that all dot.com's are doomed, just most of them.
Hope I'm not wrong in thinking that both schools with St. Petersburg are in the same city, but assuming I'm not this is quite a coup. I wonder if the city will honor them with a parade or at least a special mention from the mayor.
Being YA Waterloo alum myself, I'm really proud of those guys too but having two schools in the same city place 1st and 4th is downright amazing.
Also, congrats to all the teams to placed!
As far as M$FT owning scrollbars, these were part of the origional Macintosh (public disclosure) and Xerox Parc had them before that. Prior art I would say. Drop down and expand....I dont know.
You are very correct sir (or madam).
Gnome copied M$FT copied Lotus 123 who copied Visicalc (for spread sheets at least). My Dad (yes another my dad reference, but I'm in my 30's, so this ones a little different from the norm) bought an Apple IIe around 1980 just because it had spreadsheets (thanks Visicalc). As it happens, that computer saved his company, the spreadsheet cashflows and optimistic predictions convinced the bank to loan more and even when I found a buyer for the Apple IIe (offer of $500 in 1988) he said he would never sell it because it saved the company (and my parents house). Talk about a killer app.
I say that all aplications can be copied, you just cant copy the source code without following liscenceing protocols. Reverse engineering is an entrenched software maneuver.
Sun offers McNeely a golf match to decide the lawsuit. How about a deathmatch or a masturbation contest or....a peeing contest
Gotta love big business and little boys
you wrote The word "prime" is defined in the way which makes the word most useful. The central fact about primes is that "any number can be expressed uniquely as a product of prime factors" (ignoring the order in which you write the factors). This is regarded as so fundamental that it's called "The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic".
This fundamental theorem seems to me to be wrong in principle, it requires 1 not to be a prime, where does 0 fit in (or is it not a number). What about the primes themselves if 1 is not a prime, or have you just mis-stated the theorem?
What are the prime factors of 5?
As far as preparing the computers, this could be done easily with a room full of iMAC's that are netbooted from OS X server. If the only application they needed to use was a web brower you wouldn't be discriminating for which OS people use, just provide Netscape, IE and Mozilla (or any others people request) and a two button mouse. Each computer should be the same, running the same setup as provided by the boot server.
I'm sure similar netboot set-ups exist for the PC (or soon will).
Much like the take-home exam, the questions need to appropriate for such a test. I would love to give a test like this, advertised as open web and then I'd put questions on the test that could be answered quickly by a student who knows how to solve the problem. I'd put enough of these questions on the test to make it time limited, with ONE question that would require 10 minutes of net research. The real test would be for the student to recognize which question requires info they have not been given in the course and see if they can find it quickly. Students who surf for all the answers get hosed.
I'd tell the students my strategy beforehand so as not be tricking them.
As many others have already noted this would have to be firewalled and monitored apropriately to prevent cheating. Set it up for http requests only and snif all packets so you can investigate suspicious test answers for cheating.
In the real world, if your boss asks you a straitforward technical question you are expected to answer it immediately, if the question if difficult and you find the answer on the net you are considered resourceful.
I remember doing this myself, we were allowed 1 page, 8.5*11 with anything written on it, both sides. I filled it up with equations written very small, and when the exam came I looked at it mabey 2 or 3 times having memorized all those equations in the process of rewriting that page several times. In fact I think I still have that page in a box of notes in my basement. The funnyest thing was a student who filed the page with sample problems and solutions to the problems, man that poor guy was really lost.
4. I am aware of no works or classes of works that have, because of the implementation of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users.
with fair use on non-standard/OSS platforms but what other compelling arguments can we make?
We can protest the monopoly creating effects of CSS with regard to hardware for content playback in that only companies with the blessing of the MPAA can produce playback hardware which then stifles competition in these markets and keep new players from entering. All in all it puts too much power in the hands of a few groups that do not have the interests of everyone in mind.
Also, the hindrance to academic research that needs access to digital media in these protected formats and requires computer analysis on *nix systems.
Can anyone else add/improve these arguments, it would be good to collect them in a thread to assist letter writers.