Just to be clear, no non-coding segments have been found in bacteria yet (last I heard). So putting data in as 'junk-DNA' in humans is quite a bit different from interrupting a fully functional bacterial DNA segment with the data to be stored.
Also note that the introns in eukaryotes are highly mutable (look up 'tandem repeats' if you have the inclination), so the fidelity of the data would be sacrificed by putting it there. The longest lifetime for the data would be achieved by tricking the replication machinery into thinking the segment was an exon, which would involve tying it to a functional protein that would be absent were the sequence to be mutated.
Duplication of the data would also work, but it would only hammer down the probability of mutation, since the probability of a point mutation of a base at the same location in two widely separated sequences is roughly 10^-18 to 10^-17 per year for exons.
I'm sure no one will ever see this tiny comment buried in all the 2000 inane, opinionated, biased, and just plain ignorant comments posted thus far, but here goes...
I consider gun ownership part of the culture of personal responsibility that every truly honorable society should strive for. Life is a precious gift, and the taking of life one of the most serious acts a person can take. If you feel that owning a gun is your best bet to preserve life, especially that of you and your family, then go ahead and buy a gun. But part of owning a gun is taking responsibility for its use, including education children on its proper use, keeping it away from them if they are too young for it, and knowing how to use it yourself to successfully defend your family.
The government may try to legislate behavior on this issue, but treating the nation like children will never solve the problem. Give people responsibility, and let them learn to use it. It may take centuries or millennia, but eventually we will do it. If someone dies from illigitimate uses of firearms, well then our society is still not there yet. We can't save every person from being shot, but with some slow change we can make society safer at a more fundamental level. And of course note that we will never save everyone from accidents, just as outlawing bathtubs is not the way to save kids from drowning in them.
There will always be powerful weapons, given the progress of science to date, so outlawing them is not the ultimate answer. Education is the key of course to cleaning up our act. But personal responsibility is the particular goal I believe that could be accomplished.
The government ought to view passing legislation with more sincerity and try to plan for 100-1000 years hence, rather than their own re-elections. Our society has changed quite dramatically on a period of 100 years, and those nations who don't recognize the continual decay of basic humanitarianism are not going to fare well.
So gun control is not going to work, on a fundamental human level. Whether it will prevent a few deaths or not is not really the point.
I recently went on a tour of the HP research labs here in Palo Alto, CA, and I made a comment to the lady conducting the tour concerning this. In a nutshell, it was the following.
This technology would require liquid cartridges to run the cooling mechanism, which would mean that every computer would require us to buy these from HP, much like printer cartridges. The lady had a rude comment about how HP was really in the business about selling consumables (like printer cartridges and soon CPU cooler cartridges) and that this was somehow a wonderful idea.
Taking advantage of a liquid-gas phase transition to cool is a great idea, but to require a proprietary chemical to do it is lame. I'm sure there are ways to do this with water, right?
Makes you wonder whether this would be better than the cheap plastic cooling fans that break down and have to be replaced all the time now.
Here's how the number of vulnerabilities should be tallied:
1. The number of vulnerabilities per distro should be weighted by that distro's percentage share.
2. The average number of vulnerabilities for linux as a whole is then the sum of these weighted vulnerabilities.
N = \sum_i w_i * N_i
where N is the average number of vulnerabilities and w_i and N_i are the percentage marketshare and number of vulnerabilites for distro i. Sorry about the LaTeX -- I couldn't get the ascii capital sigma to look right after slashcode mangled it.
You could also in this scheme add a (albeit subjective) weighting for the severity of the vulnerabilities. So why can't SecurityFocus do this?
"...Do you really want a version of Office for Linux? Really?"
Better Office for Linux than Microsoft Linux for Windows...
Run all your favorite unix apps on the innovative MS Linux emulation layer! Download new kernel binaries for free as soon as they become available! (Source is available to qualified business partners.) No messy compiling or arcane directory structures! Keep everything in C:\WINNT\LINUX for simple, One-Click(TM) access!
No need to waste electricity with a machine that stays on all the time! Family licenses available!
Most people don't have wireless network connections and laptops. Why is it imperative that the government pay to buy luxury items for the schools?
I'm all in favor of spending money on education, but that means *education*, not laptops for stupid powerpoint presentations on Abraham Lincoln. (Bitter high school experience.) Why can't we buy the children better textbooks or pay the teachers more money. A laptop for every teacher and assuming ~20 kids per teacher is tens of thousands of dollars that could pay for more and better-qualified teachers and facilities.
*Sigh* Maybe I just miss the good ol' days of playing Doom in the high school computer lab -- the old fashioned way, with wires.
I actually did exactly that. The books were padded and wrapped with old clothes, and they were in three separate boxes with each one weighting ~30 lbs. Shouldn't have been a problem. I didn't pack them as tightly as I could have, though, so they probably got crushed.
When I moved off to grad school, I had my books (three boxes worth) shipped via US Postal Service
media mail from Texas to Massachusetts. Short story: they beat the crap out of my books. The three cardboxes, originally brand new U-Haul moving boxes, were completely destroyed. Two of the three were ripped open at the corners exactly like your boxes. Needless to say, the books inside were mangled.
Not sure if it's related, but the next couple of weeks afterward, which happened to be after Sept. 11, every package I received was ripped open. One package, which was a bubble wrap envelope marked "Fragile", had been cleanly sliced open with a knife. (This is all USPS here.) I wonder if the post office was inspecting packages, or it was just some thug package handler looking for goodies.
I suggest using an express courier. Pay the extra money -- it's worth it if you value what you're shipping.
... adult's might be too polite to be honest or too dignified to participate,...
The test's were held in a shower to handle any accidents that might result from forced farting. It worked brilliantly. The children tried them in turn's, and not an unpleasant whiff escaped.
Aww, look at this post. You have completely butchered the use of the apostrophe. You forgot the poor englishman who runs the Apostrophe Protection Society. He got the literature award and would be horrified by your post. Is that a coincidence? Hmmm...
Where's GrammarNazi when you need him?
BTW, I actually attended the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, and it was hilarious. I would highly recommend anyone in the Cambridge/Boston area attend next year if at all possible.
That's what hackers do right? Exploit the vulnerablities in order to get them fixed? Oh,
wait, they just get sent to jail while the corporations or govt bureaucracies do nothing to improve the system.
Arbitrarily reassigning your phone number, though, that just doesn't seem right.
Well, the phone company technically loans
you your phone number. Doesn't the sysadmin
get first pick on what login he wants? Doesn't
he have the right to reassign logins or assign
them in whatever fashion he chooses?
This would directly relate to IP addresses, so
I would then liken trademarks to the domain name. What if someone took the domain amazon.com? That's integral to Amazon.com's business.
We must remember that property rights in America are extensive in order to facilitate capitalism. That's what drives us, and that's
what drives the legal system, like it or not. I see the big companies winning out on this one, so
don't be surprised if things do get passed on up the
food chain.
... by the administration here to eliminate overcrowding. If you can't see students, you don't have to worry about them. I hear they're going to build invisible dorms. We already have
invisible parking lots.
Scenario: you're on a date and it's in your
pocket on sleep mode. Your date caresses your
hand, and you move. At the same time, the HDD
wakes up. Now you have a very comic sound
coming from your pocket.
You can also do some nice, efficient array transformations with common blocks. For example, you can turn a 100x100 array into a 10000x1 array inside a subroutine. This helps the mind and the compiler. It also allows some flexibility with what you have in memory, since you know everything in the common block will be put together in memory. This eliminates the need for pointers, per se.
C is not fast. After conversion to the intermediate language, all high-level languages are indistinguishable, and that's just a tenth of the compile process. What you mean is the _compilers_ for C make fast code. C in no way lends itself to speed, with its generous use of pointers. Fortran may suck for OS programming, but it's faster than C for number crunching b/c the compilers are better and there are no weird constructs (like pointers).
As for inline assembly and blazing loops, I doubt that many people could hand code a bit of assembly that runs faster than the compiled version. Give the compiler a straightforward loop or something, and it often knows best. You could eventually get a better optimization by hand, but the trouble is almost never worth it.
C is small, though. But it's not like memory is a limiting factor anymore. The only time it matters is when the entire program exceeds the the CPU cache, and memory fetches start hurting you.
Cute on what planet? Pluto? This person needs to get a life. If you don't like Slashdot, then go away and make your own geek news site. Else, I'll beat your ass.
A NASA press release the other day had wrong temperature conversions: "-100 F (or -40 C)".
They meant -70 C. Idiot engineering schools are to blame. My engineering friends learn conventional units in their applied classes, while physics classes are all in mks units. And I go to UT, which supplies a lot of NASA's engineers.
It's certainly true that Astronomers have no control over the processes they watch - however, there is choice over what you watch. Part of the art of astronomy is learning how to pick up the threads of other observations to determine what to look at next.
That is not even what I was talking about. I mean you have no way of separating physical phenomena, i.e. interstellar effects vs. a peculiar spectrum. That makes quantitative analysis difficult. Ask any astronomer about the distance to the LMC. Ha!
blinked a bit when I saw this. Or maybe your definition of high energy phenomena is a little higher than mine. I'd put intracluster (i.e. clusters of galaxies) gas at 10^9K as being a high energy plasma, along side supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, molecular outflows (from stars), black holes and gamma ray bursts as all belonging to the high energy phenomena bracket. There are plenty of others - without high energy phenomena the astronomers would be out of a job.
Again you are off the mark. These are energetic macro phenomena. A supernova has 10^51 ergs behind it, but individual particle energies are not too remarkable. The closest astronomers come to something I would call cool is high energy cosmic rays at 10^20 eV per particle. We could observe them with the right equipment, but right now we're stuck with watching the showers of particles they create when they smash into our atmosphere. Even so, they are too rare to do much with and not directional, since they are affected by galactic magnetic fields.
What are it's macro properties? [Ed - glib comment alert!] If you can tell me that, I can probably find some astronomers who'll look for it.
That's the point. Some things may not have macro properties. What then?
Well - true up to a point. Astronomical observations do take a long time to reach us. But because space is not a particularly dispersive media the signal received still maintains much of its time resolution without distortion.
Again you miss the point. These high energy interactions in particle colliders create particles with very short lifetimes, so they would decay before reaching Earth. Thus, we get no kaons, pions, etc., from supernovae. Not to mention they'd take longer to get here. The way to determine that they're being created is look for their macro signatures in colliders on earth and then compare with astronomical observations.
we get with observatories. (And to some extent neutrinos.) Only one force in nature is transmitted by photons (the electromagnetic force), so there's a lot we're missing. Astronomical objects are by nature very far away and uncontrolled. Anything could be happening that you don't see. Also, there is no opportunity to see very high energy phenomena. The latest colliders can make a quark-gluon plasma. When's the last time you heard of an astronomer seeing that? These exotic particles and matter like this are short-lived, so their properties are almost impossible to infer from astronomical observations, which take many years to reach us.
Another point is that most astronomers deduce the physics by comparing observations to known physics. We see spectral lines in stars and know that they signify certain elements because we can reproduce the spectral lines of a single element here on earth and compare.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you may have your terms a little mixed up. An intron is the DNA between exons (coding regions) in a gene. i.e.
Note I never said that introns were junk-DNA, and I don't even like that term. Perhaps I should have said 'non-functional' vs. 'functional' DNA.
Just to be clear, no non-coding segments have been found in bacteria yet (last I heard). So putting data in as 'junk-DNA' in humans is quite a bit different from interrupting a fully functional bacterial DNA segment with the data to be stored.
Also note that the introns in eukaryotes are highly mutable (look up 'tandem repeats' if you have the inclination), so the fidelity of the data would be sacrificed by putting it there. The longest lifetime for the data would be achieved by tricking the replication machinery into thinking the segment was an exon, which would involve tying it to a functional protein that would be absent were the sequence to be mutated.
Duplication of the data would also work, but it would only hammer down the probability of mutation, since the probability of a point mutation of a base at the same location in two widely separated sequences is roughly 10^-18 to 10^-17 per year for exons.
I'm sure no one will ever see this tiny comment buried in all the 2000 inane, opinionated, biased, and just plain ignorant comments posted thus far, but here goes ...
I consider gun ownership part of the culture of personal responsibility that every truly honorable society should strive for. Life is a precious gift, and the taking of life one of the most serious acts a person can take. If you feel that owning a gun is your best bet to preserve life, especially that of you and your family, then go ahead and buy a gun. But part of owning a gun is taking responsibility for its use, including education children on its proper use, keeping it away from them if they are too young for it, and knowing how to use it yourself to successfully defend your family.
The government may try to legislate behavior on this issue, but treating the nation like children will never solve the problem. Give people responsibility, and let them learn to use it. It may take centuries or millennia, but eventually we will do it. If someone dies from illigitimate uses of firearms, well then our society is still not there yet. We can't save every person from being shot, but with some slow change we can make society safer at a more fundamental level. And of course note that we will never save everyone from accidents, just as outlawing bathtubs is not the way to save kids from drowning in them.
There will always be powerful weapons, given the progress of science to date, so outlawing them is not the ultimate answer. Education is the key of course to cleaning up our act. But personal responsibility is the particular goal I believe that could be accomplished.
The government ought to view passing legislation with more sincerity and try to plan for 100-1000 years hence, rather than their own re-elections. Our society has changed quite dramatically on a period of 100 years, and those nations who don't recognize the continual decay of basic humanitarianism are not going to fare well.
So gun control is not going to work, on a fundamental human level. Whether it will prevent a few deaths or not is not really the point.
I recently went on a tour of the HP research labs here in Palo Alto, CA, and I made a comment to the lady conducting the tour concerning this. In a nutshell, it was the following.
This technology would require liquid cartridges to run the cooling mechanism, which would mean that every computer would require us to buy these from HP, much like printer cartridges. The lady had a rude comment about how HP was really in the business about selling consumables (like printer cartridges and soon CPU cooler cartridges) and that this was somehow a wonderful idea.
Taking advantage of a liquid-gas phase transition to cool is a great idea, but to require a proprietary chemical to do it is lame. I'm sure there are ways to do this with water, right?
Makes you wonder whether this would be better than the cheap plastic cooling fans that break down and have to be replaced all the time now.
1. The number of vulnerabilities per distro should be weighted by that distro's percentage share.
2. The average number of vulnerabilities for linux as a whole is then the sum of these weighted vulnerabilities.
where N is the average number of vulnerabilities and w_i and N_i are the percentage marketshare and number of vulnerabilites for distro i. Sorry about the LaTeX -- I couldn't get the ascii capital sigma to look right after slashcode mangled it.
You could also in this scheme add a (albeit subjective) weighting for the severity of the vulnerabilities. So why can't SecurityFocus do this?
"...Do you really want a version of Office for Linux? Really?"
...
Better Office for Linux than Microsoft Linux for Windows
Run all your favorite unix apps on the innovative MS Linux emulation layer! Download new kernel binaries for free as soon as they become available! (Source is available to qualified business partners.) No messy compiling or arcane directory structures! Keep everything in C:\WINNT\LINUX for simple, One-Click(TM) access!
No need to waste electricity with a machine that stays on all the time! Family licenses available!
To clarify, I meant tens of thousands of dollars *per teacher*. You could, for example, give that teacher a $10,000 pay raise.
(Not a troll.)
Most people don't have wireless network connections and laptops. Why is it imperative that the government pay to buy luxury items for the schools?
I'm all in favor of spending money on education, but that means *education*, not laptops for stupid powerpoint presentations on Abraham Lincoln. (Bitter high school experience.) Why can't we buy the children better textbooks or pay the teachers more money. A laptop for every teacher and assuming ~20 kids per teacher is tens of thousands of dollars that could pay for more and better-qualified teachers and facilities.
*Sigh* Maybe I just miss the good ol' days of playing Doom in the high school computer lab -- the old fashioned way, with wires.
I actually did exactly that. The books were padded and wrapped with old clothes, and they were in three separate boxes with each one weighting ~30 lbs. Shouldn't have been a problem. I didn't pack them as tightly as I could have, though, so they probably got crushed.
When I moved off to grad school, I had my books (three boxes worth) shipped via US Postal Service
media mail from Texas to Massachusetts. Short story: they beat the crap out of my books. The three cardboxes, originally brand new U-Haul moving boxes, were completely destroyed. Two of the three were ripped open at the corners exactly like your boxes. Needless to say, the books inside were mangled.
Not sure if it's related, but the next couple of weeks afterward, which happened to be after Sept. 11, every package I received was ripped open. One package, which was a bubble wrap envelope marked "Fragile", had been cleanly sliced open with a knife. (This is all USPS here.) I wonder if the post office was inspecting packages, or it was just some thug package handler looking for goodies.
I suggest using an express courier. Pay the extra money -- it's worth it if you value what you're shipping.
Wow, this must be the highest-rated pro-Windows post ever to appear on slashdot. ;-)
... adult's might be too polite to be honest or too dignified to participate, ...
The test's were held in a shower to handle any accidents that might result from forced farting. It worked brilliantly. The children tried them in turn's, and not an unpleasant whiff escaped.
Aww, look at this post. You have completely butchered the use of the apostrophe. You forgot the poor englishman who runs the Apostrophe Protection Society. He got the literature award and would be horrified by your post. Is that a coincidence? Hmmm...
Where's GrammarNazi when you need him?
BTW, I actually attended the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, and it was hilarious. I would highly recommend anyone in the Cambridge/Boston area attend next year if at all possible.
You'd get pretty hungry, since earthrise only happens once a month.
That's what hackers do right? Exploit the vulnerablities in order to get them fixed? Oh, wait, they just get sent to jail while the corporations or govt bureaucracies do nothing to improve the system.
Arbitrarily reassigning your phone number, though, that just doesn't seem right.
Well, the phone company technically loans you your phone number. Doesn't the sysadmin get first pick on what login he wants? Doesn't he have the right to reassign logins or assign them in whatever fashion he chooses?
This would directly relate to IP addresses, so I would then liken trademarks to the domain name. What if someone took the domain amazon.com? That's integral to Amazon.com's business.
We must remember that property rights in America are extensive in order to facilitate capitalism. That's what drives us, and that's what drives the legal system, like it or not. I see the big companies winning out on this one, so don't be surprised if things do get passed on up the food chain.
... by the administration here to eliminate overcrowding. If you can't see students, you don't have to worry about them. I hear they're going to build invisible dorms. We already have invisible parking lots.
Shhh, don't tell anyone.
... it's how you use it.
...
Scenario: you're on a date and it's in your pocket on sleep mode. Your date caresses your hand, and you move. At the same time, the HDD wakes up. Now you have a very comic sound coming from your pocket.
I'm just saying
Cray does a good job of a psuedo-distributed operating environment. Depends on if you count a processor+memory node as independent.
Check it out.
You can also do some nice, efficient array transformations with common blocks. For example, you can turn a 100x100 array into a 10000x1 array inside a subroutine. This helps the mind and the compiler. It also allows some flexibility with what you have in memory, since you know everything in the common block will be put together in memory. This eliminates the need for pointers, per se.
C is not fast. After conversion to the intermediate language, all high-level languages are indistinguishable, and that's just a tenth of the compile process. What you mean is the _compilers_ for C make fast code. C in no way lends itself to speed, with its generous use of pointers. Fortran may suck for OS programming, but it's faster than C for number crunching b/c the compilers are better and there are no weird constructs (like pointers).
As for inline assembly and blazing loops, I doubt that many people could hand code a bit of assembly that runs faster than the compiled version. Give the compiler a straightforward loop or something, and it often knows best. You could eventually get a better optimization by hand, but the trouble is almost never worth it.
C is small, though. But it's not like memory is a limiting factor anymore. The only time it matters is when the entire program exceeds the the CPU cache, and memory fetches start hurting you.
Cute on what planet? Pluto? This person needs to get a life. If you don't like Slashdot, then go away and make your own geek news site. Else, I'll beat your ass.
A NASA press release the other day had wrong temperature conversions: "-100 F (or -40 C)".
:)
They meant -70 C. Idiot engineering schools are to blame. My engineering friends learn conventional units in their applied classes, while physics classes are all in mks units. And I go to UT, which supplies a lot of NASA's engineers.
BTW, I'm an astronomer -- I use cgs units.
Well, I *am* an astronomer. :-)
It's certainly true that Astronomers have no control over the processes they watch - however, there is choice over what you watch. Part of the art of astronomy is learning how to pick up the threads of other observations to determine what to look at next.
That is not even what I was talking about. I mean you have no way of separating physical phenomena, i.e. interstellar effects vs. a peculiar spectrum. That makes quantitative analysis difficult. Ask any astronomer about the distance to the LMC. Ha!
blinked a bit when I saw this. Or maybe your definition of high energy phenomena is a little higher than mine. I'd put intracluster (i.e. clusters of galaxies) gas at 10^9K as being a high energy plasma, along side supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, molecular outflows (from stars), black holes and gamma ray bursts as all belonging to the high energy phenomena bracket. There are plenty of others - without high energy phenomena the astronomers would be out of a job.
Again you are off the mark. These are energetic macro phenomena. A supernova has 10^51 ergs behind it, but individual particle energies are not too remarkable. The closest astronomers come to something I would call cool is high energy cosmic rays at 10^20 eV per particle. We could observe them with the right equipment, but right now we're stuck with watching the showers of particles they create when they smash into our atmosphere. Even so, they are too rare to do much with and not directional, since they are affected by galactic magnetic fields.
What are it's macro properties? [Ed - glib comment alert!] If you can tell me that, I can probably find some astronomers who'll look for it.
That's the point. Some things may not have macro properties. What then?
Well - true up to a point. Astronomical observations do take a long time to reach us. But because space is not a particularly dispersive media the signal received still maintains much of its time resolution without distortion.
Again you miss the point. These high energy interactions in particle colliders create particles with very short lifetimes, so they would decay before reaching Earth. Thus, we get no kaons, pions, etc., from supernovae. Not to mention they'd take longer to get here. The way to determine that they're being created is look for their macro signatures in colliders on earth and then compare with astronomical observations.
How can you people moderate this stuff up?
(You Must Have Been An Astronomer, You Certainly Were Not An English Major.)
And neither were you -- this is a comma splice.
we get with observatories. (And to some extent neutrinos.) Only one force in nature is transmitted by photons (the electromagnetic force), so there's a lot we're missing. Astronomical objects are by nature very far away and uncontrolled. Anything could be happening that you don't see. Also, there is no opportunity to see very high energy phenomena. The latest colliders can make a quark-gluon plasma. When's the last time you heard of an astronomer seeing that? These exotic particles and matter like this are short-lived, so their properties are almost impossible to infer from astronomical observations, which take many years to reach us.
Another point is that most astronomers deduce the physics by comparing observations to known physics. We see spectral lines in stars and know that they signify certain elements because we can reproduce the spectral lines of a single element here on earth and compare.
Moral: Ug like collider too. Make happy.