Rumplestiltskin, I say!
on
EULA In Games
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· Score: 1
Wow, I should read those EULAs more carefully...the game is cool and all, but they're not getting my firstborn child! I guess it's back to playing tic-tac-toe with a stick in the dirt. Or playing hearts with real cards! Imagine that!
AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced their browser
while still funding the vast
majority of the development on it.
And now what they do with their commercial browser
is a slap in the face to Mozilla? I think not.
The ads are annoying, yes. But rather than being
stuck with a crashing ad-filled browser, we also
have a slightly less featureful ad-free alternative. Sounds good to me.
If NS6 is too buggy and too filled with ads, it
just won't gain market share (and will probably
continue to lose it). We should complain
about bad marketing strategy for the commercial
product instead.
One of the reasons why foodstuffs have "secret
formulas" is because it's not possible to get
intellectual property protection for a recipe.
Flavor is too vague. ("That tastes too much like Kentucky Fried!" "Does not!" "Does too!!!")
A system somewhat like this is half of what is
needed to make the recording of odor/flavor
precise enough for legal action--the other half
is an understanding of what goes on in our brains
in response to a given set of chemicals.
Note that if done properly, this will allow the
digitization of odor. To play back an odor you'd
spray a mixture of simple compounds that would have the same neurologic effect as the compounds
being measured.
(Technical note: metalloporphyrins can potentially
be used to inexpensively identify a large number of compounds
simultaneously; mass spec requires a very expensive machine to do this.)
There are some reasons why SR isn't plausible; the reasons you picked are not very convincing examples, though.
Suppose you have a handful of people and you try to take over an entire well-armed country that has been the most powerful entity in the region for centuries. Impossible, right? Even if the handful have some big advantages on their side in terms of weaponry, right? Better tell that to Cortez, but I don't think he'll believe you. (Granted, if you cut the magic out of SR, it's ridiculous, but SR-without-the-Awakening isn't SR; don't fault the designers for being consistent with their vision of magic rather than yours!)
The South, in SR, didn't secede from the U.S. for no good reason. Heck, slavery was a pretty lousy reason, but they tried anyway. As I recall, in the SR world, the South was upset about the North giving away the South's territory to NAN and Aztlan.
Extraterratoriality is not viable right now, but that doesn't mean that it will be forever into the future. See other postings for a refutation of that point.
Some things that are hard to swallow: * The population of NAN. There are only a handful of Native Americans alive now. How'd their population expand to tens of millions in less than two generations? * Seattle remaining independent in a sea of NAN, when other important cities switched to NAN control. * Japanese armed occupation of SF without it becoming officially part of the Japanese nation. And so on.
...there is no intelligence gene. There is no tall gene. There is no smart gene. There are combinations of thousands of different polymorphic loci that will yield these phenotypic traits.
This is trivially true in that there are thousands of genes required for us to live, and without them we won't be tall or smart; we'll be dead.
However, it's entirely unclear at the present time exactly how many genes are responsible for traits that are apparently polygenic. Or, more importantly for this discussion, it isn't clear how many genes one would need to change in order to enhance a trait in question.
Thousands is likely much too pessimistic. After all, we only have a hundred thousand genes or so. I doubt that it requires 1% of our entire genome simply to specify how tall we are. But whether it is hundreds or dozens or a few, it's still a more difficult problem than we know how to solve right now (even with handy tricks like linkage disequilibrium).
My admittedly vague understanding is that patent laws cover processes, not stuff. Property rights laws cover stuff, while copyright laws cover your intellectual ownership of random babble.
My understanding of the new regulations is that DNA sequences can be part of a patented process only if the process has significant usefulness. So, if I clone a novel gene which may do something interesting or may not, I can't write a patent application because I can't say that anything that I might do with this has significant usefulness. At least, I can't describe any kind of process (aside from more research) that I know will be of use. However, if I clone a disease that predisposes people to Alzheimer's disease, I might patent that as part of a diagnostic test for determining whether someone is likely to get Alzheimer's. I'm not sure how far this is allowed to extend to other applications one might use the DNA sequence of an Alzheimer's gene for (and I'm not sure the PTO has any idea either, until lawsuits are brought and settled over the matter).
In any event, it sounds like the right idea: reward people for substantive work towards something really useful, while keeping people from getting rich simply because they were the first ones to explicitly describe something that they had no clue how to use. But the devil is in the details, as they say, so we may well see that it is still all messed up. Especially since "substantive" is such a subjective term.
We do have a very good idea of the long term effects of some genetic modifications. What do you think genetecists have been doing all these years? They don't understand all of it, but does anyone understand all of Linux's code? Are the ones that do the only ones who should modify it? Maybe understanding some of it is good enough.
Life is a modular system. Just because you add, say, a bacterial toxin gene to a plant it doesn't mean that it's going to take over the world--in the same way that adding one program to your 386 is not going to make it outperform an Athlon across the board.
Keep in mind that life has been adapting for a long time and therefore is already pretty close to optimal for natural conditions. It isn't that close for weird conditions, such as are found in your average heavily fertilized agricultural monoculture. Our peculiarly adapted things have a long and glorious history of faring horribly in the wild. (Note the lack of packs of wild poodles overruning the world.) GM allows us to make peculiar adaptations even faster than before.
Rather than being scared of GM in general, then, we have to examine each and every proposed application and consider how that might have an impact. Including pesticides in food is questionable, for some of the reasons the article mentioned. Removing enzymes responsible for breakdown in ripe fruits seems a bit more reasonable.
Humans have been in the business of breeding strains of crops for ages. These usually have superior characteristics for those traits we selected for (that is why they were selected!).
Therefore, being afraid that GM crops will drive out non-GM crops (under cultivation) is as silly as being afraid that my new traditionally selected long-grain rice will supplant other breeds of long-grain rice cause mine is better.
Furthermore, if we make plants that are unfit (i.e. don't produce progeny) then there is little chance of them naturally replacing the fit plants (those that do produce progeny). I believe that Darwin and Wallace had some things to say about this.
Actually, Katz's post here is what I gathered from the mainstream media. Granted, they weren't that explicit about it, but since when did you not have to read behind the lines?
I don't view the whole anti-corporate message as anything new. People are complaining that everyone is insecure, vulnerable and dispensable, everyone's role and mission is continously subject to change? Fine, let them complain. Being secure, invulnerable, and required, with a static role and mission is, in a word, inefficient. This is why corporations have moved away from static invulnerable security. Efficiency is not a bad thing; it gives us more necessities (and more toys) for the same amount of work. The complaint, it seems to me, is not about efficiency but about security; people want the Big Friendly Corporation to take care of them. This is antithetical to the supposedly net-generated individualism being touted here. I will be frightened when corporations start having the resources to take care of people. ("GigaCorp. My Corp, My Life. Have a GigaNice day!" Insert catchy jingle.)
Also, what is the deal with this: Corporations have increasingly acquired and sought to monopolize whole elements of culture, from movies to books to the press. This has sparked an epidemic homogenization of popular culture - not a dumbing down, but a dulling down - as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed. Er, say what? As far as I can tell, it's exactly the corporate influence that has encouraged the controversial, profane, and sexual over the past forty years. Why? Controversy sells. Profanity sells. Sex sells. What do corporations do? They sell things. Left to our own devices in the absence of constant advertising and fierce competition for business, people can be quite happy without a constant influx of profane sexual controversy.
There have also been protests against Monsanto's genetically engineered foods in Europe; but this has nothing to do with anti-corporate sentiments. There's a very strong anti-genengineering sentiment in much of Europe, without any apparent factual basis. The rhetoric is not anti-corporate, it's pro-health. In many cases, genengineered foods are safer than the traditional alternatives as far as we can tell; only the pesticide-supertolerant plants seem to pose a health risk. The fear seems, therefore, based largely in lack of information, of blindly following the crowd of popular opinion. This isn't an internet/individuality phenomenon.
Come to think of it, neither is vandalizing Starbucks. Anyone can vandalize Starbucks as part of a mob. What would show true cooperative individuality would be if the people who had a unique and compelling message--the individuals--were to stop the random hoodlums from stealing the spotlight with their socially destructive actions in a situation where they think they can get away with it. The mainstream media has the perfect excuse now for ignoring valid arguments: "they're a bunch of irrational rioters".
It's difficult to tell, without direct access to the evidence, whether or not there were any serious threats made.
From the description, it sounded as though it was a fairly typical flame-war, where much is said and little is meant. If that's all it was, I can't imagine that the ruling would hold up under the First Amendment.
If, on the other hand, people were making threats which they seemed poised to carry out, then action may have been warranted.
Has anyone found a copy of the posts in question? I had a quick look but wasn't successful.
Some might say that college students, as a grouup, might be the most out of touch people on the face of the earth. Happily, having observed both, I can conclude that neither is the case: Siberian hermits are the most out of touch people on the face of the earth.
More seriously, have you ever hung around a lecturer at a university for very long? It gives you an entirely different perspective.
I can't count the number of times that students have come to my supervisor complaining that they should get credit for something because they answered a question "correctly" based on someone else's incorrect notes. Inasmuch as it is the job of a professor to teach students, a professor is liable to at least encourage students to not simply "do whatever they want with their notes".
Further, some professors spend large amounts of time preparing material in a novel way to best inform their students about the material that they are presenting. (Others don't bother.)
Now, back to selling class notes online. We've touched on the reproduction of copyrighted material outside of class (with no permission, and selling to tens/hundreds/thousands of people is not "fair use"), but it is an important one. How'd you like it if publishers uniformly refused to let ANY figures from ANY textbooks be reproduced in class because that would allow them to be resold on the internet?
Further, if you were to spend a large amount of time and effort to come up with an exceptionally clear way to explain a certain topic, how would you like it if students took notes, got paid for their utility (i.e., how useful YOUR lecture was (and how good of recording devices they were)), and then blamed you for their errors that made it into the pay site? Personally, if I were a professor, I wouldn't bother. I'd ignore my own class and let them buy notes from someone gullible enough to do all the work of preparing good lectures. Or, alternatively, I might try to submit my own set of notes so at least there would be a correct version around. (The financial aspect is minimal. When you are making 70k per year, 2k from lecture notes is trivial, especially when it takes dozens of hours away from applying for the 250k grant you need to keep your lab running, talking to the students who are doing work in your lab, holding office hours, reviewing the chapter of a textbook that's being revised, etc. etc. etc..)
Leeching off other people's work is just stupid. It encourages bad work. And this is what the note-reporting schemes in their current form are doing. What you want to do instead is find people who gladly give out their work (and accept suggestions on how to improve it) in exchange for the same from you and others. This encourages good work. Gee, sounds kind of like OSS, doesn't it?
Somebody start up an open-source note repository and put all the commercial ones out of business already, huh?:)
[me]> Why wouldn't she look 75? Along with her daughter and grand-daughter?
You're assuming that death is postponed but that ageing would continue at the normal rate.
Uh-huh. That's because our friendly age-extended roundworms age at the normal rate until about the middle of their reproductive lifespan. And that's all the data we have to go on. (Well, okay, there's the Mesuthelah(sp?) mutation in Drosophila as well.
Telomeric renewal is supposed to defeat the Hayflick limit which causes cell lines to die out after about twenty generations.
As far as I know, there isn't a solid consensus that this is a limiting process in humans, that the Hayflick limit is real outside of tissue culture, and that telomeric renewal would fix the problem. It may be true, but I'm waiting for the extended lifespan transgenic mouse that is overexpressing telomerase. (Note that mice which are lacking telomerase are good for about six generations, e.g. Herrera et al, EMBO 18:2950-60.) Also, note that one of the leading causes of death is cancer, and that cancer cells upregulate telomerase activity. Kind of makes one skeptical about telomerase as a magic bullet.
It's likely though that some ageing processes not directly associated with senescence would need separate adjustment.
Yes, other changes occur also. One you didn't metion: metabolism slows rather dramatically, especially in men, especially around the age of 30 or so. Looking 23 and having the energy of an 85 year old is not going to help you much.
A lot of people have been posting that embedded devices are not useful, and hence that there is no reason to be worried about a massive attack on them.
I personally would love well designed intelligent appliances, and I'm not a technogadget collector. I keep my notes on folded up sheets of paper, not the latest Color Palm VII/CX Plus Pro. But when was the last time your refrigerator froze your tomatos? The ice-cream was too hard to eat? You were out of coffee in the morning? The microwave broke and you weren't sure how to fix it? Intelligent appliances could take care of all of these things easily. Suppose I'm at work and I read on CNN's website that they have a special that afternoon that I want to record. Why can't I program my VCR from my computer over the internet? Why doesn't my alarm clock set itself when I turn it on? I'm not willing to pay much extra for all these little conveniences, but I am willing to pay something, and I'd wager that many others would too.
I also think that at some point power cables will have five prongs instead of two: the current three (to provide power) and two extra to provide a USB-style link. With open protocols for inter-device communications, even advanced appliances could require no setting up. You just plug them into the wall, they find the right place to get all the information needed to configure themselves, and off you go.
I am not particularly worried about people cracking my toaster oven, though. There are two reasons. First, my toaster oven will not have a worthwhile amount of processing power nor will it do anything that anyone cares about. (Maybe if some uberhacker develops a grudge against me I'll find my toast burnt one morning, but that's hardly a world-shattering threat.) Second, those appliances that can be dangerous should have isolated kill-switches that shut the thing down if it engages in dangerous behavior. If you can afford an entire embedded processing system in your networked toaster oven, you can avoid an extra sensor and circuit that kills the power before the cracker lights your toast on fire. If the system is both boring and harmless, there is little danger of intentional damage. Viruses may accidentally become a problem, in which case....
Obviously, there should be manual controls to disconnect both net access and maybe even kill switches, in the unlikely event that you *need* to light your toast on fire for some reason.
Besides, without every electric toothbrush connected to the net, what are we going to do with all the IPv6 addresses?
De-novo synthesis of 20kb of DNA is not trivial. In fact, I don't think it has ever been done before. Yes, you could theoretically create Ebola by stitching together about 200 pieces of 100bp oligos, but it would take years and would require a very competent cloning lab. It would be much faster and cheaper to send someone down to Nigeria to collect a sample of the stuff.
Downloadable instructions on how to make bombs with fertilizer...that could be dangerous.
I am not religious, but I recall in the Upanishads, Torah, Chinese (Lao Tzu makes mention of it) and Greek myth a time of a golden age when mankind had a physical perfection, and lived lives roughly 4 times the current maximium life spans with a degree of youth and vigor.
Um, if you're not religious, then is your point only that lots of religions paint long, healthful life as desireable?
All we are now, even our sexual revolution stemmed from the concept that we could all die tomorrow.
Even more than that: the reality that we all will die soon. Unsafe sex is a good idea if it's likely that you'll die soon and need to leave progeny behind. It is a really bad idea if you're going to live hundreds of years and stay fertile for many of them (and hence can be more selective).
This genetic research we have now has already revealed the secret of telemeres which control aging by cell division and we have already sustained human cells and quadrupled the natural life span of a roundworm.
The telomere story is still not completely resolved, and the roundworms' extended lifespan comes from a combination of (1) turning off their reproductive system (which normally uses about half the worm's energy) and (2) placing them into a starvation-like state (which worms have adapted to live through). Neither of these are really applicable to mammals, and even if they were I doubt we'd like the consequences. So, yes, there is progress, but aging is a big problem. It is a big problem in the same way that artificial intelligence is a big problem: we haven't even gotten far enough along to tell just what the problem is, let alone solve it.
Even love and family relationships may change, for a mother that is 200 would proably look about 25 and seem to be by appearance a peer not only to her daughter but to her grandaughter as well.
But why? Why wouldn't she look 75? Along with her daughter and grand-daughter? Some age will be the easiest to prolong...but don't count on it being the age that you would most wish to prolong. Going back to our friendly quadruple-lifespan roundworms, they tend to look Quite Old for a very long time. (A very long time for worms. Their lifespan is normally about two weeks, so two months is quite an accomplishment.)
If people beleive they have a long future, they have to plan for it, it won't be their children's problem anymore it will be theirs.
I wish...but in this age when people can't avoid overdrinking even though they know they'll have a horrible headache the *next morning*, I am not all that optimistic. There will definitely be an effect, but it may be disappointingly small. After all, were our long-term plans that much more shortsighted when life expectancy was only half as long?
The sponsors of the site, Pangaea Systems, are known primarily for their sequence clustering tools, which are primarily of use to pharmaceutical companies at the moment. The idea is that, given a whole heck of a lot of genes, you would like to put them in to related "clusters" that may then be regulated or inhibited by similar drugs. Pharmaceuticals hope to use this to simplify drug design. (Hey, this antidepressant already binds to this protein...which looks a lot like this protein implicated in hypertension...I wonder...?)
For an average researcher, having a complete set of clusers usually is irrelevant. (Of course, it may not always be; once cluster information is available, people will probably figure out ways to use it well.) All they want to know is how similar their gene(s) of interest is/are to other known genes. And there are plenty of tools that do that already, most notably the set at NCBI. DoubleTwist offers little of use there.
The interesting concept is that of "agents" who go out and look for your data for you. Agents aren't new, but they have not been used much in biological research thus far. Most of the relevant data is at a very small number of sites, so setting up an agent might not be much easier than going around yourself, but if agents become prevalent it will allow biological information to sprawl all over the place to a much greater extent. I wonder if this is a good thing? It is nice to have all your data found for you automatically, but if that's the only way to find anything it may get burdensome.
One point of concern: some of these agents will poll existing sites daily for new sequences. What happens if a hundred thousand researchers all ask for daily polling on ten or twenty genes? Suddenly NCBI will be getting a million extra hits a day and will be slowed to a crawl. I would feel a lot more comfortable if DoubleTwist did the searches on its own machines and only downloaded the new data once a day--but from the description, it sounds as though they plan on searching the public databases repeatedly. (And since it costs them nothing, if 50 people all request information on the same gene, they may not have an incentive to avoid making 50 separate search requests.)
I share the skepticism that anything *really* novel or useful will be greeted with a cheerful reminder that this is an "advanced" feature that requires payment. Further, I'd bet that Celera Genomics is paying close attention here...they are currently racing the NIH to sequence the human genome, and claim that their commercially-funded sequencing will be available for free. However, the advanced tools to search and understand the sequence will not. If Pangaea's attempt here goes badly, watch for Perkin-Elmer (the underwriters of Celera Genomics, who build DNA sequencers among other things) to make Celera back off on their openness statements and start getting really aggressive with patenting....
Given how little the government and legal system seem to understand information technology (e.g. export restrictions on encryption, patents on algorithms, etc.), I am quite worried that if anything is done to MS at all, that it will be counterproductive to everyone.
For instance, the giant Ma Bell was broken up into a bunch of Baby Bells, each of which was a monopoly and still is. That really helps me a lot as a consumer. (Note: long distance prices are now determined by how much the local companies charge long distance carriers per minute to complete the connection.)
Suppose MS is broken up into OS, Office, and "other" components and is forced to port software to other OSes. This means that there will be really, really lousy versions of Word97 for Linux and BeOS. Is this a good thing for quality operating systems? I don't really think so. It is nice to have MS Office available for the Mac, until you realize that it isn't really quite PC compatible, is horribly slow, and has a couple of irritating bugs that don't exist in the Windows version. If Office is your main software of use, it's enough to make you dump the Mac for a PC. (I know of two people who have.)
So, forced ports aren't a good idea. How about just a breakup? Then the question is, why would MS/OfficeWare do anything but write software the way it is doing it now? Well, maybe it wouldn't. What would happen if a competitor to Office came along? MS/OfficeWare alone would have plenty of financial power to play all the current M$ tricks.
So maybe a breakup isn't a good idea. How about stern warnings telling M$ that it has to be "good". What is good? There are a few anticompetitive practices that are fairly obvious targets (such as volume discounts in exchange for an exclusive relationship). But even with those injunctions, M$ still has plenty of advantages. And even without those, vendors will jump ship if M$ prices their product too outrageously. (Especially since there are free alternatives now.)
About the only real change I can see happening is the DOJ telling M$ to do something, M$ losing a lot of money, and the situation proceeding as it would have before. Since Bill Gates claims to be intending to give most of his wealth to charity, that sounds like a net negative to me. (The lost money will go to lawyers and evaporate in reshufflings.)
I could care less if others use Linux, I know that I can use it, it takes care of my needs, and I never have to reboot my machine.
Suppose your needs include doing useful things on the web like viewing streaming video, running java applets, and such. And your OS has no software to support it. Is it taking care of your needs? Not in that respect. You go use a machine with another OS.
I have yet to come upon any problems after extensive testing of Netscape with thousands of pages loaded with Java.
And do you know why? It's because people have gone to great pains to make sure that the Java runs on the buggy browsers of most operating systems. I've been working on a Java app for molecular modeling and on Linux, NS crashes after about two seconds of trying to rotate the model. The code is fine. NS is buggy. Can I use Linux to view models? No. I use the Win98 machine next to it instead. (Ha--I still compile to bytecode under Linux though!) Besides which, I've hit a half dozen Java applets that didn't work. The stupid simple ones tend to work; the slightly involved ones tend to crash.
You see, one of the most important differences between Windows and Linux is that Windows is all smoke and mirrors (marketing) whereas Linux is an product that is actually well made and capable of delivering on its promises.
Who is delivering working Java 2 support, 3D graphics, streaming sound/video/etc., effortless DVD playback, and so on, right now? Windows. This doesn't mean that Linux can't do it better, just that it doesn't do it now. And now is important. Now is when I'm trying to do something.
Gee, I don't suppose they could be smart enough to count the number of numeric characters in words and convert them to letters, could they? char *cvtable="olseas6t89"; i=j=0; for (k=0;st[k];k++) (isdigit(st[k]))?j++:(isalpha(st[k]))?i++:0; if (j*8>i) for (k=0;st[k];k++) st[k] = (isdigit(st[k]))?cvtable[st[k]-'0']:st[k]; Nah. Too tricky.
For me, it comes down to using the right tool for the job. If I want to get a CGI script up and running quickly--and I'm not going to have thousands of users pounding on it at the same time (I wish)--then I use Perl. It lets me finish the job quickly and move on to something more interesting.
If I need to do anything complex, I'll write it in C. Usually, for me, this involves calling a C program from Perl, but I have no moral objection to using C++ if I really need that level of performance.
(I do exactly the same thing with Java; if I need a quick graphical widgety app or applet, Java is the way to go. If I'm trying to perform image deconvolution as fast as possible, it's back to C or even Fortran....)
I suppose that there is some danger in allowing Perl to become so much of a standard that everyone automatically uses it for CGI scripts regardless of the speed required. But I have difficulty imagining a CGI script that really requires the type of heavy-duty information processing that Perl is not good at. Mostly, Perl just calls library routines to do the heavy work, and those can be just as fast as any compiled language.
There are certainly a lot of very bright people in IT fields. However, as a graduate student in biology at a major research university, with friends in the math, physics, and engineering departments, I can attest that there are plenty of bright people left to do other important things.
I am not particularly concerned about IT draining the talents of the very brightest away from other, more important pursuits simply because almost no-one can be the very brightest in multiple fields. For instance, I know mathematicians who can run rings around every programmer I know when it comes to making deductions from large sets of highly abstract definitions. That's what mathematicians do, and some of them are very good at it and like it. I know biologists who are far better at recalling tons of minute detail about apparently unrelated processes than any programmer I know. And so on. And, of course, most of the biologists and mathematicians couldn't write a device driver to save their life.
Actually, amusingly enough, most of the scientific fields are actually too crowded, biology especially. It's not clear that without IT there would be more demand for people in those fields. So I'm not sure that we're losing too much talent.
If there is a loss, it seems to me to be mostly a second-tier loss. The very few very best are still doing what they're best at, but a lot of the next best are going into IT for the money. It's now a viable alternative to medicine or law or finance, if you can handle it. The implications are that a lot of bright people are going to be off making money instead of doing something useful. Gee, when has that ever not been true? Think of all the wonderful developments we'd have if lawyers all had been working on vaccines and antibiotics!
Besides, IT is genuinely useful. When it stops being genuinely useful, there will be less money in it, and people will go back to being lawyers or stockbrokers or maybe even virologists.
(The real danger, it seems to me, is that the internet can be a great productivity-sapper as well as a productivity-enhancer. Why, right now, some biologist is probably posting to slashdot instead of doing their research!)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I should read those EULAs more carefully...the game is cool and all, but they're not getting my firstborn child! I guess it's back to playing tic-tac-toe with a stick in the dirt. Or playing hearts with real cards! Imagine that!
And now what they do with their commercial browser is a slap in the face to Mozilla? I think not. The ads are annoying, yes. But rather than being stuck with a crashing ad-filled browser, we also have a slightly less featureful ad-free alternative. Sounds good to me.
If NS6 is too buggy and too filled with ads, it just won't gain market share (and will probably continue to lose it). We should complain about bad marketing strategy for the commercial product instead.
A system somewhat like this is half of what is needed to make the recording of odor/flavor precise enough for legal action--the other half is an understanding of what goes on in our brains in response to a given set of chemicals.
Note that if done properly, this will allow the digitization of odor. To play back an odor you'd spray a mixture of simple compounds that would have the same neurologic effect as the compounds being measured.
(Technical note: metalloporphyrins can potentially be used to inexpensively identify a large number of compounds simultaneously; mass spec requires a very expensive machine to do this.)
Suppose you have a handful of people and you try to take over an entire well-armed country that has been the most powerful entity in the region for centuries. Impossible, right? Even if the handful have some big advantages on their side in terms of weaponry, right? Better tell that to Cortez, but I don't think he'll believe you. (Granted, if you cut the magic out of SR, it's ridiculous, but SR-without-the-Awakening isn't SR; don't fault the designers for being consistent with their vision of magic rather than yours!)
The South, in SR, didn't secede from the U.S. for no good reason. Heck, slavery was a pretty lousy reason, but they tried anyway. As I recall, in the SR world, the South was upset about the North giving away the South's territory to NAN and Aztlan.
Extraterratoriality is not viable right now, but that doesn't mean that it will be forever into the future. See other postings for a refutation of that point.
Some things that are hard to swallow:
* The population of NAN. There are only a handful of Native Americans alive now. How'd their population expand to tens of millions in less than two generations?
* Seattle remaining independent in a sea of NAN, when other important cities switched to NAN control.
* Japanese armed occupation of SF without it becoming officially part of the Japanese nation.
And so on.
This is trivially true in that there are thousands of genes required for us to live, and without them we won't be tall or smart; we'll be dead.
However, it's entirely unclear at the present time exactly how many genes are responsible for traits that are apparently polygenic. Or, more importantly for this discussion, it isn't clear how many genes one would need to change in order to enhance a trait in question.
Thousands is likely much too pessimistic. After all, we only have a hundred thousand genes or so. I doubt that it requires 1% of our entire genome simply to specify how tall we are. But whether it is hundreds or dozens or a few, it's still a more difficult problem than we know how to solve right now (even with handy tricks like linkage disequilibrium).
My understanding of the new regulations is that DNA sequences can be part of a patented process only if the process has significant usefulness. So, if I clone a novel gene which may do something interesting or may not, I can't write a patent application because I can't say that anything that I might do with this has significant usefulness. At least, I can't describe any kind of process (aside from more research) that I know will be of use. However, if I clone a disease that predisposes people to Alzheimer's disease, I might patent that as part of a diagnostic test for determining whether someone is likely to get Alzheimer's. I'm not sure how far this is allowed to extend to other applications one might use the DNA sequence of an Alzheimer's gene for (and I'm not sure the PTO has any idea either, until lawsuits are brought and settled over the matter).
In any event, it sounds like the right idea: reward people for substantive work towards something really useful, while keeping people from getting rich simply because they were the first ones to explicitly describe something that they had no clue how to use. But the devil is in the details, as they say, so we may well see that it is still all messed up. Especially since "substantive" is such a subjective term.
Life is a modular system. Just because you add, say, a bacterial toxin gene to a plant it doesn't mean that it's going to take over the world--in the same way that adding one program to your 386 is not going to make it outperform an Athlon across the board.
Keep in mind that life has been adapting for a long time and therefore is already pretty close to optimal for natural conditions. It isn't that close for weird conditions, such as are found in your average heavily fertilized agricultural monoculture. Our peculiarly adapted things have a long and glorious history of faring horribly in the wild. (Note the lack of packs of wild poodles overruning the world.) GM allows us to make peculiar adaptations even faster than before.
Rather than being scared of GM in general, then, we have to examine each and every proposed application and consider how that might have an impact. Including pesticides in food is questionable, for some of the reasons the article mentioned. Removing enzymes responsible for breakdown in ripe fruits seems a bit more reasonable.
Therefore, being afraid that GM crops will drive out non-GM crops (under cultivation) is as silly as being afraid that my new traditionally selected long-grain rice will supplant other breeds of long-grain rice cause mine is better.
Furthermore, if we make plants that are unfit (i.e. don't produce progeny) then there is little chance of them naturally replacing the fit plants (those that do produce progeny). I believe that Darwin and Wallace had some things to say about this.
I don't view the whole anti-corporate message as anything new. People are complaining that everyone is insecure, vulnerable and dispensable, everyone's role and mission is continously subject to change? Fine, let them complain. Being secure, invulnerable, and required, with a static role and mission is, in a word, inefficient. This is why corporations have moved away from static invulnerable security. Efficiency is not a bad thing; it gives us more necessities (and more toys) for the same amount of work. The complaint, it seems to me, is not about efficiency but about security; people want the Big Friendly Corporation to take care of them. This is antithetical to the supposedly net-generated individualism being touted here. I will be frightened when corporations start having the resources to take care of people. ("GigaCorp. My Corp, My Life. Have a GigaNice day!" Insert catchy jingle.)
Also, what is the deal with this: Corporations have increasingly acquired and sought to monopolize whole elements of culture, from movies to books to the press. This has sparked an epidemic homogenization of popular culture - not a dumbing down, but a dulling down - as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed. Er, say what? As far as I can tell, it's exactly the corporate influence that has encouraged the controversial, profane, and sexual over the past forty years. Why? Controversy sells. Profanity sells. Sex sells. What do corporations do? They sell things. Left to our own devices in the absence of constant advertising and fierce competition for business, people can be quite happy without a constant influx of profane sexual controversy.
There have also been protests against Monsanto's genetically engineered foods in Europe; but this has nothing to do with anti-corporate sentiments. There's a very strong anti-genengineering sentiment in much of Europe, without any apparent factual basis. The rhetoric is not anti-corporate, it's pro-health. In many cases, genengineered foods are safer than the traditional alternatives as far as we can tell; only the pesticide-supertolerant plants seem to pose a health risk. The fear seems, therefore, based largely in lack of information, of blindly following the crowd of popular opinion. This isn't an internet/individuality phenomenon.
Come to think of it, neither is vandalizing Starbucks. Anyone can vandalize Starbucks as part of a mob. What would show true cooperative individuality would be if the people who had a unique and compelling message--the individuals--were to stop the random hoodlums from stealing the spotlight with their socially destructive actions in a situation where they think they can get away with it. The mainstream media has the perfect excuse now for ignoring valid arguments: "they're a bunch of irrational rioters".
From the description, it sounded as though it was a fairly typical flame-war, where much is said and little is meant. If that's all it was, I can't imagine that the ruling would hold up under the First Amendment.
If, on the other hand, people were making threats which they seemed poised to carry out, then action may have been warranted.
Has anyone found a copy of the posts in question? I had a quick look but wasn't successful.
More seriously, have you ever hung around a lecturer at a university for very long? It gives you an entirely different perspective.
I can't count the number of times that students have come to my supervisor complaining that they should get credit for something because they answered a question "correctly" based on someone else's incorrect notes. Inasmuch as it is the job of a professor to teach students, a professor is liable to at least encourage students to not simply "do whatever they want with their notes".
Further, some professors spend large amounts of time preparing material in a novel way to best inform their students about the material that they are presenting. (Others don't bother.)
Now, back to selling class notes online. We've touched on the reproduction of copyrighted material outside of class (with no permission, and selling to tens/hundreds/thousands of people is not "fair use"), but it is an important one. How'd you like it if publishers uniformly refused to let ANY figures from ANY textbooks be reproduced in class because that would allow them to be resold on the internet?
Further, if you were to spend a large amount of time and effort to come up with an exceptionally clear way to explain a certain topic, how would you like it if students took notes, got paid for their utility (i.e., how useful YOUR lecture was (and how good of recording devices they were)), and then blamed you for their errors that made it into the pay site? Personally, if I were a professor, I wouldn't bother. I'd ignore my own class and let them buy notes from someone gullible enough to do all the work of preparing good lectures. Or, alternatively, I might try to submit my own set of notes so at least there would be a correct version around. (The financial aspect is minimal. When you are making 70k per year, 2k from lecture notes is trivial, especially when it takes dozens of hours away from applying for the 250k grant you need to keep your lab running, talking to the students who are doing work in your lab, holding office hours, reviewing the chapter of a textbook that's being revised, etc. etc. etc..)
Leeching off other people's work is just stupid. It encourages bad work. And this is what the note-reporting schemes in their current form are doing. What you want to do instead is find people who gladly give out their work (and accept suggestions on how to improve it) in exchange for the same from you and others. This encourages good work. Gee, sounds kind of like OSS, doesn't it?
Somebody start up an open-source note repository and put all the commercial ones out of business already, huh? :)
You obviously haven't used their mice, or have but failed to noticed them.
You're assuming that death is postponed but that ageing would continue at the normal rate.
Uh-huh. That's because our friendly age-extended roundworms age at the normal rate until about the middle of their reproductive lifespan. And that's all the data we have to go on. (Well, okay, there's the Mesuthelah(sp?) mutation in Drosophila as well.
Telomeric renewal is supposed to defeat the Hayflick limit which causes cell lines to die out after about twenty generations.
As far as I know, there isn't a solid consensus that this is a limiting process in humans, that the Hayflick limit is real outside of tissue culture, and that telomeric renewal would fix the problem. It may be true, but I'm waiting for the extended lifespan transgenic mouse that is overexpressing telomerase. (Note that mice which are lacking telomerase are good for about six generations, e.g. Herrera et al, EMBO 18:2950-60.) Also, note that one of the leading causes of death is cancer, and that cancer cells upregulate telomerase activity. Kind of makes one skeptical about telomerase as a magic bullet.
It's likely though that some ageing processes not directly associated with senescence would need separate adjustment.
Yes, other changes occur also. One you didn't metion: metabolism slows rather dramatically, especially in men, especially around the age of 30 or so. Looking 23 and having the energy of an 85 year old is not going to help you much.
I personally would love well designed intelligent appliances, and I'm not a technogadget collector. I keep my notes on folded up sheets of paper, not the latest Color Palm VII/CX Plus Pro. But when was the last time your refrigerator froze your tomatos? The ice-cream was too hard to eat? You were out of coffee in the morning? The microwave broke and you weren't sure how to fix it? Intelligent appliances could take care of all of these things easily. Suppose I'm at work and I read on CNN's website that they have a special that afternoon that I want to record. Why can't I program my VCR from my computer over the internet? Why doesn't my alarm clock set itself when I turn it on? I'm not willing to pay much extra for all these little conveniences, but I am willing to pay something, and I'd wager that many others would too.
I also think that at some point power cables will have five prongs instead of two: the current three (to provide power) and two extra to provide a USB-style link. With open protocols for inter-device communications, even advanced appliances could require no setting up. You just plug them into the wall, they find the right place to get all the information needed to configure themselves, and off you go.
I am not particularly worried about people cracking my toaster oven, though. There are two reasons. First, my toaster oven will not have a worthwhile amount of processing power nor will it do anything that anyone cares about. (Maybe if some uberhacker develops a grudge against me I'll find my toast burnt one morning, but that's hardly a world-shattering threat.) Second, those appliances that can be dangerous should have isolated kill-switches that shut the thing down if it engages in dangerous behavior. If you can afford an entire embedded processing system in your networked toaster oven, you can avoid an extra sensor and circuit that kills the power before the cracker lights your toast on fire. If the system is both boring and harmless, there is little danger of intentional damage. Viruses may accidentally become a problem, in which case....
Obviously, there should be manual controls to disconnect both net access and maybe even kill switches, in the unlikely event that you *need* to light your toast on fire for some reason.
Besides, without every electric toothbrush connected to the net, what are we going to do with all the IPv6 addresses?
I wonder what he thinks "bias" is supposed to mean? I wonder if he thinks he isn't?
Downloadable instructions on how to make bombs with fertilizer...that could be dangerous.
Um, if you're not religious, then is your point only that lots of religions paint long, healthful life as desireable?
All we are now, even our sexual revolution stemmed from the concept that we could all die tomorrow.
Even more than that: the reality that we all will die soon. Unsafe sex is a good idea if it's likely that you'll die soon and need to leave progeny behind. It is a really bad idea if you're going to live hundreds of years and stay fertile for many of them (and hence can be more selective).
This genetic research we have now has already revealed the secret of telemeres which control aging by cell division and we have already sustained human cells and quadrupled the natural life span of a roundworm.
The telomere story is still not completely resolved, and the roundworms' extended lifespan comes from a combination of (1) turning off their reproductive system (which normally uses about half the worm's energy) and (2) placing them into a starvation-like state (which worms have adapted to live through). Neither of these are really applicable to mammals, and even if they were I doubt we'd like the consequences. So, yes, there is progress, but aging is a big problem. It is a big problem in the same way that artificial intelligence is a big problem: we haven't even gotten far enough along to tell just what the problem is, let alone solve it.
Even love and family relationships may change, for a mother that is 200 would proably look about 25 and seem to be by appearance a peer not only to her daughter but to her grandaughter as well.
But why? Why wouldn't she look 75? Along with her daughter and grand-daughter? Some age will be the easiest to prolong...but don't count on it being the age that you would most wish to prolong. Going back to our friendly quadruple-lifespan roundworms, they tend to look Quite Old for a very long time. (A very long time for worms. Their lifespan is normally about two weeks, so two months is quite an accomplishment.)
If people beleive they have a long future, they have to plan for it, it won't be their children's problem anymore it will be theirs.
I wish...but in this age when people can't avoid overdrinking even though they know they'll have a horrible headache the *next morning*, I am not all that optimistic. There will definitely be an effect, but it may be disappointingly small. After all, were our long-term plans that much more shortsighted when life expectancy was only half as long?
For an average researcher, having a complete set of clusers usually is irrelevant. (Of course, it may not always be; once cluster information is available, people will probably figure out ways to use it well.) All they want to know is how similar their gene(s) of interest is/are to other known genes. And there are plenty of tools that do that already, most notably the set at NCBI. DoubleTwist offers little of use there.
The interesting concept is that of "agents" who go out and look for your data for you. Agents aren't new, but they have not been used much in biological research thus far. Most of the relevant data is at a very small number of sites, so setting up an agent might not be much easier than going around yourself, but if agents become prevalent it will allow biological information to sprawl all over the place to a much greater extent. I wonder if this is a good thing? It is nice to have all your data found for you automatically, but if that's the only way to find anything it may get burdensome.
One point of concern: some of these agents will poll existing sites daily for new sequences. What happens if a hundred thousand researchers all ask for daily polling on ten or twenty genes? Suddenly NCBI will be getting a million extra hits a day and will be slowed to a crawl. I would feel a lot more comfortable if DoubleTwist did the searches on its own machines and only downloaded the new data once a day--but from the description, it sounds as though they plan on searching the public databases repeatedly. (And since it costs them nothing, if 50 people all request information on the same gene, they may not have an incentive to avoid making 50 separate search requests.)
I share the skepticism that anything *really* novel or useful will be greeted with a cheerful reminder that this is an "advanced" feature that requires payment. Further, I'd bet that Celera Genomics is paying close attention here...they are currently racing the NIH to sequence the human genome, and claim that their commercially-funded sequencing will be available for free. However, the advanced tools to search and understand the sequence will not. If Pangaea's attempt here goes badly, watch for Perkin-Elmer (the underwriters of Celera Genomics, who build DNA sequencers among other things) to make Celera back off on their openness statements and start getting really aggressive with patenting....
For instance, the giant Ma Bell was broken up into a bunch of Baby Bells, each of which was a monopoly and still is. That really helps me a lot as a consumer. (Note: long distance prices are now determined by how much the local companies charge long distance carriers per minute to complete the connection.)
Suppose MS is broken up into OS, Office, and "other" components and is forced to port software to other OSes. This means that there will be really, really lousy versions of Word97 for Linux and BeOS. Is this a good thing for quality operating systems? I don't really think so. It is nice to have MS Office available for the Mac, until you realize that it isn't really quite PC compatible, is horribly slow, and has a couple of irritating bugs that don't exist in the Windows version. If Office is your main software of use, it's enough to make you dump the Mac for a PC. (I know of two people who have.)
So, forced ports aren't a good idea. How about just a breakup? Then the question is, why would MS/OfficeWare do anything but write software the way it is doing it now? Well, maybe it wouldn't. What would happen if a competitor to Office came along? MS/OfficeWare alone would have plenty of financial power to play all the current M$ tricks.
So maybe a breakup isn't a good idea. How about stern warnings telling M$ that it has to be "good". What is good? There are a few anticompetitive practices that are fairly obvious targets (such as volume discounts in exchange for an exclusive relationship). But even with those injunctions, M$ still has plenty of advantages. And even without those, vendors will jump ship if M$ prices their product too outrageously. (Especially since there are free alternatives now.)
About the only real change I can see happening is the DOJ telling M$ to do something, M$ losing a lot of money, and the situation proceeding as it would have before. Since Bill Gates claims to be intending to give most of his wealth to charity, that sounds like a net negative to me. (The lost money will go to lawyers and evaporate in reshufflings.)
It would be rather ironic, though, if Windows users could get a free usable browser while Linux users had to pay for theirs.
Suppose your needs include doing useful things on the web like viewing streaming video, running java applets, and such. And your OS has no software to support it. Is it taking care of your needs? Not in that respect. You go use a machine with another OS.
I have yet to come upon any problems after extensive testing of Netscape with thousands of pages loaded with Java.
And do you know why? It's because people have gone to great pains to make sure that the Java runs on the buggy browsers of most operating systems. I've been working on a Java app for molecular modeling and on Linux, NS crashes after about two seconds of trying to rotate the model. The code is fine. NS is buggy. Can I use Linux to view models? No. I use the Win98 machine next to it instead. (Ha--I still compile to bytecode under Linux though!) Besides which, I've hit a half dozen Java applets that didn't work. The stupid simple ones tend to work; the slightly involved ones tend to crash.
You see, one of the most important differences between Windows and Linux is that Windows is all smoke and mirrors (marketing) whereas Linux is an product that is actually well made and capable of delivering on its promises.
Who is delivering working Java 2 support, 3D graphics, streaming sound/video/etc., effortless DVD playback, and so on, right now? Windows. This doesn't mean that Linux can't do it better, just that it doesn't do it now. And now is important. Now is when I'm trying to do something.
All right, that's not fair. I previewed that and the formatting was FINE. *mutter*
Gee, I don't suppose they could be smart enough to count the number of numeric characters in words and convert them to letters, could they? char *cvtable="olseas6t89"; i=j=0; for (k=0;st[k];k++) (isdigit(st[k]))?j++:(isalpha(st[k]))?i++:0; if (j*8>i) for (k=0;st[k];k++) st[k] = (isdigit(st[k]))?cvtable[st[k]-'0']:st[k]; Nah. Too tricky.
If I need to do anything complex, I'll write it in C. Usually, for me, this involves calling a C program from Perl, but I have no moral objection to using C++ if I really need that level of performance.
(I do exactly the same thing with Java; if I need a quick graphical widgety app or applet, Java is the way to go. If I'm trying to perform image deconvolution as fast as possible, it's back to C or even Fortran....)
I suppose that there is some danger in allowing Perl to become so much of a standard that everyone automatically uses it for CGI scripts regardless of the speed required. But I have difficulty imagining a CGI script that really requires the type of heavy-duty information processing that Perl is not good at. Mostly, Perl just calls library routines to do the heavy work, and those can be just as fast as any compiled language.
I am not particularly concerned about IT draining the talents of the very brightest away from other, more important pursuits simply because almost no-one can be the very brightest in multiple fields. For instance, I know mathematicians who can run rings around every programmer I know when it comes to making deductions from large sets of highly abstract definitions. That's what mathematicians do, and some of them are very good at it and like it. I know biologists who are far better at recalling tons of minute detail about apparently unrelated processes than any programmer I know. And so on. And, of course, most of the biologists and mathematicians couldn't write a device driver to save their life.
Actually, amusingly enough, most of the scientific fields are actually too crowded, biology especially. It's not clear that without IT there would be more demand for people in those fields. So I'm not sure that we're losing too much talent.
If there is a loss, it seems to me to be mostly a second-tier loss. The very few very best are still doing what they're best at, but a lot of the next best are going into IT for the money. It's now a viable alternative to medicine or law or finance, if you can handle it. The implications are that a lot of bright people are going to be off making money instead of doing something useful. Gee, when has that ever not been true? Think of all the wonderful developments we'd have if lawyers all had been working on vaccines and antibiotics!
Besides, IT is genuinely useful. When it stops being genuinely useful, there will be less money in it, and people will go back to being lawyers or stockbrokers or maybe even virologists.
(The real danger, it seems to me, is that the internet can be a great productivity-sapper as well as a productivity-enhancer. Why, right now, some biologist is probably posting to slashdot instead of doing their research!)