Parent is not a troll. It's a valid complaint. Displaying the entire URL, including the protocol, is absolutely the standard and should remain that way.
The guy's got a Wikipedia article if you want to know more. Short version is, he's director of the NSA and it looks like he's spent most of his career in intelligence. He does have Master's degrees in physics and electronic warfare, and well, from his picture he looks like a slightly older version of the typical Slashdotter.;) So he's probably about the best choice available in the senior ranks; hopefully he's smart enough to listen to the junior personnel under his command who are more likely to know what's actually going on in the hacking world.
There is no possible way that parent post deserves a troll mod, except in Windows-fanboi land. What he says is exactly right: in certain ways -- specifically, code availability, which is exactly the sense in which "open" is most often used on Slashdot -- the Mac is indeed more open than Windows. As another poster points out, hardware-wise Windows is more open, but think about the subject of the story! Sony isn't going to start writing OSs for other companies' game systems any time soon, but more information about the PS3 would help draw developers to the platform. The type of "openness" which Valve is calling on Sony to practice with regards to the PS3 is exactly the type of openness Apple practices with OS X, not that which Microsoft practices with Windows.
To their credit, Venter doesn't seem to be claiming they made new life, but they are aiming for that eventually, and I'm curious as to what slashdot thinks about when we can actually say we've created artificial life.
I'd say it's life once the constructed bacteria show that they're able to reproduce, and keep doing so for a number of generations (which can take place pretty quickly for bacteria.) Until then it's an interesting piece of machinery.
The typical American asks "What is the possible return" and ignores the risk in pursuit of personal gain.
Given the amount of Luddism that is invariably displayed with respect to genetic engineering, I'd say that in this particular case the reverse is true. There's a level of ignorance driven fear on this topic that I haven't seen since the days when a lot of people genuinely believed that computers were malevolent "thinking machines" that would try to take the world away from their human creators.
It can be done, and that means it will be done. The first applications will be medical; synthetic gene therapy could offer cures for many diseases we currently have no way to treat, and only "it's bad 'cause it's got DNA in it!!!" Luddites will object. Yes, there will be harmful side effects, including death, but people with terminal cancer, or parents of children with terrible birth defects, will be willing to take the risk. Once the therapeutic principles are established, we'll inevitably see more frivolous applications. And at that point, whether or not it's "welcomed by society" will be irrelevant -- as long as there are people with the money to pay for it, someone will do it.
That being said, we're a long way from that point. There's a hell of a lot of difference between building a bacterial genome and modifying a human one at will.
But since correlation isn't causation you'd have no idea as to whether or not the commenter is a "fucking moron."
If someone tags a story with "correlation!=causation" (c!=c) or attempts to use that phrase as an attack on the story's premise, that is prima facie evidence that the person in question is, indeed, a fucking moron (FM). Not all FMs parrot c!=c (PCC) at every opportunity, of course, but only FMs do so. The correlation between FM-ness and c!=c parroting is therefore quite large, certainly large enough to be significant.
In the presence of a significant correlation between X and Y, there are three causal possibilities: either X causes Y, Y causes X, or there exists a third factor, Z, which causes both X and Y. Let X = PCC and Y = FM, and break down the possibilities:
X ==> Y: PCC makes you an FM. This seems unlikely. We could test it, of course, but there's no causal mechanism.
Z ==> X,Y: certainly possible, but the universe of possible Zs is pretty large. No need to complicate the hypothesis -- Occam's Razor and all that -- when...
Y ==> X: FMs are incapable of understanding statistics, since they're, well, FMs. And PCC depends on a profound lack of understanding of statistics. Ta-da! There's your causal mechanism and your significant correlation.
The remainder of the problem is left as an exercise for the reader. If you have trouble, there's a hint in my.sig, or see the TA during office hours.
I'm trying to imagine what kind of sample size you'd need to represent, well, everything in the universe.
Sample size and significance calculations are generally done assuming an infinite population from which to sample, so "everything in the universe" is actually as close to perfect agreement between the math and the reality as you can get.
Wow, this is hilarious! It's like watching a video of a cat barking! Seriously?!? A right wing and a far right wing?
Yes, seriously. There is no major left-wing party in US politics today. Far right-wingers who claim that the Democrats are "left-wing" or "socialist" or "communist" only reveal their absymal ignorance of history, which Texas is apparently doing its best to reinforce in the next generation.
To put it in more concrete terms: Obama's policies are in essence Republican policies of a generation or two ago, and ever Republican President of the latter half of the 20th c. -- yes, even St. Ronald -- would be considered far too liberal to find a place in the Republican Party of today.
The Republicans are more centre right - "liberal democracy, capitalism, the market economy (albeit with some limited government regulation), private property rights, the existence of the welfare state in some limited form, and opposition to socialism and communism. "
The Democrats are centre left - "Environmentalism and environmental protection laws, value-added/progressive taxation system to fund government expenditures, Immigration and multiculturalism, Fair trade over free trade, Advocacy of social justice, human rights, social rights, civil rights and civil liberties."
Those are reasonable descriptions of the positions of the two major parties, say, 25 years ago, not today. These days the Democrats stand for most of what's on the "centre right" list, and the Republicans for... well, it's hard to say, exactly, except "if the Democrats are for it, then we're against it."
He didn't say there should be limits on education. He said that there should be limits on how much education the Government will subsidize.
Lots of people say that kind of thing. Why did this guy's statement get reported? Probably because he's a professor of economics... at a state-supported school, and who most likely got his own education with various types of government assistance. Yeah, I'd say "fuck you with a chainsaw" is pretty much an appropriate response. People who want to pull the ladder up after themselves are scum.
Yes, you can derive all of mathematics from a fairly small set of axioms every time you want to do something. The point of having a reference handy is that you don't have to. You see, in the modern world we have this thing called a "body of knowledge," the idea being that smart people can do new work which builds on the previous work of other smart people. It's been quite a successful approach so far; perhaps you should give it a try?
Stalingrad and Kursk were both over by the time the massive USAAF bombing campaign geared up. And there is no way in hell D-Day and the subsequent operations by the Western Allies could have succeeded if two-thirds of the Wehrmacht hadn't already been lying face-down on Russian soil. This is the reality: Russians did more and sacrificed more, by far, than any other people to stop Nazi Germany, and the numbers of troops and amount of materiel involved in the Eastern Front dwarf the entire rest of the European war combined. While it is literally true that "Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII," your follow-on assertion that "nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'" is an absurd denial of history.
"It's kind of everybody's problem, because it impacts the stability of the Internet, but at the same time it's nobody's problem because nobody owns it," says Doug Maughan, who deals with the issue at the Department of Homeland Security.
So clearly we need one centrally owned routing system under the watchful and benevolent eye of DHS, right? With help from advisors provided by Microsoft and Disney.
Decentralized routing is a feature, not a bug. And although the problems identified in the article are real enough, the implications of this kind of discussion always scare the hell out of me.
Going to reply myself, to add something important I forgot to mention in the previous post: if you're looking for RNA viruses such as HIV, then to identify "not patient" you'd also need to have a sequence of the patient's entire genome, but also the entire transcriptome, i.e. all the RNA which can be transcribed from the patient's DNA (and then, often, post-processed in various ways which can alter the sequence.) This is a problem which is dramatically larger than "just" getting a complete DNA sequence. I think we're on track for the "thousand-dollar" genome within a decade, at which point your DNA sequence will become part of your standard medical record, but a complete personalized transcriptome is still a distant dream. So for this application, it's much, much easier to look for RNA sequences known to be characteristic of HIV and other RNA viruses than it is to look for "anything that might not have come from this guy."
Because DNA probes don't work that way. Reassembling complete organism genomes is a non-trivial task; all the current methods rely on chopping DNA up into fragments, sequencing those fragments, and then reassembling the fragment sequences. Unless you have a complete sequence for that particular patient, which unfortunately isn't yet quite practical, you can't say for sure that a given fragment is "not patient."
What they're doing instead, it sounds like to me, is looking for known subsequences that are characteristic of particular known, sequenced pathogens. Now, there's no guarantee that these subsequences don't come from the patient, but it's a pretty good bet, especially if those subsequences have never been observed in any sequenced human genome. The universe of "possible subsequences that aren't human in origin" is an infeasibly large search space.
As another poster pointed out, all science attempts to predict the future; if a theory doesn't make predictions, it's worthless. Now, in some cases, these predictions are perforce rather limited -- e.g. cosmological theory makes predictions mainly about what past events we may observe in the future via telescopic studies of things that happened billions of years ago, and about events billions of years from now that we won't be around to see. But to use your example of evolution, I can tell you, working in biomedical research, that evolutionary theory does in fact make predictions about events that are happening right now, on human timescales. And you can take a look at the NIH budget, or Merck's or Pfizer's annual earnings reports, to get an idea of just how much money is involved.
A skeptic is someone who is dubious of a claim, but is willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence. A denier is someone who will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence. There's precious little skepticism with regards to climate change these days, because the evidence is sufficient to convince those who were initially skeptical, but there's a hell of a lot of denial. If people who still refuse to accept the evidence don't want to be called "deniers," then you're welcome to come up with a different word -- but you can't have "skeptic," because that word already means something different.
And you can take your Godwin and stuff it. Godwin's Law is invoked when someone brings Hitler or the Holocaust into the conversation where they don't belong. So far, the only people doing that in this conversation are the climate change deniers. You don't get to, er, deny other people the use of the word "denier" just because it's often used with the word "Holocaust" in front of it. The verb "to deny" is a perfectly good English word going back to the 1300s, and it can be used in reference to many, many things that have nothing to do with the period from 1933 to 1945. In this particular case, the label fits: deal with it.
We either accept the methods by which the big bang, evolution, and climate change (along with pretty much everything else we think we know about how the world works) are understood, or we don't. If we do, then the economics are irrelevant: the universe doesn't care about our economy. If we don't, then we should have a better reason for this decision than saying "the motivations are different," because the universe also doesn't care about motivation, at least as far as we can tell.
In other words, you're letting your politics interfere with your understanding of science. Thanks for providing such a useful demonstration of how this works.
Yep. When I was a medic, the vast majority of wounds I treated were superficial. And, as you say, the demands of triage are such that in combat, soldiers with "superficial" wounds which are still painful and debilitating enough to take them off the line can wait a long time for treatment.
And when I was an infantryman, I learned that even when people aren't actively trying to kill you, just being in the field is enough to generate a constant low-level stream of injuries. Crawling around in rocks and brush is a hazardous activity in and of itself. Rarely is anyone hurt badly enough to threaten life or limb, but when you're under constant stress, sleeping far too little, living in dirt, eating irregularly -- i.e., pretty much a description of a grunt's life -- and add a bunch of lacerations and abrasions to the mix, there's a very good chance that yesterday's minor irritating cut will become tomorrow's massive infection. Actually, now that I think about it, living that way was pretty much why I decided to become a medic when I re-upped.;)
I know all the physics I need to know in order to understand the mechanism. You probably do too -- the problem is that you're not using that knowledge. You made a dumb statement, you were corrected, and now you refuse to admit your mistake. You can accuse other people of ignorance all you want, but all you're doing is digging yourself a deeper hole.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is not a troll. It's a valid complaint. Displaying the entire URL, including the protocol, is absolutely the standard and should remain that way.
dogs that shoot guns
So the saloon door swings open, the piano player stops, and a dog with a bandage on one foot and packin' a six-shooter limps in.
He heads up to the bar, tosses a coin to the bartender, and laps up a glass of whiskey.
Then he turns around, looks out at the folks in the saloon, and growls, "I'm lookin' fer the man who shot my paw."
The guy's got a Wikipedia article if you want to know more. Short version is, he's director of the NSA and it looks like he's spent most of his career in intelligence. He does have Master's degrees in physics and electronic warfare, and well, from his picture he looks like a slightly older version of the typical Slashdotter. ;) So he's probably about the best choice available in the senior ranks; hopefully he's smart enough to listen to the junior personnel under his command who are more likely to know what's actually going on in the hacking world.
There is no possible way that parent post deserves a troll mod, except in Windows-fanboi land. What he says is exactly right: in certain ways -- specifically, code availability, which is exactly the sense in which "open" is most often used on Slashdot -- the Mac is indeed more open than Windows. As another poster points out, hardware-wise Windows is more open, but think about the subject of the story! Sony isn't going to start writing OSs for other companies' game systems any time soon, but more information about the PS3 would help draw developers to the platform. The type of "openness" which Valve is calling on Sony to practice with regards to the PS3 is exactly the type of openness Apple practices with OS X, not that which Microsoft practices with Windows.
We already have.
Oops, said too much, gotta go now, bye.
To their credit, Venter doesn't seem to be claiming they made new life, but they are aiming for that eventually, and I'm curious as to what slashdot thinks about when we can actually say we've created artificial life.
I'd say it's life once the constructed bacteria show that they're able to reproduce, and keep doing so for a number of generations (which can take place pretty quickly for bacteria.) Until then it's an interesting piece of machinery.
The typical American asks "What is the possible return" and ignores the risk in pursuit of personal gain.
Given the amount of Luddism that is invariably displayed with respect to genetic engineering, I'd say that in this particular case the reverse is true. There's a level of ignorance driven fear on this topic that I haven't seen since the days when a lot of people genuinely believed that computers were malevolent "thinking machines" that would try to take the world away from their human creators.
It can be done, and that means it will be done. The first applications will be medical; synthetic gene therapy could offer cures for many diseases we currently have no way to treat, and only "it's bad 'cause it's got DNA in it!!!" Luddites will object. Yes, there will be harmful side effects, including death, but people with terminal cancer, or parents of children with terrible birth defects, will be willing to take the risk. Once the therapeutic principles are established, we'll inevitably see more frivolous applications. And at that point, whether or not it's "welcomed by society" will be irrelevant -- as long as there are people with the money to pay for it, someone will do it.
That being said, we're a long way from that point. There's a hell of a lot of difference between building a bacterial genome and modifying a human one at will.
But since correlation isn't causation you'd have no idea as to whether or not the commenter is a "fucking moron."
If someone tags a story with "correlation!=causation" (c!=c) or attempts to use that phrase as an attack on the story's premise, that is prima facie evidence that the person in question is, indeed, a fucking moron (FM). Not all FMs parrot c!=c (PCC) at every opportunity, of course, but only FMs do so. The correlation between FM-ness and c!=c parroting is therefore quite large, certainly large enough to be significant.
In the presence of a significant correlation between X and Y, there are three causal possibilities: either X causes Y, Y causes X, or there exists a third factor, Z, which causes both X and Y. Let X = PCC and Y = FM, and break down the possibilities:
X ==> Y: PCC makes you an FM. This seems unlikely. We could test it, of course, but there's no causal mechanism.
Z ==> X,Y: certainly possible, but the universe of possible Zs is pretty large. No need to complicate the hypothesis -- Occam's Razor and all that -- when ...
Y ==> X: FMs are incapable of understanding statistics, since they're, well, FMs. And PCC depends on a profound lack of understanding of statistics. Ta-da! There's your causal mechanism and your significant correlation.
The remainder of the problem is left as an exercise for the reader. If you have trouble, there's a hint in my .sig, or see the TA during office hours.
I'm trying to imagine what kind of sample size you'd need to represent, well, everything in the universe.
Sample size and significance calculations are generally done assuming an infinite population from which to sample, so "everything in the universe" is actually as close to perfect agreement between the math and the reality as you can get.
Wow, this is hilarious! It's like watching a video of a cat barking! Seriously?!? A right wing and a far right wing?
Yes, seriously. There is no major left-wing party in US politics today. Far right-wingers who claim that the Democrats are "left-wing" or "socialist" or "communist" only reveal their absymal ignorance of history, which Texas is apparently doing its best to reinforce in the next generation.
To put it in more concrete terms: Obama's policies are in essence Republican policies of a generation or two ago, and ever Republican President of the latter half of the 20th c. -- yes, even St. Ronald -- would be considered far too liberal to find a place in the Republican Party of today.
The Republicans are more centre right - "liberal democracy, capitalism, the market economy (albeit with some limited government regulation), private property rights, the existence of the welfare state in some limited form, and opposition to socialism and communism. "
The Democrats are centre left - "Environmentalism and environmental protection laws, value-added/progressive taxation system to fund government expenditures, Immigration and multiculturalism, Fair trade over free trade, Advocacy of social justice, human rights, social rights, civil rights and civil liberties."
Those are reasonable descriptions of the positions of the two major parties, say, 25 years ago, not today. These days the Democrats stand for most of what's on the "centre right" list, and the Republicans for ... well, it's hard to say, exactly, except "if the Democrats are for it, then we're against it."
You know, you'd have a really interesting point there, if what you wrote had any relation whatsoever to reality.
He didn't say there should be limits on education. He said that there should be limits on how much education the Government will subsidize.
Lots of people say that kind of thing. Why did this guy's statement get reported? Probably because he's a professor of economics ... at a state-supported school, and who most likely got his own education with various types of government assistance. Yeah, I'd say "fuck you with a chainsaw" is pretty much an appropriate response. People who want to pull the ladder up after themselves are scum.
Yes, you can derive all of mathematics from a fairly small set of axioms every time you want to do something. The point of having a reference handy is that you don't have to. You see, in the modern world we have this thing called a "body of knowledge," the idea being that smart people can do new work which builds on the previous work of other smart people. It's been quite a successful approach so far; perhaps you should give it a try?
Stalingrad and Kursk were both over by the time the massive USAAF bombing campaign geared up. And there is no way in hell D-Day and the subsequent operations by the Western Allies could have succeeded if two-thirds of the Wehrmacht hadn't already been lying face-down on Russian soil. This is the reality: Russians did more and sacrificed more, by far, than any other people to stop Nazi Germany, and the numbers of troops and amount of materiel involved in the Eastern Front dwarf the entire rest of the European war combined. While it is literally true that "Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII," your follow-on assertion that "nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'" is an absurd denial of history.
Actually no, DARPA is, if it was the US Government that was the founder, IPv4 would still be in a committee somewhere :)
Hint: Military trumps government for getting stuff done...
You don't actually know what "the government" is, do you?
From TFA:
"It's kind of everybody's problem, because it impacts the stability of the Internet, but at the same time it's nobody's problem because nobody owns it," says Doug Maughan, who deals with the issue at the Department of Homeland Security.
So clearly we need one centrally owned routing system under the watchful and benevolent eye of DHS, right? With help from advisors provided by Microsoft and Disney.
Decentralized routing is a feature, not a bug. And although the problems identified in the article are real enough, the implications of this kind of discussion always scare the hell out of me.
Going to reply myself, to add something important I forgot to mention in the previous post: if you're looking for RNA viruses such as HIV, then to identify "not patient" you'd also need to have a sequence of the patient's entire genome, but also the entire transcriptome, i.e. all the RNA which can be transcribed from the patient's DNA (and then, often, post-processed in various ways which can alter the sequence.) This is a problem which is dramatically larger than "just" getting a complete DNA sequence. I think we're on track for the "thousand-dollar" genome within a decade, at which point your DNA sequence will become part of your standard medical record, but a complete personalized transcriptome is still a distant dream. So for this application, it's much, much easier to look for RNA sequences known to be characteristic of HIV and other RNA viruses than it is to look for "anything that might not have come from this guy."
Because DNA probes don't work that way. Reassembling complete organism genomes is a non-trivial task; all the current methods rely on chopping DNA up into fragments, sequencing those fragments, and then reassembling the fragment sequences. Unless you have a complete sequence for that particular patient, which unfortunately isn't yet quite practical, you can't say for sure that a given fragment is "not patient."
What they're doing instead, it sounds like to me, is looking for known subsequences that are characteristic of particular known, sequenced pathogens. Now, there's no guarantee that these subsequences don't come from the patient, but it's a pretty good bet, especially if those subsequences have never been observed in any sequenced human genome. The universe of "possible subsequences that aren't human in origin" is an infeasibly large search space.
As another poster pointed out, all science attempts to predict the future; if a theory doesn't make predictions, it's worthless. Now, in some cases, these predictions are perforce rather limited -- e.g. cosmological theory makes predictions mainly about what past events we may observe in the future via telescopic studies of things that happened billions of years ago, and about events billions of years from now that we won't be around to see. But to use your example of evolution, I can tell you, working in biomedical research, that evolutionary theory does in fact make predictions about events that are happening right now, on human timescales. And you can take a look at the NIH budget, or Merck's or Pfizer's annual earnings reports, to get an idea of just how much money is involved.
climate deniers
Wow, is that what they're called?
A skeptic is someone who is dubious of a claim, but is willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence. A denier is someone who will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence. There's precious little skepticism with regards to climate change these days, because the evidence is sufficient to convince those who were initially skeptical, but there's a hell of a lot of denial. If people who still refuse to accept the evidence don't want to be called "deniers," then you're welcome to come up with a different word -- but you can't have "skeptic," because that word already means something different.
And you can take your Godwin and stuff it. Godwin's Law is invoked when someone brings Hitler or the Holocaust into the conversation where they don't belong. So far, the only people doing that in this conversation are the climate change deniers. You don't get to, er, deny other people the use of the word "denier" just because it's often used with the word "Holocaust" in front of it. The verb "to deny" is a perfectly good English word going back to the 1300s, and it can be used in reference to many, many things that have nothing to do with the period from 1933 to 1945. In this particular case, the label fits: deal with it.
We either accept the methods by which the big bang, evolution, and climate change (along with pretty much everything else we think we know about how the world works) are understood, or we don't. If we do, then the economics are irrelevant: the universe doesn't care about our economy. If we don't, then we should have a better reason for this decision than saying "the motivations are different," because the universe also doesn't care about motivation, at least as far as we can tell.
In other words, you're letting your politics interfere with your understanding of science. Thanks for providing such a useful demonstration of how this works.
Yep. When I was a medic, the vast majority of wounds I treated were superficial. And, as you say, the demands of triage are such that in combat, soldiers with "superficial" wounds which are still painful and debilitating enough to take them off the line can wait a long time for treatment.
And when I was an infantryman, I learned that even when people aren't actively trying to kill you, just being in the field is enough to generate a constant low-level stream of injuries. Crawling around in rocks and brush is a hazardous activity in and of itself. Rarely is anyone hurt badly enough to threaten life or limb, but when you're under constant stress, sleeping far too little, living in dirt, eating irregularly -- i.e., pretty much a description of a grunt's life -- and add a bunch of lacerations and abrasions to the mix, there's a very good chance that yesterday's minor irritating cut will become tomorrow's massive infection. Actually, now that I think about it, living that way was pretty much why I decided to become a medic when I re-upped. ;)
I know all the physics I need to know in order to understand the mechanism. You probably do too -- the problem is that you're not using that knowledge. You made a dumb statement, you were corrected, and now you refuse to admit your mistake. You can accuse other people of ignorance all you want, but all you're doing is digging yourself a deeper hole.