In five year's time, I'm not going to be interested in reading the HDs I have now because they'll have long been transferred to the 50TB NAS type solution I'll have then.
And what if your NAS fails? Or is it fully redundant RAID-1? Or are you backing up to something else?
It wasn't that long ago we thought the same about the parallel port. I suspect I'm not the only person here who used a Zip drive through a parallel port interface "back in the day".
does anyone really connect their printer via parallel port anymore?
Well, junior, we used to connect more than just that through parallel. And not everyone likes to replace printers that still work; I have a parallel port laserjet that I still use from time to time because it is the cheapest way to print available to me at home.
In the consumer market: We had ATA for something like twenty years. And now we have SATA, with no replacement in sight.
Before that, we (consumers) had MFM and RLL.
Unless, of course, you were a Mac user. In which case you used SCSI for some time, before switching to IDE.
And now most people are using SATA.
Assuming, of course, that they are using a system that is only a few years old (or less). There are still plenty of systems in operation using IDE, as much as the drive manufacturers might not want to believe it.
And of course, if you are backing up your files, then the duration for which you want to keep those files may vary. If someone wants to keep those old pictures for 10 years or more, going to a hard drive might not be the wisest choice.
The summary seems to want to lead us to backing up on hard drives:
In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs.
Though I'm not convinced many consumer hard drives have shelf lives on the same order as the optical media that some of us are backing up to. Add to that the fact that hard drive interfaces do change fairly often (some of us still have systems in the transitional period between IDE and SATA), and you could have potentially more irritating problems if you were to back up to hard drives instead.
I suspect for paranoid user it may be more cost effective to backup multiple times to CD-R rather than to a hard drive. And on top of that, if one CD of your backup set goes, you are only out 700 MB or so. If you have a series of backups on a single 100+ GB hard drive, and it fails, you may be out everything that was on that drive.
As a crackberry user myself, I can tell you that sometimes a change in battery life isn't even something I would worry much about. Considering the number of applications that many of us have on our 'berries, the number we have in the background at any given time, and the amount we use the applications in the foreground, a noticeable shift in battery life between Tuesday and Wednesday might not be considered abnormal. I know there are people who just charge every night religiously because they always want to start with a full battery in the morning; if they ended at 45% instead of 55% they might not think anything of it as long as their charge made it to the end of the day.
On the other hand if they normally end at 45% and now they don't make it through the day, they would likely notice that.
We've known for quite some time that spammers pick up email addresses by trolling the internet. With spam so insanely cheap - and highly profitable - to send out, there is no incentive for the spammers to select for email addresses that are known to be read regularly (or ever).
If they can harvest 1,000 new addresses in a few minutes of bot-crawling the internet, versus a few dozen by buying them from someone with a form somewhere, the choice is pretty simple.
The take-home message of this is something we've known for quite some time - don't let your email address out on public pages.
a Fujitsu P1510D (there was an article on Slashdot a little while back about alternative operating systems that mentioned it specifically). It's got a touchscreen, half a gig of memory, 30 gigs of hard drive space, a biometric sensor, et cetera. Oh, and in lieu of a touchpad it has a trackpoint
Your Fujitsu still sells for over $1,000. I could easily buy a thinkpad in the same price range that will do what I want. I want a netbook that is affordable with a trackpoint.
... for a netbook to ship with a trackpoint instead of a damned touchpad. When someone (are you listening, lenovo?) finally brings out an affordable netbook with a trackpoint, I'll bring out my checkbook. Until then I'll keep to my old thinkpad, thank you very much.
I understand his approach to biology is free market capitalist.
An argument could be made that such an approach is against the way that big science should be done. His approach to the human genome project was almost the molecular biology of "scorched earth" - he took everything he could, and gave back nothing. Much of the difficult sequencing was done by the public consortium and they were obligated to make their results known publicly. Being as he was funding his work himself he was obligated to share nothing.
Though perhaps even more critical is that privately funded work like that has no obligation to submit to peer review. Had some minor mistake been made in his work very early on that snowballed to enormous problems later on they might not have been caught for some time. If procedures aren't known, evaluation of the quality of the data becomes immensely difficult (if even possible at all).
they don't owe anyone for their work
I agree, they own their results. They can do whatever they want with them. However it can lead to dangerous outcomes later on.
Nevertheless, what he has done is outstanding
You say outstanding, I say dangerous.
I have an opinion and it is that J.C. Venter does badass science
You are entitled to your opinion. I will admit I am a bit envious of his recent globe trotting expedition to survey tropical bacterial genomes (in his private yacht, no less). However there is still very much an open question as to how a private investment company such as his should be competing with non-profit institutions if the two are not held to the same obligations and review standards.
I would suggest that you spend some time studying the topic in more detail before you make comments
Starting your response by insulting the other person? I ordinarily wouldn't bother responding, but since you took the time to provide a peer-reviewed article as a reference I'll give you a chance.
The DNA composition and ultrastructure may also effect things like gene expression (DNA unwinding temperature, variable access to genes, etc.).
Actually if you had read what I said earlier about gene regulation you would have seen that I already said that. Non-coding regions are where transcription factors for gene expression often bind.
If you knew about the 5+ types of DNA repair (BER, NER, MMR, HR, NHEJ) involving 150+ proteins or had some knowledge
You could be less arrogant and presumptuous in your statements. You seem to have taken what you wanted to see in my original post and drawn your own conclusions about me without having anything else to back up your assumptions. You don't seem to be following a very rigorous scientific method, here.
The accumulation of mutations *does* happen in non-dividing cells
I never asserted that it does not. You read what I said and somehow took it to say that. Why you made those assumptions I am not sure.
Any cell biologist can tell you that there are significant numbers of non-dividing cells in any higher eukaryote; one of the reasons why the number of dividing cells is kept low in comparison to non-dividing cells is of course to protect the genome of the organism. While higher eukaryotes have error-checking mechanisms in their dna replication mechanisms, keeping dna duplication to a minimum is a good way to prevent mistake from happening in the first place.
There are several million differences in the, esp. SNPs, between the genomes of each human, which is what makes each of us (excepting identical twins/triplets) "different".
Please clarify that sentence, you either forgot a noun after "the", or the phrase "in the" was added erroneously. (I could insert a joke about your sentence structure undergoing mutagenesis but that would be unkind)
Speciation results when those differences become sufficient to effectively prevent breeding between population groups.
Is there some reason why you expected me to disagree with that statement?
However, the same mutation accumulation that drives differences in individuals and evolution among species can also occur within a single individual.
I do, however, disagree with this statement. Individuals do not evolve; populations evolve. If an individual acquires a mutation during life, the likelihood of them passing it on is nearly zero. While their own genes - or more likely gene expression - may change, it will likely not have any net effect on the population.
so it is unlikely that even within a single individual all of the "genomes" are the same
There is an important distinction to be made between sequencing "a human genome" and "the human genome (project)". We know that there are particular regions of "the human genome" that are particularly difficult to sequence with available technology due to a variety of factors. If "a human genome" were to be sequenced today, we would use much of what we know about "the human genome" to work around these difficult areas, accepting very low coverage of some areas in exchange for very high coverage of coding regions. And amongst the coding regions, the likelihood of finding variation within an individual should be quite low as many coding regions encode for critical cell machinery without which a cell would not be viable.
As for the paper you cited, the institution I am working at does not have that year available in print or electronic. I will have to try to find it the next time I am at a larger university. I will wait to comment on how a paper titled "DNA damage and aging" could relate to genomic variation until after I get a chance to look at it.
Each science has its own heroes in the current day. If you really want to establish a science hero for your kids, choose which science you want to teach them about first. Much as Einstein isn't a great hero to evolutionary biologists, Darwin isn't a great hero to modern physicists. You could, of course, try to cover a wide variety of scientific disciplines (and their respective heroes) in a short amount of time, but you would probably do better to start with more approachable subjects and bring up the heroes of those.
He could also be thought of as somewhat of an antihero in biology. He did, after all, try to fund the human genome project with profit as a motive. There is a pretty good argument that he would have wanted to patent the entire genome, had his group succeeded in completing a draft of the human genome first.
Had that happened, then the promise of genomic medicine might be even more remote.
Not necessarily. The genome refers specifically to the genes encoded by DNA; mutations can also occur in the non-coding regions. Indeed the non-coding regions are often the most critical for gene expression.
Hence a non-genomic mutation can have a profound effect on gene expression.
lots of mutations happening all the time in probably every cell of our body
Also not necessarily true. For example, a non-dividing cell has no reason to duplicate its own genome, hence it has almost no chance to acquire mutations.
That in turn causes your gene expressions to change since they're also, to a large extent, controlled by the genome.
As I already described, much of gene expression is regulated by non coding upstream (or sometimes downstream) DNA sequences. Look up eukaryotic gene expression and you'll see how critical non-coding regions are; this is often where transcription factors bind.
Hence your initial claim is based on how you define the genome. As the genome is supposed to be the collection of genes, the assertion of the genome changing rapidly is not necessarily true.
Suppose they sequence a specific human's genome. Now they do it again. Will the two sequences be the same?
They should be. An individual's genome does not change over time. Gene expression can change, which can itself lead to significant problems such as cancer.
Sentences as passwords are only applicable in environments that allow such things. Sure, they are very strong for hacker-resistance but you should realize how many systems don't allow:
spaces
passwords longer than 16 characters
In particular many *NIX environments still don't natively allow spaces in passwords, so that approach would fail there.
I wouldn't expect that anyone smart enough to come up with a strong password would be dense enough to somehow expect it to be immune to keylogging. However with the number of brute force methods out there for cracking weak passwords, I don't see how this in any way reduces the value of strong passwords on systems where passwords are critical.
If only these same people who secured my passport were in charge of my healthcare as well, then everything would be great!
We live in a country that is protected by a military funded by the government
If my house is on fire, the fire is managed by a fire department funded by the government
Law enforcement is provided by a police or sheriff's department funded by the government
I drive to work on roads whose maintenance are funded by the government
I was educated at public schools funded by the government
(just to name a few government services that are entitled to US citizens)
If you would rather not have any of those services, there may be countries on other continents where you can opt to not have them. But these are all different departments of government; why you would assume that any of them - or the department in charge of passports - would be connected to a health care system that hasn't even been proposed is beyond me.
The organization he's referring to is the American Association of Concerned Scientists -- which is not the organization used in TFA, but is an open-membership, left-leaning organization of scientists.
Pew used the AACS membership list to generate their list of "scientists" to poll
I looked to find this "aacs" you refer to. I came up with several organizations:
American Association of Christian Schools
American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery
American Association of Cosmetology Schools
Advanced Access Content System
Annapolis Area Christian School
Ashtabula Area City Schools
None of those organizations seem particularly scientific to me. Perhaps you meant the AAAS - American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. And if we look at their membership requirements for the US we'll see that only students can sign up for full membership at $99 per year. A K-12 teacher would pay $146, the same as the professional rate, though they do have a low-frills option at $99.
The stated goals of AACS essentially define it as a left-leaning organization
Not sure where you got their goals from, but we'll read their
website:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Triple A-S" (AAAS), is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide.
The same page continues on with some broad goals:
AAAS Mission AAAS seeks to "advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people." To fulfill this mission, the AAAS Board has set these broad goals:
* Enhance communication among scientists, engineers, and the public; * Promote and defend the integrity of science and its use; * Strengthen support for the science and technology enterprise; * Provide a voice for science on societal issues; * Promote the responsible use of science in public policy; * Strengthen and diversify the science and technology workforce; * Foster education in science and technology for everyone; * Increase public engagement with science and technology; and * Advance international cooperation in science.
That doesn't really seem particularly liberal or conservative from a political standpoint, unless conservatives have a decidedly anti-science-education standpoint.
I would say that actually there are more republicans in science than what that study found. Granted I cannot survey all the scientists in America. However, in the blue state where I am working on my PhD more than 6% of the scientists I know have conservative leanings. In my entering class of 22, there were two students who viewed Rush Limbaugh as a legitimate news source and blamed everything wrong in the universe on Bill Clinton, personally. And those were just amongst the fraction of students who were open with their political views.
It has been a quest for a lot of people for some time now. USB 3.5" floppy drives are a dime a dozen but I haven't found a manufacturer for USB 5.25 floppy drives yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll buy one when we finally have Dire Straits available to play on guitar. 'Cause I want my ... you know.
In five year's time, I'm not going to be interested in reading the HDs I have now because they'll have long been transferred to the 50TB NAS type solution I'll have then.
And what if your NAS fails? Or is it fully redundant RAID-1? Or are you backing up to something else?
I don't see USB going out anytime soon
It wasn't that long ago we thought the same about the parallel port. I suspect I'm not the only person here who used a Zip drive through a parallel port interface "back in the day".
does anyone really connect their printer via parallel port anymore?
Well, junior, we used to connect more than just that through parallel. And not everyone likes to replace printers that still work; I have a parallel port laserjet that I still use from time to time because it is the cheapest way to print available to me at home.
In the consumer market: We had ATA for something like twenty years. And now we have SATA, with no replacement in sight.
Before that, we (consumers) had MFM and RLL.
Unless, of course, you were a Mac user. In which case you used SCSI for some time, before switching to IDE.
And now most people are using SATA.
Assuming, of course, that they are using a system that is only a few years old (or less). There are still plenty of systems in operation using IDE, as much as the drive manufacturers might not want to believe it.
And of course, if you are backing up your files, then the duration for which you want to keep those files may vary. If someone wants to keep those old pictures for 10 years or more, going to a hard drive might not be the wisest choice.
In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs.
Though I'm not convinced many consumer hard drives have shelf lives on the same order as the optical media that some of us are backing up to. Add to that the fact that hard drive interfaces do change fairly often (some of us still have systems in the transitional period between IDE and SATA), and you could have potentially more irritating problems if you were to back up to hard drives instead.
I suspect for paranoid user it may be more cost effective to backup multiple times to CD-R rather than to a hard drive. And on top of that, if one CD of your backup set goes, you are only out 700 MB or so. If you have a series of backups on a single 100+ GB hard drive, and it fails, you may be out everything that was on that drive.
slightly excessive battery drain
As a crackberry user myself, I can tell you that sometimes a change in battery life isn't even something I would worry much about. Considering the number of applications that many of us have on our 'berries, the number we have in the background at any given time, and the amount we use the applications in the foreground, a noticeable shift in battery life between Tuesday and Wednesday might not be considered abnormal. I know there are people who just charge every night religiously because they always want to start with a full battery in the morning; if they ended at 45% instead of 55% they might not think anything of it as long as their charge made it to the end of the day.
On the other hand if they normally end at 45% and now they don't make it through the day, they would likely notice that.
We've known for quite some time that spammers pick up email addresses by trolling the internet. With spam so insanely cheap - and highly profitable - to send out, there is no incentive for the spammers to select for email addresses that are known to be read regularly (or ever).
If they can harvest 1,000 new addresses in a few minutes of bot-crawling the internet, versus a few dozen by buying them from someone with a form somewhere, the choice is pretty simple.
The take-home message of this is something we've known for quite some time - don't let your email address out on public pages.
Then it would appear you missed where I said "affordable netbook". The Vaio P is not affordable for most people (myself included).
a Fujitsu P1510D (there was an article on Slashdot a little while back about alternative operating systems that mentioned it specifically). It's got a touchscreen, half a gig of memory, 30 gigs of hard drive space, a biometric sensor, et cetera. Oh, and in lieu of a touchpad it has a trackpoint
Your Fujitsu still sells for over $1,000. I could easily buy a thinkpad in the same price range that will do what I want. I want a netbook that is affordable with a trackpoint.
So indeed, I am asking for something new.
... for a netbook to ship with a trackpoint instead of a damned touchpad. When someone (are you listening, lenovo?) finally brings out an affordable netbook with a trackpoint, I'll bring out my checkbook. Until then I'll keep to my old thinkpad, thank you very much.
... because if they aren't on wikipedia, then nobody will ever find them on the internet and the images will be safe forever!
I understand his approach to biology is free market capitalist.
An argument could be made that such an approach is against the way that big science should be done. His approach to the human genome project was almost the molecular biology of "scorched earth" - he took everything he could, and gave back nothing. Much of the difficult sequencing was done by the public consortium and they were obligated to make their results known publicly. Being as he was funding his work himself he was obligated to share nothing.
Though perhaps even more critical is that privately funded work like that has no obligation to submit to peer review. Had some minor mistake been made in his work very early on that snowballed to enormous problems later on they might not have been caught for some time. If procedures aren't known, evaluation of the quality of the data becomes immensely difficult (if even possible at all).
they don't owe anyone for their work
I agree, they own their results. They can do whatever they want with them. However it can lead to dangerous outcomes later on.
Nevertheless, what he has done is outstanding
You say outstanding, I say dangerous.
I have an opinion and it is that J.C. Venter does badass science
You are entitled to your opinion. I will admit I am a bit envious of his recent globe trotting expedition to survey tropical bacterial genomes (in his private yacht, no less). However there is still very much an open question as to how a private investment company such as his should be competing with non-profit institutions if the two are not held to the same obligations and review standards.
I would suggest that you spend some time studying the topic in more detail before you make comments
Starting your response by insulting the other person? I ordinarily wouldn't bother responding, but since you took the time to provide a peer-reviewed article as a reference I'll give you a chance.
The DNA composition and ultrastructure may also effect things like gene expression (DNA unwinding temperature, variable access to genes, etc.).
Actually if you had read what I said earlier about gene regulation you would have seen that I already said that. Non-coding regions are where transcription factors for gene expression often bind.
If you knew about the 5+ types of DNA repair (BER, NER, MMR, HR, NHEJ) involving 150+ proteins or had some knowledge
You could be less arrogant and presumptuous in your statements. You seem to have taken what you wanted to see in my original post and drawn your own conclusions about me without having anything else to back up your assumptions. You don't seem to be following a very rigorous scientific method, here.
The accumulation of mutations *does* happen in non-dividing cells
I never asserted that it does not. You read what I said and somehow took it to say that. Why you made those assumptions I am not sure.
Any cell biologist can tell you that there are significant numbers of non-dividing cells in any higher eukaryote; one of the reasons why the number of dividing cells is kept low in comparison to non-dividing cells is of course to protect the genome of the organism. While higher eukaryotes have error-checking mechanisms in their dna replication mechanisms, keeping dna duplication to a minimum is a good way to prevent mistake from happening in the first place.
There are several million differences in the, esp. SNPs, between the genomes of each human, which is what makes each of us (excepting identical twins/triplets) "different".
Please clarify that sentence, you either forgot a noun after "the", or the phrase "in the" was added erroneously. (I could insert a joke about your sentence structure undergoing mutagenesis but that would be unkind)
Speciation results when those differences become sufficient to effectively prevent breeding between population groups.
Is there some reason why you expected me to disagree with that statement?
However, the same mutation accumulation that drives differences in individuals and evolution among species can also occur within a single individual.
I do, however, disagree with this statement. Individuals do not evolve; populations evolve. If an individual acquires a mutation during life, the likelihood of them passing it on is nearly zero. While their own genes - or more likely gene expression - may change, it will likely not have any net effect on the population.
so it is unlikely that even within a single individual all of the "genomes" are the same
There is an important distinction to be made between sequencing "a human genome" and "the human genome (project)". We know that there are particular regions of "the human genome" that are particularly difficult to sequence with available technology due to a variety of factors. If "a human genome" were to be sequenced today, we would use much of what we know about "the human genome" to work around these difficult areas, accepting very low coverage of some areas in exchange for very high coverage of coding regions. And amongst the coding regions, the likelihood of finding variation within an individual should be quite low as many coding regions encode for critical cell machinery without which a cell would not be viable.
As for the paper you cited, the institution I am working at does not have that year available in print or electronic. I will have to try to find it the next time I am at a larger university. I will wait to comment on how a paper titled "DNA damage and aging" could relate to genomic variation until after I get a chance to look at it.
Each science has its own heroes in the current day. If you really want to establish a science hero for your kids, choose which science you want to teach them about first. Much as Einstein isn't a great hero to evolutionary biologists, Darwin isn't a great hero to modern physicists. You could, of course, try to cover a wide variety of scientific disciplines (and their respective heroes) in a short amount of time, but you would probably do better to start with more approachable subjects and bring up the heroes of those.
He could also be thought of as somewhat of an antihero in biology. He did, after all, try to fund the human genome project with profit as a motive. There is a pretty good argument that he would have wanted to patent the entire genome, had his group succeeded in completing a draft of the human genome first.
Had that happened, then the promise of genomic medicine might be even more remote.
The genome sure as hell changes
Not necessarily. The genome refers specifically to the genes encoded by DNA; mutations can also occur in the non-coding regions. Indeed the non-coding regions are often the most critical for gene expression.
Hence a non-genomic mutation can have a profound effect on gene expression.
lots of mutations happening all the time in probably every cell of our body
Also not necessarily true. For example, a non-dividing cell has no reason to duplicate its own genome, hence it has almost no chance to acquire mutations.
That in turn causes your gene expressions to change since they're also, to a large extent, controlled by the genome.
As I already described, much of gene expression is regulated by non coding upstream (or sometimes downstream) DNA sequences. Look up eukaryotic gene expression and you'll see how critical non-coding regions are; this is often where transcription factors bind.
Hence your initial claim is based on how you define the genome. As the genome is supposed to be the collection of genes, the assertion of the genome changing rapidly is not necessarily true.
Suppose they sequence a specific human's genome. Now they do it again. Will the two sequences be the same?
They should be. An individual's genome does not change over time. Gene expression can change, which can itself lead to significant problems such as cancer.
In particular many *NIX environments still don't natively allow spaces in passwords, so that approach would fail there.
I wouldn't expect that anyone smart enough to come up with a strong password would be dense enough to somehow expect it to be immune to keylogging. However with the number of brute force methods out there for cracking weak passwords, I don't see how this in any way reduces the value of strong passwords on systems where passwords are critical.
If only these same people who secured my passport were in charge of my healthcare as well, then everything would be great!
We live in a country that is protected by a military funded by the government
If my house is on fire, the fire is managed by a fire department funded by the government
Law enforcement is provided by a police or sheriff's department funded by the government
I drive to work on roads whose maintenance are funded by the government
I was educated at public schools funded by the government
(just to name a few government services that are entitled to US citizens) If you would rather not have any of those services, there may be countries on other continents where you can opt to not have them. But these are all different departments of government; why you would assume that any of them - or the department in charge of passports - would be connected to a health care system that hasn't even been proposed is beyond me.
Bad programming isn't always punished. And if you look at how this place is running, one might conclude bad programming is seldom, if ever, punished.
The organization he's referring to is the American Association of Concerned Scientists -- which is not the organization used in TFA, but is an open-membership, left-leaning organization of scientists.
I did not find them when searching for "aacs". I did, however, find the Union of Concerned Scientists, who certainly have a very clear opinion on global warming.
Pew used the AACS membership list to generate their list of "scientists" to poll
I looked to find this "aacs" you refer to. I came up with several organizations:
None of those organizations seem particularly scientific to me. Perhaps you meant the AAAS - American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. And if we look at their membership requirements for the US we'll see that only students can sign up for full membership at $99 per year. A K-12 teacher would pay $146, the same as the professional rate, though they do have a low-frills option at $99.
The stated goals of AACS essentially define it as a left-leaning organization
Not sure where you got their goals from, but we'll read their website:
The same page continues on with some broad goals:
That doesn't really seem particularly liberal or conservative from a political standpoint, unless conservatives have a decidedly anti-science-education standpoint.
I would say that actually there are more republicans in science than what that study found. Granted I cannot survey all the scientists in America. However, in the blue state where I am working on my PhD more than 6% of the scientists I know have conservative leanings. In my entering class of 22, there were two students who viewed Rush Limbaugh as a legitimate news source and blamed everything wrong in the universe on Bill Clinton, personally. And those were just amongst the fraction of students who were open with their political views.
It has been a quest for a lot of people for some time now. USB 3.5" floppy drives are a dime a dozen but I haven't found a manufacturer for USB 5.25 floppy drives yet.