... sometime around 2000 give or take a couple of years. The government hired a company to write software so that small businesses could do their tax returns online. The software was supposed to be OS neutral. The company first got the Windows version running and released, and then asked themselves "now,how do we port all this ActiveX stuff to Mac and Linux?"
Not having any involvement in small business taxes, I don't know how it progressed after that. I hope it involved firings and large penalty payments.
(This is all from my fallible memory, so may not be entirely accurate.)
Alas, I have enough biology to have questions not answered in the short article, but not enough to extract the answers from the referenced paper. (I did notice that the news article was slightly incorrect on one point. They are not actually 'clipping out' the CCR5 gene. They cause a break in the gene which gets imperfectly repaired, so that the gene becomes nonfunctional.)
Are these T cells capable of 'reproducing' and having an unlimited number of descendants? This is not the case for many types of cells - it is part of what makes stem cells special. The paper refers to T4 cell lines, which suggests that they can indefinitely reproduce.
If the treatment works, how long will it last? (If the answer to the previous question is 'no', the answer to this one will likely be be 'about as long as the lifetime of a T cell.' If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', the answer might be 'for a lifetime.'
Do the modified T cells have to come from the patient? If not, the treatment will be much cheaper: Do the extraction and genetic modification once, breed up a big batch, treat dozens of patients. If not, you need to do the genetic modification once for each patient.
Once you have a bunch of immune T cells, will they be able to eliminate HIV from the body? (I suspect not: I understand that as a retrovirus, HIV is very good at hiding dormant for a long while.)
The answers to these questions are the difference between this being a laboratory curiosity and this being the elimination of HIV in developed countries within 5 years.
OK, this is getting a bit off topic, but Yuki Sonoda is also a character in the Megatokyo web comic. In the comic, she's a 15 year old whose only geek credential is that she collects ancient video game platforms.
Here is a pilot complaining about the 'modern airplanes almost fly themselves' myth. (You'll need to wait for some ads before the page loads.) And here he talks about the sort of training which produces people able to land a crippled plane on a river instead of a skyscraper.
The military have autonomous planes, but this isn't really relevant to airliners. The military will (if it has to) accept a crash every thousand flights. The airline industry won't accept a crash every million.
I've just skimmed the patent. The basic situation is they have the entire book on computer, you can choose any pages to view, but once you've viewed a certain number, it won't let you view any more. There was also a bit of stuff about supplying image and text in different formats/resolutions, and (I think) using keys to scroll around the image of one page.
How do they know that it is you, not someone else asking for more pages? They specifically include the use of cookies, but allow for other methods. There is no mention of (e.g.) using IP addresses, but I expect this would be covered. The interesting problems (How do you know the user isn't deleting the cookies? How do you know whether there are 200 people behind that single IP address?) are not addressed.
IANAL, and I didn't read it carefully, so I might be wrong about some details.
I've just made three fruitcakes for the christmas season. For me, the most important rule is: use lots of dried apricots. They must be the *good* dark orange ones, not the common crappy soft light orange ones (often from Turkey.) The good ones cost twice as much, but unlike the crappy ones, they actually taste good, which makes them infinitely better value. Although probably less than 10% of the cake by weight, the apricots were about 50% by cost.
The second rule is: candied peel/cherries are an abomination, and shall not be used. Ditto 'fruit cake mix' bags of dried fruit.
Those 'limbs' are in an exceptionally regular spiral pattern. If you fossilized an octopus, you'd expect the limbs to be all crossed over and tangled up. I'm guessing that those 'limbs' couldn't move independently, and are more like ridges in a sheet of material.
This sounds like a very difficult task to do efficiently and in large quantities.
I did find a couple of articles in Wikipedia, but they are very brief. The vacuum swing adsorption sounds like it could be what they use.
If the argon in the air goes through the furnace, once the CO2 is liquified, the remaining gas would be very argon rich - would this be of commercial value? (Perhaps there is already more argon-rich gas coming from the cyrogenic gas industry than we know what to do with.)
Maybe it has improved in the last couple of years, but last time I tried maths in OpenOffice I ran screaming. I pretty much couldn't figure out how to do anything, nor could I find any useful documentation. I now use LyX for anything mathematical.
While I'm panning software, avoid TeXmacs. I once spent two hours trolling through documentation trying to figure out how to do something simple (I think change the footer on a page) without success. (This was the experience that converted me to LyX.)
I have had a few issues with LyX, but mostly it works great. I few weeks ago, it mysteriously decided I needed a package I didn't have, and I ended up having to change to the root account* and loading the document there before the auto-package-download would work to fix the problem.
* Technically the admin account, as I'm on Windows these days, but I can call it root if I want to.
This isn't the first time we've seen evolution in the lab. Andrew Spiers has been doing it for years - e.g. here (2003) or more recently here.
Basically Spiers grows bacteria in an unstired beaker. As the limiting resource for growth (nitrogen? Oxygen? I forget) is most available at the top of the beaker, it soon evolves a mutation which allows the bacteria to stick together and form a mat at the top ("wrinkly spreader"). Then somewhat later the mat collapses as freeloaders have evolved and come to dominate the population.
Spiers' experiment is highly predictable - the populations always go through the same phases, but different colonies turn out to have used different mutations to get there. This differs significantly from the research here, where it appears a low probability event has occured.
(Warning: the above is primarily based on my memory of a talk he gave several years ago. My memory is known to be lossy.)
"If we decide that we need a new right, it should be acknowledged in the traditional way - amend the constitution."
It has already been done. It is the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Just because a right isn't listed in the constitution, that doesn't mean it isn't constitutionally protected. (But clearly it helps.)
Sure, contamination is a big problem, but it isn't like this hasn't been done before.
The problem is that you're trying to take very small traces of human DNA and greatly amplify it. Even a very small amount of contamination from the researchers or lab environment can introduce as much or more modern DNA than the ancient DNA being studied - so you end up sequencing the lab's janitor instead of the viking.
For example, here is a list of ancient humans who have had mitochondrial DNA sequences taken. (There are also Neandertal sequences not listed here.)
So I'd say this is a good job, and good science, but not at all a first.
In the translation: "In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew."
Is "man" here meaning "adult male human", or just "human"? Is there a German speaker with access to the original text who can clarify this?
He was not "prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent". "Prosecuted" implies there was a trial. He was arrested, and later the charges were dropped.
He shouldn't have been arrested either, given how slight the evidence against him was. A search was justified, but no more.
My bot was made out of Mindstorm Lego and pushed my mouse button at regular intervals. I used it for making lots of arrows - load up with raw materials, position the mouse in the right location, start the bot, have a shower. 15 minutes later, lots of arrows...
(The point was actually to improve the fletching skill, not to acquire arrows.)
The attitude that "rules apply to everyone else but not to us" is the single most distinctive aspect of the current US administration. Torture, the Geneva convention, the world court for prosecuting war crimes, illegal bugging of US citizens, the ABM treaty - and that's just what I can think of in a few seconds.
You can probably take this to a small claims court (or whatever your local equivalent is.) Get a judgement for your $600 back, and tell Meraki they can come and collect the hardware from you within 6 months, else it gets dumped.
Re:Talk Like A Physicist Day
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
And in Japan it is White Day, where men are supposed to give return gifts for the chocolates the women gave them on Valentine's day.
So today* is the day to give that special someone in your life a chocolate pi with 129 candles on it and singing a song something like this:
Oh dear, where can the matter be? There's not enough for the gravity Maybe its all in dark energy The microwaves say it is there.
The argument is that the RIAA needs to prove *actual* harm (copying) took place, rather than just creating a significant potential for harm. However, there are many instances in law where creating the potential for harm is punishable, without actual harm.
Here are some examples. Speeding is illegal because excessive speed creates a much higher chance of damage, injury and death. It is not necessary to show actual damage, injury or death was caused by a speeding motorist to charge them. Releasing carcinogens into the environment is (should be?) illegal, even though we can't prove whether a specific case of cancer in an exposed individual would or would not have occured without the exposure. Distribution of child pornography is illegal because of the harm done to children in producing it, and because it may prompt "consumers" to harm children. In a given case of C.P. distribution, it is not necessary to demonstrate that a child was harmed in the production, that the production would not have occured without this instance of distribution, or that a user of the material harmed a child in response to viewing it.
It seems to me that punishing "potential harm" is justifiable under certain circumstances: * If the harm is large but rare, and if the harm does occur, the at-fault person is not able to make full restitution. (Speeding would fit into this category.) * If the harm is real, but it is very difficult to connect any instance of actual harm to a specific instance of increased-chance-of-causing-harm behaviour. (Releasing carcinogens fits into this category, as does any 'many small polluters' situation.)
The 'making available' theory clearly does not fall into the first justifiable category. Whether it falls into the second category is open to argument. There is at least a case to be made that it does - showing that a work was made available *and* that somebody took advantage of that availability is technically challenging, and would probably require allowing a level of snooping which we don't wish to allow anyone except police with a search warrent.
Having said that, I think that the decision on whether a "potential harm" should be punishable is in the domain of politics. Generally, it shouldn't be punishable unless a law specifically says it is. The RIAA may be legally wrong here, but that is not the same as saying a law which made them right would be a bad law.
This is an excellent point - what you describe is the most natural/parsimonious expectation from the theory. However, I think there is enough wiggle room to evade this objection. Perhaps the ancestoral cyrophiles relied on cyanide snowing from the sky. Or perhaps once life evolved sufficient complexity, it benefited greatly from escaping the icy womb. Then temperate life quickly evolves and eventually reinvades the cryophile niches and drives the ancestoral forms to extinction. (E.g. imagine cetacians driving fish to extinction.) Another possibility (a remote but exciting one) is that the ancestoral cryophiles are still there, but we didn't know how to look for them.
I'd add scientists, mathematicians and computer programmers to this list. This group are also well suited to finding holes in security. We're used to analysing things logically and looking for the 'corner cases' where generally applicable rules may break down. It is very natural for such people to ask themselves questions like 'what if I don't present the same boarding pass to airport security as the one I got from check-in?'
For example, I thought of "hijack a plane and fly it into a large gathering of people" well before 2001, not because I had any desire to do so, but it was an answer to an interesting problem "what is the most damage I could cause given my current resources?"
Your comments are reasonable, but I think a bit misleading in this context.
At the scale of this research, life really is a tree. I doubt there are retroviruses which are able to transfer genetic material between (e.g.) plants and animals. Even if there is a low level of horizontal gene transfer, this is just a small perturbation on the tree model: just because there is a canal between two rivers, we don't claim that they are really one river, or that the canal is where the two rivers join.
At least for eukaryotes, there are two mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer: retroviruses and hybridization. Hybridization only works between quite closely related species (although it is rife in plants). Reteroviruses can shift genetic material over greater evolutionary distances, but your examples are still all within mammals - a small twig when we're looking at the tree of all eukaryotes.
As well as the horizontal gene transfer/hybridization problem with treating evolution as a tree, there is another reason to instead model it as a network: presenting your data as a tree does not distinguish between branchings that are well established, and those which are questionable. There is software for doing 'network' (instead of 'tree') analyses of phylogeny - the best known is "SplitsTree".
Slashdot Mirror
... sometime around 2000 give or take a couple of years. The government hired a company to write software so that small businesses could do their tax returns online. The software was supposed to be OS neutral. The company first got the Windows version running and released, and then asked themselves "now ,how do we port all this ActiveX stuff to Mac and Linux?"
Not having any involvement in small business taxes, I don't know how it progressed after that. I hope it involved firings and large penalty payments.
(This is all from my fallible memory, so may not be entirely accurate.)
Alas, I have enough biology to have questions not answered in the short article, but not enough to extract the answers from the referenced paper. (I did notice that the news article was slightly incorrect on one point. They are not actually 'clipping out' the CCR5 gene. They cause a break in the gene which gets imperfectly repaired, so that the gene becomes nonfunctional.)
Are these T cells capable of 'reproducing' and having an unlimited number of descendants? This is not the case for many types of cells - it is part of what makes stem cells special. The paper refers to T4 cell lines, which suggests that they can indefinitely reproduce.
If the treatment works, how long will it last? (If the answer to the previous question is 'no', the answer to this one will likely be be 'about as long as the lifetime of a T cell.' If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', the answer might be 'for a lifetime.'
Do the modified T cells have to come from the patient? If not, the treatment will be much cheaper: Do the extraction and genetic modification once, breed up a big batch, treat dozens of patients. If not, you need to do the genetic modification once for each patient.
Once you have a bunch of immune T cells, will they be able to eliminate HIV from the body? (I suspect not: I understand that as a retrovirus, HIV is very good at hiding dormant for a long while.)
The answers to these questions are the difference between this being a laboratory curiosity and this being the elimination of HIV in developed countries within 5 years.
OK, this is getting a bit off topic, but Yuki Sonoda is also a character in the Megatokyo web comic. In the comic, she's a 15 year old whose only geek credential is that she collects ancient video game platforms.
Here is a pilot complaining about the 'modern airplanes almost fly themselves' myth. (You'll need to wait for some ads before the page loads.) And here he talks about the sort of training which produces people able to land a crippled plane on a river instead of a skyscraper.
The military have autonomous planes, but this isn't really relevant to airliners. The military will (if it has to) accept a crash every thousand flights. The airline industry won't accept a crash every million.
I've just skimmed the patent. The basic situation is they have the entire book on computer, you can choose any pages to view, but once you've viewed a certain number, it won't let you view any more. There was also a bit of stuff about supplying image and text in different formats/resolutions, and (I think) using keys to scroll around the image of one page.
How do they know that it is you, not someone else asking for more pages? They specifically include the use of cookies, but allow for other methods. There is no mention of (e.g.) using IP addresses, but I expect this would be covered. The interesting problems (How do you know the user isn't deleting the cookies? How do you know whether there are 200 people behind that single IP address?) are not addressed.
IANAL, and I didn't read it carefully, so I might be wrong about some details.
I've just made three fruitcakes for the christmas season. For me, the most important rule is: use lots of dried apricots. They must be the *good* dark orange ones, not the common crappy soft light orange ones (often from Turkey.) The good ones cost twice as much, but unlike the crappy ones, they actually taste good, which makes them infinitely better value. Although probably less than 10% of the cake by weight, the apricots were about 50% by cost.
The second rule is: candied peel/cherries are an abomination, and shall not be used. Ditto 'fruit cake mix' bags of dried fruit.
Those 'limbs' are in an exceptionally regular spiral pattern. If you fossilized an octopus, you'd expect the limbs to be all crossed over and tangled up. I'm guessing that those 'limbs' couldn't move independently, and are more like ridges in a sheet of material.
This sounds like a very difficult task to do efficiently and in large quantities.
I did find a couple of articles in Wikipedia, but they are very brief. The vacuum swing adsorption sounds like it could be what they use.
If the argon in the air goes through the furnace, once the CO2 is liquified, the remaining gas would be very argon rich - would this be of commercial value? (Perhaps there is already more argon-rich gas coming from the cyrogenic gas industry than we know what to do with.)
I was on Linux when I got disenchanted with TeXmacs. And I came to TeXmacs as a long-time Emacs user.
Maybe it has improved in the last couple of years, but last time I tried maths in OpenOffice I ran screaming. I pretty much couldn't figure out how to do anything, nor could I find any useful documentation. I now use LyX for anything mathematical.
While I'm panning software, avoid TeXmacs. I once spent two hours trolling through documentation trying to figure out how to do something simple (I think change the footer on a page) without success. (This was the experience that converted me to LyX.)
I have had a few issues with LyX, but mostly it works great. I few weeks ago, it mysteriously decided I needed a package I didn't have, and I ended up having to change to the root account* and loading the document there before the auto-package-download would work to fix the problem.
* Technically the admin account, as I'm on Windows these days, but I can call it root if I want to.
This isn't the first time we've seen evolution in the lab. Andrew Spiers has been doing it for years - e.g.
here (2003) or more recently here.
Basically Spiers grows bacteria in an unstired beaker. As the limiting resource for growth (nitrogen? Oxygen? I forget) is most available at the top of the beaker, it soon evolves a mutation which allows the bacteria to stick together and form a mat at the top ("wrinkly spreader"). Then somewhat later the mat collapses as freeloaders have evolved and come to dominate the population.
Spiers' experiment is highly predictable - the populations always go through the same phases, but different colonies turn out to have used different mutations to get there. This differs significantly from the research here, where it appears a low probability event has occured.
(Warning: the above is primarily based on my memory of a talk he gave several years ago. My memory is known to be lossy.)
"If we decide that we need a new right, it should be acknowledged in the traditional way - amend the constitution."
It has already been done. It is the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Just because a right isn't listed in the constitution, that doesn't mean it isn't constitutionally protected. (But clearly it helps.)
Ha! They said the same of Solaris - it would never be made with a blockbuster budget. But they were wrong!!!! Bwahahahaha!!
and (100% predictably) it flopped. Good box-office for an art-house movie, but lousy for a blockbuster.
Sure, contamination is a big problem, but it isn't like this hasn't been done before.
The problem is that you're trying to take very small traces of human DNA and greatly amplify it. Even a very small amount of contamination from the researchers or lab environment can introduce as much or more modern DNA than the ancient DNA being studied - so you end up sequencing the lab's janitor instead of the viking.
For example, here is a list of ancient humans who have had mitochondrial DNA sequences taken. (There are also Neandertal sequences not listed here.)
So I'd say this is a good job, and good science, but not at all a first.
In the translation: "In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew."
Is "man" here meaning "adult male human", or just "human"? Is there a German speaker with access to the original text who can clarify this?
He was not "prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent". "Prosecuted" implies there was a trial. He was arrested, and later the charges were dropped.
He shouldn't have been arrested either, given how slight the evidence against him was. A search was justified, but no more.
My bot was made out of Mindstorm Lego and pushed my mouse button at regular intervals. I used it for making lots of arrows - load up with raw materials, position the mouse in the right location, start the bot, have a shower. 15 minutes later, lots of arrows...
(The point was actually to improve the fletching skill, not to acquire arrows.)
The attitude that "rules apply to everyone else but not to us" is the single most distinctive aspect of the current US administration. Torture, the Geneva convention, the world court for prosecuting war crimes, illegal bugging of US citizens, the ABM treaty - and that's just what I can think of in a few seconds.
I suspect that would change it from a three-hours-including-preparation-time small claims case into a full blown lawyers-and-discovery suit.
You can probably take this to a small claims court (or whatever your local equivalent is.) Get a judgement for your $600 back, and tell Meraki they can come and collect the hardware from you within 6 months, else it gets dumped.
And in Japan it is White Day, where men are supposed to give return gifts for the chocolates the women gave them on Valentine's day.
:-(
So today* is the day to give that special someone in your life a chocolate pi with 129 candles on it and singing a song something like this:
Oh dear, where can the matter be?
There's not enough for the gravity
Maybe its all in dark energy
The microwaves say it is there.
(Lyrics original to this post.)
* Yesterday for most of us
I'll play Devils Advocate here.
The argument is that the RIAA needs to prove *actual* harm (copying) took place, rather than just creating a significant potential for harm. However, there are many instances in law where creating the potential for harm is punishable, without actual harm.
Here are some examples. Speeding is illegal because excessive speed creates a much higher chance of damage, injury and death. It is not necessary to show actual damage, injury or death was caused by a speeding motorist to charge them. Releasing carcinogens into the environment is (should be?) illegal, even though we can't prove whether a specific case of cancer in an exposed individual would or would not have occured without the exposure. Distribution of child pornography is illegal because of the harm done to children in producing it, and because it may prompt "consumers" to harm children. In a given case of C.P. distribution, it is not necessary to demonstrate that a child was harmed in the production, that the production would not have occured without this instance of distribution, or that a user of the material harmed a child in response to viewing it.
It seems to me that punishing "potential harm" is justifiable under certain circumstances:
* If the harm is large but rare, and if the harm does occur, the at-fault person is not able to make full restitution. (Speeding would fit into this category.)
* If the harm is real, but it is very difficult to connect any instance of actual harm to a specific instance of increased-chance-of-causing-harm behaviour. (Releasing carcinogens fits into this category, as does any 'many small polluters' situation.)
The 'making available' theory clearly does not fall into the first justifiable category. Whether it falls into the second category is open to argument. There is at least a case to be made that it does - showing that a work was made available *and* that somebody took advantage of that availability is technically challenging, and would probably require allowing a level of snooping which we don't wish to allow anyone except police with a search warrent.
Having said that, I think that the decision on whether a "potential harm" should be punishable is in the domain of politics. Generally, it shouldn't be punishable unless a law specifically says it is. The RIAA may be legally wrong here, but that is not the same as saying a law which made them right would be a bad law.
IANAL.
This is an excellent point - what you describe is the most natural/parsimonious expectation from the theory. However, I think there is enough wiggle room to evade this objection. Perhaps the ancestoral cyrophiles relied on cyanide snowing from the sky. Or perhaps once life evolved sufficient complexity, it benefited greatly from escaping the icy womb. Then temperate life quickly evolves and eventually reinvades the cryophile niches and drives the ancestoral forms to extinction. (E.g. imagine cetacians driving fish to extinction.) Another possibility (a remote but exciting one) is that the ancestoral cryophiles are still there, but we didn't know how to look for them.
I'd add scientists, mathematicians and computer programmers to this list. This group are also well suited to finding holes in security. We're used to analysing things logically and looking for the 'corner cases' where generally applicable rules may break down. It is very natural for such people to ask themselves questions like 'what if I don't present the same boarding pass to airport security as the one I got from check-in?'
For example, I thought of "hijack a plane and fly it into a large gathering of people" well before 2001, not because I had any desire to do so, but it was an answer to an interesting problem "what is the most damage I could cause given my current resources?"
Your comments are reasonable, but I think a bit misleading in this context.
At the scale of this research, life really is a tree. I doubt there are retroviruses which are able to transfer genetic material between (e.g.) plants and animals. Even if there is a low level of horizontal gene transfer, this is just a small perturbation on the tree model: just because there is a canal between two rivers, we don't claim that they are really one river, or that the canal is where the two rivers join.
At least for eukaryotes, there are two mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer: retroviruses and hybridization. Hybridization only works between quite closely related species (although it is rife in plants). Reteroviruses can shift genetic material over greater evolutionary distances, but your examples are still all within mammals - a small twig when we're looking at the tree of all eukaryotes.
As well as the horizontal gene transfer/hybridization problem with treating evolution as a tree, there is another reason to instead model it as a network: presenting your data as a tree does not distinguish between branchings that are well established, and those which are questionable. There is software for doing 'network' (instead of 'tree') analyses of phylogeny - the best known is "SplitsTree".
(I am a researcher in genetics and phylogeny.)