You're off. The Protoss didn't have the nukes. The Terrans did. So it was the disembodied female voice that spoke the command center lines which said "nuclear launch detected."
Thankfully, Nature provided the reference to the original report printed in Science. Since this thing's right up my alley (I'm a biochemist), and since I know few people will read the real article, and since I'm a karma whore anyway, here's a summary of the original report. It assumes you know a little about prion diseases (BSE, CJS, GSS) already -- see other posts in this thread, or Wikipedia, for more info.
First: some background. There is a gene in mice that, if a certain mutation occurs, causes the mice to develop a neurodegenerative disease (hereafter abbreviated NDD) at an early age. If brain extracts from the diseased mice are transferred to healthy mice, the healthy mice contract the same disease. We're talking about an extant, previously-known prion-like disease in mice. Previous work by Kaneko, et al (see article if you really want the reference) took a short amino-acide sequence from the mouse protein believed to cause the NDD, and folded it into two different conformations: a non-beta-rich and a beta-rich (beta-rich structures are believed to be the NDD-operative part of other prion diseases such as BSE and CJD). They then injected the two different conformations into two different groups of mice. The non-beta-rich-protein group was fine, but the beta-rich-protein group developed the NDD anywhere between 1 and 2 years after injection. All this was work published previously, before the current paper in Science.
Okay, now we get to what Legname's paper is about. Taking the previous knowledge into account, Legname, et al took a similar beta-rich segment of the possibly infectious protein (called MoPrP -- roughly moprion protein) and made two preparations of it: one MoPrP which was just separate strands (called "unseeded"), and one MoPrP which was clumped in amyloid fibrils (called "seeded" -- basically an abnormally polymerized clump of protein, the presence of which correlates with NDD's like BSE and Alzheimers). Note that the critical difference here between the current work and the previous work is that the previous work folded the MoPrP protein into a known beta-rich (infectious conformation), whereas the current work just polymerized it into an amyloid plaque. The former doesn't necessarily happen spontaneously in vivo, whereas the latter certainly can. Anyway, the two preparations, unseeded and seeded, were injected into mice. Two years later, the seeded mice had a much higher rate of NDD than did the unseeded mice.
So, some of the conclusions that come from this:
Strong evidence that prion diseases are in fact caused by misfolded proteins -- generally believed to be true, but some people thought otherwise.
"amyloid fibrils harbor detectable levels of prion infectivity"
"PrP [prion protein] is both necessary and suffienct for infectivity"
"spontaneous formation of prions, which is thought to be responsible for sporadic forms of prion disease in livestock and humans, can occur in any mammal expressing PrPC" and "no exogenous agent is required for prions to form in any mammal" (though an exogenous agent can certainly help).
My own conclusion from the last point: it's possible that Alzheimers is just like a prion disease, just one that starts spontaneously. The issue of infectivity (as far as we know, Alzheimers isn't communicable) is still unsolved, but Legname's work is an interesting addition to the prion work.
The comparison is right, but the label's a little off. Beckett and RvB are both "absurdist," not exactly existentialist. Yes, the former is an offshoot of the latter, but the point of absurdism is really just to show that existence is pretty much meaningless and all our efforts amount to nothing. The existentialists didn't take such a dim view of the human condition.
... and use Blender. I've tried switching to 3DSMax, Lightwave, Maya, and I just keep coming back to Blender. I can do all you want and more. A lot of people whine about the learning curve, but there are many tutorials on the web to get you started.
All 1000+ workstations (HPUX, Windows, and Linux) at BYU's College of Engineering use Mozilla. The Windows boxes still have IE on them, but we had it turned off for a while (gotta love Active Directory profiles that let you cripple IE) to encourage users to switch over. A vocal few complained, but it was mostly because they had been brainwashed with MS FUD and hadn't even tried Mozilla.
I once did a five-day LAN party, hosted in my basement while my parents were out of town:). Looks like you covered most everything, except two necessities.
food Make sure there's enough to eat for everyone, because even after being sedentary for 8 hours your stomach starts rumbling. And after eating junk food for 24 hours, you start craving something nutritious.
sleep Most people don't have the stamina to do anything for more than 18 hours straight, even if it is just sit at a computer and play games. You are going to want to crash some time, so provide places to sleep.
Other than that, I suggest you have some movies available, because gaming is competitive and intense, so it's good to just relax for a while. 2001: A Space Odyssey is just wonderful at 4 am.
It doesn't seem to me that Pacotti understands that knowing how to do something dangerous and actually having the capability to do it are two vastly different situations. I know enough physics to know how to make a thermonuclear bomb. Given a month or so, I could probably put together the entire genetic sequence of the Ebola virus. I know how to fly an airplane well enough to get it to plow into the side of a skyscraper. Sarin, TNT, or C4 aren't too hard to make and they can do a lot of damage.
However, the capability to do any of these things is far beyond my reach. I don't have access to nuclear-grade plutonium, the equipment to assemble a genetic sequence from scratch costs several million dollars, and I don't stand much of a chance getting into the cockpit of a 747, much less getting control of it. The examples of dangerous information he gives are just software (DeCSS and viruses), which cost basically nothing to generate and reproduce. The examples of computer-based manufacturing he cites are funded by multi-million dollar organizations operating in the open and investing huge amounts of time and talent into their production. The two don't go together as easily as Pacotti makes them seem.
Instruments of mass destruction are quite another story. They require a lot funding, a lot of time, a lot of manpower, and a lot of expertise. The necessity of running the entire operation covertly just complicates matters by several orders of magnitude. Look at North Korea and Iraq: they have had the funding, the technology, and are operating only semi-covertly, and still the most pessimistic estimates put them reaching nuclear or biological weapons capability a few years off! Al Qaeda or any other independent terrorist organization certainly isn't ahead of them. Nanotechnology, which doesn't even exist in an sort of a usable fashion, certainly isn't a threat either.
Pacotti raises some good points about access to information, but I don't think the situation is as dire as he makes it out to be. Playing Deus Ex and writing sci-fi tends to make you a little paranoid like that.
Would cloned animals really have a chance of prolonging the life of the species?
Not very likely, because basically what you're getting is a 100% inbred population. You may be able to get a couple of generations out of the species if you're careful (like keeping them locked up in a zoo), but in the wild, a species thrives on its genetic diversity. If you have a totally heterogenous gene pool, then other than random mutation (which is more often deleterious than beneficial), you have no chance for evolution. If selection pressures start acting against your species, it'll be wiped out pretty quickly.
FreeBSD is actually the most high-performace server operating system.
On Intel platforms, yes. But I guarantee you that if I pit a halfway decent Alpha/True64, SGI/Irix, or a Sun/Solaris box against even the biggest Intel box, the UNIX box will run circles around the Intel.
All the PowerEdge servers I've bought in the last year (about 5) have used Adaptec SCSI hardware built onto the mobo. So though I don't know exactly what this "PERC2" controller is, I imagine it's Adaptec too.
...to see the reaction from the 14,000-odd attendees (and this isn't including the MSFT staff) at MS Tech-Ed 2000 going on in Orlando this week. I'll just have to wait and get the scoop when my dad gets home.
I was head sysadmin for an ISP for about 2 years. During that time, we had a handful of DoS's. One was against a co-loc. Two were against our shell boxes. One was against a user's dialup. In the latter 3 cases, I did drop the accounts. I did so not out of censorship or whatever else you want to say against this ISP. I did it because this person had brought about an attack that totally prevented us from carrying out our business. These DoS's annihilated both our T1's, and even made a dent in the multiple-T3 bandwith of our upstream provider, for several hours during peak times. That's several hours of a few hundred people not being able to use the Internet connections they are paying for. DoS's are not unprovoked; they are partially the victim's fault (at least I have yet to find an instance where it isn't).
If a user is somehow adversely affecting the way the network runs, especially if it's interfering with other customers' use of the network, then the admin has the right to pull the plug on the user. It's no different than setting quotas on disk use so people can't fill up an entire hard drive, disabling a slashdotted site that is dragging a webserver to its knees, cutting off the shell account of a user who won't quit screwing up the shell server, or k-lining someone's IP address. When you have a few hundred people under your administrative responsibility, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.
... the Quake II CAVE. Although it appears the Earthlight fits into my meager student budget a bit better.
Re:Fahrenheit 451 censored
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Fahrenheit 451
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· Score: 1
> Recent editions of the book (sorry, I don't have my copy to hand) contain an appendix that details how Fahrenheit 451 was censored by the publisher in some editions, without the author's permission.
I actually have one of these censored versions -- I stole it from my high school. More here
I had a censored version of this book once...
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Fahrenheit 451
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· Score: 2
I read Fahrenheit 451 in English class freshman year of high school. We were issued the school's copies of the book, while my teacher used her own copy. Well, to make a long story short, I had read the book before, and I noticed a distinct lack of profanity in this edition. Sure enough, I flipped through the publisher's introduction, which promoted itself as a "Special Student Edition" of the novel. What they didn't say was that all the mild profanity ("Damn in, Montag!") and other potentially objectionable material had been removed -- including several whole paragraphs, which my teacher hadn't noticed because she was reading from her own copy. The book was published by a now-defunct publisher (Lloyd-Merson Publications), that edition copyright 1985; with a little bit of digging I found that it had been published against Ray Bradbury's permission, and when he found out about this abomination he was nothing less than immensely pissed off, as was I and my teacher (one of the few that I've ever had that really had a good head on her shoulders). Citing [legitimate] bugetary constraints, the school and district politely refused to buy new copies, so all the students wrote "Warning: this book has been censored" in the front covers. How ironic that a book critiquing the censorship and repression of objectionable material is itself censored for a few pathetic words which are already in every American student's vocabulary.
The only problem with this is that it kills incoming only. If you run a mailserver for an affected site, well, you're still sending it out like mad, just not getting any more. See the other sendmail tip for a sendmail filter.
You ever had administrative responsibility over a server that some spammer has used? Do you know what sort of beating even a modestly powered box running sendmail+FreeBSD takes when it gets abused by a spammer? Do you know what sort of bandwidth a few hundred simultaneous SMTP sessions all sending 20k messages eats up? In short, spam may not be that big of a deal on the client side (procmail is a godsend in this respect), but it's total hell on the mail server that has to distribute all that meat.
Re:top 10 pickup lines on calculusgirls.com
on
80 Proof Quickies
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· Score: 1
"Let's make some flux: my vectors through your surfaces. I've got high circulation, negative divergence, and curl like you'd never believe."
"Let me prove that there's no limit to my love functions."
FreeBSD does allow you to specify incoming traffic vs. outgoing traffic and traffic for specific interfaces. For instance:
ipfw allow ip from any to any via lo0
allows all traffic via the loopback device, and
ipfw allow tcp from any to any 80 in via fxp0 ipfw allow tcp from any 80 to any out via fxp0 ipfw deny ip from any to any via fxp0
allows all external traffic (via my ethernet card, named fxp0) to my webserver and nothing else. I haven't messed with natd on FreeBSD much, but the huge advantage it has over Linux's ipchains is that it handles NAT in both directions, so hitting your firewall with a connection to port 80 can be redirected to your internal webserver. On Linux 2.2, you have to use ipchains for masquerading (which is a separate kernel option) and ipportfw (which is yet another kernel option) for port-forwarding, aka reverse NAT.
Right now, FreeBSD's got a few advantages over Linux 2.2 in firewalling:
state monitoring for TCP (can allow all established TCP connections on any ports, but not allow incoming connections, etc.)
arbitrary, and clearly labeled numbering of rules (counting down the list just to figure out the insertion number for a new rule is inexcusably stupid)
an intelligent natd that handles masquerading in both incoming and outgoing directions
The good news is that all these "disadvantages" are fixed with the new Linux 2.4 iptables setup, which is a vastly more intelligent, though slightly more complex, way of doing things. There's even a iptables module to handle FTP (which is absolute hell for firewall designers) intelligently. Good stuff; one of 2.4 features I'm really looking forward to.
Slashdot Mirror
You're off. The Protoss didn't have the nukes. The Terrans did. So it was the disembodied female voice that spoke the command center lines which said "nuclear launch detected."
Thankfully, Nature provided the reference to the original report printed in Science. Since this thing's right up my alley (I'm a biochemist), and since I know few people will read the real article, and since I'm a karma whore anyway, here's a summary of the original report. It assumes you know a little about prion diseases (BSE, CJS, GSS) already -- see other posts in this thread, or Wikipedia, for more info.
First: some background. There is a gene in mice that, if a certain mutation occurs, causes the mice to develop a neurodegenerative disease (hereafter abbreviated NDD) at an early age. If brain extracts from the diseased mice are transferred to healthy mice, the healthy mice contract the same disease. We're talking about an extant, previously-known prion-like disease in mice. Previous work by Kaneko, et al (see article if you really want the reference) took a short amino-acide sequence from the mouse protein believed to cause the NDD, and folded it into two different conformations: a non-beta-rich and a beta-rich (beta-rich structures are believed to be the NDD-operative part of other prion diseases such as BSE and CJD). They then injected the two different conformations into two different groups of mice. The non-beta-rich-protein group was fine, but the beta-rich-protein group developed the NDD anywhere between 1 and 2 years after injection. All this was work published previously, before the current paper in Science.
Okay, now we get to what Legname's paper is about. Taking the previous knowledge into account, Legname, et al took a similar beta-rich segment of the possibly infectious protein (called MoPrP -- roughly moprion protein) and made two preparations of it: one MoPrP which was just separate strands (called "unseeded"), and one MoPrP which was clumped in amyloid fibrils (called "seeded" -- basically an abnormally polymerized clump of protein, the presence of which correlates with NDD's like BSE and Alzheimers). Note that the critical difference here between the current work and the previous work is that the previous work folded the MoPrP protein into a known beta-rich (infectious conformation), whereas the current work just polymerized it into an amyloid plaque. The former doesn't necessarily happen spontaneously in vivo, whereas the latter certainly can. Anyway, the two preparations, unseeded and seeded, were injected into mice. Two years later, the seeded mice had a much higher rate of NDD than did the unseeded mice.
So, some of the conclusions that come from this:
- Strong evidence that prion diseases are in fact caused by misfolded proteins -- generally believed to be true, but some people thought otherwise.
- "amyloid fibrils harbor detectable levels of prion infectivity"
- "PrP [prion protein] is both necessary and suffienct for infectivity"
- "spontaneous formation of prions, which is thought to be responsible for sporadic forms of prion disease in livestock and humans, can occur in any mammal expressing PrPC" and "no exogenous agent is required for prions to form in any mammal" (though an exogenous agent can certainly help).
My own conclusion from the last point: it's possible that Alzheimers is just like a prion disease, just one that starts spontaneously. The issue of infectivity (as far as we know, Alzheimers isn't communicable) is still unsolved, but Legname's work is an interesting addition to the prion work.So, given that Gentoo is probably going to move to this version of X, how much of a pain in the neck is it going to be to upgrade?
So you got to work on the early versions of CHARMM, huh?
The comparison is right, but the label's a little off. Beckett and RvB are both "absurdist," not exactly existentialist. Yes, the former is an offshoot of the latter, but the point of absurdism is really just to show that existence is pretty much meaningless and all our efforts amount to nothing. The existentialists didn't take such a dim view of the human condition.
... and use Blender. I've tried switching to 3DSMax, Lightwave, Maya, and I just keep coming back to Blender. I can do all you want and more. A lot of people whine about the learning curve, but there are many tutorials on the web to get you started.
All 1000+ workstations (HPUX, Windows, and Linux) at BYU's College of Engineering use Mozilla. The Windows boxes still have IE on them, but we had it turned off for a while (gotta love Active Directory profiles that let you cripple IE) to encourage users to switch over. A vocal few complained, but it was mostly because they had been brainwashed with MS FUD and hadn't even tried Mozilla.
Yes, negate those. It was late at night during finals week, and I made a careless cut and paste.
- food Make sure there's enough to eat for everyone, because even after being sedentary for 8 hours your stomach starts rumbling. And after eating junk food for 24 hours, you start craving something nutritious.
- sleep Most people don't have the stamina to do anything for more than 18 hours straight, even if it is just sit at a computer and play games. You are going to want to crash some time, so provide places to sleep.
Other than that, I suggest you have some movies available, because gaming is competitive and intense, so it's good to just relax for a while. 2001: A Space Odyssey is just wonderful at 4 am.mirror
It doesn't seem to me that Pacotti understands that knowing how to do something dangerous and actually having the capability to do it are two vastly different situations. I know enough physics to know how to make a thermonuclear bomb. Given a month or so, I could probably put together the entire genetic sequence of the Ebola virus. I know how to fly an airplane well enough to get it to plow into the side of a skyscraper. Sarin, TNT, or C4 aren't too hard to make and they can do a lot of damage.
However, the capability to do any of these things is far beyond my reach. I don't have access to nuclear-grade plutonium, the equipment to assemble a genetic sequence from scratch costs several million dollars, and I don't stand much of a chance getting into the cockpit of a 747, much less getting control of it. The examples of dangerous information he gives are just software (DeCSS and viruses), which cost basically nothing to generate and reproduce. The examples of computer-based manufacturing he cites are funded by multi-million dollar organizations operating in the open and investing huge amounts of time and talent into their production. The two don't go together as easily as Pacotti makes them seem.
Instruments of mass destruction are quite another story. They require a lot funding, a lot of time, a lot of manpower, and a lot of expertise. The necessity of running the entire operation covertly just complicates matters by several orders of magnitude. Look at North Korea and Iraq: they have had the funding, the technology, and are operating only semi-covertly, and still the most pessimistic estimates put them reaching nuclear or biological weapons capability a few years off! Al Qaeda or any other independent terrorist organization certainly isn't ahead of them. Nanotechnology, which doesn't even exist in an sort of a usable fashion, certainly isn't a threat either.
Pacotti raises some good points about access to information, but I don't think the situation is as dire as he makes it out to be. Playing Deus Ex and writing sci-fi tends to make you a little paranoid like that.
Would cloned animals really have a chance of prolonging the life of the species?
Not very likely, because basically what you're getting is a 100% inbred population. You may be able to get a couple of generations out of the species if you're careful (like keeping them locked up in a zoo), but in the wild, a species thrives on its genetic diversity. If you have a totally heterogenous gene pool, then other than random mutation (which is more often deleterious than beneficial), you have no chance for evolution. If selection pressures start acting against your species, it'll be wiped out pretty quickly.
FreeBSD is actually the most high-performace server operating system.
On Intel platforms, yes. But I guarantee you that if I pit a halfway decent Alpha/True64, SGI/Irix, or a Sun/Solaris box against even the biggest Intel box, the UNIX box will run circles around the Intel.
All the PowerEdge servers I've bought in the last year (about 5) have used Adaptec SCSI hardware built onto the mobo. So though I don't know exactly what this "PERC2" controller is, I imagine it's Adaptec too.
Create a caption for this picture to describe what is running through Hemos's head.
BOIING!
...to see the reaction from the 14,000-odd attendees (and this isn't including the MSFT staff) at MS Tech-Ed 2000 going on in Orlando this week. I'll just have to wait and get the scoop when my dad gets home.
Anyone there who cares to report?
I was head sysadmin for an ISP for about 2 years. During that time, we had a handful of DoS's. One was against a co-loc. Two were against our shell boxes. One was against a user's dialup. In the latter 3 cases, I did drop the accounts. I did so not out of censorship or whatever else you want to say against this ISP. I did it because this person had brought about an attack that totally prevented us from carrying out our business. These DoS's annihilated both our T1's, and even made a dent in the multiple-T3 bandwith of our upstream provider, for several hours during peak times. That's several hours of a few hundred people not being able to use the Internet connections they are paying for. DoS's are not unprovoked; they are partially the victim's fault (at least I have yet to find an instance where it isn't).
If a user is somehow adversely affecting the way the network runs, especially if it's interfering with other customers' use of the network, then the admin has the right to pull the plug on the user. It's no different than setting quotas on disk use so people can't fill up an entire hard drive, disabling a slashdotted site that is dragging a webserver to its knees, cutting off the shell account of a user who won't quit screwing up the shell server, or k-lining someone's IP address. When you have a few hundred people under your administrative responsibility, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.
... the Quake II CAVE. Although it appears the Earthlight fits into my meager student budget a bit better.
> Recent editions of the book (sorry, I don't have my copy to hand) contain an appendix that details how Fahrenheit 451 was censored by the publisher in some editions, without the author's permission.
I actually have one of these censored versions -- I stole it from my high school. More here
I read Fahrenheit 451 in English class freshman year of high school. We were issued the school's copies of the book, while my teacher used her own copy. Well, to make a long story short, I had read the book before, and I noticed a distinct lack of profanity in this edition. Sure enough, I flipped through the publisher's introduction, which promoted itself as a "Special Student Edition" of the novel. What they didn't say was that all the mild profanity ("Damn in, Montag!") and other potentially objectionable material had been removed -- including several whole paragraphs, which my teacher hadn't noticed because she was reading from her own copy. The book was published by a now-defunct publisher (Lloyd-Merson Publications), that edition copyright 1985; with a little bit of digging I found that it had been published against Ray Bradbury's permission, and when he found out about this abomination he was nothing less than immensely pissed off, as was I and my teacher (one of the few that I've ever had that really had a good head on her shoulders). Citing [legitimate] bugetary constraints, the school and district politely refused to buy new copies, so all the students wrote "Warning: this book has been censored" in the front covers. How ironic that a book critiquing the censorship and repression of objectionable material is itself censored for a few pathetic words which are already in every American student's vocabulary.
> 2) US postal code for the state of Iowa.
BZZT, wrong. Thanks for playing. The postal abbreviation for Iowa is IA.
No wonder non-Americans think Americans are stupid. We can't even get our own geography right.
The only problem with this is that it kills incoming only. If you run a mailserver for an affected site, well, you're still sending it out like mad, just not getting any more. See the other sendmail tip for a sendmail filter.
You ever had administrative responsibility over a server that some spammer has used? Do you know what sort of beating even a modestly powered box running sendmail+FreeBSD takes when it gets abused by a spammer? Do you know what sort of bandwidth a few hundred simultaneous SMTP sessions all sending 20k messages eats up? In short, spam may not be that big of a deal on the client side (procmail is a godsend in this respect), but it's total hell on the mail server that has to distribute all that meat.
"Let's make some flux: my vectors through your surfaces. I've got high circulation, negative divergence, and curl like you'd never believe."
"Let me prove that there's no limit to my love functions."
ipfw allow ip from any to any via lo0
allows all traffic via the loopback device, and
ipfw allow tcp from any to any 80 in via fxp0
ipfw allow tcp from any 80 to any out via fxp0
ipfw deny ip from any to any via fxp0
allows all external traffic (via my ethernet card, named fxp0) to my webserver and nothing else. I haven't messed with natd on FreeBSD much, but the huge advantage it has over Linux's ipchains is that it handles NAT in both directions, so hitting your firewall with a connection to port 80 can be redirected to your internal webserver. On Linux 2.2, you have to use ipchains for masquerading (which is a separate kernel option) and ipportfw (which is yet another kernel option) for port-forwarding, aka reverse NAT.
Right now, FreeBSD's got a few advantages over Linux 2.2 in firewalling:
- state monitoring for TCP (can allow all established TCP connections on any ports, but not allow incoming connections, etc.)
- arbitrary, and clearly labeled numbering of rules (counting down the list just to figure out the insertion number for a new rule is inexcusably stupid)
- an intelligent natd that handles masquerading in both incoming and outgoing directions
The good news is that all these "disadvantages" are fixed with the new Linux 2.4 iptables setup, which is a vastly more intelligent, though slightly more complex, way of doing things. There's even a iptables module to handle FTP (which is absolute hell for firewall designers) intelligently. Good stuff; one of 2.4 features I'm really looking forward to.