I agree that banks can't withstand data loss, but they can withstand data errors. If there's a 30-second period per year when data doesn't properly move, and that requires manual cleanup, that's acceptable.
Still, it's pretty cool. Even if it is useful for trademark cases, you have to figure that sets from 50 years ago are there mostly just for the awesome historic value and as inspiration to the engineers.
Exactly. A bank requires "six nines" of performance (i.e., right 99.9999% of the time) and probably wants even better than that. Six nines works out to about 30 seconds of downtime per year.
It seems like Wikipedia is getting things right 99% of the time, or maybe even 99.9% of the time ("three nines"). That's a pretty low standard relative to how most companies do business.
It's true that this could backfire, but it could also cause a massive arms race. If politics weren't messy and dirty enough already, imagine if both campaigns were spending massive amounts of time and energy to control the other side's Google results. McCain supporters would link to dirty articles about Obama, Obama supporters would link to dirty articles about McCain, and the whole Internet would be filled with even more political links than it already is.
Heck, a really smart campaigner would just outsource the whole thing to India and have thousands of staffers constantly building links to positive and negative results.
First, it's confirmation that the white stuff at the poles really is ice (and not some unknown martian substance that just looks like ice).
Second it means that the lander is digging in the right places to find all of the interesting stuff that goes along with water. It's tremendously interesting to discover whether there's carbon-based fragments in the water (suggesting life did or could exist) and to figure out what else is in the water.
I gave up yesterday after a few too many server errors.
That said, the map of countries is pretty cool. Ignoring the island micro-nations (the Falkland Islands won with 2% of 3000 people pledging to download), it's interesting to see how high Firefox penetration is in Eastern Europe. I wonder if that's a function of very connected economies without a lot of love for Microsoft and a strong desire for free software?
Oh, and good luck to the Firefox team trying to save the "E" logo from this year's cake! That thing is HUGE!
The point is that most people on/. post in these discussions using pseudonyms for a good reason; we like to be able to control who knows our IRL identity.
There are a few people who use real names, and for that I commend them.
But it's a little complicated more than just pure societal rules. There's also the question of what I individually choose to disclose and what not to disclose. I'm free to have privacy in my bedroom, just as you're free to be an exhibitionist. Maybe society sets the outer limits of what we can declare to be private, but we still make individual choices within those boundaries.
I personally think I have nothing to hide. That's why I use my real name on Slashdot./sarcasm.
They claimed that they found a new procedure using them. If I were the first person to invent the Chevy El Camino ("it's a car and it's a truck") I would be able to patent the invention of a car/truck combination, even if I didn't invent wheels, headlights, doors, windshields, etc.
The only thing the patent covered was a new diagnostic test. They invented the never-before-seen diagnostic test by combining existing elements. Combining existing things is a perfectly valid form of invention for patents.
It's a pretty common misperception that somehow humans would have to pay license fees for use of DNA.
What was being patented was a purified sequence of DNA for use in a diagnostic test. It's not the DNA itself--there's 10 million years of prior art for that--but the use of a particular sequence of DNA for diagnostics.
The total human genome is over 3 billion base pairs. Companies were racing to figure out which small sequences (100 or so pairs) would be useful in diagnostics and possibly in therapy. The use of DNA for that purpose was completely new at the time.
For example, check out this DNA patent application. The application refers to a specific DNA sequence, but the patent itself is for the use of that particular sequence for a specific kind of therapy.
It's still perfectly legal to reproduce, sell your DNA in a bottle, and so forth. The only thing the patent covers is the use of one very short sequence in a particular kind of therapy.
It might still be bad policy, but it's not as if you don't own your DNA.
I heartily applaud their attempt to get free coverage. But even if they fail there's still a lot of great stuff on the horizon. The coverage of commercial services like FON is increasing fast. At the same time, the new G3 phones are coming online (new iPhone, anyone?) and tethering is starting to look like a more and more attractive way to get high-speed Internet on the go. I'd love it if Internet were free everywhere, but I'll take iPhone tethering (yes, it's probably against the TOS) as a fallback.
i've notice[d] that a lot of smart, wealthy successful people And how many of those wealthy successful people were mathematicians and physicists? Smart, certainly. But wealthy?
how inaccurate can they be? If China thinks that Tibet is part of China, I don't think the best satellite data in the world will make the map any more "accurate" in China's view.
(Background: In 1966, some MIT computer science faculty thought AI was so easy that computer vision could be solved in one summer worth of work; it probably took 35 years to reach the milestones identified in the research abstract).
Yet, I'm not impressed. Powerset is not an instant solution, it's a step in the right direction. Early Google wasn't perfect, but it got a lot better over time as the Pagerank algorithm was refined. Hopefully Powerset will show similar improvement over time.
Heck, if Powerset is just watching what links people click on more often (Google does) then even that can help provide a training set for its algorithm. Using that kind of training set would make it vastly easier to figure out whether a change in the algorithm would be an improvement or not. That's priceless data and I hope they'll use it wisely.
But, really, just remember that this is the first in a new breed of search engines. It won't be the last, by any means:
-Search 0.9 was using the meta and description tags on a page to index (see Altavista). It broke when spammers figured out the algorithms.
-Search 1.0 was using the text of inbound links to index (see Google). It doesn't know what the text means, it just knows that it has a bunch of keywords. It's breaking as people start to game their Google search results.
-Search 2.0 will try to find meaning in the web and understand what a page is really saying (see Powerset).
I don't know yet what Search 3.0 will be, but we're still a long way from getting Search 2.0 to work right. But we're still making progress. Just because Powerset isn't perfect doesn't mean we should give up on the whole venture.
now a judge in the United States Courts No, he's a Colorado state judge. He is not a judge appointed by President and confirmed by the Senate, therefore he is not a judge in the United States courts.
Thank you for a well-reasoned post. It's much better than "OMG! Patents are teh suxors!"
I ultimately disagree -- I doubt that we'd get as much successful research under your model -- but it's at least a solution that has some potential. I just fail to see universities conducting massive clinical trials, especially in light of the high risk of tort lawsuits for failed trials (see the gene therapy death). It's true that right now universities conduct a lot of the work of physical trials, but they are backed by pharamacos that will pay their legal bills if they get sued. I don't see a university risking its billion-dollar endowment over high-risk drug testing. And, unfortunately, all Phase I and II drug testing is high-risk.
Real chemists know that there are actual patterns in chemistry and doctors know that there are receptors that need to be targeted. No kidding. Drug developers don't randomly dump household chemicals into petri dishes trying to get a reaction. If you know that a given enzyme is relevant to a disease, it gives a general idea as to what kinds of drugs might work. The problem is that the human body is incredibly complex. Just look at one protein in the process of folding. Tell me how easy it is to identify one molecule that will correct an error in that process without messing up other systems.
Drug designers use a pen and paper to narrow it down to a range of possibilities, then they have to run tests against hundreds (if not thousands) of possible targets to figure out which one has the exact desired effect without causing other harm.
There's a big difference between basic research and drug development. Even assuming that basic research revealed only one candidate drug, and that this candidate drug actually worked without side effects, you'd still have to get through animal trials, Phase 0, Phase I, Phase II and Phase III trials.
Unfortunately, that's not how basic research works.
Basic research is research that reveals "Protein X is involved with Alzheimer's" or "a shortage of enzyme Y leads to arthritis." That's a great head start, but that doesn't tell you how to cure it. It just gives some sense of direction to the next steps. Designing a drug that affects protein X or enzyme Y without disturbing other systems is still an incredibly difficult task. And it's a task that can be accomplished in a number of ways, which is why we leave it to competing companies to figure out the best solution.
The millions and billions are collective research, not just solely put on one product. It's throwing money at the wall, waiting for some to stick, Yes, because it's impossible to know in advance which concept will work. There is no way to know that Molecule #1512 will be the one that will become a successful therapy, and that #1-#1511 will be failures. Investigating the first 1511 is an absolute prerequisite to finding out that #1512 is the one that will work. You call it "throwing money at the wall," but that's the only practical way to do drug research these days. You start with a bunch of compounds that look like possible candidates, then slowly weed out the ones that don't work or cause unacceptable side-effects or otherwise aren't promising.
If there were a way to know in advance which drugs would work then nobody would waste time looking at the unsuccessful ones.
multiply it by the prevailing property tax rate The only asset that gets taxed in most jurisdictions is land. Other kinds of assets (factory equipment, inventory, raw materials, etc) doesn't get taxed at all.
It depends on the way it is used; if you just sit on your invention for 20 years and prevent others from doing something similar, or if you sell it at an outrageous cost (see: drugs) it's really detrimental to humanity as a whole. But it's equally detrimental if those innovations are never made. It's just as bad to NEVER INVENT something as to not sell it, or to sell it at high prices. Most people who innovate don't do it for free; they do it because they need to feed their families and might even hope to strike it big.
And the process of innovation is rarely cheap. You use the example of drugs. For every one drug that makes it to market, hundreds of drugs fail animal tests or basic safety tests, and tens more fail in human trials. These are extremely expensive. Right now we compensate drug developers for the risk and expenses of drug design by allowing them to sell the successful drugs at a price above cost. Requiring that drugs be sold at or near cost would put a halt to innovation that has saved countless lives; there'd just be no reason to sink millions (or even billions) into research and testing if any competitor could copy your product as soon as it it the shelves.
There might be other ways to encourage innovation (government grants, government funding, competitions, etc), but any solution has to recognize that innovation is rarely cheap.
I'm sorry, but there was a time in US history when only white men who owned more than 40 acres of land could vote. It is utterly unrealistic to claim that nothing good has come of expanding the vote to include people of every race, gender, and income group.
He claimed that governments ONLY got more elitist. Of course there are some policies that appear to benefit a small group; it doesn't take a genius to see that. But that's a far cry from saying that government ONLY exists to serve a small group and ONLY gets more interested in that group.
Claiming that government just serves some arbitrary elite makes for great teenage "down with the man!" soundbites, but it doesn't account for the fact that there are movements in both directions. Nor does it account for the fact that a lot of it is a matter of perception: It's easy to view a silent majority that you disagree with as a special interest; it's vastly easier than admitting that democracy works both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
The nines can refer to both.
I agree that banks can't withstand data loss, but they can withstand data errors. If there's a 30-second period per year when data doesn't properly move, and that requires manual cleanup, that's acceptable.
Still, it's pretty cool. Even if it is useful for trademark cases, you have to figure that sets from 50 years ago are there mostly just for the awesome historic value and as inspiration to the engineers.
Exactly. A bank requires "six nines" of performance (i.e., right 99.9999% of the time) and probably wants even better than that. Six nines works out to about 30 seconds of downtime per year.
It seems like Wikipedia is getting things right 99% of the time, or maybe even 99.9% of the time ("three nines"). That's a pretty low standard relative to how most companies do business.
It's true that this could backfire, but it could also cause a massive arms race. If politics weren't messy and dirty enough already, imagine if both campaigns were spending massive amounts of time and energy to control the other side's Google results. McCain supporters would link to dirty articles about Obama, Obama supporters would link to dirty articles about McCain, and the whole Internet would be filled with even more political links than it already is.
Heck, a really smart campaigner would just outsource the whole thing to India and have thousands of staffers constantly building links to positive and negative results.
Politics might be the one thing strong enough to overcome all of Google's attempts to stop Googlebombs.
Yes, we've even mapped the ice at the poles. But this is still important for a couple of reasons.
First, it's confirmation that the white stuff at the poles really is ice (and not some unknown martian substance that just looks like ice).
Second it means that the lander is digging in the right places to find all of the interesting stuff that goes along with water. It's tremendously interesting to discover whether there's carbon-based fragments in the water (suggesting life did or could exist) and to figure out what else is in the water.
I gave up yesterday after a few too many server errors.
That said, the map of countries is pretty cool. Ignoring the island micro-nations (the Falkland Islands won with 2% of 3000 people pledging to download), it's interesting to see how high Firefox penetration is in Eastern Europe. I wonder if that's a function of very connected economies without a lot of love for Microsoft and a strong desire for free software?
Oh, and good luck to the Firefox team trying to save the "E" logo from this year's cake! That thing is HUGE!
So if you have nothing to hide,
/. post in these discussions using pseudonyms for a good reason; we like to be able to control who knows our IRL identity.
I think you missed the sarcasm tag there. WHOOSH.
The point is that most people on
There are a few people who use real names, and for that I commend them.
But it's a little complicated more than just pure societal rules. There's also the question of what I individually choose to disclose and what not to disclose. I'm free to have privacy in my bedroom, just as you're free to be an exhibitionist. Maybe society sets the outer limits of what we can declare to be private, but we still make individual choices within those boundaries.
/sarcasm.
I personally think I have nothing to hide. That's why I use my real name on Slashdot.
They never claimed they created the sequences.
They claimed that they found a new procedure using them. If I were the first person to invent the Chevy El Camino ("it's a car and it's a truck") I would be able to patent the invention of a car/truck combination, even if I didn't invent wheels, headlights, doors, windshields, etc.
The only thing the patent covered was a new diagnostic test. They invented the never-before-seen diagnostic test by combining existing elements. Combining existing things is a perfectly valid form of invention for patents.
It's a pretty common misperception that somehow humans would have to pay license fees for use of DNA.
What was being patented was a purified sequence of DNA for use in a diagnostic test. It's not the DNA itself--there's 10 million years of prior art for that--but the use of a particular sequence of DNA for diagnostics.
The total human genome is over 3 billion base pairs. Companies were racing to figure out which small sequences (100 or so pairs) would be useful in diagnostics and possibly in therapy. The use of DNA for that purpose was completely new at the time.
For example, check out this DNA patent application. The application refers to a specific DNA sequence, but the patent itself is for the use of that particular sequence for a specific kind of therapy.
It's still perfectly legal to reproduce, sell your DNA in a bottle, and so forth. The only thing the patent covers is the use of one very short sequence in a particular kind of therapy.
It might still be bad policy, but it's not as if you don't own your DNA.
I heartily applaud their attempt to get free coverage. But even if they fail there's still a lot of great stuff on the horizon. The coverage of commercial services like FON is increasing fast. At the same time, the new G3 phones are coming online (new iPhone, anyone?) and tethering is starting to look like a more and more attractive way to get high-speed Internet on the go. I'd love it if Internet were free everywhere, but I'll take iPhone tethering (yes, it's probably against the TOS) as a fallback.
Kudos to them.
Will it Blend?
Wait, you're saying that the MIT summer vision project wasn't as easy as people thought?
(Background: In 1966, some MIT computer science faculty thought AI was so easy that computer vision could be solved in one summer worth of work; it probably took 35 years to reach the milestones identified in the research abstract).
Heck, if Powerset is just watching what links people click on more often (Google does) then even that can help provide a training set for its algorithm. Using that kind of training set would make it vastly easier to figure out whether a change in the algorithm would be an improvement or not. That's priceless data and I hope they'll use it wisely.
But, really, just remember that this is the first in a new breed of search engines. It won't be the last, by any means:
-Search 0.9 was using the meta and description tags on a page to index (see Altavista). It broke when spammers figured out the algorithms.
-Search 1.0 was using the text of inbound links to index (see Google). It doesn't know what the text means, it just knows that it has a bunch of keywords. It's breaking as people start to game their Google search results.
-Search 2.0 will try to find meaning in the web and understand what a page is really saying (see Powerset).
I don't know yet what Search 3.0 will be, but we're still a long way from getting Search 2.0 to work right. But we're still making progress. Just because Powerset isn't perfect doesn't mean we should give up on the whole venture.
Thank you for a well-reasoned post. It's much better than "OMG! Patents are teh suxors!"
I ultimately disagree -- I doubt that we'd get as much successful research under your model -- but it's at least a solution that has some potential. I just fail to see universities conducting massive clinical trials, especially in light of the high risk of tort lawsuits for failed trials (see the gene therapy death). It's true that right now universities conduct a lot of the work of physical trials, but they are backed by pharamacos that will pay their legal bills if they get sued. I don't see a university risking its billion-dollar endowment over high-risk drug testing. And, unfortunately, all Phase I and II drug testing is high-risk.
Drug designers use a pen and paper to narrow it down to a range of possibilities, then they have to run tests against hundreds (if not thousands) of possible targets to figure out which one has the exact desired effect without causing other harm.
There's a big difference between basic research and drug development. Even assuming that basic research revealed only one candidate drug, and that this candidate drug actually worked without side effects, you'd still have to get through animal trials, Phase 0, Phase I, Phase II and Phase III trials.
Unfortunately, that's not how basic research works.
Basic research is research that reveals "Protein X is involved with Alzheimer's" or "a shortage of enzyme Y leads to arthritis." That's a great head start, but that doesn't tell you how to cure it. It just gives some sense of direction to the next steps. Designing a drug that affects protein X or enzyme Y without disturbing other systems is still an incredibly difficult task. And it's a task that can be accomplished in a number of ways, which is why we leave it to competing companies to figure out the best solution.
If there were a way to know in advance which drugs would work then nobody would waste time looking at the unsuccessful ones.
Applying your formula would always result in $0.
And the process of innovation is rarely cheap. You use the example of drugs. For every one drug that makes it to market, hundreds of drugs fail animal tests or basic safety tests, and tens more fail in human trials. These are extremely expensive. Right now we compensate drug developers for the risk and expenses of drug design by allowing them to sell the successful drugs at a price above cost. Requiring that drugs be sold at or near cost would put a halt to innovation that has saved countless lives; there'd just be no reason to sink millions (or even billions) into research and testing if any competitor could copy your product as soon as it it the shelves.
There might be other ways to encourage innovation (government grants, government funding, competitions, etc), but any solution has to recognize that innovation is rarely cheap.
I'm sorry, but there was a time in US history when only white men who owned more than 40 acres of land could vote. It is utterly unrealistic to claim that nothing good has come of expanding the vote to include people of every race, gender, and income group.
He claimed that governments ONLY got more elitist. Of course there are some policies that appear to benefit a small group; it doesn't take a genius to see that. But that's a far cry from saying that government ONLY exists to serve a small group and ONLY gets more interested in that group.
Claiming that government just serves some arbitrary elite makes for great teenage "down with the man!" soundbites, but it doesn't account for the fact that there are movements in both directions. Nor does it account for the fact that a lot of it is a matter of perception: It's easy to view a silent majority that you disagree with as a special interest; it's vastly easier than admitting that democracy works both ways.