"...Jon is to geekdom as Hitler was to his victims..."
Godwin's Law. Thread closed. *THUMP*
Another translation from nVidiaSpeak
on
Nvidia Apologizes
·
· Score: 2
From Derek's answer to Hypothermia: "I feel really bad in your situation, because for the last 7 months you have been misled by a non-NVIDIA employee (intern, contractor, etc...). This situation has been rectified and we have put in the necessary steps so this doesn't happen again..."
Translation: We're not going to take the blame, so this disposable Intern will be ordered to fall on his own sword.
"If gene sequencing really does turn out to be useful, of course the machines to do it will get cheaper and faster. Since cheaper usually also means smaller... eventually we might very well see gene sequencers that fit on a desktop."
"640kb (kilo-base pairs) ought to be enough for anybody...";)
BTW, lots of sequencing equipment already does fit on a desktop, although you probably won't get the degree of automation in one of Celera's high-throughput machines.
"Surviving in a hard vacuum and radiation is one thing, but surviving a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is quite another.":
I'm not entirely sure about that. The mass to surface area ratio of a bacterium is pretty small, so the re-entry velocity might actually end up being pretty reasonable. I don't have any figures available, but I have heard that small enough dust particles survive re-entry by simply drifting down slowly.
"Well, gee. I coulda told you who won *that* comparison just by the name of the place."
Actually, I thought it was a pretty fair comparison. Insight Central claims to be an independent site, and it sounds like they're fans of hybrid technology in general, rather than Honda boosters. In the conclusion the reviewer never says that "X is better". Take a look at the quote below, in which he says he's glad that both cars exist.
"While the comparisons between the Insight and Prius certainly won't end here, I want to finish by pointing out how important it is that both cars exist. Not only is it true that one car will never address everyone's automotive needs and desires, but having manufacturers like Honda and Toyota competing to produce more environmentally sound cars will benefit all of us."
"Comparisons between the Insight and Prius are inevitable. While they do have a lot in common, there are also some significant differences: in format, technology, amount of fossil fuel consumed, smog-causing emissions levels (as measured by California LEV, ULEV, SULEV standards), greenhouse gas emissions and performance..."
You might especially be interested in one of the links on that page, "A subjective comparison from John Wayland", written by a person who has test driven both vehicles.
For those interested in possible storyline information for the 3rd Tenchi OAVs, I recommend you take a brief look at the recent Tenchi Muyo Canon and Storyline FAQ. Note that these documents are still in the process of being written by Tenchiken, and contain mostly information from the Tenchi Muyo novels. I've only included links to the 2 out of 7 sections that have been posted so far.
BTW, anybody know what happened to What Is Tenchi Muyo? or The Jurai Royal Library? Those were two of the better general Tenchi info sites around, and they've both disappeared. I've also been looking for an old R.A.A.M post that was an lengthy and amazing dissertation/plot overanalysis of the Tenchi OAVs, but I haven't been able to locate it anywhere on Dejanews.
I'm not too familiar with the details of that experiment, but I believe that the soil's reaction was later demonstrated to be better explained by non-living chemical reactions. Martian soil is full of reactive substances like peroxides and superoxides that can do interesting things.
[Continued from parent due to spoiler] ...Origami Dog ending, which contains the following conversation between you and Gaff, about your beloved pet dog Maggie:
Gaff: "Get yourself a *real* dog, McCoy!" McCoy: "She *was* real." Gaff: "Sure McCoy, believe what you want to believe..."
For those of you who've never played Westwood's BladeRunner, I recommend you do so. The game has been out for several years, but it's recently become available again as part of an "Ultimate Sci-Fi Series" game collection that you can get pretty cheap.
Not only does the game faithfully reproduce important portions of the scenes, sounds, and moods of the movie, but you get some of the ambiguity as well. Each time you play the game as the BladeRunner Ray McCoy, it changes who is or is not a replicant. Your targets, your partner, even you yourself.
As the game progresses, you may think you've discovered what you really are, but often it's more complicated. For instance, the hard evidence that says you're not human might have been faked by a replicant you're hunting, or perhaps planted by a human who needs you out of the way.
Of the numerous possible endings available, some reveal your true identity, but my favorite has to be the ambiguous... [Continued in reply due to minor spoiler]
"The problem with this speculation is that the escaped replicants had a built in "expiration date" with Roy Batty being the only one of the escapees that lived to full term (so to speak). For Deckard to have been one of the six, would he not have died around the same time as Batty?"
Not necessarily. The replicant group consisted of several different models, so it's unlikely they were made in one single "batch". Instead, they probably had different incept dates and maybe different lifespans as well.
"I conclude that the American newspapers have brain-washed the American public into believing that the government of China is totally "evil". Your all a bunch of racist!"
It has been my experience (as an overseas born Chinese) there is a not insignificant number of Chinese individuals with prejudiced attitudes towards whites, blacks, and non-Chinese asians. Most of the examples I've met are from the mainland -- pride has something to do with that, I think, with Chinese from outside the PRC having had enough broadening (humbling?) experiences to teach them better.
Now it's true that the conversation thread has become increasingly off-topic, but I'd like to ask you something. You say, "You all" are a bunch of racists? Remember that on Slashdot you are addressing an international audience (including your own countrymen, perhaps). Perhaps you mean "all Americans"? I that case, think about how that sounds. You are saying that all Americans, as a group, can be classed as racists?
"And this sentance - "Scientists in Australia have done some fun things with genetics..." - am I the only person who thinks that this flappant attitude is appalling? Tinkering with the natural order of things which God has decreed is not a "bit of fun", it is both dangerous and amoral and needs to be stopped."
Wait a moment... feel free to flame Timothy, who submitted the story, but besides him, who's talking about fun here? If you'll take a look at the original Nature article, the scientists who published the article have a serious, sober attitude towards their own work.
I think the FTC could easily solve this problem once and for all with one single step. On each box, the manufacturers should be required to print, in big letters:
"There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
Re:thoughts on Katz, Eugenics, and such
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 2
Bravo, Otter. You made some pretty good points there.
I can't claim to be objective here, being someone who's in this field, but it seems to me that Scientists are, if anything, *more* concerned with the implications of knowledge than the average person. As a scientist, you are probably fairly intelligent, well educated, and most importantly, trained to be critical of others, and especially critical of yourself.
Right now, most of the voices of doom seem to be coming from non-scientists. I'm not going to worry until I start hearing the same things in a peer-reviewed journal.
"Another problem I see is that even if we are able to sequence the genetic code for all the proteins, what are we going to do with them. Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die? "
This might be slightly offtopic, but just very recently (no more than a day or two ago) I came across an article concerning a new drug that substantially delayed the development of Huntingdon's Disease in a mouse model. Unfortunately, I can't seem to remember where I last saw it. Of course, this particular candidate may or may not make it to human clinical trials, but regardless, I'll bet a knowledge of Huntingdon genetics was used to develop that mouse model.
"The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation. With this sort of track record how are we going to do against diseases that are caused by multiple mutations or where different individuals with the disease have different mutations? And this isn't even considering diseases that are caused by interactions between interactions between the gene and environment/history of the individual or disease caused non-genetic inheritance."
Maybe we can't patch busted DNA, but what we do know has already been a great boon to the traditional way that treatments are developed. A great many phamaceuticals were developed by nearly blindly trying out lots of different substances--for instance, finding antibiotics by throwing stuff onto a plate and seeing if it inhibits bacterial growth.
Being able to find and manipulate a gene allows us to apply that same sort of approach, by developing animal models or in-vitro systems that allow rapid assaying of potential treatments. So instead of throwing extracts of eye of newt and toe of frog onto a petri plate with bacteria, we can instead throw them onto a plate with a cell culture designed to simulate, say, the production of the amyloid associated with Alzheimer's. It's not a great leap forward, but it's better than what we had before.
"I'm a level 10 Sorceress named CmdrTaco, so if you see me, give me cool amulets or something."
Some time ago, there was a story on Slashdot that dealt with Men Playing as Women, as I see CmdrTaco is now doing. Here's a quick list of some possible reasons why the commander is playing a female...
- He likes the way the sorceress looks. - He likes the technical characteristics of that character class. - For, um... exploration of gender issues. - He wants horny guys to give him free stuff.
Now, given that request for amulets, I'd have to say he's playing a sorceress for that last reason there. So all you guys out there playing male characters -- might I suggest you make Taco work for those items by forcing him to flirt outrageously with your characters before you give him anything?
"If we end up with Castronaughts, does this mean the space station will become the world's most expensive cigar shop, or that our old friend Fidel will sue for trademark infringement?"
Neither. It means that NASA is concerned enough about the potential for zero-gee hanky-panky that they've decided to put an end to the possibility once and for all.
Look at the bright side... 100% aggression-free astronauts.
Try contacting your congressman, they or someone on their staff may be interested enough in getting your vote to drop a letter to the telco. It might work even better if you mention the poor lady's story is being followed on a "popular internet news site" and maybe set up a quickie little page on Geocities. I don't live in NY, but if a couple NY Slashdot readers were to also write letters of support I think it would get your representative's attention pretty quick. They love doing things for voters when it doesn't cost them anything.
...all the power of a Mac, with none of the style. I'd feel more enthusiastic if Total Impact would at least throw in a couple of sheets of blue plexiglas we could stick on our beige boxes.
"This would rock on the PC, where our bus speeds are slowly reaching 133mhz. If you could send the data compressed across the bus, that is."
Maybe, but I'll bet there will be a fairly large impact on latency, with the overhead needed for compression/decompression. Bandwidth is more important for some kinds of memory-intensive applications, like database and photo/video editing stuff. But for everyday applications or games like Q3, the latency is going to knock your performance way down. It's one of the problems with Rambus, where the bandwidth improves but latency actually gets worse.
Slashdot Mirror
"...Jon is to geekdom as Hitler was to his victims..."
Godwin's Law. Thread closed. *THUMP*
From Derek's answer to Hypothermia:
"I feel really bad in your situation, because for the last 7 months you have been misled by a non-NVIDIA employee (intern, contractor, etc...). This situation has been rectified and we have put in the necessary steps so this doesn't happen again..."
Translation: We're not going to take the blame, so this disposable Intern will be ordered to fall on his own sword.
"If gene sequencing really does turn out to be useful, of course the machines to do it will get cheaper and faster. Since cheaper usually also means smaller... eventually we might very well see gene sequencers that fit on a desktop."
;)
"640kb (kilo-base pairs) ought to be enough for anybody..."
BTW, lots of sequencing equipment already does fit on a desktop, although you probably won't get the degree of automation in one of Celera's high-throughput machines.
You are probably referring to D. radiodurans, which is one of several organisms that will be carried aloft in this mission.
This NASA article talks about D. radiodurans with an eye on possible uses of the bacterium in space exploration.
"Surviving in a hard vacuum and radiation is one thing, but surviving a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is quite another.":
I'm not entirely sure about that. The mass to surface area ratio of a bacterium is pretty small, so the re-entry velocity might actually end up being pretty reasonable. I don't have any figures available, but I have heard that small enough dust particles survive re-entry by simply drifting down slowly.
Actually, I thought it was a pretty fair comparison. Insight Central claims to be an independent site, and it sounds like they're fans of hybrid technology in general, rather than Honda boosters. In the conclusion the reviewer never says that "X is better". Take a look at the quote below, in which he says he's glad that both cars exist.
InsightCentral has an article, "Honda's Insight compared to Toyota's Prius" which compares the features, performance, emissions specs, etc. of the two cars:
You might especially be interested in one of the links on that page, "A subjective comparison from John Wayland", written by a person who has test driven both vehicles.
For those interested in possible storyline information for the 3rd Tenchi OAVs, I recommend you take a brief look at the recent Tenchi Muyo Canon and Storyline FAQ. Note that these documents are still in the process of being written by Tenchiken, and contain mostly information from the Tenchi Muyo novels. I've only included links to the 2 out of 7 sections that have been posted so far.
Tenchi FAQ Part 1/7
Tenchi FAQ Part 2/7
BTW, anybody know what happened to What Is Tenchi Muyo? or The Jurai Royal Library? Those were two of the better general Tenchi info sites around, and they've both disappeared. I've also been looking for an old R.A.A.M post that was an lengthy and amazing dissertation/plot overanalysis of the Tenchi OAVs, but I haven't been able to locate it anywhere on Dejanews.
I'm not too familiar with the details of that experiment, but I believe that the soil's reaction was later demonstrated to be better explained by non-living chemical reactions. Martian soil is full of reactive substances like peroxides and superoxides that can do interesting things.
[Continued from parent due to spoiler]
...Origami Dog ending, which contains the following conversation between you and Gaff, about your beloved pet dog Maggie:
Gaff: "Get yourself a *real* dog, McCoy!"
McCoy: "She *was* real."
Gaff: "Sure McCoy, believe what you want to believe..."
For those of you who've never played Westwood's BladeRunner, I recommend you do so. The game has been out for several years, but it's recently become available again as part of an "Ultimate Sci-Fi Series" game collection that you can get pretty cheap.
Not only does the game faithfully reproduce important portions of the scenes, sounds, and moods of the movie, but you get some of the ambiguity as well. Each time you play the game as the BladeRunner Ray McCoy, it changes who is or is not a replicant. Your targets, your partner, even you yourself.
As the game progresses, you may think you've discovered what you really are, but often it's more complicated. For instance, the hard evidence that says you're not human might have been faked by a replicant you're hunting, or perhaps planted by a human who needs you out of the way.
Of the numerous possible endings available, some reveal your true identity, but my favorite has to be the ambiguous... [Continued in reply due to minor spoiler]
"The problem with this speculation is that the escaped replicants had a built in "expiration date" with Roy Batty being the only one of the escapees that lived to full term (so to speak).
For Deckard to have been one of the six, would he not have died around the same time as Batty?"
Not necessarily. The replicant group consisted of several different models, so it's unlikely they were made in one single "batch". Instead, they probably had different incept dates and maybe different lifespans as well.
"I conclude that the American newspapers have brain-washed the American public into believing that the government of China is totally "evil". Your all a bunch of racist!"
It has been my experience (as an overseas born Chinese) there is a not insignificant number of Chinese individuals with prejudiced attitudes towards whites, blacks, and non-Chinese asians. Most of the examples I've met are from the mainland -- pride has something to do with that, I think, with Chinese from outside the PRC having had enough broadening (humbling?) experiences to teach them better.
Now it's true that the conversation thread has become increasingly off-topic, but I'd like to ask you something. You say, "You all" are a bunch of racists? Remember that on Slashdot you are addressing an international audience (including your own countrymen, perhaps). Perhaps you mean "all Americans"? I that case, think about how that sounds. You are saying that all Americans, as a group, can be classed as racists?
"And this sentance - "Scientists in Australia have done some fun things with genetics ..." - am I the only person who thinks that this flappant attitude is appalling? Tinkering with the natural order of things which God has decreed is not a "bit of fun", it is both dangerous and amoral and needs to be stopped."
Wait a moment... feel free to flame Timothy, who submitted the story, but besides him, who's talking about fun here? If you'll take a look at the original Nature article, the scientists who published the article have a serious, sober attitude towards their own work.
I think the FTC could easily solve this problem once and for all with one single step. On each box, the manufacturers should be required to print, in big letters:
"There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
Bravo, Otter. You made some pretty good points there.
I can't claim to be objective here, being someone who's in this field, but it seems to me that Scientists are, if anything, *more* concerned with the implications of knowledge than the average person. As a scientist, you are probably fairly intelligent, well educated, and most importantly, trained to be critical of others, and especially critical of yourself.
Right now, most of the voices of doom seem to be coming from non-scientists. I'm not going to worry until I start hearing the same things in a peer-reviewed journal.
"Another problem I see is that even if we are able to sequence the genetic code for all the proteins, what are we going to do with them. Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die? "
This might be slightly offtopic, but just very recently (no more than a day or two ago) I came across an article concerning a new drug that substantially delayed the development of Huntingdon's Disease in a mouse model. Unfortunately, I can't seem to remember where I last saw it. Of course, this particular candidate may or may not make it to human clinical trials, but regardless, I'll bet a knowledge of Huntingdon genetics was used to develop that mouse model.
"The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation. With this sort of track record how are we going to do against diseases that are caused by multiple mutations or where different individuals with the disease have different mutations? And this isn't even considering diseases that are caused by interactions between interactions between the gene and environment/history of the individual or disease caused non-genetic inheritance."
Maybe we can't patch busted DNA, but what we do know has already been a great boon to the traditional way that treatments are developed. A great many phamaceuticals were developed by nearly blindly trying out lots of different substances--for instance, finding antibiotics by throwing stuff onto a plate and seeing if it inhibits bacterial growth.
Being able to find and manipulate a gene allows us to apply that same sort of approach, by developing animal models or in-vitro systems that allow rapid assaying of potential treatments. So instead of throwing extracts of eye of newt and toe of frog onto a petri plate with bacteria, we can instead throw them onto a plate with a cell culture designed to simulate, say, the production of the amyloid associated with Alzheimer's. It's not a great leap forward, but it's better than what we had before.
Some time ago, there was a story on Slashdot that dealt with Men Playing as Women, as I see CmdrTaco is now doing. Here's a quick list of some possible reasons why the commander is playing a female...
Now, given that request for amulets, I'd have to say he's playing a sorceress for that last reason there. So all you guys out there playing male characters -- might I suggest you make Taco work for those items by forcing him to flirt outrageously with your characters before you give him anything?
"If we end up with Castronaughts, does this mean the space station will become the world's most expensive cigar shop, or that our old friend Fidel will sue for trademark infringement?"
Neither. It means that NASA is concerned enough about the potential for zero-gee hanky-panky that they've decided to put an end to the possibility once and for all.
Look at the bright side... 100% aggression-free astronauts.
"In order to fly to the moon, he strapped a buttload of fireworks to the back of his chair, lit the fuse....and Juan Ho was never seen again!"
And, according to popular legend, since they never found his body he must have made it, too!
Try contacting your congressman, they or someone on their staff may be interested enough in getting your vote to drop a letter to the telco. It might work even better if you mention the poor lady's story is being followed on a "popular internet news site" and maybe set up a quickie little page on Geocities. I don't live in NY, but if a couple NY Slashdot readers were to also write letters of support I think it would get your representative's attention pretty quick. They love doing things for voters when it doesn't cost them anything.
...all the power of a Mac, with none of the style. I'd feel more enthusiastic if Total Impact would at least throw in a couple of sheets of blue plexiglas we could stick on our beige boxes.
:)
"This would rock on the PC, where our bus speeds are slowly reaching 133mhz. If you could send the data compressed across the bus, that is."
Maybe, but I'll bet there will be a fairly large impact on latency, with the overhead needed for compression/decompression. Bandwidth is more important for some kinds of memory-intensive applications, like database and photo/video editing stuff. But for everyday applications or games like Q3, the latency is going to knock your performance way down. It's one of the problems with Rambus, where the bandwidth improves but latency actually gets worse.
"'A' stands for adenine not adenosine..."
Sorry. Had a brain burp there, you're absolutely correct.