Actually, upon further reflection, my proposed Amendment not only repeals the Federal Income Tax, but FICA (Social Security payroll tax), corporate income taxes, and capital gains taxes as well...
A little something for everyone.
Knowing the way Washington currently works, however, I doubt whether the constitutionality of Congress' power to tax the Internet (cf. Art. I, Sect. 9) will even enter into the discussion. Congress and the Executive seem to have realized that they can have however many unconstitutional laws/executive orders/punitive lawsuits they want, and they might get reviewed by the Supreme Court 20 years later (or not), but meanwhile they get to assert whatever powers they want, constitutionality be damned...
As is suggested below by Synaptic in "Grr, more taxes? Come on!," if the Feds want to tax internet (and by extension, interstate mail order) commerce, they should adopt a Constitutional amendment with language such as this:
Amendment XXVIII
1. The sixteenth article of amendment to the Constitution is hereby repealed.
(Repealing the income tax amendment, for those of you without a copy of the Constitution handy...)
2. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on sales transacted in interstate commerce by electronic means, but such taxes shall be uniform among the several States.
3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.
Indeed, it can fairly be said that Judge Hupp left the door open for a link-averse Web operator to ban linking via a contract that a Web surfer is forced to agree to before being allowed to enter a site. He implied that those who deep link in violation of this conspicuous and assented to "agreement" would have a potential breach of contract problem on their hands.
Oh, great... so now we're going to have "shrink wrap licensing" on web sites?
(I mean, other than pr0n sites... which give "deep linking" a whole different meaning.)
So, if in the future anyone wants to post a link to a NY Times story, please use the deep link, and not the annoying "free registration required" link.
Actually, the quote originates with Benjamin "A Republic... if you can keep it." Franklin.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor, November 11, 1755 (later, motto of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, c. 1759)
Yes, but contamination/environmental degradation makes it less likely that the DNA evidence will match the suspect's DNA, not more likely. If you have a sample that's a mixture of two people's DNA, it's less of a match for either of them than if it was pure (given that you test for the possibility that the DNAs got mixed).
Just like with any other evidence, a documented "chain of custody" is critical, so as to minimize the possibility of manufacturing evidence against a suspect (swapping vials, etc.)
As far as the time resolution of DNA forensic techniques, DNA in the environment will tend to get degraded to varying degrees, but you would usually still need to use other forms of evidence to prove your case (except perhaps in rape and paternity cases). When combined with other forms of evidence, DNA evidence can greatly enhance your confidence that you got the right culprit.
Of course, re: the O.J. case, you still have to have a jury that's competent enough to understand it...
To hide steganographic code in an organism's genome would be more difficult than hiding it in (as you say) a blizzard of synthetic DNA containing false messages. The naturally occurring DNA would be unlikely to resemble whatever encoding you chose for your message, since even the unexpressed (intron) regions of eukaryotic DNA tend to have some structure (multiple repeats, etc).
Still, you can't beat the information density that the technique gives you.
> We already have rampant self-replicators on the loose! Oh my!
> Yeah, humans, fish, bacteria, ants and trees are already rampant. Earth is not covered in a 5 mile deep layer of killer bacteria or killer rabbits because runaway replicators have to deal with competition, lack of resources, and death. Machines will have the same problems. I still need to see an argument on why replication will be so much easier for them.
It's not really the "gray goo" nanites that evolve out of control that bother me, but more the thought of nano script kiddies or (even worse) nanite gray goo "virus" authors...
Although Bill Joy seems to dismiss the idea of building nanite immune systems to confront these dangers as being inherently risky (e.g. due to possible "autoimmunity" against the biosphere) we'll probably have to fight the gray goo somewhat the way we fight forest fires (by depriving the wild nanites of raw material through competition with domesticated immune system nanites who establish a perimeter and seal off the "infection").
In a Petri dish, some bacterial colonies can limit each other's growth by depleting their immediate surroundings of critical nutrients. This establishes a "no bug's land" between the colonies and prevents growth in the space between them.
Any nanite immune system will need to have a good IFF (identify friend or foe) system built into it to avoid fratricidal "toner wars" (to borrow a Neal Stephenson phrase). So studying the immune systems found in nature is a good starting point.
You could even have nanite equivalents of "land mines" strewn throughout the biosphere, which when they encountered a wild nanite would report the event and begin replicating an army of specialized immune nanites (something like "clone expansion" in the human immune system) to fight back.
Certainly it's possible that immune nanites could themselves mutate and expand out of control, so it's best to have an immune system (like the biological ones) in which there is sufficient redundancy and heterogeneity and cooperativity built in (to minimize the damage that any one type of immune-nanite-gone-bad can do). The control systems for the nanoimmune defense of Earth will have to be at least as good (hopefully better than) as the ones which prevent nuclear missiles from being launched (so far!) today.
Fight abuse of distributed power with more distributed power!
It only takes a few Aum Shinryko Tokyo Subway gas attacks, Long Island Railroad massacres, and London Underground station bombings to make one appreciate driving to work every morning on a crowded expressway in one's own car...
The physical shape of the green Coca Cola bottle is also protected by trademark status. According to their corporate website, the bottle shape was trademarked in 1977.
The current iMacs shipping with MacOS 9 are pre-installed with Instant Palm Desktop in the menu bar. There must be some cross- licensing agreement with 3COM in place already.
Unfortunate they didn't let Dame Dench's "M" show a little more of the resourcefulness and tradecraft that she must have had as an agent before she got promoted to "M".
But the exit scene for "Q" in the current Bond movie is one of the best parts of it, IMHO.
Noryungi: "My most serious concern, as of now, is that corporations will take over the Genetic Code of humanity. The moral, economical and intellectual implications are simply staggering. Read 'intellectual property, gene patent and corporate destruction of democracy' there and you have it in a nutshell."
The good news is, the human genome is_already_ Open Source. You've got billions of copies of it in your body's cells.
The interface may need some work, tho'.../p
Re:unclear on the concept
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Molecular biology and computer science overlap in at least two areas of potential interest to the readership of/.
The currently most important one is the interdisciplinary field known as bioinformatics, which seeks to use the methods of computing to solve biological problems (such as the earlier mentioned protein-folding problem, one of the "hardest" in a computational sense) and to help organize and search within the vast amounts of data (strings) generated in molecular biology research.
Then there's the fledgling field of DNA computing, which tries to harness the tools of biochemistry (nucleic acids, enzymes, etc) to do computation. While right now DNA computing is at a stage equivalent to back when one had to wire the vacuum tubes together to perform a computation, there are certainly some types of computing problems which can only reasonably be solved using the massive parallelism which Adelman demonstrated in his DNA hybridization experiment a few years back.
Whether these topics (and related ones) fit the "mission statement" or definition of/. depends on how narrowly construed those limits are.
--
LaoK (microbiologist/computer nerd)
Re:Genetic analysis in two seconds?
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Minor correction, the company's name is Affymetrix (as in "AFFinitY"). The "gene chip" technology they're marketing is a quick way of probing for the presence of certain sequences in a larger genome (such as "genetic markers" for diseases), without having to directly sequence the DNA.
And, like computer chip manufacturers, they're trying to cram more and more information into smaller space (i.e. more tiny patches of DNA onto the microarray), eventually leading to a method where you could see exactly which genes are being expressed in any given tissue sample. As I recall, they've already got an entire yeast genome on a chip, and can follow the expression of its genes through its entire life cycle. A powerful technique.
There are certainly ways around this tendency of microorganisms to spontaneously throw out genes that aren't useful_to them._ Basically, you put the organism under some sort of selection pressure with a toxic drug (an antibiotic, for instance), and then put gene(s) conferring resistance to the drug into the cell, along with the gene you want the cell to express, both located on the same DNA molecule (a plasmid).
That way the gene you_want_to stay in and be expressed isn't as likely to be kicked out. Even better is putting the gene you want into the chromosomal DNA of the cell since that would tend to be more "stable"*. This can be done with a virus that integrates into the host cell's chromosomes (like a retrovirus**).
With a "reduced genome set" organism like that described in the news, however, it should be possible to more easily put desired genes into the chromosomal DNA directly (via chemically sythesizing the genome) and more easily "debug" expression of new genes that are "run" on the system...
* In biotech jargon, "stable" has a meaning analogous to a compile time error, that is the new genetic program is "rejected" by the cell, not simply that it doesn't "run" and express the way it was intended to. Debugging gene expression (runtime errors) is another matter!
** Which is one reason why the human body can't easily get rid of herpes or HIV, since they have the ability to integrate into the chromosomes.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, upon further reflection, my proposed Amendment not only repeals the Federal Income Tax, but FICA (Social Security payroll tax), corporate income taxes, and capital gains taxes as well...
A little something for everyone.
Knowing the way Washington currently works, however, I doubt whether the constitutionality of Congress' power to tax the Internet (cf. Art. I, Sect. 9) will even enter into the discussion. Congress and the Executive seem to have realized that they can have however many unconstitutional laws/executive orders/punitive lawsuits they want, and they might get reviewed by the Supreme Court 20 years later (or not), but meanwhile they get to assert whatever powers they want, constitutionality be damned...
LaoK
As is suggested below by Synaptic in "Grr, more taxes? Come on!," if the Feds want to tax internet (and by extension, interstate mail order) commerce, they should adopt a Constitutional amendment with language such as this:
(Repealing the income tax amendment, for those of you without a copy of the Constitution handy...)
Sound like a fair trade?
LaoK
Indeed, it can fairly be said that Judge Hupp left the door open for a link-averse Web operator to ban linking via a contract that a Web surfer is forced to agree to before being allowed to enter a site. He implied that those who deep link in violation of this conspicuous and assented to "agreement" would have a potential breach of contract problem on their hands.
Oh, great... so now we're going to have "shrink wrap licensing" on web sites?
(I mean, other than pr0n sites... which give "deep linking" a whole different meaning.)
LaoK
Ahh... the irony!
So, if in the future anyone wants to post a link to a NY Times story, please
use the deep link, and not the annoying "free registration required" link.
Information w/o registration!
LaoK
Actually, the quote originates with Benjamin "A Republic... if you can keep it." Franklin.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
--Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor, November 11, 1755
(later, motto of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, c. 1759)
LaoK
Yes, but contamination/environmental degradation makes it less likely that the DNA evidence will match the suspect's DNA, not more likely. If you have a sample that's a mixture of two people's DNA, it's less of a match for either of them than if it was pure (given that you test for the possibility that the DNAs got mixed).
Just like with any other evidence, a documented "chain of custody" is critical, so as to minimize the possibility of manufacturing evidence against a suspect (swapping vials, etc.)
As far as the time resolution of DNA forensic techniques, DNA in the environment will tend to get degraded to varying degrees, but you would usually still need to use other forms of evidence to prove your case (except perhaps in rape and paternity cases). When combined with other forms of evidence, DNA evidence can greatly enhance your confidence that you got the right culprit.
Of course, re: the O.J. case, you still have to have a jury that's competent enough to understand it...
LaoK
Yet another copy protection scheme bites the dust, a la William Gibson's not-quite-ephemeral "Agrippa: A Book of the Dead".
LaoK
To hide steganographic code in an organism's genome would be more difficult than hiding it in (as you say) a blizzard of synthetic DNA containing false messages. The naturally occurring DNA would be unlikely to resemble whatever encoding you chose for your message, since even the unexpressed (intron) regions of eukaryotic DNA tend to have some structure (multiple repeats, etc).
Still, you can't beat the information density that the technique gives you.
LaoK
> We already have rampant self-replicators on the loose! Oh my!
> Yeah, humans, fish, bacteria, ants and trees are already rampant. Earth is not covered in a 5 mile deep layer of killer bacteria or killer rabbits because runaway replicators have to deal with competition, lack of resources, and death. Machines will have the same problems. I still need to see an argument on why replication will be so much easier for them.
It's not really the "gray goo" nanites that evolve out of control that bother me, but more the thought of nano script kiddies or (even worse) nanite gray goo "virus" authors...
Although Bill Joy seems to dismiss the idea of building nanite immune systems to confront these dangers as being inherently risky (e.g. due to possible "autoimmunity" against the biosphere) we'll probably have to fight the gray goo somewhat the way we fight forest fires (by depriving the wild nanites of raw material through competition with domesticated immune system nanites who establish a perimeter and seal off the "infection").
In a Petri dish, some bacterial colonies can limit each other's growth by depleting their immediate surroundings of critical nutrients. This establishes a "no bug's land" between the colonies and prevents growth in the space between them.
Any nanite immune system will need to have a good IFF (identify friend or foe) system built into it to avoid fratricidal "toner wars" (to borrow a Neal Stephenson phrase). So studying the immune systems found in nature is a good starting point.
You could even have nanite equivalents of "land mines" strewn throughout the biosphere, which when they encountered a wild nanite would report the event and begin replicating an army of specialized immune nanites (something like "clone expansion" in the human immune system) to fight back.
Certainly it's possible that immune nanites could themselves mutate and expand out of control, so it's best to have an immune system (like the biological ones) in which there is sufficient redundancy and heterogeneity and cooperativity built in (to minimize the damage that any one type of immune-nanite-gone-bad can do). The control systems for the nanoimmune defense of Earth will have to be at least as good (hopefully better than) as the ones which prevent nuclear missiles from being launched (so far!) today.
Fight abuse of distributed power with more distributed power!
LaoK
It only takes a few Aum Shinryko Tokyo Subway gas attacks, Long Island Railroad massacres, and London Underground station bombings to make one appreciate driving to work every morning on a crowded expressway in one's own car...
LaoK
The physical shape of the green Coca Cola bottle is also protected by trademark status.
According to their corporate website, the bottle shape was trademarked in 1977.
LaoK
Adobe's main webservers and product registration have been unreachable
since about 9:30 ET, at least that's how it looks from here.
The packet storms continue... :[
LaoK
Looks like adobe.com is getting hit too...
Can't connect to their product registration or main webservers since about 9:30 ET.
LaoK
The current iMacs shipping with MacOS 9 are pre-installed with Instant Palm Desktop in the menu bar.
There must be some cross- licensing agreement with 3COM in place already.
Unfortunate they didn't let Dame Dench's "M" show a little more of the resourcefulness and tradecraft that she must have had as an agent before she got promoted to "M".
But the exit scene for "Q" in the current Bond movie is one of the best parts of it, IMHO.
Rest in peace, Desmond Llewelyn...
Noryungi: "My most serious concern, as of now, is that corporations will take over the Genetic Code of humanity. The moral, economical and intellectual implications are simply staggering. Read 'intellectual property, gene patent and corporate destruction of democracy' there and you have it in a nutshell."
The good news is, the human genome is_already_ Open Source. You've got billions of copies of it in your body's cells.
The interface may need some work, tho'.../p
Molecular biology and computer science overlap in at least two areas of potential interest to the readership of /.
The currently most important one is the interdisciplinary field known as bioinformatics, which seeks to use the methods of computing to solve biological problems (such as the earlier mentioned protein-folding problem, one of the "hardest" in a computational sense) and to help organize and search within the vast amounts of data (strings) generated in molecular biology research.
Then there's the fledgling field of DNA computing, which tries to harness the tools of biochemistry (nucleic acids, enzymes, etc) to do computation. While right now DNA computing is at a stage equivalent to back when one had to wire the vacuum tubes together to perform a computation, there are certainly some types of computing problems which can only reasonably be solved using the massive parallelism which Adelman demonstrated in his DNA hybridization experiment a few years back.
Whether these topics (and related ones) fit the "mission statement" or definition of /. depends on how narrowly construed those limits are.
--
LaoK (microbiologist/computer nerd)Minor correction, the company's name is Affymetrix (as in "AFFinitY"). The "gene chip" technology they're marketing is a quick way of probing for the presence of certain sequences in a larger genome (such as "genetic markers" for diseases), without having to directly sequence the DNA.
And, like computer chip manufacturers, they're trying to cram more and more information into smaller space (i.e. more tiny patches of DNA onto the microarray), eventually leading to a method where you could see exactly which genes are being expressed in any given tissue sample. As I recall, they've already got an entire yeast genome on a chip, and can follow the expression of its genes through its entire life cycle. A powerful technique.
There are certainly ways around this tendency of microorganisms to spontaneously throw out genes that aren't useful_to them._ Basically, you put the organism under some sort of selection pressure with a toxic drug (an antibiotic, for instance), and then put gene(s) conferring resistance to the drug into the cell, along with the gene you want the cell to express, both located on the same DNA molecule (a plasmid).
That way the gene you_want_to stay in and be expressed isn't as likely to be kicked out. Even better is putting the gene you want into the chromosomal DNA of the cell since that would tend to be more "stable"*. This can be done with a virus that integrates into the host cell's chromosomes (like a retrovirus**).
With a "reduced genome set" organism like that described in the news, however, it should be possible to more easily put desired genes into the chromosomal DNA directly (via chemically sythesizing the genome) and more easily "debug" expression of new genes that are "run" on the system...
* In biotech jargon, "stable" has a meaning analogous to a compile time error, that is the new genetic program is "rejected" by the cell, not simply that it doesn't "run" and express the way it was intended to. Debugging gene expression (runtime errors) is another matter!
** Which is one reason why the human body can't easily get rid of herpes or HIV, since they have the ability to integrate into the chromosomes.