You've hit the nail on the head. It's Church-Turing impossible to guarantee knowledge in advance of what the program will or will not do, beyond what API calls it's allowed to make.
It doesn't matter whether or not it happens. They're creating a fucking file format. That hardly protects against (a) fraudulent data input or (b) fraudulent reporting of results. Time to upgrade to dead trees, guys.
I would have trouble believing you can't name a religion that doesn't have a history of violence.
An organized religion (not religion as a whole, but just any given religion) is nothing more than a set of tools for social control based on irrational beliefs. Whether that gets used for good or evil is the decision of whomever holds the reins. It is not a guarantee that religion will inevitably be used to exclude or harm.
That they did. Old English had a neuter gender, but was frequently in contact with Romance languages that didn't, and Old English used gender in peculiar and exciting ways on its own anyway. The US Navy's Naval History & Heritage Command has a trivia page that corroborates the assumption that the ship is seen as something that is nurturing, but to be honest we can't say either way—for the most part, the origins of particular grammatical gender assignments are very ancient, and full of eccentricities we cannot hope to fathom.
Sounds like you're well on the way to developing some hardcore Nostradamosity.:) But really, it has nothing to do with science; Italy is just systematically corrupt. Whether it's nuclear waste disposal or child prostitution by the president, there's pretty much a 100% chance that someone is shirking the rules. The American media circus is nothing compared to the mess in Italy (and France and Greece, but that's a story for another time.)
Courts tend to have a history of rejecting cases that would open the floodgates and bog them down until the end of time. Unless you wanted an inquisition against local news meterologists or something?
Oh, and while you're at it, repeat this too: "as I am already posting on Slashdot, it is absolutely certain that my personal anecdotes in no way reflect the behaviour or opinions of the majority."
Your lack of cynicism is refreshing. Repeat after me: "we geeks are (almost) alone in our desire to have productive potrable devices, and everyone else just consumes, perhaps with the occasional e-mail or trip to Facebook."
I've found at least one reliable citation. Note: if, in the future, someone says their Wi-Fi is "showing an error" and equates this to "being hacked," they're completely clueless. This shouldn't be on Slashdot.
I am saying "Hey, ha, it looks like the universe's parameters have a high probability of self-replicating molecules! Wouldn't it be funny if the universe's parameters were deliberately tuned that way? Or if someone was randomly selecting parameters just to see what would happen?"
That is all I am saying. Everything—everything—you are trotting out as an example of religion is a byproduct of misguided social planners and self-interested scoundrels. Your view of the world is profoundly coloured by your experiences with those schemes, and you are describing the boiled-down afterbirth of things that were invented specifically to control people. When I spoke of the notion of deliberateness in the nature of the universe, I was speaking as a rational person who is fully aware that discussing such things could never have an effect on how we conduct our lives, and, at any rate, never should.
That you cannot draw a distinction between such speculation and structured religion is evidence that you have no place in such an innocent and inconsequential discussion. Claiming that speculation inevitably leads to religion is as absurd as any other claim that religion is unavoidable, and implies that education is futile, which is an extremely anti-intellectual posture.
Your reaction might as well be a cry of heresy or a call for a witch-burning. Go yell at a psychiatrist, move somewhere further north, and spend less time on the Internet.
Here's a citation regarding non-planar silicon resonance structures which the discoverers have labelled 'aromatic'. You may wish to classify it as an abuse of terminology.:)
Out of the alternative backbones, only TNA has been demonstrated to be easier to generate spontaneously than RNA; GNA in particular is known to be more complicated than RNA. TNA also has the advantage of a similar gap between nucleotides with RNA, making hybrids or mixtures possible. But if RNA is present, a DNA backbone, to me at least, seems inevitable, largely because deoxyribose is chemically easy to synthesize from ribose. For other backbone systems to really be viable, I believe topics such as catalytic potential (can it cut itself like RNA? what about other molecules?), EM mutability (what kind of changes do various frequencies of light cause? are they different from in DNA?), helix geometry (does it form an accessible groove in H2O or NH3 solution? would a non-curved backbone be fragile?), and annotatability (e.g. can methylation or something akin to it be easily detected by interacting molecules?) would need to be explored.
Given that some oligomers of RNA have already been found spontaneously forming, other backbones don't seem like they would, again, be very competitive.
...that all being said, I have nothing against alternatives to Watson-Crick base pairs, although a good source for making an argument from natural abundance currently escapes me.
Personally, I'd put my money on detecting RNA. Harder to catch, obviously, but also more general. (And in tongue-in-cheek mode, why not send a protein sequencer to search for novel RNases? It's hard to fathom anything more likely to survive.)
That's a fair cop, but keep in mind that "life can survive here" is not the same as "life can start here." I believe it's broadly agreed that the surface of the Earth as it is today would be completely inappropriate for abiogenesis, even though we run around on it routinely.
I tend to agree; at best they'd find free nucleotides, which would be useless to an Ion Torrent machine. They'll probably end up sequencing some contaminant like E. coli and we'll all have a good laugh about it.
Ouch; "can't" is the wrong word; that was bad paraphrasing on my part. It would be excessive to rule it out with any certainty. But it's still a lot less flexible—no carbonyls, ketimines, and barely-usable chair-shaped aromatics. To top it off, silicon chains break down in water unless they're padded with alternating oxygens. For the purposes of chemical evolution, this is certainly much more pressure; if we assume that molecules start off having some minimal purpose, and then grow through an inductive process towards something more useful (as we do with larger evolved structures such as the widely-publicised matter of the eye), the distance between any two viable, useful molecules has more than doubled. Of course, one can always play the "well maybe they're at extreme pH, temperature, and pressure" card, but as far as I know constructing a viable framework for alternative chemical evolution under such radical conditions has escaped publication.
For your edification, the human body contains (very roughly) 10,000,000,000,000 human cells and ten times that in bacterial cells and other symbiotes. Sixty-five billion is a drop in the bucket unless you've killed off your microbiome with antibiotics.
I don't think you and I are talking about the same kind of deity. The origin of the big bang is beyond our ability to know anyway (at least, it was the last time I checked); all the hypothesis says is "gee, these conditions sure are lucky; what if they're part of deliberate permutations"? There's no need to get into recursive "where did it come from?" problems just because one has proposed a watchmaker; if anything, the question stands anyway. It's just a silly conjecture; nothing more, and quite honestly does not even qualify as religion.
Slashdot Mirror
You've hit the nail on the head. It's Church-Turing impossible to guarantee knowledge in advance of what the program will or will not do, beyond what API calls it's allowed to make.
It doesn't matter whether or not it happens. They're creating a fucking file format. That hardly protects against (a) fraudulent data input or (b) fraudulent reporting of results. Time to upgrade to dead trees, guys.
I would have trouble believing you can't name a religion that doesn't have a history of violence.
An organized religion (not religion as a whole, but just any given religion) is nothing more than a set of tools for social control based on irrational beliefs. Whether that gets used for good or evil is the decision of whomever holds the reins. It is not a guarantee that religion will inevitably be used to exclude or harm.
That they did. Old English had a neuter gender, but was frequently in contact with Romance languages that didn't, and Old English used gender in peculiar and exciting ways on its own anyway. The US Navy's Naval History & Heritage Command has a trivia page that corroborates the assumption that the ship is seen as something that is nurturing, but to be honest we can't say either way—for the most part, the origins of particular grammatical gender assignments are very ancient, and full of eccentricities we cannot hope to fathom.
I'm guessing the Kickstarter campaign would've involved "free" as a key buzzword. Probably can't outright demand money for it after that.
Oh code quality? Just from looking at the tags I thought this was a story about cod equality. Damn those herrings.
Think of it like really fancy checksums. Most of the data we no longer have to transfer is redundant packets re-sent due to errors.
It's okay; there never seems to be a perfect time. Done!
I couldn't agree more.
Sounds like you're well on the way to developing some hardcore Nostradamosity. :) But really, it has nothing to do with science; Italy is just systematically corrupt. Whether it's nuclear waste disposal or child prostitution by the president, there's pretty much a 100% chance that someone is shirking the rules. The American media circus is nothing compared to the mess in Italy (and France and Greece, but that's a story for another time.)
Harmed Cervicals 1, Hooray Chiropractors 1...
Courts tend to have a history of rejecting cases that would open the floodgates and bog them down until the end of time. Unless you wanted an inquisition against local news meterologists or something?
Oh, and while you're at it, repeat this too: "as I am already posting on Slashdot, it is absolutely certain that my personal anecdotes in no way reflect the behaviour or opinions of the majority."
Your lack of cynicism is refreshing. Repeat after me: "we geeks are (almost) alone in our desire to have productive potrable devices, and everyone else just consumes, perhaps with the occasional e-mail or trip to Facebook."
I've found at least one reliable citation. Note: if, in the future, someone says their Wi-Fi is "showing an error" and equates this to "being hacked," they're completely clueless. This shouldn't be on Slashdot.
...I thought I'd seen something about amber preservation, but wow, what a load of retractions. Once again, Michael Crichton fails to deliver.
I am saying "Hey, ha, it looks like the universe's parameters have a high probability of self-replicating molecules! Wouldn't it be funny if the universe's parameters were deliberately tuned that way? Or if someone was randomly selecting parameters just to see what would happen?"
That is all I am saying. Everything—everything—you are trotting out as an example of religion is a byproduct of misguided social planners and self-interested scoundrels. Your view of the world is profoundly coloured by your experiences with those schemes, and you are describing the boiled-down afterbirth of things that were invented specifically to control people. When I spoke of the notion of deliberateness in the nature of the universe, I was speaking as a rational person who is fully aware that discussing such things could never have an effect on how we conduct our lives, and, at any rate, never should.
That you cannot draw a distinction between such speculation and structured religion is evidence that you have no place in such an innocent and inconsequential discussion. Claiming that speculation inevitably leads to religion is as absurd as any other claim that religion is unavoidable, and implies that education is futile, which is an extremely anti-intellectual posture.
Your reaction might as well be a cry of heresy or a call for a witch-burning. Go yell at a psychiatrist, move somewhere further north, and spend less time on the Internet.
Here's a citation regarding non-planar silicon resonance structures which the discoverers have labelled 'aromatic'. You may wish to classify it as an abuse of terminology. :)
Out of the alternative backbones, only TNA has been demonstrated to be easier to generate spontaneously than RNA; GNA in particular is known to be more complicated than RNA. TNA also has the advantage of a similar gap between nucleotides with RNA, making hybrids or mixtures possible. But if RNA is present, a DNA backbone, to me at least, seems inevitable, largely because deoxyribose is chemically easy to synthesize from ribose. For other backbone systems to really be viable, I believe topics such as catalytic potential (can it cut itself like RNA? what about other molecules?), EM mutability (what kind of changes do various frequencies of light cause? are they different from in DNA?), helix geometry (does it form an accessible groove in H2O or NH3 solution? would a non-curved backbone be fragile?), and annotatability (e.g. can methylation or something akin to it be easily detected by interacting molecules?) would need to be explored.
Given that some oligomers of RNA have already been found spontaneously forming, other backbones don't seem like they would, again, be very competitive.
...that all being said, I have nothing against alternatives to Watson-Crick base pairs, although a good source for making an argument from natural abundance currently escapes me.
Personally, I'd put my money on detecting RNA. Harder to catch, obviously, but also more general. (And in tongue-in-cheek mode, why not send a protein sequencer to search for novel RNases? It's hard to fathom anything more likely to survive.)
M-Theory is merely the sample tray in the context of such a cosmic experiment. :)
That's a fair cop, but keep in mind that "life can survive here" is not the same as "life can start here." I believe it's broadly agreed that the surface of the Earth as it is today would be completely inappropriate for abiogenesis, even though we run around on it routinely.
I tend to agree; at best they'd find free nucleotides, which would be useless to an Ion Torrent machine. They'll probably end up sequencing some contaminant like E. coli and we'll all have a good laugh about it.
Ouch; "can't" is the wrong word; that was bad paraphrasing on my part. It would be excessive to rule it out with any certainty. But it's still a lot less flexible—no carbonyls, ketimines, and barely-usable chair-shaped aromatics. To top it off, silicon chains break down in water unless they're padded with alternating oxygens. For the purposes of chemical evolution, this is certainly much more pressure; if we assume that molecules start off having some minimal purpose, and then grow through an inductive process towards something more useful (as we do with larger evolved structures such as the widely-publicised matter of the eye), the distance between any two viable, useful molecules has more than doubled. Of course, one can always play the "well maybe they're at extreme pH, temperature, and pressure" card, but as far as I know constructing a viable framework for alternative chemical evolution under such radical conditions has escaped publication.
For your edification, the human body contains (very roughly) 10,000,000,000,000 human cells and ten times that in bacterial cells and other symbiotes. Sixty-five billion is a drop in the bucket unless you've killed off your microbiome with antibiotics.
I don't think you and I are talking about the same kind of deity. The origin of the big bang is beyond our ability to know anyway (at least, it was the last time I checked); all the hypothesis says is "gee, these conditions sure are lucky; what if they're part of deliberate permutations"? There's no need to get into recursive "where did it come from?" problems just because one has proposed a watchmaker; if anything, the question stands anyway. It's just a silly conjecture; nothing more, and quite honestly does not even qualify as religion.