Your "reasonable confidence" is way off the mark, at least with respect to the scientific field I work in.
CS and math academia I have no knowledge of. I am, however, a graduate student in molecular biology at a top-5 American university. The principal investigators I work with have had many papers printed in Science and Nature collectively.
And they universally have no idea what LaTeX is. I do because I do computational work and I was a CS major as an undergraduate. They care about the results they get in R, or Excel, or the proprietary software that came with the AP Biosystems scanner. They could care less what they write those results up in. And since Word is the de facto standard, Word is what they use.
Maybe you just have a bad upscaling DVD player. I have a Sony DVD player hooked up to my 720p Panasonic plasma via an HDMI cable, and the quality of picture when watching DVDs is considerably better than standard def tv. It still isn't like watching broadcast HD, of course, but it definitely isn't bad.
Office is second rate? And OpenOffice, by emulating it, is a first-rate product emulating a second rate product?
The number of hysterical anti-Microsoft geeks is slowly decreasing, but it's nice to see that they haven't quite gone extinct yet.
And as full disclosure, I used to work for Microsoft a few years ago. You probably think I'm part of some evil borg hive-mind now, but your characterization of Microsoft as one voice, despite it having tens of thousands of employees, is as hysterical as your characterization of their products.
As a clarification, this research isn't part of the Human Genome Project. It's research that uses the results from the human genome project to identify genes associated with diabetes.
Or, in Slashdot-ese:
Step 1: Identify all of the human genes (the HGP) Step 2: Find which of these genes are associated with diabetes Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit!
And I suppose Microsoft shouldn't be able to sell their software in stores, either, since they're a monopoly and all, right?
You're going way overboard in my opinion. If a company illegally leverages their monopoly, stop them from leveraging their monopoly and fine them. Bidding in a market, however, is not leverage. It's...a fair market.
These people aren't "environmentalists." They're some of the most respected scientists in the world.
As for the Americans on the list, the "vested interests" they're funded by is primarily the government (they're also funded by their universities and occassionally by private sources, but the government is a huge chunk of funding, although I admit I don't know exactly how much).
Would you rather trust a professor who is on Exxon's payroll, or Science magazine (one of the most respected academic journals in the world)? Because here's what Science magazine has to say about the debate:
Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.
Some people would consider Prof. Carter to be an organ of said corporations.
Of course it's entirely possible that Prof. Carter is correct, as the Science article points out. But in light of the evidence, I'm inclined to think that this is a FUD campaign rather than a sound argument from a trusted authority.
Not really. Hearsay is when you pass on unverified information. In this case, "heresay" is more accurate. He's there with the broken laptop, and saying how much it sucks.
Disclaimer: I used to work for MSN (this disclaimer will soon be ironic, though)
I just loaded up live.com and searched for myself. Decent results, whatever...search sites don't usually wow me any more. Then I click on the "images" tab and...both of my Firefox windows just disappear.
I am very amused that Microsoft found a way to crash Firefox on RH4.
I started cooking years ago, I think it's a better way to pass time than playing WoW. It's very hard to eat Sonic after work now that I'm accustomed to roasted sweet potatoes with braised pork roast, for example. Neither of those dishes are very hard, either:)
And I wouldn't ever make dinner in the morning. I'd make it the night before and stick it in the fridge. It makes for better marinading anyway.
But yeah, I don't know why this is on the front page either. Maybe the web-enabledness is a sign of things to come.
I would classify your post as FUD. Google's witholding of data has almost nothing to do with privacy -- rather, they were just trying to protect their trade secrets. See this NY Times article for more information.
So the battle they were picking wasn't a "good" one in the sense that you think it was. They were protecting themselves, not our privacy. Yes, their stock took a dive for a day, but in Google's estimation it's worth it to protect the long-term value of the stock.
Capitulating to an evil law is evil. If there were a law that said you could kill babies, it would be evil to follow the law. Similarly, following the Chinese laws regarding censorship is wrong.
Laws are not automatically ethical just because Google's involved.
I've included somewhat complex images in a scientific paper before. I called out specific portions of the image by circling, labeling it, or both.
This is a scientific paper -- it should include unmanipulated data to let others come to their own conclusions. Cropping is one thing, since people reading the paper will know that there will be data outside of the field of view. Manipulating within an image is an entirely different proposition.
Another important reason why the "just change it" response is bogus is that the libel can reappear the next day. It's like saying "yeah, he stole your car, but you can take it right back!"
I don't think he should have to monitor his entry every day to make sure nobody is libeling him. It seems more reasonable to just hold people accountable for the behavior in the first place.
This is precisely why I support patents and copyright, but for a shorter term than exists now. Inventors should be given the right to profit from their inventions, and without patents, process farms would hyper-specialize production facilities and outcompete inventors. On the other hand, 20 years (for patents -- copyright is currently a joke) is just too long in the current environment of technological innovation, and ends up hurting the public good.
Beginning this month, Guba will convert video files from Usenet into the format used by the iPod, known as H.264.. and lets users stream small versions from its Web site.
Your criticism may be applicable to drug companies, but it's just not applicable to where I work. You say several times that we don't know how these drugs work, but that's all my lab is focused on in the science that we do. We purposefully don't focus on drug discovery and let drug companies handle that.
For example, you must have missed the bit where I talk about secondary screens to determine binding strengths. This is an experiment performed with a half-million dollar machine that determines the binding strength between the small molecule and one specific protein (that is the proposed target). Since the small molecule usually acts as an inhibitor by binding the protein, this IS THE WAY IT WORKS. Once you find the protein that the small molecule binds to, you're done -- that's the method of action (assuming there aren't other methods of action).
I get your point about these small molecules not being designed, however, and I agree that our science there is pretty weak at the moment. But there are plenty of PhDs and PhD candidates working on precisely that problem, too. Given time I'm sure we'll be able to take a protein and design a small molecule that inhibits (or promotes) its activity.
As for troll karma.. yeah, isn't it a bitch when the truth hurts.
Ironically, I made the troll comment when your comment was modded up:-P
There is a significant amount of throwing the kitchen sink at pathogens and pathogen-related proteins and small molecules, this is true. But I work in a chemical biology lab filled with scientists who I assure you are not quacks, and along with a large academic community are doing their best to further the science involved.
As an example, once a hit is registered for a small molecule (potential drug) in a pathogen-related screen, a set of chemists go about producing analogs of the drug. While this is going on, molecular biologists are busy finding out the protein (or other) target of the small molecule, and why an interaction causes a phenotypic result.
Once the analogs are produced, they (and this is just one approach used of many) can be micro-printed on small glass slides with advanced surface chemistry, and very specific screens can be performed in a high-throughput manner to find out which small molecules are the most potent and specific. Follow-up secondary screens are then performed to find exact binding strengths of the most potent hits. Etc.
So no, there is more to it than voodoo like you seem to imply. I hope you enjoy your troll karma, though.
I've always wondered why Google's black box approach to AdSense didn't tip off people's evil-meter. That sort of opacity would never in a million years be tolerated from Microsoft, especially when it comes to money.
It may just be that there's no real competition, so they can take advantage of their mono...uhh...I mean, "reap the benefits of their innovation".
If you're so averse to anonymous profiling, you should probably stop shopping at Amazon. And your local grocery store. And Wal-Mart. And countless other retailers who collect anonymous usage data or match your credit card number to private databases to find out more about you.
To be honest, I don't mind demographic targeting as long as it's anonymous. I don't mind getting ads for Playstations instead of Barbies. And I don't mind it when Amazon suggests that I buy things targeted to my shopping profile. We're not all going to be mindless drones in the future, numbed to our corporate overlords. We're just going to be more jaded in the face of ever more sophisticated targeting.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a Dell laptop two years ago and tried to install Ubuntu on it. It was an utter nightmare.
Your condescension does not make a persuasive argument.
Your "reasonable confidence" is way off the mark, at least with respect to the scientific field I work in.
CS and math academia I have no knowledge of. I am, however, a graduate student in molecular biology at a top-5 American university. The principal investigators I work with have had many papers printed in Science and Nature collectively.
And they universally have no idea what LaTeX is. I do because I do computational work and I was a CS major as an undergraduate. They care about the results they get in R, or Excel, or the proprietary software that came with the AP Biosystems scanner. They could care less what they write those results up in. And since Word is the de facto standard, Word is what they use.
Maybe you just have a bad upscaling DVD player. I have a Sony DVD player hooked up to my 720p Panasonic plasma via an HDMI cable, and the quality of picture when watching DVDs is considerably better than standard def tv. It still isn't like watching broadcast HD, of course, but it definitely isn't bad.
Office is second rate? And OpenOffice, by emulating it, is a first-rate product emulating a second rate product?
The number of hysterical anti-Microsoft geeks is slowly decreasing, but it's nice to see that they haven't quite gone extinct yet.
And as full disclosure, I used to work for Microsoft a few years ago. You probably think I'm part of some evil borg hive-mind now, but your characterization of Microsoft as one voice, despite it having tens of thousands of employees, is as hysterical as your characterization of their products.
As a clarification, this research isn't part of the Human Genome Project. It's research that uses the results from the human genome project to identify genes associated with diabetes.
Or, in Slashdot-ese:
Step 1: Identify all of the human genes (the HGP)
Step 2: Find which of these genes are associated with diabetes
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
And I suppose Microsoft shouldn't be able to sell their software in stores, either, since they're a monopoly and all, right?
You're going way overboard in my opinion. If a company illegally leverages their monopoly, stop them from leveraging their monopoly and fine them. Bidding in a market, however, is not leverage. It's...a fair market.
If we can't trust Science magazine in this society any more, we're in a lot more trouble than you think. Here's a list of the journal's editors:
t l
http://www.sciencemag.org/about/editorial_board.d
These people aren't "environmentalists." They're some of the most respected scientists in the world.
As for the Americans on the list, the "vested interests" they're funded by is primarily the government (they're also funded by their universities and occassionally by private sources, but the government is a huge chunk of funding, although I admit I don't know exactly how much).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/57
Some people would consider Prof. Carter to be an organ of said corporations.
Of course it's entirely possible that Prof. Carter is correct, as the Science article points out. But in light of the evidence, I'm inclined to think that this is a FUD campaign rather than a sound argument from a trusted authority.
Not really. Hearsay is when you pass on unverified information. In this case, "heresay" is more accurate. He's there with the broken laptop, and saying how much it sucks.
Yeah, if only Google had become profitable, the whole ad revenue model might have worked out. Too bad.
Er...I meant FC4. And I just did some more testing, and any time I click on the "images" tab Firefox crashes. Time to file a bug report.
Disclaimer: I used to work for MSN (this disclaimer will soon be ironic, though)
I just loaded up live.com and searched for myself. Decent results, whatever...search sites don't usually wow me any more. Then I click on the "images" tab and...both of my Firefox windows just disappear.
I am very amused that Microsoft found a way to crash Firefox on RH4.
I started cooking years ago, I think it's a better way to pass time than playing WoW. It's very hard to eat Sonic after work now that I'm accustomed to roasted sweet potatoes with braised pork roast, for example. Neither of those dishes are very hard, either :)
And I wouldn't ever make dinner in the morning. I'd make it the night before and stick it in the fridge. It makes for better marinading anyway.
But yeah, I don't know why this is on the front page either. Maybe the web-enabledness is a sign of things to come.
I would classify your post as FUD. Google's witholding of data has almost nothing to do with privacy -- rather, they were just trying to protect their trade secrets. See this NY Times article for more information.
So the battle they were picking wasn't a "good" one in the sense that you think it was. They were protecting themselves, not our privacy. Yes, their stock took a dive for a day, but in Google's estimation it's worth it to protect the long-term value of the stock.
Capitulating to an evil law is evil. If there were a law that said you could kill babies, it would be evil to follow the law. Similarly, following the Chinese laws regarding censorship is wrong.
Laws are not automatically ethical just because Google's involved.
I've included somewhat complex images in a scientific paper before. I called out specific portions of the image by circling, labeling it, or both.
This is a scientific paper -- it should include unmanipulated data to let others come to their own conclusions. Cropping is one thing, since people reading the paper will know that there will be data outside of the field of view. Manipulating within an image is an entirely different proposition.
Another important reason why the "just change it" response is bogus is that the libel can reappear the next day. It's like saying "yeah, he stole your car, but you can take it right back!"
I don't think he should have to monitor his entry every day to make sure nobody is libeling him. It seems more reasonable to just hold people accountable for the behavior in the first place.
This is precisely why I support patents and copyright, but for a shorter term than exists now. Inventors should be given the right to profit from their inventions, and without patents, process farms would hyper-specialize production facilities and outcompete inventors. On the other hand, 20 years (for patents -- copyright is currently a joke) is just too long in the current environment of technological innovation, and ends up hurting the public good.
Does EasyNews do that?
Your criticism may be applicable to drug companies, but it's just not applicable to where I work. You say several times that we don't know how these drugs work, but that's all my lab is focused on in the science that we do. We purposefully don't focus on drug discovery and let drug companies handle that.
:-P
For example, you must have missed the bit where I talk about secondary screens to determine binding strengths. This is an experiment performed with a half-million dollar machine that determines the binding strength between the small molecule and one specific protein (that is the proposed target). Since the small molecule usually acts as an inhibitor by binding the protein, this IS THE WAY IT WORKS. Once you find the protein that the small molecule binds to, you're done -- that's the method of action (assuming there aren't other methods of action).
I get your point about these small molecules not being designed, however, and I agree that our science there is pretty weak at the moment. But there are plenty of PhDs and PhD candidates working on precisely that problem, too. Given time I'm sure we'll be able to take a protein and design a small molecule that inhibits (or promotes) its activity.
As for troll karma.. yeah, isn't it a bitch when the truth hurts.
Ironically, I made the troll comment when your comment was modded up
There is a significant amount of throwing the kitchen sink at pathogens and pathogen-related proteins and small molecules, this is true. But I work in a chemical biology lab filled with scientists who I assure you are not quacks, and along with a large academic community are doing their best to further the science involved.
As an example, once a hit is registered for a small molecule (potential drug) in a pathogen-related screen, a set of chemists go about producing analogs of the drug. While this is going on, molecular biologists are busy finding out the protein (or other) target of the small molecule, and why an interaction causes a phenotypic result.
Once the analogs are produced, they (and this is just one approach used of many) can be micro-printed on small glass slides with advanced surface chemistry, and very specific screens can be performed in a high-throughput manner to find out which small molecules are the most potent and specific. Follow-up secondary screens are then performed to find exact binding strengths of the most potent hits. Etc.
So no, there is more to it than voodoo like you seem to imply. I hope you enjoy your troll karma, though.
"Just because the AC didn't know they were ramen doesn't make them any less dead."
:-P
I've always wondered why Google's black box approach to AdSense didn't tip off people's evil-meter. That sort of opacity would never in a million years be tolerated from Microsoft, especially when it comes to money.
It may just be that there's no real competition, so they can take advantage of their mono...uhh...I mean, "reap the benefits of their innovation".
If you're so averse to anonymous profiling, you should probably stop shopping at Amazon. And your local grocery store. And Wal-Mart. And countless other retailers who collect anonymous usage data or match your credit card number to private databases to find out more about you.
To be honest, I don't mind demographic targeting as long as it's anonymous. I don't mind getting ads for Playstations instead of Barbies. And I don't mind it when Amazon suggests that I buy things targeted to my shopping profile. We're not all going to be mindless drones in the future, numbed to our corporate overlords. We're just going to be more jaded in the face of ever more sophisticated targeting.
Worked for Bush :-P