Because the force of gravity drops off exponentially with altitude, the bottom is always heavier than the top and so you'll need to put more on top to get that center of gravity higher.
It doesn't drop off exponentially, it drops off as the inverse square. This is an awful lot different from exponential. The universe would be much different if the force of gravity was proportional to e^(-r);)
A lot of people are arguing that DNA should not be patentable because it is a natural object, and has existed longer than humanity, and therefore cannot be an invention.
This is definitely the crux of the issue, but I think it's slightly more complicated. Imagine that the patent system had been invented before the discovery of the lever (ok, just for the sake of argument). Should a person be able to patent the lever? Did they discover the lever, or invent it?
Given the laws of physics, there is the potential for the existence of a lever, and lever-like objects can exist even if human hands did not make them. Therefore, it might be argued that the lever was discovered, not invented.
On the other hand, you can also argue physically that levers in general cannot exist without intelligent design. In order to really be a "lever," an object must not only have lever-like characteristics, but there must also be a source of input force, and an object to which the output force is transferred. Thermodynamically, this combination is highly unlikely, and you might argue that a lever-like object is not a lever unless an intelligent being uses it as such. Therefore, the lever was invented, not discovered.
Now, look at DNA. You can claim that since DNA existed before humans, it cannot be patented since it was not discovered. But you can also argue that, pre-humanity, DNA had no actual "purpose," since only humans create "purpose" and lower forms of life do not (this is a controversial statement). Therefore, by finding new "purposes" for DNA, such as the curing of diseases and other non-natural uses, we are "inventing," in a way. Therefore perhaps DNA can be patentable.
To boil it down to an archetypal example: suppose a team of scientists discover a gene in a rare species of dung beetle that can be spliced into human DNA to give increased resitance to ultraviolet radiation. Should the team of scientists be able to patent this use of the gene? Note that this is a patent for a specific "use" of the gene, not the gene itself.
I think that if a team of people has put in the effort, time, and frustration to discover something like that, they should be allowed to benefit from their research. As long as DNA patents are patents on "uses" and not the genes themselves, it doesn't bother me much.
Suppose, for example, that the next "step" in human evolution is a move to more fingers (wouldn't it be nice to type faster?). If kids start getting born with, say, 16 fingers, do you think those kids will seek each other out, have children, and perpetuate this 16-fingered gene?
Or will modern medicine and modern human culture prevent this, by viewing the improvement as a monstrosity, and trying to eradicate it? If you thought racism was bad, think about speciesism. Wars between the 10-digits and 16-digits, etc etc. "You don't have to treat them with human dignity; they aren't even human!"
Will we allow ourselves to evolve? Seeing how badly humanity has dealt with other stressful events in history, I really think not.
(I'm not claiming that having 16 fingers is an improvement -- it's just an example)
Even if the thing had huge solar collectors, it still couldn't stay in orbit indefinitely. In order to propel a craft you need two things: energy and propellant.
I suppose if the thing had enough energy it could stay up there by pointing an enormous laser beam downward and taking advantage of the momentum of light, but first of all, we don't have the technology to collect that much energy, and second... think about where that big old laser beam is pointing. Down, right?
I guess
the simple truth is that now that 100 gig drives are a couple hundred
bucks, we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could
need (unless you define "Reasonable" as "I need to store DNA Sequences").
Unless Taco is storing DNA sequences from aliens, I don't know what he's talking about. I downloaded the human genome project last year and if I remember correctly it was definitely under a gigabyte.
I think they would charge 1000x the methanol is worth.
If they did that, they wouldn't sell much product.
And what about some chineese manufactured notebook that got dropped on concreate 5 times and is still in use by some poor (now probably blind) lamer?
If you drop a lithium ion battery that much, it too will leak. Dropping electronic equipment is bad.
Besides, what percentage of methanol gets to the exaust? Id does have some exaust fluids (gases?), doesn't it? I don't think the proces is that perfect.
These people are chemists and know more about this than you or I. I'm sure they aren't going to release a product that's going to kill people.
There are plenty of things around your house that can kill you. Drinking a bottle of ammonia would be bad, drinking bleach (or even spilling it on your skin) is bad, drain cleaner is extremely dangerous, insecticide will kill you as well as insects, etc etc. It would be ridiculous to say we should all stop using bleach and go back to water and sand just because if you happen to drink a bottle of bleach you'll be in serious trouble.
Don't worry about it so much...
Re:The core technologies are out there...
on
Digital Lifestyle
·
· Score: 2
* Comes with built-in Macintalk, and will read out aloud any text in a number of voices, and even in Spanish, if you select one of the Spanish voices. My favorite is Victoria, who actually has a pretty seductive voice.
I don't know how many road warriors will really want to triple their carry weight and pay extra money for a few extra hours of runtime.
I would, even if it reduced the runtime. This is the first step in getting fuel cells accepted as mass-market products. If they can successfully break into one market, then they have a chance at another (e.g., fuel cell automobiles). Anything I can do to speed that process along is great.
Do you think a lithium ion battery is perfectly safe? Try opening one up and eating the contents (no, don't really do this).
I'm sure their "refueling" procedure involves a special tool designed to avoid spills. Methanol can be absorbed through your skin, but if you have a proper system in place you can do it safely. As for using ethanol instead of methanol, you can't just substitute one alcohol for another and expect it to work...
Have the bioinformaticists (now there's a word) ever thought of outsourcing it? Putting together all the experience gained over the years of scripting, pasting, gluing, etc and writing up a nice requirements document, and handing it off to some software people to write a system?
Or are bioinformaticists so paranoid about others using their techniques that they don't want such a tool to be available commercially? I bet there are a ton of "trade secrets" in some of that Perl code...
Why do scientists gravitate to these scripting languages? My guess is that scripting languages avoid several common things that non-programmers usually have a hard time with:
Variable declarations
Memory allocation
Type conversion
Unless you're using Python in which case you have to do type conversion sometimes...
Really, why scripting languages? It seems like some of these scientists are getting really good at it, using OO and everything. Why not switch over to a native language like C++ (which isn't actually that hideous if you avoid all the stupid features) and do the calculations 50 times faster?
The problem with doing OO is it requires you to understand software engineering. Biologists are probably more interested in crunching their numbers than in good OO design. Or am I wrong?
If biologists are learning how to do OO, maybe I should get out my old chemistry set and try some gene-splicing:)
What's with that last couple of sentences? Did you fall out of bed this morning?
First you made fun of Tualatin -- a shitty city to be sure, but also the name of an Indian tribe and a river. I work in Tualatin.
Now you are making fun of Yamhill. Not only a river, but a city as well, and a major east-west running street in Portland. If you ever come to Portland, check out Yamhill street. Lots of cool stuff, nice place to get drunk.
Would everyone please lay the fuck off already. We're proud of Intel around here and we're proud of our rivers, cities, and streets. I don't make fun of people who live in New York, even if "York" is a pretty stupid sounding word.
Duh. First of all, the AppleScript everyone uses is AppleScript English. There are other dialects, including a C one, but AppleScript English has become the most popular (if anyone even remembers that others do exist).
I doubt that is the case among e.g. French speakers. What if the situation were reversed?
set locked of (every item of entire contents of the trash whose locked is true) to false
It's been a long time since I studied French, but you can take my word that if this was written in "natural French" a French-ignorant American would be extremely hard-pressed to understand why it has to be written the way it is written.
Secondly, just because it's English, it doesn't mean possessive apostrophes are bad for programming languages. list'3 (the WebSiphon example) will always be more convenient than list[3].
Why, exactly? Because it saves you a single keystroke? If that's your complaint, then look to Java where object member access is done with a dot:
foo.bar()
But that's besides the point, because your example is not a possessive construct. The following is:
foo's bar()
's followed by space is three characters, a character longer than your -> example. So if you are arguing from the standpoint of typing economy, then you aren't making a point. Not to mention a non-English speaker will be thinking to him/herself: "I can deal with that apostrophe, but why on Earth does that s have to be there? What does it mean?"
Computer language grammar should remain computer language grammar. Natural grammars are inefficient and can be very counter-intuitive to non-native speakers. Computer grammars might take a while to learn and understand, but they'll always be much easier to figure out than ambiguous, ideosyncratic natural language. It's just a bad idea all over.
Uh, no, it just makes sense. Possessive apostrophes are awesome for programming languages.
Unless you happen to be one of the billions of people on this planet whose natural language doesn't have such a construct. Or did you think everyone spoke English?
A language that "reads like English" might be great for ego-centric Americans, but imagine having to understand the nuonces of English grammar in order to write a f*cking computer program.
The fonts are probably giving him fits because of FreeType, not KDE. Taco, what version of FreeType is installed on that Debian unstable? There have been many many patches lately, some of them even submitted by myself;)
If you can describe the actual problem I might even be able to tell you what version it got fixed in. 2.0.6 is out there now with all the latest patches applied. And there were some NASTY bugs.
BTW don't blame Debian for including a buggy FreeType (if that's what the problem is). RedHat 7.0 shipped with FT 2.0.1 which has a horrific bug in the autohinter that made outline transformations essentially useless. People can and do screw up.
When you say "switching constantly" you are talking about simple threading. In this case, pipeline length does not matter much because the time it takes to finish a pipeline's worth of instructions is much shorter than the time between task switches. The biggest problem for this kind of heavy threading is keeping all of the appropriate data in cache. It's tricky, but not impossible.
A hyperthreaded processor actually has multiple instruction streams. Each of these has its own pipeline. An instruction executes whenever the necessary chip circuits become available. This isn't quite the same as having two processors, because the sum of the clock rates (roughly the same as instruction throughput) for the two hyperthreads must add up to at most the chip clock rate -- perhaps less if stalls and cache misses are common. It's an elegant idea, but you could probably spend much less money and get far more processing power by simply buying two processors.
but wait, lets look at that list in how it relates to the pipeline idea:
games: probably a good deal is going on here, AI, 3d pipelines, IO, networking probably not something a branch predictor would excel at
Actually, most of what you mentioned do involve small, tight loops over many iterations -- perfect fodder for a branch predictor.
Long pipelines do have drawbacks. A stall on a long pipeline, especially if it keeps happening over and over, can really hurt your performance. I'm more excited about this "hyperthreading" stuff, personally. I think CPU makers should start putting more resources toward these new ideas instead of just extending and re-extending the old. Longer pipelines and more cache can help to a point, but I think there's a barrier that needs to be broken through. Once manufacturers start to do it, I think we'll start seeing all kinds of scary-cool CPUs.
As for my statement about fucked up standards, I believe I'm entitled to express that opinion. It might do some good to read "Why I Am Not A Christian," a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell. You don't have to agree with it -- but why not read it?
This was the first post to the discussion, so I'm at risk of feeding a troll, but here goes:
are you going to start killing adults now too?
No, I believe we'll start healing them. Stem cells taken from your own body could be used (eventually) to produce entire new organs for transplantation. Nothing could be better than a transplant made of tissue from your own genetic makeup. This would be the end of anti-rejection drugs and the terrible lifestyles that some transplantees live.
When will the Christians of the world wake up and realize that their "moral standards" are seriously fucked up?
I have a theory, which explains why people can be fine for years, and then suddenly become "sensitized."
Maybe certain frequencies cause chemical changes in these people's bodies, who knows how -- a broken bond, an inactive gene that becomes active, a protein is somehow modified, whatever. Over time, these people develop allergic sensitivities to these mutated biochemicals (the same way a worker in a perfume factory might develop a sensitivity over the years).
Then, whenever they are exposed to the right frequency radiation, and these chemicals start to get produced, they have an allergic reaction.
Could it be possible? I'm not a chemist, so could somebody comment on it?
When I was a stupid teenager, one of my friends and I took over a particular IRC channel. Man, the rush that gave. Yes, like I said before, stupid.
Some people really get a kick out of it. It's hardly even malicious intent -- they're just trying to get a fix. I think most of them don't understand that what they are doing is damaging businesses, hurting peoples' livelihoods, and ruining lives. It's like their drug, but in this case you inject it into someone else instead of yourself.
Possibly, it's an act similar to scientific discovery, in that moment when you are the only one who knows something new: "Buahaha, Ebay just went down, and I'm the only one on Earth who knows who did it." Except with scientific discovery, you get recognition and possibly a Nobel prize. When you DDOS or otherwise f*ck up somebody's system, you get no public recognition unless you are caught.
I think for the most part these kiddies are neglected children, probably not physically abused, who feel hopeless in their daily lives and use the Internet as their means to exert "power" over other people. God knows I was the same way for a while, until I woke up and realized how f*cking stupid I was.
The problem is that sysadmins see the scans from these kiddies and ignore them (those that even have a portsentry or similar application in place). If you saw someone walking around your house and trying the doors and windows, you'd call the police right away, wouldn't you?
You know, for a while I thought this would be a good idea. First, I set up MySQL with a DB and some tables to store information on portscans. Then, I downloaded portsentry, and hacked it slightly to make entries in the database whenever I was scanned. Then, I wrote some PHP to let me look at the results via a webpage.
The result? I have learned that I'm scanned anywhere from 3 to 50 times per day, from all over the world. I tried emailing abuse@... as you suggest, many many times, with no results.
Now, I have learned some interesting things by doing this:
Most scans are on ports 21 (ftp) or 23 (telnet). It's hard to prosecute someone, or even get them in trouble with their ISP, simply for trying to ftp to you.
Most scanners are scanning from hacked accounts. ISPs are unwilling to shut down these accounts for lack of proof, and to avoid pissing off a customer.
All the scanners are quite easily blocked by portsentry.
I no longer try to do jack sh*t about portscanners. My pleas have gone unanswered, and I simply don't care anymore. Once I have a true firewall, I'll care even less. Let them scan me.
The only thing I'm apathetic about is University Government (a big crock, I think). If I were in Alan's position, and I believed that I saw an opportunity to make a real difference towards DMCA, etc., then I would.
Martyrdom is something I would not choose, however. The only thing Alan will gain from this move is unemployment. If he was taking part in a larger-scale movement against the DMCA, I wouldn't view it as so much of a waste.
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It doesn't drop off exponentially, it drops off as the inverse square. This is an awful lot different from exponential. The universe would be much different if the force of gravity was proportional to e^(-r) ;)
This is definitely the crux of the issue, but I think it's slightly more complicated. Imagine that the patent system had been invented before the discovery of the lever (ok, just for the sake of argument). Should a person be able to patent the lever? Did they discover the lever, or invent it?
Given the laws of physics, there is the potential for the existence of a lever, and lever-like objects can exist even if human hands did not make them. Therefore, it might be argued that the lever was discovered, not invented.
On the other hand, you can also argue physically that levers in general cannot exist without intelligent design. In order to really be a "lever," an object must not only have lever-like characteristics, but there must also be a source of input force, and an object to which the output force is transferred. Thermodynamically, this combination is highly unlikely, and you might argue that a lever-like object is not a lever unless an intelligent being uses it as such. Therefore, the lever was invented, not discovered.
Now, look at DNA. You can claim that since DNA existed before humans, it cannot be patented since it was not discovered. But you can also argue that, pre-humanity, DNA had no actual "purpose," since only humans create "purpose" and lower forms of life do not (this is a controversial statement). Therefore, by finding new "purposes" for DNA, such as the curing of diseases and other non-natural uses, we are "inventing," in a way. Therefore perhaps DNA can be patentable.
To boil it down to an archetypal example: suppose a team of scientists discover a gene in a rare species of dung beetle that can be spliced into human DNA to give increased resitance to ultraviolet radiation. Should the team of scientists be able to patent this use of the gene? Note that this is a patent for a specific "use" of the gene, not the gene itself.
I think that if a team of people has put in the effort, time, and frustration to discover something like that, they should be allowed to benefit from their research. As long as DNA patents are patents on "uses" and not the genes themselves, it doesn't bother me much.
Or will modern medicine and modern human culture prevent this, by viewing the improvement as a monstrosity, and trying to eradicate it? If you thought racism was bad, think about speciesism. Wars between the 10-digits and 16-digits, etc etc. "You don't have to treat them with human dignity; they aren't even human!"
Will we allow ourselves to evolve? Seeing how badly humanity has dealt with other stressful events in history, I really think not.
(I'm not claiming that having 16 fingers is an improvement -- it's just an example)
I suppose if the thing had enough energy it could stay up there by pointing an enormous laser beam downward and taking advantage of the momentum of light, but first of all, we don't have the technology to collect that much energy, and second... think about where that big old laser beam is pointing. Down, right?
Unless Taco is storing DNA sequences from aliens, I don't know what he's talking about. I downloaded the human genome project last year and if I remember correctly it was definitely under a gigabyte.
If they did that, they wouldn't sell much product.
And what about some chineese manufactured notebook that got dropped on concreate 5 times and is still in use by some poor (now probably blind) lamer?
If you drop a lithium ion battery that much, it too will leak. Dropping electronic equipment is bad.
Besides, what percentage of methanol gets to the exaust? Id does have some exaust fluids (gases?), doesn't it? I don't think the proces is that perfect.
These people are chemists and know more about this than you or I. I'm sure they aren't going to release a product that's going to kill people.
There are plenty of things around your house that can kill you. Drinking a bottle of ammonia would be bad, drinking bleach (or even spilling it on your skin) is bad, drain cleaner is extremely dangerous, insecticide will kill you as well as insects, etc etc. It would be ridiculous to say we should all stop using bleach and go back to water and sand just because if you happen to drink a bottle of bleach you'll be in serious trouble.
Don't worry about it so much...
Ohhhhhhhhhh god...
That is all.
I would, even if it reduced the runtime. This is the first step in getting fuel cells accepted as mass-market products. If they can successfully break into one market, then they have a chance at another (e.g., fuel cell automobiles). Anything I can do to speed that process along is great.
I'm sure their "refueling" procedure involves a special tool designed to avoid spills. Methanol can be absorbed through your skin, but if you have a proper system in place you can do it safely. As for using ethanol instead of methanol, you can't just substitute one alcohol for another and expect it to work...
Or are bioinformaticists so paranoid about others using their techniques that they don't want such a tool to be available commercially? I bet there are a ton of "trade secrets" in some of that Perl code...
- Variable declarations
- Memory allocation
- Type conversion
Unless you're using Python in which case you have to do type conversion sometimes...Really, why scripting languages? It seems like some of these scientists are getting really good at it, using OO and everything. Why not switch over to a native language like C++ (which isn't actually that hideous if you avoid all the stupid features) and do the calculations 50 times faster?
Anyone have input?
If biologists are learning how to do OO, maybe I should get out my old chemistry set and try some gene-splicing :)
What's with that last couple of sentences? Did you fall out of bed this morning?
Also Timna which is an ancient Egyptian Coppermine located near Intel's Israeli fab plant.
Now you are making fun of Yamhill. Not only a river, but a city as well, and a major east-west running street in Portland. If you ever come to Portland, check out Yamhill street. Lots of cool stuff, nice place to get drunk.
Would everyone please lay the fuck off already. We're proud of Intel around here and we're proud of our rivers, cities, and streets. I don't make fun of people who live in New York, even if "York" is a pretty stupid sounding word.
Grow up, assholes.
I doubt that is the case among e.g. French speakers. What if the situation were reversed?
set locked of (every item of entire contents of the trash whose locked is true) to false
It's been a long time since I studied French, but you can take my word that if this was written in "natural French" a French-ignorant American would be extremely hard-pressed to understand why it has to be written the way it is written.
Secondly, just because it's English, it doesn't mean possessive apostrophes are bad for programming languages. list'3 (the WebSiphon example) will always be more convenient than list[3].
Why, exactly? Because it saves you a single keystroke? If that's your complaint, then look to Java where object member access is done with a dot:
foo.bar()
But that's besides the point, because your example is not a possessive construct. The following is:
foo's bar()
's followed by space is three characters, a character longer than your -> example. So if you are arguing from the standpoint of typing economy, then you aren't making a point. Not to mention a non-English speaker will be thinking to him/herself: "I can deal with that apostrophe, but why on Earth does that s have to be there? What does it mean?"
Computer language grammar should remain computer language grammar. Natural grammars are inefficient and can be very counter-intuitive to non-native speakers. Computer grammars might take a while to learn and understand, but they'll always be much easier to figure out than ambiguous, ideosyncratic natural language. It's just a bad idea all over.
Unless you happen to be one of the billions of people on this planet whose natural language doesn't have such a construct. Or did you think everyone spoke English?
A language that "reads like English" might be great for ego-centric Americans, but imagine having to understand the nuonces of English grammar in order to write a f*cking computer program.
If you can describe the actual problem I might even be able to tell you what version it got fixed in. 2.0.6 is out there now with all the latest patches applied. And there were some NASTY bugs.
BTW don't blame Debian for including a buggy FreeType (if that's what the problem is). RedHat 7.0 shipped with FT 2.0.1 which has a horrific bug in the autohinter that made outline transformations essentially useless. People can and do screw up.
A hyperthreaded processor actually has multiple instruction streams. Each of these has its own pipeline. An instruction executes whenever the necessary chip circuits become available. This isn't quite the same as having two processors, because the sum of the clock rates (roughly the same as instruction throughput) for the two hyperthreads must add up to at most the chip clock rate -- perhaps less if stalls and cache misses are common. It's an elegant idea, but you could probably spend much less money and get far more processing power by simply buying two processors.
Actually, most of what you mentioned do involve small, tight loops over many iterations -- perfect fodder for a branch predictor.
Long pipelines do have drawbacks. A stall on a long pipeline, especially if it keeps happening over and over, can really hurt your performance. I'm more excited about this "hyperthreading" stuff, personally. I think CPU makers should start putting more resources toward these new ideas instead of just extending and re-extending the old. Longer pipelines and more cache can help to a point, but I think there's a barrier that needs to be broken through. Once manufacturers start to do it, I think we'll start seeing all kinds of scary-cool CPUs.
For a first shot, not too bad, eh?
As for my statement about fucked up standards, I believe I'm entitled to express that opinion. It might do some good to read "Why I Am Not A Christian," a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell. You don't have to agree with it -- but why not read it?
are you going to start killing adults now too?
No, I believe we'll start healing them. Stem cells taken from your own body could be used (eventually) to produce entire new organs for transplantation. Nothing could be better than a transplant made of tissue from your own genetic makeup. This would be the end of anti-rejection drugs and the terrible lifestyles that some transplantees live.
When will the Christians of the world wake up and realize that their "moral standards" are seriously fucked up?
Maybe certain frequencies cause chemical changes in these people's bodies, who knows how -- a broken bond, an inactive gene that becomes active, a protein is somehow modified, whatever. Over time, these people develop allergic sensitivities to these mutated biochemicals (the same way a worker in a perfume factory might develop a sensitivity over the years).
Then, whenever they are exposed to the right frequency radiation, and these chemicals start to get produced, they have an allergic reaction.
Could it be possible? I'm not a chemist, so could somebody comment on it?
Some people really get a kick out of it. It's hardly even malicious intent -- they're just trying to get a fix. I think most of them don't understand that what they are doing is damaging businesses, hurting peoples' livelihoods, and ruining lives. It's like their drug, but in this case you inject it into someone else instead of yourself.
Possibly, it's an act similar to scientific discovery, in that moment when you are the only one who knows something new: "Buahaha, Ebay just went down, and I'm the only one on Earth who knows who did it." Except with scientific discovery, you get recognition and possibly a Nobel prize. When you DDOS or otherwise f*ck up somebody's system, you get no public recognition unless you are caught.
I think for the most part these kiddies are neglected children, probably not physically abused, who feel hopeless in their daily lives and use the Internet as their means to exert "power" over other people. God knows I was the same way for a while, until I woke up and realized how f*cking stupid I was.
You know, for a while I thought this would be a good idea. First, I set up MySQL with a DB and some tables to store information on portscans. Then, I downloaded portsentry, and hacked it slightly to make entries in the database whenever I was scanned. Then, I wrote some PHP to let me look at the results via a webpage.
The result? I have learned that I'm scanned anywhere from 3 to 50 times per day, from all over the world. I tried emailing abuse@... as you suggest, many many times, with no results.
Now, I have learned some interesting things by doing this:
- Most scans are on ports 21 (ftp) or 23 (telnet). It's hard to prosecute someone, or even get them in trouble with their ISP, simply for trying to ftp to you.
- Most scanners are scanning from hacked accounts. ISPs are unwilling to shut down these accounts for lack of proof, and to avoid pissing off a customer.
- All the scanners are quite easily blocked by portsentry.
I no longer try to do jack sh*t about portscanners. My pleas have gone unanswered, and I simply don't care anymore. Once I have a true firewall, I'll care even less. Let them scan me.Martyrdom is something I would not choose, however. The only thing Alan will gain from this move is unemployment. If he was taking part in a larger-scale movement against the DMCA, I wouldn't view it as so much of a waste.