It's almost funny. You have to wonder: what the fuck is SCO thinking? I imagine the official order from IBM upper management is to ass-rape SCO in court. IBM's lawyers are probably laughing their asses off right now. SCO will run out of cash before IBM even gets warmed up. . . I keep getting this image of an expensive European loafer flattening a helpless insect.
On a side note, David Boies' career seems to be headed off a cliff lately...
The article raises several interesting question about the arrest. Who actually was in charge?
Yeah, they left it unsaid, but I got the feeling that the US was stepping aside to allow Pakistan to take full credit for the capture, and the roles were actually much different. I can't figure out whether to find this disturbing or not, but the article seems almost tongue-in-cheek.
The counterargument to this is that if you really want privacy, you need to use strong encryption or simply forget about using mobile phones that way. In this era of high technology, unencrypted cellular communications are about as private as shouting across a crowded street. People have such short memories - remember when Newt Gingrich was overheard discussion GOP strategy on the phone by a pair of retirees with a police scanner?
By the same token, we should simply forget about using surveillance satellites. It's when the government really starts to intrude on areas that have always been considered private, or tries to prevent us from using technology that aid privacy, that we should be really worried.
You tell everyone at your high school reunion "I'm a vice president at Microsoft" you'll be the envy of everyone.
Hell, you tell everyone "I'm a computer programmer" and the hot chicks will still not speak to you. You tell them "I'm a computer programmer at Microsoft", they probably won't be able to keep their hands off you. The difference in popular opinion is roughly that between garbage collecter and movie star. (I get people asking me why I didn't go to work for Microsoft all the time, usually because they know nothing about my job except I work with computers.)
OR if America is going to change all it's French words for some what less French words
Thanks, dude, that was hilarious. For the record, I oppose all incarnations of this sort of nonsense- I don't think the restaraunt owner grasped the concept that "liberty cabbage" is now nothing more than a punch line. However, the French are the ones with an entire ministry devoted to creating French-sounding words for (largely) American inventions, to preserve the purity of their language. Assramps.
Anyone who thinks this is about science has their head up their ass. This is pretty much an international pissing contest, led by Europe and China. I doubt the PRC leadership gives a fuck about scientific results, as long as they get to lord it over the capitalist pigs and give the Chinese people another reason not to get rid of their corrupt, brutal government. Europe. . . sure, perhaps they want to do science, but as long as the French are involved I have my doubts.
Of course. The problem is that the modern market system often seems to defy the laws of economics. The absurd sums paid to CEOs whose companies tanked. The absurd stock prices for many dotcoms, which made some charismatic idiots far more wealthy than they deserved. The fact that at Enron, the people who did the actual work got screwed, while the people who cooked the books kept a great deal of money.
Personally, I view these as the price we pay for having a market economy (though a reminder of why we need some regulation), and not an indicator that our otherwise healthy system is broken. However, I can understand why some people might feel especially bitter about it right now.
Remember, this is the state with the People's Republic of Berkeley.
Actually, I visited there several weeks ago to look at the grad school (which I will probably attend). I knew it was Berkeley because all of us recruits got free coupons for fair trade organic coffee. When I mentioned this to my host, he said there had been a city ordinance on the ballot to mandate a fine and jail time for any vendor selling coffee that was not fair trade, organic, and shade grown. (It failed, but more than 30% voted for it.)
Now tell me what incentives Germany and Belgium have to oppose war?
Fucking America. One of your commments on some poll expressed the belief that you'd "never want to move to the USA". I'm constantly amazed at how much contempt Europeans have for Americans - it doesn't usually show until the subject of the US government comes up. It's astounding how they can treat you like a friend, but then tell you that you're a tool of a brutal, corrupt state that deserved what it got on 9-11 (or that your president planned it).
Frankly, I'd never move to Europe, because I know I'd be treated like lowlife, uncultured scum there, and told tasteless Bush jokes all the time by morons who elected Chirac and Schroeder.
Clearly this breaks down for certain applications, but most of the science currently being done (read: molecular biology, and no, not bioinformatics) is not algorithm-bound.
Most of the bioinformatics being done that I'm aware of is not algorithm-bound either.
People do tend to find a language and stick to it, though. Usually Perl. You get the occasional Python diehard as well, but my experience has been that while I'd far rather use Python for a large project, I'd rather use Perl for anything with significant amounts of text processing. There are times when weird kludges and shortcuts are actually a good thing. I know someone who programs in Lisp whenever possible. C is usually the last resort of people who think it'll be faster than Perl. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes they simply can't program worth shit.
The real problem is that many bioinformaticists have no concept of software engineering. This applies on many levels. First, they can't write reusable, maintainable code. Second, they have no concept of algorithms or recursion. Third, they never get to the point where they can write software reflexively. The best code, in my experience, is the stuff that's pounded out in under an hour, but which has been thought about for days beforehand. I think everyone wanting to do bioinformatics should be forced to take an intermediate CS class before they're allowed to do research, rather than sitting down with an O'Reilly book and starting to write code. They'll waste less of their time and everyone else's this way.
Frankly, however, two-thirds of the time of any bioinformaticist is spent interpreting and reformatting the crap data that biologists give us.
Please, to make your point stronger, name ONE company that got rich with patents on DNA.
Well, many have tried. Myriad Genetics, for one. Most of the companies who hoped to make it rich this way (Incyte, HGS, Millennium) are aparently having problems - this was a Slashdot article about a month ago.
Folding@Home does molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the pathway of protein folding. It does not predict the final structure, at least not to useful resolution. It is simply a biophysical simulation. Pretty cool at that, but people misunderstand it.
The UD Cancer Research project is doing "virtual library screening" - essentially, docking many small molecules to proteins of known structure, sampling many conformations to determine which candidate compounds bind with the greatest affinity. The idea is that it will screen out the worst candidates, leaving many fewer to be verified experimentally.
Many people are doing the latter; it's the basis of computational drug design. I think the other projects you mentioned are doing exactly the same sort of simulation. *If*, and only if, it works, it will actually be medically useful (though it still requires a lot of grunt work to verify the predictions).
It's very nice to know how proteins fold. Good, solid, theoretical work. However, most people confuse this with what proteins look like when they're folded. Computational simulation will never be a substitute for experimental work in this field. Too many of the people talking about "protein folding" do not seem to understand this.
To take your absurd motherboard example, understanding protein folding is more akin to understanding the principles of electromagnetism. It still won't tell you how the thing works.
I haven't seen anyone doing interaction studies via biophysical simulation - it's all been done by other means. It's hard enough to simulate the folding of a small peptide chain; we're certainly not ready to study interactions of entire subunits.
given a sequence of letters (out of the four), what protein (3-D structure, function, reactive parts etc) is associated with it? How is it cut into introns and exons? What sequence of letters can act as regulators?
Virtually all of this requires significant experimental work, to varying degrees- I wouldn't call this the "computational part" under any circumstances. Some things can be done at least partway through bioinformatics; introns and exons, for example. For protein structure and function the best we can do is use homology to proteins of known structure and/or function. To get the high-resolution structure, it still needs to be crystallized. . . which can be a colossal pain in the ass. Computational studies will not be a substitute for this until after all the protein structures have been solved experimentally anyway.
The NY Times article about this mentions that Watson asked Wilkins if he and Franklin should share co-authorship on the famous article, but that Wilkins declined (for both of them!). From what I've read, I always thought Wilkins was the real dickhead; he just assumed that Franklin was a subordinate, and treated her as such. It would not be the last time that a junior scientist has had his or her research stolen by their faculty advisor (though Franklin was not even working under Wilkins). I've heard of worse.
The real tragedy is the way Watson treated Franklin
No, the real tragedy is that she died of ovarian cancer in 1958. For her to have done as well as she did in that era, she clearly must have been absolutely brilliant. And she did great work after DNA too- Aaron Klug won the Nobel for a project that Franklin was working on when she died. Birkbeck College (where she ended up) has a page about her which says she should have won two Nobels, if not for her untimely death.
When I get one of these autoreplies, unless it's someone I really care about contacting, I just ignore it. I know one professor who now uses 'vacation' to autoreply to everything with a message saying, in effect, that he's too busy and important to read every email. Fine- I'll remove his address from anything I send.
Occasionally I'll get a bot reply to a message I send to a subscribers-only email list. Every time, I contact the list admin and ask that the individual be removed. They've always complied. Usually I'm not even the first to ask.
I would consider using a whitelist myself, but I wouldn't be so stupid as to send obnoxious messages to everyone who tried to get in touch with me. Especially not if I signed up to receive these messages in the first place. . .
but only when we can first correct this very severe problem that exists in the process.
Okay, I oppose reproductive cloning for other reasons too, but let's start here. How exactly can scientists determine that they've fixed the problem without actually cloning and raising a human, perhaps with disasterous results? It would suck to spend the first 18 years of your life as a medical experiment.
Re:What about the problems with Genetic Engineerin
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Wrong for two reasons:
1. Genetic engineering is not "random". A better comparison would be a hacker taking 10MB of source code to some random program and adding an email client. (hey, like Emacs!)
2. The genetic code can handle quite a bit of "random" mutation. There are cases where it is extremely sensitive to mutation, such as sickle-cell leukemia (single poylmorphisim that causes hemoglobin to form chains), but there are "silent" mutations and even amino acid mutations that will have no effect.
So when some 80 y.o. geezer elects to have himself cloned the "new" baby will have the genetic signiture of an octagenarian
But it won't be the same person. You won't get real immortality this way, the way the bad guy does in the Schwarzenegger pic "The Sixth Day". Perhaps you could make your genetic material last perpetually, but this is just stupid.
Rael was on MSNBC talking about exactly this type of thing, and I was so pissed I threw my remote across the room. There's just no basis in biology for any of that crap.
Slashdot Mirror
It's almost funny. You have to wonder: what the fuck is SCO thinking? I imagine the official order from IBM upper management is to ass-rape SCO in court. IBM's lawyers are probably laughing their asses off right now. SCO will run out of cash before IBM even gets warmed up. . . I keep getting this image of an expensive European loafer flattening a helpless insect.
On a side note, David Boies' career seems to be headed off a cliff lately...
The article raises several interesting question about the arrest. Who actually was in charge?
Yeah, they left it unsaid, but I got the feeling that the US was stepping aside to allow Pakistan to take full credit for the capture, and the roles were actually much different. I can't figure out whether to find this disturbing or not, but the article seems almost tongue-in-cheek.
The counterargument to this is that if you really want privacy, you need to use strong encryption or simply forget about using mobile phones that way. In this era of high technology, unencrypted cellular communications are about as private as shouting across a crowded street. People have such short memories - remember when Newt Gingrich was overheard discussion GOP strategy on the phone by a pair of retirees with a police scanner?
By the same token, we should simply forget about using surveillance satellites. It's when the government really starts to intrude on areas that have always been considered private, or tries to prevent us from using technology that aid privacy, that we should be really worried.
You tell everyone at your high school reunion "I'm a vice president at Microsoft" you'll be the envy of everyone.
Hell, you tell everyone "I'm a computer programmer" and the hot chicks will still not speak to you. You tell them "I'm a computer programmer at Microsoft", they probably won't be able to keep their hands off you. The difference in popular opinion is roughly that between garbage collecter and movie star. (I get people asking me why I didn't go to work for Microsoft all the time, usually because they know nothing about my job except I work with computers.)
OR if America is going to change all it's French words for some what less French words
Thanks, dude, that was hilarious. For the record, I oppose all incarnations of this sort of nonsense- I don't think the restaraunt owner grasped the concept that "liberty cabbage" is now nothing more than a punch line. However, the French are the ones with an entire ministry devoted to creating French-sounding words for (largely) American inventions, to preserve the purity of their language. Assramps.
The most dangerous person on the planet to other human beings today is... not Saddam Hussein.
Okay, I agree on this, but who would you like to nominate for that position? Do I even need to ask?
Actually, I suspect the mission will be held up indefinitely will they invent new words in French for all the equipment involved.
'scuse me? I missed the part where Bush gassed Northern California, or sent the entire DNC to slave labor camps. Fucking moron.
Anyone who thinks this is about science has their head up their ass. This is pretty much an international pissing contest, led by Europe and China. I doubt the PRC leadership gives a fuck about scientific results, as long as they get to lord it over the capitalist pigs and give the Chinese people another reason not to get rid of their corrupt, brutal government. Europe. . . sure, perhaps they want to do science, but as long as the French are involved I have my doubts.
Of course. The problem is that the modern market system often seems to defy the laws of economics. The absurd sums paid to CEOs whose companies tanked. The absurd stock prices for many dotcoms, which made some charismatic idiots far more wealthy than they deserved. The fact that at Enron, the people who did the actual work got screwed, while the people who cooked the books kept a great deal of money.
Personally, I view these as the price we pay for having a market economy (though a reminder of why we need some regulation), and not an indicator that our otherwise healthy system is broken. However, I can understand why some people might feel especially bitter about it right now.
Remember, this is the state with the People's Republic of Berkeley.
Actually, I visited there several weeks ago to look at the grad school (which I will probably attend). I knew it was Berkeley because all of us recruits got free coupons for fair trade organic coffee. When I mentioned this to my host, he said there had been a city ordinance on the ballot to mandate a fine and jail time for any vendor selling coffee that was not fair trade, organic, and shade grown. (It failed, but more than 30% voted for it.)
JAIL TIME. FOR COFFEE. Jesus.
Aha, I see someone from France has moderator privileges today. Bring it on.
Now tell me what incentives Germany and Belgium have to oppose war?
Fucking America. One of your commments on some poll expressed the belief that you'd "never want to move to the USA". I'm constantly amazed at how much contempt Europeans have for Americans - it doesn't usually show until the subject of the US government comes up. It's astounding how they can treat you like a friend, but then tell you that you're a tool of a brutal, corrupt state that deserved what it got on 9-11 (or that your president planned it).
Frankly, I'd never move to Europe, because I know I'd be treated like lowlife, uncultured scum there, and told tasteless Bush jokes all the time by morons who elected Chirac and Schroeder.
Clearly this breaks down for certain applications, but most of the science currently being done (read: molecular biology, and no, not bioinformatics) is not algorithm-bound.
Most of the bioinformatics being done that I'm aware of is not algorithm-bound either.
People do tend to find a language and stick to it, though. Usually Perl. You get the occasional Python diehard as well, but my experience has been that while I'd far rather use Python for a large project, I'd rather use Perl for anything with significant amounts of text processing. There are times when weird kludges and shortcuts are actually a good thing. I know someone who programs in Lisp whenever possible. C is usually the last resort of people who think it'll be faster than Perl. Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes they simply can't program worth shit.
The real problem is that many bioinformaticists have no concept of software engineering. This applies on many levels. First, they can't write reusable, maintainable code. Second, they have no concept of algorithms or recursion. Third, they never get to the point where they can write software reflexively. The best code, in my experience, is the stuff that's pounded out in under an hour, but which has been thought about for days beforehand. I think everyone wanting to do bioinformatics should be forced to take an intermediate CS class before they're allowed to do research, rather than sitting down with an O'Reilly book and starting to write code. They'll waste less of their time and everyone else's this way.
Frankly, however, two-thirds of the time of any bioinformaticist is spent interpreting and reformatting the crap data that biologists give us.
Please, to make your point stronger, name ONE company that got rich with patents on DNA.
Well, many have tried. Myriad Genetics, for one. Most of the companies who hoped to make it rich this way (Incyte, HGS, Millennium) are aparently having problems - this was a Slashdot article about a month ago.
The two projects are actually very different.
Folding@Home does molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the pathway of protein folding. It does not predict the final structure, at least not to useful resolution. It is simply a biophysical simulation. Pretty cool at that, but people misunderstand it.
The UD Cancer Research project is doing "virtual library screening" - essentially, docking many small molecules to proteins of known structure, sampling many conformations to determine which candidate compounds bind with the greatest affinity. The idea is that it will screen out the worst candidates, leaving many fewer to be verified experimentally.
Many people are doing the latter; it's the basis of computational drug design. I think the other projects you mentioned are doing exactly the same sort of simulation. *If*, and only if, it works, it will actually be medically useful (though it still requires a lot of grunt work to verify the predictions).
It's very nice to know how proteins fold. Good, solid, theoretical work. However, most people confuse this with what proteins look like when they're folded. Computational simulation will never be a substitute for experimental work in this field. Too many of the people talking about "protein folding" do not seem to understand this.
To take your absurd motherboard example, understanding protein folding is more akin to understanding the principles of electromagnetism. It still won't tell you how the thing works.
I haven't seen anyone doing interaction studies via biophysical simulation - it's all been done by other means. It's hard enough to simulate the folding of a small peptide chain; we're certainly not ready to study interactions of entire subunits.
given a sequence of letters (out of the four), what protein (3-D structure, function, reactive parts etc) is associated with it? How is it cut into introns and exons? What sequence of letters can act as regulators?
Virtually all of this requires significant experimental work, to varying degrees- I wouldn't call this the "computational part" under any circumstances. Some things can be done at least partway through bioinformatics; introns and exons, for example. For protein structure and function the best we can do is use homology to proteins of known structure and/or function. To get the high-resolution structure, it still needs to be crystallized. . . which can be a colossal pain in the ass. Computational studies will not be a substitute for this until after all the protein structures have been solved experimentally anyway.
The NY Times article about this mentions that Watson asked Wilkins if he and Franklin should share co-authorship on the famous article, but that Wilkins declined (for both of them!). From what I've read, I always thought Wilkins was the real dickhead; he just assumed that Franklin was a subordinate, and treated her as such. It would not be the last time that a junior scientist has had his or her research stolen by their faculty advisor (though Franklin was not even working under Wilkins). I've heard of worse.
The real tragedy is the way Watson treated Franklin
No, the real tragedy is that she died of ovarian cancer in 1958. For her to have done as well as she did in that era, she clearly must have been absolutely brilliant. And she did great work after DNA too- Aaron Klug won the Nobel for a project that Franklin was working on when she died. Birkbeck College (where she ended up) has a page about her which says she should have won two Nobels, if not for her untimely death.
When I get one of these autoreplies, unless it's someone I really care about contacting, I just ignore it. I know one professor who now uses 'vacation' to autoreply to everything with a message saying, in effect, that he's too busy and important to read every email. Fine- I'll remove his address from anything I send.
Occasionally I'll get a bot reply to a message I send to a subscribers-only email list. Every time, I contact the list admin and ask that the individual be removed. They've always complied. Usually I'm not even the first to ask.
I would consider using a whitelist myself, but I wouldn't be so stupid as to send obnoxious messages to everyone who tried to get in touch with me. Especially not if I signed up to receive these messages in the first place. . .
Two parts:
." is closer to reality than most people would guess.
1. Keanu asleep at the keyboard.
2. "I don't even see the code any more - now it's just blonde, brunette, redhead. .
Especially any scene involving the all-purpose appliance. Before I leave my current job, I swear I'm going to take an axe to our Xerox laser printer.
but only when we can first correct this very severe problem that exists in the process.
Okay, I oppose reproductive cloning for other reasons too, but let's start here. How exactly can scientists determine that they've fixed the problem without actually cloning and raising a human, perhaps with disasterous results? It would suck to spend the first 18 years of your life as a medical experiment.
Wrong for two reasons:
1. Genetic engineering is not "random". A better comparison would be a hacker taking 10MB of source code to some random program and adding an email client. (hey, like Emacs!)
2. The genetic code can handle quite a bit of "random" mutation. There are cases where it is extremely sensitive to mutation, such as sickle-cell leukemia (single poylmorphisim that causes hemoglobin to form chains), but there are "silent" mutations and even amino acid mutations that will have no effect.
So when some 80 y.o. geezer elects to have himself cloned the "new" baby will have the genetic signiture of an octagenarian
But it won't be the same person. You won't get real immortality this way, the way the bad guy does in the Schwarzenegger pic "The Sixth Day". Perhaps you could make your genetic material last perpetually, but this is just stupid.
Rael was on MSNBC talking about exactly this type of thing, and I was so pissed I threw my remote across the room. There's just no basis in biology for any of that crap.