...rogue countries probably had the virus, and hence destroying it would damage future defense attempts.
Yeah, like it's going to be hard to get a culture once a bunch of people are infected.
The only situation where already having the culture would make a difference would be in some kind of bio-weapons arms race where there was the threat of use but not actual use. The thing is, nukes are way more effective weapons than bio-weapons (you can't quarantine nukes, nukes don't require exact weather conditions, nukes are harder to shoot down, etc.) so there's no point in a bio-weapons arms race.
North Korea would be like "We've got enough smallpox that if we could somehow magically deliver it half way around the world in just the right dosage we could kill thousands of people in a couple of your major cities." and the USA would be like "We've got enough nukes loaded on ICBM's that we can level your entire country in a matter of hours."
Being in science/engineering is like playing Santa in a mall: people like the superficial image of benevolence but not the underlying reality of harsh disappointments.
What did it for me, though, was the bit about the hot bartender that is so obsessed with the superficial image of Santa that she completely ignores the underlying realities of Bad Santa and throws herself at him.
If there's hope for Bad Santa, there's gotta be hope for me.
My assessment was that the ring gave the power to lead (a sort of mind control). As a result, the ring was most dangerous to those who saw it as their task to shape the course of world events. Faramir, however, was mostly interested in conducting himself well as he carried out the orders of others so he wasn't really tempted by the ring.
Reversing aging of the brain is problematic because if you reverse the
"aging" you also erase the memories (which are just accumulated
patterns of the neurons).
By the time it is possible to deal with that problem, it will also be
possible to transfer the neural patterns representing memories to
things like patterns of energy permeating space.
And it will also be possible to change one's emotions so that one is
pure happiness or pure goodness or pure evil. So, essentially, by the
time we have immortality we will have become gods.
Especially when they aren't cheap either and joe has no use for it's features
A lot of people do video editing and 3D stuff but you can't win if you don't play so, yeah, unless they're cheap and easily available the average consumer isn't going to be buying.
Reminds me of Unix in the late 80's and early 90's: it was so hard to get and expensive that someone had to go out a write a free version from scratch for it to get popular for home use.
Now that stereo 3D is available with Linux and consumer hardware, the SGI offerings look a whole lot less impressive.
I looked into getting an SGI workstation a while back but since I wasn't a big corporation they treated me like I didn't exist. If SGI dropped their prices and marketed their stuff through something like Best Buy they'd have a chance of being more than a niche market supercomputer manufacturer but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
Clinton's personal life should definitely be considered a sign of greatness but most people don't think it caused enough violence and suffering to be a truly great.
If Andrew Jackson's ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears) can get him commemorated on a $20 bill, then Reagan's lies (Iran-Contra) should be enough to get him commemorated on an aircraft carrier.
One would think that his time is more valuably spent running important medical institutions, searching for new cancer insights/cures, etc,...
Either that or it was a subtle critique of the Bush administration's use of fear of biological terrorism to justify it's foreign policy.
Most of the points Varmus makes about the movie also apply biological weapons. These include points include the time required for the the organism's replication, the difficulties of transmission and the idea that the world is already under constant biological attack already (many times the number of people killed in 9/11 die every day of preventable biological diseases).
I would imagine that Varmus has to be pretty constrained in his critique of the government if he wants them to continue giving him money. If he didn't he'd probably be like: "Hey idiots! Quit beating up the Middle East and get real about stopping the biological organisms that are actually killing people right now!"
A movie where the main good guy was in love with a character called Allah (instead of Trinity) and was using gratuitous violence to fight for a place called Palestine (rather than Zion) would encounter calls for censorship in the US.
All this Linux audio stuff is great for Linux nerds with no friends because now they can sing in harmony with recordings of themselves and not get the nasty distortion that results from trying to use a taperecorder for that purpose.
Maybe it wasn't that funny but it wasn't a troll. The point I was making was that the conference was about serious recording audio rather than comsumer entertainment audio. Recording audio is about being able to playback and record multiple tracks simultaneously so the point is that Linux is becoming a viable platform for people who want to do multitrack recording and editing in digital rather than analog format.
All this Linux audio stuff is great for Linux nerds with no friends because now they can sing in harmony with recordings of themselves and not get the nasty distortion that results from trying to use a taperecorder for that purpose.
Re:Microbes would be ... depressing.
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 1
If there is life out there that is millions of years less advanced then there is probably also life out there that is millions of years more advanced.
Of course, life that is millions of years more advanced than us probably has as much in common with us as we do with life that is millions of years less advanced than us (bacteria).
For example, in a few million years we'll probably have transferred our consciousness to patterns of energy permeating the universe and biological sensations such as happiness, fear and love will no longer have any meaning for us. Or they will be much more complex than we can comprehend in our current state. Sort of like hunger for bacteria versus hunger for present day humans.
While some problems can be solved by funding the development of new technology, an awful lot of problems could also be solved if people would quit beating on each other.
For example, in most cases where people are starving, the problem is less that there isn't the technology to produce enough food and more that someone else (eg. a country that's at war with them) wants them to starve. At least with Fosset's effort someone else isn't spending a lot of money trying to shoot him down.
On the other hand, I take that view that if Bill Gates really wanted to do something useful with his money, he would promote Free Software rather than mucking about with trying to shape policy in less developed countries.
If each person in your group is going to be evaluated on the work they are responsible for, then make sure you you get the work you are responsible for completely done before you start helping others. Otherwise, when the project fails and nobody has their work done (including you) you'll look just as bad as the rest.
There are two views on how to make life better. The first is to try to arrange things so that everyone gets what they want without getting in each other's way. The second is to figure out who's trying to get things they shouldn't and to hurt them.
One of the things that I don't like about the Bush administration is that they seem to take the second view. That is, they go around figuring out who they don't like and hurting them. Along those lines, they promote a view where a law abiding "Good Public" needs to go around smugly beating on law breaking "Bad Individuals".
The current case is an example of this. Even though these "warez gangs" would be totally inconsequential without a general public that was eager to take advantage of their services, it is a few individuals in these "warez gangs" that are targeted. In this particular case, it sounds like the software that was cracked wasn't even used by the "warez gang", but it was the "warez gang" that 's going to jail.
My impression was that PubMed was a database of journal articles rather than a database of the data itself.
Along those lines, I suspect that an equally important factor preventing "open source biology" will be the policy of scientific journals to not publish that has been "published" previously. That is, if you contribute your data to an open source database, you may not then be able to publish it.
Back when it was possible to read all the journals relating to a particular field cover to cover, it made sense for scientific dscoveries to be published in journals. Now, however, there is just too much data out there and what is needed is a curated (by online volunteers) heirarchichal database. From the article, it sounds like Gilman is doing just that. I wouldn't be surprised if scientific journals become obsolete in the next 20 years.
My family has one of the old player pianos that uses the punched out paper rolls. The only rolls we have are old "grandparent's music" so we don't use it that much (or at all, actually).
I can see a place for the new player pianos in music education and maybe at cheap religious events (cheap weddings, funerals, etc.) but unless Britney releases her next big hit in this format I doubt it will catch on for home use (aside from the $150K price issue).
An alternative to geothermal would be huge mats of seaweed in the oceans that have been genetically engineered to convert the CO2 back into oil or ethanol.
At any rate, Iceland probably has a better chance with geothermal than with solar given its location.
If they are really serious about cloning the whole animal they should wait until the technology is actually available and not waste the DNA that they have some largely pointless "experiments".
One way to achieve an impossible goal is to redefine the key terms in the statement of that goal until it becomes possible. It sounds to me like the term "light" may get a bit of a redefinition when it comes to near field "optics".
That's not to say that near field "light" can't be useful for, say, marking an optical disk. But until it is conclusively proven otherwise I will contend that applications that absolutely require (only) visible wavelength illumination and sub-nanometer spacial resolution are "pretty much impossible". Not that there's anything wrong with trying the impossible. After all, I'm in protein folding.
I don't know what they mean by "near field" in this particular case. There are, however, labs out there that are trying to overcome the "diffraction limit" of light waves which is pretty impossible (ie. How do you make a wave with wavelength x shorter than x?).
I'm not saying that what these guys have accomplished is impossible but I wouldn't be surprised if what they are trying to accomplish is impossible.
I'm certainly no expert on the Constitution, but I believe that the first ammendment was put into place not to allow citizens to say and act whatever and however they please, but rather to act as a guard against the kind of oppression that was found in England at the time.
Freedom is less about being allowed to do things that everyone thinks are a good idea and more about being allowed to do things that just about everyone thinks are a bad idea. Free speech is about being allowed to say things that most people don't want to have said. That's why freedom is a hard issue.
This particular chain is probably too big to see much brownian motion. Something like the ion channels that control the movement of ions across cell membranes might be more the right size.
If one could design an ion channel that allowed ions to diffuse in one and only one direction one would have a battery that never needed charging. Of course, if that were possible evolution would probably have done it already. On the other hand, as I understand it, Boltzmann's H-Theorem only applies to dilute gasses so it remains to be proved that such a thing is impossible.
Maybe the reason that humans are smarter than animals is that the neural ion channels in human brains have evolved to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It would be interesting to know if anyone has ever looked at whether ion channels obey the Second Law.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, like it's going to be hard to get a culture once a bunch of people are infected.
The only situation where already having the culture would make a difference would be in some kind of bio-weapons arms race where there was the threat of use but not actual use. The thing is, nukes are way more effective weapons than bio-weapons (you can't quarantine nukes, nukes don't require exact weather conditions, nukes are harder to shoot down, etc.) so there's no point in a bio-weapons arms race.
North Korea would be like "We've got enough smallpox that if we could somehow magically deliver it half way around the world in just the right dosage we could kill thousands of people in a couple of your major cities." and the USA would be like "We've got enough nukes loaded on ICBM's that we can level your entire country in a matter of hours."
Being in science/engineering is like playing Santa in a mall: people like the superficial image of benevolence but not the underlying reality of harsh disappointments.
What did it for me, though, was the bit about the hot bartender that is so obsessed with the superficial image of Santa that she completely ignores the underlying realities of Bad Santa and throws herself at him.
If there's hope for Bad Santa, there's gotta be hope for me.
My assessment was that the ring gave the power to lead (a sort of mind control). As a result, the ring was most dangerous to those who saw it as their task to shape the course of world events. Faramir, however, was mostly interested in conducting himself well as he carried out the orders of others so he wasn't really tempted by the ring.
By the time it is possible to deal with that problem, it will also be possible to transfer the neural patterns representing memories to things like patterns of energy permeating space.
And it will also be possible to change one's emotions so that one is pure happiness or pure goodness or pure evil. So, essentially, by the time we have immortality we will have become gods.
A lot of people do video editing and 3D stuff but you can't win if you don't play so, yeah, unless they're cheap and easily available the average consumer isn't going to be buying.
Reminds me of Unix in the late 80's and early 90's: it was so hard to get and expensive that someone had to go out a write a free version from scratch for it to get popular for home use.
Now that stereo 3D is available with Linux and consumer hardware, the SGI offerings look a whole lot less impressive.
I looked into getting an SGI workstation a while back but since I wasn't a big corporation they treated me like I didn't exist. If SGI dropped their prices and marketed their stuff through something like Best Buy they'd have a chance of being more than a niche market supercomputer manufacturer but maybe that's all they care about anyway.
Clinton's personal life should definitely be considered a sign of greatness but most people don't think it caused enough violence and suffering to be a truly great.
If Andrew Jackson's ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears) can get him commemorated on a $20 bill, then Reagan's lies (Iran-Contra) should be enough to get him commemorated on an aircraft carrier.
Either that or it was a subtle critique of the Bush administration's use of fear of biological terrorism to justify it's foreign policy.
Most of the points Varmus makes about the movie also apply biological weapons. These include points include the time required for the the organism's replication, the difficulties of transmission and the idea that the world is already under constant biological attack already (many times the number of people killed in 9/11 die every day of preventable biological diseases).
I would imagine that Varmus has to be pretty constrained in his critique of the government if he wants them to continue giving him money. If he didn't he'd probably be like: "Hey idiots! Quit beating up the Middle East and get real about stopping the biological organisms that are actually killing people right now!"
This point has been made earlier but...
A movie where the main good guy was in love with a character called Allah (instead of Trinity) and was using gratuitous violence to fight for a place called Palestine (rather than Zion) would encounter calls for censorship in the US.
Maybe it wasn't that funny but it wasn't a troll. The point I was making was that the conference was about serious recording audio rather than comsumer entertainment audio. Recording audio is about being able to playback and record multiple tracks simultaneously so the point is that Linux is becoming a viable platform for people who want to do multitrack recording and editing in digital rather than analog format.
All this Linux audio stuff is great for Linux nerds with no friends because now they can sing in harmony with recordings of themselves and not get the nasty distortion that results from trying to use a taperecorder for that purpose.
Of course, life that is millions of years more advanced than us probably has as much in common with us as we do with life that is millions of years less advanced than us (bacteria).
For example, in a few million years we'll probably have transferred our consciousness to patterns of energy permeating the universe and biological sensations such as happiness, fear and love will no longer have any meaning for us. Or they will be much more complex than we can comprehend in our current state. Sort of like hunger for bacteria versus hunger for present day humans.
For example, in most cases where people are starving, the problem is less that there isn't the technology to produce enough food and more that someone else (eg. a country that's at war with them) wants them to starve. At least with Fosset's effort someone else isn't spending a lot of money trying to shoot him down.
On the other hand, I take that view that if Bill Gates really wanted to do something useful with his money, he would promote Free Software rather than mucking about with trying to shape policy in less developed countries.
If each person in your group is going to be evaluated on the work they are responsible for, then make sure you you get the work you are responsible for completely done before you start helping others. Otherwise, when the project fails and nobody has their work done (including you) you'll look just as bad as the rest.
One of the things that I don't like about the Bush administration is that they seem to take the second view. That is, they go around figuring out who they don't like and hurting them. Along those lines, they promote a view where a law abiding "Good Public" needs to go around smugly beating on law breaking "Bad Individuals".
The current case is an example of this. Even though these "warez gangs" would be totally inconsequential without a general public that was eager to take advantage of their services, it is a few individuals in these "warez gangs" that are targeted. In this particular case, it sounds like the software that was cracked wasn't even used by the "warez gang", but it was the "warez gang" that 's going to jail.
Along those lines, I suspect that an equally important factor preventing "open source biology" will be the policy of scientific journals to not publish that has been "published" previously. That is, if you contribute your data to an open source database, you may not then be able to publish it.
Back when it was possible to read all the journals relating to a particular field cover to cover, it made sense for scientific dscoveries to be published in journals. Now, however, there is just too much data out there and what is needed is a curated (by online volunteers) heirarchichal database. From the article, it sounds like Gilman is doing just that. I wouldn't be surprised if scientific journals become obsolete in the next 20 years.
My family has one of the old player pianos that uses the punched out paper rolls. The only rolls we have are old "grandparent's music" so we don't use it that much (or at all, actually).
I can see a place for the new player pianos in music education and maybe at cheap religious events (cheap weddings, funerals, etc.) but unless Britney releases her next big hit in this format I doubt it will catch on for home use (aside from the $150K price issue).
An alternative to geothermal would be huge mats of seaweed in the oceans that have been genetically engineered to convert the CO2 back into oil or ethanol.
At any rate, Iceland probably has a better chance with geothermal than with solar given its location.
If they are really serious about cloning the whole animal they should wait until the technology is actually available and not waste the DNA that they have some largely pointless "experiments".
That's not to say that near field "light" can't be useful for, say, marking an optical disk. But until it is conclusively proven otherwise I will contend that applications that absolutely require (only) visible wavelength illumination and sub-nanometer spacial resolution are "pretty much impossible". Not that there's anything wrong with trying the impossible. After all, I'm in protein folding.
I'm not saying that what these guys have accomplished is impossible but I wouldn't be surprised if what they are trying to accomplish is impossible.
Freedom is less about being allowed to do things that everyone thinks are a good idea and more about being allowed to do things that just about everyone thinks are a bad idea. Free speech is about being allowed to say things that most people don't want to have said. That's why freedom is a hard issue.
If one could design an ion channel that allowed ions to diffuse in one and only one direction one would have a battery that never needed charging. Of course, if that were possible evolution would probably have done it already. On the other hand, as I understand it, Boltzmann's H-Theorem only applies to dilute gasses so it remains to be proved that such a thing is impossible.
Maybe the reason that humans are smarter than animals is that the neural ion channels in human brains have evolved to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It would be interesting to know if anyone has ever looked at whether ion channels obey the Second Law.