"Nature" isn't intelligent, it just does what works. Imagine a startup company that hacks together a web site for a demo, soon that is the production version. Eventually the main website is based on a hack. A complete redesign just will never be in the budget, nor will it be viable as long as the hack is being maintained.
That describes perfectly what is going on in plants. Nobody in the comments has mentioned RuBisCO (although TFA does), but RuBisCO that is one of the most significant bottlenecks. Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (RuBisCO) is a protein that binds CO2 but it is competitively inhibited by O2. Because it evolved at a time when the earth's atmosphere had far more CO2 than it does now, it worked. Since the CO2 has gotten more sparse, rather than do a redesign, plants just produce more Rubisco. They make ALOT of RuBisCO; roughly 30% of the protein in a leaf is RuBisCO. If a version of RuBisCO could be engineered or modified to exclude oxygen, or even to slightly reduce oxygen affinity, plants could be orders of magnitude more efficient both in their nitrogen use (make less RuBisCO) and in their carbon fixation.
In TFA, the scientists are approaching this by attempting to have the plant concentrate CO2 near RuBisCO. Perhaps a better strategy since it is based on existent biology.
I strongly disagree with your conclusion. People, almost all people, are susceptible to group-think. It's built into our genes that we want to agree with those around us, a sort of empathy. This may seem counterintuitive because it is a well known fact that most people are resistant to persuasion, but this sort of group influence relies on a lack of an opinion prior to the influence.
One thing that always bothered me was that after political debates all the networks want to show me a group of "independents" who tell me who won. On fox you can bet they vote republican, and on CNN it's always the democrat who wins. Thing is, I don't want to know who they thought won! I would much rather hear some post debate fact checking and then turn the TV off: I know my opinion is susceptible to influence and I'd rather protect it, allowing me to crystallize my own opinion.
I assume you are referring to the continued feet dragging with the Honeycomb source.
I would like to start by saying that many of the people complaining about this are people with little knowledge of the Android development cycle. For starters, the newest version of Android is always released closed source so that Open Handset Alliance partners get premium access. Eventually the versions are all released under the Apache license. The only difference between Honeycomb and previous versions is that Google is slowing down the release a bit. They have not reversed their commitment to open source it, they just delayed it.
One of the most common complaints about Android is the fragmentation. This is one way that Google can slowly rein this in. If they are completely closed the source and locked the platform they will be much more like Apple. If they are completely open it will be more like Linux (Android distributions anybody?). It is in the middle ground where they can be both a little open, yet still control the platform and keep quality and homogeneity high.
[quote]Apple and any other company that hosts and shares this music deserve a piece, say 30% or something. And the rest needs to go to the ARTIST.[/quote]
The content of your comment implies that you didn't read the article. This article isn't about Apple getting a 30% margin of music sales, nor is the article about record companies getting too much money. Services like last.fm, pandora, and netflix purchase the rights to content from the record companies and repackage the content for streaming. They are the middle man, albeit a very visible, important, and useful middle man.
Apple's 30% revenue theft doesn't effect the record companies, it effects the service providers that we rely on. I use Pandora One on android and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay 30% more because some Apple exec thought they were entitled to 30% of Pandora's gross revenue. Pandora cannot afford the 30% loss in income; the cost of content is fixed. They really only have 2 choices, raise their price for everybody, or ditch iOS.
Also, a note on nomenclature. Many people in the media are calling this an "Apple tax"; this is incorrect. Tax is a percentage of profits. Apple's 30% is a cut of the gross revenue of a service. Many businesses could afford a 30% reduction in profits, but for the vast majority of businesses a 30% reduction in gross revenue translates to a greater than 100% reduction in profit.
People knock android for requiring a Google account, but I would argue that it doesn't: you can install the yahoo mobile app which also does email and contact synchronization.
Note that my statement assumes you are not on at&t which blocks 3rd party apps thus requires a google log-in to get the Yahoo app. A cool thing about Amazon coming out with an app store soon is that it will become an option to purchase an Android phone even on a carrier like AT&T and avoid all ties to google.
I like Google but I can see why some people want to stay out of their databases, a 'fragmented' android is a free android. Steve Jobs and his iJail army will never have that advantage.
So because a copyright troll sued a conservative it is somehow benign or OK? What if somebody sued Obama for reprinting a NYT article on his campaign website? What if somebody sued a college professor for reprinting a journal article on his class web page? Either of these actions would be no different in principle, but both would cause slashdot to go into a state of perpetual bloodlust for the copyright troll's head.
Anyways, I'm just saying that it's not right no matter who it is. If the newspaper was really offended, perhaps they should have sent a letter requesting her to take it down before they let some scumbag get the rights to sue her.
My mother, who is a database admin for a county office (and has been for a long time), was getting a tour of a brand new mainframe server in the basement of her department's building back in the early 80's. At some point during the tour a large red button was pointed out that controlled the water-free fire suppression system. When pressed it activated a countdown safety timer that could be deactivated when the button was pulled back out.
Always wanting to try things for herself, she went to the red button at the end of the tour and pressed it. No timer was activated, instead a noticeable shutting down sound was heard as the buzzing of the mainframe died down. She accidentally hit the manual power-off button for the mainframe which was situated very close to the fire suppression button and happened to look similar.
All the IT staff of that building got to go home early that day because the mainframe took several hours to reboot and it was already lunch. She was very embarrassed and I have heard that story many times.
Did you even read what I had said? This practice has been going on for thousands of years. What you said about disease in mono culture is true, but many of the sexually reproducing plants don't have more than a few dozen viable strains. Farmers know how to deal with fungal, viral, bacterial, and insect pests.
Furthermore, Monsanto only has a corner on the strains it produces. If that strain is the only viable strain of that plant, then we should applaud Monsanto for making a new breed that is so productive and/or hearty as to make all previous versions obsolete. But patents run out, and if their fees are truly abhorrent, farmers can just wait that 20 years while growing a different crop or strain.
"They also have a nasty habit of breeding strains that can not reproduce on their own."
Are you saying that the practice of cloning plants by grafting, which has been done since before written history, is going to somehow fail us? The domestication of apples, peaches, cherries, and many other fruits and nuts would have been impossible without clone propagation. If you ever doubt me, please plant an almond and enjoy the bitter useless nut that comes off the progeny. Most of the food you eat today comes from plants that "cannot reproduce their own".
These days we are even more advanced. Through plant tissue culturing we can even reproduce plants that can't be propagated by seed or grafting. Plant tissue culturing sounds impossible, but most people with a book and a credit card could do it in their kitchen.
I never said that the eventual loss of helium as a feasable refridgerant is a good thing. There would be a significant loss in sensitivity and much longer trials would have to be run just to get the same results. There are many fields where high priced helium would hinder productivity, but it's just something we have to deal with, and something that history has shown we will be able to deal with.
We really have 2 options: 1) stop using helium now because it will eventually run out. 2) stop using helium later when it eventually runs out. They both lead to the same result.
Being more conservative will help slow down the loss of helium, and one of the best ways to make people more conservative is by letting the free market determine the price of helium: no government subsidy, no government rationing.
If only the Romans had been more conservative with their wood resource use! If they had carefully controlled the cutting of trees and rationed the wood, they could have theoretically never run out, and we would still be using the burning of wood as our primary energy source today.
The next energy and/or mineral gap is always just around the bend, and while prices are cheap, people never develop (or find) alternatives. I agree that we should not be keeping the helium price artificially low, but don't think that we should go into crisis rationing mode just yet.
There are alternatives on the horizon (using NMR as an example since I am familiar with it): high temperature superconductors exist that some day will be able to make powerful magnetic fields while cooled only by nitrogen. More sensitive detectors and better analysis methods can yield more data from weaker magnets. There are solutions just waiting to be found. If we ran out of helium today, I promise you that organic chemists would still be using NMR in a year.
Maybe all the android owners are watching Nascar right now. I just came out of Infinion raceway and I didn't see many iPhones but a lot of people had Droids
Read article 1, section 8 and come back here. Without a complacent (corrupt?) supreme court, most of the legislation passed in congress these days clearly does not fall under the scope of the federal government outlined in our constitution. It is only by the circular logic of jurisprudence that many of our most egregious constitutional infringements are taking place.
I do believe that more so than any other section of the constitution we are ignoring article 1, section 8; the enumeration of the powers of congress.
Many people would like to forget that the centralized government of our nation was meant to be weak and primarily used for defense and diplomacy. You see, prior to the foundation of the US, the word 'State' referred to an independently governed nation. Hence the name, United States. Maybe we should change the name of our country to "The united group of quasi-distinct geographic areas of america".
Commentary, like news, does have an expiration date. Who could write a tech cult article today without mentioning Android? I guess this goes to show how fast info in the tech world seems dated.
Thats cool and all, but can they power my stillsuit, will they alert the sandworms of my location, and are they compatible with the foot controls of my ornithopter?
My point was that many of us are armchair physicists. I don't know much about quantum theory or astrophysics other than the watered down versions of those subjects in popular press and on Wikipedia. Black holes are interesting and exciting, but I feel like a first grader hearing a description of calculus every time I read an article about them.
My understanding was that black holes were a singularity. As for how something with no dimensions can spin, I am baffled. Perhaps my understanding of graduate level astrophysics is lagging a little.
The average cost per megabyte is directly dependent on how many megabytes you use, if I use 100 megabytes a month and I'm paying $30, the cost is way higher.
You say, "How about the other 5%?" Maybe the top 5% should be paying more for data! If you paid a flat rate for gas, why would you ever buy a prius? It is no secret that AT&T's cellular network is overstressed. You can build more towers, but AT&T can't build more spectrum.
I own an Eris and I recently got the update. I noticed a contact loss for about 1 minute until the phone re-synced and restored all my info stored on the cloud.
For the 99.9% of people who sync contacts with Google or Facebook there is no loss. When I bought my phone, the Verizon representative insisted that we set it up with all the accounts I have. I'm sure this is true for most Eris owners. For that 0.1% of Android phone owners without Google or Facebook, HTC distributed PC sync software for the purpose of backing up contacts.
Slashdot Mirror
"NSF and research" = "Railroad retirement and income security"
"Weapon R&D" = 17x"NSF and research"
Something is seriously wrong with our priorities.
"Nature" isn't intelligent, it just does what works. Imagine a startup company that hacks together a web site for a demo, soon that is the production version. Eventually the main website is based on a hack. A complete redesign just will never be in the budget, nor will it be viable as long as the hack is being maintained.
That describes perfectly what is going on in plants. Nobody in the comments has mentioned RuBisCO (although TFA does), but RuBisCO that is one of the most significant bottlenecks. Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (RuBisCO) is a protein that binds CO2 but it is competitively inhibited by O2. Because it evolved at a time when the earth's atmosphere had far more CO2 than it does now, it worked. Since the CO2 has gotten more sparse, rather than do a redesign, plants just produce more Rubisco. They make ALOT of RuBisCO; roughly 30% of the protein in a leaf is RuBisCO. If a version of RuBisCO could be engineered or modified to exclude oxygen, or even to slightly reduce oxygen affinity, plants could be orders of magnitude more efficient both in their nitrogen use (make less RuBisCO) and in their carbon fixation.
In TFA, the scientists are approaching this by attempting to have the plant concentrate CO2 near RuBisCO. Perhaps a better strategy since it is based on existent biology.
I strongly disagree with your conclusion. People, almost all people, are susceptible to group-think. It's built into our genes that we want to agree with those around us, a sort of empathy. This may seem counterintuitive because it is a well known fact that most people are resistant to persuasion, but this sort of group influence relies on a lack of an opinion prior to the influence.
One thing that always bothered me was that after political debates all the networks want to show me a group of "independents" who tell me who won. On fox you can bet they vote republican, and on CNN it's always the democrat who wins. Thing is, I don't want to know who they thought won! I would much rather hear some post debate fact checking and then turn the TV off: I know my opinion is susceptible to influence and I'd rather protect it, allowing me to crystallize my own opinion.
I assume you are referring to the continued feet dragging with the Honeycomb source.
I would like to start by saying that many of the people complaining about this are people with little knowledge of the Android development cycle. For starters, the newest version of Android is always released closed source so that Open Handset Alliance partners get premium access. Eventually the versions are all released under the Apache license. The only difference between Honeycomb and previous versions is that Google is slowing down the release a bit. They have not reversed their commitment to open source it, they just delayed it.
One of the most common complaints about Android is the fragmentation. This is one way that Google can slowly rein this in. If they are completely closed the source and locked the platform they will be much more like Apple. If they are completely open it will be more like Linux (Android distributions anybody?). It is in the middle ground where they can be both a little open, yet still control the platform and keep quality and homogeneity high.
[quote]Apple and any other company that hosts and shares this music deserve a piece, say 30% or something. And the rest needs to go to the ARTIST.[/quote]
The content of your comment implies that you didn't read the article. This article isn't about Apple getting a 30% margin of music sales, nor is the article about record companies getting too much money. Services like last.fm, pandora, and netflix purchase the rights to content from the record companies and repackage the content for streaming. They are the middle man, albeit a very visible, important, and useful middle man.
Apple's 30% revenue theft doesn't effect the record companies, it effects the service providers that we rely on. I use Pandora One on android and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay 30% more because some Apple exec thought they were entitled to 30% of Pandora's gross revenue. Pandora cannot afford the 30% loss in income; the cost of content is fixed. They really only have 2 choices, raise their price for everybody, or ditch iOS.
Also, a note on nomenclature. Many people in the media are calling this an "Apple tax"; this is incorrect. Tax is a percentage of profits. Apple's 30% is a cut of the gross revenue of a service. Many businesses could afford a 30% reduction in profits, but for the vast majority of businesses a 30% reduction in gross revenue translates to a greater than 100% reduction in profit.
It would help to know what field of law he is in.
Step 1: Profit!!!
Step 2: ????
Step 3: block apps that mention your competitor
Step 4: block the iOS browser from viewing android blogs and news postings.
People knock android for requiring a Google account, but I would argue that it doesn't: you can install the yahoo mobile app which also does email and contact synchronization.
Note that my statement assumes you are not on at&t which blocks 3rd party apps thus requires a google log-in to get the Yahoo app. A cool thing about Amazon coming out with an app store soon is that it will become an option to purchase an Android phone even on a carrier like AT&T and avoid all ties to google.
I like Google but I can see why some people want to stay out of their databases, a 'fragmented' android is a free android. Steve Jobs and his iJail army will never have that advantage.
That's why I use Dropbox; not only is it saved to the ethereal cloud, but a hard copy of all my work is on my wife's computer.
So because a copyright troll sued a conservative it is somehow benign or OK? What if somebody sued Obama for reprinting a NYT article on his campaign website? What if somebody sued a college professor for reprinting a journal article on his class web page? Either of these actions would be no different in principle, but both would cause slashdot to go into a state of perpetual bloodlust for the copyright troll's head.
Anyways, I'm just saying that it's not right no matter who it is. If the newspaper was really offended, perhaps they should have sent a letter requesting her to take it down before they let some scumbag get the rights to sue her.
My mother, who is a database admin for a county office (and has been for a long time), was getting a tour of a brand new mainframe server in the basement of her department's building back in the early 80's. At some point during the tour a large red button was pointed out that controlled the water-free fire suppression system. When pressed it activated a countdown safety timer that could be deactivated when the button was pulled back out.
Always wanting to try things for herself, she went to the red button at the end of the tour and pressed it. No timer was activated, instead a noticeable shutting down sound was heard as the buzzing of the mainframe died down. She accidentally hit the manual power-off button for the mainframe which was situated very close to the fire suppression button and happened to look similar.
All the IT staff of that building got to go home early that day because the mainframe took several hours to reboot and it was already lunch. She was very embarrassed and I have heard that story many times.
Did you even read what I had said? This practice has been going on for thousands of years. What you said about disease in mono culture is true, but many of the sexually reproducing plants don't have more than a few dozen viable strains. Farmers know how to deal with fungal, viral, bacterial, and insect pests.
Furthermore, Monsanto only has a corner on the strains it produces. If that strain is the only viable strain of that plant, then we should applaud Monsanto for making a new breed that is so productive and/or hearty as to make all previous versions obsolete. But patents run out, and if their fees are truly abhorrent, farmers can just wait that 20 years while growing a different crop or strain.
"They also have a nasty habit of breeding strains that can not reproduce on their own."
Are you saying that the practice of cloning plants by grafting, which has been done since before written history, is going to somehow fail us? The domestication of apples, peaches, cherries, and many other fruits and nuts would have been impossible without clone propagation. If you ever doubt me, please plant an almond and enjoy the bitter useless nut that comes off the progeny. Most of the food you eat today comes from plants that "cannot reproduce their own".
These days we are even more advanced. Through plant tissue culturing we can even reproduce plants that can't be propagated by seed or grafting. Plant tissue culturing sounds impossible, but most people with a book and a credit card could do it in their kitchen.
I never said that the eventual loss of helium as a feasable refridgerant is a good thing. There would be a significant loss in sensitivity and much longer trials would have to be run just to get the same results. There are many fields where high priced helium would hinder productivity, but it's just something we have to deal with, and something that history has shown we will be able to deal with.
We really have 2 options:
1) stop using helium now because it will eventually run out.
2) stop using helium later when it eventually runs out.
They both lead to the same result.
Being more conservative will help slow down the loss of helium, and one of the best ways to make people more conservative is by letting the free market determine the price of helium: no government subsidy, no government rationing.
If only the Romans had been more conservative with their wood resource use! If they had carefully controlled the cutting of trees and rationed the wood, they could have theoretically never run out, and we would still be using the burning of wood as our primary energy source today.
The next energy and/or mineral gap is always just around the bend, and while prices are cheap, people never develop (or find) alternatives. I agree that we should not be keeping the helium price artificially low, but don't think that we should go into crisis rationing mode just yet.
There are alternatives on the horizon (using NMR as an example since I am familiar with it): high temperature superconductors exist that some day will be able to make powerful magnetic fields while cooled only by nitrogen. More sensitive detectors and better analysis methods can yield more data from weaker magnets. There are solutions just waiting to be found. If we ran out of helium today, I promise you that organic chemists would still be using NMR in a year.
Maybe all the android owners are watching Nascar right now. I just came out of Infinion raceway and I didn't see many iPhones but a lot of people had Droids
PS. Typed on my eris with swype
Read article 1, section 8 and come back here. Without a complacent (corrupt?) supreme court, most of the legislation passed in congress these days clearly does not fall under the scope of the federal government outlined in our constitution. It is only by the circular logic of jurisprudence that many of our most egregious constitutional infringements are taking place.
I do believe that more so than any other section of the constitution we are ignoring article 1, section 8; the enumeration of the powers of congress.
Many people would like to forget that the centralized government of our nation was meant to be weak and primarily used for defense and diplomacy. You see, prior to the foundation of the US, the word 'State' referred to an independently governed nation. Hence the name, United States. Maybe we should change the name of our country to "The united group of quasi-distinct geographic areas of america".
Commentary, like news, does have an expiration date. Who could write a tech cult article today without mentioning Android? I guess this goes to show how fast info in the tech world seems dated.
From article:
By Dan Tynan
Created 2009-05-04
I became suspicious when he predicted the resurgence of palm.
Thats cool and all, but can they power my stillsuit, will they alert the sandworms of my location, and are they compatible with the foot controls of my ornithopter?
Wow, lots of responses.
My point was that many of us are armchair physicists. I don't know much about quantum theory or astrophysics other than the watered down versions of those subjects in popular press and on Wikipedia. Black holes are interesting and exciting, but I feel like a first grader hearing a description of calculus every time I read an article about them.
My understanding was that black holes were a singularity. As for how something with no dimensions can spin, I am baffled. Perhaps my understanding of graduate level astrophysics is lagging a little.
The average cost per megabyte is directly dependent on how many megabytes you use, if I use 100 megabytes a month and I'm paying $30, the cost is way higher.
You say, "How about the other 5%?" Maybe the top 5% should be paying more for data! If you paid a flat rate for gas, why would you ever buy a prius? It is no secret that AT&T's cellular network is overstressed. You can build more towers, but AT&T can't build more spectrum.
I own an Eris and I recently got the update. I noticed a contact loss for about 1 minute until the phone re-synced and restored all my info stored on the cloud.
For the 99.9% of people who sync contacts with Google or Facebook there is no loss. When I bought my phone, the Verizon representative insisted that we set it up with all the accounts I have. I'm sure this is true for most Eris owners. For that 0.1% of Android phone owners without Google or Facebook, HTC distributed PC sync software for the purpose of backing up contacts.