Linux, Mac and Android are all UNIX-based. Writing something for Linux is relatively easily portable to Mac or Android. Porting to Windows is another venture alltogether.
Human cells already do some sort of checksumming on their genes. To start with, polymerases - the proteins that copy DNA - have proof-reading activity. That is to say, they check whether their copied DNA is equal to the parent DNA molecule.
Then, if DNA damage occurs - which happens more frequently than you'd think - it gets repaired almost entirely flawlessly. Single strand breaks are easy to repair for the cellular machinery; they can use the opposite strand of the same DNA molecule as a scaffold for repair. Double strand breaks are indeed more difficult to repair, but luckily we have two sets of each chromosome (one from mommy, and one from daddy), so if one breaks, the other pair member is used as a reference. Sure, these pairs of chromosomes are not entirely identical, but for most cases, it suffices.
As a result, the human mutation rate is on the order of about once every 100 million times. That's really low. Try to copy a 3GB file (roughly the size of human DNA) 100 million times on your computer, and I'm sure you'd have a lot more corrupted files than just 1. Unfortunately, the human body contains several trillions of cells, leaving enough room for incremental errors.
One hallmark of cancer is that it relies on (partially) shutting down this "checksumming", and as such can attain a much higher rate of mutation - and as a result, a much higher rate of evolution - than normal cells. (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867411001279?np=y for a very nice overview).
Besides that, just guarding the genes is not enough. Our genetics is more than enough to induce heavy proliferating cells. How else would we be able to grow from a single-celled individual (the fertillized egg) to a fully-grown body of several trillion cells? Healthy humans NEED proliferation (of certain cells), and thus we have genes that code for just that. The key here is activating certain genes in certain environments, and inactivating other genes. Every cell type has a different transcriptional landscape. This is controlled by epigenetics. Just guarding your genes would not guard against any changes in epigenetics, and you would still be prone to cancer.
Metastasis is intrinsically linked to cell mobility. Animal cells need to be more or less motile - depending on what cell type. All a human cancer cell has to do is activate the genetic pathway to become motile.
Plants don't require their cells to be very motile. The genetic framework is simply not there for plants; a plant cancer cell would have to entirely re-evolve mobility - something that is highly unlikely to happen. In stead, plant cells are mostly stuck. That means that any plant cancer will have great difficulty to metastasize.
Thus, by the very nature of humans being animals, we are prone to more metastasis than plants do.
(note: I'm not saying metastasis is purely the result of an increase in cell mobility of an already cancerous cell, but it does play an important factor)
In many places in the world a debit card is the only viable card option available for a sizeable fraction of the population. I know US citizens get credit cards super easy, but most of Europe's bank only give credit cards to middle income and higher income people. That, therefore, excludes most students and teens. The bank will only give them a debit card without a sizeable stable income. Credit card acceptance itself is generally quite low anyway. Ever tried to buy a Dutch train ticket with a credit card? Not possible. Cash is neither. Only debit cards are accepted.
That said, nowhere on the continent have I seen vending machines where one has to pay with a debit card directly. Rather, it's usually some kind of electronic wallet system (ChipKnip in the Netherlands, GeldKarte in Germany) that's used for vending machines. As these usually contain less than €50, there's not much to worry about when something goes wrong. Besides that, systems that no longer use the magnetic bar, but use the on-card chip instead (as is now mandatory in the Netherlands), are much harder to break.
I'm not sure whether I understand the principles correctly, but if you can conjure up something that deflects seismic waves, you wouldn't need to drill holes under the entire city. All you'd need is a ring of deflectors around the city large enough to deflect a decent earthquake. The city would then only be unprotected in the unlikely event the epicenter is directly beneath the city.
Even if that is, for some reason, impossible, underground work is required in most cities on a regular basis anyway. One could drill the necessary holes when the sewers are upgraded, new utility lines are being laid etc. Sure, that would mean at least several decades before completion for most areas, but most nation-scale infrastructure projects take that much time anyway.
Have you ever tried to use modern GNOME, i.e. version 3.x? It's an abomination! completely unworkable desktop environment. Every app takes over the entire screen, can't minimize/maximize etc. It tries to implement mobile "dekstop" features (as the aforementioned fullscreen apps), but this just doesn't work in a workstation environment. Or am I the only one these days who wants multiple windows open (and visible!) at the same time, so I can do terminal stuff simultaneously while writing a document and browsing the web?
Unity, on the other hand, is quite usable, even if it makes some rather odd design choices. Yes, it takes some getting used to, and it's not perfect, but it's a gazillion times better than default GNOME 3.x. I have tried GNOME fallback mode (basically gnome 3.x trying to impersonate its older self), but this has some serious features lacking (can't alt-tab for instance). Personally, I would now prefer something that combines GNOME 2.x with Unity. I do really like the unity dash for quick finding of files, but prefer to have an applications overview a la GNOME 2.
This might sound a bit stupid, but in my opinion it is more interesting to see how the soil survives than how the plants do. Most people think soil is dead material, while in fact it is full with activity of bacteria, fungi, insects, earthworms, nematodes and more. Growing anything usefull requires good soil. Once we know how soil biology behaves in Lunar conditions, we might be able to come up with a way to convert Lunar regolith into useable soil.
And you're confused because you're making this über-US-centric. AFAIK, fair use is a purely American concept. In many countries a notion of 'fair use' doesn't exist. As Canonical is a British company, any argument based on fair use might be totally irrelevant by definition.
Re: Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
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You're wrong. The net inflation of the yen over the last two decades is closer or below 0. In a nutshell: inflation no longer happens. See here for details: http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/japan/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-japan.aspx
Besides that, the word "Stagflation" is a combination of inflation and stagnation. It has nothing to do with deflation. Japan did not experience stagflation. It experienced stagnation, yes, but not stagflation. Stagflation is the paradoxical situation of having (high) inflation and stagnation at the same time - something that keynesian economics deems impossible. Much of Europe is going through stagflation.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
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For a good example of deflation: see Japan. Recession since the 1980s.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
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Bitcoin is a doomed currency by definition. At around 21 million bitcoins, no more bitcoins can be created. This inevitably means the value of bitcoins will rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. Another word for this: deflation. As any economist will tell you, deflation is extremely harmful for an economy. Why: the value of money increases, but the value of real (tangible) products DECREASES. On top of that, delfationist economist run the risk of its people to hoard all the money (since it will become more worth with time), instead of spending it into the real economy.
I'm sorry to awaken you from your dream that the NSA cannot monitor Ubuntu One clouds. It most definitely can. Have you ever looked at where your machine is connecting to when Ubuntu One is active? Right, it's Amazon. Canonical buys some cloud storage space from Amazon and basically just resells it. Amazon is, as we all know, an American company, and thus falls under PRISM.
Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space. That's something very different from intergalactic space. Something about several orders of magnitude further away.
Well.. Ubuntu nowadays does have quite some tracking. Remember the amazon shenanigans they built in to Ubuntu? You have to manually turn this off. How many casual users do you think know that it is even possible to turn this off? Or Ubuntu One? Or unity lenses? Or who assures me there is no back door in Zeitgeist?
If you want to market or profit from your app, you most probably need some kind of company registration. Hence, you are trackable - at least your company is.
Von Neumann was born in Hungary; he moved to the US in 1933. Einstein was a German; he moved to the US only in 1933, decades after he published his famous relativity theory in the 1910s. Now, if we were to follow your logic and only those countries where technology x was invented can use this technology, then the US would still be a well.... hunter-gatherer society. You can attribute many 20th century inventions to US citizens, but they tend to build on earlier industrial revolution technology. And where did that happen? Right, in Europe. Now, take your nationalistic bullshit, and put it up your ass. Technology is for all of mankind.
You're forgetting one major infrastructure problem that in my opinion plagues apps: mobile data plans. Most fancy games and apps these days are at least several tens of MBs big - I've seen ones which hit the 200MB mark. Most people - even in the developed world - don't have a mobile data plan of more than, say, 1GB per month. If one single game eats up one fifth of that data plan in no-time, that's a very big reason for me NOT to buy it. Sure, I could go home and use my wifi to download said app, but that kinda defies the concept of mobile, doesn't it? ISPs keep talking about speeds, fancy 4G/LTE etc, but the speed of mobile internet isn't really the problem; it's the limited amount of volume that is the bottleneck here.
I'm afraid to say, but there are loads of gene patents out there. SO yes, half your body belongs to some kind of corporation or another, and hence so will your clones (with the added bonus that the cloning technique itself probably has been patented a million times over)
Even though jezus christ, mohammed, buddha et al are all long dead and we can never provide evidence they were potentially damaging to society, does not mean their heritage hasn't been very very very damaging indeed. Need I remind you of the concept of crusades or jihad? In another example of religious-induced suffering, followers of the usually-so-peaceful buddha recently stormed and burned muslim villages in Myanmar, purely and only because the residents of those villages were not like-minded buddhists. ALL major religions have the alarming attribute of being potentially very harmful to society.
In a truly 'free' market there would be no such thing as patents or the International Trade Commission in the first place. Since patents - unfortunately - do exist, we need some kind of regulation. If companies really have a great invention, I'd think they could better just keep it really secret the old-fashioned way: Coca Cola never patented anything, yet even after all those years nobody knows its recipe and reproducing Coca Cola is therefore effectively impossible, just to give an example.
As far as we know, the speed of light has always been the same.
Not necessarily. Some so-called variable speed of light theories postulate that c could have been up to 60 orders of magnitude bigger in the very early universe than it is today. This would solve some problems in cosmology, and form an alternative to cosmic inflation theories.
As said, it takes only a few lines of code to fix this "bug". Not really hard. Just set a fixed amount of time for the response.
Besides:
The researchers also found that queries made to programs written in interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby -- both very popular on the Web -- generated responses much more slowly than other types of languages such as C or assembly language, making timing attacks more feasible. "For languages that are interpreted, you end up with a much greater timing difference than people thought," Lawson said.
Is there any situation where interpreted languages are actually faster than said other languages?;-)
Hmm... interesting observation. It is, however, flawed in the details.
Devising a system with a different currency for information sure as hell is necessary. The radical solution however, is not reputation exchange. Because then you'll come to the age old question of what's good and what's bad. In each culture, one's reputation would depend on different factor. Even factor that would up the reputation level in one place, would downgrade the reputation in the other. Not very useful in terms of international trade. However, I quite like the idea of something other than money the currency. I'd propose something more or less like the following:
People start out with a given number of credits/kudos/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-it. To get some kind of information you'd need to sacrifice a given number of credits. Giving information away would lead to receiving some a certain amount of credits. So in order to keep receiving information you need to GIVE information away as well. In such a way you prevent people from downloading huge amounts of data without giving something in return. On the other hand, you would ensure content creators give their information away, because otherwise they would not be able to receive information in the future (and everybody wants/needs information, right?). To ensure this not falling into a normal money system, one could propose a system where the cost of receiving is lower than the benefits of giving. So one would need to give more information than one receives to keep a positive account balance. Say person A and B have both have 1000 information credits. Persons A has some information that person B wants. Person B " sacrifices" 750 credits to get this information, while person A only receives 500 credits in giving this information. For person B to keep receiving information from person A, he has to give away his acquired information to another person (person C). It might seem like a normal money system, but whereas the usual systems focus on "acquiring as much as possible" this information-credit system more focusses on "giving as much as possible". Entirely different economy.
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Linux, Mac and Android are all UNIX-based. Writing something for Linux is relatively easily portable to Mac or Android. Porting to Windows is another venture alltogether.
Which will be fixed when 'light' clients à la MultiBit appear. They synchronize within a few seconds.
Human cells already do some sort of checksumming on their genes. To start with, polymerases - the proteins that copy DNA - have proof-reading activity. That is to say, they check whether their copied DNA is equal to the parent DNA molecule. Then, if DNA damage occurs - which happens more frequently than you'd think - it gets repaired almost entirely flawlessly. Single strand breaks are easy to repair for the cellular machinery; they can use the opposite strand of the same DNA molecule as a scaffold for repair. Double strand breaks are indeed more difficult to repair, but luckily we have two sets of each chromosome (one from mommy, and one from daddy), so if one breaks, the other pair member is used as a reference. Sure, these pairs of chromosomes are not entirely identical, but for most cases, it suffices. As a result, the human mutation rate is on the order of about once every 100 million times. That's really low. Try to copy a 3GB file (roughly the size of human DNA) 100 million times on your computer, and I'm sure you'd have a lot more corrupted files than just 1. Unfortunately, the human body contains several trillions of cells, leaving enough room for incremental errors. One hallmark of cancer is that it relies on (partially) shutting down this "checksumming", and as such can attain a much higher rate of mutation - and as a result, a much higher rate of evolution - than normal cells. (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867411001279?np=y for a very nice overview). Besides that, just guarding the genes is not enough. Our genetics is more than enough to induce heavy proliferating cells. How else would we be able to grow from a single-celled individual (the fertillized egg) to a fully-grown body of several trillion cells? Healthy humans NEED proliferation (of certain cells), and thus we have genes that code for just that. The key here is activating certain genes in certain environments, and inactivating other genes. Every cell type has a different transcriptional landscape. This is controlled by epigenetics. Just guarding your genes would not guard against any changes in epigenetics, and you would still be prone to cancer.
Metastasis is intrinsically linked to cell mobility. Animal cells need to be more or less motile - depending on what cell type. All a human cancer cell has to do is activate the genetic pathway to become motile. Plants don't require their cells to be very motile. The genetic framework is simply not there for plants; a plant cancer cell would have to entirely re-evolve mobility - something that is highly unlikely to happen. In stead, plant cells are mostly stuck. That means that any plant cancer will have great difficulty to metastasize. Thus, by the very nature of humans being animals, we are prone to more metastasis than plants do. (note: I'm not saying metastasis is purely the result of an increase in cell mobility of an already cancerous cell, but it does play an important factor)
In many places in the world a debit card is the only viable card option available for a sizeable fraction of the population. I know US citizens get credit cards super easy, but most of Europe's bank only give credit cards to middle income and higher income people. That, therefore, excludes most students and teens. The bank will only give them a debit card without a sizeable stable income. Credit card acceptance itself is generally quite low anyway. Ever tried to buy a Dutch train ticket with a credit card? Not possible. Cash is neither. Only debit cards are accepted.
That said, nowhere on the continent have I seen vending machines where one has to pay with a debit card directly. Rather, it's usually some kind of electronic wallet system (ChipKnip in the Netherlands, GeldKarte in Germany) that's used for vending machines. As these usually contain less than €50, there's not much to worry about when something goes wrong. Besides that, systems that no longer use the magnetic bar, but use the on-card chip instead (as is now mandatory in the Netherlands), are much harder to break.
I'm not sure whether I understand the principles correctly, but if you can conjure up something that deflects seismic waves, you wouldn't need to drill holes under the entire city. All you'd need is a ring of deflectors around the city large enough to deflect a decent earthquake. The city would then only be unprotected in the unlikely event the epicenter is directly beneath the city. Even if that is, for some reason, impossible, underground work is required in most cities on a regular basis anyway. One could drill the necessary holes when the sewers are upgraded, new utility lines are being laid etc. Sure, that would mean at least several decades before completion for most areas, but most nation-scale infrastructure projects take that much time anyway.
Have you ever tried to use modern GNOME, i.e. version 3.x? It's an abomination! completely unworkable desktop environment. Every app takes over the entire screen, can't minimize/maximize etc. It tries to implement mobile "dekstop" features (as the aforementioned fullscreen apps), but this just doesn't work in a workstation environment. Or am I the only one these days who wants multiple windows open (and visible!) at the same time, so I can do terminal stuff simultaneously while writing a document and browsing the web? Unity, on the other hand, is quite usable, even if it makes some rather odd design choices. Yes, it takes some getting used to, and it's not perfect, but it's a gazillion times better than default GNOME 3.x. I have tried GNOME fallback mode (basically gnome 3.x trying to impersonate its older self), but this has some serious features lacking (can't alt-tab for instance). Personally, I would now prefer something that combines GNOME 2.x with Unity. I do really like the unity dash for quick finding of files, but prefer to have an applications overview a la GNOME 2.
This might sound a bit stupid, but in my opinion it is more interesting to see how the soil survives than how the plants do. Most people think soil is dead material, while in fact it is full with activity of bacteria, fungi, insects, earthworms, nematodes and more. Growing anything usefull requires good soil. Once we know how soil biology behaves in Lunar conditions, we might be able to come up with a way to convert Lunar regolith into useable soil.
And you're confused because you're making this über-US-centric. AFAIK, fair use is a purely American concept. In many countries a notion of 'fair use' doesn't exist. As Canonical is a British company, any argument based on fair use might be totally irrelevant by definition.
You're wrong. The net inflation of the yen over the last two decades is closer or below 0. In a nutshell: inflation no longer happens. See here for details: http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/japan/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-japan.aspx Besides that, the word "Stagflation" is a combination of inflation and stagnation. It has nothing to do with deflation. Japan did not experience stagflation. It experienced stagnation, yes, but not stagflation. Stagflation is the paradoxical situation of having (high) inflation and stagnation at the same time - something that keynesian economics deems impossible. Much of Europe is going through stagflation.
For a good example of deflation: see Japan. Recession since the 1980s.
Bitcoin is a doomed currency by definition. At around 21 million bitcoins, no more bitcoins can be created. This inevitably means the value of bitcoins will rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. Another word for this: deflation. As any economist will tell you, deflation is extremely harmful for an economy. Why: the value of money increases, but the value of real (tangible) products DECREASES. On top of that, delfationist economist run the risk of its people to hoard all the money (since it will become more worth with time), instead of spending it into the real economy.
I'm sorry to awaken you from your dream that the NSA cannot monitor Ubuntu One clouds. It most definitely can. Have you ever looked at where your machine is connecting to when Ubuntu One is active? Right, it's Amazon. Canonical buys some cloud storage space from Amazon and basically just resells it. Amazon is, as we all know, an American company, and thus falls under PRISM.
Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space. That's something very different from intergalactic space. Something about several orders of magnitude further away.
Well.. Ubuntu nowadays does have quite some tracking. Remember the amazon shenanigans they built in to Ubuntu? You have to manually turn this off. How many casual users do you think know that it is even possible to turn this off? Or Ubuntu One? Or unity lenses? Or who assures me there is no back door in Zeitgeist?
If you want to market or profit from your app, you most probably need some kind of company registration. Hence, you are trackable - at least your company is.
Von Neumann was born in Hungary; he moved to the US in 1933. Einstein was a German; he moved to the US only in 1933, decades after he published his famous relativity theory in the 1910s. Now, if we were to follow your logic and only those countries where technology x was invented can use this technology, then the US would still be a well.... hunter-gatherer society. You can attribute many 20th century inventions to US citizens, but they tend to build on earlier industrial revolution technology. And where did that happen? Right, in Europe. Now, take your nationalistic bullshit, and put it up your ass. Technology is for all of mankind.
You're forgetting one major infrastructure problem that in my opinion plagues apps: mobile data plans. Most fancy games and apps these days are at least several tens of MBs big - I've seen ones which hit the 200MB mark. Most people - even in the developed world - don't have a mobile data plan of more than, say, 1GB per month. If one single game eats up one fifth of that data plan in no-time, that's a very big reason for me NOT to buy it. Sure, I could go home and use my wifi to download said app, but that kinda defies the concept of mobile, doesn't it? ISPs keep talking about speeds, fancy 4G/LTE etc, but the speed of mobile internet isn't really the problem; it's the limited amount of volume that is the bottleneck here.
which won't get you anywhere if you ever decide to venture out of the US.
I'm afraid to say, but there are loads of gene patents out there. SO yes, half your body belongs to some kind of corporation or another, and hence so will your clones (with the added bonus that the cloning technique itself probably has been patented a million times over)
Even though jezus christ, mohammed, buddha et al are all long dead and we can never provide evidence they were potentially damaging to society, does not mean their heritage hasn't been very very very damaging indeed. Need I remind you of the concept of crusades or jihad? In another example of religious-induced suffering, followers of the usually-so-peaceful buddha recently stormed and burned muslim villages in Myanmar, purely and only because the residents of those villages were not like-minded buddhists. ALL major religions have the alarming attribute of being potentially very harmful to society.
In a truly 'free' market there would be no such thing as patents or the International Trade Commission in the first place. Since patents - unfortunately - do exist, we need some kind of regulation. If companies really have a great invention, I'd think they could better just keep it really secret the old-fashioned way: Coca Cola never patented anything, yet even after all those years nobody knows its recipe and reproducing Coca Cola is therefore effectively impossible, just to give an example.
As far as we know, the speed of light has always been the same.
Not necessarily. Some so-called variable speed of light theories postulate that c could have been up to 60 orders of magnitude bigger in the very early universe than it is today. This would solve some problems in cosmology, and form an alternative to cosmic inflation theories.
The researchers also found that queries made to programs written in interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby -- both very popular on the Web -- generated responses much more slowly than other types of languages such as C or assembly language, making timing attacks more feasible. "For languages that are interpreted, you end up with a much greater timing difference than people thought," Lawson said.
Is there any situation where interpreted languages are actually faster than said other languages? ;-)
Devising a system with a different currency for information sure as hell is necessary. The radical solution however, is not reputation exchange. Because then you'll come to the age old question of what's good and what's bad. In each culture, one's reputation would depend on different factor. Even factor that would up the reputation level in one place, would downgrade the reputation in the other. Not very useful in terms of international trade. However, I quite like the idea of something other than money the currency. I'd propose something more or less like the following:
People start out with a given number of credits/kudos/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-it. To get some kind of information you'd need to sacrifice a given number of credits. Giving information away would lead to receiving some a certain amount of credits. So in order to keep receiving information you need to GIVE information away as well. In such a way you prevent people from downloading huge amounts of data without giving something in return. On the other hand, you would ensure content creators give their information away, because otherwise they would not be able to receive information in the future (and everybody wants/needs information, right?). To ensure this not falling into a normal money system, one could propose a system where the cost of receiving is lower than the benefits of giving. So one would need to give more information than one receives to keep a positive account balance. Say person A and B have both have 1000 information credits. Persons A has some information that person B wants. Person B " sacrifices" 750 credits to get this information, while person A only receives 500 credits in giving this information. For person B to keep receiving information from person A, he has to give away his acquired information to another person (person C). It might seem like a normal money system, but whereas the usual systems focus on "acquiring as much as possible" this information-credit system more focusses on "giving as much as possible". Entirely different economy.