Re:Do we even care about Debian anymore?
on
Debian to Run on AMD64
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· Score: 4, Informative
now even the unstable is year[s] behind even relatively mainstream competing distributions
I'm not sure how you can claim this. I run Debian Unstable on my desktop and all the packages I am familiar with are within one minor version number of the lastest upstream version.
I've been using the Linksys WMP54g PCI card on Debian Unstable with no problems. You need to make sure to get revision 4; apparently older revisions used a completely different chipset without free drivers. I believe that most stores would only stock rev 4 though.
This card uses the rt2500 driver, which apparently isn't in the main kernel tree (at least as of 2.6.12; maybe it's been integrated in newer kernels?), so I had to use the module-assistant tool to add it to my installation. This isn't difficult, but it's probably not something a non-geek will want to do. Your distro may vary.
~Phillip
This isn't about tough choices. It's about setting limits for what a boss, someone who may have the authority to set wages, promote, or recommend an employee for future employment, can ask of their employees.
Everyone values their ability to grant access to their body. We typically only allow people we are close to (family, friends and lovers) or trusted individuals (health care providers) to do anything much more intimate than shake hands with us. Any violation of our body is seen as intensely repugnant: we have laws against rape and assault, and at least in the United States, a person can only be searched when there is a warrant, or there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been commited. We only allow medical procedures to be performed on people without their consent in emergencies when they are incapable of consent, and even in this case, people can prepare advance directives limiting what is done to them. That this is proper is the consensus view in the United States.
The disruption of ones personal life, and family/work scheduling conflicts are important, and the United States has labor laws, including Family and Medical Leave Acts, allowing some workers to claim some time as only their own. However, if you put these issues on a par with surgical procedures, then you are probably far off the social consensus.
The United States Congress, local legislatures, funding agencies, and universities and hospitals, have all set rules for employment conditions and biomedical research (most stringently for research using human subjects). If you think these rules are inappropriate, then you should to lobby these bodies to repeal these laws and guidelines. I suspect that you will have a tough time.
The woman might have come forward, wholly on her own initiative, and volunteered to be an egg donor for this project, but this is irrelevant. We have blanket codes of conduct in employment and biomedical research for a reason: there is a consensus that in a case like this any coersion would be so reprehensible that we need to eliminate any possibility of, or even the appearence of the possibility of, coersion or conflict of interest. These rules have to apply to everyone or they risk becoming a paper tiger, easily circumventable by anyone with power. It's imaginable that independent review boards could allow people to apply for exemptions to rules like these, but their integrity would have to be so unimpeachable, and the gains would be so minor, that I doubt it would be worth the time or the money: the risks far exceed the benefits.
This was involving her work in her personal life. Her work was literally inserted into her person. In this case, a needle was inserted through her vagina, into one of her ovaries.
There is a difference between being expected to temporarily work overtime at a job and being expected to submit to an invasive medical procedure. Working overtime does not violate the your body's integrity, a basic human right.
We have rules to protect people from having their fundamental interests potentially set against each other. In this case, her ability to earn a living, at present and in the future, was potentially set against her health and her right to assert control over her body.
Most medical researchers insist that embrionic stem cells have less potential than other types of stem cells
This simply is not true. Perhaps you heard this claim from someone else and accepted it, but please stop repeating this claim.
Unfortunately people who know better are lying about the usefulness of embryonic stem cells, because it serves their agenda. It's one thing to oppose embryonic stem cell research because one believes it is unethical, but it's deceptive and insulting to attempt to shape public debate by lying about the science.
Adult stem cells are good and useful; they are used in existing medical treatment, and research on them should continue. However, the fact is that they are more limited that embryonic stem cells. There isn't any scientific dispute about this.
As an organism develops from a fertilized egg, cells become restricted into what sort of tissue they can become. This restriction occurs because each kind of cell has a different set of its genes active depending on its type. The set of active genes is proximally dependent on (at least):
1) Which transcription factors are present in the cell. Transcription factors are proteins that associate with DNA and turn genes on or off.
2) Chemical modifications to DNA itself("methylation") and to histones ("acetylation"). Histones are proteins which package up DNA within the cell.
The current state of the cell is determined in a history-dependent fashion by the previous state of the transcription factors and chemical modifications. The farther you get from the initial embryonic state- the more changes the cell has been through, the more specific in its abilities the cell becomes, but also the more restricted in it's capability to spin off new developmental fates.
To us, this is mostly a good thing. This developmental winnowing is what allows us to have different tissue types: neurons, blood cells, muscle cells, etc. And we probably want our cell types to be stable: we don't want our brains to have any chance of suddently becoming muscle! But there is a trade off: by losing our embryonic generative capacity we gain variety in our bilities, but lose flexibility.
The potency (the range of cell types that the cells can develop into) of embryonic stem cells is much wider than those of adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells can develop into any tissue type (this is called "pleuripotency"), while adult stem cells can develop into a one or a few different kinds of tissues ("unipotency" or "multipotency"). This is the main reason that researchers are interested in embryonic stem cells.
Future stem cell-base medical discoveries and treatments will almost certainly need to utilize the full generative capabilites of embryonic stem cell, abilities that great exceed what adult stem cells can offer.
it is slower than a car in many cases (time needed to wait for the bus, all of the bus stops the bus makes, and traffic on the roads)
That's why you need a real mass transit system in cities where the bus/train line is separate from car traffic and so doesn't have to stop at lights, intersections, or get hung up in traffic jams, etc
The average population density argument explains why train travel may not be a good solution for a US-wide system, but it isn't an arguement against regional, metropolitan area, or urban mass transit. Population isn't distributed evenly- cities have high density, suburbs intermediate, and rural areas low.
It would certainly help Seattle (where I live), if there were a real city-wide mass transit system. Unfortunately, it looks like there won't be one until the end of the next decade at best.
but programs are made unnecessarily complex by the lack of exceptions and garbage collection -- available in the most current crop of languages (C#, Java).
What are you talking about? Common Lisp has both exceptions (conditions) and garbage collection.
Why would anyone run yet another lame Linux distribution on their G5
Because Apple makes really great hardware, but I don't use software that doesn't come with source code and the freedom to improve it.
I used Apple systems while growing up, and I've always thought (most of) their hardware was fantastic.
In the time since I installed MkLinux DR2.1 on my family's PowerMac 7500 back in 1997, I've decided that the long term advantages that come from free software are worth much more than the few slight and temporary advantages a proprietary program might offer, so as far as I can, I use only free software.
The OS X kernel ("Darwin") is free software, but the interesting stuff- Cocoa and the GUI stuff is proprietary.
You might might not think that software freedom is important, but some people do, and the combination of that concern with Apple's fine hardware is the reason someone would run GNU/Linux on a G5.
The GNOME vs. KDE flameware are lame, and have been lame for ages. I don't think I've seen any of the GNOME or KDE hackers flame each other (recently at least, maybe back before the KDE licensing changes, but that's ancient history now). The flamers all seem to be trolls or fanboys too useless to actually contribute to development of either desktop so they just get off on flaming the other group. See the full quote from the article:
Schlager added that he thinks the conflict between KDE and Gnome developers has been overstated. "The developers really don't fight; it's their supporters who fight, he said.
Personally, I've switched back and forth between KDE and GNOME in the past. Right now I'm running KDE 3.2 on Debian Unstable as my desktop, but I have also GNOME 2.4 installed, and use several GTK+/GNOME programs daily.
Looking at the summaries of the intron ("Junk DNA") patents, they seem to be applications of completely general techniques and knowledge (restriction digests & DNA sequencing (first developed in the 1960's), introns (discovered in 1977), and PCR amplification (invented in 1985)) to a subsection of the domain the prior techniques were intended to cover.
It's a bit like having someone invent the automobile then someone else patenting "Using an automobile to deliver packages"
Specifically the patents seem to be:
1. Use primers derived from dna sequence flanking the intron and immediately inside the intron to PCR amplify the intron
2. Do stuff (sequence, map restriction sites) with the intron sequence you've amplified in step one.
This isn't to diminish any insight the inventor might have had into the importance of "junk DNA", but the method described is a straightforward application of more general processes.
The doctor laughed her off and used conventional blood, and the woman got infected with HIV
Can you provide some documentation for this anecdote? In the United States, the blood supply has been screened for HIV since 1985 and I assume all other 1st world countries have done the same. The risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion is about 1 in 90,000. With 4,000,000 transfusion recipients a year, there have probably been fewer than 1000 cases of HIV contracted through blood transfusions in the United States in the past 18 years.
Mac OS X takes full advantage of the 8GB memory capacity of the Power Mac G5:
It can now allocate up to 4GB of memory per process to easily fit memory-intensive
applications into RAM.
I'm not very knowledgeable about stem cells, but I read the Chambers et al. paper (but not Mitsui et al.), and I think I understand the main points and if I'm wrong hopefully someone more knowledgeable will correct me.
Mouse embryonic stem cells use a couple of factors- gp130 signalling, Oct4, and Nanog to retain their state as stem cells. Chambers et al. showed that that raising the levels of Nanog allows embryonic stem cells to maintain their "stemness"- their undifferentiated state- in the abscence of gp130 signalling. If you remove nanog, then whether the embryonic cells remained stem cells or became more specialized would probably depend on the levels of gp130 signalling, although it seems that nanog may be the limiting factor.
~Phillip
Re:On fvwm...
on
fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 4, Informative
Knuth is retired and doesn't have graduate students anymore. And if he did have grad students, I suspect they would be doing hardcore algorithmic analysis, not hacking fvwm and X11.
How soon untill they make a self-replicating protien that accomplishes ~s/bad_trait/good_trait?
There's no need for self-replicating proteins because we already have something that is much easier to manipulate than proteins and which replicates readily (although not without help from proteins): DNA
This is the basic idea behind genetic engineering: alter the DNA of a gene so it will code for a protein that will take over the function of a defective protein or do something else useful, insert it into a cell where it will be replicated everytime the cell divides, and you'll end up with many copies of the gene which can be expressed (in parallel) as the protein you are interest in.
If 99% of the important DNA is identical, then probability implies that 99% of the rest of the DNA is also identical
Different parts of the genome evolve at different rates.
Imagine that you have a gene, that if a mutated, causes a heart defect. Mutated copies of that gene will be very rare because they'll cause organisms that carry it to die earlier, leaving fewer offspring. As a consequence, the sequence of this gene will change very little over many generations.
Imagine that there is a different gene whose products do absolutely nothing. Mutations in this gene would have no effect on the organism, so those mutations would accumulate over time and the gene will be very different in sequence a few million years later.
It's a bit more complicated than this (and I'm not an expert)- but in general, genes that are essential for organism function will evolve more slowly and be share more similarities between species compared to genes (and other DNA sequence) that are less essential for survival.
With MS making hackers obsolete and all, the source code would just sit there crying to its sad little self "Won't anybody compile me? Won't someone come and debug me? Pretty please?"
That would be ghastly- taking that approach amounts to: "Hey! Look at all the cool new ways we have to kill people!"
This isn't like some geek building glowing cyberballs or running a web server on a C64. War is crushing people with heat and shock waves and rubble and tearing bodies apart with shreds of metal.
I'm not a pacifist- sometimes there's evil in the world to which the only viable response is violence. But even when the cause for war is just, we shouldn't pretend that war is anything but the intentional extinguishing of lives and the maiming of many of the survivors. And I think that taking the approach you seem to be suggesting- separating the technology from its uses- when the technology has only one use- killing- amounts to the glorification of war and dehumanizes all of us.
So right now think of the people using these weapons and the people they are being used on and the reasons the weapons are being used, but don't think of the weapons as just another neat hack.
To which I now point out (after having spent over a week trying to get Debian Woody to work with my ATI Radeon) that newbies have no idea how to handle the module config and that I've had a post on the local LUG board for almost a month now and NOT ONE Debian fan there has been able to tell me how to get Woody to support a common video card (I did get it working - that is not the point -- the point is that it wasn't supported.)
Did you try asking for help on one of the Debian mailing lists? That would have been a more appropriate forum for a Debian-specific question.
Lest we want to happen to us what is now happening to Japan and Europe. Due to lowered levels of immigration those regions are experiencing an aging of the population.
No, that's not true. These countries are experiencing an aging of the population because their citizens are having to fewer children. See this recent article in the NY Times, and this table of the fertility rates around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using the Linksys WMP54g PCI card on Debian Unstable with no problems. You need to make sure to get revision 4; apparently older revisions used a completely different chipset without free drivers. I believe that most stores would only stock rev 4 though. This card uses the rt2500 driver, which apparently isn't in the main kernel tree (at least as of 2.6.12; maybe it's been integrated in newer kernels?), so I had to use the module-assistant tool to add it to my installation. This isn't difficult, but it's probably not something a non-geek will want to do. Your distro may vary. ~Phillip
Everyone values their ability to grant access to their body. We typically only allow people we are close to (family, friends and lovers) or trusted individuals (health care providers) to do anything much more intimate than shake hands with us. Any violation of our body is seen as intensely repugnant: we have laws against rape and assault, and at least in the United States, a person can only be searched when there is a warrant, or there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been commited. We only allow medical procedures to be performed on people without their consent in emergencies when they are incapable of consent, and even in this case, people can prepare advance directives limiting what is done to them. That this is proper is the consensus view in the United States.
The disruption of ones personal life, and family/work scheduling conflicts are important, and the United States has labor laws, including Family and Medical Leave Acts, allowing some workers to claim some time as only their own. However, if you put these issues on a par with surgical procedures, then you are probably far off the social consensus.
The United States Congress, local legislatures, funding agencies, and universities and hospitals, have all set rules for employment conditions and biomedical research (most stringently for research using human subjects). If you think these rules are inappropriate, then you should to lobby these bodies to repeal these laws and guidelines. I suspect that you will have a tough time.
The woman might have come forward, wholly on her own initiative, and volunteered to be an egg donor for this project, but this is irrelevant. We have blanket codes of conduct in employment and biomedical research for a reason: there is a consensus that in a case like this any coersion would be so reprehensible that we need to eliminate any possibility of, or even the appearence of the possibility of, coersion or conflict of interest. These rules have to apply to everyone or they risk becoming a paper tiger, easily circumventable by anyone with power. It's imaginable that independent review boards could allow people to apply for exemptions to rules like these, but their integrity would have to be so unimpeachable, and the gains would be so minor, that I doubt it would be worth the time or the money: the risks far exceed the benefits.
This was involving her work in her personal life. Her work was literally inserted into her person. In this case, a needle was inserted through her vagina, into one of her ovaries.
There is a difference between being expected to temporarily work overtime at a job and being expected to submit to an invasive medical procedure. Working overtime does not violate the your body's integrity, a basic human right.
We have rules to protect people from having their fundamental interests potentially set against each other. In this case, her ability to earn a living, at present and in the future, was potentially set against her health and her right to assert control over her body.
~Phillip
Most medical researchers insist that embrionic stem cells have less potential than other types of stem cells
This simply is not true. Perhaps you heard this claim from someone else and accepted it, but please stop repeating this claim.
Unfortunately people who know better are lying about the usefulness of embryonic stem cells, because it serves their agenda. It's one thing to oppose embryonic stem cell research because one believes it is unethical, but it's deceptive and insulting to attempt to shape public debate by lying about the science.
Adult stem cells are good and useful; they are used in existing medical treatment, and research on them should continue. However, the fact is that they are more limited that embryonic stem cells. There isn't any scientific dispute about this.
As an organism develops from a fertilized egg, cells become restricted into what sort of tissue they can become. This restriction occurs because each kind of cell has a different set of its genes active depending on its type. The set of active genes is proximally dependent on (at least):
1) Which transcription factors are present in the cell. Transcription factors are proteins that associate with DNA and turn genes on or off.
2) Chemical modifications to DNA itself("methylation") and to histones ("acetylation"). Histones are proteins which package up DNA within the cell.
The current state of the cell is determined in a history-dependent fashion by the previous state of the transcription factors and chemical modifications. The farther you get from the initial embryonic state- the more changes the cell has been through, the more specific in its abilities the cell becomes, but also the more restricted in it's capability to spin off new developmental fates.
To us, this is mostly a good thing. This developmental winnowing is what allows us to have different tissue types: neurons, blood cells, muscle cells, etc. And we probably want our cell types to be stable: we don't want our brains to have any chance of suddently becoming muscle! But there is a trade off: by losing our embryonic generative capacity we gain variety in our bilities, but lose flexibility.
The potency (the range of cell types that the cells can develop into) of embryonic stem cells is much wider than those of adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells can develop into any tissue type (this is called "pleuripotency"), while adult stem cells can develop into a one or a few different kinds of tissues ("unipotency" or "multipotency"). This is the main reason that researchers are interested in embryonic stem cells.
Future stem cell-base medical discoveries and treatments will almost certainly need to utilize the full generative capabilites of embryonic stem cell, abilities that great exceed what adult stem cells can offer.
That's why you need a real mass transit system in cities where the bus/train line is separate from car traffic and so doesn't have to stop at lights, intersections, or get hung up in traffic jams, etc
The average population density argument explains why train travel may not be a good solution for a US-wide system, but it isn't an arguement against regional, metropolitan area, or urban mass transit. Population isn't distributed evenly- cities have high density, suburbs intermediate, and rural areas low.
It would certainly help Seattle (where I live), if there were a real city-wide mass transit system. Unfortunately, it looks like there won't be one until the end of the next decade at best.
but programs are made unnecessarily complex by the lack of exceptions and garbage collection -- available in the most current crop of languages (C#, Java).
What are you talking about? Common Lisp has both exceptions (conditions) and garbage collection.
Why would anyone run yet another lame Linux distribution on their G5
Because Apple makes really great hardware, but I don't use software that doesn't come with source code and the freedom to improve it.
I used Apple systems while growing up, and I've always thought (most of) their hardware was fantastic.
In the time since I installed MkLinux DR2.1 on my family's PowerMac 7500 back in 1997, I've decided that the long term advantages that come from free software are worth much more than the few slight and temporary advantages a proprietary program might offer, so as far as I can, I use only free software.
The OS X kernel ("Darwin") is free software, but the interesting stuff- Cocoa and the GUI stuff is proprietary.
You might might not think that software freedom is important, but some people do, and the combination of that concern with Apple's fine hardware is the reason someone would run GNU/Linux on a G5.
~Phillip
The GNOME vs. KDE flameware are lame, and have been lame for ages. I don't think I've seen any of the GNOME or KDE hackers flame each other (recently at least, maybe back before the KDE licensing changes, but that's ancient history now). The flamers all seem to be trolls or fanboys too useless to actually contribute to development of either desktop so they just get off on flaming the other group. See the full quote from the article:
Schlager added that he thinks the conflict between KDE and Gnome developers has been overstated. "The developers really don't fight; it's their supporters who fight, he said.
Personally, I've switched back and forth between KDE and GNOME in the past. Right now I'm running KDE 3.2 on Debian Unstable as my desktop, but I have also GNOME 2.4 installed, and use several GTK+/GNOME programs daily.
~Phillip
Looking at the summaries of the intron ("Junk DNA") patents, they seem to be applications of completely general techniques and knowledge (restriction digests & DNA sequencing (first developed in the 1960's), introns (discovered in 1977), and PCR amplification (invented in 1985)) to a subsection of the domain the prior techniques were intended to cover.
It's a bit like having someone invent the automobile then someone else patenting "Using an automobile to deliver packages"
Specifically the patents seem to be:
1. Use primers derived from dna sequence flanking the intron and immediately inside the intron to PCR amplify the intron
2. Do stuff (sequence, map restriction sites) with the intron sequence you've amplified in step one.
This isn't to diminish any insight the inventor might have had into the importance of "junk DNA", but the method described is a straightforward application of more general processes.
~Phillip
The doctor laughed her off and used conventional blood, and the woman got infected with HIV
Can you provide some documentation for this anecdote? In the United States, the blood supply has been screened for HIV since 1985 and I assume all other 1st world countries have done the same. The risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion is about 1 in 90,000. With 4,000,000 transfusion recipients a year, there have probably been fewer than 1000 cases of HIV contracted through blood transfusions in the United States in the past 18 years.
~Philllip
~Phillip
I'm not disa
The article advocates restricting port 135, not port 80.
~Phillip
From what I read MacOS X doesn't support 64bit addressing yet. There's been discussion (and here)of this on comp.lang.lisp.
Apple's own docs (PDF say:
Mac OS X takes full advantage of the 8GB memory capacity of the Power Mac G5: It can now allocate up to 4GB of memory per process to easily fit memory-intensive applications into RAM.
~Phillip
I'm not very knowledgeable about stem cells, but I read the Chambers et al. paper (but not Mitsui et al.), and I think I understand the main points and if I'm wrong hopefully someone more knowledgeable will correct me.
Mouse embryonic stem cells use a couple of factors- gp130 signalling, Oct4, and Nanog to retain their state as stem cells. Chambers et al. showed that that raising the levels of Nanog allows embryonic stem cells to maintain their "stemness"- their undifferentiated state- in the abscence of gp130 signalling. If you remove nanog, then whether the embryonic cells remained stem cells or became more specialized would probably depend on the levels of gp130 signalling, although it seems that nanog may be the limiting factor.
~Phillip
~Phillip
How soon untill they make a self-replicating protien that accomplishes ~s/bad_trait/good_trait?
There's no need for self-replicating proteins because we already have something that is much easier to manipulate than proteins and which replicates readily (although not without help from proteins): DNA
This is the basic idea behind genetic engineering: alter the DNA of a gene so it will code for a protein that will take over the function of a defective protein or do something else useful, insert it into a cell where it will be replicated everytime the cell divides, and you'll end up with many copies of the gene which can be expressed (in parallel) as the protein you are interest in.
~Phillip
If 99% of the important DNA is identical, then probability implies that 99% of the rest of the DNA is also identical
Different parts of the genome evolve at different rates.
Imagine that you have a gene, that if a mutated, causes a heart defect. Mutated copies of that gene will be very rare because they'll cause organisms that carry it to die earlier, leaving fewer offspring. As a consequence, the sequence of this gene will change very little over many generations.
Imagine that there is a different gene whose products do absolutely nothing. Mutations in this gene would have no effect on the organism, so those mutations would accumulate over time and the gene will be very different in sequence a few million years later.
It's a bit more complicated than this (and I'm not an expert)- but in general, genes that are essential for organism function will evolve more slowly and be share more similarities between species compared to genes (and other DNA sequence) that are less essential for survival.
~Phillip
Causually throwing animal genes into plants and plant genes into animals is terrifying
What is it about transfering genes between distantly related organisms (plants and animals, in this case) that terrifies you?
~Phillip
With MS making hackers obsolete and all, the source code would just sit there crying to its sad little self "Won't anybody compile me? Won't someone come and debug me? Pretty please?"
~Phillip
No. Absolutely not.
That would be ghastly- taking that approach amounts to: "Hey! Look at all the cool new ways we have to kill people!"
This isn't like some geek building glowing cyberballs or running a web server on a C64. War is crushing people with heat and shock waves and rubble and tearing bodies apart with shreds of metal.
I'm not a pacifist- sometimes there's evil in the world to which the only viable response is violence. But even when the cause for war is just, we shouldn't pretend that war is anything but the intentional extinguishing of lives and the maiming of many of the survivors. And I think that taking the approach you seem to be suggesting- separating the technology from its uses- when the technology has only one use- killing- amounts to the glorification of war and dehumanizes all of us.
So right now think of the people using these weapons and the people they are being used on and the reasons the weapons are being used, but don't think of the weapons as just another neat hack.
~Phillip
To which I now point out (after having spent over a week trying to get Debian Woody to work with my ATI Radeon) that newbies have no idea how to handle the module config and that I've had a post on the local LUG board for almost a month now and NOT ONE Debian fan there has been able to tell me how to get Woody to support a common video card (I did get it working - that is not the point -- the point is that it wasn't supported.)
Did you try asking for help on one of the Debian mailing lists? That would have been a more appropriate forum for a Debian-specific question.
~Phillip
Lest we want to happen to us what is now happening to Japan and Europe. Due to lowered levels of immigration those regions are experiencing an aging of the population.
No, that's not true. These countries are experiencing an aging of the population because their citizens are having to fewer children. See this recent article in the NY Times, and this table of the fertility rates around the world.
~Phillip