Slashdot Mirror


User: diaphanous

diaphanous's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
108
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 108

  1. Re:Proof? on Antarctic Detectors Provide Evidence For Big Bang · · Score: 3
    The title is "Possible traces of Big Bangdiscovered". Note the word possible. If I have a theory and I find some circumstantial evidence, which by itself would prove nothing, but fits in with the theory, that is proof? If anything, this has not disproven the theory.

    Well, you can never really prove a hypothesis, but you can disprove one by providing evidence contrary to its predictions. However, you can provide evidence that is strong enough to establish the hypothesis as the only one worth believing. Even if the evidence isn't strong enough to establish a hypothesis as true, it still provides a useful heuristic for deciding what to study. Just like everyone else, scientists have only a limited amount of time and so it makes sense to concentrate your work on areas that are likely to be fruitful, rather than considering every possible hypothesis as equally worthwhile


    Why get so excited over such a little thing? I would presume that people need to prove the theory so as to disprove other theories based in theology. If that is the case, I find the reporting of this proof quite pedantic.

    Big Bang theory is one of the fundamental areas of cosmology, so it merits a lot of attention. I don't see how theology is involved here at all. Do you mean to say that if a hypothesis is contrary to an interpretation of a religious tradition, it shouldn't be investigated at all, whether or not the hypothesis is true?


    I wonder what if this find didn't prove the theory. In fact, what if it slightly disproved it. Would it have been reported as well?

    If an experiment gave reason to doubt a major theory like the Big Bang, it would be written up and sent to Nature or Science as fast as possible.


    On the other hand, if a study did not show effects supporting the Big Bang model, but also did not contradict it might languish forever. This seems like a minor distinction but its very important. Evidence like this, called "negative data", is difficult to interpret because ultimately its hard to tell if you don't see what you're looking for because its not there, or because your experiment isn't designed correctly, or some unknown reason masking the effect. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. You don't know if you haven't found the needle because there is no needle, or because you aren't trying hard enough. The non-reporting of negative evidence and experimental protocols that don't work is a problem in science since it causes scientists to pursue research that they would not have had they known that others had tried and failed. It tends not to get reported because its not terribly fun to write up a paper saying that your hard work failed.


    The results of this experiment apparently supported the Big Bang theory, so this isn't a worry in this case.

  2. Re:Licensing? on Celera Has Assembled Complete Mouse Genome · · Score: 4

    Sadly, given Celera's past history, it will almost certainly be proprietary. Although they have benefited immensely from government funded research and data collection, they have refused to make their sequence data publicly available in GenBank. Most journals require you to publish your sequence data in GenBank as a condition for publication of papers related to the sequence data. Celera was granted a special exemption to this policy by Science when they published their paper on the human genome recently and I anticipate a similar special exemption will be allowed for the mouse data as well, though I haven't closely followed what's going on with the mouse genome, since I work on Acetabularia Acetabulum (this is my professor's web page, not mine, the views expressed here are not ...and so on)


    If you want to analyze publicly available gene sequence data, you can use GenBank at NCBI and software from Bioinformatics.org. There is also a great directory of online molecular biology tools and information here

  3. Re:Is my parallel right? on Celera Has Assembled Complete Mouse Genome · · Score: 3

    Actually sequencing a genome alone, particularly a eukaryote (an organism that has cells with a chromosomes, a nucleus, cytoskeleton, endomembrane system, etc) doesn't get you that much. It's more like using a disassembler on a massive binary that is full of functions that don't actually do anything (junk DNA, introns). You could look at the dump, and figure out how a few algorithms work, but it doesn't tell you much about the program works as a whole.

    Sequencing does allow to get started on the more scientificly interesting work of studying the phylogeny (evolutionary history) and expression of genes

  4. Re:What I'd like to see. on Open Source Programming Language Design · · Score: 1

    There are probably several languages that meet requirements 1,3, and 4. Common Lisp certainly does. Unfortunately these languages tend to attract cultlike followings that are more interested in the language itself, rather than what can be done with it, and so lack the standard interfaces that Java, Perl, and Python possess.

  5. Re:It's even better than that on Clawhammer to be 1/2 size of P4 · · Score: 1

    The 7200 was a second generation powermac with a PCI bus and a ppc 601 soldered on the motherboard.

  6. Re:Sun does not respect nor fully support Linux on Sun Launches JXTA · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the post was off-topic and a bit of a troll, but your post isn't quite fair either.

    Comparing the scalibility of Linux 2.0 against that of Solaris 8 is ridiculous. The kernel core has changed immensely since then, and anybody who actually needs scalability will be running 2.4.x or a late 2.2.x. Still, Solaris will beat it at the ultrahigh end, which is partially a matter of hardware (though I'd think you'd be able to do pretty well on a high end Alpha), partly due to design (threading model, for example), and partially because of focus- Your average kernel hacker doesn't have a 64-way SMP box sitting at home to test with. This will change though as IBM, Intel, HP, and others get involved

    And I would be surprised if GNU/Linux was largely responsible for a drop in Sun's revenues. There's really no point in buying a sun box if your job doesn't saturate a freenix running on a quad Xeon.

  7. Re:So who is using Slackware? on WindRiver Will Not Keep Slackware · · Score: 1

    If you've been using slackware since the 1.2.13 kernel, I wouldn't say you're new to linux. That's longer than probably 90+% of current linux users. I've only been using GNU/Linux since the 2.0.(28?)kernel and even then it still seemed more like a hacker/hobbiest thing, at least compared to today.

  8. Re:Performance on Ask Guido van Rossum · · Score: 1

    Actually neither type inference or static typing is required for a compiled implementation of a language. Common Lisp requires neither, though you can declare type information for greater efficiency. Instead of variables having an intrinsic static type, values have a type, and variables can refer to any kind of value. Typically the type of the value is encoded in the reference to it. So you might use the top three bits of a word to encode the type and the lower 29 to be a pointer to the value. Explicit declared typing information does help the compiler though- you can sometimes double the performance of a compiled Common Lisp program by using type declarations.

  9. dual booting on Ask Robert Young · · Score: 1
    On the Mac, even if you install linux, you still always have MacOS - there is no choice. Your ONLY choice is dual boot.

    This isn't true. I have an iMac running Debian GNU/Linux with no MacOS. MkLinux required a proprietary MacOS extension to boot but the monolithic kernel boots just fine on its own. You tell Open Firmware where the bootloader (yaboot) is and it goes from there.

  10. Re:Big Bang and Evolution on Slashback: Retroaction, Breakeven, Kansas · · Score: 1

    The poster I replied to doesn't seem to be a Christian though and the logic is flawed in any case. The first five books of the Old Testament include separate warnings not to mess with birds' nests and menstrating women and some people might still heed such moral law but most would consider it nonsense if someone accused them of enviromental destruction because they had sexual intercourse with their wife during her period.

  11. Big Bang and Evolution on Slashback: Retroaction, Breakeven, Kansas · · Score: 2

    I know this is hard for many people to understand but the confusion and ignorance bugs me:

    Evolutionary theory and Big Bang Theory are not identical!!!

    Everytime the subject of evolution comes up somebody brings up the big bang. Why? They refer to two separate ideas: The idea that the Universe was created about 15 billion years agoThey were were developed separately: Origin of the Species was published in 1859, Big Bang cosmology got started in the 1920's with Edwin Hubble's work but really didn't start to catch on until the 1950's. They are logically separate: One could accept a particular inflationary big bang model but still think that God created each species seperately, or one could think that the universe was divinely created (or partake of an alternate materialistic cosmological theory) but still believe that evolution is the correct explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

    Thinking the Big bang Theory is incorrect is insufficient grounds for thinking that all extant and extinct species did not evolve from a common
    ancestor. Talking about cosmology is superfluous when discussing evolution. It's like discussing fruit preference and being told that someone doesn't like plums because they think that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's plays and poetry. Evolutionary biology and Big Bang Cosmology are two different areas of study,each with its own models, methods, and evidence that should command thoughtful study, not glibly dismissed when you can't even differentiate between the two.

  12. Illinois doesn't allow this on Just Say No To Reading About Drugs · · Score: 2

    As part of its state constitution Illinois has a provision restricting a bill to a single subject. In the last year one fairly popular law (I can't remember which off the top off my head) was struck down by the Illinois State Supreme Court because it violated this provision.

  13. Re:Binary compatability? on Compaq Hints At "Opening" Parts of Tru64 · · Score: 1

    Linux runs on architectures other than i386, alphas included. That's the beauty of free software: If a program you want to use doesn't run on your OS or hardware you can port it yourself instead of whining that some corporation won't do it for you.

    I'm typing this on a powerpc running the 2.2.15 kernel.

  14. You misunderstand on Censorship != Innovation · · Score: 1

    Nobody is contesting Microsoft's legal right to make proprietary extensions to the kerberos code. The problem is that Microsoft is making proprietary extensions to the protocol and not releasing the specs so that other systems can implement the extensions and be interoperable with Windows 2000. Changing a protocol or interface affects not only the owner/user of a Win2000 box, but also anyone who is on a network with the Win2000 box using the protocol. For this reason Microsoft has a moral obligation to release the spec, more so because kerberos is a authentication protocol- no one is absolutely sure how these changes affect the security of the protocol. Regardless of which side is in the legal right the people who violated the EULA did the world a favor by publishing the spec openly and this is far more important than legal technicalities.

    You can get a bit more information from the March Crypto-Gram

  15. Futurama and DeCSS? on Hump Day Quickies · · Score: 1

    Every week Futurama has a tongue-in-cheek caption in their title sequence. The best one ever came a few weeks ago (I don't remember what episode it was preceded) It read:

    Coming soon to illegal DVD

    I fell off the sofa laughing when I saw this, assuming it was an allusion to the DeCSS lawsuits, (especially funny since Fox, as a member of the MPAA, is involved in the persecution.

    I can't seem to locate a framegrab of it on the net on the moment so if anyone knows where to find one please post a link.

  16. Why aren't there any lawsuits? on Arrest In The ILOVEYOU Case · · Score: 2

    Every few monthes there is a huge flap over some new virus propagated through Outlook Express running on Windows. The press breathlessly covers the manhunt to capture the "hacker", then drops the story as soon as he is caught, as if everyones computer has been made more secure becasuse some moron is in jail. I understand that it is more glamourous to find a human being to scapegoat, but the media is complicit security problems by writing countless editorials calling for harsher punishment for "hackers" while staying silent on the real problems and issues, the things we can do something about: Microsoft and other companies are allowed to get away with shipping insecure software with no penalties to their balance sheet or reputation. If I ran a major corporation running Windows and Outlook Express, I'd be asking my legal department to look into suing Microsoft to recover revenue I'd lost when my employees were dealing with virii instead of making and selling stuff. Is there any other industry in the world in which the manufacturers are allowed to get away with selling products they know to be defective? Why isn't there a class action lawsuit against MS for the 1e9 dollers allegedly lost?

  17. It's either classic satire or... on Crypto Advocates Favoring ... Regulation? · · Score: 1

    a marketdroid writing. No one else would be brain-dead enough to use the terms "synergy", "proactive", "consumer-driven", and "paradigm" without scare quotes around them to indicate facetiousness. And anyone else would have to be tripping on a couple grams of Something Scary to be so deluded as to call Steve Case a visionary.

  18. Top Three Reasons I will not be buying this: on WordPerfect Office 2000 For Linux Reviews · · Score: 1

    1. It doesn't run on PPC.
    2. It's proprietary software.
    3. How useful can it be if it lacks a built-in Lisp interpreter?

  19. The 6100 won't run monolithic Linux on SuSE For PPC · · Score: 1

    The PowerMac 6100 was a first generation Nubus based PowerMac, none of which are supported by the Linux kernel or NetBSD. If I remember correctly, the ASICs and bridge chips on the motherboard are actually closer to the 680x0 Macs than modern ppc motherboards. MkLinux does work on it though.

  20. Is the essay legal? on ACLU To Appeal CPHack Ruling · · Score: 1

    In some ways the essay accompanying the software which explains how they reverse engineered the excryption scheme is more valuable than the software itself. Is it legal for me post it on the web, or do the injunctions cover both the essay and the software? (The news stories and commentary I've read on the case have not been clear on this point)

  21. Oops:Correction on IBM Runs 41,000 Copies of Linux on Mainframe · · Score: 1

    That should be:

    c * sqrt(1 - ((R/ (4.1e4 * P)) ** )2) meters per second.

  22. Einstein, Linus, and me! on IBM Runs 41,000 Copies of Linux on Mainframe · · Score: 1

    Just exploit relativistic length contraction by having them run in at c * sqrt(1 - ((4.1e4)/(R *P))**2) meters per second.

    where

    c is the speed of light
    R is the length of the room
    P is the length of a penguin

    "Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."
    -- Linus Torvalds

    "Some people have told me they don't think 41,000 penguins can fit into a single room, which just tells me they have never seen 41,000 penguins charging past them at relativistic speeds. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had."
    -- me

  23. I *like* the editorializing on Microsoft Trying To Look Open Source With CE · · Score: 3

    Human beings, (and any similarly designed AI programs and humans) including Cmdr Taco, Hemos, and whoever the hell jimjag is, have opinions. What is much worse than the *editors* editorializing, is when media outlets assume a veneer of objectivity while concurrently promoting an agenda or not questioning the agenda or the people they agree with or who pay their salaries. Slashdot has been pro-free-software before "open source" was a buzzword exploited by Sun/Apple/(MS?). I know this and I know they are owned by VA.

    I am a reasonably intelligent human being (or AI or alien...) and I don't have to agree with what the editors of slashdot think. (except when Rob comes to me in my dreams and orders me to buy a VA Linux box). If I think that they are misreporting something, intentionally or subconciously, or just have their basic data wrong, I can check the facts myself, and make up my own mind and try to convince other people of my view. Moreover I hope that other people would take a rationally skeptical view when I open my mouth (or logic gates or jlkjds'ds oriface)

    I've been reading slashdot for more than 2 years in part because it is visibly run by human beings (or AIs (who need to get a date with a pretty little ispell program) or aliens). Sometimes they f*ck up. But I can deal with that, I'm a human being too (or ... )

  24. Can a Norwegian summarize the info at this URL? on Jon Johansen Indicted by the MPA(A) · · Score: 1

    Aftenposten

    Since a few posters have questioned the veracity of the story I searched a few Norwegian news sites for "DeCSS" and found this article from a Norwegian Newspaper dated just before midnight Norwegian time.

  25. How may we discuss this? on Preliminary Injunction Issued in DVD CCA Case · · Score: 1

    From the decision:

    "They may still continue to discuss and debate the subject they have in the past in both an educational, scientific, philosophical and political context."

    To me, to discuss an algorithm or piece of software in a scientific context requires you to specify what it does and how it works so that you can verify correctness (does it errorlessly decrypt a DVD?) and performence charecteristics (what are the critical parts to optimize?). I don't know how you can do this without giving enough information (in real code, pseudocode, or the natural language of your choice) to translate it to a real piece of software. Where can you draw the line between discussion and implementation? for example suppose a group of people uses a standardized pseudocode (or simple subset of english or mathematics or logic or any consistent, complete, and meaningful set of symbols for that matter ) when discussing DeCSS. They have ineffect specified a language that they could then have a pseudocode->C compiler for. Does translating from "pseudocode" (which would seem to constitute a discussion or portion thereof) to C suddenly make it illegal? If one accepts that the C code is illegal then it seems to follow that any rigorous discussion of the algorithm is also illegal.