I believe the astronauts were placed in quarantine for a week or two afterward in order to make sure they didn't have any diseases.
Re:An interesting hobby.
on
Infiltration
·
· Score: 2
Ok, not to be pickey, but you can't have steam and water at the same temperature (in
the same environment - ie pressure). Since water phase changes into steam at 100C, it
will be either a gas of > 100C or a liquid of
Actually you can. When water reaches 100C it needs an additional kick of about 4kJ/g to break intermolecular bonds and convert it to vapor. Actually whats really cool is when you get to the triple point of an element. You get solid, liquid, and gaseous phases in equilibrium so the compound is simultaneously boiling, condensing, sublimating, depositing, and crystallizing. It's a bit hard to get this with water but if you put dry ice in a closed container, you can observe this.
It's not surprising that the NSA would be interested in this technology, but I do find it
striking that there's such a blatant connection. If I was to guess, I'd say they're
probably way ahead of industry and academia on this one.
Uh...thin indium wires are used routinely on any instrument running at very low temperatures to limit heat input. The only way you can get a signal out of an instrument at say 4K and keep the instrument at that temp is to use thin wires.
You can't compress data and also have the output be the same as the input. Think
about it, there are 256^(# of bytes in the sample) possible inputs, and since every
encoder output can only decompress to one possible input, the only way to get 256^(#
of bytes in the sample) possible decompressed results is to have 256^(# of bytes in
sample) compressed outputs-- i.e. 1:1 compression ratio.
That's trivially proven to be incorrect since gzip and bzip2 compress data and yet have the outputs be the same as the inputs. In an audio context, ten minutes of a pure frequency sound be easily compressed to a small size. The only information you really need keep is the length of the tone and the frequency.
Um, duh, are there any other freely available, widely used compilers? Remember,
Linux stuff needs to be free/GPL/whatever, and prudence demands that the compiler
be ubiquitous.
Perhaps you should read the quoted text and my reply. I was just pointing out the fact that gcc has proprietary extensions and that the linux kernel uses them. By the original poster's declaration, gcc is broken.
BTW, there are other free compilers out there, lcc is one.
If code isn't readily portable from one platform to the next, then your development
environment is BROKEN. Closed source sucks. Proprietary sucks.
Then I guess gcc is broken also. People can't use compilers other than gcc to compile the linux kernel because the linux uses non standard extensions that gcc provides and other gcc quirks.
For example, let's say we have a Mexican engineer (for instance, me), a Russian
mathemathical expert, a Hindu computer programmer and a Japanese
nano-technology expert
What does being Hindu have to do with what language you speak? Last time I checked, Protestants don't all speak English, Eastern Orthodox Christians don't all speak Greek, Muslims don't all speak arabic. Maybe you meant Indian programmer. But the problem with that is India has 18 official languages and no one language is spoken by the majority.
Any deliberate
breaking of a law which is not there for a good reason _is_ civil disobedience. And I
disbelieve your argument, free software is just that free, I can download it, I can
modify it, I can give it to my friend. If let's say Sony Music places licenses on it's
records, it's not just protecting the music from being distributed for money, it's taking
away it's freedom.
There's a major difference though. Rosa Parks, Ghandi, and others who used civil disobedience did so knowing that they would get punished and because they would get punished. It's not civil disobedience if you break the laws anonymously and then whine if you get caught and punished. It is civil disobedience if you break the laws openly in order to show that your belief in your cause is strong enough that you fully accept the punishment that will result from your actions.
some of them are torn apart, half of the particle going in, half going out, and
some energy is released during this fission. It is these fissions at the edge that make a
black hole appear to give off energy, and make it detectable.
Actually, Hawking radiation doesn't occur when particles are torn apart. Rather what happens is that one particle in a virtual particle/antiparticle pair is captured and the other particle leaves.
Basically, particles and their antiparticles appear all the time out of nothing but disappear just as quickly (actually, the time the pair exists is inversely proportional to the mass of the pair). If the pair appears near the event horizon sometimes one of the pair gets caught and this prevents the pair from rejoining and disappearing. The net effect of this is to make the energy/mass in the visible universe seem to increase. This is a big no-no in physics so instead of that occuring, people believe that the blackhole loses enough mass/energy to balance out the creation of the particle. This basically implies that if a black hole doesn't have any matter around it to suck in, the black hole gradually loses energy due to Hawking radiation and at some point disappears.
Do this sometime: "find / -type f -perm +6000 -exec ls -al {} \;" and count
up the setuid files. Now ask yourself how many of them NEED to be setuid. How did
you do? Half? Less than half? Distributions hand out setuid bits like haloween candy.
Does all that crap need to be setuid? NO! And if you're wondering why setuid bits are
bad and you've handed out accounts on your system, you've probably already been
taken over.
I tried your experiment on my redhat system and
found only 34 suid files. 12 of those were actually had the sticky bit set on the group so they only changed gid, not uid. Of the remaining programs they consisted of either security wrappers like Xwrapper, pt_chown or programs that need suid to work gpasswd, chfn and friends, su, mount, umount, etc. or daemons and safe programs that need it at, ssh, crontab, sperl, suidperl. The only questionable choices I found were ping, traceroute, and usernetctl but ping and traceroute don't work with out suid and usernetctl is small (
Incidentally as others have pointed out, RedHat has changed to not installing inetd when you choose the workstation config and I believe they
closed off a lot of the open services in their default inetd.conf
Just because Scheme and Haskell are both classified as functional languages does not
make them equivalent for this particular argument. The difference is that Haskell is
purely functional (local variables don't exist) while Scheme is not
I know the difference between scheme and Haskell, but I recall that my scheme code had no defs or setfs so I was using it in a purely functional method.
Try to implement, say, Blowfish
(or whatever) on Haskell (pure functional) and Eiffel (imperative with constraints), and
Haskell advocates' "executable specification language" buzz suddenly doesn't sound so
good anymore.
Actually cryptography is a pretty nice in a pure functional language. I've implemented a toy RSA encryption package (it differed from a real packaage in that it encrypted the entire message using the public key) in scheme and it was fairly straightforward. It took less than roughly 300 lines of code to implement key-generation, and encryption/decryption routines.
A better example of a problem area for a FP might be something like a word processor or a spread sheet but that may not be so difficult (I don't think anyone's tried it).
I did this sorta thing on my own once, and I made an AI that would always beat the random player (and not by cheating and finding the next rand() number). Theres a contest every year that people make there own AI's for RPS. people who use random never win.
According to game theory, random choices is the optimal strategy. The best you can do against a random choice strategy is to draw. In the short term, you may win due to statistical fluctuations but in the long term you will draw.
Reason why random bots lose the contest is that there are other bots in the contest that play strategies like always playing stone. Random bots don't take advantage of this and so lose points to bots who do.
I'm sick and tired of hearing the same old "If artists don't get paid they won't make anymore art". How is it that we have had such great music from Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky... I don't think they lived the lives of superstars our contemporary "artists" enjoy.
Actually they did. They all had patrons who paid them handsomely to write music, they got commisions to compose pieces. Mozart at least was a court composer who was quite well known throughout England. Beethoven was very well known in Vienna and hung out with nobility and the royal court.
Sigh. Yeah, and I suppose they're in direct contact with the liquid. You take a piece of glass at room temperature and submerse it suddenly in liquid nitrogen
Actually, yes they are in direct contact with the liquid. And no they won't explode either. While doing some low temperature physics experiments, I've poured liquid nitrogen into a glass dewar without it exploding. For that matter I've poured liquid helium into a glass dewar without it exploding. Both of them were at about room temperature. The people working in labs do this on a regular basis so what I did wasn't unusual at all. On this point, you're just flat wrong. If you want I can show you lab manuals that tell people to do this. If the offer for guiness is legit, tell me and I'll give you an address that you can send the twelve pack to.
Well, don't use a thermos. They usually have glass linings inside (the high quality ones, anyway), and those WILL shatter when subjected to those kinds of temperatures,
That's really surprising since dewars are made of glass. It's also pretty common practice to use dewars to hold liquid helium(~4.2 kelvin = -294 C). Singal 11, you should go around and warn all the low temp physicists, NMR people, and a lot of other physical scientists since they all use glass dewars to hold low temperature liquids. At the very least, they'll get a good laugh out of it.
I can see some potential problems with using these in normal systems. Even if you have a 66Mhz 64bit PCI slot, I think you'll have problems with power consumption especially if you have 2 or more processors. I believe that a PCI card can only draw about 20W according to spec. However, one of these cards with two processors will need to draw at least 14-20W for the processor alone. I didn't see any information about a separate power supply like the Voodoo 6000 so I assume that you'll need a special PCI slot that can supply the power or need to attach the card to a power cable.
I do not think you see my point. 100 years ago, people thought that radiation would would cure everything. But it didn't: not then, and not now 100 years later.
Your point? Seeing as how I wrote the post top level post which you decided to copy, I don't think you really have any cogent point on this topic.
Here's the address for my post in an earlier discussion. This guy just cut and pasted it into this discussion to get karma. I guess he's never heard of intellectual honesty or properly attributing other people's ideas.
Jesus Christ! Could you be any more blatant and cut and paste my comment some more. Why not just go through my posting history and cut and paste all my other comments in the appropriate discussion.
Seriously, I read that years ago. You've got to read Lewontin in the context of his interminable public dispute with Stephen J. Gould. He's arguing against Gould's views on evolution, or a caricature thereof, not against anything that real-life human genetecists actually believe.
I didn't realize that Lewontin had a ongoing feud with Gould. You're right that I'm not denying that certain diseases are entirely due to genetic mutations. However, I'm pessimistic about the development of a viable genetic treatment in the next 10-20 years. The problems with reliably injecting genetic materials in somatic cells in vivo seems pretty difficult at the moment. I'm sure you know about problems in getting genetic cells into germ line cells. It just seems like right now, getting genes in 10-20% of the somatic cells you are targeting seems to be difficult and won't be solved anytime soon. On the whole, I'm hopely pessimistic about the promise of gene therapy in treating some of the identified genetic disorders. I certainly don't believe some of the more wild speculations that others on this forum have made will come about anytime soon.
However, I do agree with you that sequencing the geonome will allow people to identify gene location much more quickly and will allow discoveries that we can't forsee right now.
After WWII it was decided that we needed to know far more about the makeup of living organisms than we knew then. I forget who the players were, but the decision was to take a simple bacterium, Escherichia coli, and find out all about it that was doable with the methods available then. This was the first truly large scale biological research effort and it ammassed a ton of data. As a result we have an extremely well understood lab organism which enabled us to revolutionize genetics.
I agree that our understanding E. Coli has led to a great deal of advances. My problem is that a lot of the researchers have made DNA the end all and be all of life with some lip service being paid to environmental and developmental factors. Sure the HGP will bring a lot of advances, but will it bring cures for all inheritable diseases? Not necessarily, if these diseases depend on environmental or developmental factors. But when leading molecular biologists start saying things like given a complete DNA sequence and a fast enough computer, he could determine the organism totally, I think we have problems.
My reply to the message above yours has citation that does a lot better job of illustrating some of my concerns.
I think you're calling the glass half-empty. My impression (somewhat unininformed - I work in genetics, not therapy) is that we're one or two breakthroughs away from being able to fix all sorts of things. Remember that DNA is DNA, and when successful delivery methods are developed, they'll most likely broadly applicable.
My point is more that right now many people have hyped up DNA and knowing the genetic sequence will not give us a magic bullet since developmental and environmental factors seem to be just as important.
My problems with a lot of what is being said is that DNA does not solely determine what happens. Have been non-genetic mechanisms that can also affect expression of genes and the proteins that arise from these genes. For example, a few years ago there was a journal article about how heat shock proteins in yeast (hsp70, I think but I could be wrong) would change if the yeast were stressed and how these changes were passed onto offspring. It's possible that genetic expression could be dependent on whether the sequence is expressed or not. Think of something like the lac operon but where the promotor is revealed only if the dna is methylated or something. If the genetic system we are trying to change works like this then changing the DNA alone is not enough.
I suggest you read an article called The Dream of the Human Geonome by R.C. Lewontin(New York Review of Books, vol 39, no 10, May 28, 1992) to get a clearer picture about where I'm coming from. Some of his examples aren't that great but he raises some important points.
BTW, I've taken only one genetics class a year ago so my examples may be wrong here or there.
In the ABS example, simply run rigorous tests of the system to ensure that it behaves properly in all conditions. If it fails and the car smashes into a wall at 50 mph or the brakes lock up, no, of course you can't trust the system. If everything operates correctly, what the hell is the problem?
The problem is that you aren't sure that your tests cover all the cases and that you haven't left anything out. More importantly, you aren't sure exactly how the system should react in all situations. For instance, what should the maximum response time on a component of the system should be? If you don't specify this then you can't test it to make sure the system responds correctly. BTW, you need specifications like this in order to make sure the system can handle the environment its in and doesn't say start applying the brakes too late.
Basically what the formal spec does is it lets you determine how much testing you need to make sure that you've covered all the cases and that the program will respond the way the spec says it will. Personally I would prefer a software that went through this sort of procedure rather than the first public release of some open source program controlling the brakes on my car or the controls on the plane I'm flying in.
So the HGP and Celera have managed to sequence the geonome of a single person. This doesn't really address the fact that there are variations on genetic sequences even those that code for important proteins. Some of these variations cause problems but others don't. Although HGP is attempting to sequence the geonome's of 4 different people in other to get this variation, this doesn't really capture the distributions across different ethnic groups. Getting that is problem that is even larger than sequencing a few geonomes.
Another problem I see is that even if we are able to sequence the genetic code for all the proteins, what are we going to do with them. Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die?
The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation. With this sort of track record how are we going to do against diseases that are caused by multiple mutations or where different individuals with the disease have different mutations? And this isn't even considering diseases that are caused by interactions between interactions between the gene and environment/history of the individual or disease caused non-genetic inheritance.
It seems like alot of people see genetics as a panacea for all human ills. However this overlooks the fact that the environment is just as important as genetics. In some respects, the attention that whole gene therapy is getting resembles the hype that surrounded radiation in the early 20th century when radiation was going to cure anything and everything.
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I believe the astronauts were placed in quarantine for a week or two afterward in order to make sure they didn't have any diseases.
Actually you can. When water reaches 100C it needs an additional kick of about 4kJ/g to break intermolecular bonds and convert it to vapor. Actually whats really cool is when you get to the triple point of an element. You get solid, liquid, and gaseous phases in equilibrium so the compound is simultaneously boiling, condensing, sublimating, depositing, and crystallizing. It's a bit hard to get this with water but if you put dry ice in a closed container, you can observe this.
Uh...thin indium wires are used routinely on any instrument running at very low temperatures to limit heat input. The only way you can get a signal out of an instrument at say 4K and keep the instrument at that temp is to use thin wires.
That's trivially proven to be incorrect since gzip and bzip2 compress data and yet have the outputs be the same as the inputs. In an audio context, ten minutes of a pure frequency sound be easily compressed to a small size. The only information you really need keep is the length of the tone and the frequency.
Perhaps you should read the quoted text and my reply. I was just pointing out the fact that gcc has proprietary extensions and that the linux kernel uses them. By the original poster's declaration, gcc is broken.
BTW, there are other free compilers out there, lcc is one.
Then I guess gcc is broken also. People can't use compilers other than gcc to compile the linux kernel because the linux uses non standard extensions that gcc provides and other gcc quirks.
What does being Hindu have to do with what language you speak? Last time I checked, Protestants don't all speak English, Eastern Orthodox Christians don't all speak Greek, Muslims don't all speak arabic. Maybe you meant Indian programmer. But the problem with that is India has 18 official languages and no one language is spoken by the majority.
There's a major difference though. Rosa Parks, Ghandi, and others who used civil disobedience did so knowing that they would get punished and because they would get punished. It's not civil disobedience if you break the laws anonymously and then whine if you get caught and punished. It is civil disobedience if you break the laws openly in order to show that your belief in your cause is strong enough that you fully accept the punishment that will result from your actions.
Actually, Hawking radiation doesn't occur when particles are torn apart. Rather what happens is that one particle in a virtual particle/antiparticle pair is captured and the other particle leaves.
Basically, particles and their antiparticles appear all the time out of nothing but disappear just as quickly (actually, the time the pair exists is inversely proportional to the mass of the pair). If the pair appears near the event horizon sometimes one of the pair gets caught and this prevents the pair from rejoining and disappearing. The net effect of this is to make the energy/mass in the visible universe seem to increase. This is a big no-no in physics so instead of that occuring, people believe that the blackhole loses enough mass/energy to balance out the creation of the particle. This basically implies that if a black hole doesn't have any matter around it to suck in, the black hole gradually loses energy due to Hawking radiation and at some point disappears.
I tried your experiment on my redhat system and found only 34 suid files. 12 of those were actually had the sticky bit set on the group so they only changed gid, not uid. Of the remaining programs they consisted of either security wrappers like Xwrapper, pt_chown or programs that need suid to work gpasswd, chfn and friends, su, mount, umount, etc. or daemons and safe programs that need it at, ssh, crontab, sperl, suidperl. The only questionable choices I found were ping, traceroute, and usernetctl but ping and traceroute don't work with out suid and usernetctl is small (
Incidentally as others have pointed out, RedHat has changed to not installing inetd when you choose the workstation config and I believe they closed off a lot of the open services in their default inetd.conf
I know the difference between scheme and Haskell, but I recall that my scheme code had no defs or setfs so I was using it in a purely functional method.
Actually cryptography is a pretty nice in a pure functional language. I've implemented a toy RSA encryption package (it differed from a real packaage in that it encrypted the entire message using the public key) in scheme and it was fairly straightforward. It took less than roughly 300 lines of code to implement key-generation, and encryption/decryption routines.
A better example of a problem area for a FP might be something like a word processor or a spread sheet but that may not be so difficult (I don't think anyone's tried it).
According to game theory, random choices is the optimal strategy. The best you can do against a random choice strategy is to draw. In the short term, you may win due to statistical fluctuations but in the long term you will draw.
Reason why random bots lose the contest is that there are other bots in the contest that play strategies like always playing stone. Random bots don't take advantage of this and so lose points to bots who do.
Actually they did. They all had patrons who paid them handsomely to write music, they got commisions to compose pieces. Mozart at least was a court composer who was quite well known throughout England. Beethoven was very well known in Vienna and hung out with nobility and the royal court.
Actually, yes they are in direct contact with the liquid. And no they won't explode either. While doing some low temperature physics experiments, I've poured liquid nitrogen into a glass dewar without it exploding. For that matter I've poured liquid helium into a glass dewar without it exploding. Both of them were at about room temperature. The people working in labs do this on a regular basis so what I did wasn't unusual at all. On this point, you're just flat wrong. If you want I can show you lab manuals that tell people to do this. If the offer for guiness is legit, tell me and I'll give you an address that you can send the twelve pack to.
That's really surprising since dewars are made of glass. It's also pretty common practice to use dewars to hold liquid helium(~4.2 kelvin = -294 C). Singal 11, you should go around and warn all the low temp physicists, NMR people, and a lot of other physical scientists since they all use glass dewars to hold low temperature liquids. At the very least, they'll get a good laugh out of it.
I can see some potential problems with using these in normal systems. Even if you have a 66Mhz 64bit PCI slot, I think you'll have problems with power consumption especially if you have 2 or more processors. I believe that a PCI card can only draw about 20W according to spec. However, one of these cards with two processors will need to draw at least 14-20W for the processor alone. I didn't see any information about a separate power supply like the Voodoo 6000 so I assume that you'll need a special PCI slot that can supply the power or need to attach the card to a power cable.
Your point? Seeing as how I wrote the post top level post which you decided to copy, I don't think you really have any cogent point on this topic.
Here's the address for my post in an earlier discussion. This guy just cut and pasted it into this discussion to get karma. I guess he's never heard of intellectual honesty or properly attributing other people's ideas.
Jesus Christ! Could you be any more blatant and cut and paste my comment some more. Why not just go through my posting history and cut and paste all my other comments in the appropriate discussion.
I didn't realize that Lewontin had a ongoing feud with Gould. You're right that I'm not denying that certain diseases are entirely due to genetic mutations. However, I'm pessimistic about the development of a viable genetic treatment in the next 10-20 years. The problems with reliably injecting genetic materials in somatic cells in vivo seems pretty difficult at the moment. I'm sure you know about problems in getting genetic cells into germ line cells. It just seems like right now, getting genes in 10-20% of the somatic cells you are targeting seems to be difficult and won't be solved anytime soon. On the whole, I'm hopely pessimistic about the promise of gene therapy in treating some of the identified genetic disorders. I certainly don't believe some of the more wild speculations that others on this forum have made will come about anytime soon.
However, I do agree with you that sequencing the geonome will allow people to identify gene location much more quickly and will allow discoveries that we can't forsee right now.
I agree that our understanding E. Coli has led to a great deal of advances. My problem is that a lot of the researchers have made DNA the end all and be all of life with some lip service being paid to environmental and developmental factors. Sure the HGP will bring a lot of advances, but will it bring cures for all inheritable diseases? Not necessarily, if these diseases depend on environmental or developmental factors. But when leading molecular biologists start saying things like given a complete DNA sequence and a fast enough computer, he could determine the organism totally, I think we have problems.
My reply to the message above yours has citation that does a lot better job of illustrating some of my concerns.
My point is more that right now many people have hyped up DNA and knowing the genetic sequence will not give us a magic bullet since developmental and environmental factors seem to be just as important.
My problems with a lot of what is being said is that DNA does not solely determine what happens. Have been non-genetic mechanisms that can also affect expression of genes and the proteins that arise from these genes. For example, a few years ago there was a journal article about how heat shock proteins in yeast (hsp70, I think but I could be wrong) would change if the yeast were stressed and how these changes were passed onto offspring. It's possible that genetic expression could be dependent on whether the sequence is expressed or not. Think of something like the lac operon but where the promotor is revealed only if the dna is methylated or something. If the genetic system we are trying to change works like this then changing the DNA alone is not enough.
I suggest you read an article called The Dream of the Human Geonome by R.C. Lewontin(New York Review of Books, vol 39, no 10, May 28, 1992) to get a clearer picture about where I'm coming from. Some of his examples aren't that great but he raises some important points.
BTW, I've taken only one genetics class a year ago so my examples may be wrong here or there.
The problem is that you aren't sure that your tests cover all the cases and that you haven't left anything out. More importantly, you aren't sure exactly how the system should react in all situations. For instance, what should the maximum response time on a component of the system should be? If you don't specify this then you can't test it to make sure the system responds correctly. BTW, you need specifications like this in order to make sure the system can handle the environment its in and doesn't say start applying the brakes too late.
Basically what the formal spec does is it lets you determine how much testing you need to make sure that you've covered all the cases and that the program will respond the way the spec says it will. Personally I would prefer a software that went through this sort of procedure rather than the first public release of some open source program controlling the brakes on my car or the controls on the plane I'm flying in.
So the HGP and Celera have managed to sequence the geonome of a single person. This doesn't really address the fact that there are variations on genetic sequences even those that code for important proteins. Some of these variations cause problems but others don't. Although HGP is attempting to sequence the geonome's of 4 different people in other to get this variation, this doesn't really capture the distributions across different ethnic groups. Getting that is problem that is even larger than sequencing a few geonomes.
Another problem I see is that even if we are able to sequence the genetic code for all the proteins, what are we going to do with them. Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die?
The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation. With this sort of track record how are we going to do against diseases that are caused by multiple mutations or where different individuals with the disease have different mutations? And this isn't even considering diseases that are caused by interactions between interactions between the gene and environment/history of the individual or disease caused non-genetic inheritance.
It seems like alot of people see genetics as a panacea for all human ills. However this overlooks the fact that the environment is just as important as genetics. In some respects, the attention that whole gene therapy is getting resembles the hype that surrounded radiation in the early 20th century when radiation was going to cure anything and everything.