The backend of http://biocyc.org/ is written in lisp AFAIK, and it's an impressive beast, connecting to and managing databases, generating graph images on the fly on the basis of query results and embedding them in lisp-driven web pages and so on, but it's the only lisp-driven heavy duty system I've ever come across.
I'm not sure I agree. I understand this person was not arrested, tried, or prosecuted for any crime. He did nothing illegal, so I think the feds DO see it that way.
Our modest lab turns out roughly 100GB a week of finished sequence, from a single sequencer, which is only a very small fraction of the temporary disk storage needed along the way to get to finished sequence. Genome centres with many machines will turn out an order of magnitude (or two) more, and believe me, these machines are kept busy week after week. Once we have finished sequences, the assembly process adds a multiple to this. Yes, a genome is only XMB, but when you have to effectively sequence it 40 times to get the overlaps you need to assemble the thing, it soon mounts up. The sequencer machine companies are now touting similar scale machines on the basis that any lab can afford one to do their own sequencing. Sequence volumes have been outstripping Moore's law for some time now, and it isn't going to stop anytime soon.
That said, I think Facebook and their CIA funders are probably more likely to have the money for this than anyone doing anything useful for humanity.
Quite a few corporations do this routinely and are never prosecuted for it. Individuals are unlikely to take the risk due to the personal cost of a mistake, against which they can't insure. Carrying parcels for people on aeroplanes is not the same as sharing your spare computer capacity with anyone who needs some at the time. You are not carrying anything for anyone.
What will be the effect of organisations outsourcing everything and not employing engineers? Things will be poorly engineered and insecure. Everything will work a bit less well and take longer to get fixed. China will run things.
Re:Natural? uranium is 'natural'... weak argument
on
Sequencing the Weed Genome
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You could make an evolutionary argument that a medicine which has coevolved with our species, been ingested by billions of people over millions of years, and has been taken by people from most different genetic groups around the world, has been better tested, and proven safer, than something someone came up with in a lab and tried out on a few mice, and wants to push on consumers for profit.
Asking us to pay £1000 to cut his hedges is not reasonable, as most of us can't afford to pay anyone to cut our own hedges. If it was reasonable, I think he wouldn't have decided to pay it back when he was caught. Paying it back allowed him to escape any risk of prosecution, but it doesn't make it legal to have made the claim in the first place.
You make an interesting point. In East Germany, the power of the Stasi was not that they were everywhere, but that they had enough snitches everywhere. This is usually how dictatorships handle things.
My guess is that these tools would also be useful for personal army requests, calling in the cops in the middle of the night to wake up someone you are annoyed with. If they really actually work as tools for bringing perpetrators to justice, then they would also work very effectively as tools of harassment and wasting of police time.
I don't think this is entirely true. The supposed billions they made were not real, and seem to have been based on false accounting in the valuation of assets (fraud) given that the whole thing unwound and it turned out they lost billions really. In Iceland, after the crash, the government were voted out, and a fresh administration voted in, and members of the general public sat outside the bankers' houses until the police were forced to take notice and act, and bankers did jail time for their role in the economic collapse. In other countries, the same old administrations with the same links to global capital are still in charge so noone does anything about it.
The only consequences from these people's actions are that they got arrested and prosecuted. They didn't actually incite anyone to riot, noone responded to their posts by turning up and rioting. No riots occurred in the places they suggested in their posts. The only people who responded to the posts were the police, who are now butthurt that they turned up to defend shopping centres on the strength of a stupid facebook post. They should be prosecuted for wasting police time, if anything. They are being punished for intent to cause consequences, not for actually causing consequences.
The UK lot have already been investigated for fiddling their expenses (i.e. fraud). The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg "claimed £160 each month to cover "garden maintenance", including keeping his hedges and front bushes trimmed.". (guardian.co.uk). Claiming nearly £2000 a year of taxpayers' money to have your front bush trimmed is criminal as far as I can see but the deputy prime minister is not going to be doing any jail time whatever I say to the police.
I thought all currencies are generally treated as assets (current assets = cash in bank more or less). Current assets have intrinsic value which is the amount of 'cash' in the 'home currency' for which they can be exchanged on the accounting date. IANAA though.
That's really interesting, and a difficult challenge computationally (see comments above about how to work out degree of separation - finding the polar opposite would be even harder I think). The other thing I wonder is whether FB is a connected graph? Are there continents in there with no bridging friendships at all? I think we should be told! There could be a competition to be the friend who bridges continents (although my hunch is that the whole graph might be more or less connected already).
The problem might not grow quite so quickly as it seems at first, there are likely some optimisations to be had here. If person A and person Z are known at the start, then the search can proceed from both start points at the same time, and only needs to continue until a node is found in both result sets. Assuming six degrees of separation, then I guess it should only take three hops on average before the two graphs intersect (130^3). Also, bear in mind that quite a few of a person's friends will also be each others' friends, cutting down the number of outward edges from the result set, so it starts to look more like something of the order of (total guesswork here, but you get the point) 130*70*40. Then, parallelising, so you look at say, 100 people's friend sets at a time, it starts to look much more tractable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll go one better, I think it probably looks the spitting image of the new hiPhone 5
The backend of http://biocyc.org/ is written in lisp AFAIK, and it's an impressive beast, connecting to and managing databases, generating graph images on the fly on the basis of query results and embedding them in lisp-driven web pages and so on, but it's the only lisp-driven heavy duty system I've ever come across.
I'm not sure I agree. I understand this person was not arrested, tried, or prosecuted for any crime. He did nothing illegal, so I think the feds DO see it that way.
Our modest lab turns out roughly 100GB a week of finished sequence, from a single sequencer, which is only a very small fraction of the temporary disk storage needed along the way to get to finished sequence. Genome centres with many machines will turn out an order of magnitude (or two) more, and believe me, these machines are kept busy week after week. Once we have finished sequences, the assembly process adds a multiple to this. Yes, a genome is only XMB, but when you have to effectively sequence it 40 times to get the overlaps you need to assemble the thing, it soon mounts up. The sequencer machine companies are now touting similar scale machines on the basis that any lab can afford one to do their own sequencing. Sequence volumes have been outstripping Moore's law for some time now, and it isn't going to stop anytime soon. That said, I think Facebook and their CIA funders are probably more likely to have the money for this than anyone doing anything useful for humanity.
Quite a few corporations do this routinely and are never prosecuted for it. Individuals are unlikely to take the risk due to the personal cost of a mistake, against which they can't insure. Carrying parcels for people on aeroplanes is not the same as sharing your spare computer capacity with anyone who needs some at the time. You are not carrying anything for anyone.
It sounds as though you arguing that the whole software, music and film industries are really just a giant scam. Oh wait...
There you go again with this 'the group' thing. I don't think it really works like that.
Fred would have agreed with you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle See his great work Evolution from Space
Yes you're right, I'm not.
What will be the effect of organisations outsourcing everything and not employing engineers? Things will be poorly engineered and insecure. Everything will work a bit less well and take longer to get fixed. China will run things.
You could make an evolutionary argument that a medicine which has coevolved with our species, been ingested by billions of people over millions of years, and has been taken by people from most different genetic groups around the world, has been better tested, and proven safer, than something someone came up with in a lab and tried out on a few mice, and wants to push on consumers for profit.
only in america...
Asking us to pay £1000 to cut his hedges is not reasonable, as most of us can't afford to pay anyone to cut our own hedges. If it was reasonable, I think he wouldn't have decided to pay it back when he was caught. Paying it back allowed him to escape any risk of prosecution, but it doesn't make it legal to have made the claim in the first place.
You make an interesting point. In East Germany, the power of the Stasi was not that they were everywhere, but that they had enough snitches everywhere. This is usually how dictatorships handle things.
My guess is that these tools would also be useful for personal army requests, calling in the cops in the middle of the night to wake up someone you are annoyed with. If they really actually work as tools for bringing perpetrators to justice, then they would also work very effectively as tools of harassment and wasting of police time.
Unless you own an ipod/pad/phone (ducks for cover)
Maybe, but in this case they did not instigate an illegal action. Noone turned up to riot in the area they suggested, except the police.
I don't think this is entirely true. The supposed billions they made were not real, and seem to have been based on false accounting in the valuation of assets (fraud) given that the whole thing unwound and it turned out they lost billions really. In Iceland, after the crash, the government were voted out, and a fresh administration voted in, and members of the general public sat outside the bankers' houses until the police were forced to take notice and act, and bankers did jail time for their role in the economic collapse. In other countries, the same old administrations with the same links to global capital are still in charge so noone does anything about it.
The only consequences from these people's actions are that they got arrested and prosecuted. They didn't actually incite anyone to riot, noone responded to their posts by turning up and rioting. No riots occurred in the places they suggested in their posts. The only people who responded to the posts were the police, who are now butthurt that they turned up to defend shopping centres on the strength of a stupid facebook post. They should be prosecuted for wasting police time, if anything. They are being punished for intent to cause consequences, not for actually causing consequences.
The UK lot have already been investigated for fiddling their expenses (i.e. fraud). The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg "claimed £160 each month to cover "garden maintenance", including keeping his hedges and front bushes trimmed.". (guardian.co.uk). Claiming nearly £2000 a year of taxpayers' money to have your front bush trimmed is criminal as far as I can see but the deputy prime minister is not going to be doing any jail time whatever I say to the police.
I thought all currencies are generally treated as assets (current assets = cash in bank more or less). Current assets have intrinsic value which is the amount of 'cash' in the 'home currency' for which they can be exchanged on the accounting date. IANAA though.
Being in a position not to get caught and punished for their crimes does not make them not criminals.
Do you know if it's known whether the FB graph is fully connected?
That's really interesting, and a difficult challenge computationally (see comments above about how to work out degree of separation - finding the polar opposite would be even harder I think). The other thing I wonder is whether FB is a connected graph? Are there continents in there with no bridging friendships at all? I think we should be told! There could be a competition to be the friend who bridges continents (although my hunch is that the whole graph might be more or less connected already).
The problem might not grow quite so quickly as it seems at first, there are likely some optimisations to be had here. If person A and person Z are known at the start, then the search can proceed from both start points at the same time, and only needs to continue until a node is found in both result sets. Assuming six degrees of separation, then I guess it should only take three hops on average before the two graphs intersect (130^3). Also, bear in mind that quite a few of a person's friends will also be each others' friends, cutting down the number of outward edges from the result set, so it starts to look more like something of the order of (total guesswork here, but you get the point) 130*70*40. Then, parallelising, so you look at say, 100 people's friend sets at a time, it starts to look much more tractable.