"You should know what you are talking about before you make such statements."
Yes.
"As far as waste, most reactors now store their waste locally."
Until the storage runs out of course. You might want to look at the press coverage of recent events in Germany. I realise that this is outside of the US and thenfore irrelevant, but still.
"you could actually fly a Boeing 747 into one and it would not crack the containment seal."
They said this about the transport flasks. Then they ran an train into one as a public relations exercise. And yes it did indeed crack.
Nuclear power is one of the cheapest sources of power available, if not the cheapest.
"I think the numbers are something like $3 per
killowatt whereas natural gas is over $300 dollars per killowatt. That's right, over 100 times the cost of nuclear power"
This is so patently absurd that I don't know why I am bothering to answer it. The last time I looked at the stats nuclear power was four or five times more expensive to produce than gas or coal. These stats are from the UK. Obviously it depends on the local factors. But not that much.
"Why do I believe I know just a bit more than you do about nuclear power?"
Ah. Argument by higher authority. Usually used in the absence of knowledge.
"Scare tactics don't work for people properly informed with knowledge. "
I don't believe I am using such tactics. Nuclear power has its uses. My argument is simple. Nuclear power has with it an associated risk of catastrophic failure. The results of this failure are greater than that which I think it is reasonable for society to bear. Okay?
I am not sure that I did neglect this. The consequences of failure are still potentially catastrophic. The risks might be lower in the case of newer plants, but the potentially catastrophic nature is still there.
"There are designs for nuclear powerplants that use the WASTE it produces"
This would be fast breeders right? Which pump around tons of radioactive liquid sodium as coolant. Be interesting if that hit the water table.
I am sure elementary physics tells you that you can only reuse fuel so many times before you have to get rid of it. And often there is waste involved in that reuse. Sellafield for instance (which is a big reprocessing plant) is responsible for making the Irish sea the most radioactive in the world.
"it produces an AWEFULL lot of energy, more than any coal or natural gas power plant "
This would depend on the size of the power plant no?
"France uses nuclear because it can't use anything else [...] if it had small coal or natural gas reserves, it could buy those from other countries".
This would increases the cost of the electricity produced by these means. Of course there is a second issue here. France would not need to import coal after all. It could just import electricity (and indeed it does, there is a big power line between France and the UK). Most countries like to produce their own power however for political reasons.
"The main reason why they use it is because its non-polluting and produces a lot of power."
This is not true. The French produced a lot of nuclear power plants many years ago. The same is true in the UK. Its cheaper to keep the plants running than it is to decommision them. They are still more expensive than every other form of power generation though. They are definately not non-polluting, although as a lot of the French reprocessing is done at Sellafield, a lot of the pollution is shipped abroad.
France uses a large amount of nuclear power. So does Japan. The reasons are not because its "non-polluting and produces a lot of power", but because of the peculiar economic situation of those countries.
"Unless Research scientists, radiotherapy professionals, and airline staff are ingesting radioactive materials on a regular basis"
The first two categories may well be doing so, depending of course on what sort of work they are doing. Airline staff of course do not ingest radiation. Nevertheless the levels of exposure to low level radiation for external gamma ray radiation were calculated partly on the basis of the Hiroshima and other similar data, if memory serves me well. The data is calibrated for radiation type based on high level exposure data where you can collect statistics without large population data. So this data may, eventually, have an impact on the levels that are held to be safe.
Whether people have anything to worry about or not is of course a different matter.
"You wouldn't compare the safety record of the Corsair with a Saab, would you? Neither are Chernobyl and, say, CANDU reactors all that similar..."
No but as I do nothing about cars, or aeroplanes which every you are refering to thats not surprising.
The point is that if these cars both carried a nuclear bomb in the back which could kill 10 million people when the car crashed I would say that the safety record is pretty immaterial. I would not care if one were 10 times safer than another. And to be honest when the nuclear industry starts giving out failure rates of 1 in 10^6, or 10^7, I start to disbelieve them anyway. I would suggest reading Richard Feynmans comments on the risk assessment for the space shuttle following the loss of Challenger if you are interested in this sort of risk assessment.
"I understand dust can get radiated too - don't they get inhaled into the body?"
Well heavy metal contamination will occur as dust. Indeed yes this sort of dust can be inhaled. Personally I would not call this "internal", in the sense that the inside of your lungs are er, outside your body if you see what I mean. But yes this sort of dust would be dangerous. You would expect to see increased levels of lung, throat, and perhaps stomach (from food) cancer.
"How about the air molecules? Oxygen? Nitrogen?"
Both of these elements exist as radioactive forms. Except under a few circumstances I suspect that they would not be dangerous (as air) because they would dilute very very quickly. Of course following an explosion if there were any radioactive Oxygen its likely to end up as water, or other oxides and these would be a different issue.
"Chernobyl was that the wind was going to carry radioactive particles to Western Europe and such, which doesn't seemed to have happened"
It did happen. Chernobyl (which is the the ukraine) resulted in sheep in Wales being declared unfit for human consumption (it rains a lot in Wales, at least on the hills, so this is where the dust came down).
"Does this have an effect on those of us who have had radiation treatments from cancer? "
I suspect although I am afraid that I do not know for sure, that most of radiotherapy has been assessed for its side affect risks by clinical trials on those treatments. This is rather than by calibrating them against the existing data on low level exposure.
In short I suspect that this data will have little impact on the assessment of risk from radiotheraphy.
I think that area that this sort of data will have the biggest impact on is those people who are regularly exposed to low levels of radiation. Research scientests, radiotheraphy professionals (ie the nurses, technicians and doctors), and maybe airline staff will find the rules and guidelines of safe practises may come down over time. Although they probably would have done so anyway as people tend to get more worried about risks rather than less.
"It is true that Chernobyl was a humanitarian/environmental disaster of global proportions, however I feel that since that incident, nuclear power has been stereotyped as a devil energy souce."
Does Chernobyl not tell you what is wrong with nuclear power? The risks of a disaster happening might indeed be very small, but the results are catastrophic. An explosion in the Ukraine meant that sheep in Wales became too radioactive to sell!
And of course its not just Chernobyl. There have been a large number of accidents. Chernobyl was just the worse is all. And still there is the problem of what to do with the waste. There have been massive protests in Germany recently over waste disposal. If you finally add to this that nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of producing electricity you have to ask yourself why use it? France does, but only because they have no other way of producing the power.
"germline cells have a verly long lifespan and therefore have more time to mutate."
This is not actually true. The male germ stem cells for instance divide very frequently. The female stems cells divide (in mammals anyway) before birth and then stop.
Of course its not clear what you mean by "life span". The germ line cells are immortal anyway.
"here is no redundancy in germline cells, one cell makes one organism"
This is also untrue. Many organisms are diploid. We have a mother and a father! Hence two cells make one organism!
"one kidney cell doesn't really define life and death for the whole kidney)"
Unless of course the one cell turns out to be cancerous and then it can kill the entire organism.
"if a skin cells start getting mutations in a
gene thats only used in a liver cell, it is still a great skin cell."
Expressing the wrong cell at the wrong time, or in the wrong place can be pretty disasterous for the functioning of those cells. It can often be worse than a cell failing to express something.
"So far lessons in biology "
Perhaps you should work on the biology a little more?
"ummm...but what about the people at Hiroshima? Didn't they eat anything that was irradiated by the bomb? Or was it just so weak and brief that most of the foodstuff that grew later didn't have significant radiation?"
The two released very different sorts of radiation. For instance Cherynobl released significant amounts of astatine, which gets pumped into the thyroid and massively concentrated. Hiroshima was mostly heavy metal which will get onto the skin, but I don't think will get ingested.
It's always been known that different types of radiation have very different effects. I used to use P-32 a lot for instance. We used very low levels of radiation (compared to the levels physicists or engineers use for instance). But in our case we were using water soluble forms, which if ingested would be incorporated into your DNA. Not good.
"What you just described was the foundation of the Anglican Church, which is one later branch of Protestantism. "
My apologies. Yes of course you are correct. From the context though you will see that I was talking about protestantism as it exists in Northern Ireland. Or rather just Ireland as clearly Henry VIII was pre-partition. The "protestant" community in this sense is essentially Anglican.
"The differences in doctrine are deep and persistant. If you're curious about them, go find Luther's major works on the web (they are out there) and read them"
For one reasons or another I do know most of them. As is the situation on the ground in NI though you often find the reality is very different. Generally speaking I find that the major differences in doctrine between proddie and catholic in this country (the UK) relate to something much more serious than transubstianition, or original sin. Namely which football team you support.
"you would have found that everyone was anti-Semetic."
To some extent maybe. Newton seemed to take hatrid to an extreme even for the time.
"Even in 1939 at the beginning of the second world war there were still many, many anti-Semites"
There still are now I would imagine.
"Look at Ireland: Protestants and Catholics are fighting each other. Why (well, originally)? "
Because the two sections thought that they came from different class backgrounds. The protestants moved to Ireland many years ago (before the US was founded certainly), and at the time considered themselves somewhat above the Catholic population.
"After all, isn't that why it split in the first place?"
Not really. Henry VIII needed a divorce because his wife appeared to be barren. As the catholic church did not allow divorce the easiest solution was to invent a new religion. He certainly had no ideological reason for doing so. Indeed as far as we can tell he was a "devout" catholic, which was why he was awarded the "FD" title by the pope (It translates as Defender of the Faith and is still in use today).
"They differ on fundamental Christian doctrines."
The Christian doctrine is really a minor issue in Northern Ireland. Its more about tribalism. Its for this reason that you can't be an atheist in NI. You have to be either a protestant atheist, or a catholic atheist.
I am sure you are aware of similar examples. As a much milder example for instance, I am sure that you know many people who are either a democrat or a republican for reasons which appear totally divorced from politics.
"so really have no bearing on whether or not he is "a stink" in the room or not. "
Well I did give other examples. The "dwarf" crack was not terribly nice either.
My key point is that even at this distance in time, I would rather Newton not be turned from a person into an icon. In Newtons case he rather benefits from this treatment to be honest. In the case of some other great scientists, such as for instance Jacques Monod, it hides the great people behind the great science.
"Since when did loathing Catholics/Jews mean anything to the principles he uncovered?"
And since when did I say that it did? Newton was a good scientist and mathematician. That he was a bigotted shit does not impact on this.
"In my view, those views of Newton are quite
uninteresting."
And yet you choose to post on the matter?
"Offtopic"
Maybe. It was just a simple comment that the quote was not quite as magnanimous as it might seem. Its certainly relevant to the judgement about who might leave the worst stink about the place.
"Perfect quote from Isaac Newton to counter all that Microsoft has been saying. "
Its sad actually that this quote is frequently produced to show what a nice guy Newton was. Newton was actually refering to another quote when he made this, which was "we are but dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants". The "dwarfs" bit is the relevant point, because he was actually being extremely rude to Robert Boyle (him of the gas law), who actually rather on the short side.
Newton was actually a very nasty piece of work. He was massively anti-semitic. Although he hated catholics ever more. He only took a seat in parliament because someone came up with the nasty idea of admitting catholics to the Cambridge college that Newton was a member of.
His only recorded contribution to debate in parliament was on a motion to open the window. It is believed that his speech was "Mr Speaker, it is rather hot in here."
Hmmm. I am a little bit surprised that this got onto slashdot, or even new scientist. People using information extraction techniques to mine biological data. It might be important but its hardly novel.
I think that the main thing is demonstrates is how poorly scientists choose to represent their data in the first place. Not only do we choose to put all this vital stuff into something which is totally unamenable to computation, but we sign the copyright over to various commercial interests.
"One week after the 'union' has started, all software development will be moved to Singapore or India. "
Actually this is unlikely. Ask yourself why the work has not moved to India and Singapore already given that programmers in these countries cost less than yours (I am assuming that you are from the US!).
There are many factors which affect location of a business. Employment laws and unions are not the only thing of importance.
Besides what made you decide that programmers in India and Singapore should not also be part of the programmers union?
"You didn't read the whole web site. Even the contestant admits that he didn't compress anything. "
You didn't read the whole site, or you would have realised that he suggested some perfectly good ways of compressing the data, although he didn't happen to use them in this case.
Now if you read the compression newsgroup FAQ you will see that there are two challenges. The first does indeed offer a challenge to compress random data, but the second one, the one mentioned here does not offer that challenge. If you know what the data is before hand then it is NOT random data, and is it almost certain that you will be able to compress it.
Look at is this way. If I get some random number generator and send you 10 numbers, then these numbers are indeed random. If I send you the same 10 numbers again, do you have twice as many random numbers. Well of course you don't. This situation here is analagous.
"The fact that most scientists are snooty, eletist bastards who have incredible opinions of themselves "
This may of course be true, but is hardly relevant. The point is of course that scientists want to be able to perform computation over their output. As a scientist I want to be able to search through previous papers, I want to be able to follow references easily. All of this is technologically simple, but legally impossible because we can not get access to the journals.
The point is that in the past the journals used to do a reasonable job at publishing articles. Nowadays they do not simply because technology has advanced enough to make this possible.
"the scientists in our audience shouldn't take this as a flame "
Calling a group of people "snooty, elitest bastards" is not a flame!
Incidentally I am a musician as well. The issues are less clear with musicians because we are in it for much more varies reasons than scientists, and there are many more types of musicians. The community of people who listen to musicians is also much broader. With science the same people who produce the content, read it. And finally of course however rich the scientific publishers are they are no where near the scale of the music publishers. Despite this in time I think as musicians we will get ourselves a better deal for ourselves. Its just going to take a lot longer.
"because you can't compress random data. He can just generate a file of random data. This is just a scam so he can make $100 off of every entry."
No you are completely wrong here I am afraid. The challenge was not to compress random data but to compress a specific piece of data.
It is quite possible for a truely random number generator to produce a string of zero's or the complete works of Shakespeare. Both of these are clearly compressible whilst also being a valid part of a random number stream.
You should be able to compress any individual piece of data that you choose. Of course the decompression script that you write will not necessarily work for all such data. The technique which was used in this case would not work for instane if there was a massive under representation of 5's in the data set.
Now I admit that the story that we have here is one sided, but it seems clear to me that the guy who set the challenge is the one who didn't understand information theory well enough, and that given that he was foolish enough to set the challenge he should pay up.
"If authors have no copyright (ie. intellectual property is not viewed as property at all), then they cannot be compensated for creating that work"
Yes they can. I have no copyright on the work that I do, and yet I am compenstated for it. Copyright is very little protection for authors and the creators of work. Mostly these days the IP laws are used as a stick to beat these people over the head with.
"At a certain point, you're working (say) 14 hours a day making ends meet. "
Then perhaps you should be asking questions about your society. In the last 100 years our production output has increased enourmously. We could easily produce enough to feed, cloth, and house ourselves. And yet we are working longer and longer hours, and many of us are, as you say working 14 hours a day to make ends meet. How has that come about I ask myself?
"There is no difference at all. If you don't want to use the property *I* created on *my* terms, don't use it at all. Ok? This stuff about
copyright law preventing free exchange of information is nonsense. "
Perhaps if you actually read the article carefully? Or perhaps you are trolling?
The key point is fairly simple. Copyright was put in position to protect the rights of those who produce intellectual property. Like myself for instance.
The problem is that most intellectual property is now held by a few enormous corporations, and changes in the copyright law support only these corporations. Something like the internet has the possibility of changing that of course. The music companies for instance hold onto their position because they control the means of distribution of music, which are CD's and previous records. The internet could reduce these distribution costs towards a marginal cost of zero. Bang goes the recording industry. Musicians could distribute their own work freely.
Now of course these companies are aware of this possibility. They would not be the first industry to be destroyed by technology. The DCMA is one example of them fighting back against this.
Where do the artists and IP producers come into this situation? Well at the moment we are screwed over anyway. I have no control over the IP I produce (or at least the IP I produce for a job). Indeed changes in the law in the last decade mean that I can not even work in my spare time and own the IP.
In other words once I have created something I have no part in the decision about what happens to it. This is the situation that copyright, and other IP law has got us into.
Now of course things like napster don't help out artists either. What napster does however is force us to re-evaluate the justification and end results of IP law. The DCMA is it actually pretty draconian, which is what you would expect to happen at first. The thing is with these draconian laws though is that sooner or later they get broken, when they piss enough people off. If artists help to embrace this change then its possible that they may be able to benefit from this change. If they condemn it, or ignore it, then they will probably remain as screwed over as they are now.
"Looked at one way, your post says that you acknowledge 2500 years of facts but you choose to ignore them because you aren't comfortable with
the conclusion they force on you. "
The ideas have been around for 2500 years.
There have been counter arguments for that long also. I don't think that they are facts, and I don't think that they are right.
"So what you are saying is that social connections, track record, and accumulated knowledge are not involved in making a fortune? "
Well the former more than anything else I agree.
"There is something rich people have that poor people don't have (besides money) but it's not politically correct to admit it."
This argument has been used for about the last 2500 years. I still think that its shite. The Greeks used it to justify their empire and slavery. At least until the Romans came along. The British used it for the same reason. Our Kings used to be different and where they were because that was what God wanted.
You can use whatever arguments you like to justify a heavily class ridden society like yours or mine, but I think that they are as wrong as they have ever been. Call me politically correct if you like. Its not something that I find to be a term of particularly strong abuse.
"Companies usually have some form of claim to inventions, but straight copyright work is fairly safe"
Well all I can say is that I think you are wrong. My work generates only IP (I am a research scientist), and my employer has a good claim on pretty much everything that I do. I can not claim "overtime" because I have no contracted hours anyway. It's called a "salary".
Perhaps the law is different in the US. Perhaps not.
"Take away a million dollars from a wise man, he will make another million dollars. "
Well this version is considerably less unpleasant than the first.
Although like that other US saying to be found in many bars "if you are so clever why ain't you rich", I would have to say that if a man was wise perhaps he would have no need for a million dollars.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but writting software when your employed by someone does not grant them any right to the software you're developing."
You are wrong I am afraid. Because I work as a programmer (or rather part of my work is as a programmer), my employer has a fairly good claim on any programming work that I do, whether or not it is in any way related to the work that I am doing.
"going by your first piece of advice, does this mean McDonald's has the rights to the many database programs i've written for any given business that has contracted me to do so."
It needs to be more or less at the same time. If you write stuff after you were employed then they will have a harder time showing that you did the work with the resources that you got from them.
The work also needs to be related. If you write a novel, or a work on how to repair boats, then you are quite safe. And of course if you don't work as a programmer, but write programs in your spare time, then again your employer has little rights to your work.
And of course all of this depends on what your contract says. But generally speaking if it doesn't say that you DONT have to give them IP, then by default they get the IP.
At least thats how it is in the UK. I should imagine that its the same in the US as well, probably worse if anything. Its the way of the world. You think that you do the work, and they pay you, but in reality they are buying far far more rights to everything and anything that comes out of your mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
"As far as waste, most reactors now store their waste locally."
Until the storage runs out of course. You might want to look at the press coverage of recent events in Germany. I realise that this is outside of the US and thenfore irrelevant, but still.
"you could actually fly a Boeing 747 into one and it would not crack the containment seal."
They said this about the transport flasks. Then they ran an train into one as a public relations exercise. And yes it did indeed crack.
Nuclear power is one of the cheapest sources of power available, if not the cheapest.
"I think the numbers are something like $3 per killowatt whereas natural gas is over $300 dollars per killowatt. That's right, over 100 times the cost of nuclear power"
This is so patently absurd that I don't know why I am bothering to answer it. The last time I looked at the stats nuclear power was four or five times more expensive to produce than gas or coal. These stats are from the UK. Obviously it depends on the local factors. But not that much.
"Why do I believe I know just a bit more than you do about nuclear power?"
Ah. Argument by higher authority. Usually used in the absence of knowledge.
"Scare tactics don't work for people properly informed with knowledge. "
I don't believe I am using such tactics. Nuclear power has its uses. My argument is simple. Nuclear power has with it an associated risk of catastrophic failure. The results of this failure are greater than that which I think it is reasonable for society to bear. Okay?
Phil
I am not sure that I did neglect this. The consequences of failure are still potentially catastrophic. The risks might be lower in the case of newer plants, but the potentially catastrophic nature is still there.
"There are designs for nuclear powerplants that use the WASTE it produces"
This would be fast breeders right? Which pump around tons of radioactive liquid sodium as coolant. Be interesting if that hit the water table.
I am sure elementary physics tells you that you can only reuse fuel so many times before you have to get rid of it. And often there is waste involved in that reuse. Sellafield for instance (which is a big reprocessing plant) is responsible for making the Irish sea the most radioactive in the world.
"it produces an AWEFULL lot of energy, more than any coal or natural gas power plant "
This would depend on the size of the power plant no?
"France uses nuclear because it can't use anything else [...] if it had small coal or natural gas reserves, it could buy those from other countries".
This would increases the cost of the electricity produced by these means. Of course there is a second issue here. France would not need to import coal after all. It could just import electricity (and indeed it does, there is a big power line between France and the UK). Most countries like to produce their own power however for political reasons.
"The main reason why they use it is because its non-polluting and produces a lot of power."
This is not true. The French produced a lot of nuclear power plants many years ago. The same is true in the UK. Its cheaper to keep the plants running than it is to decommision them. They are still more expensive than every other form of power generation though. They are definately not non-polluting, although as a lot of the French reprocessing is done at Sellafield, a lot of the pollution is shipped abroad.
France uses a large amount of nuclear power. So does Japan. The reasons are not because its "non-polluting and produces a lot of power", but because of the peculiar economic situation of those countries.
Phil
The first two categories may well be doing so, depending of course on what sort of work they are doing. Airline staff of course do not ingest radiation. Nevertheless the levels of exposure to low level radiation for external gamma ray radiation were calculated partly on the basis of the Hiroshima and other similar data, if memory serves me well. The data is calibrated for radiation type based on high level exposure data where you can collect statistics without large population data. So this data may, eventually, have an impact on the levels that are held to be safe.
Whether people have anything to worry about or not is of course a different matter.
Phil
No but as I do nothing about cars, or aeroplanes which every you are refering to thats not surprising.
The point is that if these cars both carried a nuclear bomb in the back which could kill 10 million people when the car crashed I would say that the safety record is pretty immaterial. I would not care if one were 10 times safer than another. And to be honest when the nuclear industry starts giving out failure rates of 1 in 10^6, or 10^7, I start to disbelieve them anyway. I would suggest reading Richard Feynmans comments on the risk assessment for the space shuttle following the loss of Challenger if you are interested in this sort of risk assessment.
Phil
Well heavy metal contamination will occur as dust. Indeed yes this sort of dust can be inhaled. Personally I would not call this "internal", in the sense that the inside of your lungs are er, outside your body if you see what I mean. But yes this sort of dust would be dangerous. You would expect to see increased levels of lung, throat, and perhaps stomach (from food) cancer.
"How about the air molecules? Oxygen? Nitrogen?"
Both of these elements exist as radioactive forms. Except under a few circumstances I suspect that they would not be dangerous (as air) because they would dilute very very quickly. Of course following an explosion if there were any radioactive Oxygen its likely to end up as water, or other oxides and these would be a different issue.
"Chernobyl was that the wind was going to carry radioactive particles to Western Europe and such, which doesn't seemed to have happened"
It did happen. Chernobyl (which is the the ukraine) resulted in sheep in Wales being declared unfit for human consumption (it rains a lot in Wales, at least on the hills, so this is where the dust came down).
Phil
I suspect although I am afraid that I do not know for sure, that most of radiotherapy has been assessed for its side affect risks by clinical trials on those treatments. This is rather than by calibrating them against the existing data on low level exposure.
In short I suspect that this data will have little impact on the assessment of risk from radiotheraphy.
I think that area that this sort of data will have the biggest impact on is those people who are regularly exposed to low levels of radiation. Research scientests, radiotheraphy professionals (ie the nurses, technicians and doctors), and maybe airline staff will find the rules and guidelines of safe practises may come down over time. Although they probably would have done so anyway as people tend to get more worried about risks rather than less.
Phil
Does Chernobyl not tell you what is wrong with nuclear power? The risks of a disaster happening might indeed be very small, but the results are catastrophic. An explosion in the Ukraine meant that sheep in Wales became too radioactive to sell!
And of course its not just Chernobyl. There have been a large number of accidents. Chernobyl was just the worse is all. And still there is the problem of what to do with the waste. There have been massive protests in Germany recently over waste disposal. If you finally add to this that nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of producing electricity you have to ask yourself why use it? France does, but only because they have no other way of producing the power.
Phil
This is not actually true. The male germ stem cells for instance divide very frequently. The female stems cells divide (in mammals anyway) before birth and then stop.
Of course its not clear what you mean by "life span". The germ line cells are immortal anyway.
"here is no redundancy in germline cells, one cell makes one organism"
This is also untrue. Many organisms are diploid. We have a mother and a father! Hence two cells make one organism!
"one kidney cell doesn't really define life and death for the whole kidney)"
Unless of course the one cell turns out to be cancerous and then it can kill the entire organism.
"if a skin cells start getting mutations in a gene thats only used in a liver cell, it is still a great skin cell."
Expressing the wrong cell at the wrong time, or in the wrong place can be pretty disasterous for the functioning of those cells. It can often be worse than a cell failing to express something.
"So far lessons in biology "
Perhaps you should work on the biology a little more?
Phil
The two released very different sorts of radiation. For instance Cherynobl released significant amounts of astatine, which gets pumped into the thyroid and massively concentrated. Hiroshima was mostly heavy metal which will get onto the skin, but I don't think will get ingested.
It's always been known that different types of radiation have very different effects. I used to use P-32 a lot for instance. We used very low levels of radiation (compared to the levels physicists or engineers use for instance). But in our case we were using water soluble forms, which if ingested would be incorporated into your DNA. Not good.
Phil
My apologies. Yes of course you are correct. From the context though you will see that I was talking about protestantism as it exists in Northern Ireland. Or rather just Ireland as clearly Henry VIII was pre-partition. The "protestant" community in this sense is essentially Anglican.
"The differences in doctrine are deep and persistant. If you're curious about them, go find Luther's major works on the web (they are out there) and read them"
For one reasons or another I do know most of them. As is the situation on the ground in NI though you often find the reality is very different. Generally speaking I find that the major differences in doctrine between proddie and catholic in this country (the UK) relate to something much more serious than transubstianition, or original sin. Namely which football team you support.
Phil
To some extent maybe. Newton seemed to take hatrid to an extreme even for the time.
"Even in 1939 at the beginning of the second world war there were still many, many anti-Semites"
There still are now I would imagine.
"Look at Ireland: Protestants and Catholics are fighting each other. Why (well, originally)? "
Because the two sections thought that they came from different class backgrounds. The protestants moved to Ireland many years ago (before the US was founded certainly), and at the time considered themselves somewhat above the Catholic population.
"After all, isn't that why it split in the first place?"
Not really. Henry VIII needed a divorce because his wife appeared to be barren. As the catholic church did not allow divorce the easiest solution was to invent a new religion. He certainly had no ideological reason for doing so. Indeed as far as we can tell he was a "devout" catholic, which was why he was awarded the "FD" title by the pope (It translates as Defender of the Faith and is still in use today).
"They differ on fundamental Christian doctrines."
The Christian doctrine is really a minor issue in Northern Ireland. Its more about tribalism. Its for this reason that you can't be an atheist in NI. You have to be either a protestant atheist, or a catholic atheist.
I am sure you are aware of similar examples. As a much milder example for instance, I am sure that you know many people who are either a democrat or a republican for reasons which appear totally divorced from politics.
"so really have no bearing on whether or not he is "a stink" in the room or not. "
Well I did give other examples. The "dwarf" crack was not terribly nice either.
My key point is that even at this distance in time, I would rather Newton not be turned from a person into an icon. In Newtons case he rather benefits from this treatment to be honest. In the case of some other great scientists, such as for instance Jacques Monod, it hides the great people behind the great science.
Phil
And since when did I say that it did? Newton was a good scientist and mathematician. That he was a bigotted shit does not impact on this.
"In my view, those views of Newton are quite uninteresting."
And yet you choose to post on the matter?
"Offtopic"
Maybe. It was just a simple comment that the quote was not quite as magnanimous as it might seem. Its certainly relevant to the judgement about who might leave the worst stink about the place.
Phil
Its sad actually that this quote is frequently produced to show what a nice guy Newton was. Newton was actually refering to another quote when he made this, which was "we are but dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants". The "dwarfs" bit is the relevant point, because he was actually being extremely rude to Robert Boyle (him of the gas law), who actually rather on the short side.
Newton was actually a very nasty piece of work. He was massively anti-semitic. Although he hated catholics ever more. He only took a seat in parliament because someone came up with the nasty idea of admitting catholics to the Cambridge college that Newton was a member of.
His only recorded contribution to debate in parliament was on a motion to open the window. It is believed that his speech was "Mr Speaker, it is rather hot in here."
The thing with the apples was good though.
Phil
I think that the main thing is demonstrates is how poorly scientists choose to represent their data in the first place. Not only do we choose to put all this vital stuff into something which is totally unamenable to computation, but we sign the copyright over to various commercial interests.
Phil
Actually this is unlikely. Ask yourself why the work has not moved to India and Singapore already given that programmers in these countries cost less than yours (I am assuming that you are from the US!).
There are many factors which affect location of a business. Employment laws and unions are not the only thing of importance.
Besides what made you decide that programmers in India and Singapore should not also be part of the programmers union?
Phil
You didn't read the whole site, or you would have realised that he suggested some perfectly good ways of compressing the data, although he didn't happen to use them in this case.
Now if you read the compression newsgroup FAQ you will see that there are two challenges. The first does indeed offer a challenge to compress random data, but the second one, the one mentioned here does not offer that challenge. If you know what the data is before hand then it is NOT random data, and is it almost certain that you will be able to compress it.
Look at is this way. If I get some random number generator and send you 10 numbers, then these numbers are indeed random. If I send you the same 10 numbers again, do you have twice as many random numbers. Well of course you don't. This situation here is analagous.
Phil
This may of course be true, but is hardly relevant. The point is of course that scientists want to be able to perform computation over their output. As a scientist I want to be able to search through previous papers, I want to be able to follow references easily. All of this is technologically simple, but legally impossible because we can not get access to the journals.
The point is that in the past the journals used to do a reasonable job at publishing articles. Nowadays they do not simply because technology has advanced enough to make this possible.
"the scientists in our audience shouldn't take this as a flame "
Calling a group of people "snooty, elitest bastards" is not a flame!
Incidentally I am a musician as well. The issues are less clear with musicians because we are in it for much more varies reasons than scientists, and there are many more types of musicians. The community of people who listen to musicians is also much broader. With science the same people who produce the content, read it. And finally of course however rich the scientific publishers are they are no where near the scale of the music publishers. Despite this in time I think as musicians we will get ourselves a better deal for ourselves. Its just going to take a lot longer.
Phil
No you are completely wrong here I am afraid. The challenge was not to compress random data but to compress a specific piece of data.
It is quite possible for a truely random number generator to produce a string of zero's or the complete works of Shakespeare. Both of these are clearly compressible whilst also being a valid part of a random number stream.
You should be able to compress any individual piece of data that you choose. Of course the decompression script that you write will not necessarily work for all such data. The technique which was used in this case would not work for instane if there was a massive under representation of 5's in the data set.
Now I admit that the story that we have here is one sided, but it seems clear to me that the guy who set the challenge is the one who didn't understand information theory well enough, and that given that he was foolish enough to set the challenge he should pay up.
Phil
Yes they can. I have no copyright on the work that I do, and yet I am compenstated for it. Copyright is very little protection for authors and the creators of work. Mostly these days the IP laws are used as a stick to beat these people over the head with.
"At a certain point, you're working (say) 14 hours a day making ends meet. "
Then perhaps you should be asking questions about your society. In the last 100 years our production output has increased enourmously. We could easily produce enough to feed, cloth, and house ourselves. And yet we are working longer and longer hours, and many of us are, as you say working 14 hours a day to make ends meet. How has that come about I ask myself?
Phil
Perhaps if you actually read the article carefully? Or perhaps you are trolling?
The key point is fairly simple. Copyright was put in position to protect the rights of those who produce intellectual property. Like myself for instance.
The problem is that most intellectual property is now held by a few enormous corporations, and changes in the copyright law support only these corporations. Something like the internet has the possibility of changing that of course. The music companies for instance hold onto their position because they control the means of distribution of music, which are CD's and previous records. The internet could reduce these distribution costs towards a marginal cost of zero. Bang goes the recording industry. Musicians could distribute their own work freely.
Now of course these companies are aware of this possibility. They would not be the first industry to be destroyed by technology. The DCMA is one example of them fighting back against this.
Where do the artists and IP producers come into this situation? Well at the moment we are screwed over anyway. I have no control over the IP I produce (or at least the IP I produce for a job). Indeed changes in the law in the last decade mean that I can not even work in my spare time and own the IP.
In other words once I have created something I have no part in the decision about what happens to it. This is the situation that copyright, and other IP law has got us into.
Now of course things like napster don't help out artists either. What napster does however is force us to re-evaluate the justification and end results of IP law. The DCMA is it actually pretty draconian, which is what you would expect to happen at first. The thing is with these draconian laws though is that sooner or later they get broken, when they piss enough people off. If artists help to embrace this change then its possible that they may be able to benefit from this change. If they condemn it, or ignore it, then they will probably remain as screwed over as they are now.
Phil
The ideas have been around for 2500 years. There have been counter arguments for that long also. I don't think that they are facts, and I don't think that they are right.
Phil
Well the former more than anything else I agree. "There is something rich people have that poor people don't have (besides money) but it's not politically correct to admit it."
This argument has been used for about the last 2500 years. I still think that its shite. The Greeks used it to justify their empire and slavery. At least until the Romans came along. The British used it for the same reason. Our Kings used to be different and where they were because that was what God wanted.
You can use whatever arguments you like to justify a heavily class ridden society like yours or mine, but I think that they are as wrong as they have ever been. Call me politically correct if you like. Its not something that I find to be a term of particularly strong abuse.
Phil
Well all I can say is that I think you are wrong. My work generates only IP (I am a research scientist), and my employer has a good claim on pretty much everything that I do. I can not claim "overtime" because I have no contracted hours anyway. It's called a "salary".
Perhaps the law is different in the US. Perhaps not.
Phil
Well this version is considerably less unpleasant than the first.
Although like that other US saying to be found in many bars "if you are so clever why ain't you rich", I would have to say that if a man was wise perhaps he would have no need for a million dollars.
Phil
You are wrong I am afraid. Because I work as a programmer (or rather part of my work is as a programmer), my employer has a fairly good claim on any programming work that I do, whether or not it is in any way related to the work that I am doing.
"going by your first piece of advice, does this mean McDonald's has the rights to the many database programs i've written for any given business that has contracted me to do so."
It needs to be more or less at the same time. If you write stuff after you were employed then they will have a harder time showing that you did the work with the resources that you got from them.
The work also needs to be related. If you write a novel, or a work on how to repair boats, then you are quite safe. And of course if you don't work as a programmer, but write programs in your spare time, then again your employer has little rights to your work.
And of course all of this depends on what your contract says. But generally speaking if it doesn't say that you DONT have to give them IP, then by default they get the IP.
At least thats how it is in the UK. I should imagine that its the same in the US as well, probably worse if anything. Its the way of the world. You think that you do the work, and they pay you, but in reality they are buying far far more rights to everything and anything that comes out of your mind.
Welcome to the crazy world of IP law.
Phil