That's not at all how DNA identity testing works. I've never heard of the "remove 1 of 4" thing; it may be something that is done for some purpose. Full sequencing has been done. Once. It was called the Human Genome Project, and took several years and millions of dollars.
This is a layman version of the real process; I worked on some software to work with this data, and read some science books until I understood this. However, I couldn't do it in a lab:-)
There are 13 standard locations in the genome, called loci. Each is the starting point of a string of DNA that repeats in a known pattern, but the number of repeats varies from person to person, and is inherited. So for each of the 13 loci, you come up with either one or two repeat counts, one from each parent (they could be the same number). If all of these 13 pairs of numbers match, the samples came from the same person. If not, then they did not.
There is more to it, since the different counts are not equally likely, and the frequencies vary by race, gender, etc. So determining if two samples are from related people, and how closely they're related, is more complex.
Until one of the laptop makers get's a clue and puts in there a Geforce 4 or even a Geforce 3 it isnt gonna happen.
Some of them have. My year-old Dell Inspiron 8200 has a GeForce 4, and it plays UT2003 and RTCW just fine. It wasn't the default video choice, and it was expensive, but they offered it. It's likely that they have similar if not better choices today.
(I think that's the title.) It's been about 20 years since I've seen it, and I've never seen in for sale or rent, but I remember enjoying it thoroughly. I was into the theater tech branch of geekdom at the time, and a movie about roadies just connected.
favorite quote: "Why is my life harder than everyone else's?"
I'm encouraged by this discussion to think again about a project I've been wanting to tackle for a while -- transferring a bunch of 8mm films to DVD. We have about 30 reels (400ft each) of film that my dad took, home movies essentially, but there are some from his time in WW2. I would love to be able to transfer these.
Does anyone know of good, but inexpensivce tech to do this sort of thing? I have even thought of very slow, hacker-type things like scanning the frames one at a time with some sort of film scanner, using a Lego Mindstorms-like machine to pull the film through a frame at a time. If it takes a couple of days to do an hour of film, fine.
Anyone know of a forum or hacking group for this sort of thing?
You're right about the banks and poor security. Why do they limit me to a 4 digit password for things like ATM and online banking? You can bet that their internal accounts have password policies that would prohibit such lousy passwords.
When their money is at risk, they spend whatever it takes (how much does a longer password cost, really?)
When our money is at risk, tough. 4 digits is all you get.
(I did once have a Merrill Lynch Visa card that could be used in ATMs to withdraw cash. It had a six digit pin -- and worked in every ATM I ever tried it in. [Admittedly, I didn't use it very often, usually just on vacations.] So it seems ATM hardware/protocols can handle longer PINs just fine.)
I, too, have an 8200, and although many programs pay attention to the DPI setting, many don't. Mozilla and Evolution are two that come to mind right away. Both of them produce text that's far too small for easy reading. I usually run at 1024x768 just to be able to read the screen without squinting.
What makes it even more annoying is the mouse sensitivity. I use an external Logitech USB optical mouse, and it's so sensitive that moving it (extremely slowly) about 1.5 inches moves the cursor from full left to full right. Great for fast gaming, but really hard to point at the tiny icons or select tiny text. Neither Linux, X, nor KDE offer any way to lower the sensitivity. Raise it, sure, but not lower it. Grrrrr.
(Sorry for the ranting tone -- I've wasted far too much time trying to solve these problems....)
Just because the article didn't mention the DMCA, doesn't mean it can't be relevant. Sure this was an article about British events. His point was that if it was an American bank, and American people discovered the flaw, the banks (or the government) could use the DMCA to prevent them from telling people.
Yeah, I know that the DMCA is supposed to be about preventing illegal copying, but it gets stretched WAY beyond that sometimes. Maybe the banks would claim that the encrypted data in the ATM was copyrighted....
This innovation answers a question that has been on my mind for a while: what will be the next fancy credit card color?
We had silver, then gold cards. Then Platinum cards. Then Titanium came around. I have been wondering -- what's next? Uranium Visa? Magnesium Mastercard? (I like the sound of that, actually) Now, we have it. American Express Blackbody card.
I guess I should have expected as much from the Supreme Court that decided to throw out the results of the 2000 election, and coronate Bush.
And how were they wrong with this decision? Have you seen any valid recounts that actually proved them to be wrong? Didn't think so...
We'll never know, will we? The supreme court didn't just say that Florida didn't have to count the votes manually, they said Florida wasn't allowed to count the votes manually.
I know there were lots of issues related to how to count the votes, or which votes to count, but the Supreme Court said it was more important to have a suspect answer right away than to have a more certain answer later.
Note that politicians all over the country have jumped on this idea wholeheartedly. They are eager to deploy electronic voting machines that will give instant results, without concern as to whether the results are correct. Most of these systems don't provide any way to verify that they worked properly.
What I'd like to see is a Tivo that can directly receive digital cable signals, without a set-top box. Why have a box that converts D to A, then have the Tivo immediately do A to D conversion right back?
Does anyone know if there are patent issues or something similar preventing it? I've looked all over the net with Google, trying to find a board for PCs that will receive digital cable, and turned up nothing. A few places say things like "no products available" or "we hope to have a product like this someday" but that's as close as I could find.
You sure got that right. I used Windows Update the other day to install WinXP SP1 and it broke Corel WordPerfect 2002 (program crashed hard before it even finished starting up). Fortunately, the SP1 update can be removed easily, and that fixed the problem.
I guess I'll have to skip SP1. I know they'd like me to switch to Word, but they shouldn't try to _force_ the issue:-)
Re:Inexpensive airborne link is desparately needed
on
Warflying: San Diego
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· Score: 1
You are correct that the FARs don't prohibit the use of cell phones in this circumstance. However, FCC regulations do. The cell networks are carefully engineered to work properly with cell phones on the ground or close to it, such as tall buildings. The system is not designed to deal with phones that can "see" scores of cell towers at the same time, as would be the case with a phone at altitude. I wish I knew the specific FCC reg, but I don't.
The basic premise in his world is that only retired soldiers can vote.
No, that's not right. You earned a vote by volunteering for government service. Military service was just one form of government service, and the book made it clear that only a small percentage of volunteers ended up in the military.
I don't think I can come up with ten, but here's a few big ones (I don't know how to count these -- were they one project, or several?)
The World Wide Web (HTTP and HTML) [not exactly programming, but similar]
NCSA's original web server
NCSA Mosaic web browser
Usenet News servers and clients
Perl *
* Some would say that Perl was just a knockoff of previous write-only languages, such as APL:-)
If I recall correctly, the movie made it clear that they were iris scans, not retinal scans. There was a line just before the eye transplant that mentioned that the "doc" could change the iris, but that the scar tissue would be noticed, and cause an alarm. I think that iris scanning would also be much easier to do from the distances shown in the film.
I have no info about whether or not iris make a good biometric identifier, though.
I know that there's a certain culture on Slashdot that doesn't seem to understand the concept of a grey area. I don't know why; maybe writing code in binary makes people think in terms of Boolean logic.
Personally, I want to know whether something I am about to do is legal or not. So many of our laws are written in a strictly "yes or no" fashion, that it seems reasonable to evaluate all the laws that way. It seems to me that lawyers and legislators (most of whom are also lawyers) like them to be ambiguous to some extent, expecting the courts to reduce the amount of ambiguity eventually. That way the lawmakers can say "I passed a law that outlawed X" (pleasing some anti-X group), knowing that it's likely that the courts will overturn it, pleasing the pro-X group.
Sometimes, in the real world, you have to use your judgement.
That's a good point, but the fact is that our judgement (and I think that of the average citizen) is very different from that of the legislators, the RIAA/MPAA, and especially, the courts. People have certain expectations from devices such as MP3 players, DVD players, and other gadgets, and don't see any reason that they can't play an audio CD in their computer, when it's always worked before.
One of the big problems I see about laws such as the son-of-SSSCA (I forgot the stupid abbreviation) is that it tries to mandate a strict, zero-tolerance technical enforcement of a specific legal policy, when the real legal policies are constantly being modified by court decisions and by variations in jurisdiction. If the US Supreme Court were to rule that region-coding were illegal, would all the DVD players that implement it be upgraded to no longer obey it? Of course not. Each player is stuck with the policy in place when it was designed, as interpreted by its designer. It's true that some systems, like TiVo, or DRM code in Windows, can be changed with patches, but for many devices, all one can do is wait for new models to be built (which may not happen), and buy one.
A disposable phone with 60 minutes would likely last me a year.
Not from all the companies I looked at last month. They put a time limit on the minutes -- if you don't use them in 60 days or so, they disappear. Be sure to check your contract carefully.
I was interested in this sort of plan, but not any more.
It's not enough that they hold on to your money (without paying interest) for a while before providing service -- after a while, they decide that they don't have to actually provide the service, or give your money back. No wonder they push it so hard!
This was the last bit of news I needed to convince me that I should move my company's domain name to another registrar. (Which one, I haven't decided yet -- I've seen a number of good suggestions here.) But what about alternate certificate authorities? I'd like to find one that is totally unassociated from VeriSign, and even better, is also a good DNS registrar. Any suggestions or anecdotes, good or bad?
I like this idea. In fact, it follows as a consequence of MY idea for campaign finance reform:
Simply put, a person should not be allowed to contribute to a politician's campaign unless that person is allowed to vote for that politician at the politician's next re-election, or if the person is allowed to vote for the politician in the election for which the politician is currently campaigning (officially declared only!).
Thus, I can't contribute to another state's senator, but I can contribute to my own. On the other hand, if that senator starts running for President, then I can start contributing to his or her campaign.
Our problem is that we often have two, and once a week, three shows at the same time that we want to catch. I think that you have a good point about watching things live; we'd quickly get out of that
habit.
There are two things about Tivo that have so far kept me from running out to buy one.
First, we have digital cable. That means that we can't watch many of the channels without the help of the tuner box. We'd have to dedicate one to the Tivo, in order to be able to watch one show while
recording another, which would be our major use.
Secondly, the lack of portability. If we tape a show, we can watch it in the living room if we want, or take it to the TV in the bedroom if it's something the kids shouldn't be watching. Even if we bought two Tivos, we couldn't do that -- you have to watch it in the same room it was recorded, or move the whole box around. I guess Replay 4000s could solve that problem, and more, but that's a lot of money. A second VCR is just $100 these days.
As for building my own from a PC, if I could find a TV-in board that had a digital cable tuner, I would love to build my own. But as far as I can tell, such a thing does not exist. If anyone knows differently, please e-mail me.
Seriously, why do all of the communications companies have websites that suck?
Because the only communication they want with you is "send bill" and "receive payment". Anything more than that is just overhead they'd rather do without.
I found this abstract at washingtonpost.com. Sorry I can't get the whole article....
Bill McAllister Washington Post Staff Writer
January 12, 1994; Page a17
Section: A SECTION
Word Count: 865
An ongoing battle between the Postal Service and commercial overnight delivery services including Federal Express has a new and surprising focus: the federal government. An audit by postal inspectors released yesterday accused five federal agencies of routinely infringing on the Postal Service's monopoly on first-class mail by using Federal Express to ship materials that are not time-sensitive. Under laws that are more than 100 years old, the Postal Service is supposed to have a....
The USPS doesn't do anything to block UPS or FedEx from entering the mail delivery market.
Actually, that's not true. The USPS is by law the only organization allowed to deliver first-class mail. Several large companies had to pay fines a few years ago because they were sending things by FedEx, etc that the USPS said should have gone via USPS, and they wanted the postage they should have gotten. I wish I could remember the details, but I think it was about 10 years ago. I've been trying to find a reference to it, but I haven't.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a layman version of the real process; I worked on some software to work with this data, and read some science books until I understood this. However, I couldn't do it in a lab
There are 13 standard locations in the genome, called loci. Each is the starting point of a string of DNA that repeats in a known pattern,
but the number of repeats varies from person to person, and is inherited. So for each of the 13 loci, you come up with either one or two repeat counts, one from each parent (they could be the same number). If all of these 13 pairs of numbers
match, the samples came from the same person. If not, then they did not.
There is more to it, since the different counts are not equally likely, and the frequencies vary by race, gender, etc. So determining if two samples are from related people, and how closely
they're related, is more complex.
I hope that helps, and isn't too over-simplified.
Some of them have. My year-old Dell Inspiron 8200 has a GeForce 4, and it plays UT2003 and RTCW just fine. It wasn't the default video choice, and it was expensive, but they offered it. It's likely that they have similar if not better choices today.
(I think that's the title.) It's been about 20 years since I've seen it, and I've never seen in for sale or rent, but I remember enjoying it thoroughly. I was into the theater tech branch of geekdom at the time, and a movie about roadies just connected.
favorite quote: "Why is my life harder than everyone else's?"
Does anyone know of good, but inexpensivce tech to do this sort of thing? I have even thought of very slow, hacker-type things like scanning the frames one at a time with some sort of film scanner, using a Lego Mindstorms-like machine to pull the film through a frame at a time. If it takes a couple of days to do an hour of film, fine.
Anyone know of a forum or hacking group for this sort of thing?
When their money is at risk, they spend whatever it takes (how much does a longer password cost, really?)
When our money is at risk, tough. 4 digits is all you get.
(I did once have a Merrill Lynch Visa card that could be used in ATMs to withdraw cash. It had a six digit pin -- and worked in every ATM I ever tried it in. [Admittedly, I didn't use it very often, usually just on vacations.] So it seems ATM hardware/protocols can handle longer PINs just fine.)
What makes it even more annoying is the mouse sensitivity. I use an external Logitech USB optical mouse, and it's so sensitive that moving it (extremely slowly) about 1.5 inches moves the cursor from full left to full right. Great for fast gaming, but really hard to point at the tiny icons or select tiny text. Neither Linux, X, nor KDE offer any way to lower the sensitivity. Raise it, sure, but not lower it. Grrrrr.
(Sorry for the ranting tone -- I've wasted far too much time trying to solve these problems....)
Yeah, I know that the DMCA is supposed to be about preventing illegal copying, but it gets stretched WAY beyond that sometimes. Maybe the banks would claim that the encrypted data in the ATM was copyrighted....
We had silver, then gold cards. Then Platinum cards. Then Titanium came around. I have been wondering -- what's next? Uranium Visa? Magnesium Mastercard? (I like the sound of that, actually) Now, we have it. American Express Blackbody card.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
We'll never know, will we? The supreme court didn't just say that Florida didn't have to count the votes manually, they said Florida wasn't allowed to count the votes manually.
I know there were lots of issues related to how to count the votes, or which votes to count, but the Supreme Court said it was more important to have a suspect answer right away than to have a more certain answer later.
Note that politicians all over the country have jumped on this idea wholeheartedly. They are eager to deploy electronic voting machines that will give instant results, without concern as to whether the results are correct. Most of these systems don't provide any way to verify that they worked properly.
Does anyone know if there are patent issues or something similar preventing it? I've looked all over the net with Google, trying to find a board for PCs that will receive digital cable, and turned up nothing. A few places say things like "no products available" or "we hope to have a product like this someday" but that's as close as I could find.
I guess I'll have to skip SP1. I know they'd like me to switch to Word, but they shouldn't try to _force_ the issue :-)
You are correct that the FARs don't prohibit the use of cell phones in this circumstance. However, FCC regulations do. The cell networks are carefully engineered to work properly with cell phones on the ground or close to it, such as tall buildings. The system is not designed to deal with phones that can "see" scores of cell towers at the same time, as would be the case with a phone at altitude. I wish I knew the specific FCC reg, but I don't.
No, that's not right. You earned a vote by volunteering for government service. Military service was just one form of government service, and the book made it clear that only a small percentage of volunteers ended up in the military.
The World Wide Web (HTTP and HTML) [not exactly programming, but similar]
NCSA's original web server
NCSA Mosaic web browser
Usenet News servers and clients
Perl *
* Some would say that Perl was just a knockoff of previous write-only languages, such as APL :-)
I have no info about whether or not iris make a good biometric identifier, though.
Personally, I want to know whether something I am about to do is legal or not. So many of our laws are written in a strictly "yes or no" fashion, that it seems reasonable to evaluate all the laws that way. It seems to me that lawyers and legislators (most of whom are also lawyers) like them to be ambiguous to some extent, expecting the courts to reduce the amount of ambiguity eventually. That way the lawmakers can say "I passed a law that outlawed X" (pleasing some anti-X group), knowing that it's likely that the courts will overturn it, pleasing the pro-X group.
That's a good point, but the fact is that our judgement (and I think that of the average citizen) is very different from that of the legislators, the RIAA/MPAA, and especially, the courts. People have certain expectations from devices such as MP3 players, DVD players, and other gadgets, and don't see any reason that they can't play an audio CD in their computer, when it's always worked before.
One of the big problems I see about laws such as the son-of-SSSCA (I forgot the stupid abbreviation) is that it tries to mandate a strict, zero-tolerance technical enforcement of a specific legal policy, when the real legal policies are constantly being modified by court decisions and by variations in jurisdiction. If the US Supreme Court were to rule that region-coding were illegal, would all the DVD players that implement it be upgraded to no longer obey it? Of course not. Each player is stuck with the policy in place when it was designed, as interpreted by its designer. It's true that some systems, like TiVo, or DRM code in Windows, can be changed with patches, but for many devices, all one can do is wait for new models to be built (which may not happen), and buy one.
Not from all the companies I looked at last month. They put a time limit on the minutes -- if you don't use them in 60 days or so, they disappear. Be sure to check your contract carefully.
I was interested in this sort of plan, but not any more.
It's not enough that they hold on to your money (without paying interest) for a while before providing service -- after a while, they decide that they don't have to actually provide the service, or give your money back. No wonder they push it so hard!
This was the last bit of news I needed to convince me that I should move my company's domain name to another registrar. (Which one, I haven't decided yet -- I've seen a number of good suggestions here.) But what about alternate certificate authorities? I'd like to find one that is totally unassociated from VeriSign, and even better, is also a good DNS registrar. Any suggestions or anecdotes, good or bad?
Simply put, a person should not be allowed to contribute to a politician's campaign unless that person is allowed to vote for that politician at the politician's next re-election, or if the person is allowed to vote for the politician in the election for which the politician is currently campaigning (officially declared only!).
Thus, I can't contribute to another state's senator, but I can contribute to my own. On the other hand, if that senator starts running for President, then I can start contributing to his or her campaign.
Our problem is that we often have two, and once a week, three shows at the same time that we want to catch. I think that you have a good point about watching things live; we'd quickly get out of that
habit.
First, we have digital cable. That means that we can't watch many of the channels without the help of the tuner box. We'd have to dedicate one to the Tivo, in order to be able to watch one show while
recording another, which would be our major use.
Secondly, the lack of portability. If we tape a show, we can watch it in the living room if we want, or take it to the TV in the bedroom if it's something the kids shouldn't be watching. Even if we bought two Tivos, we couldn't do that -- you have to watch it in the same room it was recorded, or move the whole box around. I guess Replay 4000s could solve that problem, and more, but that's a lot of money. A second VCR is just $100 these days.
As for building my own from a PC, if I could find a TV-in board that had a digital cable tuner, I would love to build my own. But as far as I can tell, such a thing does not exist. If anyone knows differently, please e-mail me.
Because the only communication they want with you is "send bill" and "receive payment". Anything more than that is just overhead they'd rather do without.
Bill McAllister Washington Post Staff Writer
January 12, 1994; Page a17
Section: A SECTION
Word Count: 865
An ongoing battle between the Postal Service and commercial overnight delivery services including Federal Express has a new and surprising focus: the federal government. An audit by postal inspectors released yesterday accused five federal agencies of routinely infringing on the Postal Service's monopoly on first-class mail by using Federal Express to ship materials that are not time-sensitive. Under laws that are more than 100 years old, the Postal Service is supposed to have a
Actually, that's not true. The USPS is by law the only organization allowed to deliver first-class mail. Several large companies had to pay fines a few years ago because they were sending things by FedEx, etc that the USPS said should have gone via USPS, and they wanted the postage they should have gotten. I wish I could remember the details, but I think it was about 10 years ago. I've been trying to find a reference to it, but I haven't.