I cringe every time people start talking about crypto regulations-- why? Simple, for some reason it appears that U.S. citizens are incapable of believing that a country that isn't the U.S. (or at least isn't in a position that the U.S. can bully them) could create a mathematician with the skills required to develop strong cryptographic algorithms or the programmers required to implement said algorithms (along with the rest of the security chain). Its simple arrogance and it WILL bite us (I'm a U.S. citizen, what can I say?) on the ass eventually. Hard. Its not like this stuff is a nuclear weapons programs which at least takes a lab of some sort and readily identifiable "natural" resources (you gotta have a place to build bombs and you need stuff to put in the bombs). The crypto algorithms can be developed on a piece of paper and implemented on damn-near-anything (we could, of course, attempt to control every computer on the planet, but then most of the chip fabs aren't in the U.S. *whoops*). So what do crypto regs get us--- they hamstring U.S. companies in an internantion crypto market. This doesn't sound like a terrifically good idea does it? It also potentially exposes the average U.S. citizen in that massive personal crypto restrictions put us at a potential disadvantage (assuming a good chunk of the rest of the world responds to cries of restriction from the U.S. with a collective "Um, no? Wait, lemme think.... no"). This sounds like the opposite of what governments are put in place to do to me. Stupid.
But then, what can we expect of legislators trying to control something that they don't know enough about to even know they know nothing at all?
Yeah, my Panasonic A220 (or whatever, its not in front of me so that may not be the exact model number) doesn't play CD-Rs either (actually in the user's manual it says something about the lasers potentially destroying the CD-Rs. Maybe it has something to do with power requirements of the laser for reading the higher-density DVDs)
Heheheh, I remember that! I was working in Palo Alto at the time (didn't affect my site) and my roomate was working in San Mateo--- their servers elsewhere in the Bay Area fell down, went boom. Silly PG&E!
WaxTrax! is in fact owned by TVT (and also notable as Metallica's label before they hit it big, if I remember correctly). Cleopatra (and its associated labels, Hypnotix(?) and a couple of others ) should be RIAA-free. Of course, there's always Metropolis (www.metropolis-records.com), which fronts for a relatively large number of overseas and domestic techno/electro/indusrial/ebm/etc acts including Front242, Project Pitchfork, VNV Nation, Numb, Mentallo, Haujobb (the list is pretty big these days), they don't appear to be a RIAA member. Besides, they're licensing mostly from labels that couldn't be part of RIAA 'cause they're not "of America.":-)
Particularly device drivers. If everyone has to rewrite device drivers for Hurd, then they might as well close up shop.
Hardly. If this were true Linux wouldn't exist either-- 'sides, they probably port relatively easily from Linux (as opposed to, say, Windows device drivers)
Wow, genetics/genomics is getting a lot of press this week:-)
First off any statement as to the 'completeness' of the human genome project is something of a misnomer-- to put it in programming terms, the statement "36% of the human genome has been sequenced/mapped" is roughly akin to saying we've decompiled 36% of the world's largest piece of spaghetti code. Into an assembly language we only just learned. Running on a RISC machine with only 23 instructions. And we don't know where the entrypoint is. Did we mention that wasn't written using traditional logic? In short, the genetic engineers have their work cut out for them before they can even THINK about controlling the human genome on the level suggested by the article (you don't get to reboot people and the debug cycle is hellish).
Next, on the topic of Perfect Babies and clones. What is a "Perfect Baby"? Blonde Hair and Blue Eyes? Red Hair and Green Eyes? Free from congential disease? Most of us are already free from that, and those that aren't rarely wish it on their children. All basketball player sized? Ultra-dense muscle for supreme athletic performance? Except of course in sports that favor a lighter muscle (ever notice that swimmers aren't especially large muscled?) IQ? Unfortunate that IQ tests are essentially meaningless. What I'm trying to get at here is that the mere concept of a "Perfect Baby" is laughable at best. However, I don't deny that some parents will do their best to screw up their kids up from the day their conceived-- it is NOT the responsibility of scientists to police these people, they'll never learn if someone is always holding their hand and telling them what to do. It'll suck for awhile, but it will eventually even out. Next, cloning. Cloning has been around for awhile and the cloning of a human is (for some unfathomable reason) a holy grail of sorts. Now, I think if we can figure out how to clone bits of humans then by all means do so-- if I need an organ transplant I'd much rather have a cloned version of my original organ than the one they pulled out of some poor schmuck who got whacked by a semi. At the very least it could eliminate the need for immunosuppressant anti-rejection drugs (unless you want your life to suck). As for cloning entire people from scratch, we've already got a perfectly good way of making people. It's called SEX. And you know what? It is INFINITELY more fun than cloning (Unless you get off on pipetting small amounts of various clear fluids), so why bother? Also, cloning would tend towards a genome convergence and this is a BAD THING. (It makes it easier for me to tailor some virus to skill specifically YOU and ALL your clones without harming anyone else-- neat trick huh?)
In closing, yes, there will be some social/ethical implications when we get all this sort of stuff worked out and if people are monumentally stupid we will possess the power to extinct ourselves in short order, but we've already got the ability to do that and we haven't done it yet (and it would take considerably less time to just raze the planet and make it unlivable for humans). However, the impacts of knowing how humans work will, a) come gradually giving society(ies) time to adjust to these new abilities and b) be much less problematic than 'visionaries,' etc. think (much like the Y2K bug). So Mom and Dad create perfect clones for themselves and raise them and this goes on for a few generations... Some virus comes along thats good at killing 'em and WHAM, whole line dies, the world continues largely unaffected. *shrug* the nice part about nature is that it is a robust self-correcting system.
Additionally, from an evolutionary "fitness" point of view, having a certain amount of "useless" DNA that does, literally, nothing makes a certain amount of sense. Basically, mutations happen for whatever reason, exposure to chemical agents, being out in the sun, whatever-- there are probably plenty of ways that your DNA can become permanently screwed up s.t. your repair machinery can't fix the stuff, and its going to happen with some probability (lets call it p), now in coding regions of DNA you've got some built in redundancy (4^3 == 64 and we only have 20 amino acids + 2 stop codons (UAA,UAG) and a start codon (AUG) (hmmm... 23, but thats a different story:-)) so we've got 41 extra codons), most amino acids have multiple codons that will code for them (if I remember correctly Tryptophan (Trp) only has a single codon-- UGG)), which reduces the chances that some point mutation due to environmental mishap will change the amino acid a given codon codes (this is known as a silent mutation), which is good since if say a Tyrosine (UAC) gets changed to a stop (UAG) then the transcription/translation process stops early and the protein can't be made anymore. Now lets say it was some regularatory region that gets screwed up and causes the cell to go into massive reproduction mode (read: cancer). Wham, you lose-- no gene pool for you.
But I digress, we are talking about junk DNA. Ok, so lets consider two organisms hanging out on a beach somewhere. Organism 1 (o1) has NO junk DNA in its genome, somebody went through and "optimized" its genome:-), while Organism 2 (o2) has a genome that is about 50% "junk" (not useful in any way). Now, let's say they've got some regulatory region that, if it gets mutated, will cause uncontrolled growth (cancer) and kill the organism. Now just to simplify things lets say that any change in the regulatory region will cause cancer and the region is 10 nucleotides long. Assuming all nucleotides have an equal chance of being mutated in the event that a mutation occurs then P(Regulatory Region Changes|Mutation Occurs) = 10/n, where n is the number of nucleotides in the organisms genome, BUT o2 is 50% junk, so if 10/n is the probability of the mutation in o1, then 10/2n or 5/n is the chance of the mutation occuring in o2. Thus, o2 is 1/2 as likely to get cancer and die-- an evolutionary advantage.
Of course the amount of "junk" we can have is probably limited by some factors (stability of the DNA molecule or some sort of mechanical constraint-- I don't know) that keeps the amount of DNA from getting out of control (or we just haven't been evolving long enough and having an infinite amount of DNA is selected for). Disclaimer: I'm not really able to back this up with any hard data-- its mostly just my guess as to why we have some much apparently useless DNA, its just a hypothesis so I could be wrong:-)
Of course, the question becomes what exactly the effect of the encoding-decoding-encoding process will have on the sound quality. Since MP3 and MD use different compression schemes (even if they are only mildly different) it seems that MP3 would lose data in a different frequency range than MD (which uses a variable bitrate encoding scheme that loses more data in the midrange since your ears mostly care about treble and base-- I think www.minidisc.org has a link somewhere to the actual encoding description from Sony Labs) you would end up with a pretty limited dynamic range that sounds kinda flat and nasty.
Other than that, I'm happy to see that companies keep trying with MD's 'cause that just makes it easier for me to find discs for my Sharp MD-722 (battle-worn but surviving much better than my portable CD players ever have-- and it fits in my pocket so I can carry it everywhere:-))
I'm not sure if wounding processes or letting them kill each other is such a good idea, but this model does appear to have some interesting and potentially useful applications-- especially for large distributed systems (Beowulf clusters, etc.) or systems that are very dynamic (by dynamic, I essentially mean networks that have boxes entering and leaving the network regularly). For instance, let's say we have the latter situation and we've used our DoomUI (DUI? *grin*)to construct some sort of level (probably some sort of large central room with a bunch of corridors branching off of it) with a series of doors, one for each host. Then, when a host is online and open, the door that corresponds to the host will open for users allowing them to enter, use the resources (Consider the amusing image of marching distributed Beowulf processes into a compute node at gunpoint (or cattleprod or whatever)!) and then leave. (Continuing on the Beowulf vein, a queuing system could manifest itself as an entity in the main room and direct processes to the appropriate compute node, or if you had a Globus type of thing going on you could ship processes between nodes by marching them over-- this would, of course, require some good agent-style technology). Also, on multi-admin systems you could easily tell if another administrator was using a particular node if, say, you needed to reboot it or even the current user population for that matter.
At the risk of making myself flame bait, I have to disagree that something like The Registry is to be avoided at all costs. Rather, I think that the registry database is, in concept, a good idea-- create a "central" (its not actually a monolithic file, as far as I there is at least one file for each top-level key) repository for systemwide configuration information with a standardized mechanism for the retrieval of information from that database. Of course, Microsoft didn't really document most of the useful information contained in the registry and the registry itself is in a proprietary binary format that would make it unsuitable, really, for Linux given you may only have vi around. However, these problems are certainly not insurmountable and an XML format would actually go a long way towards fixing those problems.
I say go for it-- sure, I already invested the time required to learn the different formats but I'll take anything that makes my life easier:-)
Yeah, right- The RIAA is *such* an impartial observer. Anyways, I seriously doubt MP3s have much to do with anything, has anyone walked into a music store recently? A CD costs like $17-$19 for plain ol' normal CDs- thats why CDs aren't hopping off the shelves, they're all makred up like 3 bucks for no good reason.
Now I *know* the cost of manufacturing hasn't gone up and the CDs haven't gotten any longer- quite to opposite if anything. So where has my extra $3 gone? OH YEAH, some schmuck at a music label that wanted the new 911. Personally, I don't think the MP3 quality is quite there but bring on the direct artist distribution and cut these guys off at the knees. </manifesto:-) >
Slashdot Mirror
I cringe every time people start talking about crypto regulations-- why? Simple, for some reason it appears that U.S. citizens are incapable of believing that a country that isn't the U.S. (or at least isn't in a position that the U.S. can bully them) could create a mathematician with the skills required to develop strong cryptographic algorithms or the programmers required to implement said algorithms (along with the rest of the security chain). Its simple arrogance and it WILL bite us (I'm a U.S. citizen, what can I say?) on the ass eventually. Hard. Its not like this stuff is a nuclear weapons programs which at least takes a lab of some sort and readily identifiable "natural" resources (you gotta have a place to build bombs and you need stuff to put in the bombs). The crypto algorithms can be developed on a piece of paper and implemented on damn-near-anything (we could, of course, attempt to control every computer on the planet, but then most of the chip fabs aren't in the U.S. *whoops*). So what do crypto regs get us--- they hamstring U.S. companies in an internantion crypto market. This doesn't sound like a terrifically good idea does it? It also potentially exposes the average U.S. citizen in that massive personal crypto restrictions put us at a potential disadvantage (assuming a good chunk of the rest of the world responds to cries of restriction from the U.S. with a collective "Um, no? Wait, lemme think.... no"). This sounds like the opposite of what governments are put in place to do to me. Stupid.
But then, what can we expect of legislators trying to control something that they don't know enough about to even know they know nothing at all?
Yeah, my Panasonic A220 (or whatever, its not in front of me so that may not be the exact model number) doesn't play CD-Rs either (actually in the user's manual it says something about the lasers potentially destroying the CD-Rs. Maybe it has something to do with power requirements of the laser for reading the higher-density DVDs)
Heheheh, I remember that! I was working in Palo Alto at the time (didn't affect my site) and my roomate was working in San Mateo--- their servers elsewhere in the Bay Area fell down, went boom. Silly PG&E!
WaxTrax! is in fact owned by TVT (and also notable as Metallica's label before they hit it big, if I remember correctly). Cleopatra (and its associated labels, Hypnotix(?) and a couple of others ) should be RIAA-free. Of course, there's always Metropolis (www.metropolis-records.com), which fronts for a relatively large number of overseas and domestic techno/electro/indusrial/ebm/etc acts including Front242, Project Pitchfork, VNV Nation, Numb, Mentallo, Haujobb (the list is pretty big these days), they don't appear to be a RIAA member. Besides, they're licensing mostly from labels that couldn't be part of RIAA 'cause they're not "of America." :-)
Particularly device drivers. If everyone has to rewrite device drivers for Hurd, then they might as well close up shop.
Hardly. If this were true Linux wouldn't exist either-- 'sides, they probably port relatively easily from Linux (as opposed to, say, Windows device drivers)
Wow, genetics/genomics is getting a lot of press this week :-)
First off any statement as to the 'completeness' of the human genome project is something of a misnomer-- to put it in programming terms, the statement "36% of the human genome has been sequenced/mapped" is roughly akin to saying we've decompiled 36% of the world's largest piece of spaghetti code. Into an assembly language we only just learned. Running on a RISC machine with only 23 instructions. And we don't know where the entrypoint is. Did we mention that wasn't written using traditional logic? In short, the genetic engineers have their work cut out for them before they can even THINK about controlling the human genome on the level suggested by the article (you don't get to reboot people and the debug cycle is hellish).
Next, on the topic of Perfect Babies and clones. What is a "Perfect Baby"? Blonde Hair and Blue Eyes? Red Hair and Green Eyes? Free from congential disease? Most of us are already free from that, and those that aren't rarely wish it on their children. All basketball player sized? Ultra-dense muscle for supreme athletic performance? Except of course in sports that favor a lighter muscle (ever notice that swimmers aren't especially large muscled?) IQ? Unfortunate that IQ tests are essentially meaningless. What I'm trying to get at here is that the mere concept of a "Perfect Baby" is laughable at best. However, I don't deny that some parents will do their best to screw up their kids up from the day their conceived-- it is NOT the responsibility of scientists to police these people, they'll never learn if someone is always holding their hand and telling them what to do. It'll suck for awhile, but it will eventually even out. Next, cloning. Cloning has been around for awhile and the cloning of a human is (for some unfathomable reason) a holy grail of sorts. Now, I think if we can figure out how to clone bits of humans then by all means do so-- if I need an organ transplant I'd much rather have a cloned version of my original organ than the one they pulled out of some poor schmuck who got whacked by a semi. At the very least it could eliminate the need for immunosuppressant anti-rejection drugs (unless you want your life to suck). As for cloning entire people from scratch, we've already got a perfectly good way of making people. It's called SEX. And you know what? It is INFINITELY more fun than cloning (Unless you get off on pipetting small amounts of various clear fluids), so why bother? Also, cloning would tend towards a genome convergence and this is a BAD THING. (It makes it easier for me to tailor some virus to skill specifically YOU and ALL your clones without harming anyone else-- neat trick huh?)
In closing, yes, there will be some social/ethical implications when we get all this sort of stuff worked out and if people are monumentally stupid we will possess the power to extinct ourselves in short order, but we've already got the ability to do that and we haven't done it yet (and it would take considerably less time to just raze the planet and make it unlivable for humans). However, the impacts of knowing how humans work will, a) come gradually giving society(ies) time to adjust to these new abilities and b) be much less problematic than 'visionaries,' etc. think (much like the Y2K bug). So Mom and Dad create perfect clones for themselves and raise them and this goes on for a few generations... Some virus comes along thats good at killing 'em and WHAM, whole line dies, the world continues largely unaffected. *shrug* the nice part about nature is that it is a robust self-correcting system.
Additionally, from an evolutionary "fitness" point of view, having a certain amount of "useless" DNA that does, literally, nothing makes a certain amount of sense. Basically, mutations happen for whatever reason, exposure to chemical agents, being out in the sun, whatever-- there are probably plenty of ways that your DNA can become permanently screwed up s.t. your repair machinery can't fix the stuff, and its going to happen with some probability (lets call it p), now in coding regions of DNA you've got some built in redundancy (4^3 == 64 and we only have 20 amino acids + 2 stop codons (UAA,UAG) and a start codon (AUG) (hmmm... 23, but thats a different story :-)) so we've got 41 extra codons), most amino acids have multiple codons that will code for them (if I remember correctly Tryptophan (Trp) only has a single codon-- UGG)), which reduces the chances that some point mutation due to environmental mishap will change the amino acid a given codon codes (this is known as a silent mutation), which is good since if say a Tyrosine (UAC) gets changed to a stop (UAG) then the transcription/translation process stops early and the protein can't be made anymore. Now lets say it was some regularatory region that gets screwed up and causes the cell to go into massive reproduction mode (read: cancer). Wham, you lose-- no gene pool for you.
:-), while Organism 2 (o2) has a genome that is about 50% "junk" (not useful in any way). Now, let's say they've got some regulatory region that, if it gets mutated, will cause uncontrolled growth (cancer) and kill the organism. Now just to simplify things lets say that any change in the regulatory region will cause cancer and the region is 10 nucleotides long. Assuming all nucleotides have an equal chance of being mutated in the event that a mutation occurs then P(Regulatory Region Changes|Mutation Occurs) = 10/n, where n is the number of nucleotides in the organisms genome, BUT o2 is 50% junk, so if 10/n is the probability of the mutation in o1, then 10/2n or 5/n is the chance of the mutation occuring in o2. Thus, o2 is 1/2 as likely to get cancer and die-- an evolutionary advantage.
:-)
But I digress, we are talking about junk DNA. Ok, so lets consider two organisms hanging out on a beach somewhere. Organism 1 (o1) has NO junk DNA in its genome, somebody went through and "optimized" its genome
Of course the amount of "junk" we can have is probably limited by some factors (stability of the DNA molecule or some sort of mechanical constraint-- I don't know) that keeps the amount of DNA from getting out of control (or we just haven't been evolving long enough and having an infinite amount of DNA is selected for). Disclaimer: I'm not really able to back this up with any hard data-- its mostly just my guess as to why we have some much apparently useless DNA, its just a hypothesis so I could be wrong
Of course, the question becomes what exactly the effect of the encoding-decoding-encoding process will have on the sound quality. Since MP3 and MD use different compression schemes (even if they are only mildly different) it seems that MP3 would lose data in a different frequency range than MD (which uses a variable bitrate encoding scheme that loses more data in the midrange since your ears mostly care about treble and base-- I think www.minidisc.org has a link somewhere to the actual encoding description from Sony Labs) you would end up with a pretty limited dynamic range that sounds kinda flat and nasty.
:-))
Other than that, I'm happy to see that companies keep trying with MD's 'cause that just makes it easier for me to find discs for my Sharp MD-722 (battle-worn but surviving much better than my portable CD players ever have-- and it fits in my pocket so I can carry it everywhere
I'm not sure if wounding processes or letting them kill each other is such a good idea, but this model does appear to have some interesting and potentially useful applications-- especially for large distributed systems (Beowulf clusters, etc.) or systems that are very dynamic (by dynamic, I essentially mean networks that have boxes entering and leaving the network regularly). For instance, let's say we have the latter situation and we've used our DoomUI (DUI? *grin*)to construct some sort of level (probably some sort of large central room with a bunch of corridors branching off of it) with a series of doors, one for each host. Then, when a host is online and open, the door that corresponds to the host will open for users allowing them to enter, use the resources (Consider the amusing image of marching distributed Beowulf processes into a compute node at gunpoint (or cattleprod or whatever)!) and then leave. (Continuing on the Beowulf vein, a queuing system could manifest itself as an entity in the main room and direct processes to the appropriate compute node, or if you had a Globus type of thing going on you could ship processes between nodes by marching them over-- this would, of course, require some good agent-style technology). Also, on multi-admin systems you could easily tell if another administrator was using a particular node if, say, you needed to reboot it or even the current user population for that matter.
:-)
At any rate, at least its entertaining
At the risk of making myself flame bait, I have to disagree that something like The Registry is to be avoided at all costs. Rather, I think that the registry database is, in concept, a good idea-- create a "central" (its not actually a monolithic file, as far as I there is at least one file for each top-level key) repository for systemwide configuration information with a standardized mechanism for the retrieval of information from that database. Of course, Microsoft didn't really document most of the useful information contained in the registry and the registry itself is in a proprietary binary format that would make it unsuitable, really, for Linux given you may only have vi around. However, these problems are certainly not insurmountable and an XML format would actually go a long way towards fixing those problems.
:-)
I say go for it-- sure, I already invested the time required to learn the different formats but I'll take anything that makes my life easier
Yeah, right- The RIAA is *such* an impartial observer. Anyways, I seriously doubt MP3s have much to do with anything, has anyone walked into a music store recently? A CD costs like $17-$19 for plain ol' normal CDs- thats why CDs aren't hopping off the shelves, they're all makred up like 3 bucks for no good reason.
:-) >
Now I *know* the cost of manufacturing hasn't gone up and the CDs haven't gotten any longer- quite to opposite if anything. So where has my extra $3 gone? OH YEAH, some schmuck at a music label that wanted the new 911. Personally, I don't think the MP3 quality is quite there but bring on the direct artist distribution and cut these guys off at the knees.
</manifesto