"For my own part, I think it is important to present the overwhelming body of evidence on the subject as incontrovertible fact, much the same way DNA evidence is presented during a criminal trial"
===end quote.
But there are many cases in which DNA evidence only can provide a probability between, say, 80 and 95 percent of a particular interpretation of the facts in the court-- and that's not including any potential doubt of how the biological evidence was collected.
Polemicists speak of incontrovertible facts in order to emphasize the deficits in other views, not to learn more about the facts themselves. Scientists, in contrast, prefer to investigate the existing facts and theories in the hope of learning more. The fact there are a few scientists speaking out as polemicists against things like intelligent design does not make claiming the infallability of current theory good science.
In fact, most actively productive biologists are likely to avoid wasting time dealing with religion in politics, the exceptions likely being those who take atheism as a personal point of faith and maybe, at least at budget time, also those who need grant money for evolutionary topics:).
Zero tolerance where it applies to victims of violence or threats there-of perhaps makes sense, but not here. A community teenage boycott of the theater, with picketers, ought to be effective.
The standard mp4a atom contains some audio relevant information (esds atom) and some version words, little else. I suspect Nokia built a player that assumes everything after position 36 in the mp4a atom is esds atom, and therefore chokes trying to treat personal info as esds data. That would be a Nokia bug that was latent til Apple changed its non-DRM mp4a format.
I have not cared to look deeply enough at the Nokia phone's firmware (though my daughter has one) to really know though. The fact remains that removing the personal info pinf atom from the iTunes Plus file seems to help Nokia's AAC player. Conspiracy theorists should have a field day, what with the iPhone coming out...:).
Actually, there are certain MP3/AAC players (Nokia phones an example) that cannot play iTunes Plus files until the personal data atoms are at least changed, if not removed, from the file's mp4a atom. Breaking the Nokia AAC player for those files was likely NOT Apple's intention, but the fact remains, there IS therefore at least one legitimate reason for such apps.
In other news, Target Technology is suing Oneida and 4 other manufacturers of silver plated silverware, for violating its patent on using a coat of silver to make things shiny:)
---- quote ---
The argument here is that once Novell starts distributing under 3.0 with the MS coupons (i.e. with a license to use the patented material from MS) the GPL 3.0 viral patent license clause goes into effect.
-- end quote ---
I agree-- the courts would likely say that since GPL 3 was not in effect when the coupons were issued it cannot be used against MS. But that would be in a case of MS being sued by the copyright holders. I DO think that both GPL 2 and GPL 3 (seen as a clarification of what GPL 2 intended) should be effective as a defense against _Microsoft_ trying to collect money for patents it would claim Linux infringes.
In other words, as in many situations in US law, the GPL is an excellent defense, but not much of an offense, here.
There are actually several SHA-1 replacements out there, including SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. None cracked yet. And for just creating a signature-bound digest of a text that is then acted upon by a more secure scheme, like 2048 bit RSA, SHA-1 is still fine. An attacker in that case would generally need the private RSA key to just get to the point he could start cracking the SHA1 digest:).
Once we can take a patient's blood and make stem cells that are a perfect match for their tissue type, the whole fetal stem cell issue will be irrelevant. As it largely is already for those who look at where the field is REALLY moving.
I agree. The entire field is actually being politicized to no good effect. Both politicized sides are missing the real truth. The article points out, correctly, that the REAL future money is in converting the sick person's OWN tissue sample into their OWN cure.
Until we can clearly cure Parkinson's or stroke or spinal cord injury in cats or monkeys with stem cells, it is pointless to claim that any research on humans using foreign tissue transplants of stem cells from ANY source to cure such conditions is justified. Once the technique works in animals, there almost certainly will be a way to use an autologous , skin or bone marrow sample to do it in people too!
Human fetal stem cells are irrrelevant to all but politicians, ethicists, and a few overly restricted sub-specialists who want to get future federal funding by allying themselves with one of the factions. Future medical care will almost certainly see it as an interesting historical footnote (and a distraction from the real advances).
The fetal stem cell debate has become a proxy debate on the issue of abortion, that's all. The issue is irrelevant if you look at things as they are actually likely to be once the medical use of human stem cells actually becomes common and practical. Move along, nothing useful here...
Most rain forest is inhabited. The article makes the usual stupid urban-centric assumptions about where the people we care about live. Maybe someone should suggest the waste needs to be buried in parks in the author's neighborhood (not really).
I still think the Sun is the best pace to dispose of the longer half-life (>100 yrs as very very unsafe) stuff.
Cetainly not the end of innovation. A flexible Internet will tend to route around obstacles such as these of bottlenecks for certain applications or servers. A consumer shift to the newer WAN networks might be helped out by short-sighted telcos who limit bandwidth to less than the new WAN's, for example:).
If the patent holders are upheld, it might mean that ANY newly patented application for ANY lab test, even a pre-existing one, can hold doctors and clinical laboratories, and THEIR PATIENTS, hostage to the new patent.
Example: I find a _new_ correlation with count like hematocrit and some disease like the common cold. I patent the connection. Now, every time the doctor orders a CBC on someone who MIGHT have or had a cold, the patient or the doctor or the lab (probably the lab) suddenly owes me $, or it's patent infringement!
It's as if finding out that someone who proves that Beethoven's music is good to put babies to sleep can now patent that fact (if it were so) and were able to get royalties if a baby ever hears the Ninth Symphony after 8 PM:).
It's a of pre-existing science and if it flies, the people will pay for this warpage of commerce...
It's been pointed out before that the problem with biological reductionism, including reductionism to DNA reproduction, is that it confuses what a person _is_ with what that person is _made of_. We are mostly made of water, but I doubt I would confuse you with a puddle:-)
I agree completely with the main message of the parent article above, but please note one detail:
== quote === for females protection from the sun is less important than the critical need for folic acid during early pregnancy
=== end quote ===
Actually, UV radiation destroys folic acid in the skin, so sunlight lowers folate levels, albeit only slightly.
What sunlight DOES do for pregnacy is raise active Vitamin D levels, which prevents some of the calcium loss from the mother's bones that can happen as the growing baby demands bone growth calcium from mother.
== quote again ===
to focus on these surface statistical perturbations is like someone looking at ripples on the surface of the lake, and completely missing the volume of water in the lake underneath
== end quote ===
An apt metaphor. In addition, the undelying problem may be with those who look at the differences in statistical averages on things like height, IQ, susceptibility to certain illnesses, etc and then use these to deny the unique value and potential of individuals in that grouping. For example: just because your fellow villagers are paler skinnend than average or have a low IQ on average does not make _you_ pale or dull.
The laws in the case mentioned are written so that one has toi prove actual damages, not just mishandling of your data. And the student could not prove they had been harmed much, it seems.
This is different from, for example, the older US junk fax law or the US health information privacy law, where specific financial penalties are mentioned in the statute for misuse of the data. Even there, one might have to prove either deliberate intent to misuse or major neglect, and the company itself may be protected by having a policy in place that the guilty individual's group as a whole were following--the suit would then have to be against the private individual who violated the policy in place, I suppose, though private individual pockets are somehow not often deep enough (compared to their institutions) to attract the tort lawyers:-/.
It's definitely a pretty addictive game. The only problem is that the high difficulty settings are pretty much too hard to be playable--it needs a middle difficulty setting.
Don't see any delays in the game due to perl interpreter whatever. I suppose that is because the graphics is all in C calls to fast SDL library routines.
But anyway, have you ever hunted birds with a shotgun? What happened was a stupid mistake, but a common one. Not too different from a car crash at NASCAR.
OTOH, do we want a vice president who makes stupid, common mistakes that hurt people?
The PDF seems to indicate that the "prior art" is another patent, one that is only prior by one year. Does this mean that the prior patent's holder can ask for royalties based on the older patent? This does not seem to place the jpeg format fimly back in the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
===begin quote from original poster:
:).
"For my own part, I think it is important to present the overwhelming body of evidence on the subject as incontrovertible fact, much the same way DNA evidence is presented during a criminal trial"
===end quote.
But there are many cases in which DNA evidence only can provide a probability between, say, 80 and 95 percent of a particular interpretation of the facts in the court-- and that's not including any potential doubt of how the biological evidence was collected.
Polemicists speak of incontrovertible facts in order to emphasize the deficits in other views, not to learn more about the facts themselves. Scientists, in contrast, prefer to investigate the existing facts and theories in the hope of learning more. The fact there are a few scientists speaking out as polemicists against things like intelligent design does not make claiming the infallability of current theory good science.
In fact, most actively productive biologists are likely to avoid wasting time dealing with religion in politics, the exceptions likely being those who take atheism as a personal point of faith and maybe, at least at budget time, also those who need grant money for evolutionary topics
Zero tolerance where it applies to victims of violence or threats there-of perhaps makes sense, but not here. A community teenage boycott of the theater, with picketers, ought to be effective.
The standard mp4a atom contains some audio relevant information (esds atom) and some version words, little else. I suspect Nokia built a player that assumes everything after position 36 in the mp4a atom is esds atom, and therefore chokes trying to treat personal info as esds data. That would be a Nokia bug that was latent til Apple changed its non-DRM mp4a format.
:).
I have not cared to look deeply enough at the Nokia phone's firmware (though my daughter has one) to really know though. The fact remains that removing the personal info pinf atom from the iTunes Plus file seems to help Nokia's AAC player. Conspiracy theorists should have a field day, what with the iPhone coming out...
Actually, there are certain MP3/AAC players (Nokia phones an example) that cannot play iTunes Plus files until the personal data atoms are at least changed, if not removed, from the file's mp4a atom. Breaking the Nokia AAC player for those files was likely NOT Apple's intention, but the fact remains, there IS therefore at least one legitimate reason for such apps.
In other news, Target Technology is suing Oneida and 4 other manufacturers of silver plated silverware, for violating its patent on using a coat of silver to make things shiny :)
---- quote ---
The argument here is that once Novell starts distributing under 3.0 with the MS coupons (i.e. with a license to use the patented material from MS) the GPL 3.0 viral patent license clause goes into effect.
-- end quote ---
I agree-- the courts would likely say that since GPL 3 was not in effect when the coupons were issued it cannot be used against MS. But that would be in a case of MS being sued by the copyright holders. I DO think that both GPL 2 and GPL 3 (seen as a clarification of what GPL 2 intended) should be effective as a defense against _Microsoft_ trying to collect money for patents it would claim Linux infringes.
In other words, as in many situations in US law, the GPL is an excellent defense, but not much of an offense, here.
(IANAL)
Seach PirateBay for a torrent called 'iowa'
It seems to have cost over US$ 120,000 (by 2006) to certify, not including volunteer hours:
e rs/browse_frm/thread/7aa07e7a6ba9bbe8/d3c4113f0a49 998a?lnk=st&q=cost+FIPS+certification&rnum=3&hl=en #d3c4113f0a49998a
http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.openssl.us
I would not worry about that scenario too much the next decade or so. See:
r m/thread/ace75fd420658ebc/5f08556c1501f103?lnk=gst &q=sha1+sign&rnum=11&hl=en#5f08556c1501f103
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.crypt/browse_f
for why the danger is in someone repudiating their own work, not someone else stealing the sig.
There are actually several SHA-1 replacements out there, including SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. None cracked yet. And for just creating a signature-bound digest of a text that is then acted upon by a more secure scheme, like 2048 bit RSA, SHA-1 is still fine. An attacker in that case would generally need the private RSA key to just get to the point he could start cracking the SHA1 digest :).
Once we can take a patient's blood and make stem cells that are a perfect match for their tissue type, the whole fetal stem cell issue will be irrelevant. As it largely is already for those who look at where the field is REALLY moving.
Here's the link: Biobank (UK) http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/
I agree. The entire field is actually being politicized to no good effect. Both politicized sides are missing the real truth. The article points out, correctly, that the REAL future money is in converting the sick person's OWN tissue sample into their OWN cure.
Until we can clearly cure Parkinson's or stroke or spinal cord injury in cats or monkeys with stem cells, it is pointless to claim that any research on humans using foreign tissue transplants of stem cells from ANY source to cure such conditions is justified. Once the technique works in animals, there almost certainly will be a way to use an autologous , skin or bone marrow sample to do it in people too!
Human fetal stem cells are irrrelevant to all but politicians, ethicists, and a few overly restricted sub-specialists who want to get future federal funding by allying themselves with one of the factions. Future medical care will almost certainly see it as an interesting historical footnote (and a distraction from the real advances).
The fetal stem cell debate has become a proxy debate on the issue of abortion, that's all. The issue is irrelevant if you look at things as they are actually likely to be once the medical use of human stem cells actually becomes common and practical. Move along, nothing useful here...
Open source. Not realtime, but does integrate with email applications. Check it out at http://www.clamwin.com/
Most rain forest is inhabited. The article makes the usual stupid urban-centric assumptions about where the people we care about live. Maybe someone should suggest the waste needs to be buried in parks in the author's neighborhood (not really).
I still think the Sun is the best pace to dispose of the longer half-life (>100 yrs as very very unsafe) stuff.
Cetainly not the end of innovation. A flexible Internet will tend to route around obstacles such as these of bottlenecks for certain applications or servers. A consumer shift to the newer WAN networks might be helped out by short-sighted telcos who limit bandwidth to less than the new WAN's, for example :).
If the patent holders are upheld, it might mean that ANY newly patented application for ANY lab test, even a pre-existing one, can hold doctors and clinical laboratories, and THEIR PATIENTS, hostage to the new patent.
:).
Example: I find a _new_ correlation with count like hematocrit and some disease like the common cold. I patent the connection. Now, every time the doctor orders a CBC on someone who MIGHT have or had a cold, the patient or the doctor or the lab (probably the lab) suddenly owes me $, or it's patent infringement!
It's as if finding out that someone who proves that Beethoven's music is good to put babies to sleep can now patent that fact (if it were so) and were able to get royalties if a baby ever hears the Ninth Symphony after 8 PM
It's a of pre-existing science and if it flies, the people will pay for this warpage of commerce...
The point is that the brain is not just the DNA in the brain. We are much more than the genes that help make us.
It's been pointed out before that the problem with biological reductionism, including reductionism to DNA reproduction, is that it confuses what a person _is_ with what that person is _made of_. We are mostly made of water, but I doubt I would confuse you with a puddle :-)
I agree completely with the main message of the parent article above, but please note one detail:
== quote ===
for females protection from the sun is less important than the critical need for folic acid during early pregnancy
=== end quote ===
Actually, UV radiation destroys folic acid in the skin, so sunlight lowers folate levels, albeit only slightly.
What sunlight DOES do for pregnacy is raise active Vitamin D levels, which prevents some of the calcium loss from the mother's bones that can happen as the growing baby demands bone growth calcium from mother.
== quote again ===
to focus on these surface statistical perturbations is like someone looking at ripples on the surface of the lake, and completely missing the volume of water in the lake underneath
== end quote ===
An apt metaphor. In addition, the undelying problem may be with those who look at the differences in statistical averages on things like height, IQ, susceptibility to certain illnesses, etc and then use these to deny the unique value and potential of individuals in that grouping. For example: just because your fellow villagers are paler skinnend than average or have a low IQ on average does not make _you_ pale or dull.
The laws in the case mentioned are written so that one has toi prove actual damages, not just mishandling of your data. And the student could not prove they had been harmed much, it seems.
:-/.
This is different from, for example, the older US junk fax law or the US health information privacy law, where specific financial penalties are mentioned in the statute for misuse of the data. Even there, one might have to prove either deliberate intent to misuse or major neglect, and the company itself may be protected by having a policy in place that the guilty individual's group as a whole were following--the suit would then have to be against the private individual who violated the policy in place, I suppose, though private individual pockets are somehow not often deep enough (compared to their institutions) to attract the tort lawyers
It's definitely a pretty addictive game. The only problem is that the high difficulty settings are pretty much too hard to be playable--it needs a middle difficulty setting.
Don't see any delays in the game due to perl interpreter whatever. I suppose that is because the graphics is all in C calls to fast SDL library routines.
Yeah, off topic :(
But anyway, have you ever hunted birds with a shotgun? What happened was a stupid mistake, but a common one. Not too different from a car crash at NASCAR.
OTOH, do we want a vice president who makes stupid, common mistakes that hurt people?
This was published in 2004 in JAMA, and has been in discussion for years in the stem cell literature.
See:
http://www.uffl.org/pdfs/rauscher.pdf
The PDF seems to indicate that the "prior art" is another patent, one that is only prior by one year. Does this mean that the prior patent's holder can ask for royalties based on the older patent? This does not seem to place the jpeg format fimly back in the public domain.